Philip Kerr - Gridiron

'No, you can't,' she said. 'It's priceless. Tell them, Jenny. It's a holy object.'

'Strictly speaking,' said Jenny, 'Buddhism and Taoism are diametrically opposed. I can't see anything wrong with doing this, Joan.'

'Ray, tell them.'

Richardson shrugged. 'I say we use Bud here to nail the droid before it nails Mitch.'

They wheeled the statue to the balcony and, while Curtis and

Richardson positioned the head at a point on the edge of the level a little further along from where Arnon had fallen to his death, Jenny searched the kitchen where the air was now quite breathable for something that would make a mess on the droid's clean floor. Bomb bait, Curtis called it. She returned with a couple of ketchup bottles.

'This should really piss that thing off,' she said.

Mitch watched the droid turn around from the clean floor under the piano and scan the explosion of glass and ketchup on the immaculate white marble with its video camera. Immediately it moved towards the mess, inspecting the perimeters of the large red cleaning task that now lay before it.

'Wait for my signal,' said Mitch. 'It's still on the edge of the mess. We'll let the fucker get right in the middle before you hit it.'

But the droid remained motionless on the edge of the ketchup. It was almost as if it suspected a trap.

'What's it doing?' asked Jenny on the walkie-talkie.

'I think it's — '

Suddenly, the droid sped into the centre of the huge ketchup splash and Mitch yelled, ' Now ! Do it now!'

The head of the Lord Buddha seemed to take for ever to fall to the ground. As if it was on invisible wires, moving very little in the air, it fell with a serenity, as if calling the earth to witness the climactic event of its last journey, until, with a tremendous impact, it struck the SAM droid in a huge balloon burst of metal and plastics.

Mitch ducked behind the pond wall as pieces of debris flew overhead. When he looked again the droid had disappeared.

As soon as the air in the boardroom was completely breathable again, Bob Beech announced that he wanted to return to the terminal, to continue with his attempts to fathom Ishmael's thought processes. Curtis tried to dissuade him. 'You're going back in there? To play chess?'

'My position is better than I thought it would be. Ishmael's game seems rather hesitant. In fact, I'm sure of it.'

'Suppose Ishmael pulls another stunt like before? Suppose he gasses you. What then? Have you thought of that?'

'Look, I don't actually think he meant to kill anyone but Willis Ellery.'

'And that makes it OK?'

'No, of course not. All I'm saying is that I think I'll be safe enough as long as we're playing the game. Besides… I don't suppose you'd understand.'

'Try me,' challenged Curtis.

'It's more than just a game. I created this monster, Curtis. If it does have a soul I think I have a right to know about it. The maker would like to have a conversation with his creature, if you like. After all, it was me who promoted Ishmael from the darkness. Despite everything that he's done, I can't treat him as my enemy. I want Ishmael to speak to me, to explain himself. We can have a dialogue. Maybe I can find a way of defusing the time bomb.'

Curtis shrugged. 'It's your funeral,' he said.

When Beech sat down in front of the screen again the quaternion turned towards him. Then it nodded, as if welcoming him back to the game. Beech surveyed the pieces for a moment, although he had memorized the board and already knew the move he was planning to make. He had the idea that Ishmael might have made a mistake.

Beech clicked the mouse and moved his King to Knight 1.

He was glad that the rest of them were too afraid to come back. Now he had the chance to be alone with his electronic Prometheus. Besides, he had his own private set of priorities to present to his creation.

The head had been hollow, like a great chocolate egg: the face had broken off as one complete shard and Mitch saw how details like the lips and eyes of the Buddha could be traced in relief on the inside of the metal. He limped across the floor, picking his way among the combined wreckage of the Buddha's head and the SAM droid and wondering what was the statute on the feng shui for desecrating the image of the Far East's pre-eminent holy man.

Behind the horse-shoe shaped, heat-resistant ceramic desk, there was no sign of Kelly Pendry's hologram. Mitch was almost relieved. At least he wouldn't have to endure her relentlessly sunny personality. But the hologram was supposed to be triggered by anyone entering the gradient field that limited the boundaries of Kelly Pendry's interaction. If the hologram was not operating, then the front door had to be open.

'Fat chance,' he said out loud, but he walked over to the front door anyway, just to make sure.

It was still locked. He pressed his nose to the tinted glass of the door, trying to see if there was anyone on the piazza, but knowing that this was unlikely. He could just make out the raised hydraulic blocks of the piazza's Deterrent Paving that were doing their uneven job in making the area generally inhospitable. A couple of times he saw the flashing lights of a police patrol car on Hope Street, and the sight was enough to make him start hammering on the door with the flat of the hand, and shout for help. But even as he did he knew he was wasting his time. The plate glass didn't even vibrate under his blows. He might as well have been striking a concrete wall.

'Mitch?' squawked the walkie-talkie unit. 'Are you all right? What's happening?' It was Jenny again. 'I heard you shout.'

'It's nothing,' he said. 'I lost my head for a minute, that's all. It was just being near the front door, I guess.'

Optimistically, he added, 'I'll call you when I've got the laser working.'

He replaced the walkie-talkie on Dukes's utility belt and turned towards the desk, asking himself if he really had half an idea of what he was doing. His experience of working with lasers was rudimentary, to say the least. Ray Richardson had probably been right. In all likelihood he would only succeed in blinding himself. Or worse. But what else was there to do?

It was then that Mitch received a fright that made his heart leap against the ladder of his ribs like a spawning salmon.

Standing behind the desk in place of the syrupy presenter of Good Morning, America was an alien monster from some science-fiction nightmare, a grey-skinned, double-jawed, dragon-tailed beast, complete with holographic drool and Dolby Stereo heavy breathing. At least seven feet tall, the creature eyed Mitch malevolently and extended its retractable jaws suggestively. Mitch recoiled from the desk as if he had been snapped back by a safety line.

'Holy Christ!' he exclaimed.

He knew it was just a hologram: three sets of diffracted light waves, a real-time image that he seemed to recognize, but not from any movie he had ever seen. Then he remembered. It was the Parallel Demon, the ultimate creature from the computer game he had seen Aidan Kenny's son playing in the computer room. What was it called again? Escape from the Citadel ? Ishmael must have copied it from the game's WAD editor file that allowed a player to create his own monsters.

Mitch believed they would be doing well to escape from this particular downtown citadel. He knew that the facsimile demon couldn't harm him, but it took a couple of minutes to gather up sufficient courage to approach the thing.

'You're wasting your time, Ishmael,' he said, without much conviction.

'It won't work. I'm not scared, OK?'

But still he could not bring himself to go within a few yards of the demon. Suddenly it lunged towards him, its double jaws trying to bite out his throat. Despite what he had just heard himself say, Mitch jumped smartly out of the way.

'It's pretty realistic, I'll grant you,' he swallowed, 'but I'm not buying.'

He took a deep breath, clenched both his fists and, doing his best to ignore the hologram, walked straight up to the desk, gasping as the demon impaled him on the spear-points on its enormous knuckles. For a brief second he thought he had made a mistake, so convincing was the sight of the creature's fist forcing its way through his sternum. But then the lack of blood and pain reassured him. Trying his best to ignore it, Mitch bent under the desk to look for the infra-red goggles. He found them inside a drawer along with a technical manual from the

McDonnell-Douglas Corporation.

The demon disappeared.

'Nice try, Ishmael,' said Mitch. He pulled on the goggles and unlocked the back of the reception desk. Behind the door was a matt black steel cabinet that housed the laser's amplifying column.

DANGER. DO NOT OPEN THIS CABINET

CONTAINS SOLID-STATE DIODE-PUMPED NEODYMIUM

YAG LASER AND Q-SWITCHING EQUIPMENT. ONLY

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL OF THE MCDONNELLDOUGLAS CORPORATION MAY INSPECT OR MAINTAIN

THIS UNIT

CAUTION: USE PROTECTIVE EYEWEAR BLOCKING A

NEAR INFRA-RED WAVELENGTH OF 1.064

MICROMETRES

Mitch checked his goggles to make sure that they were not admitting any light: with lasers it was the invisible light that blinded you. Then he unscrewed the cabinet door. He had never seen a laser device before except for the small radar-based lasers they used at the office for alignment applications, distance measurement and determining aircurrents but, by comparing the internal layout of the hologram cabinet with the McDonnell-Douglas manual, Mitch was able to distinguish the clear plastic tube that contained the ythrium aluminium garnet rod. It was difficult to read the manual through the darkened goggles but, even though the beam of laser light was projected through a solid metallic sleeve that ran between the desk and the real-time image source — the part which Ishmael controlled — he resisted the temptation to lift the goggles. Several minutes passed before Mitch was able to locate the button that controlled the Q-switching shutter — a solid, optical shutter, normally opaque, that could be made transparent by the application of an electrical pulse — and turn it off. No laser light could now be emitted and, therefore, no more holograms be generated until the Q-switch was turned back on.

Mitch breathed a sigh of relief and lifted up his goggles. Now all that he had to do was figure out a way of making the laser point in the opposite direction, at the front door.

Richardson and Curtis carried Ellery's body to an empty office and laid him on the floor, covering his face with his coat.

'Maybe we ought to move the three in the elevator as well,' said Curtis.

'Why?'

Curtis waved a fly away from his face.

'That fly is why. Besides, they're on the nose. Every time I walk by them it's worse.'

'It's not so bad,' said Richardson. 'I mean, you can only smell them if you stand right outside the elevator.'

'Believe me, bad as they are now, they'll only get worse. It doesn't take very long for a body to start putrefying. Two days is about average. Less in this kind of heat.' There was some plastic sheeting on the floor that had been protecting the carpet. Curtis gathered it up in his hands.

'We'll use this. Only we'd better make sure we jam the doors open first. We wouldn't want Ishmael to think that we were looking for a ride downstairs, would we?'

Reluctantly Richardson helped Curtis drag the defrosted and malodorous bodies of Dobbs, Bennett and Martinez out of the elevator and into the room where they had left Ellery. When they were finished Curtis closed the door firmly behind him.