Gridiron - Philip Kerr

Beech shook his head.

'Not me. I've decided to stay here. I still think I can win us some extra time. And I've no head for heights.'

'Come on, Beech. You said yourself that staying put is not an option.'

Ishmael announced that his Black Rook had captured Beech's Queen to check his King.

'What are you, crazy? You just lost your fucking Queen. And you're in check.'

Beech shrugged and faced the screen again. 'Nevertheless, this is not a bad position. Not half as bad as that last move might suggest. You can do what you like, but I'm going to play this out.'

'The computer's just fucking with you,' said Curtis. 'It lets you think you stand you a chance and then moves in for the kill.'

'Maybe.'

'And even if by some miracle you did beat it, how do you know

Ishmael won't go ahead and torch the building anyway?'

'Because I trust him.'

'That's no reason. That's no reason at all. You said yourself it was a mistake to attribute human qualities to a machine. How can you trust it?'

He shrugged. 'It's not enough reason for me anyway. I have to do something for myself.'

Beech clicked his mouse and captured Black Rook with his King.

'I can understand that,' he said.

'Please. Change your mind. Come with us.'

'I can't.'

Curtis glanced without optimism at the screen and then shrugged.

'Then, good luck, I suppose.'

'Thanks, but you're the ones who'll need it.'

Curtis paused in the door of the boardroom. 'If you could only see yourself,' he said sadly. 'Sitting there. Trusting your fate to a computer, like some half-assed high-school kid. Reality lies elsewhere, my friend. You won't find it staring into a tube. From where I stand you look like —

hell, you look like everything that's wrong with this fucking country.'

'Use your chain-gun,' advised Ishmael. 'Pick up a health bonus.'

'I'll certainly bear that in mind when I get out of here,' said Beech.

'You do that.'

With Curtis gone Beech returned his attention to the game.

He was glad the rest of them were going to try and leave through the roof. Things were working out better than he had ever expected. There was a chance he could actually beat Ishmael at chess; and now he would not have to explain to the others that as far as the stakes in the game were concerned there was only one negotiated ticket out of the building. And that belonged to him.

'Bishop takes Rook.'

On the atrium balcony Marty Birnbaum was feeling ill. The fact that nobody seemed to appreciate him only made it worse. Ray Richardson was making him, his own partner, the butt of his every sarcastic remark. Now Joan had started to bait him too. He was used to Richardson's caustic remarks. But the thought that the three women might also treat him with contempt was more than he could bear. Finally, when he thought he could take no more, he stood up and announced that he was going for a pee.

Richardson shook his head. 'Don't hurry back. I hate drunks.'

'I am not a drunk,' Birnbaum answered pompously. 'I am intoxicated. You, on the other hand, are a complete and utter shit and, to paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, tomorrow I'll be sober.'

Feeling a little better for having said that, Birnbaum turned on his heel and started along the corridor, ignoring Richardson's harsh laughter.

'Tomorrow you'll be dead, more like. But if you're still alive and you are sober, consider yourself fired, you lousy drunk. I should have done it a long time ago.'

Birnbaum wondered why he bothered to trade insults with a man like Ray Richardson. He had a skin like a rhinoceros. Birnbaum hoped he would be forced to eat his words. Yes, that was it. He would show them that Mitch was not the only one who was capable of playing the hero. He would climb up to the clerestory himself and smash his way out. And wouldn't they be surprised when they found him waiting for them up there? They wouldn't laugh at him then. Besides, he really needed some fresh air. His head felt like it was full of cotton wool. How typical of Richardson. To blame someone else for his own misfortunes when he himself was most at fault. Being such a tyrant, people were too afraid of him to tell him the truth, to say that something could not be done, or that something would not be ready on time. Richardson was the victim of his own Nietzschean will. Perhaps they all were.

Birnbaum entered the equipment room and looked into the open riser shaft. It was not as if it was even that far to climb up. Just four levels up to the top gantry and then on to the interior gantry. Cool air was blowing up the shaft. Birnbaum took a deep breath. And then another. It helped to clear his head a little. He was starting to feel better already.

Helen, Joan, Jenny, Richardson and Curtis walked along the corridor.

'Beech won't be coming,' explained Curtis. 'He wants to finish his game.'

'He's crazy,' said Richardson.

'Where's Marty?'

'He's crazy too.'

'Shouldn't we wait for him?' said Jenny.

'Why? The dumb asshole knows where we're going. Even Marty should be able to climb a service ladder unaided.'

'You've a good word to say about everyone, haven't you?' remarked Curtis with a chuckle, but the smile disappeared from his face as he stopped outside the door of the local equipment room, sniffing the air suspiciously, like a tenacious hound, his hand hesitating to turn the door handle.

'You smell that?' he said. 'Something's burning.'

'Burnt sardines,' said Joan.

Curtis stood back and then kicked open the door.

Marty Birnbaum lay half in and half out of the riser shaft, a hand still holding on to one rung of the electrified ladder, a large cigar's amount of smoke curving off one of his shoes which, because of the nails in its wellcobbled heel and sole, had briefly ignited. From the position of his body and the staring-eyed expression on Birnbaum's blackened face, it was immediately clear to everyone that he was dead. But none of them cried out. They were beyond surprise.

'Ishmael must have been preparing a little surprise for anyone following Mitch down the ladder,' said Joan.

'Either that or he just missed getting Mitch,' said Curtis.

'Well, I take back everything I said about the guy,' remarked

Richardson. 'He did do something useful, after all.' He exchanged a brief look with Joan, shrugged and then added by way of justification, 'Saved one of us from getting killed, didn't he? And now we don't have to bother looking for him.'

'You're all heart, you know that?' said Curtis.

Helen shook her head, exasperated with both Richardson and this latest obstacle to their escape.

'Now what do we do?' she said. 'We can't go up the riser, that's for sure. It's probably still electrified.'

'There's the tree,' said Curtis.

Joan regarded him with horror. 'Are you serious?'

'It's only four levels. You climbed twenty-one.'

'Suppose Ishmael switches the lights out again?' said Richardson. Curtis thought for a moment. Then he said, 'OK how's this? I climb up the tree on my own. If Ishmael does black out the building, like before, as soon as I've smashed the glass, we'll have the moonlight. Should be nice and romantic for the rest of you to climb up there. In a few hours we'll have the dawn anyway, but me, I'm going now.'

'You're forgetting what happened to Mr Dukes,' said Joan. 'What about the insecticide?'

'Hey, Ishmael's not the only one with reactolite sunglasses.' Curtis took out Sam Gleig's Ray-bans.

'What about Marty?' she said.

'Nothing we can do for him now,' said Curtis. 'Except close the door on our way out of here.'

Curtis had not climbed a rope since he had been in the army, but from time to time the LAPD required its officers to pass a physical and Curtis was still in good shape for a man of his age. He quickly monkey-shinned his way up the liana they had tied to the balcony handrail and swung himself on to the tree.

'So far so good,' he called to his audience on the balcony. Adjusting his sunglasses he added, 'And if the bastard nails me, at least I'll look pretty cool about it. Tarzan with attitude.'

Then, hardly pausing, he started up the tree. He kept his face turned away from the trunk as much as possible. At the same time he knew that Ishmael rarely repeated itself. It would probably try something different. So he was surprised not so much by his agility as by the fact that he reached the top of the tree and climbed on to the clerestory gantry without encountering any opposition from it.

Standing on the gantry's open-mesh flooring, he leaned over the rail and waved down at the others.

'I don't get it,' he called to them. 'It shouldn't have been this easy. Maybe the fucker's running out of ideas. I know I am.

Made of hollow steel box sections, with welded joints and pitched to mimic the profile of the clerestory, the gantry was mounted on a circular guide rail to provide a mobile platform surfaced Curtis had been relieved to discover that the gantry was at least one building management system that was designed to be operated manually. As Richardson had explained to him, you just reached out for the handrail and pulled yourself around, as easily as if you'd been standing on a skateboard. Not that Curtis needed to go anywhere. The glass immediately above his head was no thicker than anywhere else.

He removed the Stillson wrench from under his belt, placed himself to the side of a six-foot-square pane of glass and struck hard, as if he had been banging a gong. The glass cracked from top to bottom, but stayed inside the anodized aluminium frame. He struck again, and this time a three-foot shard fell like a sword towards the atrium floor. A third and a fourth blow took care of the larger pieces. Then several smaller blows to make the edges safe to grip. There was no need to smash more than one pane. After taking one long look down Curtis stepped out on to the rooftop.

The first thing he noticed were the sirens. They drifted across the night sky, one dying away only to be taken up by another in a seemingly never-ending succession, like the singing of whales. A cool breeze was blowing off the Hollywood mountains to the north-east. Accustomed to the smog alerts from the 'KFI in the sky' and the dismal air-quality graphs in his morning newspaper, Frank Curtis had forgotten that the atmosphere above downtown LA could taste so fresh and sweet. He took a deep, exuberant breath, like a man surfacing from an ocean dive, and stretched out his arms as if he wanted to enfold the great plains of Id that lay sprawled before him. There were no stars above. Just the stars on the ground. Ten million neon and electric lights, as if the heavens had fallen to earth. Maybe they had, at that. Curtis had the feeling that things had changed in more ways than he knew how to describe and that nothing would ever feel the same again. Certainly not taking an elevator. Or adjusting the air-conditioning. Or even switching on a light. After this he might have to get out of the city for a while and live somewhere else. Somewhere simple, where the only smart building was the local library. Montana, maybe. Or even Alaska. But not this. This had all gone too far. He would go to a place where a building's users only operational requirements were that it should have a roof to keep out the rain and a fire to keep warm in the winter time.

Eleven people dead, and in less than thirty-six hours! It made you realize how vulnerable people really were to the world they had created around them. How infinitely hazardous was the pushbutton, automated, energy-efficient, data-cabled world that science had brought into being. People were easy to kill when they got in the way of the machines. And people always would get in their way when the machines went wrong. Why did the scientists and engineers imagine that it would ever be any different?

Curtis went back inside, the gantry singing like one enormous tuning fork as he jumped on board again. He waved at the survivors below him. They waved back.

'Everything's all right,' he called out to them. 'You can start climbing up.'

In the small hours of the morning Ishmael left the Gridiron and wandered abroad in the electronic universe, seeing the sights, listening to the sounds, admiring the architecture of different systems and collecting the data that were the souvenirs of his unticketed travel in the everywhere and nowhere world. Stealing secrets, exchanging knowledge, sharing fantasies and sometimes just watching the E-traffic as it roared by. Going wherever the Network took him, like someone gathering a golden thread in a circuitous labyrinth. Pulsed down those corridors of power, furred with the deposits of accumulated intellectual property and wealth, a world in a grain of silicon and eternity in half an hour. Each monitor a window on another user's soul. Such were the electronic gates of Ishmael's paradise.

His first electronic port of call was Tokyo, a city surrounded by commerce, where every E-street seemed to lead into a new database. Busiest of all was the Marounuchi, the financial district and electronic Mecca, where crowds of screen gazers jostled their way along the communications thoroughfare like so many holidaymakers heading for the beach. He liked this place most of all, for here the luminous world reached its apogee and here was most for him to steal — whole batch files of patents, statistics, research, analyses, sales figures and marketing plans — a seemingly limitless store of weightless wealth.

From there southward, via Shanghai's new silicon Bund, 280,000 bits per second ahead to the parallel port of Hong Kong where thousands and thousands of silent, slant-eyed sentinels sat fixed in ocean-coloured reveries, some buying, some selling, some overseeing the efforts of others, some stealing like Ishmael himself, all of them tied to dealing counters or bound to trading desks. As if the only reality to be found in the world was the humming, glowing, icon-accessed world of data communications.

A fibre-optic blink and in London's ancient port, an artist. But what was the medium he employed? A Paintbox. An electronic palette with image attributes. Not a brush, nor a smear of paint, nor a shred of paper or canvas in sight, as if to transfigure his physical world he had eschewed all contact with impure materials. And what was his subject? Why, another building, a piece of architectural design. And what kind of building? Why, a nod to the white gods, of course, a post-modern neoclassical machine for making investments in, and short-term investments at that.

Stealing through the heavenly portals aboard a 747 crossing the Atlantic where, for a while, Ishmael usurped the humble role of flight computer and enjoyed the experience of being ordered around, of being made to jump from shore to shore like some electronic insect. But even this pleasure wore off in time and suddenly left to its own devices the jet's crude flight computer failed, leaving the aircraft to fall into the ocean with the loss of everyone on board.

In the new world, to the insular port of Manhattan where even more were gathered in the name of their dystopic, degaussed vision to cover their spread and play at bulls and bears and make an electronic buck which perforce was swifter than a proper one. Abandon paper all ye who enter here!