Rid of my bodyguard my major remaining problem was Anushka, who proved much less easy to slip. I told her I’d wanted to make some private calls. I didn’t feel bad about keeping her in the dark, I was protecting her. She’d know nothing. What was the alternative? ‘Hey Anushka! Do you want to run away with me and my kids, to escape this apparent plot to mess up the world?’
Later than expected at 11:40 I saw James come out to his car in the street with Rav and Rosie. I picked up the internal phone and dialed Anushka.
‘I wondered if you could do me the hugest favour. I’m sorry to ask, but could you possibly go to the chemist for me? It’s something I need quite urgently.’
‘Of course, Ellie,’ she said, and came upstairs to pick up a sleeping pill prescription I’d been storing up for ages. I knew the nearest chemist was in Parliament Square, a 10 minute round-trip.
‘We’re going for a walk in the park,’ I said to the kids. ‘We’ll go and see the squirrels and eat ice-cream.’ Both of them cheered. ‘But you have to promise me, it’s really important that we don’t make a sound on our way down, because Daddy’s got lots of important jobs to do today and everyone’s really busy.’
I came down the stairs from the flat to find the landing empty. I went down the main staircase, everyone must’ve been in their offices watching PMQs. The front door was opened for me without any problems, no questions asked. The kids seemed quite happy, excited even. They didn’t ask why we were leaving by the front door, when the park was accessed from the back.
Rav had arranged the car, I’d insisted I left by the front door. It would be for the best, I said, if there was an irrefutable record that I left the building. Even then I wasn’t sure either of the cameramen on the other side of the street captured us as we got into the car, which turned around at the end of the road. ‘Bye-bye Number 10,’ said Sadie.
The car took us to Heathrow and I bought our tickets at the terminal. The ground agent stared at me, perplexed, but said nothing more. They didn’t stop us at security, nor at the gate. Nobody stopped us at immigration in Lisbon, nobody queried my credit card when I put down the deposit on a hire car. There were no messages on my voicemail, no texts or emails. James must’ve only found out I was missing from Number 10 when he returned from the summit that evening, by which time I was already in Naviras.
Of course it was madness to go back there, of all places, hiding in plain sight. They’d have people watching the village, surely, I thought. As we crossed the bridge heading out of Lisbon the statue of Cristo Rei seemed to frown at me. On the other side of the bridge I stopped at a service station in Almada. I called Liz Brickman from a payphone, let it ring three times before I hanging up.
It was seven o’clock at night by the time we approached Casa Amanhã. The sun had just gone down, the car disturbed tree pollen wafting along the street as I pulled up at the gates. Bobby and Sadie both remembered the house and were excited. The gates were shut, still padlocked but rustier. I could see from the road that the house was dark. For a moment I worried someone had changed the lock, but then a twiddle through the rust and it clicked. I let the chain fall to the gravel and pushed the low gates open.
‘Mummy why don’t we come and live in Naviras forever?’ Sadie said. I didn’t reply as I rolled the car slowly down the driveway and parked.
‘Stay in the car, kids. Just for a minute, please.’ I got out and stared at the house, the shutters on the windows and the doors. It seemed so wrong, for a house like that to remain closed and locked, when inside there was so much potential for life. There didn’t seem to be any structural damage though, no sign of forced entry. Apart from some new flakes in the paintwork, it looked just as I’d left it.
I walked around the house, opened the wine cellar trapdoor and walked down. The matches were still by the lantern, thankfully dry. The rest of the cellar was clean, apart from a few rat droppings and cobwebs. Lottie would have been horrified anyway, I thought, as I walked around and up the stone staircase and into the vestibule. One of the precarious book towers had fallen over, I could just make out yellowed pages curling upwards on the floor like dead insect legs. I trod on them on my way to the front doors, pulling back the big black bolts. Despite being large and heavy they opened easily enough, their hinges making just a high pitched squeal as they turned.
As soon he saw me Bobby undid his seatbelt, reached over and unstrapped Sadie from her carseat. They both got out of the car, trooping across the driveway. I took them upstairs and managed to get them to sit on the bed of Room Five. ‘Can you get ready for bedtime please?’
I walked upstairs into the bathroom of Room Seven. There was a lot of dust, more than in other parts of the house. The painting was there, lined up dead straight. I lifted it off its hook and then stood there, holding it in front of me. Behind it there was just the whitewashed brick wall. The alcove wasn’t there.
I squeezed my eyelids closed, opened them again. No alcove. I started to question my own memories, wondered whether anything I held to be true really was. I could feel the panic coming on, put my head into the toilet and threw up.
None of us slept well that night. I brought the kids upstairs to Room Seven and the three of us shared the same bed, which Bobby was none too pleased about. They both knew something was drastically wrong, despite every attempt by me to claim otherwise. It began to rain in the middle of the night, a heavy shower that hammered the roof of the house. The poplars in the garden waved noisily in the wind.
The kids were starving and woke me long before dawn, demanding breakfast. There was nothing to eat in the house, obviously, so we walked down into the village. The shop where I’d first bought cherries had just opened; I told the kids they could have whatever they wanted, which inevitably led them to the ice-creams in the freezer. Who cares, I thought. Might as well make it seem as though we’re on holiday. The woman in the shop – the same woman as ever, older and greyer – looked at me with bemusement. What sort of a mother would let her children eat ice-cream for breakfast, she must’ve thought.
We walked through the travessa down to the beach. The bar wasn’t open, it was far too early. The amber sun was just poking around the side of the eastern cliffs. Everything was normal, the cliffs were intact. Seagulls were circling over the bay, occasionally dipping into the ocean for fish. Bobby and Sadie went to sit on the beach, leaving me to stand on the slipway. It’s all real, I thought. This is real, and always was. It never changes. The world can do whatever it wants, and Naviras will just carry on regardless. It didn’t care about anything, including me. It would be there long after I was dead, others would come and fall in love with it, just as I had. Or had I? Actually it was the people I’d fallen in love with, not the place. Now they were gone, Naviras had returned to how I’d first found it; a nice little village. Not unique, not special.
Carolina came down to the slipway, having seen the car in the driveway at Casa Amanhã. We embraced and then I looked at her. She was starting to look very much like her father, I thought, before realising that grief and shock had aged her prematurely. ‘Ellie, Will you stay here for good this time?’
‘I don’t know, Carolina. Maybe,’ I looked up at the eastern cliffs, noticed the hotel was surrounded by scaffold. ‘What’s going on up there?’
‘Oh, they’ve closed it,’ she said. ‘They had an inspection and it’s not safe, they didn’t build it properly. I think it’s going to be demolished, everyone’s quite happy about it.’
A whole day, I got. A whole day of trying to clean up the mess in the house, going for a walk up to the cliffs with the kids to find the old cottage derelict as it always had been. One night of sardines eaten in La Roda with Carolina. Just one day and night of peace and quiet, then the next morning Rosie came. I watched as she walked through the gates of Casa Amanhã, started to make her way down the driveway. I’d pulled a table and chair outside from the restaurant so I could watch for the first sign of a visitor. I’d prepared myself for someone coming sooner or later, I
’d wondered if it would be her, not James. He never failed to disappoint. Bobbie and Sadie were having their lunch outside on the picnic table next to the restaurant door, heavily sunblocked despite the large parasol I’d brought out. I wanted to stand up, march down the driveway and stop her in her tracks, prevent her from coming anywhere near the house, the kids. But I couldn’t let Bobbie or Sadie out of my sight.
She drew up close to me, but not too close. ‘What’re you writing?’
‘Everything. All that people need to know, anyway,’ I replied. ‘And if you think that’s the only copy, you’re seriously wrong. Killing me won’t stop it.’
Rosie looked up to the sky, back down at me. ‘We don’t want to kill you, Ellie. I’m here because James has a message for you.’
‘What, does he want me to come home? So he can throw me in a lunatic asylum, or plug me back in to the Rendering?’
‘I know you must hate me,’ she said. ‘We never wanted you to end up feeling like this, I promise.’
‘How do you know how I feel, Rosie?’
‘Angry, frustrated, unable to believe in anything?’ She was trying to make out she felt the same way. ‘That your whole life and those you care about have been part of someone else’s little game? You made that choice, Ellie. I’m sorry to say it, but if it hadn’t been this, it could have been something else. Someone could have bombed Downing Street, or shot down a plane you were in.’
‘That someone was you, though, as it turned out. You orchestrated it, with others.’
‘Yes, I’m not going to make any attempt to dissuade you of that. But you played your part, Ellie. James never knew this house was yours, or that you’d an affair with Luis in the same bed he slept in here. On top of everything else he’s dealing with, you’ve wounded him. Look, a peace offering.’
She reached into the inner pocket of her jacket and pulled out the postcard. She handed it to me. It was a little more frayed than when I’d seen it last at Ben Gurion, it had been crumpled, folded perhaps.
I squeezed my eyes closed. ‘How long ago did this all start? For you.’
She kicked the gravel on the driveway. ‘I was recruited six years ago, just before James was made a whip. The project had been bubbling away for about a year, under the surface.’ She looked back up at me. ‘They never shared it with the British government, as it happens. I know you found out about James and me.’ She actually looked a bit sheepish. ‘I’m especially sorry for that, Ellie. I can assure you, it only happened once, I know that’s almost impossible to believe, but it’s the truth. The only reason I let it happen at all was so we could harvest James’s DNA.’
‘I guess you’re telling me all of this because you’re about to have me bumped off.’
‘Oh, we could’ve done that last night,’ she smiled, smugly. ‘With a missile from the drone we’ve had periodically flying over this village. Trust me, you’re no use to us dead, Ellie.’
I looked up into the empty sky. ‘How’s that?’
‘Because you were liable to reject the Rendering. Your reset caused a malfunction in the system, and ultimately you were unplugged prematurely because you continued to reject it. All of you, Morgan, Gavin, Rav, you were all supposed to stay under for quite a bit longer, but because you crashed the simulation we had to stop it, which means Project Tabernacle never fulfilled all its objectives.’
‘Well I’m glad,’ I said.
Rosie shrugged. ‘Nonetheless, we need one more scan of your brain, Ellie, just one. To confirm their hypothesis about your rejection rate. For what it’s worth, there’ve been ninety-six people who’ve gone into the Rendering, and not one has ever been displaced in the simulation during a reset before. I suppose you should be proud, in a sense. You seem to be unique.’
‘I rejected it because the Rendering was incomplete.’
‘True, but that in itself doesn’t account for the synaptic behaviour you displayed. Maybe it was the meds you were taking for your depression, we can’t be sure. Anyway, we’re prepared to cut you a deal. Please, let me show you something.’ She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out her phone, pressed the screen and held it out to me.
It was a pair of line graphs; two wavelengths undulating in a slow, gentle pattern. On the left of the screen were two words: ‘Luna’, and ‘Rar’.
‘This is Lottie and Luis,’ she said. ‘Their synapses, actually. They don’t move much, not like those of someone who’s awake, but they’re perfectly healthy. We’ve kept them in the Rendering, helps to keep their brains ticking over.’ She tapped on the screen, then held it up to me again.
The graphs had gone, replaced by two images, side by side and nearly identical. On the left hand side was Lottie, suspended in the middle of a room, wires sticking out from her in all directions like spokes. She was wearing the same ball-bearing chainmail I’d seen on myself when I’d come out of the Rendering. She had a contented look on her face. Occasionally one of her arms would move, gracefully. On the right hand side of the screen Luis was similarly plugged in, only his legs were raised up, at right angles. In his mind he must’ve been sitting, maybe at the beach bar, waiting for someone to come out of the ocean.
‘These aren’t live images, but they were captured very recently. I can show you other bio-indicators if you want,’ Rosie continued to hold the screen up to me, her eyes behind it looking at me. ‘They’re in a facility not far from Bristol. We had them flown over from the US last night.’
I didn’t want to believe it, but how could I not want to? ‘You could revive them. You’d let them go.’
‘Of course, the process would take about two weeks in Lottie’s case, it has to be gradual at her age. In exchange, we need another scan of your brain, to confirm why you rejected.’
‘If that’s what you want, I don’t understand why you don’t just take me captive.’
She inhaled deeply. ‘It was looked at, but it’s too risky, under the circumstances. Someone from the village might see something, and how would we account from your absence from public life? We need you to come back voluntarily, so that’s the deal. Lottie and Luis, in exchange for you returning to Number 10, submitting to the brain scan and acting like everything’s fine for a while.’
‘You must be joking.’
‘You can divorce James in time, Ellie, after the next election. That’s all been agreed. But what we can’t have is you and the kids just vanishing from his life, suddenly. Not because it would damage his leadership as such, but since it might prompt some unwelcome research, you understand? It’s far too soon after Morgan’s death.’
‘What about Lottie? She can’t just come back to Naviras, miraculously back from the dead. There’s a bloody memorial to her in the churchyard.’
‘We’ve considered that, too, and we deem the risk to be fairly low,’ said Rosie. ‘I mean, look at this place, it’s a backwater. Who would care if two people everyone thought had died came back? And even if there were some backwash, it’d actually be furthering the aims of the project. That’s the point, after all, make people think there’s something beyond this.’
‘Do you think there is?’ I couldn’t help but ask. I wanted to know whether the woman had anything resembling a shred of conviction.
‘That’s irrelevant.’
I dearly wanted to punch her, if the kids hadn’t been there I might well have done. ‘You’ll have us all bumped off, at some point, whatever I agree to.’
‘As long as people stay quiet about it, nobody will get hurt. All you need to do is keep your mouth shut. And believe it or not, Ellie, you’re the person whose disappearance would prompt the most searching questions.’
‘What about Rav and Gavin? And his friend Rob, will you release him?’
‘Why do you care?’ She frowned at the house behind me and shrugged. ‘I’m afraid Rob is something that’s beyond my control and Rav, I believe, is stepping down at the end of next month. They’ve had to space it out a bit, given it’s not long since my departure.’
‘This isn’t really about parties, Ellie. But he’s been offered the same thing. He’ll have a happy life, so long as he observes protocol.’
‘You’ll never keep this quiet forever.’
She smirked. ‘You’re probably right, but that’s really not my concern. My task at the moment is to work towards a situation where people don’t find out in the short-term. Long-term, who knows? I intend to be well out of the picture by then, and if you think about it, Ellie, that’s what Gavin and Rav will both want.’
‘What did you hope to get out of all of this? Personally, I mean.’
‘Believe it or not, Ellie, I want people to be happy. That’s what I’ve always wanted. Project Tabernacle was meant to help people feel better, believe there’s a point to everything. You must understand that, a bit?’
I nodded, trembling. I was determined not to let her see any tears. ‘If I did this scan, where would it happen? And how would I know that you’d kept up your end of the bargain?’
‘You’d have to trust us, Ellie. I know that seems impossible to do. To do this, you must accept that we think you’ve got leverage over us. We can do the scan inside Number 10, the equipment’s quite portable.’ She took a step towards me. ‘It’s a good offer, Ellie. If you do the scan, then act like everything’s normal until the next election, we’ll release your friends immediately. For the next two years you wouldn’t be able to have much contact with them, but after that it’s up to you. If there’s any deviation, I can’t say what the consequences would be.’
‘But you’ll carry on using the Rendering.’
She gave a little smirk. ‘Well not me, exactly. I’m in a different area of the business, now. Call it a demotion, if you like.’ She gave a pained expression.
Weeks in Naviras Page 34