by Nikki Owen
Pulling my head up as far as it will go, I study the EEG monitor. The graph paper shows frantic, peaked lines where it must have recorded the brain activity from what can only have been a vivid memory, a flashback. Which means that what I am experiencing now, here, must definitely be real. Slowly, almost too frightened to look, I inch my hand down to my abdomen and pull up my gown. There, beneath my fingers, is the scar. The scar Black Eyes gave me, just as I recalled. A memory, a real memory.
I lift my hand to my head.
And one by one, I rip the electrodes from my skull.
Chapter 20
I stare at Harry. ‘Why did you not tell me you knew my papa? When we first met, why did you not tell me?’
Harry glances to Balthus. ‘Maria, my dear. I couldn’t. I…I am so, so sorry you have found out like this.’
‘Like this?’ I stand, manic. ‘Like this? I found out by chance, but, actually—’ I halt, scratch my head ‘—nothing happens by chance, does it?’ I commence pacing. ‘Numbers—they all have a meaning, a place, and numbers translate into code, and code into data, and data is just another word for information, for facts, for knowledge.’ I stop, chest heaving. ‘And you kept that knowledge from me, Harry.’
I turn, ignoring both men. How can I trust them, trust anyone? They have already lied to me, pretended they were something they are not, just like my university professor, like Father Reznik, like my hospital boss. Like Dr-fucking-Andersson. These are authority figures I assumed were genuine, there to help me. The enormity of it, the delayed shock, slaps me hard and I bend over, wretch, shoulders heaving, mouth raw. Even my boss at St James’s was not who he pretended to be, and if someone like him can be a liar, someone kind, with a family, with a loving wife, how can we ever really believe anyone is who they say they are?
‘Maria,’ I hear Balthus say. ‘Are you okay?’
I stand and wipe my face as dry as I can, not wanting to feel or appear weak any more, not wanting to seem like a victim. I want to get out, want to win my appeal. I want to survive.
‘Maria,’ Harry says, ‘I know it must seem very unlikely right now, but we are here for you, to help you.’
‘Then why weren’t you here right at the beginning?’ I say, voice firm. ‘When I was arrested? When I was facing my first trial?’
Harry sits forward a little, smiles, one with creases that makes his eyes almost disappear. I feel myself soften a little. ‘I wanted to defend you, Maria,’ he says, ‘but I was working on a high-profile case and—’
‘The chef with the knife?’
‘You know about that?’ Another smile. ‘Well, yes. And I couldn’t get out of the case, and then you acquired a legal team and all I could do was watch them butcher your defence. When you were convicted, Balthus used his wife’s connections, got you transferred to Goldmouth.’
‘The Home Secretary,’ I say, almost to myself.
Harry sits forward. ‘Maria, I wanted to help you. I called Balthus when we heard the news that you were charged. We used his contacts to get you to Goldmouth. You’re Al’s daughter for God’s sake. And he told us what he—’
My eyes dart between them both, heart shoots. ‘Papa told you? Told you what? What? What do you know? Did he tell you something to do with Scotland?’
They share a glance to each other.
‘Maria,’ Harry says, ‘Alarico didn’t mention anything about Scotland.’
I frown, shake my head. ‘Then what did he tell you?’
Harry exhales. Balthus rubs his head with his hand.
‘He told us that he was concerned for your well-being, Maria,’ Harry says after a moment. He clears his throat. ‘He told us he was concerned for you, how you would cope with day-to-day life as you got older. I suppose he was concerned for your…for your sanity.’
‘Get someone in here. Now!’
I hear the voice but I do not stop, a juggernaut of strength, of survival instinct, railroading through me. I have to escape. I have to. So I keep ripping. I tear the electrodes from my scalp, the slime of the jelly on the pads mixing with my sweat so it trickles down my brow, stinging my eyes, sticking to my lashes, but I do not care.
‘She’s tachycardic,’ someone shouts, but I don’t know who, don’t know from where.
The monitor is beeping; my heart rate is accelerating; still I rip.
Someone is in the room, flat voice, a subtle New York lilt. ‘There’s a change in her blood chemistry,’ they say. ‘We’re getting low potassium levels.’
‘Cause?’ Another voice, different, low, gravel. Scottish.
‘The sodium amytal drug. She must have had too much.’
And then I realise: Kurt. Is it Kurt’s voice? I paw at the IV drip, try to sit up. ‘Kurt!’ I shout.
‘You put it in the coffee as I instructed?’
I thrash. The coffee! He drugged me, in the therapy room. That’s why it tasted odd, why I felt tired sometimes, why events were hazy. And then I think: spiders. Is that why I saw double of them? Because he had drugged me? Is that why I thought I saw cobwebs?
‘We must have put in too much,’ the voice says now. We? Who is ‘we’? His girlfriend? The one with the leather and the studs? I lurch again to break free.
‘Kurt!’ I yell, but still he does not hear me. I thrash around, try to get up, but I am strapped down, secured by the ankles.
A face looms over my head. I gasp. Black Eyes. ‘Hmmm,’ he says, but not to me, to the other person, to Kurt. ‘The drug has certainly helped us tap into her mind, see what she remembers. Thank you for recording it all—I saw it all on the secure site. She located the camera, though. Was only a matter of time. She’s sharp, as we’ve trained her to be.’
The camera! The camera I found in the Banana Room. They were recording me. The people Kurt works for were recording me. ‘Get away from me,’ I scream, like a dog ravaged with rabies, wild, dangerous. ‘Get away!’
Yet, Black Eyes just stands stock-still, peers at me, scanning my body. ‘We’ll need to get her back there, though. Fresh recording, hidden device as before. I need to see a little more of how she is acting under pressure, how she responds when her thoughts are being challenged, compromised. And I need to see a little more of what she is recalling. It is fascinating.’ He lifts my right ear, inspects it. ‘What have the endocrinological investigations shown?’
‘No signs of Cushing’s syndrome or hyperaldosteronism.’
‘Kurt!’ I scream.
Black Eyes drops my ear and presses his palm onto my mouth, silencing me. His skin tastes of metal. I try to scream, but only woollen muffles come out.
‘I instructed you to go easy on the sodium amytal,’ he says to Kurt. ‘Your doses must have been too large. It’s supposed to lower her inhibitions and give her mental clarity to talk, not accelerate her heart rhythm.’
I thrash my head, try to shake him off; he presses down harder on my mouth.
‘Treat her with potassium and magnesium infusions. The dysrhythmia should stop. When you’ve done that and she’s calmed down, give her something to keep her lucid but controlled, then contact me. I have tests to run. MI5 are on to us now, so we need to keep her on our side.’ He looks at me, smiles, then removes his hand and slaps my cheek. ‘You scream like that again and we won’t be so nice next time. Do you understand?’
I do not respond.
He slaps me once more. A sharp sting flushes my cheek. ‘Do you understand?’
My body falls back to the bed and, reluctantly, I nod. He narrows his eyes. I pant for air, the room pixelating into spots before my eyes.
He watches me for three seconds then leaves.
‘Concerned for my sanity?’ I shriek. ‘No. No! Papa would never say that. You are just assuming that’s what he meant. He didn’t mean that at all!’
Balthus steps towards me. ‘Why don’t you sit, Maria? Let’s talk this over.’
But I shrug him off, stride to the shelves, stop, stare at the literature that stands to attention in front of me. Fact
s, hard, true facts in the words of a book. Facts that prove things, demonstrate theory, present methods. My papa wouldn’t have said he was worried for my sanity. Not my papa. He knew me, Papa, that is why he worried about me even then, always fearful that I would not cope in the world on my own. But he knew what I could do, knew how I thought, how I felt in the deep recesses of my mind even when no one else understood, when no one else could ever begin to comprehend what it was like, growing up, being me. Different, odd, freakish.
I rake my hands through my hair once, twice, three times, breathing, thinking. If it is facts that are written, then it is facts that must prove true. And my notebook contains facts.
I turn, face the two men, draw in a breath, then say it. ‘There is someone after me in here.’
Balthus shakes his head. ‘No, Maria.’
‘Yes.’
Harry sits forward, holding a hand up to Balthus. ‘Maria, why don’t you explain what you mean?’
I glance to the wall clock, to my notebook lying shut on the desk and tell them. Tell them the facts: Bobbie, MI5, my handlers throughout out my life. Project Callidus. Dr Andersson. I say it, all of it, not because I trust them now, not because they listen, but because I have to prove to them that what they think Papa said about me is wrong. When I am finished, I pause, await their replies, but neither of them speaks. Neither of them moves.
‘Well?’ I say, blinking at them, the blood rushing round my ears.
Balthus leans on the back of his seat. ‘I’m sorry, Maria, but you believe Bobbie?’
I stop. Do I? Really? Or is it that I want to, have to, need to, so I can survive, so I can prove to everyone who I really am. Not a murderer. I swallow hard, my brain on the cusp of confusion, exhaustion. Drained. I blink my eyes into focus, Harry and Balthus coming into view, shouts from the yard below drifting in and out of the room fuelling the heat of my thoughts, my uncertainty.
‘I want you to look at something for me, Maria,’ Balthus says, after a second, his voice piercing my thinking.
I look. There is the file on his desk. Balthus holds it aloft. ‘Here.’
I hesitate at first, cautious. What is he trying to do?
‘It’s okay,’ he says, ‘you can take it.’
I keep my eyes trained on Balthus and inch towards the desk. Once there, I snatch the report and scurry back to the relative safety of the shelves. On the front cover is my name. And one other, too: Dr Andersson. My foot begins to tap furiously. ‘What is this?’
‘It is a report filed by Dr Andersson giving her medical assessment of your psychiatric well-being.’
I glance to Balthus then to the report, tearing it open. My eyes scan the words. It details how I find it difficult to distinguish what is real and unreal; says that it is hard for me to manage emotions, that I have difficulty relating to others. She documents how I am hostile and suspicious, that I have an inability to express joy, a tendency to declare odd or irrational statements, that I have a strange use of words and way of speaking, that I am…that…I am…
‘No!’ I shout. My hands squeeze the report. ‘No. She cannot say this about me.’ I slam the report shut, throw it as far as I can as if it is radioactive, deadly. ‘No!’
Harry looks to Balthus. ‘What is it? What does it say?’
Balthus gives one small shake of his head. ‘It says Maria is schizophrenic.’
Chapter 21
I am on my own now and in a different room. The light is low, the blinds are black.
I lift my head. It aches, pain pounding into it like it’s a plank of wood being squeezed in a vice. Carefully, I look down at myself, jittery, nervous of anyone who may come in, frightened that Black Eyes may return. My hospital gown, I can see, is white, tied at the back, and on my head there is a plastic cap covering my entire scalp. I open my mouth to scream but nothing comes out, no sound, no shouts. Horrified, I gag slightly, my stomach heaving, and exhausted, I try to rest for a second, try to think. By my side, there is a heart rate monitor. It does not beep any more. I am no longer sweating as I was before and my breathing is steady.
While there are no more straps on my limbs, I do not move, because now, ahead, of me, I see them, standing there like ghosts: three men guarding the door. Each one of them holds a gun. And though the room is white and the lights glow brightly, a dark shadow through the window to the left douses the room in grey.
The guards stand straight and the monitor remains silent. Still I do not move, do not dare. At first, nothing changes, but then I begin to detect a voice, a murmur. I steal a glance at the guards; their heads do not move, their eyes do not blink.
There. I hear it again! My heart races—it rises, but I don’t want the monitor to resume beeping, so I pause, draw in long, deep breaths, calm myself. When I think I am clear, I listen again. There! A woman’s voice. She is singing, I am sure of it. It’s not in English, yet it is too low for me to decipher the language. I look at the window. No one there. The voice vanishes, and a feeling of dismay almost threatens to overwhelm me, when the voice appears again. This time I can detect the language: Euskadi. Basque. The woman is singing a lullaby in Basque dialect. I listen again. There are verses about twilight and silver wings spreading across the sky. The voice is light, gentle, soothing, like a warm cotton blanket.
A door opens. I dart my eyes to it. As quick as it began, the singing stops.
A man is standing in the entrance. He wears a white mask and he is wheeling in a laptop computer. He halts at my bedside, opens the laptop and taps some keys. He faces me and instructs me to sit forward.
‘Who are you?’ I say, fear prickling every molecule of my body.
‘I am going to ask you to perform a series of tests,’ the man says as if I had not spoken. He keeps his eyes on mine.
‘I do not want to do any tests.’ I try to push myself back on the bed, but it is futile: there is nowhere left to go. ‘Who are you?’
‘The tests,’ he continues, ‘measure your cognitive skills, your visual and spatial reasoning, your dexterity, your mental calculation expertise and your ability to assimilate technical knowledge.’
‘I will not do any tests. I want to see Kurt. Where is Kurt?’
The man grabs my wrist. ‘We are testing you and you will do as we ask. We are running out of time.’
‘Let go,’ I say, looking at my wrist. He does not move. ‘Please, let go.’
‘Do you really think anything about you is normal?’ he says.
And then it enters my head. I look around the room. ‘Is this Callidus?’
He grips my wrist harder. ‘I don’t know where you heard that word, but we have to get you back to London in one hour. Your Asperger’s traits are accelerating—not every aspect of the conditioning can be controlled. We only have one year left.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Wars aren’t fought on the streets any more, Dr Martinez. They are fought behind the screen of a computer.’
He slowly lifts his hand from my wrist. I hold my arm and rub the skin, too scared to connect what he is saying.
‘I do not want to hurt you,’ he says now, tapping the laptop keyboard, ‘but I will if I have to. I advise you, Maria, to do as I ask.’ He places a loaded syringe on a metal table to his left.
I bolt backwards. ‘What is in that needle?’
He keeps his eyes on the laptop screen. ‘It is a drug called Versed. If I administer it, you’ll feel severe pain and discomfort. When it wears off, you will be unable to remember the pain, or anything we inflict on you.’ He pauses. ‘Or anything I say to you.’
I stare at the syringe. If I fight it, they will hurt me; if I do the tests, will they leave me? Somehow, it feels whichever road I take, it will lead to a bad place. ‘What…’ My head sways a little. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘This is a code program,’ he says, swivelling the laptop round to me. ‘The code is encrypted. I want you to crack the code.’
I try to focus. There are blocks of letters on the scr
een. At first they seem random and then…I begin to catalogue them. One, after the other, after the other. In my head, I match them, trace the links, spot the connections, the holes. It is easy.
‘Can you do it,’ he says, ‘because the time is—’
‘It is a meeting.’
The man presses a button on his watch. ‘Go on.’
I trace the code. ‘It is for a weapons programme, but that is not all—there are details of a conversation. A transcript.’
‘What does the conversation say?’
I scan the letters. ‘It gives times and dates.’
‘Specifically. I require details.’
‘Twenty-third of September. The meeting is in Tehran. It involves one lieutenant, one colonel and one senior Iranian intelligence officer.’
‘Does it give a task and target?’
‘The American Embassy.’ I swallow. ‘A bomb will go off at fourteen hundred hours on that date. The device will be brought in through the cleaning services’ company van.’
The man in the mask presses an intercom buzzer. ‘Did you get that? Make the call.’ He releases the button.
I touch my forehead, breathe a little. ‘Can I go now?’
‘No.’ He closes the laptop and hands me a directory. ‘Take it.’
‘Wh-what?’
‘I said, take it.’
My eye spots the loaded needle. Slowly, I reach out, take the book.
‘This is a telephone directory containing every phone number in Edinburgh,’ he says. ‘You have two minutes to scan the first hundred pages and memorise every number.’
‘What?’
‘Go.’
I hesitate, then glancing once more at the syringe, open the directory. My fingers fly through the book. I scan the pages like a computer, committing each address line, name and number to memory. It takes me one minute and forty-three seconds to complete. I sit back, breathing hard.