Part 14 (1/2)
Josh started blinking, very fast.
Gun coming up, half the face exploding and my G.o.d he's just a kid just a kid ”out now, breathe in, let the feeling out, Josh, that's right, and you're fine now.”
”Jesus.” He rubbed his face, sweat-slick as if in a sauna. ”Sorry.”
Clyde started to approach. ”Sir? Are you all right?”
”He's fine.” Suzanne waved him back. ”We're doing OK.”
”s.h.i.+t.” Not the language he would normally use over dinner, not with someone like this. ”I don't know what happened. Something took me back”
”You've had counselling, after battlefield trauma.”
”I guess that's what you'd call it. Sure.”
”And they used similar techniques with you, working successfully almost all of the time, is that right?”
”Sure.” He rubbed his mouth. ”Most of the time.”
”So you had a little resonance of memory, and it's all gone now.”
”It... it has gone. I feel OK.”
”Good.”
”How did you do that?””Well.” Her smile and gaze hummed with mystery, deep as voodoo. ”Call it magic if you like.”
Casting some kind of spell, for sure.
Suzanne noted, as they walked, the way Josh cast his attention outward, in what looked like a trained pattern: left-right-left, starting close and extending to the distance. He made a soft humming noise as he spotted something about a building, then continued scanning.
”What did you notice?” she had to ask.
”Huh? Oh, those flats, how the building went from stables to warehouse to homes over the centuries.”
”You're kidding.” She saw the black iron crosses, part of the supports that held swelling brickwork in place. ”I guess the place is old.”
”Look how the place used to be mercantile, and before that rural, because the roads follow the natural contours. See?”
”Hmm. Interesting.”
So he could overlay mental pictures across reality, make deductions that were not obvious; and if he was the kind of software expert she thought, he could wrap himself in highly abstract, creative visualisations of complex systems she could not imagine. This was not how she had imagined an ex-soldier would be.
”Where is your car?” she asked.
”Not far.”
From a tiny motion of his head, she realised it was behind them somewhere, and that his walking her home took him further from the vehicle. It was good that she could read these nuances, because in some ways Josh c.u.mberland was unknowable, his physicality breathtaking, diverting her from the reason for their meeting.
”Have you thought what's going to happen once you find Richard?”
”Er, taking him home seems like a good idea.”
”It wasn't me he was running from.”
”No.” Josh stopped and scanned in all directions, before turning to her. ”I won't take him back into danger.”
”I believe the physical danger comes from his school. The home environment is stressful in other ways.”
”Yeah, I got that. Doesn't make Broomhall a bad man. I mean, he's money-grabbing and corporate, but I've met worse.”
”We agree. He's just different from his son.”
”Ah. Right.”
Again, he scanned the street. Did he ever stop?
”I'm going to ask you a favour.” Her heart, warm in her chest, reminded her of their conversation, the neuropeptide basis of emotion. ”Let me help you look for Richard.”
Was it for Richard's sake she was asking? Or to spend more time with this man?
Doesn't matter to Richard. We just need to get him back.
”I'll call you,” he said.
They walked on, reaching the door to her apartment house too soon. She went inside, stopped in the hallway, and looked back out. Josh gave a little fingertip wave, an informal salute, and slipped away. It felt as if something had been pulled out of her.
Part of her awareness, throughout the meal, had observed the natural matching of their body language, the interlocking rhythm of microgesture, and the subliminal courting dance of pheromones, their effect surfacing in the dilation of eyes, the flaring of nostrils, the inability of either person to look away.
Josh c.u.mberland.
The name rolled around in her brain, warming her, threatening her equilibrium. Perhaps he was good news, perhaps he was bad; what she could not do was ignore him.
[ ELEVEN ].
A plain budget hotel room at five in the morning. How often had Josh woken up in places like this? Sometimes when rich corporates paid his expenses he slept in five-star elegance; other times it was hard soil or rock beneath his sleeping bag, the Brecon Beacons or Tibetan Alps or the expanding Sahara, snow or heat, always different. But like a turtle in its sh.e.l.l, he was always at home, because of the discipline, the routines he carried everywhere.
Drinking tap water from a plastic cup, he unrolled his screen and keypad, thumbed his phone to life, and began amending his search arguments, changing his choice of algorithms based on the new patterns he had to look for. Most of the framework remained unaltered, while his coding changes had more to do with the London Transport network, an environment he had not hacked before. Soon his more-than-querybot call it a stealthbot was ready to s.h.i.+p.