Vortex (15 page)

Chapter Thirteen

The cell in which Ben, Annie and Joseph found themselves was empty apart from a flickering strip light on the ceiling and a metal plate by heavy electric doors that had hissed firmly shut when they had been unceremoniously thrown in here. Flight Lieutenant Johnson had at least removed the handcuffs that were by now cutting into the skin around their wrists, but then he had left them without a word.

There were no windows in the cell - just concrete walls - and in the weak artificial light it was impossible to judge how much time was passing. Joseph had walked to the far corner of the cell, sat down and huddled his arms around his knees; Annie, on the other hand, was pacing up and down, fuming. 'What's going on here?' she demanded of nobody in particular. 'I don't understand. What's Vortex? Why are we being held?' She turned to Ben and pointed a slightly threatening finger at him. 'If you try and tell me that these people are doing this with the full knowledge of the RAF--'

Ben raised his hand to quieten her. 'I don't think that, Annie,' he said softly. 'Of course I don't think that.' He looked meaningfully over at Joseph, then back at Annie, who closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath and then gave him a nod. Together they approached the old man, who was still sitting in the corner, staring impassively into the middle distance. Ben felt a bit uncomfortable, towering over someone so much older than him.

'I think we need to talk, Joseph,' he said quietly. 'I think you need to tell us what's going on. What was your brother talking about? When were you sent away? What's Vortex? Why are you here?'

Joseph looked slowly up at them. His eyes were faintly bloodshot and his floppy hair straggled over his face.

'You'll have to excuse me,' he replied, his voice hoarse. 'It has been rather a shock for me to see my brother again after so many years. I never thought he would still be here. I thought he would have settled into a quiet retirement. It seems I was very wrong.'

'Joseph,' Ben insisted urgently, 'I think we're in danger. You
got
to tell us what's going on.'

'Danger?' Joseph replied with a sinister little chuckle. 'Oh, we're in danger, all right. There's no doubt about that. I told you to stay away from this place.'

'Yeah, well we didn't,' Ben answered him shortly.

Joseph smiled. 'No,' he said. 'You didn't.' He tapped the cold concrete floor where he was sitting. 'I suppose you'd better both sit down. It's a complicated story.'

Ben and Annie exchanged a glance, then did as they were told.

'My brother Lucian is two years older than me,' he began. 'When we were young, we both followed the path of the sciences. We were both physicists. That's how we ended up working here.'

'At Spadeadam, you mean?' Ben asked.

'Yes. At Spadeadam.' Joseph's eyes misted over. 'It was like a magnet for scientists in the late nineteen fifties. They were developing the Blue Streak missile, and there was a real outlet for our skills, and a chance for us to learn.'

'But there was more going on here than just Blue Streak, wasn't there?' Ben asked intuitively.

'Oh, yes,' Joseph replied. 'A great deal more. It was all top secret, of course. It had to be - this was not the sort of science that anyone wanted to become public knowledge. And it was the sort of thing to which Lucian was bound to be attracted. He was never comfortable with the fact that - forgive me for saying it - his younger brother was a more natural scientist. He was attracted towards realms of scientific endeavour that he knew I would go nowhere near.'

Ben found he was holding his breath. 'Like what?' he asked.

Joseph shrugged. 'Certain areas of weapons research, for one.'

'But . . .' Annie faltered slightly. 'There's nothing wrong with that, is there? I mean, everyone researches new weapons, don't they? It's not like we go to war in Spitfires any more.'

Joseph's bloodshot eyes fixed Annie with a piercing stare. 'You are too young to remember Hiroshima,' he said starkly, and Annie fell silent.

'In any case,' Joseph continued, 'I don't believe we are talking about the same kind of weapons research. The experimentation that was being done here fifty years ago would have been repellent even to you, my dear.'

Ben sensed Annie flushing with embarrassment.

'I admit,' the old man said, 'that perhaps I am as guilty as anyone. I worked on Blue Streak. I helped develop missiles. But Lucian' - and here Joseph shook his head sadly - 'got wind of other experiments being conducted in secret, in underground laboratories much like the ones we are in now. Experiments involving human subjects.'

Ben and Annie looked aghast at him.

'Mostly they used criminals,' Joseph carried on regardless of their evident horror. 'The men in grey suits offered them shorter sentences in return for their permission to let people like Lucian treat them as if they were little more than laboratory rats. My brother was always interested in the effects of electrical stimuli on the human brain, and here he was given free rein to conduct his loathsome research without any thought for what he was doing to the poor people who had unwittingly volunteered themselves.'

Ben's eyes narrowed as he listened to what Joseph had to say. Men in grey suits? Evil scientists? Human experiments? It all sounded a bit far-fetched to him, like the conspiracy theories he had read about on the Internet. But then he looked around, reminding himself that he was currently trapped in a concrete cell far underground during what was supposed to be a pleasant bird-watching holiday. More than that, there was something in Joseph's voice that had the desperate ring of truth.

'But that's not weapons research,' he heard Annie saying, the shock in her voice clear to hear.

'Really?' Joseph asked. 'Weapons come in many forms. Some of them we deem to be acceptable, others we don't. Lucian boasted to me that he was developing ways of forcing prisoners of war to give us information we might want. He boasted that he and his associates were close to being able to alter the memories of enemy forces - real psychological warfare.'

'Why did he tell you all this, if he knew you didn't approve?' Ben asked.

'I don't know,' Joseph replied. 'Pride, I suppose. Perhaps it made him feel good to be in the know about something. And of course, he thought he had some sort of hold over me now.'

'I don't understand,' Annie asked. 'Why?'

Joseph looked at the two of them in turn. There was a sadness around his eyes now, as though telling them all this had drained him emotionally.

'Lucian and his associates tried to manipulate their subjects' mental states to alter brain function, using electrical and chemical means. But you can't just attach an electrode to someone's head, or pump them full of drugs, and expect them to lose all their mental faculties. These techniques only really work to their full effect if there is already a history of mental deficiency in the subject. Lucian was trying to scare me, because he knew that I had a history of mild mental illness.'

Ben and Annie remained quiet, not knowing what to say.

The old man continued. 'Lucian knew that I would not approve of what was going on, but it was clear what he was threatening me with.'

Annie's eyes were glassy now, as though she were fighting back tears. 'But he's your brother,' she whispered.

Joseph nodded.

'What did you do?' Ben asked.

It took a while for Joseph to reply, as though he were reliving the events that followed next. When he finally spoke, it was in a slow, measured tone of voice. 'Scientists have a duty,' he said firmly. 'A morality. Just because we
can
do something, it doesn't mean that we
should
.' He looked sharply at Ben and Annie. 'I went to Lucian. I begged him to stop doing what he was doing. And when he refused, I told him that I was going to blow the whistle on his activities.'

Silence.

'He said I was naive. Thinking back, he was probably right. I have no doubt that their experiments were being carried out with the full knowledge of the British intelligence services, and any attempts I made to reveal them would have been firmly stamped on. But I had to do something, and so I stood firm and insisted that I would go to the authorities.'

'But you never did, did you?' asked Ben, his voice little more than a whisper.

Joseph smiled sadly and shook his head. 'They came for me just before morning - Lucian and his colleague, his boss really, who specialized in chemical mind control. They bundled me into the back of a military vehicle and took me to an underground bunker they had reserved for such purposes. My brother stood by as I was injected with lysergic acid diethylamide - LSD to most people - and then imprisoned in a cell much like this one. I received the same treatment, daily, for a long time. I don't know
how
long, but a long time.'

Joseph stopped. His face was white and his hands were trembling with the horror of that memory. Ben watched as Annie stretched out her arm and placed it consolingly on the old man's leg.

'LSD gives you hallucinations - hours and hours of hallucinations, many of them totally terrifying. When they set me free, I was a mess,' he told them quietly. 'I was not fit to cope in society, and it wasn't long before I was placed in an institution for the insane. I tried to tell them what had happened to me, but of course nobody believed me. And that had been Lucian's plan all along.' Joseph winced slightly. 'In those days, mental institutions were not what they are today. I should know - I've seen enough of them over the past fifty years.'

'Fifty years?' Annie said disbelievingly. 'Is that how long you've been in institutions?'

Joseph nodded. 'Yes,' he said simply.

'And the place with the rats,' Ben asked him gently. 'The place we've just been. That was where--'