They collected the girl in the black jacket on the way out of the drugstore. She was where Breen had left her, handcuffed to the metal upright of a turnstile by the main entrance. 'Don't mind me,' she said as they approached. 'I like being tied up while other people fire guns.'

Breen unlocked her cuffs and they went out through the gla.s.s doors into the hot October night. The girl began to cough as soon as they hit the street air. Her eyes were streaming by the time she reached the squad car. Breen locked her in the back, handing her a mask to wear until the car air conditioning took hold. By the time she got it on the girl was coughing so hard that Mancuso's chest was aching in sympathy.

She must be from out of town.

20.

The helicopter was late.

Stephanie didn't mind. It gave her more time to observe Mulwray's increasingly interesting behaviour.

The two of them were still working together, although Mulwray had twice asked to be transferred. Both times O'Hara had routed the requests back to Stephanie and Stephanie had torn them up. She was enjoying herself. Things had reached the point now where Mulwray wouldn't even look her in the eye.

The longer the flight was delayed the more nervous Mulwray became. Eventually he went to sit in the control shack with the pilots. Stephanie remained outside on the rooftop, watching big clouds moving over the city. She was wearing a breathing mask today to protect her face against the hot sooty winds blowing in from the west.

Finally the Biostock technicians brought the teenage boy up. Two of them came out on to the roof, wearing the standard white overalls with the Butler Inst.i.tute logos on the hack. They wheeled the stretcher across the roof surface towards the painted circle where the helicopter sat. The boy's head was lolling, a small plastic tube taped to his cheek so it remained fixed in his nose. His arms were lashed down on top of the blanket in case he regained consciousness.

Stephanie read the boy's name off the ID tags that were hanging outside the blanket. Vincent Wheaton Vincent Wheaton. The technicians on the fiftyfirst floor had found the tags around his neck when he was being processed.

Vincent was the reason the flight had been delayed. He had been picked up on a routine sweep of the junkies in Central Park and would normally have gone straight into Biostock. He looked cleaner and healthier than the average derelict or street dweller, but the park sweeps were unpredictable and by rights the boy should have been spare parts by now.

But there was a new memo from O'Hara which altered the Biostock protocol. It was apparently based on an article in a British newspaper and it specified a new range of blood tests to be carried out on all incoming stock. Vincent's blood had rung bells on all the tests, so the clinical sacrifice was postponed, the boy was flagged as something special and his unconscious body was scheduled on the next flight out to the Catskills.

Mulwray came out of the flight shack now and watched as the technicians put Vincent in the back of the helicopter. They strapped him down on a portable lifesupport unit with heavy sedatives being fed into his bloodstream in a glucose solution.

'If they're pressed for s.p.a.ce I can fly out later,' said Mulwray. 'I've got a lot of deskwork to catch up on.'

Stephanie said nothing.

'So long as it's okay with you,' said Mulwray.

Stephanie smiled.

When they reached the construction site after the flight, Stephanie made Mulwray wait while she pulled on some rubber boots in the site office. There had been some drainage problems at the site, with runoff from the mountainside above flooding the tunnel. As soon as Stephanie had the boots on she set off for the tunnel mouth, not giving Mulwray time to change. She was fascinated to see what he would do. He came trotting after her, still wearing his expensive, gleaming street shoes. By the time they were inside the tunnel they had been reduced to muddy ruin.

Men and women in white coats were trudging back from lunch in the company canteen on the surface, picking their way among puddles in the rutted mud of the tunnel floor. The excavation work was complete now but the ground was still crisscrossed with the tyre tracks of the heavy machinery. j.a.panese and Korean technicians in hard hats were inspecting the wall and studying blueprints, studiously avoiding each other as they planned the installations of the mainframes and the multiple generators. Lengths of plastic piping were stacked along the tunnel walls and fat power cables were hung in loops along the ceiling.

The suite of prefab huts which Stephanie used as her offices were located 150 metres down the sloping length of the tunnel. But even this deep it was impossible to see how much further the tunnel went. It faded away in the thick mists of evaporating runoff that glared under the harsh beams of the temporary lighting system. Stephanie unlocked the offices and flicked on the lights, leaving Mulwray outside trying to sc.r.a.pe the mud off his shoes and the cuffs of his suit pants. She went directly to the telephone on the nearest desk and dialled the number for O'Hara's house.

She knew it must be a difficult day for him and she wanted to lend her support.

The signal from Stephanie's phone travelled a kilometre via land lines, routed through the communications centre, up to O'Hara's redwood house on the slope above the excavation site. Inside the big house the B&O homeentertainment computer detected the incoming call and came to life.

The video sample created by O'Hara's son was still in the memory of the machine and it was the default image for all communications. So instead of a simple telephone bell ringing, the B&O created a holographic image of Jack Blood and sent him stalking through the house, looking for the inhabitants, eager to inform them of the phone call.

The pumpkinheaded killer strutted across the wide empty living room, the image of a jagged carving knife waving in one holographic hand and the image of an oldfashioned telephone, presented on a silver butler's tray, in the other.

Jack wandered the length of the silent living room, his image fading a little and the colours turning watery in the mountain sunlight as he crossed in front of the floortoceiling picture window. He then quartered the room, exploring it carefully, empty pumpkin eye sockets scanning from side to side as he searched for someone to take the call.

Once it was clear that the living room was empty the hologram promptly vanished, only to appear in the kitchen. Projectors mounted high on the walls of the room picked up the signal from the homeentertainment unit and projected Jack in full colour and apparent solidity, striding the tile floor between gleaming refrigerator and cooking unit. The kitchen was bare and peaceful, only a slight buzzing from the refrigerator disturbing the silence. Jack paused, standing in the quiet sunlight, then turned and strode through the wall, the projector in the master bedroom picking him up and flashing his image into the shadows as he appeared again. The blinds were down in the master bedroom and the silence was heavy. Jack stood there only for a moment before moving on to Patrick's bedroom at the back of the house.

He prowled up and down the little boy's room, stalking among the colouring books and crayons and computer scattered on the floor. He peered into both layers of the bunk bed but all he found was a tangle of sheets and blankets. Jack stood in the doorway of the empty closet. Finally he walked over to stand with his back to the window, the unanswered telephone still sitting on the silver tray in his rotted twig hand. His misshapen head was tilted to one side, giving an illusion of regret, as if Jack was sad that he couldn't complete his mission.

Now Stephanie abandoned her phone call and hung up the receiver a kilometre away. The disconnect code pulsed along the wire and the B&O cancelled Jack.

Just before the hologram vanished, the tall pumpkin head did a final turn, as if giving the child's bedroom a final survey. The computer graphics faded when he was halfway through the turn. The image froze and lingered for a moment, apparently staring out the window at the mountain slope below the house.

It was almost as if he could see through the gla.s.s, as if he was looking at the man and his wife sitting out there on the lawn.

Outside the house O'Hara stood up and began to pace down towards the treeline. His wife remained sitting in one of the expensive white plastic allweather chairs. O'Hara came back across the lawn to the chairs and set his gla.s.s down beside his wife's. Ants had already discovered the other drink and were crawling around it, up the slick sides and into the gla.s.s.

O'Hara sighed. 'I'm sorry you had to find out the way you did. But you must have suspected. All the research has been heading in this direction.' He turned and looked down towards the excavation site beyond the thinning trees. 'And now we're almost ready to get started.'

O'Hara's wife said nothing and he hurried on, filling the silence. 'All right. I know how you feel. I know your side of the argument. In fact I can probably put your own case better than you can.' He crouched on the lawn and searched for a moment, then he plucked something out from among the strands of gra.s.s. One of the small wild flowers that had seeded itself, blown there on the mountain winds. He held it carefully between thumb and forefinger, inspecting it in the sunlight.

'You might look at this flower,' said O'Hara, 'and you might see something of beauty. Perhaps you'd be moved by it. I know I'm moved by it. But when we look at this flower we see different things. I see the end processes of millions of years of evolution in action. Life replicating itself, changing, taking new shapes.

And the thing I'm doing, that project down the slope, that's the end product of the same processes. That is evolution, too. It's no different than the colours and form of this flower.

'You see, we stand at the threshold of a new age. Industrialization has had a ma.s.sive impact on our planet. Our machines have brought us many boons but you might argue that they are also destroying the natural world. You might say that degradation of the ecosphere is reaching crisis proportions. That if we don't take action now there will be no turning back.' O'Hara looked at the flower again, then let it drop from his fingers, falling back to the gra.s.s. 'And you'd be right.

'But there's something you don't understand. The machines that are polluting our world are built by human beings. Human beings who have evolved on this planet. Our species has stopped evolving physically, but not mentally. Our minds keep on developing. And our machines are the creations of our minds. They are the next stage of our evolution.' Now O'Hara's voice took on a note of excitement. He paced back and forth in front of the white lawn chairs.

'We don't need the natural world any more. It doesn't matter if the flowers and trees and animals all die. It doesn't matter if we fill the sky and sea with poison. Because none of those things can harm a world populated with machines. And our minds now have the skills to lift themselves out of our bodies and place themselves into those machines.'

O'Hara pointed to the line of trees and the construction site beyond. 'Down there we're building the first outpost of a new world. A deep hunker with generators that will last forever. Maintenance machines that can repair the generators and repair themselves as well. And we will fill that bunker with computers and we'll fill those computers with people. Minds that can live forever in the memories of those computers. And that's just the beginning.' O'Hara sat down near his wife's feet, sitting crosslegged on the damp gra.s.s among the small wild flowers. 'Soon we'll be building sites like this all over the world. And they are the blossoming of evolution just as surely as these flowers are.

'What hurts,' said O'Hara, 'is that you look at me as if I'm some kind of monster. I'm not saying this will be just the salvation of a superrich few. They will be the first beneficiaries, certainly. But eventually we intend to offer this salvation to everyone. The project is in its infancy, but we already have the first prototypes out in the field, where the technology will be shaped by market forces. It will evolve and it will evolve quickly. The first human beings have already been saved from a poisoned world. We had two pilot tests, and they showed that the method worked. Then we took the mind of an ordinary policeman and transformed it. And now our son has volunteered to be part of this project.' There were tears in O'Hara's eyes. 'Right this minute he's down at the site, beginning his evolutionary journey. And you should be proud of him. You should be proud of me. I've offered him a new world.'

O'Hara reached down and picked his wife's gla.s.s off the lawn. A dozen small ants were floating in it, all dead. 'If you had been just a little more patient, a little more willing to listen, I could have offered it to you as well.'

He got up holding the gla.s.s. He closed his wife's eyes and he touched her cold hand. Then he went into the house.

The playroom was full of toys.

It was brightly lit, with a floor made of clean blond wood. You would never have guessed it was inside the smallest of the prefab huts, at the rear of the group that made up Stephanie's suite of offices. The windows were sealed with blackout material so that you couldn't see the mud walls and raw construction of the tunnel outside.

Now a fiveyearold boy entered the room. Patrick O'Hara came in slowly, looking around. He ignored the toys.

Instead he looked at the large vents in the floor.

Then he came directly over to the mirror and looked at it.

He stared into the big square of reflective gla.s.s above the sink. It was as if he expected it to be a window into another room, rather than just a mirror.

Smart kid, thought Stephanie, sitting in the darkness of the adjacent room. She moved her chair a little to the left. Now Patrick was staring right at her through the twoway gla.s.s. He wasn't looking away, even though he must be able to hear the gas by now. Stephanie had expected him to go over to the floor vents and look at them. But instead the small boy just stood there, watching the mirror above the sink. Staring into the next room at Stephanie, his little face looking somehow sad and knowing.

Stephanie thought it was a fascinating expression. She wished she'd thought to record it. Record the whole procedure, in fact. But on second thoughts the gas was coming into the playroom pretty quickly, filling it with thick white mist, and pretty soon a camera would be unable to pick up any image.

There was already a thin mist between Patrick's face and hers, the boy's face softening in the white vapour, losing details of its expression, becoming a blank slate. Now you could imagine any expression on it.

Stephanie imagined the face smiling at her, with that heartcatching smile kids sometimes have. Then any suggestion of a face was blurred away, lost like a pattern you had imagined in a cloud, staring up into the sky on a hot summer's day.

Mulwray was sitting in a chair just behind Stephanie's. She'd made sure that he had a clear view of what was happening in the playroom. Stephanie would have liked to stay in the observation suite a little longer, even though there wasn't much to see, but this whole visit was something of a luxury. O'Hara was promoting her to the position of project organizer and soon she'd be on site permanently, moving into his house. There would be plenty of room now.

But before she transferred from New York Stephanie had to clear her desk. That meant flying back in an hour and paying a final visit to the office and doing one last sweep of the police cells. She would take Mulwray with her. Stephanie liked having him around.

When the lights came on Stephanie stood up and went to the door, wasting no time. Mulwray blundered to his feet and came stumbling hastily after her, as if he was afraid to be left alone in the small room.

They emerged into the bright flat lighting of the tunnel and she had a good look at Mulwray's face. He was looking very old indeed.

As they left, the surgical teams were entering the playroom their faces concealed behind breathing apparatus.

21.

Ace didn't know what the time was. She'd been wearing a wrist.w.a.tch when she was brought into the big cell, a circle of armed guards standing just inside the cell door, then retreating quickly as she was shoved inside. The door had chunked shut behind her on a remote control lock and then the other prisoners had begun to move forward, a slow tide.

The watch had been torn off her during the first fight. It didn't matter; Ace didn't need it. She could estimate the pa.s.sage of time with a fair degree of accuracy. She guessed she'd been in the cell for about two and a half hours. She'd had to fight three men and two women. The women had been the worst. Then some fresh prisoners had arrived, two teenage boys. And because of them, and because she'd won the fights, Ace had been left alone.

Now she squatted in a corner of the cell, balanced so that the ball of each foot was on the concrete floor while she sat back on her heels. It was comfortable when you got the knack, although you had to rise up every so often, like doing deep knee bends, if you didn't want your muscles to lock. There was a bench running the full length of one wall of the cell, but it was fully occupied and ruthlessly defended. You didn't necessarily have to fight to get a place, but the other things you had to do were worse.

After the teenagers arrived Ace had a chance to sit back and look and listen, learning everything she could about this new environment. But then she'd heard the man talking about how his first month in the cell had been the worst, and someone else agreeing and saying it hardly ever took more than a year before you got your first court hearing. And then she'd seen the woman nursing a newborn child in one corner, a pale, quiet baby. And that was when Ace stopped looking and listening.

As she rocked back and forth on her heels Ace kept her arms hugged tight around herself, her bruised shoulder aching savagely now.

'You're the one, right?'

Ace looked up. She recognized the man from the crowds that had gathered during the fights. He had watched with interest and kept a safe distance. He was better dressed than the other prisoners and seemed to be able to move through any part of the cell with impunity.

'I'm from the committee,' said the man. 'Actually, to tell you the truth, I am the committee.' He smiled at Ace. 'You're a good fighter, I'm sorry to lose you.' He signalled and two big men moved in quickly and dragged Ace to her feet. She pulled free but the men had already released her and moved back. 'I was going to give you a week and then, if you held out, I was going to nominate you for the committee,' said the welldressed man. 'But that's the way it goes. Come on.'

Ace didn't move.

'We haven't got all day,' said the man. 'Even the committee can't hold them back forever.'

What Ace recognized as a group of the most dangerous prisoners were creating a human corridor, their backs to her, facing outwards towards the other prisoners in the cell.

Ace walked along the corridor, the man from the committee beside her. 'Listen, next time you're arrested, see if you can get them to put you back in this cell.'

'I'm not coming back.'

The man was looking past Ace at the cell door. 'Maybe not,' he said.

Waiting beyond the barred door were a man and woman. The woman looked just a few years older than Ace, the man's age was harder to guess. He had beautiful Eurasian features but he was stooped and old looking; beaten looking. Ace found herself thinking that he wouldn't last long in the cells.

The woman leaned forward and pa.s.sed something through the bars. It looked like a telephone. The man from the committee accepted the telephone and took an American Express card out of his shirt pocket. Ace saw that the portable phone had a small screen on the handset. The man ran his credit card down a groove in the side of the phone and the screen lit up, showing numbers and a dollar sign. 'That's equitable,' said the man. There was the chunking sound Ace had heard once before and the cell door shivered.

The man stood aside politely to let Ace by. Ace stared at the open door and the man and woman who stood waiting on the other side. The man from the committee winked at Ace. 'I haven't figured out a way of charging them for incoming prisoners yet, but I'm working on it.' He smiled as Ace walked past him and out of the cell.

The man and woman were immediately beside Ace, a little closer than she would have liked. Ace's heart was racing.

The cell door was locking behind her. She was out. Ace couldn't quite believe it. She felt like running, before someone could change their mind. Now that she had time to think, the pain was coming back. Her shoulder pulsed with pain and sweat crawled down her sides. She felt a little feverish.

The woman was smiling at her. She had perfect teeth. She caught Ace's hand and shook it. 'My name is Stephanie, this is Mr Mulwray.'

'Are you sure?' Petersen was saying. 'The subconscious mind can respond with amazing speed.'

'You're talking about reflexes,' said Mancuso. 'I know what my own reflexes feel like.'

'It was a moment of extreme stress '

Mancuso set aside her cup of powdery, machinetasting coffee. 'Listen, I didn't do anything. I was standing there in the drugstore. The situation appeared to be under control. I was trying to do a count in my head, working out if we'd dropped all of them. Then the gun swivelled. It moved on some kind of universal joint just over the handle. It moved by itself.'

Petersen sighed and took a Phillips screwdriver out of a coffee mug full of pens on his desk. On the coffee mug there was a big letter I I, then a drawing of a heart, then big letters NY NY. The heart had bullets holes in it. 'They never tell us exactly what to expect with the new weapons systems.' He opened a concealed panel on the underside of the gun and began to work at a recessed screw.

'I thought you guys designed them,' said Mancuso, pacing the laboratory area. The R&D lab was a big open s.p.a.ce occupied by work stations, desks and long benches. It was silent except for recurrent deep rumbling and a regular highpitched beeping sound.

'Mostly we do,' said Petersen, 'but sometimes we get government or company specifications. Features they want us to test.'

'Features they want us us to test,' said Mancuso, returning to stand at the desk beside Petersen. 'When was the last time one of you guys fired a gun?' to test,' said Mancuso, returning to stand at the desk beside Petersen. 'When was the last time one of you guys fired a gun?'

'When was the last time you dismantled one? These thing have been known to blow up when you take them apart. Greetings from the Pacific Basin.' Petersen's fingers had found the seam that divided the lower cylinder of the gun and he was prying it apart.

'Where's that noise coming from? The beeping.' Mancuso crushed her coffee cup and dumped it in a bin of junk fax and printout.

'Why don't you settle down? Read a book or something.' Petersen indicated his desk screen. 'That noise is the coder on the door lock. The side entrance, down in the alley. Ignore it. It's just some wino punching numbers, trying to get lucky.' On the small screen digits flashed on, in time with the beeping sound. Petersen watched the sequence of numbers for a moment, then returned to the gun on his desk. 'Come and see this.'

The black metal cylinder was lined with a white plastic honeycomb matrix that supported the gun's control system. There were surprisingly few components. A complex optical unit with a shatterproof quartz lens that peeked out of the front end of the tube, just under the muzzle. A bus cable that ran the length of the cylinder. A little silver sticker that said 'Made in Korea'. Some drops of spilled solder. A rack of chips and a large, nonstandard chip with a luminous line framing it. Petersen pointed with the screwdriver. 'That's special. It's powered all the time. It has its own longlife battery on the underside.' Petersen's fingers moved to the bus cable, gently working it free. A flat tongue of clear plastic emerged with a network of copper lines embossed on it.

Petersen had connected an earthing line to his wrist so that static wouldn't fry the circuitry.