Antman (35 page)

Ah, thought Hugh, this was a student perhaps, or a former student. There were so many that he couldn't possibly recognise all the people who apparently knew him. The voice was muffled, through one of those voice distorters, he thought.

'You don't recognise my voice do you, Dr Mackintosh?'

'I'm afraid not.' Hugh couldn't keep the tremor in his voice under control.

'Listen carefully, Dr Mackintosh, if you want to see your wife again.'

Hugh's heart leapt. So Janie was here. He cared not at that moment for any other consequences, but only for seeing her.

'Is she safe?'

'Yes, provided you do exactly what I say.'

'I must warn you –' began Hugh.

'Shut up,' the man cut in. 'If you want to see your wife. Keep listening and keep your mouth shut.'

'I'm sorry. I –'

'In the box on the shelf to your left, you'll find a blindfold. Put it on.'

Hugh's hand trembled so much he could hardly complete this task. A wave of dizziness overcame him and he thought he'd pass out.

'Push open the door.'

Standing inside the house, Hugh jumped as a hand gripped his right arm firmly.

'Shut up and keep walking. Left here. Down two steps. Through this door. A moment, out of the way. Stand still.'

Hugh heard the man produce a key. He pushed roughly past Hugh, unlocking the door swiftly and pulling back before Hugh could think to react.

'Open it and push it open.'

As Hugh obeyed he felt an enormous blow in the small of his back which forced all the wind from his lungs and propelled him forward violently into the utter blackness of the space ahead. He was so disoriented and dazed that he hardly noticed the prick of the hypodermic.

There was very little time. Mahler's tenth symphony moved into its third movement – the allegro moderato headed Purgatorio, which lasted less than four minutes.

Graver's stomach was queazy with anticipation. He leaned forward in the near-pitch darkness and seized the shoulder of the befuddled man, pressing the hypodermic into the upper arm and pressing its syringe before the confused senses of the man enabled him to react. The drug would ensure his skin was subjected to multiple punctures – as when bitten by ten thousand ants – without him feeling the full intensity of the pain.

In the absolute darkness of moonless night, Hugh tried at the very last moment to prevent himself from falling into the deep pit, but with arms waving wildly, pitched headlong into its black depths. Across the corner of the pit was the log Graver had placed strategically to support the largest of the branches with which he had then disguised it. It was this log which the intruder had now tripped over, clutching hopelessly and bringing it down with him when he lost his balance. By a bleak coincidence, the entire nest of army ants had chosen to bivouac in a huge pear-shaped swarm half a metre wide and twice as deep on the underside of this log, around the attractive protection of its hollowed out centre. Lying semi-conscious on the damp ground, his legs hopelessly twisted and partly hidden under the ball of ants, Hugh became vaguely aware of the movements of a myriad tiny feet on his legs. The ball bubbled like a volcano. The soldiers boiled first from its hissing centre and ran blindly about as the angry workers rushed forwards in an unstoppable stream. Thousands upon thousands of them slipped under his torn trouser legs and sank their jaws into his quivering flesh.

Mercifully, by the time they reached his neck, he was already out of his mind and when the first ants bit into the tender skin inside his nostrils and lips, he had already lost consciousness. Their appetite for flesh was so keen that less than ten minutes after the first attack, when they laid part of his heart bare under his rib cage, it was still beating. Five minutes later there was no sound beyond the irrepressible rhythm of their ticking legs as they skittled back and forth, carrying chunks of grim booty from the body to their brood in the nest.

Janie wasn't aware of the faint clicking of the antennator, as its leaf like pendants flickered away inside the nest entrance. It could have operated silently, but Graver had introduced the sounds so that when it was placed out of sight inside the nest, he could confirm it was working. She couldn't see him peering at her from behind the one-way glass either, stopwatch, notepad and pen at the ready. He didn't need to use artificial antennation after the initial phase, but was keen to compare the speed of “completion”, as he termed it, with the previously recorded observations using various animals' heads without its stimulus.

It was hot. She found it was impossible to exclude the craving for water from her mind. From time to time she looked towards Hugh. It was an effort twisting her head round. She tried to look solely by moving her eyes, but this made them ache. She'd given up trying to attract his attention. He didn't respond any more to her hand movements, or to her calling, and she still wasn't sure whether he'd heard her earlier.

There was a click. It gave her a shock. Not so much the loudness as the fact of a single movement from outside herself. At first she couldn't make out the direction from which it had come. But almost immediately her eye was drawn to a movement on the right edge of her sight. She knew as soon as she swivelled her eyes painfully round and saw the knot of ants bubbling from the newly opened semicircular hole, that all these events were the purposeful preparations for a drama that was now too horrible even to contemplate.

Graver retreated rapidly via a small, tight-fitting door and regained his vantage point behind the glass. He was watching and speaking into the microphone:

'The soldier form of the army ant Eciton Burchelli has reddish, sickle-shaped mandibles which would not disgrace those centimetre diameter reddish clamps brandished by the two-inch male stag beetle. These more fearless and aggressive ants rush forward ahead of the remaining army. Performing their massive biting movements, they place the first strategic markers in the larger prey, horribly disfiguring or even cutting it in two. The wounds they inflict on large animals can be truly horrendous if they happen to dig their huge jaws into a region of softer flesh, or strike a blood vessel in the process.'

Janie braced herself and clenched her teeth as the first scuttling ants reached her and sank their mandibles into the pulsating flesh of her wrists. She beat her hands wildly and shook these off whilst others ran further on towards her half-buried neck.

Graver was revisiting earlier memories, too deep and obscure to be recovered. When he saw the head with the eye sockets basically empty save for a sliver of liquid which had run down the torn cheeks, he remembered a similar appearance in an account of survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

'The first time you stuff the mouth full of formicas, it's pretty difficult. After that, it gets easier. I used to find it was the doing which was the hurdle. Now it's more the planning, because in the nature of this method I've adopted, carrying it out follows a predictable sequence and I'm segregated from it.’

Janie thought she saw Hugh's head twitch under its thick carpet of ants, from which a straggling line emerged as individuals were already beginning to carry away indescribable chunks of booty. Weakened by the blood seeping from thousands of tiny bites, Janie's hands and arms lay helplessly pinioned by the weight of tens of thousands of bodies.

As more and more ants frothed from the hole and foamed across the sand towards her, she began to experience the unbounded terror of the paralysed victim. But as yet she was still inhibited from opening her mouth to scream, in case the horde on her face, already burrowing away at her nose and ears, crowded into her mouth.

Graver's voice had faded away. He watched, hypnotised. The entire scene was suffused with sound as the final movement of the Mahler reached its climax.

Chapter 23

Tom was about to knock on the door when he realised it was ajar. He gave it a push and looked round. The surprise was that Chris Winchester sat on the desk, crying in almost complete silence. She started at the sight of him, slid off the desk and turned away, dabbing her eyes with a tissue.

'Hey,' he said, 'I shouldn't be here.'

'No, please stay,' she said quickly enough for him to realise she meant it.

Tom was embarrassed and made for a small table on which sat a kettle, coffee and a couple of mugs.

'Let me make myself useful,' he said.

'I'll have one,' she said. 'You're not used to the iron fist of the law crumpling up.'

'We must stop meeting like this,' Tom said jovially, to hide his nervousness.

'If you say so,' said Chris, then regretted it.

He made two mugs of coffee and she seemed to relax a little.

'I wanted to say sorry,’ she said, ‘for the way I barged into your private life.'

'No problem,' said Tom. 'I've enjoyed the barging.' He realised as he said it how much it was true.

They were talking over the coffees.

'I wanted to take up science as a child,' he said. He stood up and stretched his legs. 'Being a research scientist isn't so glamorous when you look at the wear and tear on your body. Staring through microscopes for hours at a time is bad for the eyes, the neck and the shoulder muscles, the backbone and, for good measure, the circulation. To say nothing of the mental stress of struggling to get reports written and published, whilst between times competing with your colleagues in other universities for further research grants. My job is to keep two moves ahead of possible competitors in the grant-seeking stakes.'

'Hmm, life at the top. What a penance! You make being a professor sound like a punishment.'

'You've caught me on a mediocre day.'

'Me too and I'm sorry. I do have good days.'

'You can tell me about them some time.'

'The original purpose of Robin's unit was to examine the migration of pests. But over time what constitutes a pest has proved somewhat flexible. Basically, we follow the money. If there's a grant going, we'll consider it.'

'So now?'

'Hang on,’ Tom said. He felt this questioning was too one-sided. ‘I could do with finding out a little more about you.'

'You'll have to wait until your job gives you the excuse.'

'I'm not patient enough.'

'Then you'll be a frustrated old man.'

'Hey, less of the old.'

'Anyway,' Chris said, ignoring him, 'my life looks too boring and ordinary alongside your high flying career, rubbing shoulders with high profile people.'

'It doesn't feel that way under the skin,' he mused, as though thinking aloud to himself. 'A lot of the time an injection of normalcy wouldn't come amiss.'

'What about the answer to my question?' she persisted.

'Okay,' said Tom with resignation. 'We've a grant from a large honey processor, for example, to investigate the spread of varoa in bees.'

'I've heard of that. Isn't it some kind of disease?'

'It's a mite actually. Like many parasites, its main aim in life is to live off its host rather than kill it. Once it becomes established it's impossible to eradicate it without chemical means. If unchecked it weakens the hive to the point where the bees can only survive and their proneness to disease is vastly increased. Most important, no honey surplus is produced. Multiply this by several hundred beehives in an apiary, each normally producing fifty to eighty kilos per year at one pound sterling per kilo, and you're talking about an economic catastrophe for the bee farmer. My colleague Robin Lovelace supervises a team trying to understand the life cycle of the mite, to establish whether it has natural predators which could be used as a substitute for chemical controls. If we could offer the producer these, then the word “organic” could still be used on the honey jar, at an enormous premium to the producer.'

'Sounds impressive.'

'The spread of the varoa mite from central Europe to the UK since the mid-1980s has taken the bee farming industry by surprise. This has led to the current work of Robin's unit on the impact of global warming more generally on insect migration. They're doing some pretty speculative work on the possible conditions under which locust swarms might move to the present Mediterranean zone and devastate wine and sweet corn crops in the more intensively farmed parts of Spain, Portugal and southern France. Apart from that, they're carrying out studies in Europe of the movements of populations of fleas, and diseases such as rabies as well as some rather sensitive and confidential research into the migratory habits of some of the more aggressive species of bees and wasps.'