Philip Kerr - Gridiron

'Forget that. Listen to me. I've changed my mind. And I think you're right. We have to escape. I was thinking…' He coughed some more.

'While Beech has got Death distracted, well, it's our best chance to get away. I think that the two of them are so occupied with their game they wouldn't even…'

Curtis coughed too. The air was beginning to taste vaguely metallic. He coughed again, failing to get a breath of clean air and noticed that Ellery was lying on his back and that a mucous-looking bubble had formed on his lips. He dropped on to his knees, looked closely at the edges of a carpet tile and then tore it up with his bare fingers.

'Gas!' he yelled. 'Everybody out!'

Smoke was wisping out of a perforated access panel in the centre of the floor. Curtis prised it open to reveal something that looked almost organic, like an anatomical dissection exposing the veins, arteries and nervous fibres in a human cadaver: thousands of miles of copper information cables winding their way around the Gridiron. In a computer room or some military application, plenum cables would have been sheathed with a specially formulated low-smoke flame-retardant material. Or with a zero-halogen coating. But since the Gridiron's boardroom had not been designated an area where there was an increased fire risk, the plenum cables were sheathed in ordinary polyvinyl chloride materials and the fumes released from the PVC by the extraordinary high temperatures Ishmael had generated in the copper cables was a harmful acid gas.

Curtis looked around for a fire extinguisher. Failing to see one he grabbed Ellery under the arms and started to drag him out.

Jenny, Helen and Birnbaum dashed towards the door, already halfchoked by the quick-dispersing fumes, but Beech seemed inclined to remain seated in front of the computer.

'What are you, crazy?' coughed Curtis. 'Beech. Get the fuck out of here.'

Almost reluctantly, Beech stumbled up from his chair. Convulsed by a fit of coughing he followed the others into the corridor where Ray and Joan Richardson had already been driven by the same fumes under the kitchen floor.

'Get to the balcony,' said Curtis. 'The air should be better near the atrium.'

Beech helped Curtis drag Ellery towards the section of handrail where David Arnon had fallen to his death. For a while they stood there, coughing, spitting and retching into the atrium below.

'What the hell happened?' wheezed Joan.

'Ishmael must have caused the data cables under the plenum floor to get hot and release some kind of halogen acid gas,' said Richardson, 'but I can't imagine how.'

'Still figure we can last the weekend?' asked Curtis. He wiped his streaming eyes and knelt down beside the injured man. Ellery had stopped breathing. Curtis leaned forwards and pressed his ear close to his heart. This time the man was beyond resuscitation.

'Willis Ellery is dead,' he said after a long moment. 'He was lying on the floor. The poor bastard must have been breathing that stuff for a while longer than the rest of us.'

'God, I hope Mitch is OK,' said Jenny and looked anxiously over the buckled handrail. But there was no sign of him.

Mitch slid off the cross-brace and jumped to the floor.

As he walked around the tree towards the hologram desk he saw what was left of David Arnon. Hardly recognizable, he lay slumped across the bloody broken table leg that had impaled him, as in a ghastly vampire horror movie, his long legs splayed out in front of him like a collapsed scarecrow.

It was strange how you reacted to things, he thought, as he stood near his old friend with a short prayer in his heart, wishing that there was some way of at least covering him up. Strange what you noticed: Arnon himself was encrusted with congealed blood, but the white marble floor around him was spotless, almost as if it had been cleaned up afterwards. A few metres further on, spread-eagled on the lid of the Disklavier piano, was Irving Dukes, his head hanging over the strings, his open eyes still bright red from the contact poison.

Mitch looked for the walkie-talkie and saw that it was on Dukes's belt with his gun and his Maglite. Trying to unbuckle the belt, Mitch leaned on the piano keys, still silent, and jumped back, horror-struck, when they started to ooze blood. It was a moment or two before he realized that blood from the huge fracture on the back of Dukes's head had collected inside the piano frame and run down the keys when he had pressed them. Mitch wiped his fingers on the dead man's pants and, ignoring the blood that was now dripping off the keyboard, quickly relieved the body of the belt.

'I hope you haven't damaged this,' he said, inspecting the walkietalkie. He pressed the call button.

'This is Mitch. Come in Level 21. Over.'

There was a momentary silence before he heard Jenny's voice.

'Mitch? Are you all right?'

'It was harder getting down here than I imagined. How are things?'

Jenny explained about the gas, and told him that Willis Ellery was dead.

'We're out here on the balcony waiting for the air to clear. If you look up you can see me.'

Mitch walked to the opposite side of the atrium and looked up. He could just make Jenny out. She was waving. He waved back without much enthusiasm. Willis Ellery was dead.

'Mitch?' Suddenly there was urgency in her voice. 'There's something crossing the floor. It's coming straight at you. Mitch!'

Mitch looked round.

Speeding towards him was the floor-cleaning droid.

Marble is one of the easiest materials to maintain. The beauty of the white stone can be enhanced by polishing with a good silicone wax, although care needs to be taken to prevent staining. Thus there existed SAM, the Semi-Autonomous Micro motorized surface-cleaning droid —

the most sophisticated maintenance system for marble flooring in the world, designed to deal with every kind of hazard, including oil, citrusfruit juice, vinegar and similar mild acids. SAM was about the weight and height of a medium-sized refrigerator, and shaped like a pyramid. Powered by thirty silicon-embedded micro-motors, the machine was practically a semiconductor wafer chip on wheels, with the circuitry of eighteen computers, fifty different sensors to detect obstacles, and an infrared video camera to find dirt. SAM was supposed to travel at no more than one mile an hour, but it hit Mitch square against his ankle at nearer fifteen. The impact knocked him off his feet.

As he rolled over the apex of the pyramid-shaped droid, Mitch recollected the clean floor around Arnon's body and, before he landed hard on the marble, he told himself that he ought to have remembered SAM. He was still picking himself painfully off the floor when the machine hit him again, this time on the knee cap. Bellowing with pain, he fell back, clutching his leg.

With sufficient distance to build up momentum for another potentially damaging impact, the SAM droid spun around on its short axis and, once again, accelerated.

Mitch drew Dukes's gun, aimed it at the centre of the electronic pyramid and fired, hitting it several times. But if the SAM was damaged it gave no indication, and Mitch found himself cannoned towards the empty pond at the bottom of the tree. Grateful for the hint, he scrambled over the low wall to safety. For a minute or so SAM patrolled the perimeter of the pond and then set itself to clean the blood from the floor underneath the piano.

'Mitch?' It was Curtis speaking on the walkie-talkie. 'You OK?'

'A few bruises.' He tugged down his sock to inspect an ankle that was already turning a dark shade of purple. 'But I don't think I'll be able to outrun that thing. I shot at it couple of times. Didn't even slow it down. Right now it's cleaning the fucking floor.'

'That's good. It's doing what it's supposed to do.'

'Well, that makes a change around here.'

'Because I've got an idea. We'll bomb the motherfucker.'

'How's that?'

'We'll drop something to make a mess. Get it positioned underneath us, and then we'll nuke the sonofabitch. Drop something heavy right on top of it.'

'It might work.'

'Keep your head down, pal,' chuckled Curtis. 'I'll be back on air when we've got the Fat Man ready.'

'I think I know what will do the job,' said Helen.

She led them to a room near the elevators where a solitary object stood on a remover's trolley, awaiting its final destination.

The Buddha's head was over a metre high. It was all that remained of a thousand-year-old bronze statue of the Tang dynasty that must have been enormous. Curtis took hold of the usnisa, the protuberance on top of the Buddha's head that marked the attainment of supreme wisdom, and rocked the object gently.

'You're right,' he told Helen, 'it's perfect. It must weigh a couple of hundred pounds.'

Joan shook her head with horror. She didn't know which part of her was more outraged: the Buddhist or the art lover.

'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?