The Visitor--Kill or Cure--A Tor.com Original

by Mark Lawrence

  ‘He’ll see things our way,’ Tex said. ‘We got him by the balls. I’ll do the girl myself if need be.’

  Ruby shrugged. ‘Some men love their children. Others just think they do, but when it comes to the crunch, to get what you want you actually have to take them by the balls.’ She cupped her hand and her palm began to glow red as if it were steel fresh from the furnace.

  Tex pursed his lips. ‘Ted’ll be here soon. He’ll give her the Ted talk. Daddy Harman will be falling over himself to give us whatever it is we want soon enough.’

  Ruby left the mansion, a place her employers had been renting at an eye-watering weekly rate for several years now in a well-heeled corner of Hampton, a place where most of the properties were investments by Russian oligarchs and others seeking to launder money which, while a touch cleaner than cartel cash, still carried all kinds of stink. It was a corner of London where curtains rarely twitched and even if they did there was little to see save the neighbours’ high walls.

  She drove down the gravelled path to the main gates, her rental car sleek, black, and anonymous. When she’d emerged from the inferno of pain into her power and discovered what the wild card virus had wrought of her, she had thought she might own a place like the mansion retreating behind her. She’d thought that wealth and fame were hers for the taking. Who could stand against a woman who could melt steel in her hands and throw a grown man into the air as if he were a baby?

  The reality had proved itself rather different. Her strengths made her an asset the powerful wished to acquire rather than a threat they feared. She was still just one person and the rich had many people at their disposal. She needed to sleep, and whichever way she turned, her back still faced half the world. She might be tough but a bullet to the head or poison in her morning juice would be the end of her.

  Then there was the kiss.

  Her ability to generate heat had made her mildly famous in a world where there were other more powerful, more flamboyant aces. The kiss though, that had made her infamous.

  Kyle had stayed at her bedside throughout the whole battle with XTA, despite the fear of infection, despite her screaming, her toxic desperation. He’d held her hand until it blistered him. When they moved her to the special facility at Holborn, Kyle came too. She fell into a coma for a week and he’d sat behind a heat shield even as her sheets smouldered. And when her fever miraculously broke on the twenty-third day he was there. A day after the Witch’s visit Ruby had risen from the carbonised remains of her bed, marvelling that the delirium had cleared from her head so swiftly and so totally, battle smoke swept away by a fresh wind. She’d found herself in a blackened room, windowless and refractory tiled. Beyond the single heavy ceramic door a battery of tests awaited, a host of councillors, contracts, lawyers quoting regulations, invitations, scientists.

  At the end of it all, relegated to the street, sat Kyle, waiting on a bench with the first of spring’s blossom speckling the trees to either side and the last of the daffodils nodding at the margins of the small triangle of green behind him.

  The tests had been thorough. They knew she could will her hands to a white heat. They knew that anger could turn her breath to fire. The press already had hold of that one. She was ‘The Dragon’ in the nationals before she even regained consciousness. They had sequenced her DNA to the last of a trillion base pairs, measured and quantified her, blood to bone. But somehow the fact that her kiss would light a man up had escaped them. Kyle had burned like a torch in her arms and nothing had been right since that day. Some wag at the Daily Mirror had christened it ‘The Kiss of the Dragon’ in reference to a film she’d never heard of. It caught on, became a meme, haunted the internet. She’d never hated humanity before. Been irritated by them, despairing, sure, but never hated. But when, en masse, the planet took her tragedy, having the only man she’d ever loved, the only man who’d ever loved her, die before her in the most horrible way, and having it be her fault … when they had taken that and made a joke of it … the Witch’s dark seed had grown. A coldness had tempered Ruby’s heat, and every day the world seemed further away.

  Ruby took a hard right, tyres squealing. Harman’s place wasn’t far now. Her team were in place. He would fold. He’d get his brat of a daughter back. Ruby would get paid. She didn’t even know what the dispute was about. Corporate take-over probably. Her employer was big pharma. She wasn’t supposed to know that. The CEO of the company involved probably didn’t know it either. But a conglomerate of the biggest shareholders collectively financed her sort of covert operations, just to ensure the dividends kept flowing, a hedge against the unexpected.

  Ruby didn’t care about the money. It was good, not mansion good, but she had few opportunities to spend it. Since she went off-radar she’d had to get used to a changing succession of wigs, prosthetics, identities, and addresses. The carrot they dangled before her was a modified retrovirus they claimed would soon be able to provide temporary respite from the effects of XTA. Why she believed they might succeed where Doctor Tachyon had failed after four decades of effort she couldn’t say. Hope is a cruel thing.

  The alien doctor had left Earth before Ruby was born, leaving the virus behind him. His other legacy was the Blythe van Renssaeler Memorial Clinic, the centre of endless conspiracy theories. One of the more popular ones, to which Ruby gave considerable credence, was that far from seeking to continue Tachyon’s work in helping the victims of the wild card virus, the clinic in fact continued his work in testing and further developing the infection. Her employers claimed that their retroviral cure, so tantalisingly close now, had as its foundation work stolen by their agents from the alien’s clinic.

  Ruby pulled into the drive of another of her employer’s rentals. A shadow moved in the grounds. One of her team, watchful, ready. The others would have eyes on Harman, and ears. When they took down his security they left their own in its place.

  ‘Boss.’ Kirsta greeted Ruby without looking up from the monitors as she entered the ops room.

  ‘All square?’

  Krista shrugged her broad shoulders. Unusual. Certainty was the woman’s defining characteristic ‘He’s walking around. Been doing it a while. Saw the point of entry a few minutes ago and just carried on wandering.’

  ‘He can’t have seen it,’ Ruby said.

  ‘Ran his fucking finger round the hole. Just kept going, like he was lost in his own house. No reaction.’

  ‘Weird.’ Ruby considered herself to have written the book on weird. ‘Must be a sleepwalker.’

  ‘No sign of it during the week.’ Krista shook her head. ‘Cut hisself on the fucking glass too. Leaves an edge, a hole like that. Surprised he ain’t sliced it right open. Should of woke him up though.’

  Ruby’s turn to shrug. ‘Show me him now.’

  Krista pointed to the relevant monitor, bringing the image onto the big central screen. In the half-light an image-intensified Miles Harman ambled barefooted through his library. He had pyjamas on, silk by the way they hung. He walked without purpose, touching the books and gazing at the height of the shelves in wonder. He looked away. Ruby squinted, trying to force meaning from the grainy image. Impossible to say for sure but she could swear he suddenly looked sad.

  A moment later he stumbled then jerked upright. He spun in confusion then walked with outstretched arms, patting the walls until he hit a light switch. The monitor pulsed as it compensated for the replacement of the ambient city glow and exterior security lights with the glare of hundred-watt LEDs blazing within the diamonded guts of an antique chandelier.

  Ruby and Krista watched while Harman made his way purposefully back to his bedroom, shaking his head as he mounted the grand staircase.

  Ruby’s phone, the phone to which almost nobody had access, buzzed. The pattern told her who it was. ‘Tex?’

  ‘Riley here.’ The man sounded unsettled. ‘We got trouble.’

  * * *

  Hannah Harman came to her senses from a confused dream where she’d found herself bei
ng carried through her own house by gorillas. The room in which she woke distinguished itself by its lack of furnishing and by rotating slowly around her in a manner that left her nauseated and hardly able to lift her face from the rug on which she was lying.

  The rotation slowed then stopped, a double image of the room fusing reluctantly into a singular version. Hannah found that she had been drooling and that strings of saliva still joined her to the wet patch on the rug where her head had been resting. Her arms trembled with effort as she levered herself into a sitting position. She was wearing the blue nightie she’d gone to bed in.

  The room was bare, lit by a naked bulb, but by no means squalid. White, well-plastered walls, a plain linoleum floor, a thick, shaggy rug in the corner she occupied. Confused, she tried to stand, reaching for the wall for support. She noticed for the first time that on her left wrist she was wearing what looked like half a handcuff. The chain, rather thicker than traditional and much longer, stretched from the cuff to a solid bracket bolted to the wall.

  Almost without thinking she began to tug at the chain, trying to yank it free. Her hands had time to become sore before the chemical fog lifted from her mind sufficiently to consider the puzzle more broadly. Terror arrived belatedly but in full force. She’d been abducted. Fuzzy memories returned to her. Black-clad men in gorilla masks carrying her from her house. Jeffry should have been on guard. Not to mention the two Dobermans, Maximillian and Alphonso. But all she remembered was leaving. Watching over someone’s shoulder as the house retreated into the distance. They must have taken her over the rear wall but she couldn’t remember that part.

  All of her trembled now, a hot terror infecting every thought. There had been several of them. Three at least. Hannah hugged herself, willing her limbs to stillness. She didn’t think murderers and rapists came in trios. She wasn’t going to be tortured and buried under the floorboards. Her father was a rich man. This was about money. It had to be. She clenched her chattering teeth, trying to reclaim the confidence she’d owned all her life. This was about money and her father would get her out of here.

  She made a less panicked survey of the room. She hadn’t missed much, but there in the top right corner of the room a small black camera sat on a small black bracket. It lacked the tell-tale red light of most active cameras but something told Hannah that its dark eye was drinking in every detail.

  Hannah sat back against the wall. There was no point shouting to be freed. They were hardly likely to come in, say, ‘So sorry. Our mistake,’ and let her go. No point speaking at all until she needed something. Pitting her strength against the chain was wasted effort. Instead she tried to concentrate, shaking away the last of whatever drug they’d used to knock her out.

  This had to be time critical. She was at university most of the year. They could have taken her from her shared house far more easily than stealing her from under her father’s nose during the summer vacation. It couldn’t just be money they wanted. It had to be something to do with her father’s current business dealings. He’d said the new report on Bioxin would upset the markets. When the antibiotic was released for prescription, a range of chronic conditions that required regular palliative drugs would become curable. A month’s course of Bioxin and done. Her father had anticipated aggressive market takeovers, shareholder buyouts, legal challenges, and good old fake news. He was threatening the revenue streams of major drug companies. It was the very reason none of them researched antibiotics anymore – to do so would harm their major sources of income. Ultimately drug companies are not in the business of curing disease, they’re in the business of managing disease.

  It seemed that Hannah’s father had underestimated how violently the vested interests would oppose him.

  * * *

  The door opened unexpectedly, startling Hannah out of her contemplations. A man walked in, the light from the bare bulb gleaming on his bald head. A black T-shirt strained to encompass his chest. His arms were those of a bodybuilder, the muscle heaped up to an unhealthy steroid-driven excess. He had bad skin, deep-set eyes, and a curiously thoughtful expression. In one hand he carried a three-foot cane and in the other a smartphone.

  ‘I’m Ted.’ His voice was higher pitched than she expected, not the rumble such a chest should issue. ‘You and I are going to make a video. All you have to do is scream and cry and beg for your daddy to save you.’ He tilted his head on a thick neck, as if sizing her up for the part. ‘This’ – he swung the cane, making the air hiss – ‘is to help you be convincing.’

  Ted hit her without warning. She didn’t even see the blow coming. A white agony erupted in her arm, filling it from shoulder to fingertips. She fell back with a scream, clutching at her triceps. The cane had left a livid crimson line, maybe six inches long. With her eyes screwed tight the line was still there, burning white across the back of her eyelids. The air had left her lungs but somehow the pain wouldn’t let her draw breath. All she could do was huddle, clenched against the hurt, hissing out whatever dregs remained in her chest. Black dots danced before her vision.

  ‘That was just to warm you up.’ The man jabbed at his phone with thick fingers. ‘We’ll get the rest on camera.’

  You’re awake. A young woman’s voice sounds in Hannah’s head. It has a child-like quality to it. But there’s nobody else in the room. You’re hurting.

  Hannah at last sucks in a shuddering breath and looks around in amazement. The man peers at her over his phone and frowns. When he hurts people he is the centre of their world. They look at him or they close their eyes. They don’t take a sudden interest in their surroundings.

  ‘Where are you?’ Hannah manages to gasp.

  I can help you. But you have to invite me.

  ‘I don’t understand!’ Hannah cries to the room.

  Ted’s frown deepens but whatever is wrong with the girl doesn’t matter. All she needs to do is scream. The phone is filming now. He steps in closer, raising the cane. ‘Hannah! Look at me, Hannah.’ He has to start with a good close up. The girl glances at him then looks to her side as if hunting something lost. The fear’s unhinged her. He’s seen it before but never this early on.

  Invite me. I can help. The Visitor sees what Hannah sees. We’ve met before. You were kind to me.

  ‘I invite you! I invite you!’ Hannah curls foetal before the descending blow.

  The cane lands squarely across her back. The nightie makes no difference. Ted only uncovers them to show the welts. They could wear a woolly jumper and the cane would still leave them crisscrossed and screaming. Ted knows all that stuff with thumb screws and racks is for show. He’s never met anyone, from hard man to little girl, who can hang on to their pride past the first few strokes of his cane. Doesn’t take more than a few minutes and all you’ve got is a blubbering, screaming, pleading mess, all snot and blood.

  Ted draws back for the next swing before he realises there wasn’t a scream that time, not even a gasp.

  Hannah Harman looks up at him with dark, tear-filled eyes.

  ‘You’re a horrible man,’ she says.

  He’s so surprised that he forgets to hit her as she stands. She turns away from him as if he were of no account, looking at the door. His next blow takes her across the small of the back but lacks strength. She walks away from him towards the door.

  ‘Bitch!’ Ted surprises himself. He’s not given to cursing. He swings with all his strength and the cane explodes across the girl’s back, breaking in two. Again the girl doesn’t seem to notice.

  Into the silence that stretches between them comes the sound of feet descending the stairs beyond the door. Tex will have seen what’s going on.

  Hannah sets her hand to the door handle and looks in surprise at the broken chain trailing from her wrist. ‘There are other men outside?’ she asks. ‘You’re keeping her prisoner?’

  Ted doesn’t understand the question but he nods anyway.

  The door handle breaks off in Hannah’s hand. ‘I’m only doing this because I don’t want t
o hurt them,’ she says. ‘But I will if they make me.’ She pauses. ‘Also, I’m in a hurry.’

  With that she hurls herself at the opposite wall, using the door to launch herself towards it. There’s a deafening crash. Ted watches open-mouthed, phone forgotten, as masonry dust swallows the room.

  * * *

  ‘What do you mean, “she escaped”?’ The scrambler flattened the words but couldn’t blunt the tone of outrage.

  Ruby had asked the same question herself in the same tone when Riley’s call came in.

  ‘She’s an ace. I should have been told.’ Criticising your paymaster is not considered professional, even among those in Ruby’s line of business, but her temper has never been well controlled, at least not since the infection. ‘She went through two walls and came out of the basement through steel shutters. I’ve seen what’s left of them. Ted and the grounds teams tried to stop her. She threw three of them over a fence.’

  Silence at the end of the line. ‘If she’s an ace why would she let herself be taken? Why wait so long? Why go when she did?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Ruby growled the words. It hurt her to say them. ‘I’m ready to move against Harman.’

  ‘No.’ The man’s voice came sharp, commanding. ‘We need to understand this better.’ A pause. ‘I’m sending Jane.’

  Ruby killed the call. ‘Fuck.’

  Ruby stood slowly. A cold knot formed in the hot pit of her stomach and darkness pulsed behind her eyes. She left the small, copper-lined room where she’d taken the call and strode back into the operations centre where Krista still watched the monitors.

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘More problems?’ Krista looked up, her blunt face inscrutable.

  ‘They’re sending the Witch.’

  ‘Fuck.’ Nature hadn’t shaped Krista’s features for fear but she managed to look frightened even so. ‘Here?’

  The doorbell sounded. It shouldn’t be possible to reach the front door without being intercepted and without silent alarms turning the control board in front of Krista into a Christmas tree.