People in Season (3 page)

‘Have you heard from Ava today?’ Joanne has latched onto a girl whose name she doesn’t know so that she won’t have to interact with the social agent.

There is giggling and cursing, and grumbles at being interrupted, but mostly it’s as though the alarm going off has reminded the staff of a bell at the end of a school day. As they descend the first staircase, bumping into one another and talking louder when they pass alarms, they’re joined by stragglers from the office below who pass comments like, ‘ChatterFive? Joanne actually let you leave your desks?’ and, ‘There really must be a fire. It’d want to have destroyed half the building for her to let you guys out.’

Everybody laughs except Joanne, who looks about self-consciously for the social agent, hopeful that the comments about her management style go unnoticed. ‘Ava!’ she calls again, not expecting to find the assistant editor, but wanting to remind those present that she is not to be a topic of conversation. The corridor is, after all, an incubator in which they are being studied. Relieved when they reach the ground floor, she approaches the security guard, shouting, ‘Where’s this goddamn fire? I’ll put it out myself if that’s what it takes to get these people back at their desks.’

Directing her across the lobby, the security guard says, ‘I was on the second floor when the panel broke. Seems like some dope’s idea of a prank to me.’

Joanne plants her feet into the ground and bites down on her e-smoke. Around her, the crowd splits in two, flow by, and join again on the other side where they’re conveyed into the grey by the force of their own momentum.

‘A prank? Does that mean we can go back?’

‘We have to do a headcount and check the building.’

‘Give me strength.’

‘The rules aren’t for me to break,’ says the guard.

‘Nor for me,’ Joanne says as the social agent passes by. ‘Who on earth set the alarm off though?’

‘Somebody who works here I reckon.’ He points to a camera in the corner, thrilled by the rare excitement in his monotonous job. ‘It’s a mystery. They knew we were refitting the system today so there’s no chance of catching them on video.’

For their part, Joanne’s subordinates comment that it’ll at least make good fodder on the live feed. Joking about what headlines they could use, Barry takes out a camera and begins to record the scene.

‘Sabotage At ChatterFive – The Untouched Are Undercover.’

‘That’s dry as sandpaper,’ goes the voice of a critic.

‘Alright,’ Barry suggests, ‘The Untouched Strike Back,’ his cumbersome London accent making punches of the vowel sounds. ‘Nah,’ he says, ‘Disaster At Five! No Smoke Without Fire! Have it take up the homepage, make them click through for the story.’

There’s a few snickers, but people squirm as they notice the sober grimace on Francis. The journalists are reading suspicion in his scrunched up nose. This social agent, who they ignored for the length of his stuttered presentation, now has their future in his hands. The thought spreads telepathically from one person to the next as he slinks about the place, on the watch for clues. After sneering at a colleague’s warning to pipe down, Barry Danger pans his camera over the bundle of nervous suspects. ‘Susan, you’ve always had a mischievous bent, haven’t you? Derek, don’t think I’ve trusted you in years.’ But he pans the opposite direction as Joanne comes into frame. The man has been pushing his luck today and clocking the grinding of her jaw, is smart enough to walk away. Francis knows that he should follow him. With the chattering crowd dispersing among the vehicles to become collections of private whispers, he could use any entry point he can get. Flushed with anxiety though, he’s pained to do anything except try to remain calm.

Somebody has triggered a false alarm. This has happened on his first day in the office. Coincidences in his job are not something to be glossed over. It is a perfect situation to get a feel for the people he’ll be examining over the course of the next few weeks. Right now in particular, whoever smashed that panel is of considerable interest. Francis has an image in mind. A thin glowing point filed away like stock in a photo archive, he concentrates on it to clear his head.

At his side, Joanne slips her e-smoke into its case and replaces the thing almost immediately with a real cigarette. Touching the stick perched on her lips with the flame of her gold plated lighter, she’s the first to spot the woman sectioned off in the smoker’s area. Pale, lithe and dressed in a wool coat, Francis mistakes the stranger’s shy greeting to Joanne as a signal to him. When she drops a packet of cigarettes, he falls forward to pick them up, and as his fingers graze hers the thin glowing point he so delicately brought to the fore disappears – her porcelain features overwhelm its place like a flash of lighting in the sky. At the same time, somewhere between a Merc and a Fiat, Barry’s camera now rests on the striking woman. Capturing the assistant editor in his lens, he says her name with wary clarity.

‘Ava O’Dwyer.’

The newsroom’s building occupies a business district nestled into the Dublin mountains, and the car park, set into the hillside where a slice had been taken out for it, is bleak and windy. Ava O’Dwyer’s colleagues spilled into the lot before her, a procession of jabbering faces, flat in her eyes, which like two cups of coffee sit on a pair of slick white saucers. The man who’d come to her aid almost tripped over in his haste to return the cigarettes she dropped, but steadies now, fidgety hand pocketed on one side. Poised with the composure of a marionette on display, Ava comes to life with a smirk and just as suddenly brushes past him, leaving the man two steps behind and smelling her perfume thinly weaved with the trail of her smoke. She’s late. What little concern she has about it disappears as Joanne rushes toward her, the woman’s face aghast between a green blazer and dry straw hair bunched atop her head. She judges her editor’s moods by the clothes she wears and choosing a word her now, she settles on distraught. In a sea of confusion, Ava, her face balanced on either side by slight rectangular earrings, offers Joanne a life preserver.

‘You won’t believe this,’ Ava says in a stage whisper.

‘Good news or bad?’ Joanne takes a drag on her cigarette.

‘Bad news sells good news, doesn’t it?’

Her editor brightens, hungry for a fix of scandal. ‘What have you got?’

‘I was in a riot.’

‘My god,’ the gauche man has sidled over, ‘are you alright?’

Ava jumps at the sound of his voice, blatantly surprised, and looks through him as if he were invisible and had spoken to frighten her. Without replying, she turns to Joanne for explanation.

‘Ava, this is our new friend, Agent Mullen. He’ll be taking staff members for interview, and ultimately, selecting people to be scanned.’ Irritated, Joanne adds, ‘I’m sure you knew he was starting today.’

‘Oh, that’s right.’ The man becomes solid now that he’s earned a name. After registering the drippy suit, Ava lets her eyes settle on his. ‘Nice to meet you. A social agent, is it? Hefty title. I’m sure you have a nicer name we could use. You’ll be poking around our heads after all.’

‘Francis,’ he nods, caught in her gaze.

‘Don’t be too rough with us, we might seem thick skinned but it’s only bravado.’

‘Not many will get to the scanning stage, really, I can’t imagine most of your days will be interfered with at all.’

‘That’s a relief, I’d hate to have to suffer through the electric shock process,’ she nudges her editor and gives Francis a cheeky smile to entrap him in the joke.

‘Electric shock?!’

The huddle of journalists about them feel a jolt at Joanne’s cry. All ears prick up to hear the social agent’s response.

‘It’s not that bad.’ Wriggling free of Ava, Francis attempts to reassure them, ‘I promise it’s not. Read one of the leaflets, it covers everything you need to know. I’ll go through it with you all later.’

‘It doesn’t sound like nothing,’ Joanne rubs her arms. ‘I had an aunt who went through three rounds of shock therapy. Her roots were never the same again.’

The image the editor provides overwhelms the social agent’s reassurances in the eavesdroppers around them. Francis is about to insist that it isn’t anything remotely like electric shock therapy when Ava speaks over him.

‘Joanne, the riot.’

‘Yes-yes, the riot!’

‘I think I heard something about that last night,’ says Francis.

‘So it’s not an exclusive,’ Joanne’s excitement fades as quickly as it came. ‘Agent Mullen, do you mind if I have a few minutes alone with my assistant editor? There are plenty of other people standing around for you to inspect and I think Ava here might be traumatised. She seems a tad confused, thinking I should be excited by old news.’

‘I have full access to ChatterFive,’ Francis declares authoritatively. The change in character is so abrupt that they’re left standing quietly in response. Embarrassed by the women’s reaction, he rubs the length of his tie and stops when he notices himself doing it. ‘The conversations that take place during work hours are completely within my purview and open for...’

Growling, Joanne rolls her eyes and pulls her assistant editor toward their building. With the social agent abandoned to an empty car space, Ava scrunches up her face in sympathy, but makes no effort to help him in any way.

‘Don’t waste my time on this Ava, tell me you’ve got a spin on it.’

The security guard taps their shoulders for a head count as he passes by.

‘Of course I do, I was there.’

Cigarette a stub between her fingers, Joanne spins her hand around impatiently.

‘On Grafton street, late night shopping, you know what Thursday’s are like.’ Ava paints a picture of it, the preoccupied people jostling between lines of crammed buildings, then the next moment, ‘Somebody flicked a switch. This school of picketers came through like they were trying to escape a net, passing some horrible fit of anger from one face to the next, and in a heartbeat they were looting. I was knocked to the ground, as much from the shock of it as anything else. Really, I don’t remember being pushed or even the fall, just finding myself on the concrete looking at peoples’ filthy shoes go by. Then I saw it. A button must have ripped off my coat. I was crawling to pick it up when somebody pulled me into an alcove. It was like waiting under a tree for a storm to pass. I suppose it was silly of me to be so caught up in finding a button, but I’d have been pulled along with the current if only for it. It was monstrous. All those people flared up and acting like they only had one mind between them. A savage one at that. I felt like the only sane person for miles.’

‘Bollocks,’ Barry points his camera at Ava as they push into the building. ‘You’ve made all that up.’

‘Get that out of my face,’ Ava sighs, ‘you were probably caught up in it too, egging it all on, I bet.’

‘Her coat isn’t ripped and it’s got all the buttons.’

‘Tell him to put the camera away, I’m not working on a reality show.’

Barry catches a stern look from Joanne and flicks his phone shut, ‘Go on then.’

‘Let’s take the lift.’ Ignoring a protest from the security guard, Joanne nudges her way through the crowd while Francis, following in their wake, is tugged back by the sleeve and stops to talk his way past security rather than just pushing. The elevator is long shut before he can.

‘I picked up a new coat after.’

‘I saw you wearing that one yesterday.’

‘I bought the same one again,’ she says as if to a child. ‘Wool’s in fashion. Some of us make an effort for work, right Joanne? Though I do hate the stink of it when it rains.’

‘The riot, Ava, the riot.’

‘A car parked down the way was a charred skeleton of itself. It must have exploded. I didn’t even notice that my hearing was gone until it came back, you know, it sounded like an alarm at first and then real alarms were ringing and the sound of somebody crying out. The ground was covered in tiny pieces of smashed glass like sweets from a piñata. When I tried to walk my heel was loose on my left foot, and well, you should see the cut I got.’

‘Oh do show us your little scratch.’

‘Did anybody die?’ asks Joanne.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Ava admits the fault in her sales pitch. By way of making up for it she adds, ‘The guy who helped me might have took a hit to the head. I hope he was alright.’

‘This isn’t a story,’ Barry snorts. ‘This is a blog entry.’

‘Do you know how many flash riots we’ve ignored the past six months, Ava?’

‘Not really,’ she mutters.

‘Neither do I,’ Joanne Victoria arches her eyebrows, ‘because nobody cares. You said it yourself, they’re like spots of rain, best left to the weather pages.’

Stepping ahead of them, Barry’s long arm reaches for the conference room’s doorknob. Opening it and begging them to enter, he is a parody of a gentleman. ‘At least you got a new coat out of it, sweetheart.’

At once, all looks go to the projection at the far end of the room. A photo of a man’s face dominates the wall. He seems to have been carved and sanded especially for the image. Though the picture is one from a photo booth, for a passport or driver’s licence, he is no less attractive for it. The sanguine expression he wears could be that of a statesman, or better yet, a man who could play one in Hollywood. Both women stop to absorb the beauty, one choosing a guarded expression, the other visibly salivating.

Not missing a beat, Barry jeers, ‘Don’t fight over him just yet, ladies.’

‘Who on earth is he?’ asks Joanne.

‘That arresting youth, is Doctor Alistair Evans.’

‘He’s gorgeous,’ breathless, she falls into her chair at the head of the table. ‘Such a virtuous smile.’

‘Yeah, I wonder who he stole it from. He has, after all, only just dodged charges of malpractice, relating to four women who he sent to intensive care in a north London hospital last year. All a bit mundane until you take his history into account, a colourful CV with a sprinkling of sexual harassment claims and also happens to include a dropped manslaughter charge.’

‘My God.’ Hand pressed against chest, Joanne declares, ‘I’m in love.’

‘And it’s exclusive to us for now.’

‘Barry, I take back everything I said about you. Close the door, let’s hammer this out and get it online.’

‘I don’t know,’ Ava says, cautious. She’s gotten a sniff of something she likes and, as is her habit, goes to doing what she can to get it without giving a thought to the how or why. ‘This is an English story. Why should we be breaking it?’

Joanne, exasperated, explains, ‘He’s beautiful and he murders people.’

Barry sits, arms lazily folded. ‘Besides, he’s Irish.’

‘One of us,’ Joanne swoons. ‘Take us through it. Who are these patients he hurt?’

Tapping a display, Barry brings up information on the doctor’s background to recite. ‘Working with subjects in early stage testing of a potential new medicine for inflammatory diseases, the worst of them reportedly had extreme breathing difficulties within three hours of taking the drug. One ended up in a coma for fifteen days. Loss of blood to her limbs during the ordeal resulted in dry gangrene – that’s mummification of toes, leaving them like stone. Gruesome, but why is it the good doctor’s fault? He didn’t develop the product. Here’s the suss part. In animal studies, delivery of the drug had been carried out over a period of an hour. In the human trial this was reduced to six minutes. Apparently that’s a big deal. On top of that, there’d been concerns that a patient, who’d been prescribed an antibiotic the week previous, would react badly. Two red flags that both needed signatures for them to be overlooked, and our beautiful man,’ Barry gestures to the screen, ‘is the bloke who did the signing.’

‘Medical trial gone wrong doesn’t exactly make him Doctor Death,’ Ava tuts.

The doubt is ignored. Her colleagues put it down to a competitive streak she’s grown with Barry.

‘Where’s this manslaughter charge?’

Barry winces, ‘More a suspicion really.’

‘Go on.’

‘Working for the same company, SimperP, an American business in the top ten big pharma, he was based at their Jersey labs overseeing yet another medical trial when a woman died from an aneurism. There was a suspicion that trace amounts of cytokine would be found in her system but it’s not explained why. Hours passed by the time she got to autopsy, which is suss in itself, and that’s not even taking into account that any trace might have left her system by then.’

‘That’s it?’ Ava’s voice sinks dubiously. ‘They brought him up on charges for that?’

‘Tell me they stuck,’ Joanne begs.

‘No, they were dropped soon after and he left the island. He dossed around Belgium for a while after, but I couldn’t dig anything up on him there. One problem is that a doctor can amass a malpractice record in one country, but pack up and move to another, get licensed and begin again with a clean slate. Malpractice in one place doesn’t appear on the new licensing record. Our doctor has moved around more than your average parish priest. A story about this guy is a story about the whole mess of a system. It’s big. After Belgium he went to England where his latest troubles went down, and now he’s back home, running a trial for the same company just off Dublin Two.’

‘So what do we have here?’ Joanne is trying to bunch the details into a presentable bouquet. ‘Oodles of allegations that didn’t stick, laws that don’t work, and a sinister man who wriggled his way wherever he liked because of it.’ She tap-taps her finger on the table, examining the model-like features of the projected man. ‘A face for the failed system. More a tagline than a headline isn’t it?’

‘There’s no grammar mistakes,’ Ava smirks. ‘Who got this together for you, Barry?’

‘One of the interns found it on the community pages. It’s not big yet. If a couple more people come out of the woodwork to press charges against him it could be a hit though. We have his face, but none for the victims since they’ve all settled. If a pretty girl comes out with something, a struggling mother maybe – we need to get on this before somebody else breaks it.’

‘Nobody will break it.’

‘Look at him Ava!’ Joanna waves at the screen.