"Business is looking good," Nigel commented.
"I give people what they want."
He glanced up. He wondered exactly how old she was.
"Take you. I mean, these wheels of yours: seriously loaded." Her hand stroked the bonnet, coyly. "But you can't jack up the throttle cos of these speed laws. They ain't tailored to modern cars. They're antiques, thirties fodder."
"How do I just know you're going to sell me something else?"
Her answering grin was evil, moist tongue tip peeking out from the corner of her mouth. "Cos I like ringing your bell. I've got a zapper scrambler here that's got your name on it. You game?"
He tried to keep his eyes off the open buttons of her blouse. "Maybe. Speak to me."
"It screws the law's radar guns something chronic. First, a warning bleep from the laser detector at half a mile, then the LCD counts you down to ground zero. And the big plus: even if they do blast you, their read-out swears blind you're only doing a poxy twenty eight."
No more fines, no more penalty points. Every motorist's dream gadget. "How much?"
"Fifty."
He sighed. "I'm all yours."
~ * ~
The next day he drove into the tarmac wasteland of his local hypermarket's customer park and shot into a space near a trolley rack, tires crunching the litter of polystyrene wrappers.
"Wow, this is one totalled-out machine." The Nimbus's admirer was another girl: mid-teens, golden hair, dirty fingernails and white jeans as tight as a tourniquet. "I just bet you could go supersonic if it wasn't for those dumb speed limits."
He pointed to the newly installed LCD radar-trap warning on his dashboard. The girl shrugged and moved on. Looking out across the hypermarket park he could see nearly all of the cars sported micro-friction coatings. Several cars in the row behind him had their bonnets raised, with kiddie teams slamming in zapper scramblers as though they were on a triple bonus productivity scheme. They also had a runner. A twelve-year-old boy collected the cash from the older kids, then disappeared into a graffiti-splashed alley at the rear of the park. A minute later he would reemerge with boxes of scramblers.
Nigel strolled over to the hypermarket entrance. Simon was sitting in his usual place beside the wire baskets, wrapped in a thick Oxfam duffle coat despite the warm sun. Scuffed wraparound sunglasses made him look like a washed up Terminator. He was playing his flute, a tired golden Labrador guarding a threadbare cap with a few coins in.
"Morning, Simon."
"That you, Mr Finchley?" Simon asked.
"Indeed it is." Nigel found a coin and bent down as if to drop it into the cap. He made the coin chink quietly, to disguise the fact that he kept it in his hand. It was a nothing- for-nothing world, in which Nigel was prepared to donate to the blind beggar no more than the sound of his money.
"Thank you, sir."
"My pleasure."
As Nigel stood up he saw the runner on the other side of the road. He was sure the boy had looked away quickly, a subliminal impression of a guilty start.
When Nigel had negotiated the maze of dingy backstreets at the side of the hypermarket he found the other end of the alley was blocked by a hired Transit van. A young black man was sitting in the driver's seat, flicking through a tabloid newspaper.
Nigel ambled past, snatching a glimpse of the runner returning to the car park, a scrambler box tucked under each arm. Another young man stood beside the van's rear doors.
The pair of them could have been cousins of the redhead's boyfriend. There was something shared between them; it wasn't so much a physical characteristic, more an attitude. Not arrogance exactly. Confidence. They possessed confidence.
Unenlightened, Nigel moved on. If they'd got the whole day's cash taking in the van, they'd be nervous about people who loitered.
~ * ~
Wednesday saw the redhead in a black one-piece cycling uniform. Nigel couldn't understand how she'd got into it, the fabric was already stretched to its limit.
Her knowing grin was becoming a little too familiar.
"Have you ever heard of the term 'market saturation'?" he asked before she made her pitch.
She stuck her tongue out, awesomely childlike. "Nah. Have you ever heard of an encryption-buster?" Resting in her palm was a matte-black box the size of a blockbuster paperback. There was a small keyboard on top. "Unkink everything the satellites beam down: Disney through to Movie Channel, Hot Dutch, the works, no smart card required. You'll never cop for a subscription charge again."
"Very nice. Where did you get it?"
"Bloke in a pub."
Acquisitive lust began to gnaw. The cost of a decoder card for his Globecast system was criminal. "How much?" It seemed to be the one consistent phrase he spoke to her.
"Fifty for cash."
"Sold. Come and have a drink with me."
She looked over her shoulder and thought for a moment. "Sure."
~ * ~
Nigel lived alone in his Docklands condominium. There were plenty of trees lining the empty streets, and no delinquents since the entire area was security-ringed and patrolled. Sometimes the only movement in the whole neighbourhood would be that of a scrap of newspaper blowing down the achingly new concrete walkways.
He told himself he still enjoyed the single life. He had enough friends in the same situation to make a cosy self- reinforcing group when they spent their weekend nights on the town. Jannice had been his last permanent attachment, though the relationship had broken down on a dispute over language.
"Please don't refer to me as your 'partner' or your 'girlfriend.' It's insulting and demeaning."
"So what are you, then?"
"Nothing which implies a contract."
I'm being outmoded before I'm thirty, Nigel had thought at the time. Jannice was four months ago. There had been other girls since, one night stands picked up while clubbing, a friend's younger sister. But his job on the trading floor was secure, which in itself was a bonus these days. The City and the new government were still eying each other wearily across the political divide; but apart from a little ideologically symbolic blood-letting among the fat cats of the utilities in the first six months after the election, there had been no incursions, no major campaigns led by reforming chancellors. The sheer voltage of money flowing through the cables of the City's finance web was so great nobody was going to risk shorting it out. So Nigel and his kind were still allowed to play their fast, adrenaline-high game.
Bathing in the timid blue phosphorescence of the monitors, he drank down information, hungry for the elusive patterns that bespoke success. When he found one, a bond, a rights issue, a commodity, he pumped money into the precious new find, guarding the knowledge until the stock rose and his investment grew ripe for harvest. He bred money from money, a nexus between data and currency arranging diabolical matings. Always on the hunt for new brides. A search he could run on autopilot these days. Same as his life.
And so unlike Miranda, the young redhead who had unsettled him. A teeny-rebel, making money and having fun, delighting in life. She made him realize that his own secret promises to himself had been broken; that his technicolour dreams had been pawned to pay for a permanent place on the trading floor. Freshness for stability.
That drink in The Swan had turned into two before she would even tell him her name. Then when he'd offered to take her to dinner she'd narrowed her eyes at him.
"It's a good thing I'm older than I look," she said, fingering the stem of her glass.
"Why? How old do you look?" The stupidity of this question didn't strike him until long afterwards.
He'd collected her from The Swan later that evening. Later than he intended, actually. The floor had gone through one of those unexplained jittery days; as if nervousness had suddenly mutated into an airborne virus, circulated by the slow-spinning rooftop fans of the City's air conditioners. End-of-month figures showed African imports of electronics were down, reducing the continent's borrowing. Rumour-quakes ran gleefully thr
ough the money market. Several blue chip companies turned slightly pale. He hated days like that, hated the disorder.
Miranda had waited, though, an encouraging measure of her eagerness to sample the good life. She'd applied too much make-up, and that a little carelessly, but it didn't diminish her. He broke the speed limit thanks to his new box and tried to impress her by taking her to a Chelsea restaurant supposedly used by Princess Di, knowing she'd be completely out of her depth. Princess Di wasn't in, but it looked as if the maître d' was operating a beauty code for patrons.
"Hot dump this, eh?" Miranda said as they sat. Her gaze hardened as she took in the designer dresses by Lang, Versolato, Rocha, and Westwood. Her own dress was some not-quite-Goth purple velvet with a low front and black lace sleeves.
"All the best TFBs come here," Nigel assured her.
"?"
"Trust Fund Babes. Never done a day's work in their lives."
"You normally go out with women like that?"
"Only when they're slumming. They tend to go for farmers who own half of Sussex."
Miranda ordered the same dishes as him; she watched him carefully when the food arrived, mirroring his movements, and choosing the same cutlery. It wasn't as amusing as he'd expected. She was so bloody determined. He knew that for the rest of her life now she would always select the right fork, would tilt her soup bowl away from her.
"Another bottle of champagne," Nigel said to the wine waiter.
"Don't waste your folding," Miranda said. "I've already decided to fuck you."
They lay on his bed, the curtains of his room drawn back and the strange spectral light from the flashing and steaming Cesar Pelli tower reflecting on the perspiration of their naked bodies. He tried to get her to tell him where she got all the strange new merchandise. One slip of the tongue, one name, was all he needed to make his killing on the floor.
"Secret."
"Ah, come on!" His voice mellowed out. "Between us?"
She flinched, confused and vulnerable. "Don't know much. Honest. All I know, it's called afto-aspro. Same stuff in the electronics as does for the gleam."
He puzzled over that. "Afto-aspro?"
"Yeah. Ilkia says that's what the Greeks called it. Means white stuff."
"It's manufactured in Greece?"
"No. That's just where it turned up first. Couple of weeks back."
"So where does it come from originally?"
"Ilkia says the exos brought it in with them when they come over from Africa. It's all over the estate now."
"Who's this Ilkia character?"
"Mate of mine. He'd kill me if he knew I was here."
"Jealous type, is he?"
"Not that… Well, sometimes. He gets us the afto-aspro gear, see. I have to keep him sweet; and he don't like the likes of you."
"White?"
"Nah. Rich. Ilkia says companies like yours are the generals on your side of the class war."
"Oh, Jesus wept. Look, does this Ilkia know who's manufacturing afto-aspro?."
"Dunno. He never says much about it, just bangs on about how it's gonna make things different for us. All the global capitalist state is gonna get whacked. It'll start with the electronics companies, and when they go, they'll bring everything else down with them."
"I think your friend is talking out of his arse. He really doesn't know much about enterprise economics. The electronics industry is a perpetual war of innovations and next generation chips. That's what makes the companies so dynamic, and strong. One new gizmo isn't going to bring civilization to a halt."
"We don't want to halt it, just change it."
"So, broadly speaking, would you describe yourself as an anarchist, or just another rainbow Nazi?"
"Don't say stuff like that. Nigel, be straight, d'you think it's possible for someone like you to love someone like me?"
He grinned savagely, she didn't get it—too young. "Let me show you instead."
When she was finally asleep he went through her bag. Usual teenage junk, except for a wad of seven hundred quid in new twenties held together by elastic bands. No hint to the origin of afto-aspro.
The only thing he didn't understand was a slim oblong of plastic with chrome-silver surfaces, about the same size as a credit card.
"I want a favour from you," he asked her over breakfast.
Miranda giggled. "I thought I did all that last night."
"I want you to find out more about afto-aspro."
"You got all I know."
"Listen, you want to be like me, to run in my world, move in my circles?"
"Maybe." She nodded, face all dumb and serious. "You ain't how llkia said you would be. And this place… I had a good time last night, Nigel. Honest. That's not greedy, is it? Not to want that?"
"Nothing like. Motivation makes the world go round. You have to give people incentives. As a race we need to create and achieve; the alternative is stagnation."
"Right. Yeah."
"This is your chance to achieve, Miranda. You can come in with me, I can make you part of my deal. All I need is the name of the company which produces afto-aspro. I can buy up their stock and cut myself in for a big percentage. It'll be like knowing the lottery roll-over numbers in advance. Now do you want a piece of that? Do you want last night to be every night?"
"You shitting me?"
"Just bring me the information."
~ * ~
Trouble mugged Nigel as soon as he reached the floor. Everyone was on their feet screaming into telephones. The markets were going crazy. High Street banks had reported a massive surge in demand for gold sovereigns. There was no logical reason for it. Of course the banks didn't stock the coins, they had to be ordered from the Bank of England.
There was a similar demand sweeping the entire European mainland. Not from dealers, but from the public. Gold prices grew by the minute. Nobody knew what was happening. Yesterday's nervousness blossomed out into full-scale panic.
Six hours later everyone held their breath as New York started trading. Wall Street dived straight into the gold market. And Nigel found out the true meaning of pandemonium.
After a terrible day he washed up at The Swan, hoping to find Miranda there. She wasn't. But a fourteen-year-old girl wanted to sell him an emax.
"A what?"
Freckles crinkled against spots as she smiled. "An energy matrix, what they used to call a battery." She showed him a small fat cylinder: black, glossy, seamless. "The outside casing is a solar collector, see? Ninety-five per cent conversion efficiency. You just have to leave it in the sun and it'll recharge in a couple of hours."
Ten quid each. He bought six to power his ghetto blaster.
~ * ~
Next morning the public's thirst for gold had increased. The Chancellor appeared on the lunchtime news to try to calm people, assuring them that the Bank of England had enough reserves to cope with the unexpected consumer-led boom, and no restrictions were even being contemplated. The interviewer's questions about the economy starting to downturn in such a climate were brusquely dismissed as scaremongering.
Nigel couldn't concentrate that afternoon, despite all the floor supervisor's screams and threats to level their investments. He spent the time accessing share prices for electronics companies. What he found was more unsettling than any of the five-million-quid skeletons he had rattling round his accounts. Miranda had been right: the prices were slowly starting to drop. Worse, it was a global picture. Other analysts would be plotting the trend, the whole electronics section of the market would crash. If he just knew which name made afto-aspro he could pump millions into their stock and ride the storm's lightning.
Before he left work that evening a rumour swept the floor that cashpoint machines all over town had malfunctioned, dishing out three thousand pound windfalls to hundreds of lucky punters. The banks were closing down their hole-in-the-wall outlets until the electronics could be checked.
He started the drive home. The traffic all around him shone like a river of
prismatic sunlight. Everyone, these days, gleamed.
Halfway to Docklands he saw three ten-year-old girls standing beside a building society's cashpoint. One of them had a silver card just like the one in Miranda's bag, which she shoved into the slot. Money started gushing out. The girls squealed excitedly, scooping it up.
Nigel parked and walked, soaking up the new fizz loose on the block. A knot of five boys loitered ahead of him. He had no doubt that the one with his back to him was an afto-aspro peddler. It was the clothes—bright, new, expensive. There was a glint of gold necklace chains exchanged for a slimline afto- aspro box. The peddler shook hands and departed; not getting three paces before more people buttonholed him.
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