Free The Mandel Files by Peter F. Hamilton Page A

time it’s suicide, the rest it’s burnout. So instead of pursuing cheap thrills, Kendric gets his buzz by going right out on the edge. He plays the master-class game, backing smugglers like me, leveraged buyouts, corrupting politicians, software piracy, design piracy—I bought the Sony flatscreen templates Event Horizon uses from him. It’s money versus money. His ingenuity and determination are taxed to the extreme, but he can’t actually get hurt. I might not like him personally, but I admit he’s been mighty useful. And he’s exploited that position to grab his family house a big interest in Event Horizon. Clever. I like to think I’d have done the same.”
    “I’ll get rid of him,” Julia whispered fiercely. Her tawny eyes were burning holes in Kendric’s back as he chatted up a brace of glossy starlets.
    Philip patted her hand tenderly. “You be very careful around him, Juliet. He eats little girls like you for breakfast, both ways.”
    Greg could sense her raw hostility, barely held in check by her grandfather’s cautionary tones.
    He sat next to Dr Ranasfari for the meal, an exercise in tedium; the man seemed to be a sense of humour-free zone. Ranasfari’s doctorate was in solid-state physics, and his conversation was mostly of a professional nature; it all flew way over Greg’s head. Although, curiously enough, Ranasfari loosened up most when he was talking to the ever-jovial Horace Jepson.
    In the event, dogged perseverance finally enabled Greg to check him out as clean. He couldn’t believe Ranasfari even knew what duplicitous meant. The Doctor had a very rarefied personality, perfectly content within the confines of his own synthetic universe. A genuine specimen of a head-in-the-clouds professor. Whatever project Philip Evans had him working on it was completely safe.

CHAPTER 5
    Wilholm’s library was a long, airy room on the ground floor, its arched ceiling painted with quasi-religious murals in rich, dark reds, greens, blues, and browns. Below this unchristian pantheon, glass-fronted shelves ran the length of the walls, illuminated from within by tiny biolum strips; there were matching marble fireplaces at each end of the room, an oriel window giving a view out across the rear lawns. Three tables spaced down the centre had genuine nineteenth-century reading-lamps at each seat. The air-conditioning was set to keep it degrees cooler than the rest of the manor. It was the room Julia preferred to work in: bringing Event Horizon data into her bedroom always seemed intrusive somehow. There had to be some distinction between private and working life, especially as she had so little of the former.
    She sat in a plain admiral’s chair behind a polished rose-wood table, wearing a hyacinth cardigan over a peach chambray button-through dress, watching interviews on a big wall-mounted flatscreen. The image was coming over the company datanet from Stanstead.
    Morgan Walshaw had commandeered a whole floor in the company’s airport administration block, using it to keep the furnace operators in isolation while they were processed.
    He and Greg were doing the interviews in a modern office with a window wall overlooking the giant new freight hangar which Event Horizon used. Both of them sitting behind a chrome and glass desk, Morgan Walshaw in his usual suit; Greg in a red and white striped shirt with braiding down the placket, a black and white mosaic tie.
    It was a tedious way to spend the day, but she persevered. A penance for her earlier misdemeanour, that and a refuge, occupying her mind so that memories of Adrian couldn’t encroach in that sneakily persistent way they did whenever she had a spare moment. He’d left this morning, together with Kats, the pair of them driving off on his Vickers bike, holographic flame transfers sparkling along the chrome gearmounting. Julia had watched them go, kicking up a cloud of dust and gravel as they zoomed off down the drive, hard rock blaring from the speakers. It