what you think I should and shouldn’t be doing.”
“As if you don’t know.”
“Excuse me,” Rachel said, her voice icy. “I am here and present. And if you speak round me again, Tim, I shall give you a slap that’ll knock your teeth out.”
Tim’s fury withered so quickly he hunched his shoulders in reflex. “Sorry,” he grumped.
“I went to bed with Jeff because I wanted to. That’s it. The end. Live with it.”
He nodded contritely, and retreated from the kitchen.
Jeff waited in silence until he heard Tim’s feet pounding on the stairs. He let out a low, regretful whistle. “I think we could have done that better.”
“It was best this way,” Rachel said. “Trust me. Hard and fast, this way he gets over it quicker.”
“Is that the way to do it?” Jeff muttered.
“God, you’re as bad as him. If you’re that sensitive, then last night shouldn’t have happened.”
“I should put you over my knee,” he said.
Rachel crunched down on a slice of toast, chewing it with exaggerated movements. Her eyes glittered with suppressed amusement, fixing on him like some kind of missile radar lock. “Promises, promises,” she purred.
THEY WENT BACK UPSTAIRS to bed. For Jeff, it was almost like a
He was actually quite relieved when Rachel left around midmorning. Tim had disappeared, and the Europol team was watching a sports stream in the downstairs lounge they’d commandeered. Jeff went into the study and locked the door with a voice code. His desktop synthesizer was housed in a specially designed drawer in the desk’s left side. Its lock was voice coded as well, clicking open smoothly as Jeff spoke to it. To look at it, the unit wasn’t much, a cube of gray-white plastic fairly similar in appearance to the last century’s laser-jet printers.
When the first models had started to come on the market ten years ago, the editorial commentators of the DataMail news stream, which considered itself a prominent occupant of the moral high ground to the right of center, had denounced them as tools of the drug barons, which would bring degenerate misery into millions of families. The early models were designed around a couple of programmable molecular sieves that could combine a few base chemicals into an array of drugs. Originally intended to help reduce the stock costs for high-street pharmacies and hospitals, their potential was eagerly exploited by the illegal narcotics trade. Governments responded with their usual mistrust of their citizenship, legislating heavily, and restricting ownership to legitimate licensed medical concerns. Consequentially a huge and prolific black market for pirated machines flourished in tandem with the lawful industry, gradually forcing back the statutory regulations. Along with that relaxation a multitude of new chemical templates for recreational drugs were released into the datasphere, going under the generic of synth8.
The complexity and sophistication of the desktop machines advanced swiftly, expanding the range of drugs they could produce. Within ten years, the advanced models incorporated a multitude of programmable sieves, capable of churning out all but the most advanced drugs. The DataMail had been right: It was the age of the ultimate designer drug, although their predicted crash of civilization showed no sign of occurring. Any student or qualified neurochemist could generate a synth8 template. There were even self-design programs floating around within the datasphere, where you loaded in your required narcotic effect, and they’d give you a template that should do the trick. Whether you used them depended how keenly you followed the conspiracy tracker sites.
For the biogenetic corporations, desktop synthesizers represented a huge loss of revenue, although supplying vials of high-purity base chemicals certainly went some way toward compensating. What prevented them from suffering the same fate as the publishing and music industries was the sheer range of the new genoprotein and biochemical products, which, thanks to their enormous complexity, still had to be factory produced.
Seventeen green LEDs glowed on the top of Jeff’s unit, showing him the base chemical vials were all still over thirty percent full.
“Click, give me the same Viagra dose I used last time.”
“Synthesizing now,” the computer told him.
He’d bought the desktop synthesizer a few years back to supply himself with some of the simpler drugs his anti-aging regimen required. The only time he’d used the machine after he’d returned from his rejuvenation treatment was to churn out some neurofen capsules to take care of Tim’s hangovers. But after his second encounter with Annabelle at the George he realized that his own stamina couldn’t quite match her own natural youthful endurance. Sue had kept him aroused all night with her diabolical knowledge. Those were skills in which he was now methodically instructing a hugely willing Annabelle. But until he’d finished corrupting her, he simply needed a little something extra to keep that initial blissful physical momentum of their sessions going.
The first time he’d come to the study and instructed a findbot to get him a Viagra template he’d been astonished by the number of results it had fished out of the datasphere. He should have known, of course; it was now a generic name along with Aspirin and Kleenex. Pharmacists had been refining the principle for decades, gradually eliminating side effects such as headaches, loss of balance, constipation, and even tinnitus, until the modern versions could sustain an erection for a very long time with almost no problem. Even with his programming skills it took ten minutes to filter the possible templates down to less than a dozen. After that, he simply took the first one off the list and fed it into the synthesizer. It hadn’t disappointed.
The desktop synthesizer pinged discreetly. Three blank turquoise capsules dropped into the little dispenser tray. Jeff put them in his pocket, and locked the unit up again. It was an hour until he was due to meet Annabelle for lunch. After coping with Rachel for most of the morning as well as last night, he’d probably have to take two of the capsules with his dessert.
36. BIG CITY BLUES
TIM CAUGHT THE MIDMORNING EXPRESS train from Peterborough down to London. He got off at Kings Cross station and took the tube, using the Livingstone line to North Kensington, which emerged just behind the Royal Albert Hall. From there it was a ten-minute tramp through the streets to the flat, with three of the Europol team walking with him.
When the lift opened, Sue was waiting for him in the hallway. She gave him a long hug, resting her head on his shoulder. Tim hugged her back, slightly surprised by the intensity of the greeting. But, he had to admit to himself, it was nice to see Mum again. She represented life from before, when everything was easy and routine.
“You look all right,” she told him as they dumped his single shoulder bag in the guest bedroom. There was a touch of admiration in her voice, as if she’d been expecting a hospital case.
“Mum, you haven’t been gone a month.”
“I know.” She gave him a quick kiss. “But it’s still nice to see you. Now, come along, I’ve got a taxi booked, we’re going to Fortnum and Mason for lunch.”
Natalie Cherbun came in the taxi with them, while the other two Europol officers were left to catch one of their own. His mother, Tim noticed with some jealousy, no longer had a bodyguard team.
The distinguished old department store on Piccadilly hadn’t changed since the last time Tim had visited several years ago—also with his mother. The ground floor was given over entirely to a delicatessen, with long, dark wooden shelves stacked with a fantastic array of bottles and packets. It was as if the old store was completely immune to the decay of global transport and the political instabilities that raged across the world. Delicacies from just about every country were stacked neatly in their sections. Tim imagined each brand and variety must have occupied the same part of shelving for decades, as if they’d somehow colonized the place. There was even tea from China, which had long ago disconnected itself from the datasphere.
His head swiveled around as they walked through, distracted by the smells, first coffee from the big grinding machines behind the counter, then chocolate, then cheese. By the time they reached the far side, and walked up the short flight of steps to the raised restaurant overlooking the shop floor, his stomach was growling with
