He gave me a printout. I had a quick look and saw Betts, J among the other names.
‘How did you get in there?’ I asked.
‘I can’t tell you that,’ he said. ‘You stick with the apps, I’ll do the black-hat stuff. I take it this is a black-hat operation?’
‘This is a grey area.’
‘Grey-hat operation, then. They’ve got some heavy-duty security there, I’ll give them that.’
He went back to his desk, cheered up by his own cleverness. I looked at the list again. So, Betts was working at Bright Harvest as Dan had said. That meant that things were going to get more difficult. I’d have to get in there to talk to him.
Or would I? He didn’t live there. If I was outside when he left, I’d be able to talk to him then. I could see him on his way home.
I went back to my desk, cheered up by my own cleverness. Clive arrived a little later and asked for our attention.
‘We have a contract,’ he said. ‘I’ll email you the details, but this is a big one. We’ll need to put in a lot of work to get it done, and I’ll probably be looking at hiring a few extra staff. Mick, I’ll need you to put a specification together based on their specification, fill in the gaps where their know-how doesn’t quite know how. I’d like that later this week, feel free to take it home and work on it if it’s too distracting here. You two can start thinking about the database while he’s doing that, you can probably have the core tables done before he’s got the specification finished. Just don’t tell anyone I said so.’
We all did a the-boss-made-a-joke laugh. Programmers were notoriously bad at documenting what they were up to. Clive often tried to get us to put comments in our code. We seldom got round to it.
I thought about what he’d said. Working from home would give me an opportunity to go to Bright Harvest and try to track down Betts.
I told Clive I’d put in a day at home, and then come in and finish the work off on Wednesday. There wouldn’t be any problem with that, he said.
Things were moving forward at last.
FOURTEEN
I
The next day, I stayed at home and went through the documentation for Clive’s new project and started to convert it into something we could work from. A least, that’s what I tried to do. I couldn’t concentrate on the work. I was too busy thinking about Betts. Would he want to talk to me? Did I really want to talk to him?
What if he was working strange shifts? In a laboratory they might not work nine-to-five hours. Perhaps they worked all night. Perhaps they offset their working hours to avoid the protestors.
I struggled to keep my mind on my work. I turned a page and caught five words from the middle of a sentence:
in case of fatal crashes
That stopped me thinking about Betts. I saw a small red car, upturned and crumpled. The girl in the car had died, bleeding red onto the red paint, listening to the sea falling against the land. There was a photograph of her hidden in a cupboard at Roger and Tina’s house. I hadn’t heard from either of them since Saturday morning. If the flood hadn’t forced us to stay, I would never have seen that picture. If Dermot hadn’t taken it from the cupboard –
That didn’t help. I had never been sure of Dermot, at some level. To tell the truth I was afraid not to be his friend. I certainly didn’t want him as an enemy. I thought of him holding my elbow and aiming me at the mirror in the grimy toilet of a Birmingham club, the day we first met. I thought of his evil looks, and I thought of something running from the Welsh mountains.
The telephone rang. I answered it, expecting it to be Clive checking on my progress.
‘Hello?’ I said.
‘Hello there,’ said Roger. ‘Haven’t got long, Tina’s just popped upstairs. The mobiles don’t get a signal out here. There’s not much room here, either, but I understand the water’s down now. Should be back home by the end of the week. Still, no time for that. You have to bear this in mind. Your hallucinations are more than they seem to be. They’re getting to be real, aren’t they? They’re getting out of you. You’re able to do that. Years ago, you suddenly bumped your head on your stress limit, and Tina tried to snap you out of it with that mirror business. But it didn’t snap you out of it, it just snapped you. You manifested the contents of your head into the world. You’re still doing it. Your hallucinations are real. They can hurt you. They can hurt the rest of us.’
There was extra noise on the other end of the line, Tina calling faintly. He shouted something back to her, and then came back to me.
‘That’s all I can tell you,’ he said. ‘You need to do the rest yourself. They’re right. Find Betts, get it out of your head. Before it gets out by itself. She’s back.’
The line went dead. 1471 didn’t give me a number. Roger had sounded composed, even while he was giving me his strange warning. He should have been working for the Secret Service, if he wasn’t already.
Perhaps he was. I had no idea what he did for a living.
I couldn’t stay in. I looked at the documentation and found the phrase that had thrown me. The full sentence read:
The database will be backed up in case of fatal crashes or other problems.
Fatal crashes and other problems, I thought. That seemed to sum everything up.
I got my coat and set out to see what was happening at Bright Harvest Research Laboratory.
II
This is what Les Herbie had to say about animal experimentation:
I have a confession. I like animals. This is going to upset some of you. You think I don’t like anything.
Let’s get it straight. I don’t like it here. I don’t like your houses. I don’t like your mothers and I don’t like you.
I do like animals. A lot of them are edible. A lot of the others will carry you about. You can extract perfumes from them. You can get glue out of them.
You can try out gene splicing on them. You can clone them.
I like all of this. Animals are good sports. You can do anything to them and they’ll come back and be your friend again.
Sometimes I get headaches. Reading your mail, I get headaches. I get ones that send me cross-eyed. I hold my head and shout. I take tablets and my headache goes.
I know they work because after I take them I have less headache. My eyes straighten out.
I know they’re safe to take because they were tested on animals. I like animals. They take a lot of my risks for me.
It isn’t a problem. We know what the food chain looks like. We’re way up there at the top. Everything else is lower down. We can take them all out. That’s our right. That’s what we’re there for. That’s what they’re there for.
We’re supposed to eat them. We’re better than them.
We got the opposable thumbs. We got the language.
That warbling whales do is not a language. That chirruping dolphins do is nothing. Put a million monkeys in a room with a million typewriters and you’d get a million broken typewriters.
They’re there to make our lives easier. They’re there to make our lives better. They’re there to be eaten.
Let’s stop pretending anything else.
That one really got the letters coming in.
III
The people outside Bright Harvest would have lynched Les Herbie on sight, if only they knew what he looked like. There was a small gathering outside the laboratory. It was a quiet and colourful gathering, but still small. Crusties with dreads hoisted banners with slogans. A few women were concerned enough about the lab to bring their children to stand in a demonstration rather than send them to school. The high moral ground seemed to have a few ditches in it. The slogans had been around since the sixties and hadn’t aged well.
Bright Harvest was sited in its own grounds just outside Stourbridge. It was close to a business park but separate from it. A high red-brick wall surrounded the building and its car park. On top of the wall, curls of evil razor wire sparkled in the sunlight. Cameras on posts watched the demonstration from inside
the walls. The posts had clusters of spines encircling them at intervals.
Some slogans had made their way onto the walls. ANIMAL MURDER, one said. END ANIMAL TORTURE NOW, said another. The protesters looked half asleep, as though they’d stopped considering what they were doing. The outrage was so well rehearsed that they didn’t need any emotional involvement. They could do it in their sleep.
I was still in the Audi. If I got out, I’d be caught up in the demonstration. They wouldn’t recognize me as one of their own. They’d want to know what I was doing there. I had the windows open because it was a warm day, and that was as close to the outside world as I was getting. I was both bored and agitated, which wasn’t helping. All I could see of Bright Harvest was the second storey, which was square and undecorated, with mirrored windows.
I was very unhappy about the mirrored windows. If I could alter reality using a few mirrors in an upstairs room in a Welsh college, then a building covered in mirrors was just asking for trouble.
Of course, that was assuming that Roger was right. He thought that I’d manifested something, brought it out of my imagination and into the world. Why had it been a strange-looking mountain man? I’d had a lot of dreams when I was adolescent. I could have done with one or two of those becoming reality. I’d have died of exertion, or possibly dehydration, but it would have been a good way to go. But no, the first thing my imagination spewed into the world was a Welsh hobgoblin.
My train of thought was derailed by a commotion. The demonstrators had become louder and more agitated. The banners were heaved upright, and they began to shout the slogans written on them.
There was a very large, extremely solid gate halfway along the length of the front wall. It was of blank metal, topped with the ubiquitous razor wire. It was opening.
The demonstrators gathered around it.
A car emerged at speed. All of its windows were heavily tinted. Either it was a rap band on the way to the studio, or Bright Harvest employees were very shy. The demonstrators got a few kicks in as the car passed them, and shouted some unlikely accusations. A pair of enormous security guards stood inside the gate keeping an eye on things as it rumbled closed. The demonstrators calmed down. One of them opened a flask and began filling mugs with what looked like coffee.
I was going to have trouble talking to Betts if that was the standard method of leaving work. I wouldn’t be able to see him, and by the time I got the Audi started he’d be on the ring road. It was barely possible to drive around Stourbridge ring road without colliding with another vehicle under normal circumstances. It’d be impossible for me to follow another car. I hadn’t even seen the driver, I realized. For all I knew that may have been Betts. Besides, even if I did manage to follow him, what would he think? He’d see someone chasing him from outside Bright Harvest and he’d call the police, if not the army. If I stood close to the gate every time it opened, there was a chance he’d see me and remember me. There was also a chance that someone would run over me at high speed, if the security guards didn’t fling me out of the way first.
In a video game, I could have switched to sniper mode, clipped the left guard, run to his body and grabbed his weapons, taken out the second guard and pressed the huge square button marked CAMERA OFF SWITCH.
In real life, I didn’t have sniper mode. The security guards weren’t likely to be armed. There was unlikely to be a huge square button that turned all of the cameras off. I couldn’t get inside, and they didn’t answer the telephone. I could try firing emails at their likely addresses – [email protected] – but they’d be unlikely to get through. They’d have that covered. I’d need to use external help.
I’d need to use Dermot.
I went home, leaving the demonstrators to their fun.
IV
Once I was back at home I gave Clive’s documentation another try. It was no good, my attention was in two other places. Part of it was thinking about Betts, and all that he represented. Another part of it was thinking about the girl in the photograph, with her arm linked with mine. Tina looked like she was spare, on that picture. Tina looked like a gooseberry. I didn’t remember the girl, but there were other things I didn’t remember as well. I’d lost six months, if not more. I had no clear recollection of anything that happened at Borth before I met Tina in the bar.
She’d spoken as though she already knew me. According to the photograph, she did. Along with her friend, the girl with no name. I’d known the pair of them and one of them had died. Then I’d forgotten all about the pair of them.
There must be some sort of report of the crash, in newspapers somewhere. There were archived articles on the Net.
It was possible that it was all connected, the girl and Betts, the whole business of the mirrors and the missing memory.
It was more than possible, it was all but certain. Tina belonged to both puzzles, along with Borth. I couldn’t focus on the problem. It was too close in some places and too far away in others. Every time I made sense of any one part of it, all of the other parts became indistinct.
I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. I was like an old version of Windows, everything I loaded into memory stopped something else from running.
I unplugged the phone and connected my PC to the socket. I double-clicked my way onto the Net. I began trying the combinations of words you try when you start to look for anything. CAR+CRASH got six million matching results. CAR+CRASH+BORTH got none. SEASIDE+TOWN+TRAGEDY hauled back thousands. I told it not to tell me about anything outside the British Isles. It still brought back huge lists.
As with all Net searches, everything after the ninth item was porn. Pop-ups popped up. Adverts posing as puzzles wanted me to click here.
Nothing useful turned up. There didn’t seem to be such a thing as the Borth Gazette. It wasn’t as though there were a lot of pretty girls in that area. Surely someone must have noticed one dying.
I tried searches based on Aberystwyth. That was the closest place of any size. I found local newspaper archives for the local newspapers and used their search engines.
I found a story. It was only a paragraph long, with a grainy black-and-white photograph. The photograph was of a familiar small car. In the photograph it was grey, not red. It still looked red to me, though. In the photograph, as in my dream, it was upside down. The photograph was too lo-rez to make out what was inside the car. Whatever it was, it was wrecked. It was smashed. It looked like patches of blackness.
The car had been found on the road between Borth College and Borth. The driver – a woman, yet to be named – was dead when found. With any luck she’d died when the car overturned. It wouldn’t have been any fun being alive in there. She’d died not far from the sea. There was no sign of foul play. She’d lost control of the car and it had skidded sideways into a tree and the impact had been enough to upset the laws of physics. Judging by the skid-marks, and the distance the car had gone without its wheels touching the road, it had been doing in the region of forty miles an hour. Not all that fast, really. Or much too fast, looking at what had happened.
I remembered that car, all of a sudden. It looked small from the outside. It was small inside, too. In the passenger seat it felt as though you were on a motorcycle. The engine noise came in through the flimsy bodywork. Every bump in the road rattled the chassis. At forty miles an hour it felt like you were doing eighty. At fifty it began to shake and hiccup. We never got it to go any faster. It was a Fiat Panda, painted an uneven red by the previous owner. It infuriated other drivers. They would come up to the rear bumper and wait to go flying past us.
She is looking in the rear-view mirror, in this memory. She’s such a pretty thing, cropped blonde hair and a smile with a corner out of place because she isn’t really smiling. She’s watching the cars stuck behind our slow Panda.
The memory stopped.
She was real, then. It didn’t help. The more information I got, the worse off I seemed to be. What had we done to her? There were no suspicious circumstanc
es, according to the report. She was just an unnamed person who’d died doing forty in a car that would have fallen apart if it ever got to sixty miles an hour.
Had we cut the brake cables or whatever it was you did to brakes? I knew we’d done something. I’d been responsible for her dying. I could feel it.
I needed to know what had happened to her. Betts could wait. This was something worse.
I needed to know what the autopsy had found.
The hackers at work were going to be busy again.
V
I got to work late the next day. I hadn’t been able to sleep all night, instead lying awake until the sky lightened. Then, with morning on the way, I fell asleep and slept through the alarm.
I arrived at work dazed and not properly shaved. Everyone was in. I logged in and fired up Boris. I couldn’t concentrate on the documentation, it belonged to a world I could no longer connect to.
When Clive went to get himself some lunch, I asked Andy if he could get at police records.
‘Easy. They trust their techies, so there are always back doors. What are you after?’
‘An autopsy report. I knew a girl who died in Wales and we never found out what happened to her.’
‘What was her name?’
‘I can’t remember.’
He looked at me. No doubt he thought I was involved in a conspiracy theory. He was big on conspiracy theories, as many hackers are. This was probably the first time he’d been right about one.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Dead girl, no name.’
I was going up in his estimation.
‘Where did it happen?’
I told him what I knew.
‘Ten minutes,’ he said. ‘Do you want pictures? If there are any? Some forces scan them.’
I wanted them. I went further up in his estimation. All I needed to do now was break into a strange underground base run by a secret government agency and he’d more than likely marry me.
Execution Plan Page 15