The Administration Series (142 page)

Perhaps there
was
nothing to worry about, and Warrick had spent the afternoon showing the woman his new collection of clouds and other weather effects.

Still. P-Leisure.

Grimacing, Toreth turned his attention back to Warrick. He hadn't moved, his eyes still closed, and the dim, uneven, artificial lights through the car windows left his face shadowed and unreadable.

Normally, Warrick in a dinner jacket brightened any day. This evening, though, the immaculate suit, which Toreth had so carefully not creased on the journey to SimTech, made him look oddly remote — almost unreal, or at least suddenly very corporate. His crisp collar stood out against the black jacket, matching the crescents of white cuffs where his hands were folded in his lap.

Toreth moved seats, over to beside Warrick, who opened his eyes and smiled. The illusion of untouchability vanished, leaving Toreth with a ridiculous sense of relief.

"I thought it was quiet in here," Warrick said.

"I was thinking."

"Oh?"

Toreth shook his head. "Work stuff. Nothing important." He cast around for a distraction, for something sufficiently detailed and requiring enough concentration to drive out the memory of the woman and speculations about the sim. "I thought you could tell me who's going to be there this evening, so I'll have a tiny chance of remembering who the fuck any of them are."

It always surprised Toreth that places this big could be found so close to the centre of New London. It shouldn't — he'd seen satellite images and there were plenty of green splotches on them. Some were parks for the ordinary citizens, providing a breath of open air in the overcrowded city. Many were houses like this one, corporate retreats for people who could afford a level of privacy which mere mortals in compact blocks of flats could only dream about.

The impregnable gate and long driveway alone must have occupied a fortune in real estate. Conspicuous wealth at its most conspicuous, with plenty of lighting to show off the gardens and the monstrous house. Toreth wondered if the place was an original survivor from the old city, or if it had just been built in an old style. Yellow brick — ugly as hell in Toreth's opinion — and a white-balustraded roof. Most of the windows were brightly lit, although the scenes within were obscured by one-way scatter-filter security glass. It made the house look like a half-completed sim room, where the details hadn't yet been filled in.

The double front doors stood at the top of a flight of a dozen steps. As they approached, one door opened with a faint, eerie hiss. It might look like old-fashioned wood, but the door clearly concealed very modern security. Just inside, a woman waited to take their coats and very politely check their ID. Toreth judged her to be ten percent cloakroom attendant, ninety percent corporate muscle; it took him only a few seconds to find the lines of the holster under her jacket.

Corporate socialising at its finest. He was about to mention something to Warrick when he heard a familiar voice.

"Doctor Warrick!"

Caprice Teffera obviously remembered Toreth from the SimTech investigation but, as he'd expected, she was immaculately polite and greeted both him and Warrick with every appearance of pleasure. She escorted them through to the main reception room.

Toreth tried his hardest not to stare, but he simply couldn't believe the ballroom could be part of a private house. Four normal stories high, the room had a balcony holding real live musicians. A single one of the vast chandeliers would've virtually filled Toreth's living room, and their light reflected from an intricately patterned wooden floor with a glass-like polish. What wall surface he could make out under the swathes of New Year decoration seemed to be covered in printed silk.

Jesus. Places like this really emphasised that Warrick was a
minor
corporate. Would Warrick eventually own an equally stupendous house, when the sim was in use across the Administration and beyond? Toreth couldn't imagine it. Or at least couldn't imagine being a part of it, or see himself walking into somewhere like this and feeling at home. He wished suddenly that he was spending the evening at his own shabby flat instead, with Warrick safely there with him.

Chained to the bed, maybe. Toreth smiled at the image and tried to push aside the unease.

The room was already crowded, voices competing with the music. Caprice ushered them into the room, then paused to introduce Warrick to a couple of people he apparently didn't know, but whom Caprice seemed to think he would like to. Perfect hostess, and more helpful than she'd been in the middle of a murder investigation.

The first introduction of the evening always made Toreth uncomfortable. Not a major trauma, just an irritation.

"And are you corporate?"

"No. I work for Int-Sec, at the Investigation and Interrogation Division."

He rarely got an original response, and tonight the tight-skinned, middle-aged woman who had asked the question followed up by saying, "Which part are you?"

He gave her his best fake-sincere corporate smile and said, "Both. I'm a senior para-investigator."

Of course, that generated a tiny hiccup of silence in the conversation, and Warrick stiffened very slightly, and Toreth thought, well, why the fuck did you ask me to come with you, then?

Business as usual.

After that, Toreth found a drink and finished it, and then found another one. That blunted the edge of irritation. It wasn't Warrick's fault, after all, if I&I didn't enjoy a sparkling reputation in corporate circles. It wasn't I&I's fault either. All the corporates had to do to avoid I&I's attention was stop killing each other and defrauding the Administration. And that would happen about the time Caprice and Marc Teffera opened their overgrown house to indigents.

They circulated from group to group. Some of the guests Toreth had met before. He found it hard to remember names — a combination of his innate dislike of corporates as a species and not really giving a fuck — but he recognised faces.

At SimTech events, he could usually pick out the major sponsors, and even remember one or two facts about them onto which he could pin a conversation. Here there were more total strangers. Half an irritation, because it meant paying attention to introductions, and half a good thing, because he didn't have to remember if he'd spoken to them during a previous event, or fucked them after one.

Eventually, Toreth relaxed sufficiently for boredom to set in. The initial conversations were usually the dullest part of these evenings, all business, with everyone jockeying for status and fishing for information. Later on, after the alcohol had been flowing for a few hours, even corporates would unbend into something almost human.

After a while, using the excuse of needing a piss, he left Warrick talking to a safely unattractive couple and went for a wander. It gave him a chance to scope out the layout of the house and spot likely dark corners and empty rooms.

In the car on the way here, Warrick had said strictly no fucking this evening. Toreth took it as a challenge rather than an order.

Tonight, assuming he could get Warrick to break his resolution, there would be no problem finding a venue. The Tefferas' vast house was like an extension of the LiveCorp headquarters, although there was no hint of the mass-media porn on which the Teffera fortune rested. The rooms were different in detail, but identical in overall impression: tasteful decor with a smooth and bleakly impersonal blending of styles. Unobjectionable colours, tasteful art, unmarked rugs, unused-looking furniture — the place must keep an army of expensive consultants supplied with designer drugs and designer clothes. Toreth found it hard to believe anyone lived there at all.

A figure stepped out of a doorway on the periphery of Toreth's vision, and he turned a little too quickly, training readying him for trouble.

Another security officer, male this time, stood a few metres away, his hand hovering ready to drop to the concealed weapon. Toreth kept still, his own hands carefully in view.

"Can I help you, sir?" the guard asked.

"Yes. I'm lost. Where's the nearest toilet?"

The guard relaxed, if not completely. "This way, sir. I'll take you there."

Which he did, then escorted Toreth back to the main event, and very discreetly made sure that he was a legitimate guest before he let Toreth out of his sight. Sharp and professional, Toreth thought as the man left. However, it left him with the feeling that he ought to be wearing a collar and nametag — something to identify his corporate owner.

When he returned to the high-ceilinged reception room, Toreth spotted Warrick at once. He was deep in conversation, not with the couple with whom Toreth had left him, but with a single man. They stood together by the cavernous fireplace, against a backdrop of New Year decorations.

Warrick was listening intently to the stranger, his head slightly tilted, nodding agreement from time to time. Whatever they were talking about, he looked thoroughly engrossed. In Toreth's experience, that tended to mean something technical, but even so the scene made the hair on Toreth's neck prickle and his stomach tighten.

Maybe it was that there was no one standing close by them, which meant they could be talking about
anything
. Maybe it was the fact that the man was, if not especially handsome, at least perfectly fuckable. Fit, certainly, blond and tall, and notably young for the party crowd.

Whatever it was, it kicked off the familiar twinge of unease — familiar enough that Toreth could often pretend it wasn't even there. Not tonight, though, not after the nasty shock at SimTech. It seemed to have primed his system, so that the slightest possibility of a sexual interest threw another log on the growing fire.

He took a deep breath and walked over to join them. Toreth was so absorbed in a closer examination of the man — better looking than he'd thought from across the room, with the crotch of his trousers outlining a respectably suggestive bulge — that he almost missed his name when Warrick introduced them.

Gavin Tordoff.

Toreth smiled and filed the information away, just in case he felt a need to check into the bastard's background on Monday.

It turned out that he and Warrick were enmeshed in computer-speak about ultra-large-scale data processing; the conversation lost Toreth after thirty seconds. Despite the mundane topic, there was still something about the man that set off irrational alarm sirens in Toreth's mind. There was nothing that he could put his finger on: no obvious flirting, no unwelcoming glances directed towards Toreth.

However, there was something, and it was dismantling his self-control faster than Sara could take apart an arrogant junior.

His fist was itching for solid contact when he caught sight of the reflection of the three of them in the mirror over the fireplace, and realised how alike he and Tordoff were. Not just in height and colouring, but in build, bearing — even the bone structure of their faces, although Toreth could confidently say he was the better looking of the two.

The realisation took the edge off the anger. Was that all it was? That the man was so plausibly someone Warrick might find attractive?

'Fuckable' was a sliding scale when it came to worrying — wondering — about Warrick's opinions of others. At the high end, the danger end, were the Gavin fucking Tordoffs. Toreth had good reason to think that Warrick liked tall, well-built blonds — the kind of solid evidence on which he'd submit an Investigation in Progress without any expectation of it setting Tillotson's nose twitching.

If that had been it, things wouldn't be so bad. However, Girardin had been neither tall, nor blond, nor especially muscular. To add to the problem, he'd had a beard, which was something Toreth found off-putting. Warrick clearly didn't, though. Girardin's existence meant that a whole other segment of the population stirred up feelings Toreth hated having as much as he hated admitting to them.

It was a bad, bad idea to start thinking about Girardin. Toreth downed half his drink, the champagne bubbles making his eyes water, and forced his attention back to the conversation, concentrating on following the computer-speak.

Five minutes later, the man excused himself to join another group. Once he was a few metres away, Toreth said in an undertone, "He was fit."

Warrick's eyebrows lifted. "Was he? I didn't really notice, I'm afraid — we were talking tech."

Next moment, of course, Warrick turned to look after Tordoff, and Toreth wanted to kick himself. When Warrick looked back, Toreth could see from his expression that he
knew
, and wanting to kick himself transmuted into a deeper need to kick someone else.

But Warrick smiled disarmingly, and laid his hand briefly on Toreth's forearm.

"Not bad," he said, "but I already have a better one."

Before Toreth could reply, he heard Marc Teffera calling Warrick's name. Warrick smiled again and walked off to answer the summons, leaving Toreth blinking after him.

Follow or not? Toreth wondered when the surprise had dissipated. In the end, Toreth let him go and went in search of food instead. He'd skipped lunch, and during the conversation with Tordoff the rumblings from his stomach had started to get noticeably loud.

In Toreth's view, buffets were one of the main perks of these bullshit corporate events. Most of the other guests were still at the schmoozing stage, so he had the room almost to himself. The huge table was covered with a blindingly white cloth and decorated with holly and unnaturally red orchids — nice blend of festive and financial.

He buttered half a seed-encrusted roll — the nearest thing to proper white bread he could find — and ate it while he surveyed the spread. Not one of the dozens of dishes had a hint of reconstituted protein about it. Fresh fruit and vegetables, fresh meat and fish, all beautifully prepared to emphasise the natural ingredients.

By the salads, he spotted a thin-spouted bottle of olive oil, and he grinned, thinking about fucking Warrick over the buffet table at the SimTech celebration. No way would Warrick risk that sort of thing here.