The Mandel Files

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Julia sat in the swivel chair behind the desk, a black imitation-wood affair with an Olivetti terminal linked into a complicated CAD drafting board. The office belonged to a middle-manager in the microgee module power systems bureau. Rachel checked it out, then closed the door behind her, standing sentry duty. Dr Ranasfari sank into the cheap thickly padded chair in front of the desk.

  “What is it, Cormac?” Julia asked.

  He gave another nervous grimace. “Perhaps I should have gone to Mr Walshaw, but I really feel this must be taken up at the highest level. And the Prime Minister is here, he will listen to you.”

  Julia moved from studious interest to outright fascination. Ranasfari never showed the slightest concern for anything outside his work.

  Open Channel To NN Core.

  Hello, Juliet, what’s the problem? I thought you’d be enjoying yourself today, Philip Evans said soundlessly into her mind.

  It’s Ranasfan, she told him. I’d like you to listen in on this. I might want your opinion.

  “That sounds very drastic, Cormac,” she said out loud. “But you know I’ll help in whatever way I can.”

  He nodded, squeezing the knuckles of his left hand. “Thank you. It concerns Dr Edward Kitchener. You know I used to be one of his students?”

  “I didn’t know that, no. But I’ve heard of Edward Kitchener.” Even as she said it she remembered: Kitchener’s gruesome murder had dominated the newscasts three days ago, even managing to nudge Scotland off the premier bulletins on Friday night. She couldn’t remember seeing much else about it since, although there had been an update this morning, some poor detective in the hot seat, unable to satisfy the incessant questions that reporters were flinging at him.

  Grandpa, have they caught the killer yet?

  No.

  Ah. I think I see where we’re leading.

  “His death was a tragedy,” she said hurriedly.

  “Yes. And the culprit still has not been brought to justice. That is what I want Miss Evans, justice. Kitchener was a brilliatit man. Brilliant. He had flaws, weaknesses, we all do. But his genius is undeniable. Simple dignity demands that his murderer is caught. I’m not asking for vengeance. I do not want the return of the death penalty. Nor do I want this barbarian quietly eliminated. But I do want him caught and tried, Miss Evans. Please. The police…, they’ve had three days. I’m sure they’re doing their best, but after all Oakham is just a provincial station. You must impress the Prime Minister, and through him the Home Secretary, on the absolute urgency of this case.”

  Tricky one, Juliet. According to finance division records, we were paying Dr Edward Kitchener for research work.

  What? I don’t remember that.

  It was a contract issued by Ranasfan.

  Bloody hell.

  Damn right, girl. You start pushing Marchant for action now, and people will accuse you of meddling in police affairs. There’s enough allegations about you and Event Horizon having undue influence over the New Conservatives as it is.

  “What project was Dr Kitchener working on for us?” she asked Ranasfari.

  He stopped playing with his hands. “I didn’t think it was worth bringing to your attention,” he said evasively.

  She decided to go all out on the friendship routine. “Cormac, you know you have my full confidence. That’s why your budget doesn’t have to be cleared through the finance division first, I don’t want you having to justify yourself to accountants. I genuinely do appreciate the value of pure research.”

  Seductress! Mental laughter echoed faintly.

  “Well, thank you.” Ranasfari ducked his head. “I asked Edward to look into wormholes for me. It corresponds with his field of interest. He was quite intrigued by the prospect. We discussed a fee, but he was more interested in the specialist programs our software division could provide for his light-ware processor than actual money. He agreed to take the contract, and I would channel his software requests through my laboratory. The money was just a token.”

  Access General Encyclopedia. Query: Wormholes, Category Physics.

  A neat little precis emerged from the processor.

  “When you say wormholes, you mean the instantaneous connections through space-time, I take it?” she asked.

  “Yes. Wormholes are quite permissible under Einsteinian relativity.”

  “I know it’s off the point, but what exactly is your interest in these wormholes?”

  “I thought, Miss Evans,” he said stiffly, ‘I thought that there might be a possible application in interstellar transit.”

  “A stardrive?” she said in a surprised whisper.

  He nodded, thoroughly miserable.

  “Faster than light travel?”

  Another brief nod.

  “Bloody hell,” said Julia. She summoned up a logic matrix from the processor node, feeding in the relevant bytes. The combination of irrational brain and coldly precise nodes gave her an ability to dissect problems from oblique angles, fusing intuition and syllogism in a way no pure computer could match. Data packages flowed and merged through the mental construct, budding into ideas. Most she rejected, the remainder opened up interesting options.

  “Who else would know that Kitchener was working for us?” she asked.

  “Secrecy was not something I would wish to impose on Edward. But he was not naturally communicative, certainly not to the media. His students would know, of course, probably several high-level theoretical cosmologists. He maintained contacts throughout the physics community, in fact academia in general. The free exchange of ideas is vital in such a field.”

  She ignored the defensive tone.

  How about it, Grandpa? Could Event Horizon be tied in?

  You mean, was he killed to prevent us from obtaining a stardrive?

  Yes.

  It’s a probability, Juliet, you know it is. But I can’t see anyone getting so worked up about it that they’d butcher the old boy, not for something that hypothetical. Besides, if it is possible to build an FTL stardrive, then ultimately it will be built. Kitchener might have been a wild card, but plodders have their place too. I expect Ranasfari could crack it if he put enough time in.

  Lord, I hope he doesn’t. I rather wanted that direct thermocouple.

  What are you going to do, Juliet?

  Well, we can’t ignore Kitchener’s murder now. If there is someone that paranoid about Event Horizon walking round loose, then I want them behind bars pronto.

  Attagirl.

  She put her elbows on the desk, and pressed her palms together. “I will have Morgan Walshaw contact the Home Office directly,” she said. “I think I can see how we can get this terrible crime solved quickly.”

  “How?” Ranasfari asked.

  “The Home Office can authorize local police stations to hire specialist advisers when the circumstances warrant it.”

  “What sort of specialist?”

  She smiled. “I was thinking a psychic might be appropriate.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Greg stood behind the moss-covered stone wall of his farmyard and watched a swarm of bilious clouds buffet the southern sky, blocking out the clean gold and orange colours of the low morning sun. Fast, cool gusts of air chased random wave-patterns in the shaggy grass around the lime saplings, twitching the slate-grey water of the reservoir into small peaks.

  In the long thistle-mottled field running between the groves and Hambleton Wood he could see the rabbits venturing out of their huge warrens hidden below the dead trees. Small tawny mounds sloping through the nettle clumps and spindly mildewed forget-me-nots which flourished around the rank of perished hawthorn bushes marking the boundary of the wood. There must have been over eighty of them. He and Eleanor went out on rabbit shoots two nights each week, infrared laser hunting-rifles picking off fifty at a time. It never seemed to make the slightest difference to their numbers the next morning.

  The hot climate had expanded their breeding season to ten months of the year, and the impenetrable tangle
of lush undergrowth in the wood meant he couldn’t reach their warrens to cull them properly. A Forestry Commission logging team was scheduled to fell the dead trunks in a couple of years, replanting with Chinese pines, otherwise he would probably have torched the wood at the height of summer, and to hell with the owner. The rest of the peninsula’s citrus farmers certainly wouldn’t object.

  Rabbits were a countrywide problem; despite the massive shooting and trapping campaigns which had turned them into a cheap staple meat, they were making serious inroads into England’s food crops. The Ministry of Agriculture was holding discussions with the Farmers’ Union about releasing a new virulent strain of myxomatosis. It was a nasty virus, but Greg couldn’t see an alternative.

  He shrugged his black leather jacket over a dark-blue short sleeve cotton sports shirt. His olive-green trousers had a tropical weave, which should keep him from sweating. He would have preferred shorts, but that was pushing it. At least he could wear comfortable suede ankle boots today, the Armani suit and shiny black leather shoes Eleanor had made him put on for the roll out ceremony had been a torture. Too stiff, too hot. It reminded him of the dress uniforms he had had to wear for regimental dinners. But at least they had been introduced to Prince Harry at the VIP reception, which made up for a lot. Then Julia waylaid him with her oh-so-reasonable favour.

  He shook his head at the memory. He was irritated, more by the fact that she had automatically assumed he would help the police than being dragged back into that kind of work, but he couldn’t honestly say there was any real anger. In any case, the idea of a killer as psychotic as Kitchener’s stalking the district wasn’t a particularly welcome one. Just so long as this wasn’t going to set a precedent. The citrus groves were his life now, and hopefully children before too long.

  Eleanor came out of the front door and blipped the lock. She was wearing a navy-blue waiter-cut jacket over an embroidered Indian cotton blouse, deep purple culottes. Her gaze ran over the windows she had been painting before the weekend; the frames were coated in a dull-pink undercoat, waiting for the white gloss finish. She crinkled her nose up.

  “Maybe I should stay,” she said, sounding unconvinced.

  “Not a chance, if I have to go, so do you. I’ve still got those limes to plant. And our neighbouring army of killer bunnies is waiting for a chance to eat the ones I did put in, look.”

  She glared at the mounds of brown fur bopping about through the undergrowth. “Perhaps we ought to torch the wood after all.”

  He opened the EMC Ranger’s door, and climbed in behind the wheel. “It’s too near Hambleton, and it’s not the real solution anyway.”

  “I suppose.” She sat in the passenger seat. “I hate the idea of myxamatosis.”

  He drove up the slope, and into the village. The broken windows on the Collisters’ cottage had already been boarded up with clean sheets of plywood and a heavy padlock held the front door shut. Someone had picked all the ripe brambles from the hedge.

  Eleanor gave it a sombre look as they went past, but didn’t say anything.

  The EMC Ranger’s fat, deep-tread tyres made short work of the slushy vegetation matting the peninsular link road. Monday night’s rains had left the flat fields beside the road looking like rice paddies. They were planted with gene-tailored barley, a design which utilized the increased level of atmospheric carbon dioxide to produce high yields. Long lines of verdant green shoots as thick as his thumb were poking up through silver poois of water; flocks of gulls waded up and down the ranks, pecking up the bounty of worms which had risen to the surface.

  When they reached the roundabout on the Oakham bypass, Greg steered straight round and headed down the A606. The fields of gene-tailored barley gave way to cacao plantations for the last kilometre into town. Over the last few years Oakham had gradually been encircled by the bushes, and more ground was being prepared, expanding the plantations outward like a vigorous mushroom ring. They were a valuable addition to the town’s economy. The price of the seed was rising all the time as processed food factories came back on stream, bringing chocolate back into the shops; and the gene-tailored variety flowered twice a year. Their cultivation also soaked up a fair fraction of the unemployed refugees who had been billeted on the town when the Lincolnshire Fens were flooded by the rising sea.

  The expanse of small amber flowers was just starting to bloom, but Greg ignored it. In his mind he was still running through yesterday afternoon’s conversation with Julia.

  “It’ll just be half a day’s work for you,” she’d said. “It’s really important to me. Please, Greg.”

  All he could see was a pretty young oval face and big tawny eyes looking up at him entreatingly. That kind of sly appeal, the not quite innocent adolescent adoration, was really below the belt. Typical Julia. The number of boys with broken hearts left in her wake could populate a small city.

  “I’m a psychic,” he said out loud.

  Eleanor turned and gave him an expectant glance. “Yes?”

  “So how come I can never win an argument with Julia?”

  “Because you want to lose. You know the way she feels about you.”

  “Why didn’t you object? This Kitchener thing, it’s exactly why we moved out to the farm, to get away from it.”

  She flashed him a dry, knowing smile. “I didn’t object because you were interested. Julia was right when she said you could clear it up in an afternoon. And once she mentioned it, you were hooked. Admit it.”

  “Yeah,” he said. Immensely grateful that she understood, once again. Though right at the back of his mind was a tiny smack of disquiet, a subliminal certainty that something didn’t quite gel. His intuition playing up again, although he hadn’t used his gland since leaving the Collisters’ cottage. It had started as soon as Julia mentioned Kitchener’s murder at Launde Abbey. And the more he tried to resolve it, find the reason, the more elusive it became. It would come eventually, of course, and then he’d kick himself for missing the obvious.

  Inside Oakham, the road surface improved noticeably, thistles and twitch grass still burrowed up through the tarmac near the kerbs, but the streets were open to two-way traffic. Scooters and bicycles clogged the middle of the town, forcing Greg to reduce speed; horse and cart rigs queued up patiently behind pre-Warming juggernauts. The big lorries had been converted to burning methane, true dinosaurs now, paintwork scarred and fading, drive mechanisms cannibalized from a dozen different wrecks.

  The ramshackle stalls which used to run the length of the High Street during the PSP years had recently been evicted, and the tarmac sealed over with thermo-stabilzed cellulose.

  Greg used to enjoy the souk-like atmosphere of the town centre, but the economic upswing was steadily squeezing street traders and spivs out of national life. Die-hard stall-holders had moved back to the market square, but it wasn’t the same. Shops were in vogue again. Almost two-thirds had re-opened, and he could see another three being refurbished; although they mainly sold consumer products and clothes, the market retained its hold over supplying fresh food. He wondered sourly how long it would take for the supermarket chains to re-establish themselves. Back to sanitized mass-produced packets of tasteless pap. A sure sign of prosperity.

  The way the country was right now was just about perfect, he reckoned. Emerging from the nightmare past, and looking forward to a future rich with promises-most of them made by Julia.

  They turned off the High Street and drove down Church Street, past Cutts Close, the central park. It was bounded by earth ramparts, and terribly overgrown; dead oak trees lying where they had fallen, waist-high grass choking the ancient swings. The affluence of the High Street didn’t extend far.

  A cluster of thirty-odd sleek white and silver trailers and caravans was drawn up in the middle of Cutts Close, looking like some kind of futuristic gypsy convoy. Greg saw the corporate logos of channel newscast companies splashed on them, a thicket of tripod-mounted satellite uplink dishes pointing up into the southern sky.

&nbs
p; His fingers tightened around the steering-wheel in reflex dismay. Of course! How stupid, he should have realized. A groan escaped from his lips.

  “What is it?” Eleanor asked.

  “Them!” He nodded ahead.

  The police station was sited just past the bottom of the park, backing on to what had once been the famous public school’s playing fields. The rugby pitches and cricket squares had long since been dug up to provide allotments for the Fens refugees displaced by the rising seas; over two hundred families had been crammed into the school buildings by the PSP Residential Allocation bureau. It was only a temporary accommodation, they were promised. Now, twelve years on, they were still waiting for proper housing.

  The main part of the station was a broad two-storey building built out of drab rusty-coloured brick, roofed by steel-grey tiles. A single-storey wing jutted out of the front, almost like an afterthought, long, narrow windows facing the road. It dated from the tail-end of the last century, and despite the architect’s use of curves and split levels to reduce its starkness it had a fortress-like appearance. The image wasn’t helped by the relics of the People’s Constables’ tenure. Metal grilles had been fitted over the long ground-floor windows, black security camera globes hung from the eaves, and the entrance to the rear car park was guarded by a high fence of thin monolattice slice-wire with skull and crossbones warning signs on each post. The brickwork facing the street was covered in ghostly remnants of paint-bomb impacts and fluorospray graffiti; an ineffectual solvent wash had left several anti-PSP slogans visible. Tapering soot scars, like frozen black flames, showed where the molotovs had hit.