Slow Burning Lies (22 page)

39

In the Lake’s End coffee shop, the man seated opposite Maggie Dolan flicked his hand out and the lid of his cigarette lighter clicked open. He rolled a thumb over the roller and there was a faint, barely audible crackle.

The flame that threw itself into the world was long and perfectly formed. The man held it up in front of his face, then drew his hand from side to side, his eyes never leaving the friendly yellow ghost dancing majestically in front of him.

‘Hey, it’s no smoking in here,’ Maggie said.

‘I don’t smoke,’ the man said without taking his eyes off the flame.

‘Is that it?’ Maggie said.

‘The end of the story?’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think you can’t just leave it there.’

‘Why not? It’s my story.’

‘Your story? So you
are
Patrick, yeah?’

He lifted a hand, spread his fingers out wide and teased them over the flame, almost playing it like a pianist tapping the keys of a piano. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I’m not Patrick.’

‘But you have to be.’

‘I don’t have to be anyone,’ the man said, his eyes momentarily more lively.

Maggie watched and waited for him to explain. All he did was wave the flame under his chin a couple of times and half-close his eyes.

‘So is that the end or not?’

He snapped the lighter shut. ‘Of course not.’ He held it tightly in one fist, then rolled the other hand around the fist.

‘So are you going to tell me what happened after this Patrick guy gave himself up?’

‘Who said he gave himself up?’

‘But I thought you said—’

‘You think Patrick would give himself up after all he’s been through? That wouldn’t make for a good story, would it?’

‘I guess not.’

‘And I know how much you want the story to be a good one.’

Maggie waited again, before saying, ‘And so?’

‘So do you want me to continue?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Maggie said.

‘Okay then, I will.’

The phone started ringing.

‘Who the hell
is
that?’ Maggie said. Under the table her hands repositioned the knife. ‘Perhaps I should—’

‘No,’ the man said. ‘Like you said, you’re closed. They can always ring back.’

‘I guess so.’ Maggie said. One cheek bulged slightly as half of her mouth twitched upwards. ‘So go on, finish your story.’

‘Okay,’ the man said.

40

At the end of the ill-lit corridor Beth pulled on Patrick to drag herself to her feet.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Let’s just wait here. It’s for the best.’

‘You know, somehow I’m not completely sure about that.’ He loped a couple of paces to the bend in the corridor and peered around. He still couldn’t see the guards, which meant they hadn’t yet reached the T-junction. ‘But hey,’ he said. ‘We don’t seem to have any choice.’ He returned to Beth and held her. ‘You feeling better?’

She nodded, and moved her body between Patrick and the end of the corridor. He looked beyond her, to the dead end, and squinted.

‘Anyway, what are those signs?’ he said.

He stepped to the side.

So did Beth. ‘I thought we were going to wait for security and stop this wild goose chase?’ she said.

Patrick took a couple of paces forward, brushing aside Beth’s protestations along with her straining arms.

‘I’m going to check,’ he said.

‘Does it matter?’

The sound of running boots paused for a second, then restarted with a slightly different tone.

‘They’re at the T-junction,’ Patrick said. He took three steps closer to the end of the corridor, and a confused frown started to take hold of his forehead.

He pointed to the middle sign. ‘Does that say…?’

He started jogging towards it. Beth followed.

He stopped at the sign and stood still, unable to speak, not listening to Beth.

The sign was at head height and had a large arrow pointing upwards and two words printed on it.

The words were: ‘Patrick Leary’.

‘I don’t get it,’ Patrick said. ‘I mean, is this some sort of sick joke? What the hell is going on?’

He looked up to where the arrow was pointing. The grey cables they’d inadvertently been following disappeared up into the roughly plastered ceiling. And in the centre of the ceiling was a small square door. It reminded Patrick of the hatch door back in the house he grew up in, the one that led to the attic.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I just don’t get it. Someone’s playing a bastard of a trick on me here – either that or I really have fallen over the edge and gone crazy.

Beth reached up and tried to turn his face away from the hatch door. ‘No, Patrick. You haven’t gone crazy. Just wait.’

‘But what is it?’ he said.

They both turned as the guards reached the bend, and were now facing them. The guards paused for breath as they saw the dead end.

Patrick looked up. ‘I’ve got to find out even if you don’t.’ He reached up but couldn’t quite touch the single circular handle midway along one side of the door. His heels lifted off the floor and he stretched his frame up, just about grasping the handle and straining to turning it. It moved with a rusty squeal and after ninety degrees there was a dull click. Patrick pressed his fingertips up against that side of the door. It moved, but only slightly, and reseated itself as soon as he released the pressure.

He looked across to the guards, now strolling purposefully towards them. He crouched down and bounded up into the air, smashing both fists against the door. It flexed but stayed shut. He tried again, it did the same. Another jump and strike, this time with the full force of his forearm. The door flew open with a crunch, and he and Beth bowed their heads as a mass of shimmering blue fragments showered down on them.

Then the guards started running towards them again.

Patrick jumped up once more and grabbed the exposed edge of ceiling with both hands. He swung his body back and forth a couple of times then convulsed his torso and managed to slap an elbow onto the floor above, onto the dark floor of whatever room lay above the hatch. More sharp fragments twinkled as they descended from the darkness past the lights, and Patrick brought another elbow up onto the surface above. With a grunt he struck a palm onto it and heaved himself up and through the hole.

‘Beth! Come on!’

He knelt down by the hole and shot a hand down to her.

But she simply stood there, motionless.

‘Beth?’

He saw her look to the side, then back up to him.

‘Give me your hand!’

But all she offered up to him was a pained expression.

Seconds later the guards reached her. They didn’t even touch Beth, but instead looked up to Patrick.

Patrick saw no more. At that moment he slammed the door down, snapping the debris that stood in its way, and plunging himself into darkness. He knelt down on top of the door and fumbled around, not fully sure what for.

His hands fell upon a large solid object. Yes, it seemed heavy enough. He gave it a shove. It moved. Still keeping his knees on the hatch he reached both hands out, took a few moments to find handholds, and started to tug the object – whatever it was – towards him. It screeched and scraped like a clutch of stones pulled up the steel hull of a ship, but come it did. Eventually it came to a halt on top of the hatch and Patrick let out a long groan.

He lay on his back on the floor, staying close enough to the hatch in case the guards tried to open it again. But all was silent apart from Patrick’s own panting. Once he’d calmed himself down he started to hear faint sounds, mechanical noises that accelerate and decelerated. It sounded like traffic. Tentatively reaching out, he started to feel his way around the room.

Apart from the countless fragments which Patrick now realized were smooth yet sharp, most items were big and solid. He got to his feet and felt a little further afield. His hand fell up on something soft and cottony – a damp thick material of some sort. Then he turned back and something stroked his face, making him jerk and put his hands up to defend himself. But there was nothing. He slowly cast a hand across in front of his face and found it, still wriggling from his reaction. It was string. A light switch?

He pulled the string and his eyes instinctively squeezed shut at the harsh brightness. He held a palm against his forehead like a visor, and surveyed the room.

It was a bathroom.

He’d broken through the floor of a bathroom, shattering the tiled floor in the process.

But there was more.

It took a few seconds for him to be sure – to believe his eyes – but there was no mistaking it. He checked the toothbrush on the sink, the shower gel in the glass cubicle, and the small bag on the large cabinet he’d dragged onto the trap door.

Everything in the room had been showered with fragments of the shattered floor tiles, but no, there was no mistaking it.

Even the sign in the corridor below had said it.

This was the bathroom of Patrick’s own apartment.

41

Patrick looked to the sink, then the shower cubicle, and then the cabinet, askew and lonely in the centre of the room.

He checked every little item from the shaving foam to the towels to the familiar scuff marks on the wall near the light switch cord.

It didn’t need much checking. This was no stunt. It was definitely his bathroom, from the hi-tech razor to the way he folded his towels – or didn’t.

Quietly, fearfully, he opened the door and stepped outside and into the small hallway leading to the living area. And then he felt all at once both at home but also very queasy.

Everything from the packet of gum on the pile of magazines to the view from the window made him sick.

And then it got worse. It hit him.

That was why Beth had stalled, why she kept saying they should turn back or give themselves up – anything to keep him away from that hatch. It also explained why she didn’t come up into the bathroom with him, preferring to stay and ‘be caught’. Did that mean the bitch knew all along where the private pedway led to? Could that have been why she insisted on coming with him in the first place? If so, then what more truths were lurking in the darkness?

It was Beth who had egged him on to kill Rozita – he really wouldn’t have done it without her influence, not to mention her transport. And did he really tell her about his sick nightmare holding the Carlini family hostage? If he didn’t and she found out some other way, what the hell was that ‘other way’?

He shook thoughts of friends – or people who perhaps never had been friends – from his mind and started to give some thought to what to do next.

Grey cables.

That was the answer to
what to do next
. Grey cables.

He went back to the bathroom and revisited the scene of his entrance – the cabinet with the hidden trapdoor underneath. He stared down, trying to visualize the cables that had come up from the tunnel below, trying to remember which direction they were routed. They’d obviously been laid under the flooring, but where did they lead to?

He dug the heel of his boot into the fractured floor tiles again and again, shielding his face from the flying fragments thrown up by his strikes. It took ten or twenty attempts before the grey cables were revealed. They separated into two bundles, one heading towards the bedroom, and one towards the door to the hall and main living room.

He dashed into the kitchen, pulled open a drawer and sifted through the contents, creating a minor percussion orchestra as an assortment of metal utensils were flung from side to side. He grabbed a couple of flat-bladed items, then plucked the biggest, sharpest knife from the magnetic holder on the wall, and went into the bedroom.

There, he knelt down against the wall adjoining the bathroom, and took a wild stab at where he thought the cables might feed through. Soon a section of carpet was ripped up, but beneath the off-white glue that retained fragments of the carpet there was no obvious break in the concrete floor.

He looked towards the bed, then went across and knelt down at its edge. He hoisted the knife up alongside his head and braced his body for another stab.

But he stopped. He focussed on a small rectangular section of carpet underneath the bed. From this angle it looked out of place, different to the rest in some way. He crawled underneath on his belly and scraped the section up using his knife, revealing a white grille.

Was this part of the air-con system?

No. If it was it wouldn’t have been covered by carpet, and in any case the air-con was supplied overhead.

He hooked the tip of the knife under the edge and lifted it out. It was made of plastic and obviously only there to support the section of carpet.

He eased himself back out, fetched a flashlight, and returned. Now, with more light, he could see that the legs of the bed were bolted down onto the floor by their insides, something which wasn’t obvious unless you made the effort to look. It was also clear that the hole in the floor was dead centre underneath the pillow end of the bed.

He crawled along a little more and shone the flashlight inside the hole. If there was any time he wished he’d studied physics or engineering, that time was now. There were three items. The major one was a dark grey circular block with wire wound around it, with a circuit board and a couple of fins like tiny radiators. The second item looked like a mini TV aerial, again with a circuit board attached. Both of these were wired up to the third item, a metal box with ventilation holes, and on the other side of the box were those familiar grey cables tunnelling under the floor in the direction of the bathroom.

Patrick recognized the metal box from his days taking computers apart. It was a power supply. But for what?

He took a deep breath and tentatively reached into the hole with his hand, giving each item a sharp tap with the outside of his fingers. It was then that the thing seemed to grab him, snapping his wrist back at an angle over the edge of the hole, pulling and holding him in place. He grunted as he struggled but couldn’t pull his hand away.

Jesus, what
was
this thing?

Twisting his arm in the confined space, he eased his head towards the hole and looked inside, a shoulder pressing against the underside of the bed. But it was enough to see what was holding him in.

It was his watch.

His metal watchstrap was clinging to the main object like a barnacle to a boat. It was a powerful magnet.

Now in a better position, he placed a foot forward and used it as purchase to pull his hand free. He took a closer look and saw the letters ‘MWFT’ and a small logo. He spoke the letters aloud, questioning himself but not coming up with any answers. He removed his watch and reached in again, this time turning the contraption over, twisting those grey cables in the process. On the back, in a small stick-on panel, was a power rating and the words Microwave Frequency Transceiver. Patrick said the four letters again.

He let go and scuttled out from under the bed. He didn’t need a degree in physics or engineering to know what this was. It was a transmitter and receiver of microwave signals in one package – lodged right underneath where he’d been sleeping – where he’d had all of those gross nightmares.

Was his brain being fried like a microwave TV dinner as he slept? Was that what had been happening to him?

The thought made him dizzy. He fell back and sat on the floor with his back against the wall. He brought his knees up, rested his elbows on them, and indulged himself for a moment, clasping his head in his hands.

The possibilities of what had been happening to him – no,
what someone had been doing to him
– were too much to take in. This was his home, his sanctuary, and he felt every bit as violated as he would have done had the place been burgled and ransacked. In fact, more than that. At least burglars leave, but this was more disturbing in its calculated intrusion.

Then he lifted his head and looked to the hallway. The bunch of cables coming up from the pedway had divided into two. If one feed came to the bedroom and this device under the bed then where did the other go?

He grabbed his knife and jumped up, then dashed into the living room. Within minutes he’d ripped up the section of the carpet that ran across the doorway and located the channel carrying the cables. More stabbing and ripping later he’d traced the path to the TV and internet sockets.

But this was the internet. There was only one internet, wasn’t there? And he’d been watching network TV, hadn’t he? Then he remembered back in the VTA offices, not half an hour earlier, when he’d seen footage of the bullet train crash in Japan and TV news reports about the Paris poisonings.

Yeah, he’d seen those back in the VTA offices –
at the other end of these cables
.

And that explained why nobody had been talking about the incidents, and why the news items had vanished from the internet. Perhaps the simple truth was that the accident in Japan and the terrorist attack in Paris had never happened. It was clear to Patrick now that a few of those TV news articles had been tampered with, and that one or two of the websites he’d visited hadn’t been the ones he’d thought they were.

So someone at VTA – or more accurately, OrSum – had been controlling his TV and internet feeds as well as doing something to his head with microwaves while he was sleeping.

And there was one person he knew who was in on this game, one person who would know who was doing all of this and why.

Beth.

He grabbed his wallet and left the apartment.

In the foyer he walked straight past security.

‘Sir?’ the larger of the two men behind desk said.

‘I’m sorry,’ Patrick said. ‘I’m in a rush.’

‘Mister Leary?’

‘What is it?’

‘Could you come to the desk for a moment please? There’s something I need you to see.’

Patrick glanced out of the large display windows either side of the door. The one on the left had a large ornamental acer tree on the inside to complement the manicured gardens outside. The other gave a clear view down onto the car park. All was calm.

‘Can’t it wait?’ he said.

‘It won’t take a minute, sir.’

Should he bolt or play it cool?

Cool was always best. Marlon Brando would play it cool.

He tried for a relaxed smile and approached the desk. ‘What is it I need to see?’

‘Could you come round to this side?’

The relaxed smile now slipped away like a heavy paving slab he just couldn’t hold onto any longer. ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Show me here.’

The guards exchanged a glance. The one who’d been talking pulled out a gun and pointed it directly at Patrick.

‘You’re kidding,’ Patrick said.

‘We’ve just been asked to detain you.’ The guard sounded conciliatory, almost apologetic.

‘And do you know what for?’

The guard shrugged. ‘I’m sure there are good reasons.’

Patrick’s eyes hopped between the gun and the guard’s soft eyes for a few moments. Then he said, ‘And I’m sure you wouldn’t use that.’ He took a couple of slow paces back, then turned and ran to the door.

‘Sir!’ the guard shouted. ‘You’ll find that’s locked.’

The words were unnecessary. Patrick was holding the door handle – turning it, pulling it, pushing it – more in anger than any realistic hope the door might actually open.

It was then the security guard stepped out from behind the desk and started approaching. Patrick always thought the section of floor behind the desk was raised. It wasn’t – the man must have been six and a half feet tall, and broad-shouldered too.

The other guard stayed behind, covering the other possible escape route – the walkway leading back to Patrick’s apartment. The guard stopped halfway to Patrick and all three men froze, considering their options.

An engine noise cut the atmosphere. They all turned to see a car pull up outside. The second the car came to a halt four very severe looking and sharp-suited men got out and looked around furtively.

It looked like they had all eventualities covered.

Except one.

The acer plant by the other window was as pretty as hell. It was also set in an equally pretty large ceramic pot.

Patrick crouched down, knees astride it, and up-ended the whole thing so the tree fell towards the oncoming security guard, holding off his advance.

The plant and ceramic pot separated, and Patrick hurled the latter towards the display window. Both pot and window appeared to shatter in slow motion, yet the smash seemed instant and then there was silence. Patrick leapt over the large jagged remains of the window pane, and turned left, away from the four men who had got out of the car and were now bounding up the steps towards him.

Patrick started running, and didn’t stop for two miles.