Exodus Code (19 page)

The SUV had gone, taking with it whatever Gwen had wanted him to find.

MARY COOPER WAS putting on a brave show, handing out strong tea and coffee in plastic cups, pretending that helping serve refreshments to those cleaning up the streets was distracting her from worrying about Gwen locked up in that horrible psychiatric ward.

Her husband’s fate had left Mary wary of the authorities and the hospitals.

She was simultaneously terrified of having her daughter in a hospital and anxious that she wasn’t getting the care she needed. The ward was noisy and sterile, cold and unwelcoming. Al Gwen real y needed was rest, a chance to recover from everything that she’d been through, flying back and forth across the Atlantic, trying to save her dad and anyone else that she could, and al so soon after the birth of a baby. It wasn’t surprising that Gwen’s mind had cracked; any normal woman’s would have, and way before now.

‘Thanks for doing al this, Mary,’ said one of the area’s local council ors. ‘No matter what anyone thinks, there’s stil nothing like a good strong cuppa to make the job go smoothly.’

Especial y, thought Mary, when al you’ve done al morning is parade up and down the streets giving orders, you useless twit.

‘Biscuit?’ she said to him.

‘Don’t mind if I do.’

*

The havoc was not confined to the streets. Out in the middle of the channel, a vast black geyser was shooting steam into the air, creating a grey mist around it that was keeping the coastguard at a careful distance. When the tremor had struck last night, the geyser had burst through the water’s surface. Now the sky above was fil ed with helicopters and the surrounding beaches and cliffs lined with tourists watching the towering fountain.

The wave the geyser had created had hit the corner of the southern coast of Wales like a freight train, water slamming into the cliffs with enough force to crumble a hefty chunk of coastline, littering the shore with debris and stabbing the sand with trees hurled from the cliffs during the quakes.

The Marina was swarming with men and women dressed in yel ow emergency vests, gripping black bin bags in gloved hands like an army of giant bees. A squad of local firefighters was tagging the bigger pieces of debris that were safe to have local lads on three wheelers haul to a central dumping site and from there on to the city waste yard.

Local schools had been closed for the rest of the week. There had been injuries, but no deaths, and most of the community was embracing the hard work ahead of them with a sense of humour and grace.

Most of them, that is, except Andy Davidson, who was trying to weave his police car in and out of the tides of people flowing up and down the ravaged Swansea streets. When Andy eventual y pul ed up outside the Coopers’ house, he was jittery and on edge and not looking forward to sharing his news.

‘Hey,’ he cal ed to Jack and Rhys. The two of them were busy doing makeshift repairs to the fence. Jack was holding a plank in place while Rhys hammered it with his good arm. They glanced up as Andy approached. Jack noticed the blanched look on Andy’s face, and made a quick attempt to get Mary out of the way.

‘I could use a cup of that coffee, Mary,’ he said.

Gwen’s mother remained immune to his charm. ‘Wel , Mister Captain Jack Harkness, you know where the pot is, because if this is about Gwen I’m hearing it same as you both.’ She folded her arms, pursed her lips and waited.

Andy looked from Jack to Rhys and then to Mary. He could hear Bonnie in his head: ‘Look them in the eye and serve them the news. How they take it isn’t up to you to control.’

‘Gwen’s gone,’ Andy blurted out.

‘What?’ said Rhys.

‘Gone where?’ said Mary, not quite grasping what she was hearing.

‘What happened?’ said Jack, grabbing the hammer from Rhys before he put it through a window or Andy.

‘It’s standard procedure when the emergency alert system goes off that al restrained patients have their restraints loosened – you know, in case they need to escape to a safe environment.’

‘So they just let her walk out of the bloody ward?’ asked Rhys.

‘Let him finish, Rhys,’ said Jack.

‘Al the women in that ward were sedated when their restraints were removed. The doctor checked. The guards were changing shifts. They assumed because the women were asleep that they didn’t have to watch them so careful y. They claim they turned away for only a few minutes, when they checked the ward, the nurse was knocked out and Gwen was gone. The guard says it looked like she had pul ed out her IV and must have been faking that she was getting her sedation.’

‘Did you check the CCTV footage?’ asked Jack.

‘We tracked her to the car park, and then nothing. She must have left during the tremors,’ said Andy. ‘I’ve got everyone on the lookout. We’l find her.’

Jack and Rhys knew Gwen better than anyone in the world. In unison they said, ‘I doubt it.’

Mary whirled round to face Jack. ‘I wish she’d never bloody met you!’ she yel ed.

She dashed inside the house, leaving Jack staring down at Anwen bumping his leg with her plastic trike.

THE MEDIA CLAMOUR had been growing for almost a week. By the time Dr Trimba Ormond of King’s Col ege, London cal ed an official WHO press conference about the increasingly frequent cases of female ‘insanity’, it was already too late.

A few physicians and a smattering of politicians and diplomats representing various global health institutes and NGOs gathered at the WHO’s London headquarters. They were talking anxiously among themselves, and general y avoiding any acknowledgement that they might once again be facing a global crisis. A few journalists were there, too, but most had decamped to South Wales in search of super geysers.

Two floors above the lecture hal , Dr Ormond sat in her bright but cramped office behind an overflowing desk, touching up her make-up while she finished a cal .

‘I suppose the good thing is that there has been a learning curve of sorts,’

she said, powdering her thin nose. ‘We are certainly much better equipped to share resources and information among each other than we were a year ago.’

‘That may be the case,’ said the Health Secretary on the other end of the line. ‘These women might simply be experiencing a reaction to something they’ve come into contact with, or even some medication they’ve al shared.

And, to be perfectly clear, I’m not dismissing the notion that this is simply mass hysteria among like-minded women. Let’s be honest, Dr Ormond, we’re not talking about a real health crisis, are we?’

Dr Ormond smarted at the minister’s remark and angrily snapped her powder case closed. As far as she was concerned, too many of her col eagues had been slow to respond to this crisis because it was happening only to women, and, worse, it was happening inside women’s heads. A far too scary place to inhabit if you listened to some of these men.

‘As you are wel aware from my report, sir,’ she said, ‘we’ve so far found nothing in common among these females except that there’s never only one woman affected. Almost every cluster has at least five or six women in it. We have yet to trace only one woman in an area suffering from this mental il ness alone.’

‘So perhaps that might suggest each cluster has something in common.’

Dr Ormond looked up at her assistant who had entered the office and was tapping his watch face. Three minutes until the press conference.

‘As you wil also note in our report,’ said Dr Ormond impatiently, gathering the notes for her speech from her desk and sliding them into her leather portfolio, ‘each woman in each cluster that we’ve been able to identify has been thoroughly investigated and we have found no correlation in their symptoms and nothing at al in common in their backgrounds. We’ve tested their ground water and their major food supply, their oxygen levels and their blood types. We have nothing.’

‘But you wil continue to investigate?’

‘Of course! But—’

Before she could finish her sentence, before she could present him with her plan to continue the investigation, the Health Secretary interrupted her and excused himself. From the speaker, Dr Ormond could hear a mumbled conversation, raised voices and then she heard chairs scraping. A new deeper, softer male voice came on the line. ‘Trimba, this is Alan Pride. May we speak frankly?’

She looked up at her assistant, who shrugged and rol ed his eyes. Alan Pride was the PM’s right-hand man, his amanuensis, his conscience (such as it was) and, when necessary, his fal guy. Alan Pride was in his fifties, and a man of one or two intriguing contradictions. Born to a coalmining family in the north of England, Pride had earned a scholarship to the London School of Economics, where he and the PM had become close friends. A Harvard MBA had been fol owed by rapid progress to the board of an international bank.

When the market crashed, Pride stepped down. Admitting his own bank had been complicit in making bad loans, he testified in front of Parliament and the US Congress against many of his fel ow bankers who, he believed, had shamed themselves and their profession. Sel ing his mansion in Connecticut, his pied-a-terre in Paris and his house in Kensington, he disappeared from the public eye for a few months. His appointment in Downing Street had caused a minor uproar in predictable sections of the press but, as usual, that hadn’t been enough to outweigh the support of the Party.

Was Pride a changed man or simply a man who’d changed his approach to power? Trimba Ormond hadn’t made up her mind. ‘What is it you’d like to ask, Mr Pride?’

‘Do you have a plan for what our local hospitals should do with these women who are… suffering? Because you know as wel as I do that our mental health facilities are already stretched to capacity. Before you take any of this report to the public, I’d like to talk to you about some ideas I have on the matter.’

Dr Ormond sat back down at her desk. ‘With al due respect, Mr Pride, I have a press conference about to start. I think we need to share what we’ve discovered right now. Before things get worse.’

‘That’s not your cal to make, Trimba. I’l see you in my office tomorrow at 9

a.m.’

Dr Ormond slammed her portfolio onto the speaker, disconnecting the cal .

She instructed her assistant to cancel the press conference, but gave no indication if she was going to reschedule. The press would not be happy, and neither would her col eagues. She made a few edits on the press release, then handed it to her assistant.

‘How does that sound?’ she asked.

Her assistant read the release aloud. ‘While we, in col aboration with other national and regional organisations, have not yet uncovered the cause of this widespread outbreak of mental il ness in women, we have determined that the number of cases has not increased dramatical y. We must, however, remind al care-givers of suffering women that, although it seems not to be contagious, it can be life-threatening to its sufferers and to their loved ones.

Therefore, until we can find a way to eliminate, or at the very least reduce the symptoms for these afflicted women, we and our health partners across the world are recommending that health professionals keep their patients sedated and under close supervision.’

‘Appropriately informative and necessarily vague,’ he said when he’d finished.

‘Perfect.’

RHYS WAS SLUMPED at the Coopers’ kitchen table, a half-finished beer next to him. His wrist was in a cast, his eyes red-rimmed, his left one circled in purples and yel ows. Panic and worry were the only things keeping him from col apsing from exhaustion.

Gwen’s attack on Rhys, her subsequent arrest and now her escape from the hospital had made the national news – ‘Madwoman on the Loose’ – including the drive-time phone-in show on Red Dragon radio that had been debating her plight with a variety of mostly uninformed sources. One of the cal ers claimed to have a contact in the Welsh police department who revealed that ‘This Cooper girl is a violent nutter that should have been sent straight to jail’ and that ‘the police should be taking a much tougher stance on these attacks, but they aren’t because they were women what was doing them.’

Within hours, this supposed leak had scratched and clawed its way up to Andy’s superiors, who wanted to know what the hel was being done to find Gwen.

Andy had returned to Swansea after his afternoon shift with more information for Jack about the other women who’d experienced public breakdowns around the same time as Gwen’s. He had promised more help that night, but since the ‘leak’ he’d been reassigned to set up a phone bank, taking tips on sightings of Gwen. The news that these breakdowns were now worldwide was sinking in and had also resulted in a deluge of cal s from men and women in the area wanting to report their own family members for being ‘off their effing rockers’.

Jack poured Rhys another beer, setting it next to a frozen dinner he had zapped in the microwave. ‘Andy has squads monitoring the motorway, Cardiff airport, the train stations and al the ports. If Gwen tries to leave Wales, he’l find her. The press are al over Gwen’s story, and he thinks that wil help.’

‘He’s wrong,’ said Rhys.

‘I know. Gwen isn’t going to leave you or Anwen. I think she just wants to come home.’