Strangled Silence (32 page)

He looked up at Amina, fear written on his
face.

'I have no idea how long this has been here. I
haven't taken her collar off in ages. We have to
assume they've been able to hear every word we've
said from the start.'

Amina was abruptly conscious of how vulnerable
they were here, the two of them alone in this
big house.

'Let's get out of here,' she urged him. 'I need
some air.'

'Sure, just let me get something upstairs.'

Chi understood Amina's need for people and light
and noise, but the complete failure of his countersurveillance
had shattered his confidence. He didn't
want to leave the house. He wanted to talk to his
mates online, or surf through his files or the web
looking for new leads, new connections. What he
didn't want was to think about what this all meant.

He had hidden Nexus's stuff in a concealed
compartment in the base of his bedroom wardrobe.
Pulling out the backpack, he opened it up and
checked through it. It would be easy enough to get
the fake IDs changed so that he could use them
himself. The credit cards were next to useless without
the pin numbers, but Chi had enough cash put
by in readiness for a time like this. The disguise kit
might come in useful, and he was certainly going to
keep the can of Mace handy.

He wasn't sure if he wanted to run just yet –
maybe they had let him find out just how impotent
he was so they wouldn't have to bother killing him.
Presumably it was less risky to simply neutralize the
threat somebody posed rather than bumping them
off altogether. These thoughts flared through his
mind, throwing themselves against the wave of fear
that loomed on the point of overwhelming him.
Maybe they were sitting in a van or rented room
somewhere, laughing at him and his pathetic little
quest. Maybe he'd never been in any danger at all.

Even so, he wanted to be ready. He and the
others in his network always talked about the
possibility of having to 'disappear' before somebody
did it for them, and he had made half-hearted plans
to do just that. But he never really believed it would
be necessary. He believed it now.

There was a small gap in the curtains that
covered the floor-to-ceiling window. He went over
to them, opening them wide to gaze out at the
night sky. It was hard to see any stars over the city
lights. Chi yearned for the days when he had just
been chasing UFOs and aliens. The dark side of
human nature was so much more terrifying than
extra-terrestrial bogeymen. He felt like he'd been
kidding himself this whole time. Why watch horror
films when you could read a history book or just
turn on the news and see it for real? Because horror
films gave you a way out. They told you it wasn't
real. Chi chuckled to himself, shaking his head.

He was neck-deep in reality now . . . and all
because of an illusion of war.

The sight of a dark grey disc, almost invisible
against the evening gloom, made him start. It
dropped down out of nowhere to be framed by the
window and he stared at it in disbelief. A beam of
pulsing light flashed in his face and he blinked, but
was unable to take his eyes off the unidentified flying
object. It was only as he started to faint that he
remembered the significance of the strobing lights.
As he collapsed to the floor, Chi could have sworn
he heard gunshots and the sound of smashing glass.

Amina. He knew they'd come for him
eventually, but Amina was here too. She didn't
deserve what they'd do to her. This was his last
thought before he blacked out.

Chi woke to find Amina kneeling next to him,
gently slapping his face. There was the smell of
smoke in the air. The smell came from the muzzle
of the gun she held in her hand.

'What the hell happened?' he asked, sitting
up.

'You've got a UFO out in your front garden,'
she told him. 'We better get out there. Your neighbours
are getting curious.'

Amina talked as they hurried down the stairs.
She had come up to check on him. She probably
didn't like being alone in the house and he couldn't
blame her. The lights had just started flashing in his
face as she walked in and on impulse, she had drawn
her father's automatic from her bag and started
shooting. Evidently she was a good shot; she had hit
whatever the thing was despite standing in a lighted
room, shooting through glass at a target hovering in
darkness outside.

'Like you said,' she sniffed as she opened the
front door. 'If you want to keep a secret, don't stick
flashing lights all over it.'

The thing lay on the grass, where the Furmans,
Chi's next-door neighbours, were already inspecting
it from the far side of their wall. Front
doors were opening up and down the street. The
gunshots were attracting a lot of attention and Chi
was grateful for every bit of it. The more witnesses,
the less likely he and Amina were to be dragged
into an unmarked van and driven away.

'What's going on, Chi?' Gary Furman asked.
'Bit late in the night for loud experiments, isn't it?
You haven't been messing with explosives again,
have you?'

'Nothing to worry about, Gary,' Chi reassured
him as he stared down at the object, which was
about a metre wide. 'It's just a prototype surveillance
drone a black ops group have been using
to keep tabs on me. It was trying to disable me with
strobe lights but Amina here shot it down. I don't
think it'll be giving us any more trouble.'

Furman smirked and shook his head, exchanging
a look with his wife. They knew enough about
Chi's bizarre interests to know when to take him
seriously. This wasn't one of those times. Some of
the other neighbours looked at each other with the
same expression. Chi glanced around and grinned
at Amina.

'Sometimes the truth is too much explanation
for people,' he giggled softly.

The drone was a cloudy grey disc a little over a
metre in diameter. It had four turbofans that could
move independently and a series of lenses around
its edge that looked like they might be cameras of
different kinds. There were three bullet holes in its
top edge. Chi lifted it up to look underneath. It
weighed little more than a large model airplane. A
tube set into the underside looked as if it could
project the focused light that had knocked him out
only minutes before. The whole thing appeared to
be seriously state-of-the-art. He could only guess at
what kind of technology lay under its skin. He was
going to have fun finding out.

Someone must have called the police. There
were sirens wailing in the distance. They would
arrive in a matter of minutes.

'What are we going to do now?' Amina asked.

She had a small camera out and was taking
shots of the drone.

'We need to get out of here,' he replied. 'We've
struck bloody gold. If this isn't hard evidence, I
don't know what is. I need you to go home and get
those pictures uploaded on the web somewhere,
and soon. Distribute them. Make it so they can't be
gathered up and destroyed. And then find
somewhere safe to lie low for a while. We got lucky
this time – they tried to take us on the sly and you
caught them by surprise. But these sods won't give
up that easy, especially now we've got them by the
short and curlies!'

Chi was elated. He'd finally found his flying
saucer and he was going to make sure the whole
world knew about it – but not until he'd examined
every inch of it to find out who'd made the thing.
There was a huge, stupid grin pasted on his face and
he didn't care.

'What are you going to do?' Amina asked him.

'I'm going to take this to the only man I can
trust to protect me,' Chi told her. 'And I think I've
got enough to buy my way in.'

-
stared at the phone in his
desk drawer, wondering why it was ringing. That
phone was a dedicated line. It wasn't supposed to
ring unless something was going badly wrong. It
was late in the night, when normal people were at
home in bed or out enjoying themselves.
-
rarely indulged in either
activity. The problem was, he had just been about to
pick that phone up to deliver some bad news of his
own. Now he was about to receive some instead.
With some sense of trepidation, he reached into the
open drawer and picked up the handset.

'Yes?'

'The package has gone missing,'
's voice
informed him.

'What?' he barked, glancing up at the door of
his office, to ensure it was closed. Then, in a
quieter voice, he hissed: 'What do you mean,
"missing"?'

'I mean exactly that. The container that arrived
in Sinnostan was full of water. Plain old bloody
water. The nerve agent has disappeared and we have
no idea at what stage in the shipment. The route
was so complicated it could be anywhere. Our
people are rounding up all the couriers, but it'll take
time to find out who diverted it and where. There's
a possibility it never even got put on the ship. I
think Cantang double-crossed us.'

'Cantang? Jesus,'
-
exclaimed. 'Hang on . . . you mean he could still
have it
here
? But if that's so—'

'There could only be one reason why he'd do
it,'
said calmly. 'He's going to screw us over
– the only question is how badly. We have to shut
down everything, cut our losses and get out.'