I took off the kitbag, rolled onto my back and laid it next to me. Then I began to wriggle under the wire, cutting as I went, dragging the bag next to me. The wire had a depth of seven feet. It took me three minutes to get through, which, when you’re on your back, under barbed wire and expecting to be shot at any minute, is a long time.
Then speed became more important than keeping hidden. I knew I wasn’t in the field of vision of the two next towers, and I figured the CCTV would be focused on the hangars, so I ran. I ran twenty-five yards, half the distance to the nearest hangar. Then I dropped, pulled the fuel can from the kitbag and propped it up with a couple of rocks. After that, I was up and running again, oblique, headed for a large rock forty or fifty yards away, that was casting a shadow away from the spotlights. I dropped on my belly in the shadow of the rock, took careful aim at the gas can and pulled the trigger. The silencer made a soft phut! sound and, half a second later, the can exploded.
Twenty-five liters of gasoline makes a big explosion, and right then, Joanna would know I had betrayed her. I took fifteen seconds to cover myself in dust and dirt then lay motionless, listening to the shouts and hollers and the tramping of running boots. They passed close, but they saw what they expected to see—a rock surrounded by dirt. Besides, all their attention was on the burning, smoldering can, fifty yards away.
Then I was up and running again, heading for the hangar and scanning the wall for CCTV cameras. I spotted two, dropped to my belly again, took my time aiming, phut! And again, phut! And the two cameras were out of action. I knew I now had seconds. I made it to the corner, took out two more CCTV cameras that were watching the front of the facility where the road passed through a main gate to a parking area. The entrances were a sheet-glass façade and two large plate-glass doors. I didn’t run. I strode purposefully and pushed through the two doors, bellowing like a sergeant major whose first coffee of the morning has been disturbed.
“What the fuck is going on here?”
There were six men. They all stared at me in shock. None of them was carrying anything more dangerous than a clipboard. Each one of them died, wondering what was happening. There was a set of double doors in the back wall that had to lead into the central areas where I had seen what appeared to be green crops. I crossed the floor, burst out through the doors and stopped dead. I was standing in the shade of what felt like a vast forest, only they weren’t trees. They were cannabis plants, twenty and thirty feet high. Their fan leaves were maybe five or six feet across, and they were hung with buds that looked like cabbages, oozing a thick, white slime in dense threads across the clusters of fruit. The stench was overpowering, sickly and heady.
The plantation was maybe a hundred feet across, with five giant plants abreast in rows of maybe thirty trees. I paused for only a moment, staring agog. There was a stone-paved path that crossed the plantation to the next pentagon. I ran then pushed through the doors.
I was in another broad passage. The walls were brilliant white. I kept going toward the double doors opposite. I heard feet, boots running—at least six pairs. I hammered through into another cannabis forest and stopped. I knew what I was going to find on the other side of the next set of doors. More men. I was being funneled into a trap.
It’s a golden rule. If you are being led into a trap, do something different. It might not work, but at least they won’t be searching for it. I turned, faced the doors and kneeled with the Sig held in both hands straight out in front of me.
The doors exploded open. They’d expected an empty corridor. They’d planned to charge straight through. They stumbled and froze for three precious seconds. Two on the left… Phut-phut!…straight through the heart. Two on the right… Phut-phut! Then the two in the middle… Phut-phut!
Neat.
Without pausing, I hurled my back at the left door. It slammed open and I had a clear view of four soldiers in uniform, all looking surprised. They’d expected me to barge through the middle with six soldiers behind me. Right now, they were trying to readjust to the fact that I was about to shoot them.
I figured there were four more behind the door who couldn’t see me.
I knew I had at least two seconds. I closed in methodically from the sides—left right, left, right. Phut-phut! Phut-phut!
Don’t stop! Keep moving!
I let my legs go and rolled. There were four guys in uniform. They were in disorder, trying to see where I was going to wind up.
Phut-phut! Phut-phut!
Neat.
I stood and hesitated.
Do the unexpected.
They assumed I would go barging through…she’d said, like a barbarian. So, I should circle around and approach from the side or the back. But that was what they would expect me to do. What they wouldn’t expect was this.
I hammered through the next four sets of doors. Another cannabis forest. Another corridor. Empty. Another cannabis forest. Then I crashed through the next set of doors and froze.
It was a lab. It was a pentagon, following the same pattern of the outer hangars, but there were no inside walls. Instead, there was a pentagonal garden, maybe fifty feet across, like a small woodland of giant cannabis plants. All around it the lab was a broad, deep gallery, furnished with benches, advanced chemical apparatus and high-tech electronic equipment that meant nothing to me.
What meant something to me were the thirty-odd men and women in lab coats, standing, looking at me with absolutely no expression on their faces. And the five large green-glass or Perspex tubes that stood against the far wall. All but the middle one were filled with only gently bubbling liquid. The middle one had Maria in it.
I heard the door crash behind me and the running tramp of military boots. I ignored them. Maria was suspended somehow. She was naked and her hair was covering her face, but she was unmistakable. I knew it was her. I took a couple of steps forward and heard the rattle of maybe six automatic weapons being cocked behind me. I kept walking until I heard del Roble’s voice.
“I will not say you are disappointing, Murdoch. You are never that. But you are predictable.”
He was on my left, leaning his ass against a bench with his arms crossed. Joanna was next to him. I turned and started toward him. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew I was going to end it now.
He watched me without moving till I was three strides away, then he said, “She will die.”
I stopped.
He watched me a minute, then said, “She can live or she can die. It’s up to you.”
“I have your word on that, have I, del Roble?”
The sarcasm was palpable and Joanna laughed.
Del Roble sighed like he’d suddenly grown bored and said, “Come…”
He levered his ass off the bench and went toward the big tank where Maria hung suspended in what looked like a green gelatinous liquid. He stopped a few feet from it and did that thing Spaniards do, where they shrug and pull down the corners of their mouths.
“This is your love, the thing you live and die for.” He gestured at it with his hand. “A lump of meat…animated by flows of excited particles.” It was like he was talking to himself instead of me. He shrugged again, a couple of times, the way only Latins can. “Why? What is she? Why suffer and die for this?”
I laughed. It was short and humorless. “You want to understand love? Forget it.” I reached in my pocket and found a pack of Camels. I peeled it and pulled one out. I spoke as I poked it in my mouth then lit it. “You’d have to be human, and even then, you wouldn’t get it.”
He turned and smiled at me. “Do you?”
“No.”
“And yet—”
I cut across him. He was getting on my nerves. “What do you want, del Roble? We are irrational, hot. Maybe we’re crazy and contradictory. Who gives a fuck? It’s what makes us us, and we like it that way.”
He narrowed his eyes and there was an angry hunger in them. “Do you know how old I am, Murdoch?”
I watched him while I let sm
oke out through my nose. I was fighting the desire to smash his face into the glass vat. I said, “Old enough to know better?”
Joanna surprised me. She had come up beside me and said, “It’s an important question, Murdoch.”
“Important to who?”
He dismissed my question and said, “I am three hundred and fifty years old.”
“Bullshit!”
“All these years I have lived among you, maintaining this form, trying to understand you, trying to fathom your feelings. Your irrational, confused, stupid emotions…” He turned back to stare at Maria and muttered, half to himself, “These hungers that drive you. This heat.”
I looked at Joanna.
She gave a small smile. She said, “Rupa.”
Del Roble turned to her, a little surprised, nodding. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, rupa.” He turned and gestured at the whole lab around him. “It’s what this is all about. This facility, Llyn Celyn, when it goes online… Thousands, tens of thousands of years of research. You have no idea.”
I sighed and glanced at the tip of my cigarette. It was halfway down. I reached in my pocket and made a show of searching for the pack. I found my phone and once again pressed record, then pulled out a second cigarette and lit it from the first. I said, “You’re boring me.”
He seemed slightly disgusted. “You are the lowest form of thinking life. Yet you are uniquely gifted in the universe.”
I smiled. “Who? Me, Doc?”
“Your species!” He was suddenly all passion and intensity. “You are so finely balanced between the animal and the Seraph, that you are capable of heights of emotion and feeling, capable of feats of consciousness that we—”
Joanna cut across him, “Seraph!”
He glanced at her.
I looked at them both and laughed. “So you grow giant cannabis plants to help you feel? Good luck with that.”
I saw him glance at Joanna. “We develop hallucinogenic chemicals. This is not cannabis, as you know it.” He stepped over and took hold of one of the cabbage-sized buds, dripping with a mucous like slime. “These buds—”
“Seraph!” It was Joanna again.
He hesitated, then shrugged. He settled on, “They contain secrets you cannot imagine.”
I thought a moment while I sucked on the cigarette. As I let out the smoke, I said, “You really want to tell me, don’t you? But she won’t let you. What’s that about, del Roble?” I turned to her and scanned her face for a bit. She was still expressionless. “You the senior officer here?”
He looked from me to Joanna and back again. He said, “We have many projects in the fields of genetic development. Ultimately, our aim is to discover the nature of consciousness itself. It is the principle that binds and defines the whole universe, yet nobody knows what it is. It is not predicted by relativity or quantum mechanics, yet it is central to understanding both.”
I sighed. “You’re still boring me.”
He smiled and raised an eyebrow, like he knew I was lying and trying to provoke him. “Modify a genetic code and you modify the intellectual potential of the organism. You modify its capacity to be conscious.”
I knew what he was driving at but I asked, “What’s your point?”
“You know perfectly well what my point is, Murdoch. We are searching for a perfect hybrid. A vehicle that will allow us to retain the clarity and perfection of the Ael’s mind, while having the sentient capacity of the human. We want to genetically code Enlightenment. We want to breed enlightened beings. Create, finally, the true—”
I couldn’t suppress an incredulous laugh. “Illuminati?”
He glanced at me, then at Maria suspended in the slime. He changed the subject. “You have the capacity for growth.”
I frowned. “Growth?”
He stared at me and his face was full of dark anger and hatred. “Apparently. Didn’t you ‘grow’ when you first felt love for this woman? It’s all you humans ever talk about—growth. Some metaphor to do with a change in consciousness.”
I had suddenly lost patience. I dropped the butt on the floor and said, “It’s all bullshit to me, del Roble. So, you have a genetic program where you are trying to create the perfect cross between an angel and a human. You aren’t crazy. You’re just plain stupid. What else are you doing with all this shit?”
He didn’t get the pun. He smiled in a way you’d call thin and said, “When we have isolated and reproduced the code for growth toward perfect consciousness, we will rob you of the only thing that makes you remarkable.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “You will?”
“Nature gave you this ability to touch the divine and the bestial with your minds. We are going to remove that from you. We will turn the human species into a gray, amorphous mass of organic robots. You will serve us in every way, and we shall live, as you live, feeling your appetites and conflicts, but with our higher minds.”
I nodded. “This is your obsessive pursuit of rupa. You know, del Roble, I have to hand it to you. Every time I meet you, you’re a little bit crazier than the last time—”
Joanna cut across me. “Crazy? Why? For seeking all the feelings and experiences you take for granted? Isn’t it exactly what you do? Do you have any idea how much money you humans spend each year on food, alcohol, sex and violence? Every ounce of your effort is invested in exciting these feelings. It is what you live for. Do you know what happens to people who are deprived of excitement and stimulation? They becoming psychotic and suicidal. Your entire existence as a species is focused not on survival, like every other species in nature, but on stimulating sensations of excitement and pleasure. And you call us insane for wanting the same.”
She had a point.
I frowned at her, “How can you not feel? If you don’t feel, how come you’re frustrated? That’s a feeling.”
She drew breath to answer, but del Roble was talking over her. “Of course we feel, but not as you do. It is impossible for you to understand. We do not occupy three-dimensional space as you do, so…” He spread his hands and shook his head, defeated by the impossibility of communicating with a hairless ape. “Imagine that you live permanently in a dream. You see, you hear, but your feelings are dull, muted.” He rubbed his fingertips against his thumbs. “Not full, not real!” He glanced at me. “Can you imagine that? Living permanently in a dream, without ever experiencing real touch, real taste and smell, real feeling?”
I thought about it. For a moment, I kind of understood what he was saying. “So your whole thing is to create a hybrid that can think with cold-blooded clarity and feel with hot-blooded intensity?”
“That is part of it.” He rapped hard on the glass of the huge vat.
I saw Maria twitch and move.
He said, “She is alive. She is sentient. She is in a dream, like us, but she has no control.”
I said, “What are you going to do with her?”
He pointed a finger at her. “Her… We have taken genetic material and we will use her for the hybrid program, to make docile slaves who are free from motivation or disquiet.” He glanced at me. “She will be happy. Her clones will be happy. The original, we may release back to London with certain modifications.”
Then he turned to face me and there was real hatred in his face. He stabbed his finger on my chest. “But you? You, Murdoch, will die a slow, miserable death and your seed will be dispersed and diluted and degraded and you will be the father of a race of mindless slaves. And, before you die, you will experience every shade of pain and humiliation right down to the loss of your limbs until your very ego begs for annihilation.”
I inhaled deeply while he was talking then blew a stream of smoke in his face. I said, “And your problem is you don’t feel intensely, right?”
“Yes.” It was Joanna. She was smiling at me.
There was a strong, burning pain in my arm. The walls moved sideways and the floor surged up to smash me in the face.
Chapter Twenty
I woke up and every
thing was wrong. Everything was upside down. I felt as though somebody had been pumping insulating foam into my face—and I had a headache. When I tried to put my hands to my head, I realized they were tied behind my back. Then the operating table started to come into focus.
Maria was on it.
I ignored the pain and the nausea and raised my head to look at my feet. They were chained together, and the chain was over a hook suspended from the ceiling, also on a chain. It was Colonel Ugly all over again, only this time they’d thought it through.
I squeezed my eyes and tried to see clearly. Her hair was clean and dry, so she had been out of the tank a while. Her eyes were closed and she seemed to be resting peacefully. She was covered in a white sheet up to her neck. There was a trolley next to the table with an array of cold, steel instruments on it. I noted there were several scalpels. I gave my body a shake in the vain hope the chains might be loose. They were solid.
Then I heard a small laugh behind me. It was oddly familiar. I twisted my body, tried to turn, and the laugh came again as a slow giggle.
“Are you uncomfortable, Mr. Murdoch? Pain is inevitable in the world, but the Buddha tells us, suffering is optional.”
I twisted again, trying to see where the voice was coming from. I knew the voice but I couldn’t believe it. I said, “Rinpoche?”
The voice was moving slowly, one step at a time. “Rinpoche… Rinpoche…” Then it went high with childlike amusement, “Why always Rinpoche?”
He came into view on my right. I went cold, from head to foot.
I said, “Steve…”
He wheezed and nodded. “Stephan. What to do? What to do?”
He went to the operating table and stood over Maria. He had a strange expression on his face, like he didn’t know what she was and wanted to understand. He said, “She was faithful to you, Murdoch. I tried…” He leered down at her then turned the leer at me. “I tried to fuck her and kiss her, but she only like her fucks from you, yeah?” He clenched his fists and thrust his hips forward. “Dr. Love!”
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