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Chapter Eight Down 2 Zero

Lady Clare’s black cloak was too sodden to swirl dramatically in the wind. All it could manage was a sullen flap against her ankles as the cold air howled around her; the huge slate roof was once again dark and slick with rain like a black mirror. Twenty-four hours were gone and the situation was no better.

Lady Clare wanted to jump, to feel the darkness swallow her into its narcotic grip. But she couldn’t do it, though the ledge rested right under her sodden feet. Neurotic, self-destructive, vicious... She was many things, but gutless had never been one of them. And besides, she never had been able to leave a job undone.

It was time to go. The digits were there, luminous but still almost invisible, counting off just below her rain-soaked skin. The Patek Philippe tattoo was a simple transparent subdermal mesh, powered by electrical resistance in her skin: Lady Clare’s one concession to wetware modernity.

She smiled, sadly. Her days were done. Politically, morally, probably genetically she was already a dinosaur. Self-pity was a wasted emotion, the refuge of the weak, the CPU for a victim culture Lady Clare had long ago dismissed out of hand. But it was hard not to feel self-pity now.

“Let Carthage burn,” Lady Clare tossed off the Latin tag as she took one last look out over the roofs of her city. Let her whole life burn down around her. Why should she care? Except that she did, fiercely.

It wasn’t any warmer in the attic below, but at least it was marginally more dry, though the air inside the vast roof space still quivered like the inside of a beaten drum and stank with the vinegar smell of wet rot. Once the attic had been full of crumbling furniture, ugly old paintings and fat, worm-like rolls of ancient stained tapestry, but Lady Clare had ordered those to be cleared out the summer before. A pity. Even the tapestries would have burnt better than nothing.

Ditching her Hermès scarf, the woman pulled off her sodden black cloak and bundled it under her arm long before she reached the narrow stairs down to the floor below. By the time Lady Clare reached the carved oakwood cherubs of her bedroom door she’d already unbuttoned her silk shirt. The Versace shoes she discarded just inside, tossing them into an oval bin.

“Shut,” demanded Lady Clare and was surprised when the curtains on the far wall did what they were told. Long, velvet and dark maroon, they draped a huge window glazed in shatter-proof perspex. Its only view now was of the rain-hammered cobbles in the courtyard below. Although on a clear day it was possible to look over the top of the gate and see clear across the river to the polished steel walls of the Institut Bonaparte on the bank beyond. Now the rain made it hard even to see this edge of the river and, even if it hadn’t, the Institut was gone, eaten down to a brittle rim like a badly rusted tin can. The higher the iron content the more virulent the viral attack. And the Institut Bonaparte had been walled with pure steel.

Habit made her fold the black Dior skirt and drape it over the back of a Louis XVII chair. Just as habit made her slip her cloak onto an old-fashioned hanger. Too late, of course. There were clothes and then there was haute couture. Smart fabric or not, Dior had never intended that skirt to be worn in the needle’s eye of a thunder storm.

All the same, Clare tried to smooth out the skirt’s creases before stepping out of her shot-silk slip. That got treated to a hanger, too. And then, stripped naked, Lady Clare stepped into a sonic cubicle, punching the setting up to maximum. It took two seconds to get clean, but she stayed inside the Matsui cubicle for a full half-minute, which was what the cubicle had left in its powerpack.

She knew the definition of obsessive compulsive disorder as well as the next neurotic, but didn’t regret burning up all the power at once. It was the sharp edges that gave life its shape. Besides, what was the point of saving the power when the Matsui could be a virus-ridden pile of junk by the next morning? As opposed to an empty-batteried pile of junk, she reminded herself darkly.

Smiling grimly, Lady Clare flicked on a Braun cafemeister, filling her vast bedroom with the dark scent of crushed and hand-roasted Colombian. That too would go pear-shaped soon. Its circuits eaten away or its powerpack drained. Everything was always just a matter of time.

Once this room had belonged to a Prince. It had been his study, but nothing from those days remained in the room to remind Lady Clare of the Prince or Alex Gibson. The oak panelling had long since been ripped out, the stone walls replastered and stippled off-white. One antique chair, one Third Empire rattan and mahogany bed, one vast wardrobe inset with an oval bevelled mirror filled a room that had a ceiling too high to ever know if there were cobwebs or not. Not that there would have been, Lady Clare used mitebots without even thinking about it, sprinkling the tiny nanites through the Hotel Sabatini to eat dirt, dust and crumbs.

Behind her — set either side of the over-carved door — were two oil paintings, striking in their honesty and cruelty. The larger oil was Christian Schad’s 1927 Count d’Anneaucourt, a portrait of a thin man in a black dinner jacket standing between two hatchet-faced women. The other showed an anorexically thin woman splayed on a bed in the background while another starvling sat in front of her, sad eyes staring at the floor, one jewelled hand absent-mindedly touching her own shaved vulva. It too was by Schad but painted the following year.

Each one had cost more than even Lady Clare earned in a year. Of course, Lady Clare hadn’t needed to buy them. Both had been bribes from a Flemish cocaine dealer ten years before, the year Lady Clare was confirmed as aide to the Prince Imperial. The dealer had bought them on the open market. Sotheby’s, probably.

Lady Clare sighed.

In the corner of her room a green diode was flashing quietly. But Lady Clare made herself wait until she’d struggled into a heavy red Kenzo dressing gown. Only then did she sit on the edge of her huge, unshared bed and power up her Toshiba smartbook.

On the screen a small envelope was revolving... So they weren’t using e-vid, which was interesting in itself, or maybe not. Lady Clare was finding it increasingly hard to recognize what was a significant clue and what wasn’t. But then, that was life. As her predecessor as His Highness’s aide de camp used to point out, jigsaw pieces only had relationships if you knew the picture. Though that probably wasn’t why he blew his brains out with an antique Smith & Wesson.

The e-mail was simple, even brutal. The life of Lady Elizabeth Alexandra Fabio would be forfeit unless Lady Clare Fabio voted in favour of an immediate surrender of Paris to the armies of the Reich. So it wasn’t money they were after, Lady Clare realized with shock. The kidnappers didn’t even want access codes for S3’s famous, triple-encrypted orbiting database. Lady Clare had to throw in her lot with the Reich. Nothing else would do.

It was time to summon an official car. Always assuming Les Tourelles had a Renault that was still functioning — and even that wasn’t a certainty. But then again, these days what was? Lady Clare opened her vast cupboard and started to take out dry clothes, laying them neatly on the bed.