Evensong

Gaetano’s relief was as genuine as his earlier reactions. “It’s about time we had something of substance. Both of us.”

“I’ll be back by tomorrow morning.”

“Then you must be getting one of Rafiq’s VSTOLs.”

“Yes. Not the one that’s coming for Hines. A car,” he said carefully,“is taking me to the airfield on the Downs, where the VSTOL will pick me up.” Something told him not to say what car, or where. He might need it later, if everything went wrong and he had to get her away.

Anwar took the maglev and walked out of Gateway alone, across Marine Parade and into Regency Square. Obvious symbolism, but it was now October. Everything seemed a little colder and greyer.

Regency Square had a small Green at its centre, with eighteenth-century town houses overlooking it. They were quite grand houses, three or four stories, with black wrought-iron balconies and railings. Some had external spiral staircases.

There was an underground car park on the Green, with private lock-up garages. He went down into it and saw the car he had ordered. It was in one of the private lockups, behind bars like a beast in a cage.

It was a replica Shelby Cobra. Not with the original 427 cubic inch petrol engine, of course, but four computer-synchronised electric motors, one for each wheel, charged by a jet turbine. Twelve hundred bhp (three hundred per motor) and four wheel drive. Its paint was simple matt black, not one of the fashionable kinetic or pseudoliving surfaces; that would have been wrong for a Cobra.

But otherwise, it was thoroughly modern. The jet turbine was variable-cycle for optimum power and fuel efficiency. It took air through the car’s front grille, mixed it with biomass-derived jatropha oil fuel, and used the resulting controlled explosion as a constant charge to the four electric motors. It didn’t need storage batteries. The body was ultra lightweight ceramics and plastics, so there was a huge power-to-weight ratio. It would easily out-accelerate and out corner the original Shelby Cobra which raced at le Mans in the early 1960s—and most current cars too.

Modern high-performance cars were stunningly beautiful, almost unearthly, and filled with similar technology to that of the Cobra, but the Cobra was different. Although its shape was designed over a century ago, it had a quality of timelessness. It was simultaneously ugly and beautiful. Squat, muscular, and brutish, with a low crouching stance and hugely flared wheel-arches. The shape of the grille, like a snarling mouth, made it look like it was saying Fuck You to the world. A genuine original, like the ginger cat.

These days, replicas were a strong subculture choice. Some people, like Anwar, preferred them to their modern rivals, for many different lifestyle reasons. For Anwar, it was the tension between outside and inside: old on the surface, brilliant and cutting-edge underneath.

He inserted a finger in the orifice concealed in its flank. After checking his DNA it unlocked for him. Arden Bierce had dealt with its programming and specification and delivery with her usual precision. He sat in it and allowed himself a moment to take it in. Considering what it had cost, the interior was quite spartan. Almost industrial, with lots of exposed oiled metal. Two things were very close to his heart, and he knew it was impossible they could ever come together, unless there really were infinite alternate universes: Doctor Johnson and the Shelby Cobra. He tried to imagine the former, riding as a fractious and querulous passenger in the latter.

The car didn’t have the wet-throated roar of the 1960s V8 original. When he told it to start and it recognized his voice (another piece of Arden Bierce’s attention to detail) the four electric motors merely hummed. Microseconds later the jet turbine fired up, but that too was almost silent: a soft, throbbing whine.

The drive from here to the airfield would take a matter of minutes: a few miles of countryside, past the spectacular gash in the Downs known as Devil’s Dyke. (He’d noticed it on the drive from the airfield to Brighton when he’d first arrived, and following his habit of bestowing private nicknames, he’d called it Lucifer’s Lesbian.) At the airfield they’d lock the car away somewhere securely (Arden Bierce again) and the VSTOL would probably already be waiting, hovering politely a couple of inches above the ground.

But it wouldn’t have arrived just yet. It was about 6,500 miles from Kuala Lumpur to Brighton: a flight of less than ninety minutes, including acceleration and landing, and it was nearly an hour ago that Arden Bierce had told him she’d send it. So he sat back in the Cobra smelling the leather and oil and metal of its interior, listening to the thrumming of 2060s technology inside its 1960s body.