Fourth Horseman (19 page)

‘What exactly are we going to do?’ he said.

But everything was about to become clear. We hadn’t worked it out, but Javed had. He came skidding into the yard and dropped his bike on the flagstones. We went out to meet him, but for a moment or two he was panting so hard that he couldn’t even speak. Finally he managed a single, breathless word.

‘Genocide.’

‘What?’

He gulped in air. ‘That’s what your dad’s done. He has written a recipe for genocide.’

Alex and I just gaped at him, and he had to struggle on. ‘Just one tiny genetic difference. One vital kind of cell, that’s all it takes. If it can be done with animals …’

‘It can be done with humans,’ Alex finished up.

‘A disease that can kill me and not you,’ said Javed. ‘Or you and not me. If it gets into the wrong hands …’

I was already racing for my bike. Everything was falling into place. All the secrecy, the mobile numbers that kept changing, and above all, the horsemen. And I was quite certain that the information was already on its way into the wrong hands. I knew now what it was that we had to stop.

The three of us pedalled for our lives. Or if not for our lives, for the lives of millions of others who might die if Mr Davenport got his hands on the project records that Dad had made. Poor Alex was barefooted, still in pyjamas. People in cars stared at him as they passed us, but we had worse things to worry about than that. None of us had watches, but we must have covered those four miles in fifteen minutes or less. We were all gasping for breath when we pulled up outside the gates. Dad was standing there, staring at us in amazement. He had a flask and a box file in his hands. At his feet, concealed from the road by a tangle of dead brambles, was a green plastic coolbox.

‘What are you lot doing here?’ he said. He seemed to be looking at us, but he wasn’t, not quite. He was staring straight through us. I had seen that look on his face before. It frightened me witless.

‘You said you would talk to us, Dad. You promised.’

‘I didn’t want to wake you,’ he said, his voice flat, toneless. Acting again. Acting badly. ‘You wouldn’t have appreciated it.’ He bent down and put the flask and the file into the coolbox, then he looked at Alex. ‘Why on earth are you in your pyjamas?’

Alex ignored the question. ‘What’s in the coolbox?’ he said.

‘Never mind what’s in it now,’ said Dad, and there was a cold light in his eyes as he spoke. ‘It’s a magic box. When you next look into it there’ll be a dojo in it!’

We all looked at the box.

‘Why the big mystery?’ I said. ‘Why can’t you just hand it to Davenport?’

‘He’s not sure how long he’ll be,’ said Dad. ‘I don’t want to be hanging around here waiting for him all morning. I have …’ He hesitated. ‘I have somewhere I have to go.’ He nodded in the direction of the buildings and I could see a shimmer of heat distorting the air above the chimney. I wondered what he had been burning.

‘You can’t hand that stuff over, Dad,’ said Alex.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you kids!’ Dad looked at his watch and walked back through the open gates. We followed him down the drive towards the buildings, but we didn’t make it as far as the lab. Dad stopped on the drive which ran between the buildings and the woodland. We followed his gaze.

They were back.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse.

All four horses were there now. The white, the red, the black, and an awful, sickly-looking creature with a huge, skeletal head that hung at the end of a bony neck, only a whisker above the ground. It wasn’t white or grey or cream. It was pale, with the faint yellow-green hues of fading bruises, or of pus. But the worst thing about it, the thing that froze our blood in our veins, was that it was riderless. The other three horsemen had brought it with them, saddled and ready to be ridden by the fourth. They had come to collect Dad.

And he was ready to go. He was beginning to move towards that horrendous creature as though he was without any choice in the matter. And perhaps he was. He had been under the spell of the horsemen since he had made the decision to pursue his fatal research. He had broken away from them for a short time, when the crisis happened in Shasakstan, but they had overpowered him again, that night when Mr Davenport phoned. And now the pale horse was his to ride as the horsemen drew the apocalypse down upon the human race.

But we still had choice.

‘No!’ Alex hurled himself at Dad, grabbing him by the arm and swinging him round.

‘Hold him,’ said Javed, and he made an elegant, twisting motion that looked like an aikido move. Alex nodded and, without hesitating, curled a leg round Dad’s knee and dropped him to the ground, then pinned him there with a simple arm-lock.

Javed was already haring down the drive towards the gate, and a moment later he was back, the box file in one hand and the steel flask in the other.

‘Come on,’ he said to me, running back towards the door to the lab. ‘It all has to go. Everything.’

For a moment I was paralysed, staring at the awful sights ahead of me. The horsemen, with that dreadful, deathly creature, and on the drive a few metres away, another nightmare. Dad was struggling desperately in Alex’s aikido hold and making the most awful noise. If he’d been shouting or swearing I could have handled it better, but he was wailing, pleading with Alex as though his life depended on it. His whole body was heaving with the effort to escape. I was amazed that Alex could hold him.

‘Come on!’ Javed yelled.

I wanted to run away, deny what was happening. What changed my mind was a twinge in my elbow, like an echo of a time when I had made the wrong decision. I remembered what Attiya had said. ‘Sometimes you have to run away, as fast as you can.’ But this wasn’t one of those times. What was happening now had to be faced. I moved at last; ran ahead of Javed and unlocked the door. He sprinted through and made straight for the bug-lock. While I waited for him to go through the shower I found a pair of tiny wire nippers. One by one I took the squirrels out of their cages, removed their ear tags and dropped them into the transport cages. When I was finished I had eleven ear tags. Eleven squirrels left, in two small cages. They didn’t like the enclosed space, and several squabbles had already started. I put the ear tags into my pocket and left them to it.

By the time I was showered and suited, Javed had already done a phenomenal amount of damage in the lab. All the machines were in a broken heap on the floor, and reams of printer paper were scattered around and over them. At the top of the pile were the box file and the flask.

I headed straight for the back room, expecting to find the red squirrels still alive in there, but they were gone. Of course they were. Dad, scrupulous to the last, could never have brought them back through the bug-lock. They would have carried the virus into the cage room, from where it could have gone anywhere. So that was what he had been burning that morning. Carcasses.

‘A light,’ said Javed. He was sprinkling pure alcohol from brown bottles on top of the paper. ‘We need a light.’

We stood there, looking and feeling foolish. The world on the verge of disaster for want of a match. Javed began rummaging in drawers, but I remembered something. A smell. Like an ashtray.

‘Javed, go out. Go back through the shower.’

‘Are you nuts? Take a shower now?’

‘It’s more important than ever now. There’s no point in doing all this if we bring the virus out with us.’

‘But how are you going to light it?’

I went into the little kitchen. I knew Dad couldn’t bring cigarettes and lighters through every time he came in, and that he would have a stash somewhere. It was in the first drawer I opened. Two cartons of cigarettes and four coloured lighters. I held one up so Javed could see.

‘Now go!’

‘You go,’ he said. ‘I’ll light it and come after you.’

But this was my job. On that day in early summer when I’d decided to be a warrior, my fate was already pointing to this moment. I thought I had been abandoned by my courage when I didn’t go to Shasakstan with Alex and Javed, but I hadn’t. It had nothing to do with Shasakstan. It was about this. I didn’t know it then, but I was certain of it now. Javed must have understood it too, because he didn’t hesitate any longer. He left.

I waited. It seemed like an eternity.

Outside, Alex told me later, Dad was pleading with him to let him get up. He swore blind he wouldn’t do anything and, finally, Alex was persuaded to trust him. He let go of the arm-lock and Dad got up. Alex said he was deranged. He ran towards that awful horse first, and then he doubled back and began to race towards the lab. Alex had no choice but to bring him down again, with a rugby tackle this time. That was when Dad hit his head.

I gave Javed time to get through the bug-lock, and then I waited for a few moments longer. I’ll never be able to properly describe what I felt during that time. I was besieged by doubt. The weight of the responsibility that was on me was almost more than I could stand. I had to keep still. I had to keep my mind from darting like the flies in the cool shadows beneath the trees. It wanted to escape from the truth, to believe in Dad and the squirrels and the dojo. It wanted to be a child’s mind again, free of the dreadful responsibility that Javed’s realization had brought upon us. I couldn’t let it. I had to wait until certainty arrived and stopped my hand from shaking. I saw it first from a distance, bouncing towards me across the rough turf of time. Dad couldn’t stop it. Mr Davenport couldn’t stop it. The horsemen couldn’t stop it. It sped up as it came.

I took it cleanly, calmly, and flicked the lighter. Just once. The tiny flame touched one of the alcohol-soaked pages. There was a little trickle of blue flame and then the whole lot went up in an instant inferno. I opened the door, dived through it into the bug-lock and slammed it behind me.

I was already in the shower before I realized I still had the cigarette lighter in my hand. I didn’t know what to do with it. I was terrified and desperate to get out before the fire became too strong. It was ridiculous, one of those small absurdities, like Alex being in pyjamas, that mocked the seriousness of the situation. In the time I had, the best I could think of was to wash it as well. I drenched it in disinfectant and brought it through to the other side.

By the time I got there, smoke was already leaking through the partition wall into the kitchen corridor. In the cage room the squirrels could smell it. They were frantic in their confined space, but they wouldn’t have to worry for much longer. I grabbed one cage in each hand and ran with them, out of the door and into the yard.

Javed was waiting for me. We raced for the trees, and when we turned we could see flames leaping skywards, and a huge column of smoke rising up into the atmosphere. It would be seen from miles away.

Dad was lying on his back on the gravel and Alex was bending over him. I opened the cages and tipped the squirrels out on to the grass. They scattered, racing in all directions, but I didn’t wait to see where they went. I joined Alex and Javed at Dad’s side, and stayed there, trying to wake him.

Under the trees, the horsemen were still there, but shifting restlessly now, as though they were anxious to leave. As we watched, the pale, ghastly horse staggered and shuddered and, with a huge effort, raised its cadaverous head. For a long moment it stared at us through dim, milky eyes. Then it, along with the others, vanished.

I
T TOOK AGES FOR
them to find me an appropriate adult; a social worker from Warndon. After that we had to get a duty solicitor. While I was waiting, PC Courtney came in to tell me that they’d got the report from the hospital. Dad had concussion, but nothing worse. He was rambling a bit, she said, and they were going to keep him under observation until he improved. But there was nothing to worry about. No long-term damage.

Not to his brain perhaps, I thought. But I wasn’t so sure about his mind. We were all going to have to go through some readjustment, and him more than any of us.

‘What happened to him anyway?’ she asked.

‘He fell,’ I said.

I had been in the interview room for about twenty minutes when we were interrupted. In that time I had said ten words to them.

‘Do you know what your friendly neighbourhood scientist is doing?’

They had taken that as a reason to pursue the animal rights line, but I hadn’t said anything else. Not a single word. And I haven’t since. I haven’t had to. The officer who interrupted our session brought the news that the cases had all been dropped. There were exclamations of astonishment and a brief but futile argument outside the door of the interview room, but it was all over. They must have traced the ownership of the building to somewhere higher up, and they must have been ordered to drop the charges …

As Javed knew they would. He had figured it all out. The people behind the project would not want any prosecutions brought. A case against Javed and me would bring Dad’s work out into the open. There would be investigations, perhaps even an enquiry. Far better for Mr Davenport and his colleagues to quietly admit defeat and vanish back into the musty woodwork of their secretive ministry in the back corridors of Whitehall.

Because it was someone from our government. It had to have been. It required a powerful influence to get a criminal case dropped as quickly as that. We’ll never know who, though, because ‘Mr Davenport’ kept his tracks too well covered.

Perhaps it was just meant as a threat, like nuclear weapons have been for the last sixty years. Perhaps they would never have used it. But Javed and Alex and I believe that they would have done. What other reason could there have been for the sudden urgency, the huge bribe, coming so soon after the crisis in Shasakstan? And what other reason could there have been for that dreadful, diseased creature to come looking for its rider?

We’ll never be sure, of course. But we do know this. If the pale horse had been ridden that day, a tide would have been unleashed that no one, not even Davenport and his employers, could have turned back.

W
E NEVER DID TELL
Mum or Attiya about the horsemen. What would have been the point? They would never have believed us. We told them the rest, though. Attiya says we ought to go public and get the people behind it out into the open, but Mum disagrees. She says they’re too well protected, and we would only be opening up a can of worms for ourselves, particularly after what Javed and I had done. I think it’s more than that, though. I think she’s afraid of what might happen to all of us, if we started to pursue that kind of person. I think I am too.