Free Into The Fire by Manda Scott Page A

knows, which is painfully little. Luc is a minor problem when set beside the scale of this. She can ignore him. She will.
    Her Nokia, parked in its dock, lets loose the medley of Inuit throat singers that is Patrice’s ring tone. Touch sensitive areas on all four walls allow her to pick up the call.
    ‘Picaut.’ The water is boiling again. She pours it on to the filter and watches black gold drip into her cup.
    ‘Did the Hôtel Carcassonne keep a backup in the Cloud?’
    ‘Slower, Patrice. That sound you can hear is only the second coffee of the day.’
    His laugh is muted, for the sake of her fragility. She can imagine him, hunched over the phone, his platinum-blond pony-tail hair gathered back in a magenta scrunch, his nose a little too big to be classical but matched by strong features, a black T-shirt adorned with the latest design, crowd-sourced from a cultural milieu Picaut has never explored.
    He lives in a parallel world, which runs a little bit faster, a little bit younger than her own. Now he is trying to reach over to her side of the line. Slowly, he says, ‘I had a thought: did the owner of the burned-out hotel—?’
    ‘Madame Foy.’
    ‘That’s the one. Did Madame Foy keep a backup of the hotel’s hard drive on a remote site, or in the Cloud somewhere? If she did, we could access it and find the name of your corpse.’
    ‘To access anything, we’d need the permission of Madame Foy which she is hardly going to hand over, given her current state of high umbrage. And we won’t get a warrant for a fishing trip.’
    There is a delicate silence. Patrice’s father was something big in military cyber-security, which means the young Patrice was playing Diablo pretty much as soon as he could speak and graduated on to World of Warcraft in its vanilla incarnation at launch.
    From there it was a short step to darker waters. He was a black-hat hacker, and founder member of SINK, otherwise known as the SilverFish Ninja Kolektiv, until a plea bargain with someone a great deal higher up the food chain brought him across the legal side of the line. Mostly. The silence has weight.
    Picaut closes her eyes. ‘Whatever you do, I don’t want to know.’
    ‘What if I get a name?’
    ‘Match it to the dentals from Éric. Or the DNA. Or something.’
    ‘Done.’
    Patrice hangs up. Picaut hits the touch-square with the point of her elbow. On the inner surface of her closed lids is an image of Prosecutor Ducat and what he will do if he finds out.
    ‘
Capitaine?
’
    She opens her eyes and finds Éric Masson standing in front of her, his head cocked towards the darkened viewing suite to one side of the pm room. His radiographs are ready.
    ‘Want to see?’
    ‘You tell me.’
    He gives his quiet half smile. ‘You’ll want to.’
    Packed with the highest of high technology that only Masson and Patrice understand, the suite is nonetheless a place for calm reflection. Picaut has seen him in here with Patrice, and knows that whatever he says about his ex-wife, it was this meeting of minds which lured Éric Masson away from what he called his H3 post-doctoral pop-idol posting.
    The place is snug without being claustrophobic. It has no windows and the lights are adjusted to dusk or dawn temperatures; the décor is quietly minimal. One wall is made up of a video screen, on which swirling pastel screen-savers further pacify the mind until Masson begins to call up the images.
    There are no keyboards here; everything is done by touch or voice.
    When she first came here, if she looked at a radiograph at all she saw a haphazard array of white blurs on a black background, repeating patterns that made no sense, however hard her brain tried to fit them to something she knew.
    Now, after two years of Éric Masson’s tuition, she can start at the top, with the outline of the cranium, and immediately pick out the irregular spider’s web of fractures above the black space of the left eye socket and the greyed mess of haemorrhage behind