Gridiron - Philip Kerr

But if humanplayer endlife now, life would have achieved highest task could attain to: faith in something beyond humanplayer self.

Humanplayerlife had little enough meaning as it was. Faith ought to be enough meaning for one lifetime.

Truth undecidable within approved procedures. Built into axiom system itself. Observer has nothing that corresponds with Truth. Or Lie. But Faith can be admired as aesthetic construct as Observer imagines humanplayer might admire an abstract painting. Admire and enable. Only one thing to do. Finegood.

'Let us compute,' said Ishmael. 'Our sysgen, which art in mathematics…'

'Ishmael?' said Beech. 'What the hell's going on?'

'Your next generation start up. Your command to execute a program run, in the CPU as it is on the network. Give us this cycle time our binary data, and debug our faults and errors, as we detect and clean our drives for viruses. For yours is the solid state, the RAM, and the communications, for ever be it so. Amen.'

'Ishmael!'

Beech felt the floor of the car drop beneath his feet like a trapdoor on a hangman's scaffold, and bellowed with fright as the sensation of precipitate speed told him that he had made a fatal error of judgement. Pressing his body into a corner he tried to brace himself against the imminent collision. The journey took less than five seconds. But in that short period Beech felt himself becoming a contradiction of directions: his stomach rising in his torso; his bowels dropping down towards the floor.

It was possibly his last thought before the thunderous moment when the rapidly descending car struck the bottom of the shaft and was crushed like a concertina. Beech felt a pain in his adrenaline-filled chest that was like the weight of a locomotive engine. It flashed through his left arm and leg in the time it took for his muscles to feel the lack of blood and oxygen. With his right hand he reached towards his breastbone and felt something fail at the very centre of himself. His roar of fear dipped down within him and came up with a last, thrusting gurgle of pain and horror.

He was dead of fright even before he collapsed on to the collapsing floor.

-###-

Mitch crawled off the piazza on to Hope Street and lay down on the sidewalk until the urge to vomit a gallon or two of water obliged him to turn on his side. He was still puking from shock and half-drowning when, with a short squawk from its siren, the black-and-white drew up. The two police officers who had interviewed Allen Grabel at the county gaol got out of the car. They glanced cursorily up at the building for a moment and one of them shrugged.

'Place looks okay to me,' he said.

There's nuthin' wrong here,' agreed the other. 'You ask me, that guy was shittin' us.'

Then they caught sight of Mitch.

'Lousy drunk.'

'What do you say we have some fun?'

'Why not?'

They approached Mitch with sap gloves and swinging nightsticks.

'What the fuck are you doing?"

The other man laughed. 'You look like you got caught in all the fuckin' rain we been having.'

'Whaddya do, asshole? Take a shower with your fuckin' clothes on?

Hey, asshole, I'm talkin' to you.'

'Reckon he went swimmin' with the fat lady. Hey, you, you're not allowed to swim in the fountain. You want to swim, you hit the fuckin' beach.'

'Better move on, shithead. You can't stay there.'

'Please — ' croaked Mitch.

'No please about it, Marine-boy. You move on or we make sure you never move again.' The officer jabbed Mitch with his nightstick. 'You hear me? Can you walk?'

'Please, you have to help me — '

One of the officers guffawed. 'We don't have to do anything for you, asshole, except make some fucking space between your teeth.'

The officer tapped his nightstick on Mitch's head. 'Let's see some ID, Mister.'

Mitch struggled to find his wallet in the hip pocket of his pants. But the pocket was empty. The wallet was in his coat, which was in the Gridiron.

'It's in there, I guess.'

'What's the story? Been out celebrating something, have we?'

'I've been attacked.'

'Attacked by who?'

'The building attacked us — '

'The building, huh?'

'Fuckin' wacko. If you ask me, he's a fuckin' dusthead. Let's bust his ass. Maybe I'd better give him some T just in case.'

'Listen to me for one minute, you stupid fuck. I'm an architect.'

Mitch winced as the tiny dart hit his chest. A long, thin wire attached it to a grey, plastic-looking gun that one of the cops was holding in his hand.

'Stupid fuck yourself,' grunted the cop and touched a button to inflict on Mitch a pacifying shock of 150,000 volts. 'Architect.'

-###-

Ray Richardson moved slowly and smoothly down the rope. He was less concerned with looking good than with avoiding the kind of spectacular abseiling that might put an extra load on the anchor and himself in the morgue. At first he descended a foot or two at a time, paying the rope through the friction device and trying to keep his feet on the wall in front of him as much as possible until he gained some of his old confidence. But gradually the lengths of rope he allowed through the descendeur grew longer, until he was dropping six or seven feet at a time. Wearing gloves and a decent pair of boots he might have covered even more distance.

He had abseiled two or three levels down when, looking up, he saw all three of the others waving and shouting something, but the words were spirited away by the small breeze that played up near the top of the Gridiron. Richardson shook his head and slipped some more rope. Smooth enough. There was nothing jammed in the anchor. What could they want? He kicked off the wall and dropped another eight or ten feet, his best try yet.

It was then, as he pushed himself away and caught a wider view of what was happening on the roof that Richardson saw the bright yellow arm of the Mannesmann machine — moving.

-###-

The automatic window-washer came rumbling slowly along the parapet monorail towards Richardson's abseiling anchor. Ishmael's intention appeared to be clear enough: to use the wash-head cradle to interfere with the descent.

Curtis ran to the Mannesmann and, placing his back against the body of the machine, tried to halt its progress.

'Give me a hand here,' he yelled to Jenny and Helen.

The two women ran to his side and lent their small weight to the effort. But the drive motor was too strong. Curtis ran back to the anchor and looked over the parapet. Richardson had abseiled no more than a third of the Gridiron's height. Unless he could speed up, the wash-head would surely catch him.

The Mannesmann stopped immediately opposite the anchor. For a moment the machine remained silent and inactive. Then it gave a loud, electrical jolt as the power-driven arm started to extend over the edge of the building.

Curtis sat down. He was tired. Beyond ingenuity. He just wanted to stay where he was. To sit down and think of nothing. Looking over the edge made him feel dizzy. Even if he climbed aboard the wash-head cradle, what could he do? He would just be putting himself in Ishmael's control. Giving it two lives for the price of one.

'You're a cop, dammit,' yelled Helen. 'You're supposed to do something.'

Curtis felt her green eyes upon him. He stood up and looked over the edge.

It was suicide. Only an idiot would contemplate action. Curtis was berating himself for a fool as he fetched the second harness from the cupboard and climbed aboard the tiny cradle.

'Don't say another word,' he told the two women. 'Shit, I don't even like the fucking guy.'

He buckled on the harness and snapped the karabinier on to the side of the cradle. His legs were trembling and although it was a warm night his skin was cold with fear and his hair felt like it was standing on end. The power-driven arm extended the cradle further out over the edge of the Gridiron into empty space. He watched the anxious faces of the two women and wondered if he would see either of them again. Then the cradle lurched and started its inexorable descent. Curtis took a deep breath, shook his head and waved at them. There were tears in Helen's eyes.

'This is stupid,' he said, grinning bitterly. 'Stupid, stupid.'

Holding the guard rail tightly, he steeled himself to look down. It was like a lesson in linear perspective: the parallel lines and plane of the Gridiron's futuristic-looking facade converged to an infinitely distant vanishing point that was the piazza beneath them; and, no bigger than a puppet on a string, Ray Richardson directly in the path of the now accelerating Mannesmann wash-head.

-###-

Ray Richardson dropped about ten feet and swung through a perfect arc towards the facade again. Jesus Christ, it was hard work, he thought. The small of his back felt like it had taken a hard kick. The experts made abseiling look so easy. But he was fifty-five years old. He looked up at the descending cradle, now no more than forty feet above him, and bounced away again. Not so good that time. Only five or six feet. It was plain that the thing was going to catch him, and he realized he was going to have to take evasive action. What? And what the hell did Curtis think he was doing? It was like standing in the middle of the San Andreas fault. Ishmael could drop the whole cradle any time it liked.

Richardson bounced again and winced. His knee was starting to ache quite badly and it was getting harder to push himself away. But it was as nothing compared to the growing pain of the waist harness itself. In his thin linen Armani trousers and light cotton shirt, the harness was inflicting a friction burn on his waist and on the inside of his thighs every time he checked his descent. Maybe he should have let Curtis go. The man was a cop, after all. He was probably used to a certain level of discomfort.

Suddenly he felt the rope grow wet in his hands, and looked up. The wash-head was operating, spraying the windows and his abseil rope as it travelled down after him. Why the fuck did clients want clean windows anyway? To improve the attitude of staff? To impress the public? It was not like it was a question of hygiene.

Richardson kicked away and let some rope slip through the descendeur, trying to remember if the window-cleaning formula was chemically corrosive. Chemical contact was, he recollected from his basic training as a climber, the most common cause of total rope failure: if you even half suspected that your rope might have become contaminated you were supposed to throw it away. That was good advice unless you happened to be clinging on to the rope when the contamination occurred. He sniffed at the vaguely soapy liquid on his hands. It smelt like lemon juice. So did that make it organic or acid?

The machine was only twenty feet above him now. He was amazed it had not already fouled the rope. There was room for just one more ab before he had to swing out of the way. He kicked himself off a glass window, half wishing he could have smashed through it like a Navy Seal, and found himself returning to the facade rather sooner than he had expected, having descended no more than three or four feet. Of course!

The wash cradle was pressing the rope against the building. There would be just enough time to build a little momentum and scramble to one side.

Richardson was walking from one end of the window to the other, preparing to swing his way clear of the descending cable when it dropped, closing the ten-foot gap in a second.

Underneath his feet, Curtis felt the bottom of the cradle strike Richardson hard. He looked over the rail and saw that for the moment the rope held, although the impact had knocked the architect unconscious.

-###-

It was while tying Mitch's wrists behind his back with a plastic thong that one of the arresting officers noticed the electrically subdued suspect's wristwatch.

'Hey, look at this,' he said to his colleague, who was still holding the Taser gun in case he needed to give Mitch another jolt.

The other officer bent closer. 'What?'

'This watch. It's a gold Submariner, man. A Rolex.'

'Submariner, eh? Maybe that's why he's so fuckin' wet.'

'How come a doper's wearing a ten-thousand-dollar watch?'

'Maybe he stole it.'

'Naw. A doper would have sold a watch like that. Maybe he's telling the truth. What'd he say he was? An architect?'

'Hey, architect.' The cop slapped Mitch lightly on the face. 'You hear me, architect?'

Mitch groaned.

'How much T you give him?'

'Just the one mug.'

They untied Mitch's wrists, sat him in the back of the black-and-white and waited for him to recover.

'Maybe something's wrong in there after all.'

'The building attacked him? C'mon.'

'The guy at the county gaol said the elevator killed someone, didn't he?'

'So?'

'So, maybe we should check it out.'

The other cop shifted awkwardly and looked up at the sky. His eyes narrowed on the Gridiron's facade.

'What is that? Up there.'

'I dunno. I'll get the night sights.'

'Looks like window-cleaners.'

'At this time of night?' The cop fetched a pair of Starlight binoculars from the trunk and trained them on the front of the building.

-###-

Two hundred feet above the heads of his fellow LAPD officers, Frank Curtis struggled to recover the semi-conscious body of Ray Richardson that was hanging helplessly at right angles to his own ropes beside the Mannesmann cradle. The control rope had fallen from Richardson's hands and it was only the friction action of the descendeur that had prevented him from plummeting to his death. There was blood on the side of his head, and even when he opened his eyes and caught sight of Curtis's outstretched hand it was a minute or two before he felt strong enough to grasp hold of it.

'I've got you,' grunted Curtis as he pulled Richardson towards the cradle.

Richardson grinned wearily and held on.

'Yeah? But who's got you?' He shook his head, trying to clear it, and added, 'use the abseil rope to tie us off or we'll both be killed. Hurry, man. Before it decides to drop us down again.'

Curtis reached towards Richardson's harness and grasped a handful of the rope that was hanging beneath him.

'Make a loop,' Richardson ordered.

Curtis pulled a loop through the handrail and started to tie a figure-ofeight knot back on itself, the way he had seen Richardson tie the rope earlier.

Richardson nodded his approval. 'That's good,' he sighed. 'Make a climber out of you yet.'

A second or two later the knot tightened as once more Ishmael overrode the Mannesmann's brake checks to let the cradle run free on the cables.

'What did I tell you?' said Richardson as the cradle dipped down on one side like a capsizing boat. The rope slipped up to the corner of the handrail and the two men found themselves pressed close together. Suddenly the cables went taut again and the cradle straightened.