Birdkill (32 page)

Hamilton found his voice at last, still reeling from the preposterous accusation he had been somehow responsible for any breach of security. ‘The security problem has been triggered entirely by an American whistleblower. I hardly think it would be improved by exposing the programme to more of that level of risk.’

He was making a fool of himself, of course. They had reached their decision and were here merely to deliver sentence. His only real choice would be to fall onto his sword graciously. His palms felt sweaty and his armpits were prickling. Raynesford laid his great pudgy hands on the table, the signet ring on his little finger nestled into the turgid flesh. ‘The issue is not how security was breached so much as how we have reacted to that breach. I am afraid we can no longer sustain the programme when there has been so much disclosure at a number of levels. We have now had to embark on a major damage limitation operation in Lebanon. Without wishing to prolong any debate, we have clearly established the incident that took place there was the result of a failure of science.’

Parker beamed at Hamilton, enjoying his triumph.

Raynesford cleared his throat. ‘We understand the Shaw woman remains at the Institute?’

He croaked. ‘She does.’

‘And remains unaware of what happened in Zahlé?’

‘Totally.’

‘Good. That is at least,’ Raynesford turned to the others with a moist chuckle, ‘one small consolation.’

‘We’ll have a clean-up team in place by tomorrow.’ Parker growled.

Hamilton bowed to the inevitable. ‘And in the meantime, what am I—’

‘Your contribution has been immeasurable, Dr Hamilton.’ Carter opened his hands like a Muslim praying. ‘There is a generous pension on offer.’

A pension? He had worked himself half to death for years, had barely noticed his wife Sue when she started to lose weight and energy, was so wrapped up in his mission he had listened to her news and gone back to work having barely done more than pat her hand.

He hadn’t realised until she was gone how much she meant to him. She had died without him telling her. Because he was focused on building the Institute into the world’s leading research centre on the augmentation of human capability and achievement, on turning the children of ordinary people into a new generation of beings with abilities we have only begun to explore.

He had given his life to this work and they were tearing it out of his hands and giving it all to this sneering Yank? And where would he go, without Sue at his side? A lonely few years pottering around some chocolate box cottage garden waiting to die?

‘Thank you.’ He smiled, rising. ‘That is very generous, Minister.’

EIGHTEEN

And so to Sleep

‘Mariam. It’s me.’ Clive Warren’s voice was neutral. She waited for him to continue, the little red Golf eating the miles along the motorway. She was enjoying the drive, she had to confess. Perhaps a clapped out Ford wasn’t the best way to enjoy the experience of driving. She wondered what driving a car like Robyn’s TT would be like. She’d never even bothered about driving as an experience, it had always been about A to B, even in Beirut where she’d had a clapped-out 2CV, just one step from being a clown’s car.

‘I wanted to talk. I know you have reservations about me, but I have your best interest at heart. I’m worried about your safety.’

‘So where are Tweedledum and Tweedledee?’

‘You gave them the slip. Where are you?’

‘Not telling.’

‘Oh come on, for fucks’ sakes Mariam. Did nothing that happened between us mean anything to you?’

Oh, great. Who was she, the mother of Christ or a whore? Was that to be it? Which Mary was Mariam to be? ‘It meant the world to me, Clive, but I think we’re on different sides of this story and I need to do my thing before I can trust you. I’m sorry.’

‘You’re going to get Robyn from the Institute.’

She nearly dropped the mobile. It must have been a lucky guess. ‘So where are you?’

‘I’m doing the same thing. I think she’s in danger. I’m about halfway there.’

Mariam glanced at the dash. So was she. She couldn’t help but glance in the mirror but there was no black Jaguar behind her. ‘I’ll race you, then.’

‘Or we could meet up at the Pottersbury Services.’

‘Clive, let me do this for myself. A couple of days and the whole story is going to break and it’ll all be over and Robyn and I can rebuild our lives. And you and I can see if we feel the same way about things.’

‘You’re acting like I’m with them rather than you.’

‘Aren’t you? Who’s “them” anyway?’

She passed a sign to Pottersbury Services. Five miles away. She felt weak and stupid. If she didn’t hang up on him now she’d give in to him.  ‘Clive, I have to go. Why don’t we arrange to talk in a couple of days?’

‘I’ll get to her first, you know.’

His words chilled her. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘I’ll get there first. You’ll have to meet me anyway.’

‘Why do you want to get to her first?’

‘Because I think she’s in danger and needs to be away from that place. I’m not going to do anything bad, but you get my point? We started off on this working together, we’ll end up together anyway at the end of the journey. So let’s go down together.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘Pottersbury.’

‘Fine. Hang on, I’ll be there in five minutes.’

‘I’m parked beyond the fuel station near the exit back to the motorway.’

‘I’ll find you.’

She got out of the car to meet him. He was looking pretty dishy in a bomber jacket, t-shirt and jeans, leaning against his black Jag. He opened his arms towards her and she found herself blushing. She went to him and was folded into his embrace. His strength was around her and he held her gently. They kissed and she felt stupid for mistrusting him. She ran her hand through his hair and searched his brown eyes smiling down on her.

There was barely a sound behind her, a crunch of loose stone on tarmac before a big hand was clamped over her face. Her arms were pinioned and a hand pushed her head down. Forced into the back of the Jaguar, she tried to lash out but cloth was tied around her wrists. Another length across her mouth gagged her. She struggled as a pad was forced against her nose. She tried not to breathe in the volatile chemical stench and failed.

She woke in her hired Golf, a slow, disoriented awakening. The world started to heave into focus. She was strapped in, the door open. Her head was splitting. Her hands were still pinioned behind her.

‘Are you okay?’

She nodded. The gag was removed from her mouth. She screamed at the top of her voice.

‘Sorry, love, but nobody can hear you up here.’ Warren looked down at her, a look of pity on his face.

He grasped her arm and twisted it. She felt the tiny pain of a needle and then the dab of cotton wool and a whiff of medicinal alcohol. ‘What are you doing?’

The feeling spreading across her was deeply unpleasant, a numbness that washed over her with remarkable speed. He reached in and undid the cloth binding her wrists, pulled her hands out onto her lap.

‘What are you doing?’ It was an effort to speak, her mouth felt packed with cotton wool. Her whole body was in stasis.

Warren closed the door. ‘It’s called Suxamethonium.’

He walked around the back of the car and she felt the passenger door open. She couldn’t turn her head. A glimpse of red plastic and she knew what it was, the stench of petrol reaching her. She moaned, her mouth incapable of speech, her eyes staring ahead of her at the green fields below the escarpment.

He leaned in across her and knocked the gearbox into drive, flicking a blazing spill of paper into the footwell. She felt the car leave the road and the flames bloomed all around her, her nerveless body jerked against the inertia belt as the car bumped and smashed against rocks. The heat reached her, burned her and she tried to scream as the car gathered speed and the flames licked up her blackening clothes. She watched the edge approach in horror, her eyeballs licked by the horrific heat. The car became weightless, turning over in the air as it fell.

Robyn shuffled upstairs to her bed. She had a bruise on the side of her face where she had fallen to the floor. She had ignored the doorbell twice and answered the third time. Archer’s face was a mask of concern. Her mouth seemed full of cotton wool, her speech slurred and slow. No, she was fine. Fine. Tired. Yes, sleep.

She answered the mobile to Mariam. Sure, yes, fine.

She kept seeing poor, dead Jenny and wondering who’d do something so awful, knowing in her heart of hearts what the answer was.

She tried Paul Hass’ steps to calm and then gave up half way through because it didn’t matter, it none of it mattered. She sat by the dead fire and looked out of the window at the trees moving in the wind. She reached a state of not unpleasant catatonia, where no thought or dream bothered her. She folded in on herself, finding a place of restfulness there.

Finally, she had realised it was dark outside and she had put on the lights, barely summoning up the energy to do that much.

Lying in bed, she let her eyes close and gave herself up to the little death of sleep.

She dreamed, she knew, because it was still fresh in her mind when she woke. She had dreamed about putting on her baggy trousers and Minnie t-shirt, pulling her dressing gown around her and walking out to the tower. Finding the door ajar, she walks in. It’s lit by a single bulb hanging on a long cord from the rafters above. There’s a white chair in the middle of the floor. She sits on it.

She woke from the dream. She was sat on a white chair in the middle of the tower. The ivy leaves rustled, bowling around the wall, tumbling over each other as the wind caught them. The door closed behind him. She knew it would be him.

‘I can help you.’

‘You killed Jenny.’

‘No, I didn’t. Odin killed Jenny.’

‘Who’s Odin.’

‘A Norse god.’

There was a pressure on her, a probing sensation. ‘Get out of my head. You’re just a mutant. They messed with your mother.’

He lashed out at her with his mind, but she was ready for him and rode the pain. ‘Where have you put her body?’

‘It has gone back to where it came from, to the ground.’

‘She deserved a decent burial.’

‘Your conventions don’t interest me. She was buried according to our decency.’

Again the probing. ‘Get out.’

‘You’ve locked things away in there, Pandora. Let them out.’

‘They’re there for a reason.’

‘You don’t know that. You’re ignorant.’

She shrugged. ‘You’re hardly going to beat me down with words, child.’

‘You’re not my mother.’

She felt him inside her mind, fumbling. It was an invasion of her that nagged her, it had a familiarity about it. ‘Get out, Martin. Don’t meddle with things you don’t understand.’

There was a look of triumph on his thin face for a moment. Uncertainty clouded him and then he threw a hand up to ward it off, fear drawing his face to a rictus. He staggered backwards under the pressure of the Void and she felt it wash across her, the blackness with its inchoate shapes and then with awful clarity the vision came back to her and she was there in the moment.

Robyn remembered.

The troops crashed into the classroom, roaring. Their guns and kit clanked their boots smashed on the floorboards. She stood up to them and was thrown back by a vicious elbow jab to her face. The children’s screams were joined by the crackle of automatic gunfire, flat reports all around her. The sickening twig-snaps of young bones and choked-off screams, moans of fear and terrified crying snuffed out. The stench of gun smoke and a rusty stink she realised was blood. A booted foot kicked her in the stomach and then a rough hand grabbed her and lifted her from the floor by her hair. The pain of it made her shriek.

That’s when it started. She watched Martin’s face as he lived it, forcing her back into the memory of the thing she had managed to forget. She hated him for it as she hated them for what they had done.

She lashed out, they laughed and punched her face, pulled at her and squeezed and twisted to hurt. She was strangled and used, taken again and again until she rocked and lolled under the pressure of their abusive hands and thrusting.

One of them had a cigar. The burns. Dirty fingers shoved into her mouth. Worse. It had to stop, she invoked the darkness. She brought down the Void onto their heads and broke it on their backs. Violated eternally, she screamed her soul out and lunged to make it stop. She took the vile thing and beat it out of existence, all the force of her terror focused on the urge to escape the act she feared beyond all acts.

She opened her eyes and she was still in the tower, on her knees. There was blood on her pale hands, smeared on her baggy trousers. Martin’s body lay in a pile of ivy leaves, his white face streaked with the blood from his ruined head where she had dashed it against the wall.

The dry leaves blew in rustling circles, around and around.

Thanks

Birdkill was born out of the first short story I ever did write, which I sent over to Sarah sometime back in the late 1980s, back when we used to live 4,000 miles apart and write letters to each other all the time. Yes, letters.

It was based on a very odd dream I had about a woman walking in Ashridge Forest and coming across some kids playing in a clearing. I found a copy of the original printout in an old file, tidying up after I finished writing
A Decent Bomber
. Being based on a very vivid dream indeed, it was natural that dreams should have so much of a role to play in the story of
Birdkill
. Thankfully, mine are usually more pleasant than Robyn’s.

Six weeks later, that rediscovered old printout became a new book, written in a burst of elation at having finished
A Decent Bomber
, which itself had turned into a two-year project. My beta readers, overjoyed at having got rid of me for another year, suddenly found themselves with me on their doorsteps a few short weeks later, holding a big brown paper bundle wrapped up in twine and giving them the ‘would you read this one too please?’ big brown eyes.