After that it was just a question of establishing two more cut-offs, one in Bristol city council's finance mainframe, then on through the CAA flight control in Farnborough, and dialling the magic number.
Gracious Services had a nonsense number, there was no phone on the end of it. But every English Telecom exchange computer in the country had been infiltrated with a catchment program that would slot the caller directly into the circuit.
Never, not once, in all the years they were in power, did the PSP manage to tap the Gracious Services circuit, nor expunge the catchment program from Telecom's exchange computers. They tapped individual phones, and caught people using Gracious Services that way, but that was all. Rumour had it the card carriers used the circuit themselves on occasion.
The terminal's flatscreen snowstormed for a second then printed:
WELCOME TO GRACIOUS SERVICES.
WE AIM TO PLEASE.
DATA FOUND, OR MONEY RETURNED. NO ACCESS TOO BIG OR TOO SMALL.
JUST REMEMBER OUR CARDINAL RULE: DO NOT ASK FOR CREDIT!!!
PLEASE ENTER YOUR HANDLE.
Greg typed THUNDERCHILD, his old Army call-sign.
GOOD MORNING THUNDERCHILD. YOUR UMPIRE IS WILDACE. WHAT SERVICE DO YOU REQUIRE?
PHYSICAL LOCATION OF INDIVIDUAL.
OK THUNDERCHILD, I'VE GOT SEVEN HOTRODS RARING TO BURN FOR YOU. IS THIS GOING TO BE A GLOBAL SEARCH?
I BELIEVE THE INDIVIDUAL TO BE IN EUROPE, QUITE POSSIBLY IN ENGLAND.
THIS IS THE WAY IT IS, THUNDERCHILD. A EUROPE-WIDE SEARCH WILL COST YOU FOUR THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED NEW STERLING. IF WE GET A NEGATIVE RESULT, THAT MEANS YOUR TARGET ISN'T IN EUROPE, IT'LL ONLY COST YOU TWO THOUSAND. IF YOU WANT US TO RUN A GLOBAL SEARCH IT WILL COST YOU SEVEN THOUSAND, OK?
RUN A EUROPEAN SEARCH FOR ME, WILDACE.
YOU GOT IT. I HOLD THE MONEY. I DECIDE HOW IT'S SPLIT.
SOUNDS GOOD.
DEPOSIT FOUR THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED POUNDS NEW STERLING INTO TIZZAMUND BANK ZURICH, ACCOUNT NUMBER WRU2384ASE.
Greg entered Wildace's number, authorising the transfer from his Dessotbank account.
OK THUNDERCHILD, YOUR CREDIT IS GOLDEN. WHO IS THE TARGET?
The image coalesced in his brain, rock-solid, grinning arrogantly; and he typed: KENDRIC DI GIROLAMO.
Greg's imagination painted the picture for him; seven people scattered across England, dark anonymous figures hunched over their customised terminals, mumbling into throat mikes, touchtyping, watching data flash through cubes. It was a race, the first one who satisfied Wildace they had the correct answer would get the money, less Wildace's commission. Reputations were made on the circuit. It took twenty or thirty runs, successful runs, before anyone could even think about going solo.
Royan had trained himself on the Gracious Services circuit. He could've gone solo, running data snatches against kombinates for the tekmercs. But, of course, he had a different set of priorities.
Greg sat back, wondering if he had time for a drink. He didn't have a clue how long the run was going to take. He didn't use the circuit often; the last time had been almost a year previously, tracing a money sink set up by Simon White's accountant.
Whatever he asked for, Gracious Services invariably produced an answer. Their only failure to date had been confirming whether or not Leopold Armstrong had died the day the PSP was overthrown. They weren't alone. New Conservative inquisitors had drawn a blank. Even the combined ranks of the Mindstar Brigade vets had been stumped. Most people thought he was dead, including the surviving top-rank apparatchiks. Possibly trying to create a martyr, Greg thought, two years was an impossibly long time to remain hidden if he was alive.
There had been very little of Downing Street left after the electron-compression warhead had detonated. The explosion created a deep glass-walled crater one hundred metres across, flattening every building for five hundred metres beyond its rim. Hundreds of silver rivulets scarred its slopes, molten metal which had solidified as it trickled downwards. The only human remnants were individual carbon molecules, mingling with the oily black pall clotting the air overhead.
Some said the warhead was American, others Chinese. Both had denied involvement. But it had to be one of the two superpowers, they were the only nations who had mastered the technology.
Neither had seemed a likely candidate to Greg. There had been talk in Turkey of the Northern European Alliance buying some electron-compression warheads from the Americans. The weapon that would turn the tide, was the squaddies' camp rumour. It could've been deployed to take out entire airfields or tank battalions, megatonnage blasts without the radiation and fallout of fission weapons. Rich man's nuke.
Nothing had ever come of it. So Greg reckoned that if the Americans wouldn't hand them over to the Alliance, they were even more unlikely to give one to the urban predator gang which claimed to have smuggled it into Downing Street. Certainly the New Conservative inquisitors never bothered to find out.
Greg had made his small contribution to the search for Armstrong, but for once not even his intuition could say whether the President had survived, he had no belief one way or the other. He just wished Armstrong dead dead dead; burning in Dante's hell for ever more.
He gazed out of the chalet lounge's window while the unbidden reflections drifted past, bringing the associated emotions back with them, the elation and the suffering. Flames and laughter.
Seventeen minutes after Gracious Services began the search, his terminal's flatscreen came alive again.
GOT HIM FOR YOU, THUNDERCHILD. KENDRIC DI GIROLAMO CURRENTLY ON BOARD HIS YACHT MIRRIAM, DOCKED AT PETERBOROUGH'S NEW EASTFIELD MARINA, BERTH TWENTY-SEVEN.
THANK YOU, WILDACE, Greg typed.
NO PROBLEM. HOTROD HANDLED BLUEPRINCE BURNED HIM FOR YOU. SAYS IF YOU WANT ANOTHER RUN HE'LL BE HAPPY TO OBLIGE, FEE NEGOTIABLE.
I'LL REMEMBER.
PLEASURE TO DO BUSINESS WITH YOU, THUNDERCHILD. WILDACE SIGNING OFF.
So Kendric was in Peterborough, was he? Close to the action. How convenient.
Greg made one final call, then headed back to the bedroom.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The sheer number of Event Horizon facilities springing up in Peterborough after the Second Restoration, coupled with Wilholm's proximity, meant that the company had to establish a large finance division in the city. Julia used it as her de facto head office, so it was only natural that Morgan Walshaw should use it for his security division's command centre as well. It was a temporary arrangement while both divisions waited for the respective custom-built headquarters to be completed. The building they had moved into for the interregnum was the old Thomas Cook office block, situated at the top of a small bluff overlooking the Ferry Meadows estuary, on the western side of the town. In doing so they'd ousted the PSP Minorities Enhancement Council staff who had occupied it ever since currency restrictions put an end to the glories of package holidays.
After Event Horizon had taken over, the company engineers immediately set about building a concrete embankment along the bluff to halt the erosion which was eating towards the foundations. At the base of it they planted three small lagoons of gene-tailored coral to house a set of tidal turbines which powered the finance division's gear. Seeing a building which wasn't plastered with the glossy black squares of solar-cells came as something of a novelty.
The security office inside, which Greg and Gabriel had been loaned for interviewing the NN core team, was a cramped cell of a room with a metal table and three plastic chairs. It looked out towards Longthorpe, where gulls strutted about on the partially exposed mudflats.