Until, finally, she looked up at him again.
As soon as their eyes met, he felt his hope leave.
The guards who took over at the other end of the corridor had respirators that covered their mouth and nose, overalls of rustling plastic, carefully sealed at every seam. They wore rubber gloves, yet they avoided contact, ushering Janine and William forward with orders and pointing hands.
They passed through an airlock, entered an ice-cold chamber. Fluorescent lights in the ceiling, walls and floor in shiny steel. It looked like a slaughterhouse, or a morgue: ducts in the flooring joined together in one corner, feeding into a drain. The room’s only furnishings consisted of a sprinkler system of piping, branching out here and there to valves and taps mounted on the far wall.
William heard Janine breathing behind him, and he turned to look at her. Her eyes were fixed on the wall in front of them. Staring vacantly, overcome with emotion but fighting to keep it to herself.
It wasn’t until that moment that he understood how afraid she was.
Unlike him, she’d never been trained for this. She hadn’t been through detainee simulations or mock interrogations or long, gruelling disaster exercises. She had no idea what was going to happen to them.
He wanted to say something, but there was nothing he could say that would help. All they could do was to follow the guards’ orders, avoid provoking them and wait and see what would happen next. So William followed Janine’s example, and steeled himself.
They were instructed to stand in the middle of the room, and so they did.
Waited. Heard the men behind them take a few steps back. Then a voice ordered them to undress.
Beside him, Janine stood frozen to the spot. Hesitated. And William went first.
He unbuttoned his clothes, dropped them straight on to the floor, and eventually Janine followed suit until they were both naked, eyes fixed firmly on the wall in front of them to avoid making the situation any more uncomfortable than it already was.
They were instructed to stand against the wall, their palms spread on the metal, their backs to the guards. Behind them, there was the sound of a hose being drawn across the floor.
‘Close your eyes and mouths and try to hold your breath,’ someone said. And then their backs exploded with pain.
The water that hit them was blisteringly hot, and the hose was so powerful that William had to struggle to stay upright. A stabbing pain inched over their bodies as the fluid smashed into them and ran down towards the ducts on the floor.
The fluid. Because it wasn’t water. It smelled of alcohol and chlorine and maybe iodine and something else, and whatever it was it was concentrated and unbelievably strong. Only when the stream had worked its way down to his legs did William dare to breathe again, opening his eyes ever so slightly to see the disinfectant flow down his calves. It circled in burning swirls around his feet, ran past Janine’s and on along the floor until it disappeared into a clump of acrid foam, compact and white and with edges brown from iodine, dancing on top of the drain like a large, burnt meringue.
Then, the guards instructed them to turn round. And as the hose worked its way back up and the pain surged across his chest, William closed his eyes so hard that he wondered if he’d ever be able to open them again.
The whole experience lasted a matter of minutes, and when it was over they were ordered into the next room.
They walked in a line, Janine first and William behind. And his eyes fell on her back, red raw from the disinfectant but her muscles as clearly defined as on an anatomy chart, before forcing himself to focus ahead of her instead, his gaze fixed on the room in front of them. It struck him that if she’d been here for seven months she must have been working out the whole time, and he couldn’t help wondering if she’d been doing it secretly in her room or if it was something the nameless organisation wanted them to do.
The room they entered was no more welcoming than the one they’d just left. The walls were tiled, and along one of them pipes hung from the ceiling, each ending in a massive shower head. Around every shower was a tubular tent of thin, transparent plastic, with room enough for one, sealed with a zip at the front and with top and bottom welded shut with the same transparent material.
They were each shown into a tent. Told to wash themselves with cleaning gel from dispensers suspended inside. Every hair, every fold of their skin, parts of the body that had probably never met soap before, now they were to be scrubbed, washed, scrubbed again. The soft foam soothed slightly, but their skin was so scalded it would take several days for it to recover completely and every drop of water from the nozzle above seemed to fall like the tip of a newly sharpened pencil.
William washed away the last of the soap, stayed under the shower, let it keep pouring over him as if he couldn’t trust that the danger was over.
The image of the woman in the glass box wouldn’t leave him.
What had they been exposed to? Anthrax? Ebola?
And what was it Janine had been about to tell him when the guards arrived? Who was she, what did she knew, what did it mean?
He let his eyes wander in her direction.
Only to connect with hers.
She was staring at him, and his instinctive reaction was to look away, point his eyes into the wall in front of him, innocently pretending to be far more interested in studying the tiles than the naked woman in the shower next to his own.
But there had been something in her look. She was trying to tell him something. The whole of her naked body was turned to the wall in front of her, but her eyes were glued to his, peering at him with an intense impatience that made him wonder how long she’d been doing it. And if perhaps she’d deliberately been trying to make him feel it, trying to make him look at her.
He looked at her again. Discreetly, without turning his head, as if he was still just showering.
Her eyes were still there. Her head was half-bent so the guards wouldn’t see her face, but her eyes were doing their best to communicate with him.
The wall. That’s what she seemed to be saying. The wall in front of her.
William stared at the tiles, but couldn’t see what she meant. All he could see were tiles. Tiles and piping and nothing more.
He raised his eyebrow a minute fraction. What do you mean? She flicked her eyes towards the wall again. There. Follow my eyes. There.
He didn’t understand. Looked again. What did she see that he couldn’t?
Behind them one of the guards moved, and the sound of it made them both jump.
They looked straight ahead again, rinsing themselves in the warm water, waited to see if they’d been caught. Motionless in their showers as one of the guards came up to them, tapped on the plastic of Janine’s shower, directing her to switch it off. He pulled at the zip, passed her a towel, ordered her to dry off completely before stepping out.
She did as she was told.
Threw William a final glance, but her eyes met a bent neck.
She had tried to tell him, but he hadn’t understood, and now she didn’t know what would happen to her.
Maybe it was all too late. Maybe she’d missed her chance.
Disaster was coming, and she hadn’t been able to do anything about it.
And she left the shower with her message behind her.
It wasn’t until the guards led Janine out of the room that William saw what she had been trying to show him.
In the steam inside her shower, her fingers had traced four letters. One short message, slowly vanishing as new mist started to cover the lines her skin had formed on the plastic wall.
AGCT. That was all it said.
He looked in her direction, but she had her back to him. They had wrapped her in thick towels and were whisking her out of the room, still without touching her, out through the door and into the corridor.
For a split second their eyes met. It was too brief to communicate, all he could see was the fear in her eyes as they led her out of sight. And then the heavy door sw
ung closed. Only this time it wasn’t the fear of what would happen to her. It was the fear that he hadn’t seen her message.
But he had. He just didn’t understand what she meant.
AGCT.
Adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine.
But so what?
He closed his eyes, letting the warm water wash over his body. Tried to concentrate.
The nucleic acids in genetic code. The four building blocks of DNA. It couldn’t mean anything else, but why had she written it there, why did she want him to see that?
He focused. Shook off the thoughts of whatever it might be they were infected with, pushed away the anxiety that came with what they’d seen.
A dying woman in quarantine.
DNA.
A virus? Was that what she was trying to tell him? Some genetic mutation? But if so, again: so what? What was he supposed to do with that information?
His thoughts didn’t get any further before the guards returned. They stopped outside William’s bubble, told him to turn off the water and dry himself, just as they had with Janine before him.
Their sober expressions scared him. They were genuinely afraid. And as they led him away again, clad in their protective masks and rubber gloves, it wasn’t only the cool of the air in the long, dark corridor that made him shiver.
The silence in the room continued unbroken as the door behind Franquin slid open and Connors entered. Franquin remained where he stood, didn’t even look up. Partly because he could tell from the steps who it was, and partly because he wasn’t confident he could maintain a neutral and composed expression. As if it was a secret that they all had feelings. As if uncomfortable – no, inhumane – decisions were to be carried out with a shrug and without looking back.
Connors stopped next to him. Peered through the safety glass in front of them. There they were, two silent men in uniform, doing nothing but listening to the hiss of the air conditioning. As if whatever remained unsaid would also not have happened.
Beyond the glass lay the rows of dying people, eerily motionless under their blankets, alone and unconscious and waiting to cease to exist. The nurse had long since finished her rounds, and Franquin had lost track of how many minutes he’d been standing there.
‘Well?’ he said after a while.
‘I thought you should know. It’s over.’
‘Watkins?’
He already knew the answer. He kept his eyes fixed on the room in front of him, counted the people on the other side for the hundredth time. As if Watkins’ death wouldn’t be quite as pointless if he could remind himself it was part of something bigger, that it was one in a long series of unavoidable deaths that nobody could control. In reality, it wasn’t that far from the truth.
‘We’ve informed her family,’ said Connors. ‘She died following an accident in the lab.’
Franquin nodded. That wasn’t really a lie, either. Not the whole truth, but definitely not a lie. ‘And our friends?’
‘We know what routes they’ve been taking. There’s nothing to suggest they were exposed.’
‘But we’re testing them anyway?’
‘Yes. We’ll know for certain tomorrow.’
They stood for a few more minutes, staring at the rows of nameless beds, until eventually Connors felt he’d been there long enough and turned towards the door.
He was on the verge of stepping out into the corridor when he turned. There was still one issue remaining, one that neither of them had mentioned, and even if Connors knew that this was probably an answer in itself, he looked past Franquin, through the windows, at the man with the stubble.
He was sleeping soundly, no signs of sickness. On the outside. But inside him, an unstoppable war was raging, a war that he was about to lose.
‘It would’ve been more of a surprise if she’d succeeded,’ said Franquin.
‘It’s our job to hope,’ replied Connors.
That was all they needed to say.
Connors waited a couple of moments, then left.
Watkins had been wrong. And the man under the sheet was the proof of that.
Their only hope now was William Sandberg.
Connors would have wanted better odds than that.
Nicolai Richter sat in his red Toyota RAV4, climbing one of the highway exit ramps off the A9, deeply annoyed about two quite different things. For a start, the traffic was crawling, which forced him to manoeuvre from lane to lane, swerving in and out between other cars, braking and speeding up again, earning him extended middle-finger salutes from the drivers around him, in order to advance as fast as he had to. He was late, and he needed a minor miracle to make it on time.
That was the first thing.
The second thing was that his back was itching.
Not just slightly, not the kind of mild itch that you can relieve or at least silence temporarily with a rub against the car seat until you can get out and give it a proper scratch.
No, this itch was violent and persistent. In fact, the irritation was so intense that he couldn’t decide whether it constituted an itch or a pain. As he zigzagged through the morning traffic, well in excess of the speed limit and with one hand on the wheel, he let his other hand dig down inside his collar. He made his nails march down across the skin, pulling his arm as far down as possible, desperate to reach the itch and stop it before it drove him mad.
It didn’t help.
Each touch of his nails against the skin only made the feeling stronger. And as he scratched again, hard, harder, it felt as if the skin gave way and everything turned warm, and yet the itching wouldn’t stop, just as he couldn’t stop scratching.
Cars whizzed by on both sides as he threw his car from lane to lane, passing the slow bastards blocking his way.
He wasn’t in a very good mood.
He hadn’t been for days, and it was all Yvonne’s fault. He’d known she wouldn’t be his type, he’d known it even before they met, and as soon as they’d sat down at the restaurant in Innsbruck last Tuesday and begun to make small talk, he’d regretted ever having asked her out. If it hadn’t been for her accusing him of being selfish and lacking empathy, he would never have picked up the homeless hitchhiker at the service station and given him a ride all the way to Berlin. And then the bastard wouldn’t have sat there coughing next to him, over and over, mile after mile.
And now, here he was.
And he wasn’t even supposed to be here.
The homeless guy had made him promise, and he hated himself for it, first for caving in and saying okay and then for fulfilling his promise even though he ought to be in The Hague by this time. He was taking a detour via Amsterdam to deliver a message to someone he didn’t even know how to find – and that was obviously Yvonne’s fault, too.
Nicolai Richter was as empathic as the next person. And this was the proof. And he would have been delighted to tell her so, if only she’d had the decency to answer her phone.
And here he was in Amsterdam, feeling a fever coming on, and of course it was the homeless guy’s fault. The homeless guy’s, and hence Yvonne’s. And if only she’d answer when he called her, he’d love to tell her as much.
He’d just started the long turn across the bridge, eight lanes of motorway below him, when he noticed his shirt. The glimpse of fabric that poked out from under his jacket, between the waistband of his trousers and where the seat belt clicked into place. His white designer shirt – soaked in a deep red.
Blood. And lots of it.
He pulled his hand from under his collar, ripped his jacket open, and gasped for breath. He was bleeding so heavily that the inside of his jacket had turned dark, his shirt was red and clinging to his body all the way from his arm down to his waist and what the hell was going on?
The lapse in concentration lasted only a few seconds, but that was all it took.
The first thing he heard was the sound.
The sound of steel against steel, glass, tyres squealing, brakes screeching.
Then came the
jolt as his car dropped from his own fifty miles per hour to the thirty that the car in front had travelled before he hit it.
Then the mental snapshot that he would never forget. The sight that would plague him for the twenty seconds he had left to live: the dented BMW in front of him, dancing around on the road, blurry to the point of invisibility beyond the hand he’d used to scratch his back. His fingers in front of him, dripping red. It wasn’t just blood, it was skin, it was flesh, it was spongy and porous, it was his own back that had come off and now he had it on his hand as if he’d peeled a layer of cream off a birthday cake. And yet it didn’t hurt, it just kept itching, violently and intensely, and even as he saw the BMW rotate from the impact and block the road ahead like a big, black barn door, all he could think about was scratching the itch, just a little bit more, just to get rid of it.
At the same time, Nicolai Richter’s left hand reacted instinctively. It turned the wheel to the right as far as it could, making the car lurch, slide sideways towards the slanted BMW, the engine revving and the tyres skidding on the asphalt. There was chaos all around him as cars braked, swerved to avoid the spinning twister of steel in the middle of the road, rolling like a mechanical snowball, adding new layers of metal for every rotation.
And through his fingers Nicolai witnessed it all.
The glass shattering around him as the truck to his rear collided with his hatchback. The judder as his tyres struggled for purchase. Cars he hadn’t been anywhere near braking and swerving so abruptly their front wheels folded, black smoke rising as their axles scraped the road.
And the itch. The itch that drowned out everything else.
The itch he had to get rid of.
Nicolai’s car was at a ninety-degree angle to the road when the wheels found traction. The speed seemed to come out of nowhere, the car suddenly freeing itself from the screeching cluster of wreckage, racing out of the collision and straight towards the edge.
The barrier was made of concrete and girders, but it didn’t stand a chance.
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