Halfhead (19 page)

Such a waste.

There are twenty-seven of them: boys, girls, and some not quite certain what they are. The girls are the most challenging to work with: they don’t mould as well as the boys do, female killers being more suited to the spree than the serial. The uncertain ones were the easiest; sexual dysfunction is a wonderfully fertile playground for the seasoned psychologist.

Gently she taps the datapad against her exposed teeth. Six year is a long time. Who knows what mischief they’ve been getting up to.

Twenty-seven opportunities for beautiful carnage. Twenty-six of them still out there, primed and ready to explode.

At the trial they’d thought Alastair Middleton was the only killer she’d created. Poor Alastair: her first real success. Just a shame he hadn’t been a bit more careful in his choice of prey. If he had she wouldn’t be sitting here with half her face missing.

This is
his
fault: if it wasn’t for him she’d have a seat on
the Ministry board by now. All because that stupid shit couldn’t keep his fucking dick in his trousers. Filling her world with broken glass, turning her into a mutilated freak. ALL HIS BLOODY FAULT.

She pulls another ampoule of medicine from the pack and snaps it into her neck with trembling fingers. Calm. Calm. Deep breaths.

It’s no one’s fault. It’s no one’s fault.

The chemicals rush through her bloodstream. Alastair was only doing what she’d taught him to do.

Calm.

It was bad luck, nothing more.

Calm.

Her eyes drift back to the datapad in her hands.

Six years. Most of her children would be in their late teens or early twenties by now. Perhaps Alastair Middleton wasn’t the only one who’d achieved his potential. Perhaps his wouldn’t be the only halfheading she’d find in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary database. Dr Westfield punches her children’s names into the hospital search engine and settles back to wait.

The results, when they come back, are encouraging.

Three have suffered minor breaks—nothing serious, just arms and legs. Four are getting treatment for psychotic disorders and she spends a happy hour or two reading through the psychiatrists’ notes. Of course the questioning isn’t anywhere near as insightful as her own would have been, but then she has a unique perspective.

Five of her children are already dead: two stabbings, one shot during a ‘Police Action’, one suicide, and one cut up so badly in a public toilet that they needed a DNA match to identify him. Details on the two stabbings are slim, little more than post mortems, but the shooting victim is a lot more interesting. Duncan Clark, multiple Thrummer wounds to the face and head. His post-mortem holos are a 3D treat in vivid
red and purple; his head looks as if it’s been skinned then sandblasted. She calls up the NewsNet, runs a search for ‘D
UNCAN
C
LARK
’.

An entire documentary pops up. Duncan Clark is a success story.

The presenter speaks to Duncan’s neighbours and mother—who looks every bit as deranged as she did when Dr Westfield got her hooked on Tezzers. Addicts are so very malleable.

There’s even footage of the hostage drama that marked the start and end of Duncan’s campaign to silence the voices in his head. He’s wearing black-and-grey urban camouflage, with an assault weapon over his shoulder. And then there’s the naked woman. He’s got a handful of her hair, holding her up while she screams and sobs and struggles, blood trickling down between her legs. Duncan presses a serrated knife to her throat, shouting at the Network pickup team, his pale, blotchy face speckled with targeting beams.

And then he slashes her open from ear to ear. Blood sprays out in glorious slow motion. The woman’s eyes bulge, her knees buckle, then Duncan’s face explodes in a cloud of pink mist. There’s just enough of a breeze to let the camera record every last beautiful detail as his features are boiled away. It only takes a second.

He falls on top of his victim—probably the closest he’s ever been to a naked woman—twitching. Muffled screams come from the ragged, bloody hole where his mouth used to be. There are no eyes, no cheeks and most of his jaw is gone.

The documentary goes into maudlin detail about the seventeen other people in the fast food joint: fathers, wives, sons, daughters. Not one of them survives the trip to the operating theatre.

Well done, Duncan. You’ve made mummy very proud.

Dr Westfield rewinds to the point where he cuts the woman’s throat, then pauses, her fingers caressing his evaporating face.

So pretty.

If only she could have spoken to him in the run up to that spree, could have found out what finally pushed the buttons she spent so many years setting in place.

There’s no NewsNet coverage for Allan Brown—the one they had to ID from his DNA—but his post mortem reads like the inventory of a butcher’s shop. There are a lot of holos in the file: close-ups of his hands, face, genitals, and belly, all torn and shredded. It’s beautiful workmanship. Strangely familiar…

Still, none of that matters. The important thing is that the remainder of her study group, all twenty-one of them, are still out there. Shrouded in the brittle comfort of bees and broken glass. Ready for that little push to send them right off the edge.

She has a lot of catching up to do.

Four hours later and the rain was still hammering down. Will stood on the edge of Blythswood Square, dripping quietly as he watched the halfhead.

It was dragging a buggy along behind it, picking up sodden litter from the drenched streets. It speared a discarded crisp packet and transferred it into the buggy’s bin. Strange to think that the thing cleaning the square had been human once. A creature of violence and destruction.

Now look at it.

Will stepped out from beneath the tree he’d been sheltering under, wincing as he crossed the square towards the figure in orange and black. Doc Morrison had told him to keep moving or he’d seize up, and now he knew what she meant. It was as if he’d come down with a bad case of rigor mortis. That’s what he got for spending all day sat in front of a monitor looking for Ken ‘The Invisible Man’ Peitai.

In the end he’d had to admit defeat: if there was any information on Peitai out there, Will couldn’t find it. Instead he’d
just ended up thinking about Jo and whether or not Janet would have liked her, wondering if his dead wife would approve of his seeing another woman.

Then he went looking for Alastair Middleton. It didn’t take long when you knew which databases to hack into.

The halfhead didn’t even look up as Will walked up to him and stood watching yet another bit of sodden rubbish disappear into the bin. There was something almost peaceful about halfheads. Something timeless and serene. There was never any rush. They had nothing left to worry about.

‘Afternoon, Alastair,’ said Will, shifting his grip on the carrier bag with his shopping in it. ‘Long time no see.’

If Alastair Middleton heard him, he didn’t give any sign, just went on picking up the trash and depositing it in his little buggy.

‘Been thinking about you a lot over the last couple of days. Your old mentor’s dead. Did you know?’

Alastair didn’t say anything, but then again he couldn’t: his mind and lower jaw had been taken away long ago.

‘Got burned to death in a Roadhugger that crashed. Just like that. No more Dr Fiona Westfield.’ He stuck his hands in his pockets and shrugged. ‘Don’t suppose that means an awful lot to you though, does it? She just used you the same way she used everyone else: wound you up and let you go.’

Water ran down the truncated features and dripped off the exposed upper teeth, making the thing that had once been Alastair Middleton glisten.

‘You know, I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t have been kinder to kill you when I had the chance: boil your chest away just like you did to Janet. What do you think? You happy as you are? No longer a menace to society?’

A group of about a dozen schoolgirls—all of them clearly stoned out of their heads—staggered across the square, giggling and tittering in their long red cloats. Will watched them jump
from puddle to puddle, shrieking with the joy of being young and off their faces.

‘Yeah, well,’ he said when they’d gone. ‘Just wanted you to know she was dead.’

Will didn’t wait for a reply—there wasn’t any point—he turned his back and squelched his way to the nearest shuttle station.

Brian and Jo would be in the pub by now, having the traditional booze-up to celebrate catching their bad guy. And God knew Will could do with celebrating something.

There was no sign of the pickup team in the Dog and Diode, so Will dragged out his mobile and called Brian’s. No response, so he tried him at home.

The little screen crackled and fizzed for a bit before Brian’s face swam into focus. Will was on his best behaviour. Didn’t even obscure the camera.

‘Brian, how…God you look terrible!’

Agent Alexander’s face was pale and baggy, his eyes bloodshot, his nose red. He sighed.
‘Will.’
That was it, no niceties, no hello, no merry banter.

‘Are you all right?’

‘No.’

‘Jesus, Brian, what happened?’

He rubbed at his eyes.
‘You don’t want to know. And I really don’t want to talk about it.’
He took a couple of deep breaths.
‘I’m sorry Will. I’ll…I’ll talk to you later. I can’t do this right now.’

Someone appeared at his shoulder and Will recognized James’s voice as he wrapped Brian up in a hug.
‘Shhhh…Come on. Let it go. It’s all right.’

Then the connection went dead.

Will frowned at the flashing ‘C
ALL
T
ERMINATED
’ icon. It wasn’t like Brian to let things get to him. Not like that.

Will called the West George Street Bluecoat station. A
harassed-sounding sergeant told him he could go screw himself if he thought they were going to hand out a DS’s private number to some wanker in a pub, before slamming the cut-off switch. Will was left with the ‘C
ALL
T
ERMINATED
’ icon again.

He could always dig Jo’s number out of the Bluecoats records when he got home. And anyway, he had a plastic of wine and a pizza delivery menu waiting for him. Who could ask for more?

She pushes the datapad away and stretches. It’s taken her most of the day, but she now has addresses for all her remaining children. Surprisingly, most of them live in the same place. Three stay out in the lower suburbs, but the other eighteen are all bundled up, nice and snug, in Monstrosity Square. Strange that fate made them gravitate together like that. Strange, but convenient—visiting them will be nice and easy.

She’ll have to get herself a little insurance first. Pick up a few choice items from one of her weapons caches. Wouldn’t do to fall prey to her own children. That would be too ironic.

Dr Westfield rolls out of her nest and drops to the supply room floor. Sadly, no one’s come to visit since Kris and her friend. No one to see the excellent job she’s done cleaning away the evidence. But that’s probably just as well: they might wonder about the two jars, resting against the back wall, full of preserving fluid and body parts. She likes to take them down from their shelf and dance around the room with them. Hold them up to the light and watch as it flickers and dances between the strings of flesh. Pop open the lids and…

She stops, one hand on the lid, one on the cool plastic container. She just had to open them. Her case files should have been locked tight. Passwords. Encryption.

The jar drops from her hands. It hits the concrete floor and bounces, spilling eyes and testicles and ovaries in an explo
sion of bitter-smelling liquid. Bouncing back up from the floor, it spins, spraying out the last of the preserving fluid, before sinking back to dance and skitter to a halt at her feet.

She shouldn’t have been able to just open up the Harbinger files. She’d erased all open versions when that Network bastard came snooping. Everything else was hidden. Stored. Compressed. Booby-trapped. The only way those files would be accessible was if someone had unlocked and disarmed them. And she sure as hell didn’t do it.

Someone has been tampering with her work. Someone has been meddling.

Someone is going to
pay
.

The front door bleeped at him, and Will put down his keyboard and stretched. The twinges were back, but he only had a couple of blockers left and wasn’t going to waste them. Instead he took another sip of wine and slouched through to the hall to pay the DinoPizza delivery girl for his twelve-inch Cheat-Meat feast.

He stuffed a slice into his mouth, settled back on the couch and pulled the terminal closer. Hacking into the government network didn’t take long—their security was a joke. If he weren’t in the habit of using it to sneak into other, more suspicious, systems he would have said something. The main Bluecoat computers weren’t any better, and he spent a couple of minutes skimming their arrest records to see if any names would leap out at him. They didn’t. So he pushed on—through the firewall surrounding their personnel files—and called up Detective Sergeant Josephine Cameron’s record.

Most of it he’d seen before, but he read through it again: commendations, verbal warnings, an impressive enough arrest list. Three applications for transfer to the Network. He’d not seen those in her public file. No wonder she’d jumped at the chance to act as liaison officer, it was a back door into the service for her. Three or four knock-backs weren’t unusual;
the Network liked to make sure new agents really wanted to be there.

Her disciplinary record wasn’t too bad—the most recent entry was over two years old, so it looked as if she’d learned to play the game. Politics: the bane of law enforcement agencies everywhere. It wasn’t enough to be good at your job, you also had to be sensitive to the machinations of your sup eriors.

Will took another bite of pizza. It was getting cold, the cloned pepperoni greasy, the cheese beginning to congeal.

He moved on to her personal details: address, mother’s maiden name, height, weight and home number. He punched it into the phone and settled back on the couch, only remembering at the last minute she wouldn’t be able to see anything because he’d killed the camera.