The Quorum Read Online Free PDF Page A

features, was someone Sally recognised from the front of a condom packet.
    ‘Sally, April,’ Tiny said, so overwhelmed by his master’s presence that he didn’t notice their state, ‘have you met Derek?’
    Sally prayed to be teleported to Japan. The magnate, who kept going in and out of focus as if it were unwise to look at him with the naked eye, smiled a barracuda smile that seemed to fill the lift. She’d always thought of Derek Leech as a James Bond villain, with a high-tech hide-out in an extinct volcano and a missile silo concealed beneath his glass pyramid HQ in London Docklands. A human spider at the heart of a multi-media web, he sucked unimaginable monies from the millions who bought his papers, watched his television, made love with his protection, voted for his bought-and-paid-for politicians. But in person, he was just another well-groomed suit.
    Leech nodded at them. Sally tried a weak smile, and April, snorting back blood and residual traces of nose powder, radiated warmth and love before fainting. She slithered through Sally’s grasp and collapsed on the floor, knees bunched up against her breasts.
    ‘That’s happened before,’ Leech said. ‘Embarrassing, really.’
    * * *
    Three days into April’s ‘leave’, Bender went up to the Penthouse while Tiny was out recording an interview about the franchise bid. After voiding his bowels on Tiny’s granite-slab desk-top and hurling the Mythwrhn statuette through the picture window, he crawled out through shattered glass and stood on the narrow sill while a crowd gathered below. Then, flapping his arms like the failed Wright Brother, he tried to fly over Soho Square. Ten yards from the persistent smear that marked the site of Connor’s death, Bender fell to asphalt, neck broken.
    It had not been unexpected, somehow. Sally noticed people were marginally less shocked and surprised by Bender than they’d been by Connor. The office had a wartime feel; the troops kept their heads down and tried not to know too much about their comrades. Everyone secretly looked for jobs somewhere else.
    Roger the Replacement went into hospital after a severe angina attack. He was thirty-eight. While he was away, his wife came to clear out his things and told Sally that he now planned to take a year off to consider his career options.
    ‘What’s the point,’ the woman said. ‘If he’s dead, he can’t spend it.’
    ‘True,’ she conceded.
    Tiny took to wandering around chewing his moustache, checking and double-checking everyone’s work. Still wrapped up 101 per cent in the franchise bid, he suddenly became acutely aware that Mythwrhn’s current product would influence the ITC decision. The consequences of being blamed for failure would be unthinkable. Off to one side on ‘other projects, she was spared the worst but the Survival Kit team suffered badly from the sudden attack of caution. Items toiled on for months were suddenly dropped, wasting hundreds of hours; others, rejected out of hand, were re-activated, forcing researchers to redo work that had been binned. In one case, the company was brought very close to Lawsuit County as a hastily slapped-together exposé of dangerous toys named a blatantly innocent designer rather than the shoddy manufacturer.
    ‘I blame Derek Leech,’ Useless Bruce said out loud in the meeting room as they waited for an unconscionably late Tiny.
    ‘Shush,’ Lydia Marks said, ‘this place is probably bugged.’
    ‘Tiny’s completely hung up on the bid and Kit is suffering. Plus Leech has this Mephistopheles effect, you know. I swear reality bends wherever he stands.’
    There were mumbles of agreement, including Sally’s. There was something else she blamed Derek Leech for, considering the reputation of his products. She thought she was pregnant.
    * * *
    First, her doctor congratulated her in the spirit of female solidarity; then, interpreting her blank expression, she dug out a leaflet and said that at Sally’s advanced