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Nobody moved
"Let me tell you a bedtime story," began Bradlee, yelling though the floor. "Me and Ron
'ere, we're out on the street, kicking our heels, and we're next to this big church and it's starting to get dark and all the lights are coming on in all the pretty windows. And Ron 'ere looks up and says" - and for this part Bradlee put on a perfect South African accent - "'Bradlee, when did you last see a church spire with windows?'
"Only small windows, mind, but we starts thinking, how come we didn't see these windows when we was inside? Then we start’s thinking -
American bird, load of wigs, plenty of computers, hold on a minute.
"Then we gets inside again and there's this hydraulic dick sitting in the middle of the fucking floor minding its own business, like you get to see in all the posh fucker' houses round
'ere."
Bradlee literally hammered his point home, this time using the business end of Percy when before he must have used the handle, and hitting so hard the movement jarred Danny's feet.
"Open the fucking door and get your arses down here! 'Cos if I have to come up and get you, somebody's gonna get a spanking."
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Angela nodded resignedly. Danny braced his arm again and she put her feet on top of his while Eric fiddled with the trapdoor and persuaded it to open. Angela came down the steps first, followed by Danny, then Sharon and finally Eric.
"Cor, look at this lot, Ron. I must have hit the bell and got the jackpot. Eric, you fucker, what you doin' with this crew?"
Eric didn't reply. Maybe he felt that whatever answer he gave would be wrong. They carried on down to the lounge, with their captors at each end of the line, Ronnie at the front, Bradlee at the rear.
Frank's Aspiration made a curious centrepiece for the lounge. Danny realised that anybody looking into the lit room from the darkness outside would be able to see it. He checked for curtains by the arched windows, but there were none.
Angela barely seemed to notice that somebody else had taken control. When she arrived downstairs in the lounge she dragged a computer projector out from beneath the coffee table and began to set it up.
"And who the fuck are you?" Bradlee asked her. Despite the words, his tone was oddly
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respectful. He probably wasn't used to people ignoring him.
"I'm Angela Maybury."
"Ah, what? That's a result. See, Ron, I told you this was the jackpot. We got a thirty grand bonus coming for the lanky one, and fifteen for the yank in disguise. And what you doing right now, Miss USA?"
"I'm about to contact Dan so you can tell him your good news."
"That's very nice of you," said Bradlee,
"but I got my mobile with me. Don't need no help."
"This way, you get to see him. Aren't you curious to know what he looks like?"
Bradlee didn't reply, nor did he try to stop Angela setting up the projector.
Meanwhile Danny tried to comfort Sharon. Her shoulders slouched and her eyes stared gloomily at the floor. He'd rarely seen her look this glum. He guessed that while he'd been up in the spire on his own, the discussion down below had been fierce. Angela seemed perfectly happy with the outcome, Sharon quite the opposite.
"Angela," he demanded, "what did you say to Sharon?"
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Angela continued with the wires and switches, now setting up a webcam while the projector warmed up. "Ask her."
"I've agreed to do it," mumbled Sharon, with no enthusiasm, "if we get the chance."
"Do what?" queried Bradlee.
Then Danny realised why Angela was being so casual with him, why she was working so fast on the cables. Of course. If they contacted Dan visually, he'd get to see Frank's Aspiration.
That was the original plan, and Bradlee's arrival hadn't changed it, just brought things forward a little.
He didn't know what to say to Sharon, whether he should say thank you or sorry or both, or even talk her out of it, she looked so sad.
Certainly he intended to find out how Angela had been so persuasive.
But right now his attention was taken by the sudden arrival of Frank's avatar on the projector screen
"Hello Sharon," said Frank, softly, over Angela's computer speakers. "And who's that with you. Please do introduce me."
"I'm Angela Maybury," said Angela, looking directly at the webcam.
"Angela!" said Frank. "What a pleasure to meet you! I've heard so much about you. What
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happened to your nose? Ah, you've been hiding, haven't you?"
"Nice avatar," replied Angela. "Very sexy."
"Flattery is always welcome, though better from friends."
"Yeah, Frank, listen," began Bradlee, "I got the whole shebang here. Me and Ron was outside the church and we seen this room in the steeple…"
"Eric!" said Frank, excitedly. "Is this my machine?"
Eric stepped forward, even though that wasn't really necessary. "Yes."
"And does it work? Does it have movement?"
Eric picked up the joystick control he'd connected to Frank's Aspiration, and gave a brief demonstration.
"And sensation?" asked Frank, eagerly.
"We need a big connection to get sensation. We can't do that here."
"We got the whole fucking shootin' match for you," said Bradlee, raising his voice. "Danny, Angela, and a few more besides."
"That's very good, Bradlee, well done."
"What you want me to do with 'em?"
"Nothing."
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"What do you mean, nothing?"
"Bradlee," said Frank, adding a stern edge to his voice. "I will pay you for your work. I will pay your bonuses, as we agreed, now step to one side, please. We'll come back to your issues later."
Bradlee tensed himself to argue, then thought better of it. He scowled and moved away to stand with Ronnie by the front door.
Frank couldn't take his eyes off his new toy. "I'm very impressed, Eric. Half the world's robotics experts are working on parts for my body, all of them crying how they can't make the deadline. Yet here you are, hours early. It looks great! Though I guess it doesn't really matter what I think. What do you think, Sharon?"
Danny inhaled sharply, but succeeded in freezing his expression. Whatever Sharon said, he wasn't going to let his face change.
She'd managed to lose her sad mood, or at least suppress it so she could play her role. She hesitated. "I think it's quite artistic, as an erotic sculpture. It's very well done."
"Hmmm." The tiny fan inside Angela's laptop began to whirr as the microprocessor inside heated up. Millions of computers around the world were probably heating up right now. "I would very much like to… show you how erotic
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it can be. I… uh," Frank seemed to get himself into a virtual tangle, but came out of it again.
"There's a VPN junction box at… no, none of you have the knowledge for that. What time is it?
Damn. Right, tomorrow morning, take it to the Inmarsat building at Old Street…"
Danny struggled to keep his expression frozen. Frank, the sum of hundreds of thousands of logical computers, was making as much rational sense as an adolescent with a hard-on.
This was good news.
By the door, he could see Bradlee and Ronnie in earnest discussion. Bradlee did not look happy, Ronnie's watch arm was going up and down like he had a yo-yo attached to the end.
"I think we can do better than that," said Angela, getting into the spirit of things and sounding sexy, like a woman from a TV
chocolate advert. "All you need is a fast connection, a direct link into a huge network.
We've got a router at Telehouse, a Moorhen router. I could arrange everything, get this device and Danny and Eric inside, and Sharon of course."
But she hadn't presented the idea perfectly. A little of Frank's stony rationality returned.
"I could arrange all that myself."
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Angela walked towards Frank's Aspiration, swinging her hips, playing the vamp.
"Sure you could. You could arrange security cards, find a couple of Telehouse engineers, allow them time to get familiar with the connections of your anatomy and how to patch them into the network." Slowly she drew her forefinger across the top of Aspiration's helmet, over the lips where the seam of the screen separated.
With great attention to detail, Eric had managed to fold the edges of the touch screen inside a cavity he'd carved along the body of the phallus, underneath, so there was nothing more than a thin seam. At the tip he'd let the seam separate a little, creating lips for the glans. It looked astonishingly lifelike, despite the monochrome grey, and, at least to Danny, still too large.
Angela didn't look at Frank. She held her eyes steadily and admiringly on Aspiration. "But how long would that take? Hours? Days?" She moved her finger behind and beneath the glans, and gently tickled there. "We could be at Telehouse in a half hour, all plugged in and ready to roll. Though I guess you might prefer to wait."
Frank grunted, caught himself and turned the grunt into a cough, which might have been
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comical coming from a virtual being without a throat or lungs, but nobody laughed. "Yes, yes,"
he murmured. "Much quicker, much the best plan." And louder, remembering that he had an audience, "Thirty minutes at Telehouse. And don't be late."
His avatar disappeared.
"You fucker," complained Bradlee, addressing the blank screen. His business hadn't been finished.
Eric began preparing Frank's aspiration for transport. Angela busied herself with the projector and screen. Danny looked at Sharon, and saw the mask of somebody playing a role. He wanted to say something supportive, but at the same time he didn't want to disturb that mask.
"Nicely played," he said, quietly.
By the doorway, Bradlee had his mobile out, thumb poised over the buttons. Danny got there first.
"What do you think, Bradlee?" He pointed at Frank's Aspiration. "Is that something built for a man, or for a machine with a sex drive?"
Bradlee folded his arms across his chest, mobile still in hand. Beneath his expensive suit, his fat biceps bulged. "I remember what you said
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in the car. It didn't make no sense at the time. But maybe I was a bit hasty."
"The plane crash in Germany, the train crash in Japan," said Danny. "That was Frank.
He's killed hundreds of people, Bradlee, innocent people. Is that the kind of… being you like to work for?"
"Is that the kind of thing you like to build? I remember something else you said in the car, that you built him, it, whatever."
"I made a mistake."
Bradlee gestured at Frank's Aspiration.
"So what's your angle? You got this fucking manic robot causing chaos in the world, what you doing making a piece of kit so it can shag your old lady? Don't make no sense, does it?"
In Bradlee's graphic terms, it did sound very peculiar, but Danny didn't want to go into the details. It didn't much matter what Bradlee thought, now they had Frank's approval to go to Telehouse. He turned to walk away.
Bradlee pulled him back, held him by the neck with a single fat hand and pinned him against the book-lined wall. "Unless it's a trap!"
Danny could breathe, even speak if he felt like it. Bradlee's grip wasn't having its intended effect, but Danny felt like it might be good
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politics to pretend it was. He duly struggled for breath when Bradlee let go.
"I got myself a bad position here," said Bradlee. "Geezer, or whatever it is, heap of chips, owes me close on fifty grand. But I tell you something else, I got six gorgeous grandchildren.
Fucking centre of my little universe, they are."
The anger in Bradlee's voice was curiously mixed with the crackle of emotion, of love. This was no great surprise. Almost from the beginning, Danny had Bradlee down as a family man. Even in his worst moments he'd never managed to come across as a complete psychopath. He certainly had an aggressive streak, but alongside it was too much humour, too much happiness. It was easy to imagine him as a doting father or grandfather, a huge gorilla delicately picking ticks from its cubs.
"And does Frank show respect for the way you feel about them?" asked Danny.
"How the fuck do you know about that!"
Danny didn't, but it was a reasonable guess. Frank might easily point out the frailty of small children, maybe mentioning one or two by name, nothing too overt since the pair of them were supposed to be on the same side, but just enough to keep Bradlee off-balance.
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"Frank sees love only as a weakness to be exploited," explained Danny, "because he's a machine."
Bradlee nodded. "I got this bad movie playin' in my head, see? Like, one of 'em comes up to me and says, 'Grandad, why is the world run by heartless machines?' Fucking break my heart, that would. Like, I watched it happen, sat on my arse and watched it happen."
"You and the rest of the world, Bradlee."
Bradlee grabbed Danny by the upper arm, very forcefully. "Not this time."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, I don't give a shit if I don't get my money."
"Is that it?"
"It's enough. Never know who's gonna be the winner, do we?" Bradlee looked at his mobile and put it in his pocket. "Run along, son. You got a mistake to put right."