EXTRACT FROM  THE BOOK

From Chapter 10,"Finding the Nerve."

Valery was late and he was getting anxious. The taxi inched forward and then lurched to a stop. The driver was getting bored. The car in front crept forward. Valery’s taxi driver slipped the clutch in, claimed the half metre offered up to him and again stabbed the brakes. Again Valery lurched forward.

Valery was getting annoyed. He was also getting nowhere. They’d moved less than a hundred metres up the Rue de la Loi in the last quarter of an hour. He had eighteen minutes left before the meeting began. If he legged it he might make it.

‘Damn these bloody demonstrations, I’m getting out here, I can’t wait any longer.’ The driver was disgusted with Valery’s capitulation to the traffic jam. Notes were exchanged and Valery stepped out.

The cool dirty air was filled with the noise of car horns sounding up and down the length of the road like a herd of cows bleating over their lost momentum. Valery started to jog towards the centre. He quickly felt breathless.

Valery began to detect another noise that filtered in above the hum of idling engines, car horns and his own panting. It sounded like a million screams a thousand miles away. It grew louder the closer he got to the centre. It was animal, aggressive and very powerful.

Finally he reached the junction between the Rue de la Loi and the ring road. He looked down the ring road. The city was in seething pandemonium. The fascists were rioting. Thousands of skinheads were in a frenzied uncoordinated dance with hundreds of police officers. Banners, sticks, fists, boots, batons, bodies were all gyrating wildly as groups of rioters and policemen surged back and forth. The air was filled with a cacophony of whistles and shouts as the crowd bayed for blood.

Suddenly the crowd lurched forward and the police vanished. The police were sucked into the crowd, overwhelmed and lost. Valery glimpsed individual police offices being drawn down and surrounded by flaying legs. There were no more uniforms to be seen. The police had been defeated. The enraged mass of humanity then started to head towards Valery. He was directly in their path. Valery felt desperately exposed. Dressed in the uniform of the executive middle classes he was an enemy that the crowd would obviously love to devour. Valery became acutely conscious of the ugly brutality of the boots worn by the skinheads and what those boots could do to his precious head. All the abstract fear and loathing he felt for the under classes suddenly become very real, very intense and very practical. He had to be in some other place, fast. He turned and ran.

The lead elements of the rioting crowd were already a hundred metres behind him as he turned back down the Rue de la Loi.  The crowd’s target was the Berlimont building which was occupied by the Commission. The Berlimont was located up the Rue de la Loi. Valery had made the wrong choice. And by running Valery had made himself very conspicuous.

Skinheads filled the road and flowed down it with all the force of floodwater from a ruptured dam. They bounded over the cars, leaping from one car roof to the next, the trapped passengers terrorised by the pounding of boots over their heads. Nothing was going to arrest their momentum. The enraged tide was going to catch Valery. Seeking escape he ducked into a side street only to find more skinheads coming in the opposite direction. He decided to try and hide in the underground car park that occupied the length of the Rue de la Loi. He spotted the railings of one of the entrance stairwells and ran towards it.

Valery became aware that his movements had been noticed. The beast had marked him. A small fractal of its titanic strength was separated from the flood and tasked with destroying him. Three large powerful youths ran towards Valery.

Valery flew too fast down the stairwell and crashed to the ground. He turned to see the three youths leaping down after him.

Fear left Valery. He was utterly helpless. There was only one certainty in the situation and that was time. In time the kicking would stop. Either he would die and he would stop, or they would have enough and stop. Inevitably all things come to an end. All he could do was wait.

NOT SURE? HERE'S SOME MORE INFORMATION

Some of the main characters:

Valery Montaigne: - head of the Policy Evaluation Unit. Ambitious, shallow and brilliant, Valery was determined to rise to the top by the force of his intellectual ability. Whilst power finally came to him, his thinking was permanently warped by a cowardly aversion to the ordinary people whose welfare he was meant to serve.

Renalda Emendez:- another determined technocrat but one of the few qualified by human frailties. However these were those of her sex which were ultimately to destroy her. Before then she managed her weaknesses with forceful vanity and a determination not to be compromised by her gender