Reviver: A Novel

by Seth Patrick

  Andreas bowed his head. When at last he looked up, his eyes looked wet. ‘Then ask Sam Deering,’ he said. ‘Ask him about Kendrick.’

  As they left the building, Jonah turned to Annabel.

  ‘I was bait,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t sulk,’ she said, sounding irritated. ‘You wanted to be useful, right? And I got to see Andreas. Job done.’

  For a moment he just looked at her. The fact she’d used him that way without telling him was bad enough, but she didn’t seem to give a damn how he felt. Whatever he’d thought had been there the previous day, it was wishful thinking and nothing else. He just had to deal with it.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s go see Sam.’

  25

  Sam opened the door wearing a baggy tee shirt, the sunburned skin on his face peeling. ‘Jonah!’ he said. ‘You should have called. We only got home yesterday. Helen’s already back at work, so I’m a house husband, and that makes it a very disorganized house. What’s the occasion?’

  Uneasy, Jonah glanced across to his car in the driveway. He’d asked Annabel to stay in the car and keep her head down until he’d had a chance to talk to Sam, and decide if her presence would make Sam more likely to tell them what he knew or less. ‘Just wanted to catch up. Good trip?’

  Sam beamed. ‘Wonderful. I think retirement will suit me when it’s one long vacation with Helen. I got to catch up on some grandparenting and spend time with little Jess. She’s six now, hard to believe. But after a morning on my own, I’m already at a loose end. I think I might start going crazy.’

  ‘How’s the speech?’

  Sam had the opening speech at the symposium to prepare for the end of the week. He gave a non-committal shrug. ‘Pretty much done. I guess it’ll keep me busy for the next few days, but I need to work on getting Helen to retire too. So, come in, I can do with the company. Are you just here to check up on me?’

  Jonah stayed where he was. ‘Not quite. I wanted to talk about something. I did another revival, Sam. My first since Nikki Wood.’

  ‘How did it go? You didn’t have any problems?’

  ‘It was Daniel Harker.’

  Sam’s face darkened. ‘The Harker revival. I saw the news of Daniel’s death. I called Hugo to see how the revival had gone. He managed to avoid saying you were the reviver.’

  ‘He didn’t plan it that way. There wasn’t a choice. But something happened, and I need your help. We need your help.’

  ‘We?’

  Jonah waved over to Annabel. He still wasn’t sure if her presence would be better or worse, but he wanted to be honest.

  ‘Who’s she?’ asked Sam, watching Annabel get out of the car and walk towards them.

  ‘Annabel Harker. Daniel’s daughter. If you’d rather just talk to me, that’s OK, but if there’s anything you can tell her…’

  Sam nodded. Annabel reached them, and Sam took her hand. ‘I’m sorry about your father. Now come inside, and tell me how I can help.’

  * * *

  ‘Are you here as a journalist, Miss Harker?’ Sam asked. They were sitting in Sam’s living room. Sam had fixed himself a stiff drink, which Jonah and Annabel had declined.

  ‘Right now, I just want to find out why my father was killed.’ She looked at Jonah, prompting him to start.

  ‘The people who kidnapped Daniel Harker were found with a stack of incendiary devices,’ said Jonah. ‘They triggered them when discovered. They all died, and none of them were fit for revival. All this is still being kept quiet. They were planning some kind of campaign, and the police think it was targeting revival somehow, because all the people involved had Afterlifer connections. We think Daniel was taken because one of them had contacted him, telling him about something called Unity. The contact was killed, and possibly Daniel was held to keep him quiet. The authorities thought it was conspiracy-theorist paranoia and paid little attention to it, but we want to know what they thought Unity was.’

  ‘Unity? It means nothing to me.’

  Jonah looked at Annabel. She nodded. Go ahead.

  ‘The kidnappers were scared of something,’ Jonah said. ‘They’d picked up on an old rumour. The rumour had it that a revival subject had been brought back, but when it started talking it wasn’t the subject. It was something long dead, something not human. Something they wanted to bring back, whoever they were. We think the kidnappers wanted to stop this from happening.’

  Sam’s faced became stone, his smile frozen. ‘What bearing did this have in the case?’

  ‘You mean, what do the authorities think about it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They didn’t know that part. We tracked down the source ourselves. The rumours seemed to originate with work done on BPV. This was confirmed.’

  ‘Confirmed how?’

  Annabel spoke. ‘Michael Andreas.’ She waited, watching Sam’s face.

  Sam was visibly anxious. ‘You spoke to Andreas?’

  Annabel nodded. ‘He told us that the rumours were a cover. He told us we should ask you about it. And about someone called Kendrick.’

  ‘And about Lyssa Underwood, Sam,’ Jonah said. ‘Andreas claimed Underwood was part of it. Whatever “Unity” is, it stems from the same project as Underwood. Something that the people who killed Daniel Harker were terrified of. Please, Sam. If you know anything about it, tell us.’

  Sam took a deep breath. ‘It’s classified.’

  ‘Dr Deering,’ said Annabel, ‘I want to know what motivated these people. They were directly responsible for my father’s death, but Unity is the real cause.’

  Sam looked at her. ‘Miss Harker, I owe your father. Baseline owes him. Every reviver owes him. I’ll tell you what I know. All I ask is that you don’t reveal me as a source.’

  Annabel nodded. ‘Guaranteed.’

  Sam took a drink. ‘Miss Harker, would you be surprised if military intelligence organizations used revivers?’

  ‘I’d be surprised if they didn’t.’

  Sam smiled grimly. ‘The legal position was vague then. The dead have rights now, of a kind, but then there was nothing. We knew there would be cases where nobody gave a damn how the subject was treated. A victim dies, and you want to treat them with respect. But a killer? We knew how easily a subject became unhelpful, even if they had every reason to co-operate. How do you deal with a hostile? That’s what the Kendrick project was for. Aggressive interrogation of the dead.’

  Jonah could only stare. Sam looked away, refusing to meet his eyes.

  ‘It was started in collaboration with military intelligence advisers. Kendrick was an expert in what they call enhanced interrogation. He was present at the Lyssa Underwood session. Cold man, not an ounce of empathy to him. Always in a black suit.’

  Jonah thought back to the heartbeat sound of the cryogenic pump, the unnerving expression on the face of the man in black. ‘I remember him.’

  ‘Kendrick was obviously well funded, and he poached the best people. Dr John Gideon was Andreas Biotech’s best. He’d led the team that developed all the key revival medications, including BPV. And as you know, Will Barlow was one of their revivers. What little I saw gave away what Kendrick had in mind. They’d moved on to countermeasures, training people to resist, to be quiet, under any pressure. Even after death. And then, anti-countermeasures. How do you break that training? They were weaponizing revival.’

  Jonah thought about Lyssa Underwood, about the list of questions he had read from and the curious answers she had given. ‘They told me Underwood was about preservation technology. About keeping them fresh to improve revival chances. But something about her felt wrong; she seemed disoriented and her answers made no sense.’

  ‘Jonah, she must have been trained, a well-paid volunteer with a terminal illness, her answers part of her training. I don’t know exactly how her revival fitted into Kendrick’s work, but I know what the goal was. Kendrick developed interrogation methods for revivals that I’d guess are in use by US intelligence agencies, and probably also by
their allies. Even what I’d been allowed to know about went further than I’d thought moral or possible. But it was classified, and it was fiercely protected. After the basic results on hostile questioning, I found out very little more.’

  Sam downed his drink and stood. His face became thoughtful, then resolved. Decision made. ‘I have something to show you.’

  He stood, walked to the corner of the room and knelt by a small cupboard. Inside was a personal safe. He entered a code and opened it, pulling out a large thick envelope.

  ‘Every project in Baseline followed rigid guidelines for subject sourcing. We didn’t want to be accused of a modern form of grave robbing. Those documents were classified. But Kendrick’s team was cheating. When you came to me, Jonah, you thought maybe Underwood hadn’t gone through the system. Turned out you were right. I forced their hand, and there was no documentation for her. None at all. They said it had been misplaced, but it was obvious they just hadn’t got around to faking it yet. I think they had their own supply of terminal patients, trained and ready, people whose names they wouldn’t want on anybody’s system. Kendrick’s team left in a hurry, before I could pin anything more serious on them. If I had, I’d have been able to get access to all their reports before they took them away. But before they’d gone, I took a risk. I gained entry to Kendrick’s office and took a handful of documents. Most of it was so caged in euphemism and double-speak that you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between that and an order for stationery, but one was more explicit.’

  He opened the envelope and handed the contents to Jonah.

  The top page was headed ‘Session Assessment’.

  Jonah read aloud: ‘Aggressive imagery techniques were blocked effectively by countermeasures. Emotion bombardment (stage 2) and pain transferral approaches still proved effective in this case. Subject revealed extensive pseudo-confidential knowledge.

  ‘Recommendations: examination of aggressive imagery blocking to determine strength of conditioning. Focus on stage 2 emotion bombardment, although intensive pain transferral is by far the most effective technique. Note that all attempts at passing false information were detected. No valid information was flagged as suspect.’

  Jonah handed it to Annabel, and realized he was shaking. He couldn’t help thinking of Pritchard and all the anger Jonah had let loose at the man. ‘Aggressive imagery? Emotion bombardment? Pain transferral? For Christ’s sake, Sam. This isn’t talking about interrogation. It’s talking about torture.’

  Sam nodded. ‘With a living subject, information you get under torture is so unreliable it’s typically worthless. Even so, they still do it. But with a revival, you force it out of them, and you know if they tell the truth. Revival is the only way to know for certain. Suddenly it’s their best option. Kill to interrogate.’

  ‘You really think they would kill people just to be able to question them?’

  Sam sighed. ‘Of course they would, Jonah. Kill, revive and torture. Kendrick’s team wanted the best way to do all of it to maximize the chance of success. They wanted the full military toolkit for revival. How to do it and how to stop others from using it against you. I got them to leave Baseline, but I know damn well they kept going. And sometimes I think they’d already started doing it, right under our noses.’

  Sam poured himself another drink. ‘There are ten other documents there that I found. None of them is a smoking gun, but keep them. For what it’s worth. Maybe you can make something of it.’

  Jonah felt exhausted. His own passion for respecting the dead seemed worthless with this kind of abuse happening, and he’d been one of those who had helped bring it about. Hell, he’d been a pioneer, helping them understand how to get their overly fresh subjects back.

  ‘Dr Deering,’ said Annabel, ‘do you think any base of operations could be in the area?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Sam. ‘Langley’s not far. Plenty of CIA and NSA satellite locations.’

  Annabel turned to Jonah. ‘Maybe the locations the kidnappers were targeting match up with this abuse of revival … Jonah?’

  But Jonah wasn’t listening. He was reading through the rest of the documents Sam had found, feeling sick at what was there. Yes, the phrasing was verbose and vague, designed to make a benign interpretation plausible, but in it he could recognize enough to understand some of what they had achieved.

  The problem of emotive feedback, one of the first things a reviver learns to deal with, had been turned on its head. Preventing the disorientation and panic of a revival subject from infecting you, cascading to dissolution and the end of the revival; reversing that, just as happened in revivers with burnout, the reviver’s own state of mind affecting that of the subject. The mental turmoil of a reviver creating panic and paranoia in the person they revived.

  A sentence caught his eye. ‘Generating an artifice of controlled unequivocal hostility allows self-actualized emotive extremes to be targeted effectively.’ He could see through the words, because they were familiar. They were familiar, because that was how it had felt with Pritchard.

  Vindictive, spiteful. But disciplined, not the wild emotive feedback of the untrained. Extreme emotions, sharpened into a blade.

  He looked up when Annabel called his name again. He was horrified. How close they’d come, he thought, to a world where this kind of revival was the norm, where terrorizing the dead in their last interaction with the living world was considered acceptable. It would begin with the clear-cut, the unrepentant killers scoured until they showed their remorse, but in time any amount of wrongdoing could be used as justification. How close they’d come, and how close they still were.

  There were enough people like Sam, he thought, to have established a high standard of moral duty and an environment where such casual barbarity couldn’t thrive. But would it take much for standards to slip? If it became common knowledge, wouldn’t it be inevitable?

  Jonah looked at Sam. ‘How could you let Kendrick start this? As soon as you found out, why the hell didn’t you see where it was going and shut it down?’

  Sam looked away for a moment. When he looked back, Jonah saw shame in his eyes. ‘It wasn’t Kendrick who started it,’ Sam said. ‘It was me.’

  Jonah stared at him. ‘No.’

  ‘We were only beginning to understand the potential of forensic revival. We had to investigate how to deal with hostile subjects. Some of it fed back into current FRS training. Your training. If I’d thought for a moment that it would go so far…’

  Jonah looked at Sam, then back at the documents in his hand, wondering what he was feeling, then understanding it: betrayal. ‘Not you, Sam. God, not you.’ He stood.

  Sam stood too, and put his hand out to Jonah’s arm. ‘Please, Jonah…’

  Jonah flinched from the touch as he would from chill. Unable to speak, all he could do was shake his head. Then he walked out.

  * * *

  Annabel stood, wanting to go after Jonah but resisting. She turned to Sam. ‘Are you sure about using the documents, Dr Deering? You could take the brunt of this, whatever we do.’

  Sam shook his head. He looked exhausted. ‘I deserve my share. It’s taken me a long time to do what was right, Annabel. I hope he understands, one day.’

  Annabel left, finding Jonah in his car with the engine running. When he saw her, he angrily folded Sam’s documents and put them in his pocket. She got in the passenger seat, still holding the first page Sam had given them.

  ‘Jonah,’ she said. ‘When we go public with this—’

  Jonah snatched the page from her hand, leaving her openmouthed. He crunched it up and put it in his pocket with the rest of the pages. ‘We can’t use those documents, Annabel. If we make it public, it’ll drag revival down with it.’

  They drove in uneasy silence back to Jonah’s apartment block. He got out and went around to open her door, solemn-faced and avoiding eye contact. ‘Your car’s just up there,’ he said, pointing to where Annabel had left it earlier.

  ‘Jonah,’ sh
e said, getting out, ‘this is evidence of something that has to be brought into the open. Something that has to be stopped. What are you going to do with the documents?’

  He walked over to the entry door to his apartment block and put his key in the door, not looking at her. ‘Burn them. There are things in there people can’t be allowed to know.’

  ‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘This isn’t something we can just let slide, this is important.’

  ‘If people started using this kind of technique as part of normal procedure…’

  ‘Christ, Jonah. Nobody would allow that to happen.’

  He looked at her. ‘Annabel, ten months ago I revived a woman who’d been raped and murdered, her body set alight, burned almost to the point where revival would have been impossible. We handled it at the scene, non-vocal. I got her back, but she was just screaming in my head, terrified. Nothing I did would have calmed her. The investigating officer wanted me to continue, until either I got her to talk or we ran out of time. But I let her go. I faced an official complaint as a result. It wasn’t upheld, but one member of the complaint panel found against me. They thought it was my duty to get testimony whatever the cost to the woman. Whatever the cost. That kind of thing has happened before, and it’ll happen again. I don’t want what’s in those documents to be an option for people like that. I don’t want it to be part of what I do.’ He turned back and opened the door.

  ‘You have to believe people are better than that, Jonah.’

  He paused. ‘I want to, Annabel,’ he said, still facing the open doorway. ‘But I don’t think they are.’ He went inside and closed the door behind him.

  After a minute, Annabel went to the door and stood, wondering if she should try to talk to Jonah now. Make him see sense before he did anything rash. It was important to the story.

  She reached out to his apartment buzzer but pulled her hand back before she pressed it. The story wasn’t the only thing making her want to speak to him, she realized. He was upset, and she wanted to change that, to clear the air between them.