She remembered a midnight conversation with one of her patrons, a high-grade financier, two or three years previously. He had confessed that his children were deliberately conceived to be the same age as Julia’s two children in the hope they would prove acceptable playmates. That all-elusive key to the innermost coterie. At the time Charlotte had shaken her head in bemused disbelief. Now she wasn’t so sure.
Julia Evans’s tawny eyes found Charlotte across the ballroom. With a guilty start Charlotte realized she must have been staring for well over a minute. She hurriedly took a sip of champagne to cover herself. Gawking like some adolescent wannabe who’d unexpectedly bumped into her idol. Thank heavens Baronski wasn’t here to witness such a lapse.
Charlotte quickly scanned the faces in the background. Before the party she had reviewed Julia Evans’s data profile, the one Associated Press assembled, looking for someone close to her. She had sifted carefully through the information, deciding on three names which might provide a short cut to access.
She walked round the end of the queue, towards the knot of people behind Julia Evans.
Rachel Griffith was chatting to one of the Newfields committee members. A middle-aged woman trying not to let her boredom show. The data profile had said she’d been with Julia Evans for nineteen years; starting out as a bodyguard, then moving over to personal assistant when she got too old for hardliner activity.
She gave Charlotte a quizzical look. There was that instant snap of recognition, condescension registering. ‘Yes?’
‘Would you see Julia Evans gets this, please.’ Charlotte handed over the box. It was twenty-five centimetres long, ten wide, with a transparent top showing the single mauve trumpet-shaped flower inside. A white bow was tied round the middle.
Rachel Griffith took it in reflex, then gave the box a disparaging frown. ‘Who’s it from?’
‘There is a card.’ It was in a small blank envelope tucked under the ribbon. Charlotte didn’t quite have the courage to open it and read the message herself. As she turned away, she said, ‘Thank you so much,’ all sugary pleasant, to show how indifferent she was. Rewarded by Rachel Griffith’s vexed expression.
The box wouldn’t be forgotten now. Charlotte felt pleased with herself, making the connection with so much aplomb. How many other people could hand-deliver articles to the richest woman in the world and be sure they’d reach their destination? Baronski had taught her a damn sight more than etiquette and culture. There was an art to handling yourself in this kind of company. Perhaps that was why he had selected her. His scout in the orphanage staff must have recognized some kind of inherent ability. Character was more important than beauty in this game.
Charlotte let herself be talked into a couple of dances before she started looking for her new patron. She’d be damned if she didn’t get some enjoyment out of the party. The young men were charming, as they always were when they thought they were conversing with an equal; both in their twenties, one of them was at university in Oslo. They were good dancers.
She thought she saw the creep from the airport while she was on the dancefloor, dressed in a waiter’s white jacket. But he was on the other side of the ballroom, and he had his back to her, so it was hard to tell, and she certainly wasn’t going to stop dancing to check.
She located Jason Whitehurst in one of the side rooms; it was a refuge for the older people, with plenty of big leather armchairs, and waiter service. The data profile from Baronski said Jason Whitehurst was sixty-six, a wealthy independent trader with a network of cargo agents all across the globe. She thought he looked like a Russian czar, straight backed, a pointed white beard, wearing the dress uniform of the King’s Own Hussars. There was a discreet row of ribbons pinned on his chest. She recognized the one which was for the Mexico campaign. His eyes must have been implants, they were so clear, and startlingly blue.
According to the profile Jason Whitehurst had a son, but there was no wife. Charlotte was relieved about that. Wives were a complication she could do without. Some simply ignored her, others treated her like a daughter, the worst were the ones who wanted to watch.
Jason Whitehurst was in conversation with a couple of contemporaries, the three of them standing together with large brandy glasses in their hands. She walked right up and introduced herself.
‘Ah yes, the old Baron told me you’d be here,’ Jason Whitehurst said. His voice was beautifully clipped and precise. He left his friends with a brief wave.
She liked that, there was no pretence, no charade that she was a relative or a friend’s daughter. It spoke of complete self-confidence; Jason Whitehurst didn’t have to care what anyone else thought. He could make a good patron, she thought, people like him always did. A man who had made a success of his life wasn’t inclined to quibble over trivia. Not that money ever came into it. There was an established routine, no need for vulgarity. And Baronski would never tolerate anyone who didn’t play by the rules.
While she was with him, the patron would pay for all her clothes, her travel, incidentals; and there would be gifts, mostly jewellery, perfume, sometimes art, once a racehorse (she still laughed at Baronski’s consternation over that). After it was over, after the patron had tired of her, Baronski would gather in all her gifts and pay her a straight twenty per cent.
‘Are your bags packed?’ Jason Whitehurst asked.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Jason, please, my dear. Like to keep an informal house.’
She inclined her head.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘We’ll be leaving Monaco right after this blessed fandango.’
‘Baronski said you were voyaging to Odessa,’ she said. Always show an interest in their activities, make them think everything they do is important.
Jason Whitehurst stared at her. ‘Yes. Have you been to Odessa before?’
‘No, I’m afraid not.’
‘Beastly place. I do a little trade there, no other reason to go. Lord knows what’ll happen now Turkey’s plugged in with Egypt, though. Still, not your concern. Phone your hotel, tell them my chauffeur will pick up your luggage; he’ll take it down to the airport for you.
‘Pardon me?’
‘Now what?’
‘I thought we were voyaging on your yacht?’
Jason Whitehurst pulled at his beard. She couldn’t tell if he was amused or angry.
‘Ought to read your data profiles a little closer, dear girl. Now then, I’ve got some people to see here first. So, in the mean time, I want you to find Fabian, get acquainted.’
‘Your son?’
‘That’s right. Do you know what he looks like?’
She remembered the picture in the data profile, a fifteen-year-old boy with thick dark hair coming down over his ears. ‘I think I can recognize him, yes.’
‘Excellent. Just go where the noise is loudest, that’s where he’ll be. Now then, a few words of caution. Little chap doesn’t have many real friends. My fault, I expect, keep him on board the Colonel Maitland all the time. Not terribly used to company, so make allowances, yes?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Good. I’ve told him you’ll be meeting us here. Splendid girl like you is exactly what he needs. As you can imagine, he’s looking forward to your company enormously, so don’t disappoint him.’
‘You want me …?’ Charlotte trailed off in surprise.
‘You and Fabian, yes. Problem?’
The idea threw her completely. But in the end, she supposed, it didn’t make any real difference. ‘No.’ She found she couldn’t look Jason Whitehurst in the face any more.
‘Jolly good. I’ll see the two of you in about an hour in my car. Don’t be late.’
Jason Whitehurst marched off, leaving Charlotte alone with the realization that no matter how well you thought you knew them, the ultra-rich were not even remotely human.
Fabian Whitehurst was easy enough to find. There were only about fifteen boys and girls in their early teens at the ball, and they were all clustered together outsid
e the entrance to the disco. They were giggling loudly, red faced as they swapped jokes.
Charlotte made a slow approach across the ballroom, taking her time to study them. She was only too well accustomed to the inherent brattishness of the children of the rich. Spoilt and ignored, they developed a shell of arrogance early in life, treating everyone else as third-class citizens. Including Charlotte; in some cases, especially Charlotte. Her throat muscles tensed at the memories.
These seemed no different, their voices grated from ten metres away, high pitched and raffish. The girls had been given salon treatments, fully made up, their hair in elaborate arrangements. They nearly all wore white dresses, though a couple were in low-cut gowns. There was something both silly and sad about the amount of jewellery they wore.
The boys were in dinner jackets and dress shirts. Charlotte was struck by their similarity, as if they were all cousins. Their cheeks chubby, moving awkwardly, making an effort to be boisterous. She imagined someone had told them this was the way you had to behave at parties, and they were all scrabbling to conform.
Then she caught sight of Fabian Whitehurst, the tallest of the group. His face didn’t have quite the pampered look of the others. She could see some of his father’s characteristics in his angled jawline and high cheekbones. Handsome little devil, she thought, he’ll be a real handful when he grows up.
Fabian suddenly looked up. For the second time in one evening, Charlotte felt flustered. There was something demanding in his gaze. But he couldn’t keep it going, blushing crimson and dropping his eyes quickly. She waited. Fabian glanced up guiltily. She lifted the corner of her mouth gently, a conspiracy smile, then let her attention wander away.
Julia Evans was dancing on the ballroom’s wooden floor, with some ancient nobleman sporting a purple stripe across his tailcoat. Maybe there were penalties for being so rich, after all.
Charlotte knew that if she had that much money, she would’ve taken her pick of the handsomest young blades, the ones who could make her laugh and feel all light inside, and screw protocol. She took another sip of champagne.
‘Er, hello, you look awfully bored,’ Fabian said. He was standing in front of her, an oversize velvet bow tie spoiling the sartorial chic of his tailored dinner jacket. His shaggy hair was almost falling in his eyes as he looked up at her, he flipped it aside with a toss of his head.
‘Oh dear, does it show?’ she asked encouragingly. Out of the corner of her eye she could see all the other youngsters watching them with eager envious expressions.
‘No. Well, sort of, a bit. I’m Fabian Whitehurst.’ His eyes darted down to her cleavage, then away again. As if it was a dare.
‘Yes, I know. Your father said I’d find you over here. I’m Charlotte Fielder. Pleased to meet you.’
‘Crikey!’ Fabian’s gasp of surprise was almost a shout. He blushed hotly again at the solecism, his shoulders hunching up in reflex. His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘You? You’re Charlotte?’ And for a moment every aristrocratic pretension was stripped away, he was an ordinary incredulous fifteen-year-old who didn’t have a clue.
‘ ’Fraid so.’ Training halted the giggle as it formed in her throat. But he was funny to watch.
‘Oh.’ A spark of jubilation burned in Fabian’s eyes. ‘I wondered if you would care to dance,’ he said breathlessly.
‘Thank you, I’d like that,’ she said, and drained the glass.
Fabian’s grin was arrogant triumph. They walked into the disco together, past Fabian’s astonished friends. He gave them a fast thumbs up, lips curling into a smug sneer. Charlotte’s serene smile never flickered.
3
Julia Evans’s office occupied half of an entire floor in the Event Horizon headquarters tower. When she sat at her desk the window wall ahead of her seemed to recede into the middle distance, a delusory gold band sandwiched between the expansive flat plains of floor and ceiling.
The office was decorated in beige and cream colours, the furniture all custom-made teak; work area, informal conference area, leisure area, separated out by troughs of big ferns. Van Goghs, Turners, and Picassos, selected more for price and pretension than aesthetics, hung on the walls. It would have been unbearably formal but for the crystal vases of cut flowers standing on every table and wall alcove. Their perfume permeated the air, replacing the dead purity of the conditioning units.
After her PAs politely but firmly ended her conference with the company’s senior transport division executives, Julia poured herself a cup of tea from a silver service and walked over to the window, turning down the opacity. Virtually the only reason she had an office these days was for personal meetings; even in the data age the human touch was still an essential tool in corporate management, certainly at premier-grade level.
When the gold mirror faded away, she looked down on Peterborough’s old landbound quarter lazing under the July sun, white-painted walls throwing a coronal glare back at her. The dense cluster of brick and concrete buildings had a kind of medieval disarray to them. She rather liked the chaos, it had an organic feel, easily preferable to the regimented soulless lines of most recent cities. Meticulous civic concepts like town planning and the green belt were the first casualties after the Fens had flooded; the refugees swooping on the city had wanted dry land, and when they found it they stubbornly put down roots. Their new housing estates and industrial zones erupted on any patch of unused ground. A quarter of a century on, and legal claims over land ownership and compensation were still raging through the county courts.
The old quarter had an atmosphere of urgency about it; there was still excitement to be had down on those leafy streets. From the few local newscasts Julia managed to see, she knew that smuggling was still a major occupation for the Stanground armada, a mostly quaybound collection of cabin cruisers, houseboats, barges, and motor launches that had flocked to the semi-submerged suburb from the Norfolk Broads. Unlicensed distilleries flourished; syntho vats were assembled in half-forgotten cellars, causing a lot of heat for the vice squad; brothels serviced visiting sailors; and tekmercs lived like princes in New Eastfield condominiums, ghouls feeding off company rivalries.
There was a certain romance about it all that appealed to a younger part of Julia’s personality, the girlish part. Peterborough served as a kind of link to her past, and the few brief years of carefree youth she had been allowed before Event Horizon took over her life. She could have it all shut down, of course, if she’d wanted – ended the smuggling, sent the madams packing, banished the tekmercs. It was her city well enough; the Queen of Peterborough, the channels called her. And she did make sure that the police stamped down hard on any excesses, but held back from all-out sanitization; not so much out of sentiment these days, but because she recognized the need for the escape valve which the old quarter provided. There was no such laxity in the new sector of the city which was rising up out of the Fens basin.
Seventeen years ago, when Event Horizon returned to England after the PSP fell, Peterborough had been approaching its infrastructure limits. It was becoming increasingly obvious that the kind of massive construction projects Julia and her grandfather envisaged just couldn’t be supported by the existing utilities. The city’s eastward sprawl was already up to the rotting remnants of the Castor Hanglands wood, and threatened to reach the A1 in another decade even without Event Horizon’s patronage; there simply wasn’t room for their proposed macro-industry precincts on land.
The solution was easy enough: the Fens basin was uninhabited, unused, and unloved; and west of Peterborough the water was only a couple of metres deep. So fifteen years ago the dredging crews and civil engineers moved out into the quagmire, and began to build the first artificial island.
From where she was standing, on the sixty-fifth floor of the Event Horizon tower, Julia could see all twenty-nine major islands of the Prior’s Fen Atoll, as well as the fifteen new ones under construction. Event Horizon owned twelve of them: the seventy-storey tower which was the company’s global h
eadquarters; seven cyber-factory precincts churning out household gear, cybernetics, light engineering, and giga-conductor cells; and four giant arcologies, each of them providing homes, employment, education, and leisure facilities for eleven thousand families.
Kombinates had followed Event Horizon to Peterborough, lured by Julia’s offer of a lower giga-conductor licensing royalty to anyone who set up their production facilities in England. The subsequent rush of investment helped reinvigorate the English economy at a rate which far outstripped the rest of Europe, and allowed Julia to consolidate her influence over the New Conservative government.
It was those same kombinates and their financial backing combines who had built the rest of the Atoll she was looking down on, adding cuboidal cyber-factories, dome-capped circular amphitheatre apartment complexes, the city’s international airport, and the giant pyramidal arcologies. Prior’s Fen Atoll was now home to three hundred and fifty thousand people, with an industrial output ten times that of the land-bound portion of the city.
She could see the network of broad deep-water channels which linked the islands. Their living banks of gene-tailored coral were covered in sage reeds, showing as thin green lines holding the mud desert at bay. Container freighters moved along them, taking finished products from the arcologies and cyber-factories, and sailing down the kilometre-wide Nene to the Wash and the open sea beyond. The new expanded river course had been dredged deep enough so that the maritime traffic could even sail at low tide, most of the mud winding up as landfill on the airport island.
A thick artery of elevated metro rails stabbed out from the landbound city, splitting wide like a river throwing off tributaries. Individual rails arched over the deep-water channels to reach every island. Blue streamlined capsules slid along the delicate ribbons, slotting in behind one another at the junctions with clockwork precision. In all the time she had watched from her eagle’s vantage point she’d never seen a foul-up.
The Mandel Files, Volume 2: The Nano Flower Page 4