by John Marrs
McAllister’s frosty breath glazed Bruno’s face. “You are here for one reason and one reason only. Grow a fucking backbone and get on with it.”
An image of Nora in her wheelchair came to mind and McAllister knew what he was thinking. “You didn’t give a second thought to the families of the two lawyers you beat to death, did you?” he continued. “What about that rugby player? Did he have kids?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because you didn’t bother to find out, you just wanted them all dead. But now you’re losing your edge. Just because she has a child as defective as yours doesn’t mean she gets special treatment. Do you hear me?” McAllister didn’t wait for a response before he vanished.
On his return home, Bruno made his way upstairs into the room he had replicated to resemble Louie’s former bedroom and curled up on the bed. He tried to imagine Louie’s scent on the sheets and pictured his son sleeping under his arm. Bruno could just about make out the fluorescent decorative stars he’d stuck to the ceiling. Tonight they would make themselves visible. “Shall we make a wish on them?” he often asked Louie, but Bruno’s wish was always the same—to hear his son’s voice, even if it was only once.
He took his phone from his pocket and logged on to the ReadWell message board, the first time that week. He typed in The Two Noble Kinsmen and pressed search. He hadn’t counted on the search yielding a result, and especially not this one.
CHAPTER 48
FLICK, ALDEBURGH, SUFFOLK
The Two Noble Kinsmen.
The Two Noble Kinsmen.
The Two Noble Kinsmen.
The title of the play had haunted Flick for three days since it had been posted online. Its appearance warned of an imminent threat to the Minders’ safety.
Protocol dictated that as soon as they read the message, each was expected to leave their current location and make their way to a safe house in Northamptonshire. An identical message would be left for a maximum of seven consecutive days. That was to allow enough time to see it, leave confirmation of their impending return, and make their subsequent arrangements. No further information would be offered as to the reason until their arrival.
Following Karczewski’s murder, Flick had anticipated the recall message. But not knowing how advanced the other Minders’ preparations were—or even how many of them existed—was frustrating.
With Grace away for the night visiting a university friend, Flick didn’t want to be alone in the B&B so she’d asked to stay at Elijah’s house. For much of the evening, she catnapped as he slept soundly next to her. Her dreams came thick and fast until eventually she gave up on a restful night and relocated to his lounge. She wrapped herself in a tartan throw and sat cross-legged on the sofa. As the sun rose over the North Sea, she understood why Elijah had installed floor-to-ceiling windows when he’d designed his home. It was as if she were immersing herself in a moving piece of art, the cascading colours outside making her believe that she was part of a painting. It was a brief but welcome distraction from her reality.
And the reality was that Flick was conflicted. She knew that reparation for the opportunity to start afresh was to put her country’s security before her own needs. But turning her back on the second life that had saved her from her first was agonising. And time was running out.
Think, she told herself, think. There must be another way. For the second time that week, she disobeyed the programme’s regulations and engaged the use of technology. She asked the house’s OS to switch on Elijah’s wall-mounted television screen and search for more news about Karczewski’s death. To her surprise, there was nothing—no updates and no follow-up stories. Delving deeper, she found there was no longer any trace of his death or evidence that he had ever existed. Even the Twitter account that posted footage of his body’s retrieval was deactivated. She slumped back into the sofa, puzzled.
Flick picked up her phone and read the recall message yet again. Only this time something caught her eye. It was a minute detail that she’d missed. She drew the device closer to her eye to see if tiredness was affecting her vision. It wasn’t.
There was an extra keystroke between the words Two and Noble in the first message. The rest had just one.
Flick specifically recalled Karczewski explaining how such a communication would be sent via a secure computer algorithm and each message would be absolutely identical. So was this extra space a computer glitch? It seemed unlikely. Am I clutching at straws? she asked herself. If she wasn’t, the Minders’ only means of communication had been compromised by a third party.
A panicked Flick logged off and pushed the gadget to one side, then glared at it. Five minutes passed before she picked it up again and logged in. The extra space was still there. The algorithm did not make mistakes. There was something wrong about this. With her heart racing, she began to type her first ever message.
@Ariel: Won’t be finishing The Two Noble Kinsmen. Need a little extra space so I’ve decided to start Julius Caesar instead.
The sorry tale of Caesar and the trap that led to his murder was a warning to the others that not everything about the recall was as it seemed. She hoped to God that she wasn’t mistaken and putting their lives at risk for the sake of a simple error.
When she heard Elijah’s footsteps coming down the stairs, Flick placed her phone under a cushion and changed the screen from the internet to a music video station. He leaned over the back of the sofa and kissed the crown of her head.
“What’s that?” he asked, tracing with his fingers where he’d kissed her. “It feels like a tiny lump.”
That’s where I underwent a procedure to store everything the government doesn’t want you to know, she wanted to say. And now someone is trying to lure me out of hiding to get it.
“A war wound from being the only girl with four broth—” she replied instead, suddenly stopping short. Damn it, she thought, and wanted to punch the cushions.
“You have four brothers?” he asked. “Whenever I broach the subject of your family, you never want to talk about them.”
Flick had to shut the subject down quickly but she was no longer thinking clearly. The best she could offer was a shrug. “It’s a conversation for another day.”
Inside, she quietly feared there might not be many days left for her in Aldeburgh.
CHAPTER 49
CHARLIE, MANCHESTER
Charlie wasn’t aware a courier had dropped the plain white box onto his desk until he removed his virtual-reality headset. It was the only time he had requested post to be delivered to the office, so he was aware of its contents. He knocked it to the floor and pushed it under the desk with his foot when Milo approached. His parcel was not Milo’s concern.
“Are you coming for lunch?” asked Milo, and Charlie declined.
“I have some stuff I need to sort out,” he replied vaguely.
“Okay, tomorrow then? We should try that new Mexican restaurant in the Trafford Centre.”
“Sure.”
It had been days since they’d last shared food together, and Charlie wondered if Milo was aware that he was being kept at arm’s length. It wouldn’t matter if he was because it was likely Charlie would be leaving Manchester in the next couple of days and on his way to a safe house.
He fumbled for the box and found it next to the emergency backpack he kept hidden under the desk. Since the recall message, he had left one in his cubicle, a second in the hotel suite, and another under bushes by a disused section of a canal towpath. A fourth was stored in a locker in the People’s History Museum. Each contained basic necessities that would assist in making his escape from Manchester easier. However, he had held back from confirming his return following the notice until other Minders had posted confirmation that they too were leaving. There was too much to give up here until it was absolutely necessary.
Moments later and in the privacy of a toilet cubic
le, Charlie unpacked the Match Your DNA testing kit from the box, removed the mouth swab, moved it around his tongue and cheeks, placed it inside a test tube, and stuck a new adhesive label to the front. Later, he would slip it into the post-room to arrive at its destination by the next morning.
Before leaving the bathroom, he logged in to the ReadWell message board to check if the fourth of seven recall notices had gone live. Instead, he spied a new one from someone posting under the name of Ariel.
The stubble on Charlie’s chin bristled as he rubbed at it, puzzled. Any reference to Julius Caesar meant a Minder suspected a trap. But suspecting one and there actually being one were two very different things. And they were the contrast between Charlie leaving or remaining where he was and suffering the consequences. By now, he should be concerned. Yet he felt nothing.
He slipped outside, careful to avoid Milo’s eagle eye, and chose a small cafe in a side street to eat lunch alone. As he waited for his order, he took his mind off Ariel’s warning by considering what the results of the DNA test might be. His last account had been deleted when he entered the programme, but yesterday he’d arrived at work hours before everyone else and used an empty computer terminal to access a virtual private network. There, he created an encrypted and untraceable third-party email address, followed by a brand-new account. It was where the results would be sent.
It was Alix who had reignited his interest in finding out if he’d been Matched. The more time they spent together, the more he realised how perfect she would be for him if his circumstances were different. If he were different. She was everything he could want—warm, witty, attractive, intelligent, a good conversationalist, maternal, and driven. Yet she was not enough. Perhaps the only person who could make him feel again had registered with Match Your DNA in his absence. Maybe they were waiting for him and soon he could experience that euphoric rush of love so many boasted of.
It struck him that if he was being recalled and Alix and his new circle of friends were to vanish from his life overnight, he’d be unlikely to miss them. He would simply move on and make new friends, and likely remain just as emotionally detached from them too.
He logged back on to ReadWell and reread Ariel’s message a handful of times. What was she trying to tell him? “Need a little extra space,” he said aloud, and on the fourth time of reading it, he noticed she had left two keystrokes between “extra” and “space.” Charlie returned to the original recall message, then the second and third, and spotted the second space between the words Two and Noble in the first. Computer-generated messages did not make errors like that.
Slowly, he nodded as he understood Ariel was trying to warn them. A complete stranger he was unlikely to meet might have just saved his life.
* * *
—
SLEEP DID NOT come easily to Charlie that night. But at some point, he must have drifted off because he was awoken in the morning by Alix’s voice coming up the stairs. “Which drawer do you keep the tea towels in?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” he yawned.
“How long have you been living here? Have you still not dried any dishes yet? If we ever share a place together, that’ll be the first thing to change.”
Alix was red-faced when she returned to the bedroom moments later carrying mugs of tea. “Not that I mean we are going to move in together,” she continued. “Just in case you think I’m one of those women who after a few weeks of dating is already picking her wedding dress and the colour of the nursery.”
Charlie pulled back the duvet and she climbed into bed again. “I’m not worried,” he replied. And he wasn’t. Because whatever he had with Alix was not going to last. He no longer had the capacity for love and eventually she would see that. But for the moment, his performance as a keen boyfriend was perfectly convincing.
He had ruled out any plans to leave Manchester for now, but it was never far from his mind that somebody out there had tried to lure the Minders to the safe house. For what purpose, he did not know. But it wasn’t likely to be a positive one.
He and Alix had barely spent a night apart in their time as a couple. She was smitten with him. He didn’t find her company unpleasant, but like everything else, it was neither offensive nor non-offensive. She had made no complaints about his performance in the bedroom; his lack of sex drive was easily remedied by over-the-counter medication. And ejaculation came as a result of physical stimulation, not emotional. But even his orgasms didn’t bring about their typical rush of pleasure.
Alix’s phone pinged with a news alert. “Look at this,” she began, and showed him the screen. “It says Sweden is bracing itself to be held to ransom by the Hacking Collective. Dad was telling me we should withdraw all our bank savings because Britain will be next.”
“The Hackers can try, but they won’t succeed,” Charlie replied flippantly.
“Why not?”
Because everything they want to keep secret is hidden inside your boyfriend’s brain, he thought. “The government will have planned ahead for it, won’t they? We won’t be blackmailed.”
“I hope so. The hackers inflicted so much damage with those driverless cars. One of the teachers at work lost control of her Mini and it drove into a traffic light. She got whiplash.”
Try being hit by a lorry and losing your legs, then bleeding to death like my friends did, he wanted to reply, but held his tongue.
He waited until Alix was in the shower before he returned to ReadWell. There were no updates from Ariel or any of the others, so he added his own.
@Bassanio: Julius Caesar sounds like a good read. Thanks for the tip.
Charlie was going to remain where he was. But as with everything that was supposed to scare him, he had no fear of the future. Instead, he pledged to push himself as far as possible in the pursuit of understanding who he was now.
CHAPTER 50
SINÉAD, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE
Northampton—5 miles, read the electronic road sign ahead.
Sinéad checked her speedometer—she was still below the limit. She had been showing caution for the last 438 miles by using only B-roads because motorways and superhighways contained too many speed cameras and number-plate-recognition systems. This way, she hoped to avoid the police and reach her safe-house destination as quickly as possible following the ReadWell recall message. But it also meant her journey from Scotland to the Midlands had taken over fifteen hours. Only when the tiredness became all too consuming had she come to a halt in the dark corner of a supermarket car park and slept just long enough to recharge her batteries.
When she awoke, she thought of Doon and how she must be feeling today. Sinéad realised she had been caught in the moment when she had told Doon about her daughter’s murder. She had thought the truth would set Doon free, but it hadn’t. It had released her from one prison only to lock her up in a second.
Sinéad reflected on how she had felt upon learning through implanted data that her parents’ death in the Mumbai tsunami was a result of fracking, covered up by the British government. Greed and industry had killed them, not an underwater earthquake. There would be no prosecutions, and fracking continued in the same region. The information left her furious but powerless because under the terms of the programme, there was nothing she could do about what she knew. Now Sinéad understood that she had put Doon in the same position she had been in. It had been a terrible error in judgement and part of her was relieved there was a recall. Perhaps she wasn’t cut out for this second life. But it was going to get a lot tougher before it got better.
She pulled at an eyelash as she drove, and the needle-sharp sting as the root came to the surface brought her a moment of relief. When it faded, she repeated the action, as she had done frequently over the last few hours. Each eyelash was carefully placed on her thigh to form a semicircle.
Sinéad glanced in the rearview mirror at her sleeping passenger and took a deep breath. She k
new that she was in trouble. But there was no doubt in her mind that she had done the right thing in kidnapping baby Taylor.
SINÉAD, EDZELL, SCOTLAND
Yesterday, a shocked Sinéad had been coming to terms with the prospect of her new life reaching a premature end. The recall message had taken her by surprise, but she hadn’t questioned it. And she knew that she must leave as soon as possible. But there were two stops she wanted to make before leaving Edzell behind.
The first had been a symbolic gesture. She had travelled on foot to the same part of the river Esk where she had previously cast five bottled letters downstream. She was finally ready to allow the sixth letter to set sail, and it was the most important one. Sinéad had written it to her daughter, Lilly. It was a heartfelt apology for failing to be the mother her child had deserved. It had taken an age to complete, each word hurting like a punch to the stomach as she recalled every minute of the day she woke to find her baby dead. Teary eyed, she knelt upon the grassy bank before letting go of the bottle, along with her guilt. She would never forget the precious weeks spent enraptured by her much sought-after child. But it was time to forgive herself for what she had done.
She heard a splash as she stood up and realised her phone had fallen from her pocket and into the water. She quickly grabbed it, dried it on her sleeve, and turned it on. Nothing happened. “Damn it,” she snapped. It meant she couldn’t check the boards to see how many other Minders were readying themselves to leave.
Sinéad parked on the roadside, adjacent to the last house in the village, for her second stop. Gail’s red car was the only vehicle on the driveway, suggesting Anthony wasn’t there. The house was located a distance away from its neighbours on the only road in and out of Edzell; Sinéad wondered if it was coincidence that they were too far from their neighbours for them to hear the domestic violence under its roof.