Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [28]
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5
Mulwray and Christian got out of the elevator on the fifty‐first floor, leaving Stephanie alone with the little boy Patrick, and the lingering smell of Mulwray’s perfumed hair gel.
It wasn’t an unpleasant smell. It reminded Stephanie of lavender and something else, something herbal. In any case, Stephanie imagined she was going to have to get used to it. From Monday she and Mulwray would be working together in the Social Acquisition department.
Stephanie held the little boy’s hand a little tighter as they stepped out on to the roof of the King Building. The high city wind swept grit off the surface and lashed them with it. Stephanie squeezed her eyes shut and kept them shut until they were on the sheltered side of the helicopter shack. She didn’t like to think about what kind of crud would be settling out of the sky on top of a building in New York these days. Get a speck of industrial waste lodged on your cornea, let it melt in your tears and you’d wake up with a poached egg rolling around in a dead socket in your head. Then wait eighteen weeks for a transplant, even on the company’s priority health scheme. Considering her job, it would be easy to get an early operation and select some good stock, healthy and attractive. But a new eye would most likely be brown. Even if it was blue it could never exactly match the colour of the one she already had.
Stephanie didn’t worry about the kid’s eyes. He was wearing a full‐head city mask. He loved it. Couldn’t get into it quickly enough. It gave him a killer robot aspect, making his head bug‐eyed and big on his tiny body. The mask went well with the gory, textured Jack Blood tee‐shirt. The expensive Korean hardware in the mask was filtering the air so it didn’t scorch his little pink lungs. The child was called Patrick and Stephanie had spent the day on what was basically a PR exercise, showing the kid around the Butler Institute office complex, a big bright smile on her face and lots of maternal gush. She made sure that Mr O’Hara, Patrick’s father, was in sight when she had given the little kid a carefully timed impulsive kiss on the cheek. Set that image in the father’s mind. His child and another woman. An attractive young woman, let’s be frank about it.
Stephanie was in good shape and she knew it. Still in good shape despite nearly eighteen months in New York. She’d needed minor surgery only on a couple of occasions. Once for a cyst in her breast and once for lung cancer. The new lungs in Stephanie’s chest had come from a young Peruvian woman who had come north. She’d intended to make a new and better life in the USA and had ended up living on one of the inner‐city housing projects. When Stephanie had found her she’d been there only three weeks, so her lungs were still viable.
They’d picked up the Peruvian woman on a routine sweep of the city database. She’d been arrested for attempted murder, which under the current legislation merely meant that she’d been operating as a prostitute in an area with a high incidence of HIV7. Miraculously enough, she’d actually been clean and it was the report on her blood that had attracted the Butler Institute computers. They’d picked the Peruvian woman up within an hour of arrest and retested her. She was still clean after an hour in the cells. Another miracle. The Butler Institute made the clinical sacrifice and removed her lungs the same day and within forty‐eight hours Stephanie had undergone her operation, a gift from the company.
They’d made her forfeit her Christmas bonus, though.
She could hear the helicopter now, invisible behind the solid grey overcast. A stormfront of industrial precipitate moving down from upstate. From Buffalo, blowing in off the Great Lakes. Stephanie hoped the bastard would get the helicopter down in time. She didn’t want to be on the roof when those beefy clouds passed over. Patrick shifted impatiently at her side. The child’s hand was lost in her grip, tiny fingers like frog bones squeezed in her strong hand.
The helicopter had broken through the