“Thank you for that,” Sue said coldly to the young woman. There was an old joke she remembered—probably classed as politically incorrect or racist or Separatist propaganda these days—about how heaven would be staffed by Europeans with specific jobs. The British would be the police, the Germans engineers, the French the cooks, and so on; then you swapped them all around for hell, with the British as cooks, Germans as police…Today, Sue thought, you’d have to redefine the British job. Lucy Duke was a Eurohealth Council facilitator on secondment from the Downing Street policy presentation unit. She was dressed in a smart blue and gray Italian business suit, her hair in a neat swept bob, she spoke in a classless accent, and she had a file of media contacts as long as a pre10 novel. The British today produced the best spin doctors in the world.
“They’re very unobtrusive,” Lucy continued. “And we wouldn’t appoint them if we didn’t think they were absolutely necessary. There is only a very small threat of violence, admittedly, but do you really want to take the risk?”
“How long are they going to be with us?”
“Difficult to say.”
Sue took a look around the bedroom. Like all the manor’s rooms, it was large and luxurious. She’d supervised the interior designer herself, remodeling the place twice since she and Jeff got married. Now it was perfect, representing just how good her life had become. She would hate to leave it, not that Jeff would ever make her, but Tim was past his eighteenth birthday now and he would be leaving for university before the end of the year. She corrected herself: Jeff before the treatment wouldn’t make her leave. Her whole damn world was changing, and doing it far too fast.
“Fine then,” Sue said airily. It was a capitulation, though she couldn’t really bring herself to care. Europol and the Duke cow probably knew all about her sex life anyway. “Wait a minute. If you’re giving me a bodyguard, what are you doing about Tim?”
“Naturally we’ll provide him with an equal level of coverage. We’ve already discussed arrangements with Oakham School. They’ve been most accommodating. He’s not the only pupil there that needs a watchful eye.”
Sue laughed in her face. “Have you spoken to him about all this?”
“We were assuming you would explain this to him. Your example should help.”
“You are joking!” Sue kept on laughing. The thought of Tim meekly allowing a Europol officer to trot along behind him was hilarious. “You don’t have children, do you?”
“Not yet,” Lucy said.
“Well, just remember, babies are God’s way of persuading parents to have teenagers.”
Krober gave a small smile. “Do you believe he will be unwilling to cooperate?”
“Could be.”
“Will you tell him that this development is unavoidable, try to make him understand a bodyguard is necessary?”
“No.”
“Excuse me?” Lucy Duke asked.
“I’m not saying a damn thing to him. We’re not exactly on the best of terms as it is. You want to guard him, you tell him.”
“But he’s your son.”
“Not through choice.” Sue walked out of the bedroom, leaving the astonished spin doctor staring at her back.
The Europol team spent the rest of the day tramping through the manor and its grounds, bringing mud inside as they came. Sue did her best to ignore them by helping Mrs. Mayberry, the housekeeper, in the kitchen; then she took lunch by herself in the conservatory. In the afternoon she had another argument with Lieutenant Krober about placing cameras inside the house. After a heated twenty minutes during which Lucy had to intervene again to cool tempers, they agreed that cameras could cover all the entrances from the outside, and they’d all wait until Jeff Baker came back before any would be put inside, pending his approval. Sue conceded that they could wire the manor’s existing security network into their own secure datasphere port. A command post was set up in the smallest of the five reception rooms downstairs.
Tim arrived back just after five o’clock. Fortunately most of the installation was complete by then. He brought a group of his friends with him, which stalled the inevitable confrontation between him and Lucy Duke. Mrs. Mayberry busied herself cooking pizzas for the teenagers as they descended on the swimming pool.
Ever since Jeff had gone for his treatment, fifteen months ago, Sue had slowly relaxed her objections to Tim inviting his dreadful friends round at all hours. The manor was a huge place for just two people to be living by themselves, especially two with a history of conflict like she and Tim. For all the qualities she possessed that had convinced Jeff to make his marriage contract proposal, the natural mother’s ability to bring up a child was definitely nonexistent. Curiously enough, Jeff’s absence had brought about a mild truce between them. There were none of the tantrums and screaming sessions that had so occupied the pair of them during the first half of Tim’s teenage years. They hadn’t exactly become great pals, but they were certainly civil to each other now.
Actually, it was rather nice to have the big house filled with young people, she thought; all their brash laughter and high spirits helped to banish the solemnity that had crept in over the last few months. Not that—as she had made exceptionally clear—she would ever consent to any kind of party like the poor Langleys had been lumbered with. She’d actually grinned as Tim and Zai left the house last Saturday evening, remembering her own teenage years. If only Tim had known how she used to behave….
From the living room’s huge bay windows she could see right into the swimming pool. The building was like an elaborate orangery sprouting from the southern end of the manor, with tall panes of nultherm glass supported by arching white timber frames. The teenagers were running around the edge of the pool, diving and jumping with excited whoops and yells. The inflatable floating furniture was taking a terrible battering. Plumes of spray shot upward to splash the roof. The spiral slide was in constant use.
She’d been rather surprised that Zai hadn’t been in the group when they’d barged through the front doors. Tim’s expression when he finally staggered home in the early hours of Sunday morning had provided her with a great deal of amusement: a cat that had not only got the cream, but managed to gobble down the goldfish as well. Now Zai was nowhere to be seen, and Annabelle Goddard had been invited by herself. She’d been a casual member of Tim’s group for several years, though it was only in the last twenty months that she’d become increasingly striking. Tim was keeping a civil distance from her this afternoon. Sue had almost laughed at how careful he was being, desperate not to show any favoritism, never singling her out to talk to, making sure she was just one of the lads. He must be crazy for her. It looked mutual, too.
Sue peered through the bay windows, trying to see how the pair of them were conducting themselves in the pool. It was the first time she’d noticed how amazingly pretty Annabelle actually was these days, possessing the kind of body that every boy would drool over. But then Sue had caught herself several times over the last few months looking hard at the girls in Tim’s group of friends, giving their figures and complexions a professional assessment as she ran comparisons with herself. She wasn’t forty yet, and had certainly managed to keep her own looks and figure, despite nine repellent months of pregnancy and then giving birth. Modern genoprotein-based cosmetic treatments were an absolute boon in that respect.
It wasn’t just the straight medical pharmaceutical companies that had benefited from the genome decoding projects of the nineties and noughties. There had been a long period of corporate mergers and buyouts early in the millennium, as pharmaceutical, biochemical, and cosmetic companies fused into the new economy giants that they were today. Successful and worthy genetic treatments to counter and cure appalling diseases by the use of powerful vectoring technology to deliver improved genes directly to individual cells had swiftly been adapted to insert genes that made more subtle cellular improvements.
Skin was the first area to come under scrutiny, of course. Vitality, firmness, and the eradication of wrinkles had been the goals of the cosmetics trade since human prehistory, as it attempted to infuse that elusive healthy glow so nonchalantly possessed by adolescents. Now for the first time it was possible at least to slow down normal epidermal decay with a huge array of new-genes-for-old elixirs that could target particular cells and layers. The market for such products was astonishing, almost as much as their cost.
Jeff had always been condescending when she used the dermal genoprotein treatments, and he constantly grumbled about the price of them. He claimed she was far too young to be using the stuff. But not even genoproteins could actually turn back the clock. So the sooner she used them, the easier it would be for the treatments to maintain her. Today her skin had the glossy vigor of a twenty-five-year-old’s precisely because she
