Strangled Silence (34 page)

His head leaned so hard against it, he could feel
the door buckle slightly.

They were never going to leave him alone.

A gurgling growl uttered from his throat, like
the sound of some trapped, despairing animal.

There were no clear thoughts in his head as he
strode through the corridors and out of the school.
The car park was too small and was always full at
the end of the day with parents on the school run.
Some parents didn't bother pulling in because they
were likely to get stuck behind somebody else who
was waiting, stopping instead at the kerb of the dual
carriageway that ran past the car park. Kids hung
around on the path alongside the main road, watching
out for their ride home and horsing around
while they waited.

Alan Noble and his mates were just outside the
gate. There was a three-metre fence around the
entire school grounds, but the railings on the side of
the road in front of the gate were suitable for sitting
on and Noble's crew often claimed them as their
own so that they could sit and look out over the
high roofs of the SUVs pulling up to the kerb.

Perched on the top bar of the railing, Noble
turned in time to see Tariq coming through the
gate.

'Whoa!' he said, laughing. 'Look at the face on
hi—'

Tariq's first blow broke Noble's nose. Blood
sprayed from his nostrils. The frenzy of punches that
followed shocked everyone standing nearby. Noble's
friends stood frozen for several seconds. The mother
behind the wheel of the car nearest the railings saw
the violence break out and immediately pulled out
of the space and into the road. Tariq kept hitting
Noble around the head, grabbing the bully's tie so
that he could wrench him back each time his
punches knocked the other boy away. Somebody
tried to get their arm around Tariq's neck but he bit
as hard as he could into their arm until he heard a
scream and the arm pulled away. His left hand kept
a tight hold on Noble's tie. The skin of his right fist
split around the knuckles, cut by the impacts and by
Noble's teeth.

More hands grabbed him and this time someone
seized his hair, pulling his head back. His grip
on Noble's tie was broken and he was dragged
back. A man in a silver, low-slung Mazda, unable to
see over the Range Rover in front of the fight,
spotted the vacant parking space by the railings,
gunned his engine and swung into it just as Noble
toppled backwards off the railing. His head hit the
tarmac of the road, his neck folding under
the weight of his body just as the car skidded over
him. His shriek grated across the surface of the road
before being crushed against the high kerb.

Nobody who heard the sound would ever
forget it.

The hands holding Tariq loosened, almost
letting him fall. Their grip released and he stood,
suddenly conscious of the empty space that had
developed around him. The others were distancing
themselves from him, and his vision completed the
illusion of suddenly floating in space, tunnelling his
focus onto the body beneath the front wheel of the
car. Somebody behind him started screaming and
then another started and another. The harsh sound
was a wall pushing him forwards, pressing him
against the railing, forcing him to look down on
what had once been Alan Noble. Tariq was overcome
with the certainty that he had not done this
thing. This wasn't happening to him, but to someone
outside of him.

'It wasn't me,' he whispered.

As hands seized him again, pulling him back,
forcing him to the ground, he shouted it over and
over again.

'I didn't do this! I didn't do this! It wasn't me!'

Amina got out of work when the crowds were
heaviest, seeking safety and anonymity in the mass
of bodies making for the trains. Despite Shang's
very public murder, she was convinced that nobody
would come for her as long as she had people
around her . . . and if they did, she would scream
blue murder.

She had spent the previous night lying awake,
holding her father's gun beneath the duvet, trying
to work out how she could convince her dad of the
danger she was in. Maybe if he could get her onto
one of the marine bases, they would keep her safe.
But for how long? Was she going to have to live in
fear for the rest of her life?

The last few nights had taken their toll on her. In
the reflection of the train window, her face looked
pale and drawn; there were dark bags under her eyes.
She fantasized about being able to lie down and close
her eyes without fearing for her life, as she had been
able to do only a few weeks ago.

The Underground station wasn't far from her
house, but this was where she felt the deepest
unease, on the walk home. Every car or van that
passed near her set her on edge; she flinched at any
loud noise. She had the keys for the front door
in her hand while she was still a hundred metres
from her house.

Amina was unprepared for the scene that
awaited her outside her home.

Over a dozen reporters were hanging outside
the garden gate with microphones, recorders,
cameras and TV cameras. They turned as one when
they saw her coming, spreading out to encircle her
like a pack of dogs. The questions came in a barrage
of insistent voices.

'What made your brother do it? – Has he had
any previous history of violence? – Has he ever
suffered any other mental health problems? – Tell us
about the mind control experiments! – Have any of
his friends suffered the same problems? – Does he
have any friends? – What about this mind control?
– What have the flying saucers got to do with
this? – Who is involved in this conspiracy? – Was
your father one of the brainwashed soldiers? –
What exactly—'

'Stop!' Amina shouted. 'What do you want?
What's going on?'

Some of them shared knowing looks. She
hadn't heard.

'Amina Mir.'A woman spoke up, brandishing a
microphone bearing the news logo of a radio
station. 'Your brother, Tariq, has just murdered a
fellow student on the road outside their school. He
struck him several times in the face and then
pushed him under the wheels of an oncoming car.'

Amina's throat tightened, her stomach becoming
a hard knot of wood in her abdomen.

'What? What . . . what did you say?'

'Tariq claims that he was being brainwashed by
a computer program that the army introduced into
the school. He said that he knows this because of a
story that you have been working on for the
Chronicle
– a story about soldiers being abducted
and put through mental reconditioning by a secret
black-operations unit. He said that they are using
the same process in his school and that you have
received death threats because of your investigations.
Is your mother involved in this
investigation, Amina? What about your father?
What have his connections in the military and the
Department of Defence got to say about all this?
Have you any comment, Amina?'

The rush of questions began again, buffeting
her with their insinuations. She pushed through the
pack, hurrying up the driveway, her keys in her
hand. The moment she was inside the house, she
snatched her mobile from her bag and dialled her
mother's number.

'Hi, Mum?'

'Amina? Oh God, love. Are you all right?'

'Is it true, Mum?'

'Tariq killed a boy at his school, honey. There
. . . there were a lot of witnesses. He's already . . .
he's already confessed. It sounds like a fight that got
out of hand. I'm sure the part where . . . where the
other boy – Alan Noble – was pushed under the car
. . . I'm sure that was an accident. Hang on—' Her
mother turned away from the phone to say something
to somebody else for a moment and then
directed her attention back to Amina. 'Are you all
right? The press are at the house, aren't they? Don't
say a bloody word to them, OK? Your dad will be
home soon and he'll deal with them. Stay inside
until your dad gets home. Don't say anything to the
press, do you understand?'

Amina hung up. She sat down on the stairs and
gazed out through the patterned glass at the
distorted figures hovering outside the gate. It
occurred to her that she had better put her father's
gun back. But even if she cleaned it he would know
it had been fired – and anyway, she had no way of
replacing the four missing bullets and he always
knew exactly how much ammunition
he had in the house.

If the press found out who had fired the shots
at Chi's house, her family's reputation for insanity
would be confirmed.

Staring out at the reporters, the irony of the
situation did not escape her. She had wanted proper
publicity for her story and now she'd got it. She had
craved the safety of the public eye and now she
had it in spades. It was hard to see how things could
get any worse.

Things got steadily worse. Over the next week,
Tariq's assault on Alan Noble continued to be
held up by the press as the latest evidence that young
people today were violent screw-ups. Helena Jessop
and Martin Mir put their media savvy to good use,
releasing a carefully measured statement to the press
and downplaying talk of Amina's 'investigation' and
Tariq's claims about being brainwashed.

But the dogs had their teeth into this now. If
Tariq had not mentioned the army's computer
program, the story might have faded after a few
days – another tragic episode of school violence.
Instead, the sniff of a conspiracy added far more
meat to this story. But the idea wasn't taken
seriously; it was used instead to establish how disturbed
Tariq was and how his older sister's
outlandish theories had sent him over the edge. The
boy remanded to the detention centre in Feltham –
bore so little resemblance to her brother, caught in
snatched shots by the press's cameras outside the
police station that Amina had to look twice at him
before she recognized him. Pictures on television of
his new face, with its hollowed cheeks and sunken
eyes, made him look like a haunted schizophrenic.

The
Chronicle
distanced themselves from
Amina, saying that she had been working outside
her brief, that she wasn't even a real reporter, just a
university student on work experience.

All of a sudden, the rest of the press seemed to
know a great deal about Amina and her connections
with Chi and Ivor. Too much, too fast.
She was told not to come into work for a week and
she spent most of the time watching the news and
reading the papers online, and she was astounded at
how much they knew, how detailed their background
information was.

Tariq's poor record in a series of schools, his
behavioural problems and the fights he'd got into
were all made public. Even his brief foray
into Islamic fundamentalism was dragged out. They
made a big issue of the music he listened to,
especially the 'nihilistic' work of Absent
Conscience, whose songs were also being blamed
for a school shooting in the States.

Amina's youth and lack of experience in
journalism were highlighted, excusing her for her
gullibility in being taken in by more cynical types.
But in some reports, she was portrayed as ruthlessly
ambitious, willing to weave any kind of fantastic
tale in her desperation to make headlines. Girls
she'd hardly known in school were interviewed,
claiming she had always cared more for her career
than for friends or family, airing old grudges against
her that she'd never even been aware of. In their
opinion, she was not above playing to Ivor
McMorris's insecurities in order to use him for his
story . . . and his lottery millions.

Even Dani showed up on television, labelled
'Amina Mir's Best Friend' on the banner, describing
how Amina had changed in the last couple of
weeks, how she had stopped answering her friends'
calls, and had become distant, antisocial, a loner.

Chi Sandwith was shown to be a stereotypical
conspiracy freak. Much was made of his articles on
abduction, on his more bizarre theories and his
paranoid lifestyle. His neighbours, none of whom
spoke with any ill-will, confided that he was
considered something of a harmless nut who
was tolerated in his eccentricities as long as he kept
his weird electronics experiments under control.
His parents' broken marriage was mentioned, as
well as his younger brother, who had died in a car
accident as a young child.

Ivor was portrayed as an even more pathetic
character. Allegedly addicted to sleeping tablets
while in Sinnostan, he had been caught in a
terrorist bombing that had cost him an eye and
some facial scarring that had seen him released
from service. It had resulted in him becoming a
recluse – a condition compounded by posttraumatic
stress disorder, a diagnosis that included
hallucinations, delusions and, of course, paranoia.
His recent win of over two million pounds on the
National Lottery was reported to have made him
even more insecure, and now the conspiracy he had
been concocting in his mind was being given flesh
by all the lunatics his money was attracting. The
suicide of his friend, Ben Considine, had apparently
cut the last few fragile threads of his sanity.

This kind of character assassination took up
most of the space in the reports. The trio's investigation
into Sinnostan and the brainwashing process
– Amina was really beginning to hate that term –
was mentioned just often enough to dismiss it as
fantasy. The military ridiculed the idea of soldiers
being 'abducted' and experimented upon, consigning
the idea to the same realms as UFOs and the
Loch Ness Monster. The press had even got hold of
Amina's pictures of Chi holding the surveillance
drone – she had sent them to a number of servers,
including her own email address at the
Chronicle
–
suggesting that Sandwith, an electronics expert, had
built the device himself in an effort to persuade the
world of the truth of his theories. Naturally,
the contraption did not actually
work
.

The army withdrew
MindFeed
from schools,
but vigorously defended it, denying that it caused
aggression in any way and pointing out that if you
wanted to find the source of behavioural problems
in any individual, the first place you should look
was the parents.

Helena Jessop and Martin Mir observed this
onslaught with growing outrage. They were only
beginning to come to terms with the fact that their
son had killed someone and this made it so much
worse. They knew a smear campaign when they saw
it and could not believe it was being aimed at their
children. Amina was afraid that they would hold her
partly responsible for Tariq's moment of madness,
but in the beginning they were too concerned
for their son and his victim to worry about blaming
their daughter. As the attacks in the media continued,
they recognized an agenda at work and set
about trying to find out who was feeding all of this
information to the reporters.

But then came the day when Martin, in a
moment of severe stress, settled down to the calming
routine of stripping down and cleaning his gun
at the kitchen table.

Amina had been meaning to tell him that she
had taken it – she really had. She'd just never built
up the nerve. He realized the weapon had been
fired moments after taking it out of the lockbox
and when he discovered that four bullets were missing,
he summoned Amina to him with a voice so
level and reasoned that it terrified them.

Confessing to her father that she had fired his
Browning automatic at a UFO was the scariest
thing Amina had ever done. She broke down crying
before she finished, but he just stared at her with a
stone-cold expression on his face.

'What did we do wrong?' he asked quietly,
once she had calmed down. 'Your mother and I . . .
we can't understand where all this has come from.
You have both . . .' His voice cracked, but he
regained his composure before continuing. 'You
both seem to have completely lost your minds. But
all this madness is going to stop now. Tariq is going
to stand trial for manslaughter . . . if we're
lucky
, it'll
be manslaughter. The best we can hope for is a plea
of temporary insanity, but frankly, your mother has
covered enough murder cases and she doesn't hold
out much hope. It's very possible that Tariq will be
spending the next few years of his life in juvenile
detention.

'Amina, tomorrow you are going to take me to
where you fired this weapon and you're going to
show me this thing you claim to have shot down.
And so help me God, if I'm not satisfied with what
I see, you'll think Tariq got off easy. Do you understand
me?'

That night Amina took the home phone to her
bedroom. She knew someone would be listening in
on the call, but they weren't going to hear anything
they didn't already know. She tried to ring Chi on
his mobile four times, but could not get through.
On the off-chance that he might have returned
home, she called the house too, but only the
answering machine picked up. Without much hope,
she decided to try Ivor and was surprised when he
picked up his phone on the third ring.

'You're home?' she gasped. 'They let you out
on bail?'

'The million quid I was going to give to Shang
is being held as evidence,' Ivor told her. 'The judge
at the hearing thought that was more than enough
leverage to keep me around until the end of the
trial. Listen, I heard about your brother.'

'Hard not to,' she snorted. 'The news can't seem
to shut up about it.'

'I'm really sorry, Amina. How's he holding up?'

'Better than the other guy.' She winced. 'Sorry,
that sounds awful . . . Mum and Dad met Alan's
parents the other day. It was pretty traumatic. I've
never seen Mum cry as hard as she did when she
got home.'

'There's something else I need to tell you,' Ivor
said. 'I went round to see Chi, but the police are all
over his house. There were bullet holes in one of
the windows.'

'Yeah. That was . . . that was me,' Amina replied.

She glanced towards her bedroom door; she
lowered her voice and told Ivor what had
happened, explaining that Chi had taken the
surveillance drone and gone into hiding. Ivor
whistled in wonder. She didn't tell him where Chi
had gone. Not over the phone.

'C'm'ere,' he said. 'Can I pick you up? I've
hired a car. There's something I need to tell you.
And I'm going somewhere tonight: you might want
to tag along.'

Amina could guess what her parents might
have to say about that, but at this point she was past
caring. Tariq was being done for manslaughter, she
was a public disgrace and her story had been
ridiculed. Her mother and father held her in thinly
disguised contempt. It felt like she had nothing to
lose any more.

'Sure,' she chirped. 'Beep your horn when
you're outside.'

Ivor got there in less than half an hour, drawing up
in a bland, blue Toyota saloon. Thankfully, the
reporters who had spent most of the week hanging
around the outside of the house were nowhere
to be seen. It was cold outside. Amina walked
outto the car, turning to look back through the
darkness at her parents, who were watching her,
silhouetted in the light of the living-room window.
Getting into the passenger seat, she hugged Ivor
and gave him a kiss on the cheek, and he replied
with a squeeze of her hand and an uncertain
smile.

'I'm glad you called,' she said, surprised at the
shyness in her own voice. 'Not just because of this,
I mean . . . I . . . it's just good to see you.'

'You too . . . that's . . . it's good to see you too,'
he stammered. He was about to take the handbrake
off when he hesitated, turning to look at her.
'Listen, Amina. I know how I feel about you and
I think you kind o' like me too, but . . . I have to
ask: Is it me you're interested in, or . . . or is it
my story?'

She looked away, thinking for a moment. Then
she met his gaze again.

'I don't know. Is there a difference?'

He smiled, then an uncertain expression
crossed his features and he smiled once more.

'Honestly? I'm not sure. I never thought of it
like that before.'

Ivor let it go at that, figuring that she hadn't
given him a perfect answer, but it wasn't a half bad
one either. Better than he'd hoped. Pulling back out
into the road, he started talking quickly.

'The last time I saw Chi, he told me about a
woman named Ellen Rosenstock. She came up
with a process known as strobe interruption that
could be used to—'

'I know, I heard the recording you made of
Shang,' she told him. 'So she invented the process
they used on you?'

'Yeah, right. Well, she started off using it on university
students. Listening to what the news had to
say about Tariq's freak-out, I wondered if she might
have anything to do with the program the army was
using in the school. If that's the case, then maybe he's
not so responsible for his actions after all, yeah?'