He tapped a couple of keys and it was done.
“Is there anything else I can do for you?” he asked reluctantly.
“Is there any audio that you can boost on this?” I wondered.
“No, but if you like I can run it through the lip-reading programme and see what we get out of that,” he offered. I was beginning to wonder if there was anything that the computers couldn’t do.
“Thanks. Send the results to my laptop,” I stood up, signalling that I was finished. “Focus everything on the Siren and see if you can tell me anything more about her, no matter what, no matter how small the detail.”
“Will do,” he agreed and killed the screen.
I shook his hand and thanked him as we left the room. He seemed surprised that I should take the time to do that, but he had helped me out more in this investigation than anyone else so far. I went back to the train station, which was conveniently located just over the road from the HQ building (but just out of bomb blast range) and took the first train back to Slough via Reading.
There are times when the speed of public transport is just too fast. I had a lot to think through and not enough time to do it as the trains raced through the countryside. At least one thing had been cleared up by the CCTV; this was now a case that definitely fell within the remit of the Agency. Sirens had long been a hazard to shipping, just ask Odysseus, but the establishment of the reservations kept them within accepted areas of the oceans and therefore ensured sailors’ safety as long as they knew how to navigate. In these days of GPS and sonar sounding maps, breaches of the agreed boundaries by either side were very rare indeed and always subject to in-depth investigation. Since no human could resist the voice of a Siren, treaties had been struck that restricted them to the reservations away from everyone except qualified researchers and Siren Liaison Bureau officials, all of whom received special training and special earpieces that filtered out the resonant harmonies present in the Sirens’ voices, reducing their ability to be manipulated by the so-called merfolk. Sirens were only allowed to leave the designated zones by prior arrangement and a lot of preparation. These licences were strictly controlled, as were the Sirens once they reached dry land. Identifying tags had to be displayed at all times and the Sirens had to be accompanied by a handler when in the company of other humans. If the woman who was on the CCTV really was a Siren (and I had no reason to doubt the computer boffins on that) it would explain the strange pallor of her skin and the thick red hair so typical of her kind. With a Siren involved, the case had gone from the mundane to red flag in one short sequence of television images.
It was likely now that Arnie had not dropped out of sight for his own good reasons. In the early stages of the film he had been agitated, uneasy, much like an addict overdue for his fix. This was not unusual since the spell of the Siren was delivered directly to the nerves by frequencies of sound in their voices. These caused discordances in the nerves and brain that had to be soothed at regular intervals. As exposure became prolonged, so the intervals between ‘treatments’ reduced and eventually the brain could be turned to mush. The threat was so great that getting a Siren out of one of the reservations and onto terra firma even through official channels was a major undertaking. To do it without the legal paperwork would require some major covert resources.
Then there was the matter of the smell. Sirens, in fact all member of the genus Selkie, smelled like week-old dead fish, which was part of the reason why they needed such a seductive manner of attracting their prey in the first place. This Siren, though, had walked through a room full of people and not caused anyone to vomit, or even noticeably retch, as she passed. Someone had gone to a very great deal of trouble to bring her to the UK mainland and to de-stench her, all for the purpose of introducing her to Arnold Harcourt, chemist.
The change at Reading station was chaotic with all the early morning commuters heading for London and it was only my ID badge that got me a place on the connecting train. I ignored the hostile glances of the office workers who had been queuing for a while to get on as I strolled past them and through the security gate. Minutes later I was back in a taxi on my way to the hotel. I needed to speak to Grayson, but I couldn’t do that until I got back to my room. The existence of a rogue Siren loose in our territory was a game changer. Alarm bells ought to be ringing through every branch of the Agency. Every field agent should have been put on alert and given instructions in tracking her down, but my mobile had remained defiantly silent. That might simply be because I initiated the enquiry and had, therefore, been left out of the alert process since I already knew what was going on, but I doubted that. The alert systems were automated and it would have taken longer to edit the ‘send to’ lists than it took for me to delete the unnecessary message. The fact that I had yet to receive the alert message meant that the alert message had not been sent. The only person who had that kind of authority was Grayson. He had ordered a lockdown on the information for some reason and I needed to tell him in terms that he couldn’t fail to understand that a Siren on the loose was far too serious a situation to play office politics with.
I strode rapidly through the hotel lobby, which was filled with all the businessmen checking out with their overnight bags and found the lift fortuitously on the ground floor, so I was able to go straight up to my suite. As soon as the door opened, I knew that someone was inside the room, mainly because she appeared in front of me with a very angry expression on her face.
“Where the hell have you been?” Miranda demanded, her cheeks flushed red and her eyes sparking with an emotional tide that I did not want to get in front of. Being physically in front of her was looking dangerous enough at the moment. “I didn’t know where you were or if something had happened to you or anything!”
“Did you ask the front desk for your messages?” I inquired softly, trying to inch her backwards so that I could actually get into the suite. This was not the kind of conversation that I wanted to have with her in raised voices out in the hall.
“What?
“I left a message with the front desk for you,” I explained patiently. “I didn’t want to wake you and thought you’d probably call down there as soon as I didn’t answer the door or the internal phone.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t think to do that,” she admitted and I was finally able to get her far enough inside the room to be able to close the door behind us. She was now looking abashed at her outburst, even though I could see that her anger hadn’t subsided fully.
“There’s been some progress overnight,” I said in a bid to distract her, but she jumped straight in.
“You’ve found him? Is he all right?”
“No. That is I haven’t found him, not that he isn’t all right. I still don’t have any information on that. Look I need to make one phone call and then I’ll go through everything with you. You just wait here a moment. I promise I won’t go on any long trips.”
I took refuge in the bedroom and called the office. I was put through to Grayson within seconds of asking.
“You want to know why I haven’t given the Siren alert?” were the first words he said, not so much taking the wind out of my sails as completely redirecting the global trade winds away from my patch of ocean. The surprise involvement of a Siren had me thinking in nautical terms now. I needed to stop that.
“The question had crossed my mind,” I admitted archly.
“I don’t have to explain the significance of a Siren being on the loose to you I hope,” he said, though I was thinking that I really ought to be explaining that significance to him since he was the one who had chosen not to put the alert out.
“No, you don’t.”
“If I put out an alert for a rogue Siren then every law enforcement officer in the country will have the information by the end of the day,” he went on, “and that’s far too many to keep it a secret. Anyone with enough resources behind them to swing getting her into the country without getting caught will certainly have a line into the normal police or Bor
der Control and will be equally aware of the fact that we are on their trail.”
I admit that I hadn’t considered that, though I wasn’t sure that it was worth the risk.
“That means that whoever did this would know exactly how close we are to them and will either go deeper underground or merely cut their losses and run.”
By which he meant they would get rid of both Arnie and the Siren permanently. Dead Sirens sing no songs.
“Can you tell me that you are close to recovering the victim, or knowing what this is all about?” he asked me. There was scepticism in his voice and it was justified. Sometimes it didn’t pay to have a boss who had actually done the job himself and knew what it was all about. There was no way to pull the wool over his eyes short of buying him a sweater.
“No,” I admitted reluctantly, “but I do have some lines of enquiry to follow.”
“Then I suggest you get on to following those lines of enquire and find this man before word leaks out naturally on its own. I’ve got it covered at the moment, because the number of people who know about this is pretty small and they all work for us, but that doesn’t mean it’ll stay that way forever. The clock just started ticking faster, so I suggest that you pick up the pace.”
“Yes sir,” I told him, though exactly how I was going to do that was another matter.
“Oh, and one other thing…” he added.
“Yes sir?” I asked reluctantly.
“I presume that these surprisingly large bills you’ve run up at a strip club have a direct bearing on the case.”
“Absolutely sir,” I assured him and broke the connection.
I took a moment to think before going back into the living room. Whilst what Grayson was saying was possibly true, I didn’t think that he was right about everything. OK, blowing the whistle on the Siren would alert those who brought her here to the fact that they were rumbled, at least partially, and that might be grounds for not going to all our partner agencies, but the situation was still serious enough to require a full Agency team on the search, not just me. Still, it was obvious that I was going to have to carry on alone, for the moment at least.
I went back into the living room, but the door had barely opened before Miranda set in on me. “So what are these developments then? What have you found out? What do you know?” she was almost bouncing up and down on the sofa in her excitement.
I opened up my laptop and showed her the video of her brother, which she watched with a startled ‘O’ on her lips.
“I didn’t know that he had a girlfriend,” she said when it finished. “He never mentioned her to me. She looks ill. Does she look ill to you?”
“Did you have too much coffee with your breakfast?” I wondered idly.
“Don’t like the stuff,” she denied and we went back to the video.
“So you’ve no idea who she is?” I asked, deciding that she didn’t need to know about the Siren’s true nature for the moment. It would only make her worry and worry was only useful when there was something that you could do actually do to affect the source of that worry.
“No idea at all. It doesn’t look like someone he’d picked up. In fact, I don’t think that he would actually be capable of picking up a girl,” she said slowly, thinking things through. “It was like they’d planned to meet there.”
“My thoughts exactly,” I agreed heartily, “And his name was on the list of invitees for that night, which means that someone is lying to me about him being known at the strip club. I don’t like it when people lie to me. I think that this means another trip to club, but in daylight this time and on my own.”
I was about to close the laptop when I noticed another notification that I had e-mail. I quickly checked and saw that there were a couple of items of interest. The first was from the Enquiry Desk. The pages from the textbooks that had been marked or had their corners turned down had checked out as being exactly as they should be, not altered in any way. The dry wipe board, however, was not quite as it should be. The majority of it was just standard equations for chemical processes, albeit fairly esoteric ones, but there were some sections that were, chemically speaking, completely meaningless. They weren’t just a bit wrong with the odd mistake here or there, but total and utter gibberish. Since it was unlikely that someone who was as clever as everyone was telling me Arnie was and as experienced a chemist as his qualifications confirmed him to be could possibly have gotten things so badly wrong, they had decided to pass all the information over to the Cryptology Section to see if they could determine whether there was some kind of code being used and, if so, what it said.
The second message was a transcript of snatches of dialogue that the computers had managed to reconstruct from the CCTV footage. Since the angle of the camera wasn’t so great for catching the movement of either Arnie or the Siren’s lips and they had kept their heads bent so close to each other throughout the conversation, these were just scraps that didn’t make a lot of sense on their own. The operator even said that there hadn’t been a reflective surface that he could zoom in on to fill in the missing pieces.
I showed the snippets to Miranda, whose eyes grew round as she read through them. “Oh my God!”
“What?” I quickly looked over the transcript again, but couldn’t see anything of any significance that I missed the first time around.
“They were talking about getting married,” Miranda revealed when I asked her, somewhat in shock at the idea.
“What? How do you work that out?” I’m no linguistics expert, but then neither was she according to the information I had on her, so how she got from the few passages on the e-mail to interspecies pair bonding was beyond me. Of course, she didn’t know that the woman was a Siren.
“Well look, he mentions Egypt here,” she pointed to the screen, “and Arnie has always wanted to go there. He once said he was going to go there on his honeymoon if he ever found anyone mad enough to put up with him.”
Considering my own sojourn to that bloody country I couldn’t see the attraction.
“And here she mentions children,” Miranda continued. “They were discussing having a family.”
“Now calm down just a little bit,” I suggested, closing the lid of the laptop so she couldn’t find anything else to feed her suppositions on. “One place name and the word ‘children’ doesn’t denote the promise of a lifetime spent together. For all we know she might have been telling him that she had to go home in time to put her sister’s kids to bed.”
“And Egypt?”
“You said that he always wanted to go there so maybe he was telling her the same thing.” After all, Sirens weren’t genetically compatible with humans and once you got past the surface resemblance (and the smell) they weren’t built the same way as us anyway. They spawned. That wasn’t exactly the most stable of bases on which to build a lasting relationship. And since Sirens were aquatic creatures by nature with a physical need for water way beyond a human’s, she probably wasn’t going to be overkeen on going to one of the driest, dustiest places on the face of the planet, honeymoon or otherwise. And with a Siren, what they wanted was what happened.
“All right, all right,” she said, trying to calm herself down. I didn’t have a paper bag to hand, so I just put my hand on her shoulder until she slowed her breathing down to a more normal level. She absently raised her own hand to cover mine and I wasn’t at all displeased by the purely natural gesture. “So what happens next?”
“What happens next is that I go back to the Hippo,” I told her, opening my locked briefcase and extracting my Agency pistol. Miranda’s eyes widened perceptibly. It was very possibly the first gun that she had ever seen for real in her life. Unlike the cops in the TV shows, especially the American ones, we weren’t licensed to kill just anyone. Bullets didn’t have much effect on many of the things that we went after anyway, so we were issued with non-lethal sidearms as a matter of course with access to something a bit heftier when required. The pistol’s battery was non-detachable and c
ould only deliver six discharges capable of incapacitating even the largest opponent, assuming that opponent was human anyway, before needing a full recharge. A field agent who got themselves into a situation where they needed to incapacitate more than six opponents at once wouldn’t stay a field agent for very long. Not a live one anyway. “And no, you’re not coming. Not this time.”
“I could stay in the car,” she suggested, her eyes fixed on the gun as I went through the process of checking the battery and discharge action. The model had an excellent record of not jamming since there were very few moving parts and it almost never exploded in action, which was why it was the weapon of choice for the Agency. The fact that it was non-lethal also meant that it couldn’t be used to kill you if it was taken off you in a combat situation and depressed field agents couldn’t use it as a means of ending it all.
“Certainly you could,” I agreed, holstering the gun by shoving it into the waistband of my trousers against the small of my back. Since I very rarely had need of the weapon, I had never found myself getting comfortable with any of the approved holsters that other agents were so fond of. Unlike many others I had never practiced my quick draw technique since I planned on never getting myself into a situation where I had to quick draw on anyone anyway, “as long as the car was parked in hotel car park here.”
“I thought that we were working together on this case,” she said with a pout and a deep frown.
“So we are, where it isn’t dangerous. May I remind you that I am the investigator and you are the client.” Well as far as she knew that was true anyway. “That means that where I know there’s a risk you don’t get to go.”
“How big a risk?” she was, at least temporarily, cowed by the thought.
There wasn’t anything to be gained by lying, so I didn’t bother, “Some. Could be a little, could be a lot. I won’t be able to say till I find out, so you don’t go.”
She was quiet for a moment and when she spoke her voice was soft and gentle, “You will be careful won’t you?”
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. - the Curious Case of the Kidnapped Chemist Page 10