The Storm Protocol (6 page)

He got up from the chair and moved around to the swing seat. He noticed the initials CR carved into the side of the armrest nearest the house. He patted his pocket surreptitiously; he still had the penknife that had done the deed.

‘We know our killer was here in this seat. So the next question becomes, who is Jack Doe, and is he the killer of John Doe and if so, who killed him?’

‘That’s three questions,’ said Guilbeau with a smirk, ‘and a lot of Doe’s!’

Roussel ignored him and headed for the second body. The coroner waited for him at the bottom of the steps before trailing behind.

‘So
, what can you tell me about this guy?’ asked Roussel.

The c
oroner went through the same speech again with a few modifications.

‘Subject is an adult male in his early forties; cause of death, single GSW to the head. Again, it looks like a 9mm
, but I’ll confirm. There is a very neat entry wound, but exit wound a different story. Death would have been pretty much instantaneous, same as before, ditto the grey matter.’

Guilbeau opened the body bag and using his gloved hand, gingerly lifted out and supported the subject’s
right arm. As he watched, fascinated, Roussel could see that the hand was practically severed from the body.

‘But this is where it gets curious. This is an interesting wound, and not something you see every day,’ said
the coroner. ‘Almost point blank GSW to the wrist. This would not have been fatal, unless the subject had been allowed to bleed out, but it seems almost extraneous. Like something you’d see in a punishment shooting, if that makes sense?’

‘None of this makes sense,’ said Roussel, massaging his temples.

He closed his eyes in an effort to concentrate, working to try and clear his head.

‘Have you got an estimated time of death for me? Presumably it’s roughly the same as the first victim?’

‘Again, I’ll quote that this is purely preliminary, and has to be verified, but all indications point to roughly the same time, yes.’

Roussel stood stock still for a second. His eyes scanned the ground and suddenly it hit him; the niggling question
that his mind had been juggling, since they moved to victim number two. He squatted down on his haunches.

‘Look at the ground here,’ he said, pointing to the area around the bod
y. ‘Even allowing for the storm, the wind and rain last night would have eradicated shallower markings. The ground has been seriously churned up here.’

The confusion on
the coroner’s face cleared and he snapped his fingers.

‘Signs of a struggle?’ he replied
; half question and half statement.

‘Exactly,’ said Roussel. ‘And it can’t have been a struggle with victim number one, as he was already dead at the bottom of the steps.’

He paused.

‘Unless he killed this guy, walked back up the steps, sat down with his back to the garden and then shot himself in the head.’

‘No gun,’ said Guilbeau.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Roussel.

‘There would have been a gun lying next to the body. No firearm has been found.’

‘So the person who ki
lled one or both of these men is still out there?’ ventured Roussel tentatively, almost as if he was trying to convince himself.

‘
Could be more than one person, but sure seems that way, Peeshwank.’

‘The tyre tracks make more sense now anyway.’

‘Tyre tracks?’ asked the coroner blankly.

‘There are two sets of tyre marks on the driveway; both made by the same car, or at least the same type of tyre. I was trying to work out why they were so different. Makes sense now.’

‘In what way does it make sense?’

‘One set of tracks; like the set left by you for instance, go directly down the centre of the drive. This would indicate to me that the driver was going slowly and carefully, especially if the layout and terrain were unfamiliar.’

He paused for breath, rather than effect.

‘But the other set go wildly from one side of the lane to the other. Like someone was driving at speed and over correcting constantly. So
, if I was a betting man, I’d say someone drove here carefully, but the same car left in a tearing hurry; does that have any bearing on the case? Your guess is as good as mine?’

‘We also haven’t answered the fundamental question?’ said Guilbeau thoughtfully.

‘Which is?’

‘Why were they killed?’

‘When we can answer that, I think we’ll have found our killer or killers,’ said Roussel.

Suddenly, he glanced sideways and motioned for quiet. From beneath the white forensic suit, a ringtone started; softly at first
, but getting progressively more strident with every ring. Roussel fumbled under the clothing and came up with the phone, just as it stopped. He listed the missed calls; Captain Moreland.

He dialled the number
and gave Guilbeau the sign for
ring me
. He winked at the coroner and turned away, just as the phone was answered.

‘Hey C
ap,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to like this one little bit....’

21
st
February 2009 – Two years before the Storm.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. – Marcel Proust.

The rats were feverish; scrabbling at the bars of the cage like demons. They were deeply unsettled and snappy. Something about their behaviour was odd, or maybe at odds with normal, would have been a better way to state it.

James couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was, but after almost ten years of observing animals in lab conditions, he knew something was not quite right.

He glanced up at the lights above the door. The
lab currently occupied
sign was illuminated a deep red; a signal to let any casual corridor walker know that they had better stay out. The
testing in progress
sign had yet to be lit; his finger was hovering over the button, he was just waiting on the single word to come through his headset.

He studied his reflection in the mirror opposite. He looked like a character from
Star Wars
; the wrap around protective goggles, stiff white coat and protective hat gave him a feeling of anonymity that he knew was naive and foolhardy. He was in no doubt; all the individuals gathered in the conference room behind the one way glass knew exactly who he was and why he was there.

Before he could ponder too much on that thought, he got the command that he had been waiting on expectantly for the past seven minutes.

‘Go!’

The gloved finger that had been hovering over the button dropped and he heard the mechanical clunk as the contacts engaged. The lights came
on, illuminating an extremely large maze constructed out of Perspex.

The maze was his personal triumph; designed and built by James over a five year period to develop a testing suite for his rats. The company had wanted an apparatus that would be able to benchmark with certainty
, how much effort a given rat would expend in response to certain sensory stimuli.

However, his creation had been ambushed by the faceless men behind the mirror. He looked at his invention now with something hovering between distaste and full-on horror. All over the maze, terrifying other-worldly machines were starting to power up. It now more closely resembled a torture chamber than a scientific experiment. There were pools of acid, deep pits bottomed out with razor sharp spikes, all manner of spinning and whirling blades and even one area where pressure sensors would trigger hydraulic rams, turning it into a compactor.

He shuddered; normally the rats would smell danger and avoid these types of hazards like the plague (a vague smile creased his lips at his unintended pun), but this was different; their behaviour was different, it was....frantic. The word came to him, as the second phase of the test sequence began.

At the far end of the maze, beyond all the traps and devices, was
an area of safety. In the centre of this space, a Petri dish was fixed to the floor. Above it, suspended vertically, was a stainless steel cylinder with a very small diameter.

As he watched, there was a small metallic click and a tiny white disk dropped from the end of the cylinder and into the dish
, with a rolling rattling sound. He knew it was a pill of some kind; part of the facility they were attached to did nothing else except the testing of new drugs.

Almost before the tablet came to rest in the bottom of the dish, the squeals of the rats reached a crescendo. It was extraordinary; like gang mentality in miniature. The rats were rioters, baying for the blood of the establis
hment. An electric motor whirred into life, and the door separating their place of confinement slowly slid back.

The passage from the holding area to the maze was designed to admit only one animal at a time. He had been expecting them to file through in an orderly fashion like they normally did. This time
, he watched as their nostrils flared, and then all hell broke loose. The holding pen became a seething mass of writhing bodies. Blood drops started spattering the sides, as they used claws and teeth to try and create an advantage, and if anything, the smell of the blood seemed to raise them to ever more manic levels of behaviour.

Eventually, the first battered and bloodied rat was ejected into the passageway. As James watched in horror, the creature didn’t stop at the first hazard. There was no shred of self preservation and as the creature hit the acid, the pungent smell of burning flesh assaulted his nostrils. The rat kept moving until the meat had been scorched from its bones and at one stage, James thought he could see the heart beating behind the exposed spine and rib cage, before it too melted away to nothing.

Another rat had found a different way to go; it jumped into a pit and to a watching James, it seemed deeply annoyed, as it struggled to move forward, impaling itself ever more deeply on the sharply pointed spikes as it did so. Watching with ever increasing horror, James saw another rat use the skeletal remains of the first one to leap the acid pit. It ran into a set of whirling blades at full speed, the kind you would see in a food processor. The walls of the maze went instantly red, like tomatoes in a blender.

One by one, the rats continued their headlong drive for the safety of the other side. The smell of death seemed to drive them on, their squeals getting more strident, almost panic stricken. In less than five minutes
, it was all over.

James knew he looked impassive to the watchers on the other side, but as he surveyed
the battlefield, because that was what the maze had become, a tear formed at the corner of his left eye. Blood was dripping from almost every section of the maze and the stench of burnt flesh and death hung in the air.

He blinked the tear furiously away. He did not want his employers to see him getting emot
ional, but the anguished cries of the rats had affected him deeply. And it wasn’t just their suffering that had affected him; their screams had seemed to have one thing in common. Maybe he was being paranoid, after what he had just witnessed. They were only rats after all, but to a creature, he could have sworn that their last tangible emotion was not despair, but a deep seated and overwhelming frustration.

And then, as his finger hovered over the kill switch, to his amazement, a bloodied and broken rat started shuffling toward the entrance to the sanctuary. It had managed by some miracle to elude all of the doomsday devices.

As it got further down the passageway, its nostrils started twitching and a new urgency energised its movements. The rat crawled toward the Petri dish and even as it was still moving, swallowed the pill whole.

As he watched, the creature
’s blown heart gave out, and within a couple of seconds it was dead. But the funny thing was, and he knew this would sound strange to anyone else. He knew that the rat had died happy.

He stabbed down on the button, killing the lights
, and all sounds and motion ceased; turning maze into mausoleum.

#

The agent tapped a button in the middle of the table and the one way mirror instantly went opaque. He tapped another button and the main central lights came on, making the other occupants blink suddenly. There were four people in the room including him.

He looked at their expressions; now maybe someone would take him seriously, he thought to himself smugly.

‘What the fuck is this? Some two-bit circus trick?’ asked Winston Nickelson.

The CIA d
irector was a huge man, six feet five, with a shock of curly brown hair which made him look like a teddy bear (according to his wife anyway.) He was the most laid back director the CIA had ever had; an affable man who was completely at his ease in most situations, you just had to make sure you never pissed him off. His steel grey eyes burned a hole into the agent, as he waited for a response.

The experiment had seriously rattled him.

‘I’m sorry sir,’ said the agent blankly. ‘This is about as far removed from the circus as it is possible to get.’

The d
irector exploded.

‘Just what the fuck was that all about? You’ve got about a minute to tell your story
, before I personally throw you out of that window!’

The d
irector was shouting now, but it seemed to have little effect on the agent.

Carl Grant, the deputy d
irector, put his hand on the director’s arm. The antithesis of the director in every way, Carl was small, bald and immaculately groomed. His brown eyes radiated concern, as he addressed the director directly.

‘I think we are all in a little bit of shock, sir, after what we have just seen,’ he said
, in a conciliatory tone.

‘But….
’

H
e slipped his steel rimmed glasses up onto his forehead and rubbed his eyes, before focussing directly on the agent.

‘I do think we need to get a thorough history of this....’

He searched for a suitable word.

‘
....
project,
before we decide what to do.’

The a
gent nodded once, comprehension smoothing the lines of concentration on his face.

‘I understand now, sir,’ he said. ‘Apologies for my thoughtlessness; I forget the effect it has on people when they first see the level of its efficacy. I do agree; a thorough background description would level set for everyone
, I think.’

He fixed the deputy d
irector with an unblinking stare.

‘And thank you sir, for allowing me to present my project. It has been a bit of a personal crusade for me and I would love to further develop it into the effective weapon I know it can become.’

The deputy director nodded, to show he understood. The director also nodded, and grunted his uneasy assent, as he sat back in his chair.

‘So,
how’s your history?’ asked the agent.

‘How long is
this going to take?’ asked the director, with a hint of impatience.

‘How
long have you got?’ asked the agent with a smile.

He noticed the fl
ashed look of warning from the deputy director and was immediately conciliatory.

‘Sorry for being flippant, sir, but it’s not often you are in a meeting with such hallowed company. Anyway, where best to start....’

He glanced up at the ceiling for a minute and clacked his tongue, before launching fully into the story.

‘In the early to late thirties, before, but especially because of the Second World War, the government was always looking for what we would call a game changer today. For instance, Oppenheimer gave them the Manhattan project and ultimately
,
fat man
and
little boy
scorched the earth and ended the hostilities. But alongside the big ones, the well known ones; there were a huge number of projects that never saw the light of day.’

He paused and noticed with vague amusement that he had their full attention now.

‘It may interest you to know that one of these side projects was resurrected during the Reagan era. It was ultimately a failure; the neutron bomb was more of a flight of fancy than rude science, but it does show that some of the modern ideas came from humble pre-war beginnings.’

He paused again
and this time noticed that the director was leaning ever so slightly towards him. His interest had been piqued for sure.

‘In rural England, a man named Nigel Stafford-Bowles was working on his creation. He was an interesting character, our Nigel. He was born into a titled family near a village called Orlestone
in Kent. His family home was a Jacobean manor house, which boasted a moat among other features. Nigel was a bright lad and got a first in biology at Oxford. He simultaneously maintained a childhood interest in chemistry, and took his PHD in industrial chemical applications, planning to combine the two disciplines for any future career.’

He stopped and drained his glass of water before continuing.

‘But it was at Oxford that he reached a defining moment in his life. He started reading the works of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Mao among others. He devoured the works of the leading socialist writers, leaders and thinkers of the times. No book or pamphlet was too extreme or off limits, no left leaning idea or scheme was too far to the left. It became his creed, his mantra, his dogma; in short, it became a religion for him.’

‘Nothing unusual about that in
the early thirties,’ said the director.

‘No, you’re right; on the surface
, another spoilt rich kid from a wealthy background, assuming someone else’s doctrine to assuage the accumulated guilt of a privileged upbringing. But for Nigel, it was more than a doctrine. He was easily led by all accounts. Given his ruthless scientific brain, the type that refuses to believe anything without irrefutable proof, it seems bizarre in the extreme that he would adopt a half baked creed like socialism, without a shred of corroboration. But he cloaked himself in his new religion like a new set of clothes; a tight fitting skin. Given his upper class childhood, or maybe because of it, he became more convinced than ever that all men could and should be equal. And the more he got into the notion of men as equals, the more he became convinced that it was possible to biologically create equality.’