Strangled Silence (10 page)

It seemed Chi Sandwith didn't take 'no' for an
answer.

Amina came out of the the
Chronicle
offices
with a renewed sense of purpose. She had asked
Goldbloom if she could follow up Ivor's story from
a mental-health perspective and he had agreed, but
with reservations. She had to keep up with her
grunt work in the office and she had to use some
discretion in her enquiries. He didn't want some
fumbling temp traipsing around using the name of
the paper to open doors. Having agreed that she
would hold up her end of the office work and keep
her traipsing to a minimum, Amina was given her
chance to see how much more she could make of the
story.

A tall guy with wiry fair hair, wearing trendy
narrow-framed glasses and a dark grey trench coat
intercepted her as she exited the front door of the
building.

'Hi, Amina Mir?'

'Yes?'

'I'm Chi Sandwith,' he said brightly, extending
his hand.'We spoke briefly on the phone? I've been
trying to reach you for the last couple of days.'

'How did you know my name?'

'I did a search for you on the web. Your school
team won a national hockey trophy two years ago.
The team photo is proudly displayed on the
school's website. Congratulations on your victory,
by the way.'

She shook his hand, and looked around
discreetly for an escape route.

'Twenty seconds,' he said.

'Sorry?'

'You're looking at me like I'm a double-glazing
salesman. I'm not. Give me twenty seconds to
explain my angle and then if you decide you never
want to see or hear from me again, I'll honour your
wishes.'

Amina blinked slowly, biting back a smile, and
gave him a noncommittal nod.

'OK.' He grinned, nodding back. 'Ivor
McMorris. He's a Sinnostan war veteran, right? Let
me guess – he's showing symptoms of posttraumatic
stress: hallucinations, nightmares, mood
swings, paranoid delusions, yeah? Doesn't like going
out? Thinks he's being watched?'

'You could just be—' Amina started to say.

'I could be fishing, yeah,' Chi cut her off. 'But
I'm not. He was injured, wasn't he? Does he have
unnaturally accurate memories of the period of two
or three days when he picked up his injuries? Feels
like an unchanging film in his mind?' He could see
from Amina's face that he had scored a hit. 'He has,
hasn't he? Have there been any periods since his
discharge from the army when he feels like he's lost
a day or more but can't explain why? No? Has he
said anything about a group of people called the
Scalps? No? Has he . . . has he seen any UFOs?
No? Definitely not, huh? OK . . . these people
who're watching him – does he have trouble seeing
their faces? And I don't mean they're hidden or
masked, I mean he could literally be looking
straight at them and still not see any features on
their faces . . . except maybe their eyes. Does he get
that? He does, doesn't he?'

They were staring at each other now.

'He does,' Chi muttered again, almost to himself.
'That was longer than twenty seconds,' Amina
said.

Chi didn't answer. He was gazing at her with a
strange smile on his face.

'All right.' She lifted her chin. 'What do you
know?'

She was a bit wary of letting Chi take her back to
his house. He wasn't a very threatening type –
slightly nerdy, a couple of years older than her,
maybe twenty or so – but he was a big guy and
showed definite signs of being a little unstable. They
took a taxi, and he made a point of sitting behind
the driver so he could look in the rear-view mirror,
as well as casting his eyes out of the window on
either side. Each of his hands, legs and head took
turns jiggling to an imaginary beat, as if he couldn't
bear to sit still. He didn't tell her a lot on the way
there, preferring to try and tap her for information
instead. Amina didn't give him much. She would
wait to see what he had to offer first.

The house was impressive. A sprawling
asymmetric building of rough stone and floor-toceiling
windows, it spoke of comfortable,
unassuming wealth. The shallowly sloping roofs
extended into a veranda on the south side, overlooking
a spacious garden.

Inside, it was a contrasting mix of areas; some
dressed in trendy ethnic décor from around the
world, others filled with a more homely clutter. Chi
explained that he lived in the house with his
parents, who were separated. They still shared the
place, but arranged never to be there at the same
time. His father normally lived in Switzerland and
his mother in Florida. Both were computer geeks
who'd made their money in the dot-com boom of
the 1990s. Neither of them left much of a mark
on the house and he couldn't fill it all by himself.

'So, Chi Sandwith, huh?'Amina commented as
they strolled through the hallway and kitchen and
into a wing of the house where the clutter had long
dominated. 'You get many cracks about cheese
sand—'

'Never. Never heard that one before,' Chi
interrupted her. 'What can I say? My folks had
more spiritualism than sense. Suppose they thought
that calling me "life energy" was pretty cool.'

'OK. Weeeellll . . . let's see what you've got.'

Judging by the shelves of disks, the plans chest
and a full wall of filing cabinets, he had a lot – but
Amina wasn't sure how much of it was actually
going to be relevant . . . or even real. Her heart sank
when she saw the poster that hung on one wall. It
was a photo of a blurred image of what was presumably
a flying saucer against dusky clouds. Why
was it that UFOs never showed up when there was
a competent photographer around armed with a
long-lens and tripod? Across the bottom of the
poster were the words:
WATCH THE SKIES
.

There were no windows in this room. A
powerful PC with a stack of servers, peripheral
hardware and three monitors occupied one desk,
and another was taken up with tools and half-built
electrical devices she couldn't identify. A ginger cat
with white belly and paws wandered in after them
and jumped up on the computer desk, watching
Chi as he moved about the room. He had taken a
gadget about the size of a television remote from
his pocket and was walking methodically back and
forth across the room, waving it around.

'Counter-surveillance,' he muttered. 'Checking
for radio signals. Can't be too careful.'

'No. I suppose not.'

Amina continued to look around. The place
was dusty and cluttered, but not untidy. It looked
like Chi was particular about his organization.
Everything was labelled with a series of letters and
numbers that suggested a reference system of some
kind. One wall was taken up with photographs and
newspaper and magazine clippings, as well as printouts
from websites. Most of the pictures were of
soldiers in Asia, the Middle East or North Africa.
There were also some drawings: figures with
smudged or blurred faces.

'OK, we're fine,' Chi declared with a satisfied
grunt. 'Let's get down to business.'

They settled down on comfortable leather
swivel chairs in front of the computer screens so
that Chi could click through various windows
while he talked.

'Ivor McMorris is not alone. I have interview
material from more than twenty Sinnostan veterans
who suffer from similar symptoms. Each of them
says they know others like them – the tally could
run into the hundreds, maybe even thousands. I got
some of this information from the
National News
–
I do the odd article for them – but most of this I've
picked up myself from interviews, veteran support
sites, as well as television reports and articles
like yours. These things lie around the edges of the
big stories but I've spent the last couple of years
distilling them . . . building them into a bigger
picture.

'There are some common threads that run
through each of these people's stories: the two or
three days of memories that seem unreal – or
too
real; the certainty that they are missing some part of
that time; hallucinations or nightmares of being
wheeled along a corridor while bound onto a
hospital trolley, of being paralysed while dark
figures operate on them; some are convinced that
they're being watched and just a few cases have
experienced what your guy McMorris has talked
about: seeing people with blurred faces. Blurred
faces with eyes. I think those cases may be the ones
who really
are
under surveillance.'

As he spoke, he clicked through photos of the
people he had spoken to, or the reports he had
drawn his information from.

'It's taken me a long time to separate out all of
the relevant stuff, I can tell you. War generates all
kinds of paranoid conspiracy theories. There are a
lot of nuts out there.'

'I can imagine,' Amina said. 'So what's your
theory?'

'I'm only getting started,' Chi replied, motioning
with his hands to urge patience. 'One guy I
spoke to has some of the symptoms, but he wasn't
a soldier. His name's Stefan Gierek and he was a
truck driver in Sinnostan, a civilian contractor. And
he's different from the others. He was with a
platoon of Royal Marines just outside Kring-Jintot
when it was attacked. Like so many of the other
engagements in this little war, it was out in the
middle of nowhere. I've read the reports on it; all of
the surviving marines tell the story exactly the same
way: they were driving in a convoy through
a severe storm when they came under fire in a
narrow gorge not far from the village. They
returned fire and called for air support but couldn't
get through on the radios. They eventually got out
of the valley and made a fighting withdrawal to the
village where they were based.

'But Gierek swears there was no attack. He was
bringing up the rear of the convoy and he was late.
He says that when he pulled up, he saw the vehicles
stopped in the gorge – the front APC had run
off the road. Everyone was slumped in their seats
or on the ground around the vehicles. He
thought they were all dead until he checked a
couple of them and discovered they were asleep.
Gierek is a complete survival nut; he had better gear
than half the soldiers there. He kept a detailed
journal of his experiences in Sinnostan and one of
the pieces of kit he carried was a webcam concealed
in the rim of his helmet. His memories of
the incident are much the same as the soldiers', if a
little more conflicted. But this is what his camera
saw next.'

Chi clicked on a file and a movie-player
window appeared. The camera was looking from
Gierek's point of view as he climbed out of the cab
of his sand-coloured truck. The picture was low
resolution and moved jerkily, the view changing
constantly as he looked around him. His movements
were confused. There was sound: Gierek
swearing to himself, breathing heavily, dust and
small stones blowing against the truck and the huffing
of a strong wind across the microphone. It was
hard to see anything in the low light of the storm,
but it was clear that there were bodies lying around
the vehicles ahead. One other military-style,
four-wheel-drive truck was visible, with its distinct
chunky wheels and high chassis, and ahead of it, the
more angular shapes of two armoured personnel
carriers with roof-mounted heavy machine-guns.
The rest of the gorge was hidden in the blustery
clouds of dust.

'Look like a raging fire-fight to you?' Chi asked
quietly.

Gierek hurried forward, the camera bouncing
with his movement. He came upon the body of a
soldier in full combat kit, semi-automatic rifle still
held in limp hands. Gierek's hand reached down
and checked for breathing and pulse. He stood
up and ran on, checking others. Two, then three
more were found to be unconscious.

Amina was riveted by the film. Had Ivor gone
through something like this? It was hard to picture
him out there: a recognizable face, a real human in
this surreal scene. She was struck by memories of
her own, of something she'd seen years ago.

Gierek's movements were becoming erratic,
panicky. He suddenly reacted to something, swinging
round to look behind him. There was a bright
light and then something knocked him to the
ground. The light scorched the scene white and
then the film ended.

Amina found she was leaning forward towards
the screen. She sat back and crossed her arms.

'OK, I'm intrigued,' she admitted. 'So what was
going on?'

'I don't really know,' Chi replied. He looked at
her warily for a moment, and then shrugged. 'My
contacts and I think we're looking at an honest-to-
God alien abduction.'

Amina tilted her head, but otherwise her
expression remained unchanged.

'You think that's stupid, I can tell,' he said
to her.

Yes, she thought to herself. I think you'd really
have to be looking for an alien abduction to find
one on that film. You'd have to be a full-on
UFO conspiracy nut to believe something like
that.