Connected (31 page)

After a few minutes, Markov frowned and looked at
his watch. “What’s keeping stupid Chinaman?” he snarled.
“Maybe he let her go!” goaded Doug nervously. “If you knew what was good for
you, you’d do the same – before the police get here.”
The Russian leapt out from behind the desk and started towards him. At that
moment there was a noise outside and Nadia burst through the door followed by a
stocky, oriental looking man wielding a hand gun. Her legs were free, but the
hands were still behind her back. She flashed a sad smile at him, and then
looked across at Markov, whose expression had turned from frustrated menace to
anger and hatred. He picked up the Stanley knife, walked over to Nadia and held
the blade against her one unblemished cheek.
“You touch her and I promise I’ll kill you!” said Doug.
“Oh yeah?” said Markov, pushing the point against her skin until a small
crimson bead appeared at the end of the steel. The oriental man shifted
uncomfortably, and Doug noticed a strange glaze in his eyes.
“Stop!” shouted Doug. “I’ll give you the key. Just don’t hurt her.”
Markov looked across at him slyly, then withdrew the knife and went back behind
the desk. He hit a few buttons and looked up expectantly.
“The pass code is Kaileena!” said Doug, glancing back at Nadia who had shut her
eyes and was nodding in silent recollection of the word. “K-A-I-L-E-E-N-A.”
Markov punched the letters into the keyboard and hit return. Nobody moved.
Nobody breathed. The laptop’s hard-drive and fan rattled and whirred. Seconds
passed. Markov’s face, tight with anticipation, finally relaxed. He tapped a
few more buttons and the haunting sounds of the Dream-Zone audio filled the
room. He watched the screen for a couple more seconds, blinked and then stopped
it. “Good boy!” he said coldly, taking a mobile out of his pocket and dialling.
He nestled the phone between neck and shoulder, sat down at the laptop and
started typing, his expression turning to one of earnest concentration, his
tongue protruding slightly. “Hello!” he said, “Wong please…yes…Sergei
Markov… okay.” He finished typing, then took the phone in his hand. ”Mr.
Wong…Yes I have… email… That’s right! Yes I just tested. This time
good…okay…okay.”
As Markov hung up, the laptop’s drive spun up again and started to rattle
vigorously, as though something was writing to the disk. It drew Markov’s
attention also, an expression of confused horror falling across his face. It
was obviously no backup. He punched angrily at the escape key several times,
releasing a torrent of what Doug assumed to be Russian swear words. He tried
Control-Alt-Delete, then swore again. “You!” he said suddenly, raising the
shotgun from the desk and pointing it once more at Doug. “Whatever you’ve done,
stop it now!”
Doug moved over to the desk and looked at the laptop. The screen had gone blank,
but the disk was still working away like mad. He pressed a few function buttons
in an attempt to restore video and then tried Control-Alt-Delete again. “It’s
locked. We need to switch it off and on,” he said depressing the power button
to no avail. He unplugged the power lead and flipped the machine over.
“What you doing?” said Markov pressing the barrel to his temple.
“It won’t turn off, the only way to stop it is to disconnect the battery.”
“Okay, do it!” he grunted.
The four waited in silence while the laptop started up again and ran through
its system diagnostics. “That’s not right!” said Markov sounding more
desperate. “It’s taking too long!”
Eventually the tests stopped and Doug examined the screen. “It can’t find the
operating system,” he reported, knowing this was not going to be taken well.
“What’s that mean?” asked Markov, looking worried.
Doug took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “It means your laptop is screwed.”
At that moment Markov’s mobile started ringing. He looked at the display.
“Wong,” he said, cursing again in Russian, but ignoring the call. Suddenly the
barrel of the gun was in Doug’s chest again and forcing him backwards towards
Nadia.
“You bastard! You did this!” shouted Markov, trembling with rage, the shotgun
waving precariously in his hands.
“Dmitri gave you this file.” stammered Doug quickly, “If it contains anything
other than Dream-Zone, it was Dmitri put it there, not me!”
“But you knew! You knew it contained virus. That’s why you try rescue instead
of sending key. You knew file was bad,” he shouted, sweat beading from his
forehead as he threw nervous glances at the other man.
“I swear on my life, I didn’t know,” pleaded Doug, wondering at the same time
if that life was about to end.
“What about her life?” said Markov, swinging the front sight of the gun to
within a few inches of Nadia’s nose. “Would you swear on the beautiful Nadia’s
life?” His voice had risen to a demented shriek. His fingers whitened around
the trigger and fore-end, his whole body wound like a tightly coiled spring. He
was losing it, thought Doug. In a blur of impossibly fast motion, a deafening
shot rang out, plaster was falling from a large hole in the ceiling at which
the barrel was now pointing, the oriental man’s hand clenched tightly around
it.
“No!” said the man firmly, but calmly. “I cannot let you do that.”
“You’re right!” said Markov, appearing to relax, but fixing the man with a
frigid stare. “We should not do it here.” He yanked the gun free and turned
back towards the desk. Then in one fluid movement, he spun around, the shotgun
following in a wide arc. There was a flash, another explosion of sound, and
Markov flying backwards, spinning to one side as he crashed into the table and
collapsed onto the floor.

The stocky man looked on, a thin wisp of smoke
hovering at the end of the pistol, still aimed at the crumpled heap across the
room. On his face was a look of surprise, as though he had expected a different
outcome. He then turned to Nadia pointing the gun towards her. “You!”
Suddenly Nadia’s hands were inexplicably free, one gently guiding the weapon
out of harm’s way and the other on the man’s shoulder.
“You had no choice,” she said in an unfamiliarly soothing and authoritative
tone, “He would have killed us all if you hadn’t acted with such speed and
bravery.”
Doug watched in open-mouthed awe as the man appeared to glaze over once again.
“But don’t worry,” she continued, “the heaviness you now feel in your legs and
feet will eventually pass. Even though now and for the next twenty minutes you
will find yourself rooted to this spot and unable to move, as though your
ankles are set in concrete. Just let the heaviness envelope your whole body and
sink deeper into relaxation.”
She pulled gently at the firearm. “That’s right, let me take this burden from
you, so you can relax properly.” The man calmly passed it to her with a distant
smile. She then placed a hand on his forehead. “Now sleep!” she said.
“Quick!” she whispered to Doug with a wink. “Time to go!”
He started to mouth the first ‘W’ of ‘What the fuck?’ and then decided
explanations could wait. They made their way past the stocky, slumbering statue
out to the back terrace where the sledgehammer still lay on the concrete. “Wait
a minute!” said Doug, “I need to get my phone back from Markov!”
“Leave it – Let’s go!” said Nadia, pulling at his arm.
“We need it to call the police - I’ll just be a second.” He re-entered the
cottage and went over to where the Russian lay face down on the floor. A dark
red stain was spreading out on the carpet from under his shoulder. He had seen
the man slip the phone into the left inside pocket of his leather jacket. He
rolled the body over onto its back and reached under the lapel feeling the
mobile that had almost cost him his life. As he pulled it free, Markov suddenly
grasped him by the wrist, his eyes and mouth springing open with a gasp. With
all his strength, Doug smashed his free fist into the Russian’s nose. He felt
and heard the crunching of bone and cartilage. The hand that had gripped him
loosened and fell to the floor with a thud. Doug sprang up and ran from the
room.
Nadia was waiting at the door, the pistol still in her hand. “Now can we go?”
she asked.
Doug nodded. “He’s still alive, but unconscious I think.”
They ran back across the terrace towards the wooden shed. Doug had just reached
the end of the wall as another shot rang out. From the corner of his eye he saw
Nadia’s body jerk forward as she fell, face down, the back of her blouse
peppered with tiny holes. He threw himself down next to her, rolling her over
and cradling her head in his hands. She was still breathing. The bloody figure
of Markov was staggering towards them, the breech of the shotgun broken over
his forearm as he fumbled in his pocket and withdrew two new cartridges. Doug
looked for the pistol he had seen flying out sideways as she had fallen. It had
skidded across the concrete and now lay a good thirty feet away under a tree.
Markov followed his gaze across the terrace, and hastily inserted the first
cartridge. Not enough time! Dragging her around the corner, Doug picked up the
garden fork. He heard the breech close just as the barrel appeared and started
to swing towards him. He thrust the fork forwards and upwards as the Russian
came into view. The two centre tines disappeared into the man’s throat with
surprisingly little resistance, his eyes bulging wide in disbelief. For a while
he just seemed to stand there, mouthing silently like an ugly goldfish, then
the shotgun fell from his hands and he toppled over backwards onto the
concrete, two symmetrical jets springing from the puncture wounds like an
ornate but macabre crimson fountain. Doug stood over him, clutching the fork
and shaking uncontrollably. “I warned you!” he said in a trembling voice, as
the pulsating jets lost pressure, and the last signs of life ebbed from the
man’s face.

Doug returned his attention to Nadia, who appeared
to be having difficulty breathing. He switched on the apparently jinxed mobile
and dialled 999. “Stay with me!” he said, reaching down and feeling her pulse.
He rolled her onto her side where breathing seemed easier. Lifting the blood
specked blouse, he examined her back. There were maybe two dozen small holes
where the shot had punctured her skin. He covered her with his own jacket and
lay down in front of her, gently caressing her hair. She let out a small noise
somewhere between a grunt and a sigh, opened her eyes and curled her lips into
a faint smile. “Are you going to kiss me or what?” she murmured.

Peter was frustrated. The
process of publishing an academic paper seemed to be all but closed to
outsiders. During his tenure as a post graduate research fellow at Cambridge,
he had co-authored a handful of interesting, but ultimately inconsequential
papers at the periphery of string theory. With the backing of his professor, at
the time a renowned theorist in the field, and their provenance from such a
prestigious academic institution, all but one of the manuscripts had found
print in reputable publications. Sadly, the professor had since passed away,
and none of Peter’s former peers appeared to carry any sway with the editorial
review boards of today’s leading theoretical physics journals, of which Peter
had identified ten.

The first hurdle in the process was to satisfy an
editor chosen by the journal’s editor-in-chief. Two submissions had already
fallen here, rejected out of hand by editors refusing to accept that an unknown
name could succeed where so many before had failed. Peter doubted they had even
taken the time to read it through, let alone try to verify his findings. The
next obstacle was that of peer review, at which two or three scientists were
chosen from a suggested list of peers. Peter had known none of the names so had
simply picked those whose areas of research seemed most closely aligned to his
own. Today he had just received a particularly vitriolic attack from one such
unidentified peer. The major complaint seemed to be that he had provided
insufficient justification for the intermediate conclusions presented in his
construction of the ultimate theory. It was true that he had not shown every
step of the process from ideation through to final hypothesis, but this was
largely because such explanations seemed trivial and superfluous to Peter.
Evidently, when it came to such things, one man’s triviality was another’s
travail. On reflection, many of the recently published papers in the field
dealt solely and extensively with matters which, to Peter, now seemed equally
redundant. Whether the academic world’s failure to appreciate his discovery was
purely attributable to an inability to comprehend it, or whether there was an
element of protectionism, was hard to say. There had always existed a keen
sense of rivalry among scientists of every discipline. In the absence of large
salaries – at least compared to industry – prestige and reputation counted for
everything, and one of the surest ways of augmenting these was through
publication of influential work.

Peter’s hopes of attaining international acclaim
as a theoretical physicist were slowly eroding. He found it baffling that such
a potentially important hypothesis would not be afforded greater due diligence.
Its radical nature had at least ensured a quick response, with just a couple of
weeks having passed since its initial submission, but this was also undoubtedly
part of the problem. With still a few more journals to try, his road to
publication was not yet closed, but he was beginning to resign himself to the
seemingly inevitable rejections that would follow. Only one set of feedback,
though highly critical and, it had to be said, a little cynical in tone, had
invited a revision of the manuscript, “fleshing out”, as they put it, the
reasons for his selection of the initial geometry of space-time, as well as
some of the subsequent assumptions. Making such a re-submission however would
be tricky. He could not very well explain that these insights had come to him
from exposure to a mind-altering video sequence, created by two people who were
now dead. Such an admission would ensure that nobody in the scientific
community ever took him seriously again - although he wasn’t entirely sure that
anyone had in the first place.