Gridiron

Book One

The Richardsons left L'Orangerie, one of LA's most exclusive restaurants, in their chauffeur-driven, bullet-proof Bentley and turned west off La Cienaga on to Sunset.

'We'll be staying at the apartment tonight, Declan,' Ray Richardson told the driver. 'And I'll be in the studio all morning. I won't need you again until we drive to the airport at two.'

'Are you taking the Gulfstream, sir?' Declan's Irish accent was as thick as his neck, for he was also Richardson's bodyguard, as anyone seeing his Blackcat nightsight glasses, or the Ruger P90 automatic on the Bentley's front seat, might have guessed.

'No, I'm on a scheduled flight. To Berlin.'

'We'd better leave a little bit earlier than usual then, sir. The traffic was very bad on the San Diego Freeway today.'

'Thanks, Declan. Let's say one-thirty then.'

'Yes, sir.'

It was past midnight but there were still lights burning in the architechnologist's studio. Declan switched the diode on his Blackcat lenses from red to green to cope with the change in light conditions. You never knew what might come out of left field in the darkness. Not unless you were wearing a pair of wide-angle Blackcats.

'It looks as if they're still working,' said Richardson's wife, Joan.

'They better be,' growled Richardson. 'There was plenty to do when I left. Every time I tell one of those krauts to do something I get a hundred different reasons why it can't be done.'

Designed by Richardson himself and built at a cost of $21 million, the triangular-shaped glass structure that housed his studio occupied a site amid giant billboards and sun-bleached Hollywood glitz, resembling the prow of an expensive and ultra-modern motor yacht. Pointing east towards Hollywood, with opaque glass panels screening the northern elevation from the road, the Richardson building did not conform to any coherently Angeleno architectural approach — always assuming that the eclecticism that characterized most of LA's buildings could be called a style at all. Like Richardson's other buildings in LA, it seemed almost out of place. More European than American. Or something that had just landed from another world.

The design and architectural critics said that Richardson belonged to a Rationalist tradition, and certainly his buildings had machine metaphors aplenty. There were even echoes of the Constructivist fantasies of architects like Gropius, Le Corbusier and Stirling. But at the same time his work went beyond the merely utilitarian. It declared its allegiance to high technology and can-do capitalism.

'Germans,' muttered Richardson and shook his head with contempt.

'Yes, dear,' cooed Joan. 'But as soon as we've opened the Berlin office we can get rid of them.'

The Bentley pulled off the main road and drove round the back of the building to the underground parking lot.

There were seven storeys, six of them above ground. The practice's offices and double-height studio occupied the lower part of the building, with twelve private apartments on levels three to seven. The magnificently appointed penthouse was where the Richardsons stayed when they were working late or starting early, which they often did. Ray Richardson was nothing if not single-minded about his profession. But otherwise they lived in their spectacular house in Rustic Canyon. Also designed by Richardson, this ten-bedroom house enjoyed the rare distinction of having been praised for its beauty and elegance by no less a savage critic of modern architecture than Tom Wolfe, in the pages of Vanity Fair, and was home to the couple's extensive collection of contemporary art.

'We'd better stick our heads round the door and see what's being done in my name,' said Richardson. 'Just in case there are any fuck-ups.'

The couple swept up the dramatic granite-clad staircase like royalty, acknowledging the armed security guards on duty with stiff nods of the head. They paused at the edge of the huge, luminous studio, almost as if they expected to be announced. With only a vase of irises on the receptionist's desk to relieve the monochrome of this modern Angeleno Bauhaus, the Richardsons were suddenly the most colourful thing in it. Ninety metres long, with seventeen twelve-metre work benches set at right angles to the southern-facing glass wall that commanded a panoramic view of the city, Richardson and Associates was one of the most modern architects' studios anywhere in the world. And one of the busiest, too. Even now there were architects, designers, engineers, model-makers, computer experts and their various support teams working late in open-plan harmony. Many of them had been there for thirty-six hours without a break, and those who were relative newcomers to the studio paid little attention to the arrival of the sleekly suited principal and his wife. But those who knew Ray Richardson better looked up from their computer screens and take-out pizzas and realized that harmony was about to turn into fundamental discord.

Joan Richardson glanced around and shook her head in admiration at the sterling service that was being given to her husband. In her adoring brown Navajo eyes it seemed only his due. She was used to putting her husband first.

'Just look at this, darling,' she gushed. 'The creative energy. It's simply breathtaking. Twelve-thirty and they're still working. There's so much going on, it's like a beehive.'

Joan took off her wrap and hung it over her arm. She was wearing a cream linen sarong-style skirt with a matching shirt and tabard, a multilayered outfit that did a great deal to disguise her large behind. Joan was a good-looking woman, with a face not unlike one of Gauguin's Tahitian lovelies, but she was also a large one.

'Fabulous. Just fabulous. It makes you feel so proud to be a part of all this… all this energy.'

Ray Richardson grunted. His eyes searched the hard-edged, black, white and grey surfaces of the studio for Allen Grabel, who was working on both of the largest and most prestigious projects currently occupying the firm. With the Yu Corporation building nearing completion, it was the Kunstzentrum that was immediately preoccupying the firm's senior designer, not least because his principal was about to fly to Germany to present the detailed drawings to the Berlin city authorities.

The Kunstzentrum was an arts centre, Berlin's response to the Paris Beaubourg, designed to revitalize the Alexanderplatz, a huge, wind-swept pedestrianized plaza which had once been one of the German capital's main shopping meccas.

The two projects kept Grabel so busy there were times when he had to stop and remind himself which one he was working on. Spending a minimum twelve hours a day in the office-often as many as sixteen — he had no private life to speak of. He knew he was not a bad-looking guy. He might have had a girlfriend if he could ever take the time to try and meet someone, but with no one at home he spent more and more time at the office. He was aware Richardson took advantage of this. He knew he should have gone on holiday after the major design work on the Yu Corporation building had been completed. On his salary he could have gone anywhere he wanted. He just never found the right window in his increasingly busy work schedule. Sometimes Grabel felt he was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. At the very least he was drinking way too much.

Richardson found the tall, curly-haired New Yorker staring into the screen of his Intergraph terminal through a pair of glasses that were as grimy as his shirt-collar. He was re-shaping the curves and polylines of an architectural layout.

The Intergraph software system for computer-assisted design was the cornerstone of the Richardson practice, not just in Los Angeles but throughout the world. With offices in Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, New York and Toronto, as well as new ones planned for Berlin, Frankfurt, Dallas and Buenos Aires, Richardson was Intergraph's largest customer after NASA. The system, and others like it, had revolutionized architecture, providing 'drag and drop' handle-based editing that allowed a designer to quickly move, rotate, stretch and align any number of two- and three-dimensional entities.

Richardson removed his Armani jacket, moved a chair closer towards Grabel and sat down beside him. Wordlessly he tugged the colour AOsize plot across the desk and compared it with the 2-D image on the monitor while he ate the last slice of Grabel's takeout pizza. Already tired, Grabel's spirits sagged. Sometimes he looked at how CAD transformed an input pattern into a work of architecture and wondered if he might not as easily have created a piece of music. But such philosophical musing disappeared out of the window whenever Ray Richardson arrived on the scene; and whatever pleasure and satisfaction he took in his job seemed as ephemeral as one of his own computer drawings.

'I think we're just about there now, Ray,' he said wearily. But Richardson had already accessed the Smart Draw icon on the floating toolbar with a right-button mouse click that would allow him to judge the design for himself.

'You think?' Richardson smiled coldly. 'Jesus Christ, don't you know?'

He put his hand up in the air like a kid answering a question in class and shouted: 'Someone get me a cup of coffee.'

Grabel shrugged and sighed simultaneously, too tired to argue.

'Well, what's that supposed to mean? That shrug? Come on, Allen. What the fuck is going on here? And where the hell is Kris Parkes?'

Parkes was project manager on the Kunstzentrum project: although not the most senior member of the team, it was his job to run the regular in-house coordination meetings and to articulate what the project team was thinking.

Grabel told himself that right now the project team was probably thinking the same as he was: that they wished they were at home, watching TV in bed. Like Kris Parkes probably was.

'He went home,' said Grabel.

'The project manager went home?'

Richardson's coffee arrived, brought by Mary Sammis, one of the project model-makers. He tasted it, winced and handed it back.

'This is stewed,' he said.

'He was out on his feet,' Grabel explained. 'I told him to go home.'

'Get me another. And this time bring a saucer. When I ask for a cup of coffee I don't expect to have to ask for that as well.'

'Right away.'

Shaking his head, Richardson muttered, 'What kind of place is this anyway?' And then, remembering something, he called out: 'Oh, Mary?

How's the model coming along?'

'We're still working on it, Ray.'

He shook his head grimly. 'Don't let me down, love. I'm flying to Germany tomorrow afternoon.' He looked at his Breitling wrist-watch.

'In twelve hours, to be precise. That model has to be boxed and ready to go with all the customs paperwork. Understand?'

'You'll have it, Ray, I promise.'

'You don't have to make promises to me. It's not for me. This is not about me, Mary. If it was just me it would be different. But I happen to think that the very least we can do for a new office, with thirty people on board who are going to spend the next two years of their lives working on nothing but this project, is to show them a model of what it's going to look like. Wouldn't you agree, Mary?'

'Yes, sir, I would.'

'And don't call me sir, Mary. This isn't the army.'

Richardson picked up Grabel's telephone and punched out a number. Taking advantage of these few seconds of grace Mary walked quickly away.

'Ray, who are you calling?' said Grabel, giving a little twitch. His nervous tick only started when he was dog-tired, or needed a drink.

'Didn't you hear what I just said? I said it was me who told him to go home.'

'I heard you.'

'Ray?'

'Where's my bloody coffee?' Richardson shouted over his shoulder.

'You're not calling Parkes, are you?'

Richardson just looked at Grabel, his grey eyebrows raised with quiet contempt.

'You bastard,' he murmured, suddenly hating Richardson with an intensity he found alarming. 'I wish to God you were dead, you mother…'

'Kris? It's Ray. Did I wake you up? I did? That's too bad. Let me ask you something, Kris. Have you any idea what this building is going to be worth in fees to this firm? No, just answer the question. That's right, nearly $4 million. Four million dollars. Now, there are a lot of us in here working late on this one, Kris. Only you're not here and you're supposed to be the goddamn project manager. Well, don't you think that sets a bad example? You don't.' He listened for a moment and then started to shake his head. 'Well, frankly I don't care how long it is since you've been home. And I couldn't care less if your kids think you're just some guy their mother picked up in the supermarket. Your place is here, with your team. Are you going to drag your ass down here, or do I have to look for a new manager on this job? You are? Good.'

Richardson replaced the receiver and glanced around for his wife. She was stooped over a glass case near the stairs, examining a model of the Yu Corporation headquarters which, in real life, was now nearing completion on the Hope Street Piazza. 'I'm going to be a while here, honey,' he called. 'I'll see you upstairs, OK?'

'OK, dear.' Joan smiled and looked around the studio. 'Goodnight everybody,' she said and left.

There were a few people who smiled back. But most of them were too tired, even for polite smiles. Besides, they knew that Joan was every bit as monstrous as her husband. Worse. At least he was talented. One or two of the more senior designers still remembered the time when, in a fit of bad temper, she had thrown a fax machine through a plate-glass window.

Ray Richardson returned his attention to the monitor and, clicking the mouse again, changed the picture to a 3-D image. The drawing revealed a giant semi-circle about two hundred metres in diameter, gently disked like the city of Bath's Royal Crescent and surmounted by what resembled the wingspan of an enormous bird. There were some architectural critics, most of them in Europe, who had suggested that the wings were the wings of an eagle, and a Nazi eagle at that. For this reason they had already described Richardson's design as 'Post-Nazism'.

Richardson moved the mouse forward across its pad, bringing the 3-D image closer. Now it could be seen that the building was not one crescent but two, enclosing a curving colonnade separating shops and office buildings and the exhibition halls. These were the contract drawings, representing a statement of agreed information from the various consultants who would be involved in constructing the Kunstzentrum, and they were due to be passed on to the quantity surveyor when Richardson visited Berlin. Entering the colonnade, Richardson zoomed up to the ceiling and clicking the mouse twice, exploding a detailed diagram of one of the shape-memory steel tube supports for the photochromic glass panels.

'What's this?' he frowned. 'Look, Allen, you haven't done what I wanted. I thought I asked you to draw up both options.'

'But we agreed that this is the ideal option.'

'I wanted the other one, just in case.'

'Just in case of what? I don't understand. Either this is the best option or it's not.' Grabel started to twitch again.

'In case I change my mind, that's what.' Richardson performed a cruel but accurate imitation of Grabel's nervous twitch. Grabel took off his glasses, buried his unshaven face in his trembling hands and sighed deeply, stretching his cheeks towards his ears. For a moment he looked heavenwards, as if seeking guidance from the Almighty. When none arrived he stood up, shaking his head slowly and put on his jacket.

'God, I hate you sometimes,' he said. 'No, that's not true, I hate you all the time. You are a stray dog's rectal cancer, you know that? One day someone is going to do the world a big favour and murder you. I'd do it myself only I'm afraid of all the fan mail I might receive. You want it drawn? Then do it yourself, you selfish bastard. I've had it up to here with you."

'What did you say?'

'You heard me, asshole.' Grabel turned and started to walk towards the stairs.

'Where the hell are you going?'

'Home.'

Richardson stood up and nodded bitterly.

'You walk out now, you don't come back. D'you hear me?'

'I quit,' Grabel said, and kept on walking. 'I wouldn't come back here if you were dying of loneliness.'

Richardson exploded. 'You don't walk out on me,' he screamed.

'You're fired. I'm firing you, you piece of twitching shit. All these people are my witnessess. You hear me, Twitch? Your ass is fired!'

Without looking back Grabel held up a middle finger and disappeared down the stairs. Someone laughed and Richardson looked around angrily, his fists clenched, ready to fire anyone who stepped out of line.

'What's so goddamned funny?' he snarled. 'And where's my fucking coffee?'

Still seething, Grabel walked the short distance along the strip to the St James's Club Hotel where, as usual, he had a few drinks in the artdeco piano bar while he waited for a taxi. Vodka with Cointreau and cranberry juice. It was what he had been drinking six months earlier when the police had arrested him for driving under the influence. That and a couple of toots of cocaine. He had only taken the cocaine to help him make the drive home. He might not have been drunk at all if he hadn't been working so hard.

He felt better about walking out on his job than he had felt about losing his licence. If only Richardson had not called him Twitch. He knew it was what people sometimes called him, but no one had ever used it to his face before. Only Richardson was a big enough shit to have done that.

There was a cocktail waitress who worked in the hotel, a resting actress called Mary, who was sometimes friendly to him. It was as near as Allen Grabel got to having a social life.

'I just quit my job,' he told her proudly. 'Just told my partner to shove it.'

'Well,' she shrugged, 'good for you.'

'I've been meaning to do it for a long time, I guess. Never had the nerve before. I just told him to stick it. I guess it was either that or blow his friggin' brains out.'

'Something tells me you made the right choice,' she said.

'I dunno, y'know? Really I don't. But boy, was he mad.'

'Sounds like you made quite a performance out of it. The whole dramatic gesture.'

'And how. Boy, was he mad at me.'

'I wish I could quit my job,' she said wistfully.

'Hey, it'll happen for you, Mary. I know it will.'

He ordered another drink and found it disappeared even more quickly than the first. By the time Mary told him that his taxi had arrived he had drunk four or five, although he was so exhilarated by what had happened the alcohol hardly seemed to have affected him. He peeled a couple of bills off of his money clip and tipped the girl generously. There was no need, since he had been sitting at the bar, only he felt sorry for her. Not everyone could afford to quit their job, he told himself.

After he had gone Mary breathed a sigh of relief. He was not a bad person. But the twitch gave her the creeps. And she hated drunks. Even friendly ones.

Outside the front door Grabel ordered the cab driver to take him to Pasadena. They were only a few blocks away from downtown, heading south-east on the Hollywood Freeway, about to make the north turn towards Pasadena, when he suddenly remembered something.

'Shit,' he said loudly.

'Is there a problem?'

'Kind of, yeah. I left my door-key at the office.'

'Want to go back for it?'

'Pull off here, will you, while I try to figure out what to do?'

After such a dramatic exit he could hardly return. Ray Richardson would assume he was returning with his tail between his legs to ask for his job back. He would just love holding him up to ridicule. Maybe call him Twitch again. That would be too much to bear. The trouble with making a grand gesture was that it was easy to forget your props.

'So where's it to be, my friend?'

Grabel looked out of the window and found himself staring up at a familiar-looking silhouette. They were on Hope Street, approaching the piazza and the Yu Corporation building. Suddenly he knew exactly where he would spend the night.

'Here. Drop me here,' he said.

'You sure?' said the taxi driver. 'It's kind of rough around here at night, man.'

'Perfectly sure," said Grabel. He wondered why he had not thought of it before.

Mitchell Bryan was beginning to think that his wife, Alison, was actually getting worse. Over breakfast she had informed him, with an insane look in her eye, how she had read that there were certain South African tribes who believed that the product of a miscarriage could threaten or kill not just the father but the whole country, even the sky itself: it was enough to cause the burning winds to blow, to parch the country with heat and drive the rains away. Laconically, Mitch had replied, 'Well, I guess we got off lightly then,' and headed straight for the car, even though it was still only seven-thirty.

He did not think Alison had ever really recovered from losing their baby. She was more withdrawn than she had ever been before, neurotic even, and kept away from babies like other people avoided the South Central area of LA. There were times when Mitch could not help forcing the endoscope of his memory into the maw of their relationship and asking himself whether or not a child would have kept them together. Because twelve months almost to the day after Alison's miscarriage Mitch stopped making excuses for her eccentric behaviour and started an affair. He hated himself for doing it, knowing that Alison still needed a lot of care and understanding. At the same time he was aware that he no longer loved her quite enough to give it. He felt that what she possibly needed most was to see a psychiatrist.

Right now what Mitch needed was to be in bed with a woman called Jenny Bao, the project's feng shui consultant. Usually he drove straight to the office or the Yu Corporation building, but sometimes he found himself making an early-morning call on Jenny at her West Los Angeles home, from which she also ran her business. On this particular morning Mitch chose the now familiar route off the Santa Monica Freeway on to La Brea Avenue and, just a few blocks south of Wilshire Boulevard, entered the quiet, leafy neighbourhood made up of well-built Spanish and ranch-style houses where Jenny lived. He drew up outside a pleasant grey bungalow with a raised floor and veranda, and an immaculate lawn. Next door was a house with a For Sale board that advertised it as a 'Talking Home'.

Mitch turned the engine off and amused himself for a moment by listening to the ninety-second description of the property on the designated wavelength he could receive on his car radio via a computerized transmitter inside the house. He was surprised that they were asking so much, and that Jenny could have afforded such an expensive neighbourhood. There must be more money in feng shui than he had imagined.

Feng shui, the ancient Chinese art of 'wind and water' land magic, involved locating sites and building structures so that they harmonized with and benefited from the surrounding physical environment. The Chinese believed that this method of divination enabled them to attract desirable cosmological influences, ensuring that they would have good luck, good health, prosperity and a long life. No building on the East Asian Pacific Rim, however large or small, was ever planned or constructed without regard to feng shui precepts.

Mitch had had considerable experience of dealing with feng shui consultants, and not just the one he was sleeping with. When designing the Island Nirvana Hotel in Hong Kong, Ray Richardson had planned on cladding the building in a reflective glass exterior until his client's feng shui master had told him that glare was a source of sha qi, the harmful breath of the dragon. On another occasion the firm had been obliged to alter its award-winning design for the Sumida Television Company in Tokyo because the shape resembled the short-lived butterfly.

He got out of the car and went up the path. Jenny was still in her silk dressing-gown when she answered the door.

'Mitch, what a pleasant surprise,' she said and let him in. 'I was going to give you a call this morning.'

He was already slipping the gown off her shoulders and pushing her into the bedroom.

'Mmm,' she said. 'What did you have, steroids with your Cheerios this morning?'

Half Chinese, Jenny Bao reminded him of a big cat. Green eyes, high cheekbones, and a small delicate nose he had decided was probably cosmetic. She had a bow mouth that was more Odysseus than Cupid and it was set between the parentheses of two perfect laugh lines. She loved to laugh. She carried herself well too, with the long, leggy, self-conscious stroll of the cat-walk. She had not always looked so good. When Mitch had first met her she had been maybe ten or fifteen pounds overweight. He knew how much time she had needed to spend in her local gymnasium to be in such fabulous shape now.

Underneath the robe she was wearing a garter belt, stockings and panties.

'Did the dragon tell you I was coming?' he grinned, pointing at the antique feng shui compass that was mounted on the wall above the bed's headboard. The compass was a circular disc marked with about thirty or forty concentric circles of Chinese characters, and Mitch knew it was called a luopan, and that she used it to assess the good and bad qualities of the dragon in a building.

'Of course,' she said, lying back on the bed. 'The dragon tells me everything.'

His tremulous thumbs gathered the elastic waist of her panties and plucked them down over the twin golden domes of her behind and back up over the suspended sentences and Sobranie filter-tips of her stocking tops as, obligingly, she brought her knees up to her chest. She straightened her feet and the little stealth bomber of black lace and silk was his.

Quickly he threw off his own clothes and rolled on top of her. Detaching mind from over-eager gnomon and its exquisitely appointed, shadowy task, he began to make love to her.

When they had finished they lay under the sheet and watched TV. After a while Mitch glanced at the gold Rolex Submariner watch on his wrist.

'I ought to be going,' he said.

Jenny Bao pulled a face and kissed him.

'What were you going to call me about?' he asked.

'Oh yes,' she said, and told him why she had wanted to speak to him.

As soon as Mitch sat down at his desk in the studio he saw Tony Levine coming towards him and stifled a groan. Levine was too pushy for Mitch's taste. There was something hungry-looking about him, a generally wolfish effect that was enhanced by the gap teeth shown through his near-permanent smile, and eyebrows that were joined in the middle. Then there was his laugh. When Levine laughed you could hear it all over the building. It was almost as if he were trying to draw attention to himself, and that made Mitch feel uncomfortable. But there was no sign of a smile on Levine's face now.

'Allen Grabel resigned,' said Levine.

'What? You're kidding!'

'Last night.'

'Shit.'

'He was working late on this Kunstzentrum thing when Richardson showed up and started throwing his Limey weight around.'

'So what's new?'

'I mean, really tyrannical. Like he was ready to burn the place down. Like he was fucking Frank Lloyd Wright, y'know?'

Levine uttered a dumb-sounding guffaw and smoothed a small ponytail of dark hair. For Mitch the pony-tail was another reason to dislike him, not least because Levine insisted on calling his hair arrangement a chignon.

'Yeah, well, the ego's about the same size. He thinks he's a genius. That means he has an infinite capacity for making himself a pain in the ass.'

'So what do we do, Mitch? Get another designer on the job? I mean the job's nearly finished, right?'

Levine was the Yu project manager.

'I'd better give Allen a call,' said Mitch. 'There are a couple of problems I'll need his output on, and I'd like to keep Richardson away from what still needs to be done if it's at all possible.'

'Too late,' said Levine. 'He's already been through Grabel's diary. He's coming to this morning's project meeting.'

'Shit. I thought he was going to Germany.'

'After. What problems?'

'That's all we need. You know, Allen would just have sorted things out. But Richardson is bound to make an issue out of it.'

'Out of what? Will you please tell me what the problem is?'

'Feng shui.'

'That? Jesus, Mitch, I thought we sorted that fuckin' shit.'

'We did, but only on the drawings. Jenny Bao has been round the building and she's worried about a number of things. Mainly she's worried about the tree. The way it's planted.'

'That fuckin' tree's been a headache right from the beginning.'

'You're not wrong there, Tony. She's also worried about the fourth floor.'

'What's the hell's wrong with it?'

'Apparently it's unlucky.'

'What?' Levine guffawed again. 'Why the fourth floor and not the thirteenth?'

'Because it's not thirteen that's unlucky for the Chinese, it's the number four. The word for four is also the word for death, she tells me.'

'My birthday comes on the 4th of August,' said Levine. 'Too bad for me, eh?' He cackled loudly. This Kung Fu shit is just too fuckin' much.'

Levine emitted an even louder bray of laughter.

Mitch shrugged. 'Well, I say give the client what he wants, Tony. The client wants space acupuncture, he gets space acupuncture. That way we get to present our bill as soon as possible.'

'I thought the client was in with the Commies. Aren't the Commies atheists and down on all that superstitious nonsense about spirits and good luck?'

'That reminds me,' said Mitch. 'Something else we have to discuss this morning. Remember those demonstrators? The ones who turned up when we had that cosmetic topping-out ceremony? Well, they're back.'

There were four teams working on the Yu Corporation project — designers, structural engineers, mechanical engineers and the building management systems (BMS) engineers — and it was Mitch's job to make sure that they all built the same building. Frequently a firm of architects was only responsible for the design of the building and relied on outside engineers as consultants. But being such a huge practice, employing some four hundred people, Richardsons had its own in-house mechanical and BMS engineers. An experienced architect himself, it was down to Mitch as technical coordinator to translate the designer's lofty ideas into practical instructions and to make sure that when changes were made everyone was aware of their impact.

Mitch located Allen Grabel's telephone number on his computer card file, but when he called him up he got the answering machine.

'Allen? This is Mitch, calling you at ten o'clock. I just heard about what happened last night, and well — I want to find out if you really meant it. And even if you did mean it, I wanted to see if you could be persuaded to change your mind. We can't afford to lose someone with your talent. I know Richardson can be an asshole. But he's still a pretty talented guy and sometimes talent can be difficult to be around. So, er… maybe you could give me a call when you receive this message.'

Mitch glanced at his watch. There was just enough time to familiarize himself with what the computer held on file about feng shui in the hope that he might find a solution to the problem Jenny Bao had thrown at him; and seeing Kay Killen walking along the studio gallery he waved to her. As drawings manager Kay's function revolved around the computer and the Intergraph design system, which made her the guardian of the database for the whole job and indispensable to Mitch for any number of reasons.

'Kay,' he said, 'could I have your help for a minute, please?'

'So what's the problem this time?' grumbled Richardson when Mitch brought up the subjects of Jenny Bao's concern at the project meeting.

'You know, I sometimes think these Kung Fu assholes dream these fucking things up to justify their fees.'

'Well, that sounds a familiar story,' murmured Marty Birnbaum, the management partner, adjusting his bow-tie with fastidious care. For Mitch, whose father, a journalist on a small town newspaper, had worn a bow-tie all his life, bow-ties were the meretricious accoutrements of all frauds and liars, and it was yet another reason to dislike the overweight and, he thought, supercilious Birnbaum.

They were all seated around Richardson's democratically round white wood table: Mitchell Bryan; Ray Richardson; Joan Richardson; Tony Levine; Marty Birnbaum; Willis Ellery, the mechanical engineer; Aidan Kenny, the BMS engineer; David Arnon, from Elmo Sergo Ltd, the structural engineers; Helen Hussey, the site agent; and Kay Killen. Mitch sat next to Kay, whose long legs were pointed towards him.

'It's the tree,' explained Mitch. 'Or, rather, where it's planted.'

Everyone groaned.

'Jesus Christ, Mitch,' said David Arnon, 'this may be the smartest building I've ever built, but it's also the dumbest fucking client. He employs one of the world's leading architects and then gets his fucking Chinese witch doctor to scrutinize just about everything he does.'

Mitch did not protest. He knew that Ray Richardson already had his suspicions about him and Jenny, and he had no wish to draw attention to himself by defending her.

'Has this stupid bitch any idea of what it took to get the tree through the roof of that building? It's not exactly the kind of thing you can just pick up and move somewhere else.'

'Take it easy, David,' said Mitch. 'We have to work with this stupid bitch as you call her.'

Arnon slapped his thigh and stood up. Mitch knew that he did it to create an effect, because at six foot five Arnon was the tallest, and possibly the most handsome, man in the room. He was a long wiry streak of a man, with narrow, impossibly horizontal shoulders that seemed to have been tied on to his tent-pole of a body, and a box-shaped head with a closely cut tan-coloured beard. He looked like a former basketball player, which was exactly what he was. Arnon had played Guard as a junior for Duke University, and had been Atlantic Coast player of the year as a senior, until a knee injury had forced him to quit the game for good.

'Take it easy?' said Arnon. 'You're not the one… Whose shitty idea was it to stick a lousy tree that size in there anyway?'

'Actually, it was my shitty idea,' said Joan Richardson.

Arnon shrugged an apology in her direction and sat down again. Mitch smiled to himself, half-enjoying the effect his announcement had produced. He could easily understand David Arnon's concern. It was not every day that a client wanted you to plant a three-hundred-foothigh dicotyledon from the Brazilian rain forest in the middle of his new building's atrium. Arnon had needed the biggest crane in California to lower the outsized evergreen, apparently a South American record, through the roof of the building, a task that had brought the Hollywood Freeway to a halt and closed Hope Street for a whole weekend.

'Relax, will you?' said Mitch. 'She's talking about the way it's planted, not where.'

'That makes a difference?' said Arnon.

'Jenny Bao — '

'Bow wow wow,' growled Arnon. 'Fucking dog woman.'

'- told me that it was bad feng shui to plant a large tree on an island in a pond, since the tree in the rectangular pond becomes a Chinese character meaning confinement and trouble.' He handed round some photocopies of a drawing which Jenny had made of the Chinese kun character.

Richardson regarded the sign with contempt.

'You know,' he said, 'I seem to remember her telling me about how it was good practice to make a rectangular pond because it resembles some other character meaning a mouth and symbolizing — what was it now? — oh yes, people and prosperity. Kay, I want you to look that up in the computer call report. Maybe we can screw this bitch for good.'

Mitch shook his head.

'You're talking about the kou character. But with the mu sign for a tree in the middle, the kou sign becomes a kun. You see what I mean? Jenny was kind of adamant about that, Ray. She won't sign off the feng shui certificate until we've changed it.'

'Change it? How?' said Levine.

'Well, I've had some thoughts on this,' said Mitch. 'We could build another pond, a round pond, inside the square one. That way the circle represents heaven and the square earth.'

'I don't believe we're having this conversation,' said Richardson. 'The smartest building in LA and we're talking voodoo stuff. Next thing we know we're going to have to sacrifice a cockerel and pour its blood on the front door.'

He sighed and ran a hand through his closely cropped grey hair.

'I'm sorry, Mitch. What the hell, I think your idea sounds like a good one.'

'Actually, I already put the idea to her and she seems to quite like it.'

'Well done, pal,' said Richardson. 'Get it drawn up, will you? You hear that everyone? Mitch is the kind of guy we want round here. He gets things done. Next item.'

'We're not finished here yet, I'm afraid,' said Mitch. 'Jenny Bao also has a problem with the fourth floor. Four is the Chinese word for death. Something like that, anyway.'

'Maybe she's right,' said Richardson. 'Because four is the number of bullets I'm going to fire into that bitch's fucking head. Then I'm going to tear off each of her limbs and stick them up her four inch — '

'Fucking A,' whooped Aidan Kenny. Levine guffawed loudly.

'Couldn't you just leave a space where the fourth floor used to be?' smiled Helen Hussey. 'You know, miss it out altogether. Just let the fifth floor float on top of the third?'

'Do you have a solution, Mitch?' asked Joan.

'I'm afraid not this time.'

'How about this?' said Aidan Kenny. 'The fourth floor is where we have the computer suite. That's the main computer room, the electronicmail centre, the document image processing room, the tape-drive room, the multimedia library with a secure store, and the control bridge as well as the various service corridors. So why don't we just call it something like the data centre? Then it goes like this: Second Floor, Third Floor, Data Centre, Fifth Floor, Ladies' Underwear, Soft Furnishings…'

'That's not a bad idea, Aid,' said Richardson. 'What do you think, Mitch? Will Mme Blavatsky buy it?'

'I think so.'

'Willis? You're making a face. Do you have an objection?'

As the project's mechanical engineer it was Willis Ellery's job to plan the Yu Corporation building's complex system of piping, cables, elevator shafts and ductwork. He was a thick-set man, with white-blond hair and a moustache stained fawn at the edge of his upper lip from the many cigars he smoked outside the office. He cleared his throat and gave a little nod of the head, as if trying to butt his way into the conversation. Despite his obvious-looking strength he was the mildest mannered of men.

'Well, yes, I think maybe I do. What are we going to do about the elevators?' he said. 'The indicator panels in the cars all have number fours.'

Richardson shrugged impatiently.

'Get on to Otis, Willis, get them to make you some new ones. It ought to be easy enough to make an indicator panel with a letter D instead of a four.' He pointed to Kay Killen, who was call-reporting the meeting on her laptop. 'Make sure you memo all this to the client, Kay. The cost of making all these voodoo changes is going to be down to him, not us.'

'Er… well… might take a little time to organize that,' said Ellery. Richardson looked at Aidan Kenny with what passed for a twinkle in his eye.

'Aid? You're the one who has to spend most of his life on the fourth floor at the Yu Corp. What do you think? Are you willing to take the risk?

Do you feel lucky, punk?'

'I'm Irish, not Chinese,' laughed Kenny. 'Four's never been a problem for me. My dad used to say that the fortunate possessor of a four-leaf clover would have good luck in gambling, and that witchcraft would have no power over him.'

'All the same,' said Mitch, 'perhaps it would be better if you didn't mention it to Cheech and Chong.'

'Who the hell are they?' said Richardson.

'Bob Beech and Hideki Yojo,' Kenny explained. 'From the Yu Corporation. They've been installing their supercomputer and helping me to set up the building management systems. Actually they're my chaperones. They're there to make sure I don't screw around with their hardware.'

'Do you think their being there might count as a completion offering beneficial occupation?' joked David Arnon, knowing that under the existing articles of agreement, this would have allowed his company, Elmo Sergo, to quit the site.

Mitch smiled, knowing how badly Arnon wanted to finish the job and, more particularly, to get away from Ray Richardson.

'That reminds me, Mitch,' said Richardson. 'Have you put a date in my diary for the practical completion inspection yet?'

This was the stage in the completion of a building contract when the architect accepted the building as complete and ready for occupation.

'Not yet, Ray, no. We're still running checks on services and equipment prior to obtaining the temporary certificate of occupation.'

'Don't leave it too long. You know how my diary fills up.'

'Hey, I forgot to mention it,' said Kenny, 'but, talking about dates and diaries, today is Big Bang. Our computer links up with the computers at every one of our projects in America.'

'Aidan's quite correct to remind us,' said Ray Richardson. 'Our Big Bang's important. Soon most of our site inspections will be done on closed-circuit TV via the computer modem. That should save a lot of you bastards from having to get your $300 shoes dirty.'

'We may even have that available to us for the next project meeting,' said Kenny. 'Most of the BMS is already working.'

'Good work, Aid.'

'What about security?' inquired Tony Levine. 'Mitch says that some of those demonstrators came back.'

'How come?' asked Richardson. 'It's six months since they were last there.'

'There's not half as many as last time. Only a handful,' said Mitch.

'Students mostly. My guess is it's because the semester at UCLA just ended.'

'You know, if it becomes a problem, Mitch, you should give Morgan Phillips a ring at City Hall. Get him to do something about it. He owes me one.'

Mitch shrugged. 'I don't think it's going to be a problem,' he said.

'We've got security men to handle things. Not to mention the computer.'

'If you say so. OK, everyone,' said Richardson, 'that's it.' The meeting was over.

'Hey, Mitch,' said Kenny. 'You going downtown?'

'Any minute now.'

'Give me a lift to the Gridiron, will you? My car's in the repair shop.'

Mitch winced and glanced at Ray Richardson. It had been the LA Times's architecture critic, Sam Hall Kaplan, who had first dubbed the Yu Corporation building 'the Gridiron', because of the resemblance between its framework of parallel cross-braces and supports and an American football field. Mitch knew the nickname irritated Richardson.

'Aidan Kenny,' said Richardson sharply, 'I do not want to hear anyone calling the Yu Corporation building the Gridiron. It is the Yu building, or the Yu Corporation building, or even Number One Hope Street Piazza, and that is all. No one here should denigrate a Richardson building in such a way. Is that clear?'

Aware that it was no longer just Aidan Kenny who was listening, Ray Richardson raised his voice. 'That goes for everyone. Nobody refers to the Yu building as the Gridiron. This practice has won ninety-eight awards for outstanding architectural design and we're proud of our buildings. I may base my style of architecture in technology — I don't see how you can avoid that. But you can take it for granted that I believe the buildings are also beautiful. Beauty and technology are not as incompatible as some people would like us to believe. And anyone who thinks differently has no right to be working here. Don't mistake me on this. I'll fire anyone I hear using the word Gridiron. And the same applies to nicknames anyone might have for the Kunstzentrum in Berlin, the Yoyogi Park building in Tokyo, the Bunshaft Museum in Houston, the Thatcher building in London, or any other fucking building that we have anything to do with. I hope I've made myself clear.'

Aidan Kenny was still commenting on this reprimand as Mitch drove them east along Santa Monica Boulevard. Mitch was pleased to see that he had not taken it to heart. Kenny even seemed to regard the experience as amusing.

'The Yoyogi Park building,' he said. 'What do they call that one, then?

Sorry, how do they denigrate that one? Hell of a word that — denigrate. I had to look it up. It means bad-mouth.'

'There was a piece about it in Architectural Digest,' Mitch explained.

' The Japan Times commissioned a Gallup poll about what people in Tokyo thought about it. Apparently they call it the ski jump.'

'The ski jump.' Kenny chuckled. 'I like that. It is kind of like a ski jump, isn't it? Ouch. I bet he loved that. And the Bunshaft?'

'That's a new one on me. Maybe he's seen something I haven't.'

'What gets up that sonofabitch? Maybe it's Joan. Maybe she straps one on and shoves it up his ass. She's man enough: that's what I call an Iron Lady. She could play defence for the Steelers.'

'Richardson's not the worst architect in LA, I'll say that for him. Not by a long way. Morphosis would win that prize, with Frank Gehry a close second. Ray may behave like a paranoid schizophrenic but at least his buildings don't look that way. Do you think some of those guys think that there's some kind of redemption in making buildings look as ugly as possible?'

'Hey, come on, Mitch,' chuckled Kenny. 'You know that "ugly" is not a word that has any meaning in architecture. There's avant-garde, there's very avant-garde and there's security-guard. You want your building to look fashionable these days, you make it look like a fucking state penitentiary.'

'That's good coming from the man who drives a Cadillac Protector.'

'You know how many Protectors were sold in LA last year? Eighty thousand. Mark my words, in a couple of years we'll all be driving them. You included. Joan Richardson drives one.'

'Why doesn't Ray? There are lots more people who want him dead, surely.'

'You don't think his Bentley isn't armour-plated?' Kenny shook his head. 'You can't sell a car like that in LA without armour. But frankly I prefer the Protector. It has a back-up engine, in case the first one breaks down. Not even a Bentley has that.'

'So why aren't you driving it? You've only just took delivery.'

'Nothing serious. It's just the on-board computer.'

'What's the matter with it?'

'I don't know. My eight-year-old, Michael, keeps screwing with it. He thinks it controls the car's weapons system or something, and zaps the other cars with it.'

'If only,' said Mitch, braking hard to avoid colliding with the wayward tan Ford in front, 'it were that easy.' He gritted his teeth angrily, checked the mirror and then pulled out to overtake.

'Try not to make eye contact with him, Mitch,' said Kenny nervously.

'Just in case, y'know… Have you got a gun in this car?' He opened the glove compartment.

'If a Protector had a weapons system, I'd get one today.'

'Yeah, wouldn't that be good?'

Mitch pulled in front of the tan Ford and glanced over at his passenger. 'Relax, will you? There's no gun in there. I don't have one.'

'No gun? What are you, some kind of pacifist?'

Aidan Kenny was a heavy, couch-potato type with wire-frame glasses and a wide, viscid mouth that could accommodate a whole cheeseburger. There was something about him that reminded Mitch of a minor Renaissance princeling: the eyes were small and set too close together; the nose was long and fat, adding an impression of sensuality and selfindulgence; and the chin, while not of Habsburg proportions, was prognathously stubborn and covered with a fair, boyish sort of beard that looked as if it had been grown to give the impression of maturity. His skin was as soft and white as a roll of toilet paper, as might have been expected with someone who spent most of his waking hours serving a computer terminal.

They turned south on to Hollywood Freeway.

'That's why I'm giving in and letting him have some computer games,' said Kenny. 'You know, the interactive stuff on CD-ROM.'

'Who?'

'My son. Then maybe he'll stop screwing around with the car's computer.'

'He must be the only kid in LA who doesn't already play those games.'

'Yeah, well, that's because I know how addictive they can be. I'm still attending CGA. Computer Games Anonymous.'

Mitch sneaked another sideways look at his colleague. It was easy enough to imagine him playing some fantasy game into the small hours of the morning. Not that there was anything weak-minded about Aidan Kenny. Before setting up a BMS company that Richardson had eventually bought for several milion dollars, Aidan Kenny had worked with the Stanford artificial intelligence group. That was another thing you had to hand to Ray Richardson: he hired only the best to work for him. Even if he didn't know how to hang on to them.

'Matter of fact, Mitch, he's coming in today. We're going to go to a store and he's going to pick all the games he wants.'

'Who, Michael?'

'It's his birthday. Margaret's dropping him off at the Gridiron. Whoops. The Yu building. Gee, I hope your car isn't bugged. Do you think anyone will mind Michael being there this afternoon? We're going to see the Clippers this evening and I don't want to have to go home first.'

Mitch was thinking about Allen Grabel. His attache case had still been under his desk when they left the office. And there had still been the answering machine when Mitch had phoned again. He mentioned it to Kenny.

'Do you think something could have happened to him?' he said.

'Like what?'

'I dunno. You're the one with the imagination and the Cadillac Protector. I mean, it was kind of late when he left the office last night.'

'Probably went somewhere and got himself stewed,' said Kenny. 'Allen likes a drink. Two or three if he can get away with it.'

'Yeah, maybe you're right.'

They came off the Freeway at Temple Street and approached the familiar downtown skyline, dominated by I. M. Pei's orthogonal seventythree-storey Library Tower. Mitch reflected that LA's tallest buildings (most of them banks and shopping plazas) resembled the banal, blocksquare construction he had built in the days when eight-year-olds played with simple sets of Lego bricks. Turning south on to Hope Street, he felt a surge of pride as he caught sight of the Yu building and, leaning forward in his seat, stole a quick glance up at the familiar curtain wall recessed behind the characteristic gridiron of lateral megatrusses and ivory white piers: it was not so much a frame as a three-hundred-foot ladder from which the twenty-five floors were suspended.

Despite Richardson's sensitivity about the nickname, Mitch found there was nothing inherently offensive in it. Indeed, he half suspected that there would come a time when, like the owners of New York's famous Flatiron building, the Yu Corporation would yield to popular insistence and make the nickname official. They could call it what they liked, he reflected: compared with the sullenly competent Miesian glass boxes that surrounded it, the Gridiron was, in Mitch's opinion, the most stunning piece of new architecture anywhere in America. There was nothing to touch the glistening, silver-white transparent machine that was Ray Richardson's Gridiron building. Its visible absence of colour was the most concrete of all colours and, in Mitch's eyes, the building seemed to possess the white light of a revealed truth.

Mitch slowed the car to turn down the drive that led around the side of the finished piazza to the underground car park. As he did so he felt something strike his passenger door.

'Jesus,' exclaimed Kenny and sank into his seat below the window.

'What the hell was that?'

'One of those Chinese kids threw something.'

Mitch did not stop. Like everyone else in LA he stopped for nothing except traffic lights and the LAPD. He waited until they were safe behind the rolling aluminium garage door before inspecting his car for damage. There was no dent. Not even a scratch. Just the hand-sized splatter of a piece of rotten fruit. Mitch found a tissue in the glove box, wiped the mess away and then sniffed it.

'Smells like a rotten orange,' he said. 'It could have been worse. It could have been a rock or something.'

'Next time it might be worse. It's like I told you, Mitch, drive the Cadillac Protector,' said Kenny, and shrugged. He added, quoting the now infamous television commercial in which a nerdy-looking white man drove the car through a tough black neighbourhood, 'It's the car that gives you back the freedom of the city.'

'What's got into those kids? They've never thrown anything before. Isn't there supposed to be a cop out there making sure this kind of thing doesn't happen?'

Kenny shook his head. 'Who knows? Maybe the cop did it himself. Jesus, these days I'm more afraid of the LAPD than I am of the bad guys. Did you see that blind man on the TV? The one who got shot for waving his white stick at a patrolman?'

'I guess we'd better mention it to Sam,' said Mitch. 'See what he says.'

They walked through a door to the elevators, where a car was waiting to take them up into the main building. It had been automatically dispatched to the basement car park when the two men had given their voice identification phrases outside the garage.

'Which level, please?'

Kenny leaned towards the microphone on the wall. 'Where is Sam Gleig now, Abraham?'

'Abraham?' Mitch raised his eyebrows at Kenny, who shrugged back.

'Didn't I tell you? We decided to give the A-life a name.'

'Sam Gleig is on the atrium floor,' said the computer.

'Take us there, please, Abraham.' He grinned at Mitch. 'Besides, it's a hell of a lot better than what Cheech and Chong used to call the YU-5 configuration. The Mathematical Analyser Numerator Integrator and Computer. M-A-N-I-A-C? Get it?'

The doors closed.

'Abraham. I guess it's OK,' said Mitch. 'You know, every time I hear its voice I wonder where I've heard it before.'

'It's Alec Guinness,' said Kenny. 'You know, the old English guy who was in Star Wars. We had him in the studio for a whole weekend so that we could digitize his voice. Of course Abraham can sample damn near any sound he wants, but for sustained speech you need to have an actor to give you a proper linguistic base. We researched Guinness against a dozen other actors' voices, including Glenn Close, James Earl Jones, Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood.'

'Clint Eastwood?' Mitch sounded surprised. 'In an elevator?'

'Yeah, but Guinness came out the best. People thought he sounded very reassuring. The English accent, I suppose. Not that we're restricted to English, though. There are eighty-six languages spoken in LA and Abraham is programmed to understand and respond to them all.'

The elevator doors opened on to the atrium and the waft of a pleasant, synthetically dispensed scent of cedar wood. Mitch and Kenny walked across a white marble floor that was still covered in a layer of protective film, towards the hologram console where a security guard was standing. Seeing the two men he withdrew his attention from the top of the huge tree that dominated the atrium and walked to meet them halfway.

'Good morning, gentlemen,' he said. 'How are you today?'

'Morning, Sam,' said Mitch. 'Sam, one of those demonstators just threw something at my car. It was only a piece of rotten fruit, but I thought I'd mention it.'

The three of them walked over to the front door and stared through the armoured Plexiglas at the small group of demonstrators behind the police barrier at the foot of the steps that led down on to the piazza. The motorcycle cop guarding them was sitting sidesaddle on his bike and reading a newspaper.

'You might have a word with the officer who is supposed to be keeping an eye on them,' added Mitch. 'I don't want to make anything out of it, but I wouldn't like this sort of thing to become a habit, OK?'

'No, sir, I understand,' said Gleig. 'I'll certainly mention it to him.'

'Have they caused any trouble before?' asked Kenny.

'Trouble, sir? No, sir.' Sam Gleig grinned. He raised one pizza-sized hand from the 9-millimetre automatic he kept holstered on his hip and tapped the tinted glass with his knuckles. 'Besides, what could they do?

This stuff is 200 mills thick. It can take anything from a 12-gauge shotgun to a 7.62-millimetre NATO rifle bullet without leaving a mark. You know something, Mr Kenny? This is about the safest job I ever had. Fact is, I reckon it's about the safest place in the whole of LA.' He laughed a big, slow laugh that echoed across the atrium floor: a shopping mall Santa Glaus.

Mitch and Kenny smiled and retraced their steps to the elevators.

'He's right,' said Kenny. 'This is the safest building in LA. You could hold a Russian parliament in this place.'

'You reckon I should maybe tell him about the problem with the feng shui?' said Mitch.

'Hell, no,' Kenny laughed. 'You might spoil his day.'

Mitch and Kenny held very different views of the Gridiron. Mitch looked at it from the outside in, and Kenny from the inside out. For Kenny, the Gridiron was the nearest thing to an actual physical body that any computer had ever had. The Yu-5 configuration was able to see and feel almost everything through an array of building management and security systems analogous to the receptors that provided man with his sensory capacities. The analogy had influenced Beech and Yojo, the Yu5's designers, even to the extent of programming the computer with what they called an 'observer illusion'. In essence, Abraham had been endowed with the sensation of being distributed in space and time and presiding over the chaos of his numerous perceptions and stimuli. It was, Kenny had joked, a case of 'I compute, therefore I am.'

The computer was encouraged to think of itself as the brain in the body of the building, connected to the body's functions by means of a central nervous system: the multiplex cabling system. Its visual process was provided by an elaborate system of closed-circuit television cameras, as well as a complicated system of passive infrared detectors both inside and outside the building. The auditory process resourced acoustic and ultra-sonic detectors as well as the omnidirectional microphones that facilitated access to the elevators, doors, telephones and computer workstations via the TESPAR system. The olfactory process, by which the computer was able to control and manufacture the synthetic odours within the building, was achieved via stereo-isometric and paranosmiac electrical sensors that were sensitive to a range of 1/400,000,000th of a milligram per litre of air.

The rest of the computer's sensory reception, by which it was possible for the building to react to changes in its external or internal environment, were broadly comparable to the human organism's kinesthenic and vestibular senses.

There were few if any stimuli that the computer was not able to transform from an energy change into a vital process.

As Kenny saw it, the Yu-5 computer and the Gridiron represented the most advanced stage of Cartesian logic — mathematics as the unifying glue of a rationalized world.

At a quarter to one, Cheng Peng Fei left his fellow protesters on the piazza outside the Gridiron and walked north towards the Freeway, regarding the vagrants and the panhandlers along his route with the expert indifference of someone who knew the greater poverty of SouthEast Asia. A black man wearing a Dodgers baseball cap and smelling like a dungheap fell into step beside him. My own fault for going on foot, the young Chinese told himself.

'Spare some change, please, man?'

Cheng Peng Fei looked the other way and walked on, despising the derelict who had already dropped behind, thinking that in China, no matter how poor you were, you worked and supported yourself. He cared about the poor, but only the ones who were unable to help themselves. Not the ones who looked as though they were fit for work.

He turned east down Sunset Boulevard and on the corner of North Spring Street entered the Mon Kee Seafood Restaurant.

The place was crowded, but the man he was looking for, a tough but good-looking Japanese, was easy enough to spot in his navy-blue Comme des Gargons suit. Cheng sat down opposite him and picked up a menu.

'This is a good place,' said the Japanese, speaking English with just a slight American accent. 'Thanks for recommending it. I'll come here again.'

Cheng Peng Fei shrugged, indifferent to whether the Japanese liked the place or not. His grandfather came from Nanking and he knew enough of what had happened there in the 1930s to dislike the Japanese thoroughly. He decided to move the conversation along.

'We've begun the demonstration again, like you suggested,' he said.

'So I saw. Not as many as I'd hoped, though.'

'People went home for the holidays.'

'So find more.' The Japanese glanced around the restaurant. 'Maybe a few of these waiters would like to earn some easy money. Shit, it's not even illegal. How often can you say that these days?' He reached into his coat pocket, drew out a manila envelope and pushed it across the table.

'I still don't get it,' said Cheng, pocketing the envelope without opening it. 'What's in it for you?'

'What's to get?' The Japanese shrugged. 'It's like I told you when we first met. You want to demonstrate against the Yu Corporation's involvement with the Communist Chinese. And I want to sponsor you to do it.'

Cheng Peng Fei recalled the occasion of their only other meeting: the Japanese — he still did not know his name — had tracked Cheng down after seeing his name in the newspapers in connection with the original demonstration on the new Hope Street Piazza.

'But I think you should be less polite. You know what I'm saying?

Make a little more fucking noise out there. Throw a few rocks or something. Get tough. It's a good cause, after all.'

Cheng wanted to say that he had thrown a piece of rotten fruit at a car entering the Gridiron's underground car park, only he thought that the Japanese would find that funny. What was a piece of fruit beside a rock?

Instead he said, 'Is that what you really think? That it's a good cause?'

The Japanese looked puzzled.

'Why else would I be doing this?'

'Why else indeed?'

The waiter came to take Cheng's order.

'A Tsingtao,' he said.

'You're not eating?' said the Japanese.

Cheng shook his head.

'Too bad. This is really very good.'

When the waiter had gone, Cheng said, 'Shall I tell you what I think?'

The Japanese forked some fish into his mouth and stared levelly at Cheng. 'You can say what you like. Unlike the People's Republic of China, this is still a free country.'

'I think that you and your employers are probably business rivals of the Yu Corporation and that you would like to see them embarrassed in any way possible. I'll bet you're in the electronics and computer business too.'

'Business rivals, huh?'

'Don't you Japanese have a saying — business is war? Is that why you want a demonstration outside their new building? Although I can hardly see why it should matter very much in the corporate scheme of things.'

'It's an interesting theory.' The Japanese laughed, wiped his mouth with his napkin and stood up. Still smiling he threw a handful of dollars on to the table. 'You have imagination. That's good. So get imaginative. Think of some way of making your protest a little more noticeable.

'Oh, one more thing,' added the Japanese. 'You get arrested for something? You never even met me. I hope it goes without saying that I would be very unhappy if I found out you spoke about this to anyone. Is that clear?'

Cheng nodded coolly. But when the Japanese had gone he realized that he was afraid.

Mitch had made a temporary office for himself on the twenty-fifth floor, in those parts of the building that were nearest completion and that would soon become the luxuriously appointed private and semiprivate domains of senior Yu Corporation personnel. Most of the rooms had tall doors made of dark varnished wood with silver aluminium frames designed to look like the Yu Corporation logo. Some of the rooms were already carpeted — light grey, to contrast with the darker grey carpet in the corridors — and a few of them were already marked by the negligent footprints of the electricians, plasterers and joiners who were still working there.

Now that the work was almost complete there was a general air of desertion about the building. Mitch found this unsettling, especially at night when the downtown area emptied and, like a modern Marie Celeste, the very size of the Gridiron seemed to point up the lack of human occupants. It was strange, he thought, how books and movies dwelt on the fears people had on finding themselves alone in old buildings, when new ones could be every bit as unnerving. The Gridiron was no exception. Even in the middle of the day a sudden moan of airconditioning, a whisper of water in a pipe or a groan of new woodwork as it expanded or contracted could momentarily raise the hair on the back of Mitch's neck. He felt like the one-man crew of an enormous spacecraft on a five-year mission into deep space. Bruce Dern in Silent Running. Keir Dullyea in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now and then he was inclined to take Jenny Bao's feng shui as seriously as he affected to treat it when he was with her: maybe there really was a spiritual energy, for good or evil, in a building. More rationally, he wondered if perhaps it was something to do with the observer illusion with which the computer had been endowed: maybe the feeling he had was simply that of being observed by the computer itself.

For all that, he usually enjoyed being alone in the Gridiron. The peace and quiet gave him a chance to think about his future. A future he hoped would include Jenny Bao, but not Richardson and Associates. Mitch was bored with being Ray Richardson's technical coordinator. He wanted to go back to being an architect, pure and simple. He wanted to design a house, or a school, or maybe a library. Nothing showy, nothing complicated, just attractive buildings that people would like looking at as much as being inside them. One thing was for sure. He had had quite enough of intelligent buildings. There was just too much to organize. As Mitch went from floor to floor wearing his laptop computer on an ergonomically designed harness, he found few signs of activity: a solitary plumber connecting one of the automatic executive washroom modules, prefabricated, like many of the Gridiron's systems and components, by the Toto Company of Japan; a telecommunications engineer installing the latest videophone-a fast-packet system with a caller ID and polygraph facility.

Mitch was reasonably satisfied with the progress that was being made, although he could not see how the client could take occupation in anything less than six weeks. Many of the floors were in a remarkably unprepared state, while others that were supposed to have been completed were already showing the kind of damage that was the inevitable result of the continuing work. Although on the whole he was happy with the overall standard of workmanship, Mitch knew that no matter how hard everyone tried, Ray Richardson would manage to find fault with something. He always did.

For Mitch, that was one of the essential differences between the two of them and was probably why Richardson had got to be where he was: Richardson was the kind of man who believed that it was possible to achieve perfection in something while Mitch believed that architecture and building provided a perfect miscrocosm of a universe in which order existed, rather precariously, on the very edge of chaos.

Chaos and complexity were what interested him most at that moment: the more complex the system, the closer to the edge of chaos you got. It was one of the things that disturbed him about the whole concept of smart buildings. He had tried discussing this with Ray Richardson in relation to the Gridiron, only Richardson had got hold of the wrong end of the stick.

'Well, of course the building's complex, Mitch,' he had said. 'That's the fucking idea, isn't it?'

'That's not what I mean. What I'm saying is that the more complex a system is, the bigger the chance that something might go wrong.'

'What are you saying, Mitch? That this level of technology worries you? Is that it? Come on, buddy, wake up and smell the coffee, will you?

This is an office block we're talking about, not the Pentagon's earlywarning system. Get with the programme, will you?'

End of conversation.

When, towards the end of the day, Aidan Kenny telephoned Mitch and told him to get his ass down to the fourth floor, he hardly expected to find that in a small way his earlier concern might have been justified.

The computer centre on the fourth floor was like no other computer room Mitch had ever seen. You reached it by an underlit bridge of greenish glass, gently arched as if it led across a small stream instead of the many electrical cables it had been carefully designed to conceal. The double-height door was made of heavy, clear Czechoslavakian glass, spoiled only by a sign warning that the room was protected by a Halon 1301 fire-retardant system.

Beyond was an enormous windowless room carpeted in a special antistatic surface and surrounded by floor lights resembling the exit lights on a passenger aircraft. Dominating the room, in a closed circle that reminded Mitch of Stonehenge, were the five brushed aluminium monoliths that constituted the Yu-5 Super-computer. Each of the silverwhite boxes was eight feet high, four feet wide, and two feet thick. The Yu-5 Super-computer was really several hundred computers working together in one Massively Parallel Processing System. Whereas most computers worked serially, executing the required steps of a sequence on a single processing unit, the advantage of the MPPS was that the various parts of the same sequence could be divided up and carried out simultaneously, in less time than a single fast processor.

But operating the Gridiron's complex building management systems occupied only a small part of the computer's massive capacity. The larger part of its effort was devoted to the work of the Yu Corporation's Information Mechanics Group in their number-crunching search for a Universal Computer Language — a language that would not only be able to understand programs written in other computer languages, but at the same time would also be able to deal with mathematical manipulations and business data processing. It was this project, the NOAM project, as well as other projects even more secret — Aidan Kenny suspected that the Yu Corporation was also pursuing sophisticated 'liveware' research — that had necessitated the presence of two Yu Corporation chaperones to supervise Kenny's installation of the building management systems. Inside the first circle was a smaller circle comprising five operator desks with flat 28-inch tabletop screens. Behind three of these desks sat Bob Beech, Hideki Yojo and Aidan Kenny, while a small boy, presumably Aidan's son, sat at a fourth, absorbed in some computer-generated game that was reflected in the thick lenses of his rimless spectacles.

'Mitch, how ya doing?' grinned Beech. 'Where've you been keeping yourself?'

'Why is it,' Mitch remarked, 'that whenever you see computer programmers working, they always look like they're in the middle of a coffee break?'

'Yeah?' said Yojo, 'well, there's a lot to keep in your mind, man. It's like football, you know? A lot of the time we have to huddle and figure out all the possible plays.'

'I'm flattered that you want to include me in your touchline discussions, Coach.'

Beech whooped. 'You haven't heard what we want to ask you yet.'

Mitch smiled uncertainly. 'I understood that there's a problem.'

'Yeah, that's right,' said Beech. 'Maybe you can help us get a handle on it. A bit of technical coordination is what's required.'

'That's my job.'

'But first we need some kind of executive decision from you, Mitch. To do with Abraham here.'

'Abraham, right,' echoed Yojo. 'Whose dumb idea was that name?'

Cheech and Chong: like the two marijuana-movie stars of the early seventies, Beech and Yojo affected a laid-back air, heavy, Wyatt Earpsized moustaches and unhealthy, slightly glazed looks. Like Aidan Kenny, this impression was created by their deskbound, screen-centred occupations rather than by any fondness for smoking dope. Mitch was certain of that much, anyway. Every time you visited a washroom in the Gridiron your urine was tested for drugs by the computer. Preventive health-care was something the Yu Corporation took very seriously.

'Thanks for coming down, Mitch, I appreciate it.' Aidan Kenny cleared his throat and rubbed his mouth nervously. 'Jesus, I wish I had a cigarette.'

'Smoking is forbidden in the computer room,' said the computer's urbane English voice.

'Shut up, asshole,' said Yojo.

'Yeah, thanks, Abraham,' said Kenny. 'Tell me something I don't know. Take a seat there, Mitch, and let me put you in the picture. And Hideki, would you watch your language in front of my son, please, guy?'

'Sure, no fucking problem. Hey, sorry, right?'

Mitch sat down at the spare desk and stared at the picture unfolding on the computer screen: it looked like an enormous coloured snowflake, growing even as he watched.

'What's this?' he said, momentarily fascinated.

'Oh,' said Yojo, 'that's just a screen-saver program. Stops the tube on the screen burning out.'

'It's beautiful.'

'Neat, isn't it? A cellular automata. We give the computer a seed and a set of rules and it does the rest itself. Go ahead and touch it.'

Mitch touched the screen with his finger and, like a real snowflake, the cellular automata melted quickly. Hundreds of strings of programming information started scrolling past his eyes.

'There's your problem,' said Beech.

'And how,' added Yojo.

A dull explosion emanated from the screen on Michael's desk and the boy banged the arm of his chair angrily. 'Shit,' he said loudly. And then

'Fuck, fuck, fuck.'

Hideki Yojo shot a look at Aidan Kenny and said, 'There's nothing I can teach your kid about cursing, Aid.'

'Son, cut it out. If I hear you using language like that again you'll be in big trouble, birthday or not. Do I make myself clear?'

'Yes, Dad.'

'And put your headphones on, please.'

'OK,' said Kenny, turning towards Mitch. 'This is a self-replicating system, right?'

Mitch nodded hesitantly.

'A fully autonomous, general purpose, self-replicating program that plans for the building and business-management needs of tomorrow. A fuzzy-logic-based system that operates a neural net so that it can improve on its own performance by learning. After a period of occupancy by the Yu Corporation, old Abraham here will have learned all there is to know about the way the company works. Everything from the likely pattern of office use to how the company plans to expand. For instance, using the electronic subscriber network it might monitor the local real estate market in order to alert the occupants as to the opportunities that exist in a particular location.'

'Is that so?' said Mitch. 'Maybe it can find me a house.'

Aidan Kenny smiled thinly. Mitch apologized and, sitting back in his chair, adopted a more serious-looking expression.

'After a while, version 3.0 writes version 3.1. Or, if you prefer, Abraham sires the next generation of program: Isaac. And who better to do it? That improved version of Abraham, Isaac, is even more capable of dealing with the developing needs of the Yu Corporation of tomorrow. After that, with Isaac operating at a higher level of fitness, and having performed his parental duty, Abraham becomes sterile and ceases to operate as anything other than a simple maintenance facility before finally lapsing into complete desuetude, when Isaac sires his own next generation of program, when version 3.1 writes version 3.2, if you like.'

Mitch folded his hands and nodded patiently. 'I understand all this,' he said. 'Get to the point, will you?'

'All right then, the point is this: it seems — '

'Seems?' said Beech. 'There's no seems about it, man. It's a goddamn fact.'

'It appears that Abraham has already begun his own self-replication program. Which means — '

'Which means,' said Mitch, 'that he's taking account of an entirely irrelevant occupancy. Namely ourselves. Not the Yu Corporation, like he's supposed to.'

'I told you Mitch would understand,' said Beech to Yojo.

'That's it exactly,' said Kenny. 'I mean, there's no point in Abraham evolving into a higher level of fitness and siring Isaac if he's only been dealing with us and a few goddamned workmen.'

'But this is what has happened?' said Mitch. 'Isaac is already in existence?'

Aidan Kenny nodded unhappily.

'And what does Abraham himself have to say about it?' asked Mitch.

'That's a joke, right?' said Beech.

'I don't know,' shrugged Mitch. 'You tell me.'

Bob Beech grinned and brushed up his formidable moustache with an outstretched forefinger and thumb.

'Hey, we're the best, but we're still in the twentieth century, Mitch,' he said. 'An explanation implies an understanding.'

'Not if you frame the question correctly,' argued Mitch.

'Yeah, it's a nice idea,' said Hideki Yojo. 'If only things were that sophisticated. We're doing well just to have improved on the old binary logic — true or false, y'know? Fuzzy logic encompasses binary logic but allows for the scenario which says that something might have partial membership of two separate sets.'

'So that something might be partly true, or partly false.'

'That's right. Or true given certain conditions.'

'I read something about that,' said Mitch. 'Wasn't there something about how a computer should define a penguin?'

'Oh, that.' Beech looked bored and nodded. 'Yeah, a conventionally programmed computer knows that birds fly. But when told that penguins cannot fly it insists that a penguin is not a bird. Fuzzy logic computers get around this difficulty by accepting that most if not all birds can fly.'

'Similarly,' said Aidan Kenny, 'with regard to systems management control, the fuzzy controller — in this case Abraham — permits some interpolation between sensor data classes.'

'Look,' said Yojo, 'can we please stop using that word "fuzzy" and use the proper term? It drives me nuts. This is an adaptive analog we're talking about. Mitch, the idea is that it's similar to what a human brain does in that it favours adaptation over precision and uses relative not absolute values. OK?'

'Look guys,' interjected Kenny, 'what we need to discuss — '

'There must have been a problem with defuzzification,' continued Beech and seeing Yojo's display of disgust and irritation, he gave him the finger. 'Some kind of collapse of the output fuzzy distribution into a single value — '

'You asshole — '

'- and — and that value must have distorted Abraham's interpretation of the fuzzy output.'

'What we really need to discuss,' said Kenny, raising his voice, 'is what the hell we're going to do about it.'

'Amen, brother,' said Yojo.

They seemed to be waiting for Mitch to say something. He shrugged. 'I don't know. You're the engineers, I'm just the architect. What do you suggest?'

'Well obviously there are going to be a few risks attaching to whatever we do,' said Kenny warningly.

'What kind of risks are we talking about here?'

'Expensive risks,' cackled Yojo.

'We never took an SRS off-line before,' said Beech. 'We're not exactly sure what'll happen.'

'The thing is, Mitch,' said Kenny. 'We hadn't even ceded full control of the building to Abraham yet. So in a way we can't run and test all the building management systems properly until we shut down the offspring: namely, Isaac.'

'Speaking for myself,' said Beech, 'I'd like to leave things as they are for just a while longer and see how they play out. This is interesting. I mean, it could be important not just for your building management systems, but for the future of the Yu-5-'

'The trouble with that scenario,' said Yojo, 'is that you risk sterility for Abraham. And the longer you put it off, the greater the risk becomes.'

'On the other hand,' argued Beech, 'you shut down Isaac and you run the risk that Abraham might not be able to generate another offspring program. Not without building the whole MPPS up from scratch again.'

'And you want me to decide this?' said Mitch.

'Yeah, I guess we do.'

'C'mon guys, King Solomon I'm not.'

'Cut the baby in half!' laughed Yojo. 'What a great idea.'

'We were kind of hoping you might help us decide,' said Kenny.

'But what if I decide wrong?'

Kenny shrugged.

'What I mean is, how much. What's the possible cost of the wrong decision?'

'$40 million,' said Yojo.

'Yeah, take your time there, guy,' said Beech.

'Come on,' protested Mitch, 'You're not serious. I can't decide something like this.'

'Technical coordination, Mitch,' said Aidan Kenny, 'that's what we need. A little coordination. Some executive guidance.'

Mitch stood up and walked around behind Kenny's son. The boy was still playing his game, oblivious of the discussion around him, his face myopically close to the enormous screen as he twisted the analog joystick one way and then the other. Mitch watched the game for a moment, trying to fathom its purpose. It was hard to understand precisely what was happening. The game seemed to involve Michael negotiating a gun-toting space commando through an underground city. From time to time one of an apparently endless variety of hideouslooking creatures came through a door, or arrived in an elevator, or dropped through a hole in the roof, and tried to kill the protagonist. At this point a fierce fire fight would commence. Mitch watched as Michael's thumb, furiously depressing a button on the top of the joystick, activated a chainsaw fire-throwing gun and blasted the most recently arrived creature to all four corners of the screen. The graphics were superb, Mitch thought. Damage inflicted on the creatures looked extremely realistic. A little too realistic for Mitch's taste: a large section of the creature's intestines splattered against the screen and then slid slowly away, leaving a wide trail of blood. He picked up the box that had contained the CD-ROM and read the copy. The game was called Escape from the Citadel. There were other similarly violent games in a carrier bag by the boy's feet. Doom II. The Eleventh Hour. Intruder. In all, about two or three hundred dollars' worth. Mitch wondered if any of them were suitable for a child of Michael's age. He turned away. It was probably none of his business.

He shook his head, wondering if the game he was playing with these three men was really so very different. Certainly Alison would not have thought so: she thought that smart buildings were inherently absurd. What was it she said. The bigger the boys, the bigger the toys? For the moment Mitch was disposed to think that she might be right as he glanced at the three computer experts.

'OK, look, my decision is this,' he said finally. 'You're the goddamn experts. You decide. Take a vote on it or something. I'm not sufficiently informed on this one.' He nodded firmly. 'That's my decision. Vote. What do you say?'

'Are we taking a vote on whether we take a vote?' asked Yojo. 'I say a vote sounds OK.'

'Aid?'

Kenny shrugged. 'A vote. OK.'

'Bob?'

'I guess so.'

'That's settled, then,' said Mitch. 'Let's hear it. The motion is that we take the SRS off-line.'

'I say we shut Isaac down,' said Kenny. 'It's the only way. Either that or have a totally irrelevant BMS.'

'And I say no,' said Beech. 'BMS is only one small part of what Abraham is supposed to do. And we've never taken a self-replicating system off-line before. We don't know how Abraham's observer illusion will react to this. What you're suggesting seems to run counter to the rules of the universe.'

'The rules of the universe? Christ, that's just a bit heavy, don't you think?' laughed Yojo. 'Who are you? Arthur C. Clarke or something?

Shit, Beech, what is it with you? Always with the does God play dice shit.'

He shook his head. 'I say we kill the sonofabitch. The evolution has to suit the creator, not the machine.' He glanced at Beech and added, 'See?

You're not the only one who can get heavy.'

'The SRS is taken off-line,' said Mitch. 'Motion carried.'

Aidan Kenny let out a large breath. Beech was shaking his head. 'This is wrong, man,' he said.

'We took a vote,' sneered Yojo.

'OK,' Mitch said to nobody in particular, 'let's do it.'

'Hey, listen to Gary Gilmore there,' said Beech. 'Well, don't expect me to insert the curette. I'm pro-life.'

'Shut up with that crap, will you?' snarled Yojo. 'It gives me a headache.'

'That's just PMT,' said Beech. 'Pre-Murder Tension. Anyway, you've always got a headache. Don't you love me any more? I should never have married you.' Beech tossed a computer tape cassette to his colleague. 'Is this what you're looking for, you lousy criminal bastard?'

'Aid? The man is taking this very personally. Very personally.'

'Come on, Bob,' said Kenny, 'we took a vote. A democratic decision.'

'I can abide by the decision of the majority. But I don't have to be happy about it. That's what democracy's about, isn't it?'

Yojo went to one of the steel monoliths on the outer circle and fed the tape into a port.

'Democracy? What would you know about that?' he said. 'You're a Republican. You believe that freedom of speech means the freedom to say and do nothing.'

"What's on the tape?' Mitch asked hastily.

'SSPP,' Yojo said casually. 'Species Specific Predator Program. To deconstruct illegitimate offspring.' He drew a forefinger across his Adam's apple. 'It cuts the little bastard's throat.' He grinned wolfishly in Beech's direction. 'Relax, Beech. It's quite humane. Isaac won't feel a thing.'

He resumed his seat, smacked the computer screen with the flat of his hand to clear the saver program. 'Maybe a little infanticide will get rid of this damned headache.'

Mitch winced, thinking of his wife's miscarriage.

'That's an occupational headache you have there,' opined Kenny.

'Used to get them myself. Staring at a screen all day long. Neck tension, that's what causes them. You should see a chiropractor.'

'That's not a headache,' snorted Beech. 'That's his goddamned conscience bothering him.'

'Abraham,' said Yojo, 'run the SSSP program. You really think that would work, Aid?'

'It sure worked for me. I can give you a number…'

'Strange,' said Yojo, 'that's NAK. Abraham, acknowledge please.'

'What's NAK?' said Mitch.

'Negative acknowledgement,' explained Kenny. 'The programme didn't work.'

'Maybe you should have asked Abraham if he had a vote,' grumbled Beech.

'Well, that's the damnedest thing,' said Kenny. 'Try it again, Hideki.'

'Abraham, will you please run the Predator Program,' repeated Yojo. The four men jumped as an unearthly scream suddenly filled the computer room. It lasted several seconds and sounded like some large and ferocious animal in its death throes. Aidan Kenny turned pale. Beech and Yojo exchanged looks of horror. Mitch felt the sound vibrate off one of the Yu-5's metal casings and gave a shiver.

'What the hell was that?' he said.

'Man,' breathed Yojo, 'it sounded like God-fucking-zilla.'

'Wow!' Michael Kenny's exclamation came as a shock. 'That was totally awesome!'

The four men stared at the boy.

'Michael,' yelled his father. 'I thought I told you to use the headphones!'

'I did. I am. But — ' The boy shrugged. 'I don't know what happened, Dad. Well, maybe I do. When I killed the Parallel Demon I guess — I guess I must have got carried away and pulled the headphone jack out of its socket. And maybe I had the sound turned up a bit high.'

'The kid's game,' said Beech. 'The sound came through the main speakers.'

'Mike! You damn near scared the pants off us!' said Kenny.

'Gee, sorry, Dad.'

Hideki Yojo saw the funny side and started to laugh. 'That kid of yours, Aidan. He's a character all right.'

'Running Predator Program,' said the computer's comfortable English voice. 'Estimated completion time, 36 minutes and 42 seconds.'

'That's more like it,' said Yojo. 'Thought we'd lost you there, Abraham. Please check all systems.'

'Checking systems,' said the voice.

'Check my goddamn heart while you're at it,' said Beech. 'I think it's still stuck in my throat. It leapt like a fuckin' frog.'

Yojo, Beech and Kenny sat down again and watched their screens intently.

'That's enough computer games for today, Mike,' murmured Kenny.

'Aw, Dad.'

'Aw nuthin'. Give it a rest, will you, son?'

The child stood up and, with teeth clenched, started to march around the computer room punching some imaginary culprit.

'Check this out,' said Yojo. 'Small power — Security of Supply. Hey, what do you know? The Powerbak generator came on-line for a minute there.'

'Jesus, so it did,' said Kenny. 'And there's the reason.' He looked up at his son and frowned. 'Sit down, son, you're annoying me.'

The boy kept moving.

Mitch leaned across Kenny's shoulder and read what was written on the screen:

BUILDING SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT REPORT*

SMALL POWER — INTEGRITY OF SUPPLY*

17.08.35–17.08.41. 6 SECOND VOLTAGE SPIKE IN THE

DOWNTOWN AREA OF LOS ANGELES

REASON UNKNOWN

UPS STANDBY ELECTRICAL SUPPLY BRIDGED POWER

HIATUS SUCCESSFULLY

STABLE VOLTAGE NOW RESTORED

STANDBY GENERATING SET READY TO COME ON LINE

IN T MINUS 9 MINUTES

'That's why there was a delay in running your lousy predator program,' said Beech.

'Maybe we should shut down the whole system,' said Kenny, 'just in case.' He glanced up again. This time he shouted, 'Goddamit, Mike, sit down.'

The child frowned and dropped back on to his chair.

'What's the point?' said Yojo. 'Abraham bridged the gap, just like he was supposed to. You couldn't have got a better test of his competency than that. Tight code, man. Tight code.'

'I guess you're right,' said Kenny. 'There's nothing wrong with Abraham. Look at that, will you?'

Mitch glanced down at Kenny's screen and saw a small umbrella icon appear in the top right-hand corner. Slowly the umbrella opened.

'What does that mean?' he said.

'Well what do you think it means?' said Kenny. 'It's raining outside. That's what it means.'