Shrike (Book 2): Rampant (27 page)

I'm tired of having no useful expertise to contribute. I can't exactly confront any virus or bacteria infecting my friends and punch them.

When my mobile rings, I'm not even surprised to see Trevor's name. "Trevor," I say.

"Granger got away again. Amelie Evans is dead."

"Fuck!" The expletive bursts out of my lips before I can stop it. An elderly man eyes me askance, but keeps walking down the corridor.

Amelie Evans. I repeat the name in my mind. Amelie Evans. Amelie Evans. Amelie Evans.

She paid the price for me letting Granger go. 

"How did this happen, Trevor?" I ask, already knowing the answer because my I'm accusing myself.

"She's fast and bright and she surprised us again." He sounds tired, so tired. 

My tiny bit of hope is fast dwindling. My momentary effervescence from discovering I can almost fly, my certainty that there would be more kisses with Taog — it all seems like a dream I concocted to escape the reality of death, constant death. 

"What are you going to do?"

"We're proceeding to a different course of action. All remaining list members are being taken into protective custody, effective immediately. You said there's another Gu Bràth member at ERI?"

"Tasha Smith is here. Same condition as Taog."

"I see." Trevor lets out an explosive breath. "Is Taog okay?"

"He's unconscious, though they got his fever stabilised," I say through tight lips. 

"And Tasha?"

"Sleeping, but not passed out."

There's the sound of a muffled conversation, then Trevor speaks again. "Where are you? Which ward?"

"203, Respiratory Medicine."

"Bloody hell. I'm told there's another Gu Bràth member there too. Ahmed Mohammad." From the sound of Trevor's voice, he doesn't quite believe it.

"Trevor," I say. "Check on every Gu Bràth member you can find, on or off the list. Especially any who work in the office. Taog said everyone at the office was ill."

"We're on it."

He hangs up, leaving me sitting here with Magda.

"Gwen," she says. Her hands weave a small plait in a pair of blonde curls that hang over her breast. 

I look at her, waiting for her to go on.

"You thought that John Abbey had poisoned me, that night of my celebration."

"Aye, I did. They found evidence that the champagne was drugged, but Trevor said one of his undercover people suspected the lounge of wrongdoing before your party, and he said it had nothing to do with Britannia."

Magda's fingers fall from the plait, and she frowns. "I do not know if this is right, but if Taog's friends are ill too, what if there is someone poisoning them?"

Her words hit me like an avalanche. I remember Taog jokingly saying that someone must have come in and sneezed on the water cooler at the Gu Bràth office, with everyone so ill. 

"The bloody water cooler." I can see the sodding thing in my mind's eye, with Bronwyn Sultani filling a glass just after dismissing me when I came by. It isn't all members of Gu Bràth who are ill; it's just the ones who work out of the office. I ring Trevor back immediately.

"Busy, Gwen," he starts to say.

"The water cooler at Gu Bràth," I tell him. "Have your forensics people analyse it."

"What?"

"Remember how you thought I was being paranoid about the champagne at Magda's party? Well, now I'm being paranoid about the water cooler at an office where every person to work there is coughing up blood. Be a pet and humour me, McLean."

He coughs himself, then, and I can almost feel the phantom tickle in my own throat, knowing he must be wondering what it's like to be as ill as Taog and Tasha. "Right-o, lass. I'll have someone look into it."

"Cheers, Trevor. Bloody hell, if I'm wrong, so be it, but if I'm right, we need to know." I glance involuntarily down the corridor toward Taog's room. "We need to know yesterday."

Magda takes my hand again, and we sit in silence.

Amelie Evans is dead. Gu Bràth's leaders are ill. And I've a countdown ticking down on my mobile to I don't know what. 

There's too much I don't understand, too much I don't know, like lone branches of a tree that don't connect to a trunk. I need to find where they join, I need to find what ties all these things together.

I need to find Britannia — and I need to chop that tree down and mulch it.

twenty-seven

As much as I don't want to obey, the doctors send us home a few hours later when four more Gu Bràth members are brought in, all in the same condition. Burning fever. Blood on their lips from coughing. Symptoms of strep, influenza, and tuberculosis all at once. 

There's an icy vein of fear running through me constantly. It keeps my breath coming quickly, and when the doctors say the word
quarantine
, I hate it, but I know they're right. 

I keep the list of Gu Bràth members in my mind. Taog MacMillan. My Taog. My friend and confidant and hopefully-someday-lover. Tasha Smith. Ahmed Mohammad. Bronwyn Sultani. Adair McCullough. Dirk Fraser. Kashmir Muldoon. 

And Zachary Ramsay, the man Bronwyn mentioned as being patient zero, was air-lifted from Mull to a hospital in Glasgow two days ago. 

Even Trevor can't pooh-pooh this coincidence.

Magda and I get home to a cold flat, and it's strange coming in knowing Taog won't be popping over. In the past months, his flat next door has become almost an extension of ours. We three go in one door and out another, meandering back and forth between our homes. He stays in my bed, I stay in his. Magda makes coffee for all three of us in the mornings. Taog sometimes bakes scones. We've become family, we three.

And when your blood is the only remaining blood in your family tree, the family you build becomes your new grove.

Both Magda and I feel the emptiness in our home without Taog. I can tell by the way she goes immediately to make tea, starting to wash up the set of three mugs in the sink only to turn the water off partway through, leaving them soaking in suds as if cleaning them and putting them away would somehow remove Taog's presence even further. 

The burbling sputter of the kettle pervades the kitchen, and Magda speaks over it.

"I want to help," she says. "I could not help you last time. I want to help you now."

Her fingers curl in on a fist, and she smooths them out over the worktop. I can almost see the war in her. Her dream was handed to her by a man I suspect of being the instigator of all our angst and troubles. Her kidnapping. The way it's taken us months to walk into our flat and not check every window and door after Mick Hamilton and Darren Forbes robbed us of our safety here. The way she still avoids stepping on a certain patch of floor in my bedroom where Hamilton's blood pooled under his broken skull. The way she has poured herself into her work as if she had to prove to me, to Taog, to herself that she could go on like normal when nothing will ever be normal again.

"What can I do?" she says.

John Abbey is one of the keys; I know he is. Even if he's not really the head of Britannia, he inserted himself into our lives, and I know he's somehow involved. Maybe he's the one Trevor's undercover friend was searching for, maybe he's only peripherally connected to Britannia. 

And that's only if Trevor's right and I hallucinated seeing him at Magda's party.

I don't think Trevor's right. 

"We need to find John Abbey," I say to Magda. 

"I can try ringing him. He gave me his mobile number and told me to ring any time."

It's simple to the point of absurdity, and I want to laugh. The likelihood that Abbey would answer his mobile is almost naught, but I shrug. "It's worth trying."

Magda scrolls through her contacts and presses the button to call. "It is ringing," she says.

So he hasn't disconnected the number. My mind combs through the possible thought processes behind Abbey's decisions, from investing in Magda's work to giving her his personal mobile number, to vanishing but leaving that number intact.

Voice mail
, she mouths at me. "Hello, John," she says. "We are working hard on the portfolio, and I had some questions for you about the textiles you recommended. Please ring me back."

She hangs up, and I want to applaud her. It can't hurt to send Trevor Abbey's mobile number, so I do that next, then settle in at the table with Andrew Granger's letters. 

"Can I help?" Magda asks.

"Of course." I show her what Taog has found. "You're looking for any references that could give us a clue where Britannia has infiltrated.

She pages through the letters from the beginning while I look over Taog's notes. He's drawn diagrams that look like the brainstorming webs one of my teachers used to make me use in school. Minutes slide by before I realise I haven't heard the shuffle of papers from Magda. I look at her, and a tear tumbles into her lap.

"He really loved her," she says.

Something tightens in my core, and I swallow. "I know."

"We watched him die."

"I know."

"It makes me want to scream." 

That's not the sentiment I expect to hear from Magda, and she wipes another tear away from her cheek angrily. "They rot everything they touch. Britannia. They rotted him. They rotted this love. They rot everything."

I'm not sure I've ever heard the word rot used as a verb like that, but it somehow fits perfectly. She's right. They do. The touch of Britannia rotted Andrew Granger until all that was left was a half-mad husk, stained with the blood of a man who had never wronged him.

"Today I walked down by the old church at Holyrood," Magda says, and it takes me a minute to understand that she's reading from the letter in her hand. "What old church?"

"It's just ruins now," I tell her automatically. "The abbey. Holyrood Abbey."

The abbey. The fucking abbey.

I splutter a barrage of expletives without knowing what I'm saying. "John Abbey."

Magda's face pales, but I want to grab her and kiss her. Exhaustion and stress have dulled my mind. I must have read that letter a thousand times, and I never thought to question the church. Taog's thought-webs didn't even mention it; in fact, he put down
church
as a possible Britannia surname, so sure that each word in Andrew's letters had to be taken at face value.

How frightened of John Abbey must Andrew have been, if he even coded his name in a box of letters that were already in encoded?

John Abbey must be the head of Britannia. He must be.

"Magda," I say, "You're a sodding genius."

After two hours, Magda and I have a new list. Places we believe Britannia to have infiltrated.

Holyrood.

The Church of Scotland. 

The Ministry of Justice.

The police, which I already suspected.

And most frighteningly, the military. 

We already knew about Rosamund Granger — she was in the Royal Military Police when I first met her — but Andrew's letters imply more. It's in a line from one of the letters in the middle of the stack that Andrew gave us a number.
I hate that it's always thirty. Thirty days before I see your face. Thirty days between kisses. Always thirty. Such a small number, so how can it cause so much anguish in my heart and home?

Only if someone had read all of Andrew's letters would that stand out. He and Gina saw each other every other week or every other month, not every thirty days. 

Thirty members of Britannia. As far as conspiracies go, I'm unsurprised that it is a relatively small number, but I am surprised even to hear there are that many of them. And the number holds even more significance knowing that Edmund Frost and Rosamund Granger had been working on their plots for thirty years.

Britannia, it seems, plays a very long game. 

Rosamund Granger is back in Falkirk, my mobile tells me. Probably washing Amelie Evans's blood from her hands. For the first time when I look at that pulsing white dot on my mobile's screen, I see it as a target.

I receive a call from Trevor at three in the afternoon. Part of me wishes I just had an open line to him in my brain at this point. 

"Talk to me, Trevor," I say.

"You were right about the water cooler."

My insides do a flip, and I can't tell if it's dread or triumph. "I was right."

"The lab found active bacteria and viruses in the water. Streptococcus and influenza were among them."

I don't sweat easily, but I feel perspiration break out on my forehead. "Tell me something good, please."

The silence on the line makes me bang my hand into the table. The wood cracks, and Magda jumps. 

"They're very ill, Gwen. The doctors are quarantining them all in the respiratory ward, just in case, and they're all receiving the best treatment they can, but I won't lie to you. Doctor Jensen tells me that in lab controls, when researchers are trying to do a controlled infection of a test subject, they create a solution diluting the actual infection. It's possible that two weeks ago, when the Gu Bràth people first felt ill, that was the case. But what we found in that water cooler was full of microbes. Someone didn't want them ill; they wanted them dead."