Acolyte (9 page)

Next, she wrote
Tess.
Tess Neil, the only Unity volunteer who had survived the fire, and an old friend of Jonah's from his days as a young reviver working in Baseline. Annabel knew all about the
crush the teenage Jonah had had on Tess, six years older than him. She'd reappeared in his life for a one-night stand before vanishing again, just before all the trouble started. Finding her at the heart of Andreas's group had been a shock; it had been while Jonah helped her escape from Kendrick's men on the night of the fire that he'd been shot. The bullet intended to wound her had almost killed him.

Locating Tess had always been Annabel's main goal, although she'd not mentioned this to Jonah. Or to Never, come to that, as Never seemed to gets his hackles up whenever he heard the name mentioned. But Tess was crucial. She had been close to Michael Andreas, and would be able to tell Annabel much of what she wanted to know. More than that, she was the only survivor who carried within her one of the Elders. If she recovered those memories, she would know the full story of the dark creature that had come so close to destroying everything.

And that brought her to the last of the key players:
Andreas
, she wrote in large letters at the bottom of the board. His faith in the benevolence of the Elders had been unshakeable, and he had been dismissive about the fears of the Afterlifer extremists. In the end, though, they had both been right. For although the Elders were benign, they had forgotten their purpose: they were jailers, their very souls used in the construction of a prison to trap an ancient evil, a creature that went by many names. It called itself the Great Shadow, but whatever name it used, it fit any reasonable definition of Satan.

And as each Elder left the void, they unwittingly abandoned their position. Once all were gone, the creature they'd imprisoned was free. It had taken Michael Andreas's body for its own. The real Andreas and the newly freed Elder were both trapped within, as the creature rejoiced and planned the annihilation of every life on Earth; a plan brought to an end when Andreas was consumed by the inferno that the Afterlifers had started.

Annabel stepped back and looked at what she'd drawn. She
circled three of the words in red: Tess, Andreas and Kendrick, the areas she felt still had the most promise. She drew more connecting lines, writing notes and speculations beside the links.

After ten more minutes, the board was a thick tangle of fact and guesswork: a jungle that looked much the same as it usually did. There were only so many ways to rearrange the same things, but she was always hopeful that the jungle would spawn something new. A tiger to leap out at her.

She wrote the word
funding
and linked it to
Afterlifers
, then added a tentative line to Kendrick, who she suspected had known about the Afterlifer extremists well before the fire. Perhaps that had extended to funding them, but surely it had nothing to do with the mystery source of income the mainstream Afterlifers now had.

She studied the board, adding a few more notes here and there, but as she did, part of her mind crept back to her disastrous goodbye to Jonah. Before she knew it, she'd added his name to the jungle in front of her. Worse: she'd placed it next to Tess.

She set down the pen and rubbed the board clean again.

*

Annabel's meeting had been arranged in Carlsbad, an hour's drive up the coast. She took her own car and parked outside the coffee shop where her only contact instruction had been to look for a goth called Takeo. She sat and waited, tempted by the smell of coffee but wanting to stay in her car until the guy showed up.

At 6 p.m., Takeo appeared. He looked young, early twenties, comparatively understated but unmistakeable. Black jeans, long black top and black lipstick; a mean set of piercings in his right eyebrow, but that was it. He was looking around warily, so she got out of her car and approached.

‘You're Takeo?' she asked, holding out her hand. They shook. ‘I'm Penny.' Penny was the alias she'd been using when she'd made an online approach to someone claiming to be able to get
sensitive industrial information to order, someone who just went by the handle
kt44.

Takeo smiled. ‘Good to meet you. Come with me.' He turned and walked past the entrance to the coffee shop, Annabel following with a vague disappointment that they weren't going inside.

Takeo walked ahead, looking around uneasily. Two streets along he went inside a small bar and led her to a table where a petite young black woman sat, about the same age as Takeo, wearing blue jeans and a simple white top; she gave Annabel a smile.

‘OK, here we are,' said Takeo. ‘Can I get you a drink?'

‘Cola, I guess,' said Annabel, and Takeo headed off to fetch it.

‘I'm Kaylee,' said the woman, offering her hand. ‘I'm the one you were talking to online. Takeo's a friend. He's always worried the people I meet with might turn out to be some kind of lunatic. His heart's in the right place, though.'

‘So how does this work, Kaylee?' said Annabel. ‘Your message said you had something for me. It mentioned the fee but it was short on details. What did you find out that you think I'd be interested in?'

‘You wanted information on Andreas Biotech investments,' said Kaylee. ‘Specifically revival, but instead I've got something else the company is spending money on. Something you might not have known about.' She smiled. ‘Cryogenics.'

Annabel couldn't help but raise an eyebrow. Michael Andreas had been interested in cryogenic techniques years before revival first appeared, part of a long-standing fascination with death. Once revival came on the scene, though, the cryogenics subsidiaries had done little but tick over, and she'd not heard anything to the contrary.

Takeo returned with Annabel's Coke and put a beer in front of Kaylee, who smiled at him. ‘Takeo here has known me since we were thirteen. He's well trained.'

Takeo gave Annabel a grin. ‘She makes me sound so useful,' he said.

Annabel looked at Kaylee. ‘Cryogenics. You're sure?'

‘Yes,' said Kaylee, visibly pleased that Annabel sounded so intrigued.

‘And where does this information come from?'

Kaylee took a drink of her beer. ‘No specifics, but a guy I know, he … does some stuff, you know? Hacks around.'

‘You asked him to look into Andreas Biotech?'

She laughed. ‘He doesn't do this shit for free. He has clients. But he lets me know what he's been doing, and I keep my ear to the ground in case somebody else might want it too. My friend's always happy to sell the same thing twice, if I can find buyers. Then I get a little commission.'

‘So somebody else was investigating Andreas Biotech, and paid your friend?'

Kaylee nodded. ‘There are a few competitors around in cryogenics, they caught wind of Andreas Biotech moving back into the field and wanted whatever my friend could get. Then you wanted information on Andreas Biotech's revival investments, so—'

‘OK, what do you have?'

‘This.' Kaylee delved into a bag beside her and pulled out a large envelope, fat with paper. She waved it, then put it away again. ‘You pay, you can see.'

‘How do I know it's worth it?'

‘Come on,
Penny
,' said Kaylee. ‘You want it or not?'

Annabel didn't like the way Kaylee had emphasized her alias, but hell. It wouldn't surprise her if ‘Kaylee' wasn't really
her
name, either. ‘What's in it? I'm not handing you a cent unless I have some idea why I should give a damn.'

Kaylee shrugged. ‘Fine. I'll give you the summary, you decide if you want the evidence.'

Annabel nodded.

‘Andreas Biotech have a facility in Nevada,' said Kaylee, ‘place called Winnerden Flats, out in the middle of nowhere, staff living on site. Andreas wanted it to become his flagship cryogenic storage
location, something he could present as self-contained and remote. A bunker, kinda. The market didn't grow the way he'd expected, then revival came along and he got distracted. The Winnerden Flats site made a sizable loss each year but Andreas kept it going. It was a reputation thing, apparently – he made a big deal of trust. He had a very expensive way of running his cryo places, and wouldn't cut corners the way everyone else did, so his competitors weren't worried about him expanding.'

Annabel nodded. ‘And then Andreas died.'

‘Precisely. Someone in the company presumably decided they could cut corners, be competitive, and grow the business.' Kaylee pulled a sheet of paper from the envelope and laid it down on the table: a site plan. ‘This was phase one of the rebuild. The old facility has been massively extended. Their competitors think they're going to try and corner the market.' Annabel reached out to take the paper, but Kaylee snatched it away and put it into the envelope. ‘You want?'

Annabel pretended to give it some thought before nodding. ‘It wasn't quite what I was looking for, but I'll take it.' She wasn't going to say so aloud, but there was a chance that Andreas Biotech's supposed revival investment was merely creative accounting to cover this cryogenic push. When she'd told Jonah about the revival funding, she'd underplayed her own fears that the company was up to something new – something related to the creature Michael Andreas had mistakenly summoned. It was oddly reassuring that her fears might simply come back to good old-fashioned greed: that the board wanted cryogenics to turn a profit, in a way that Michael Andreas had always blocked.

She took a roll of cash out and offered it to Kaylee. Takeo snatched it and peeled off the rubber band, then riffled through.

‘Are we good?' said Kaylee.

Takeo nodded. ‘We're good.'

Kaylee handed the document envelope to Annabel. The weight of it was encouraging. ‘That's all at the moment,' said Kaylee. ‘But
there might be more coming. We'll contact you if there is.' She and Takeo stood.

Annabel stayed seated, looking up at them. ‘Any chance you could arrange for me to meet your friend face to face?'

Kaylee and Takeo looked at each other, then Kaylee smiled. ‘Not a chance,
Penny.
Not a chance.'

The pair walked out, leaving Annabel smarting. Part of her wondered if Kaylee and Takeo knew
exactly
who she was. She could almost hear Jonah's voice, chastising her.
Being cautious, huh?

‘Shut up, Jonah,' she said. ‘Shut up.'

Eleven days later, Never was making the ninety-minute drive to a case in Roanoke Rapids. Stacy Oakdale, one of the top three revivers in the office, was in the passenger seat.

The deceased was a drowned man, pulled from the lake early that morning after a lakeside fisherman spotted the body floating on the surface. An initial examination suggested he'd been dead for four or five days, and had probably been submerged for most of that time. The large stones in his pockets and a significant wound on the back of his head were more than enough justification for revival.

As Never drove, he wondered how Jonah was, but he tried to put his worries to the back of his mind. He was rationing himself to a single call a day to check up on his friend.

Jonah had told him the unpleasant details of Annabel's visit the day after it had happened, but since then the topic had been avoided by both of them. The last time Never had seen Jonah was two nights earlier. Jonah had been far more upbeat than Never had expected, keen to hear about the daily happenings at the FRS. Jonah wanted it almost case-by-case, albeit necessarily vague. After all, Jonah was no longer an FRS employee, so confidentiality rules applied. Even so, Never found it hard to self-censor while talking to him. It just didn't feel right.

Part of Jonah's upbeat mood was down to the fact that his resignation had indeed taken the wind from the sails of the Afterlifers.
Even though they had not pursued Jonah for his supposed assault, they had still been trying to stoke a public furore about the David Leith case. With the FRS looking like it had taken decisive action, that furore wasn't materializing.

The irony, Never thought: Robert Thorne, a man Never had always pegged as someone who would cut people free the moment they became a liability, had shown no intention of sacrificing his staff to the gods of public opinion. Yet the sacrifice was exactly what had been required. Part of him wondered if Thorne was less brutal than he'd assumed, or if the man had instinctively known that Jonah would offer to fall on that particular sword. The thought made him shiver.

As for the situation with Annabel, Never was almost tempted to call her and find out what the hell was going on. Jonah had left him with a stern warning not to get involved, though, so it was out of the question. When it came to Jonah's love-life Never had always been over-protective, but the way Annabel and Jonah had acted around each other in the early months had made even the cynical side of Never smile. Success in relationships had evaded Never for so long that he didn't tend to get optimistic about those of others, but he'd actually started to think they had a good chance of making a go of things, as good a chance as anyone he knew.

That was what made it all so galling, now that it looked like it was going belly up.

Fuck it
, he thought, and concentrated on the road.

When they arrived at the crime scene, two forensic tents had been set up close to the shore of the lake. One contained the corpse and would be where the revival took place. The other, a few metres away, was for him, his monitoring equipment and the police representatives.

‘You OK?' he said to Stacy as they got out. She'd been quiet for the whole drive from Richmond, but he'd left her to it. Different revivers coped with the build-up to a case in their own ways. Some
became talkative and a little hyper, but Stacy tended to be more on the silent-anxiety side.

‘Yeah,' she said. ‘I'm fine.'