“My body feels the same way every Monday morning,” I quipped weakly.
“How is it that you weren’t affected?” she wondered, fixing me with her wide-eyed regard. “Training?”
“Well, that and…” I tipped my head sideways and tapped my ear firmly. A small object fell out and landed in my hand, “…this.”
“And what’s that?”
I gave it to her to examine. It was the size of a pea, but flesh coloured, “It’s a filter. It uses white noise and amplitude reduction technology to dampen the effect of a Siren’s voice control. I’ve been wearing them ever since I’ve known there was a Siren involved.”
Since each Siren’s voice contains a unique pattern of frequencies, it is only possible to ensure complete immunity from the effects by not hearing them at all, which is impractical, but these little gadgets had proved effective enough for me to fight off the effects for just long enough to survive. I would have to send the manufacturers a thank you note.
“And you didn’t think to get me a pair?” Miranda asked, too strung out by the recent events to be honestly angry.
“They’re expensive.” I pointed out and then added before she could ask if I didn’t think she was worth the expenditure, “They also only had one pair in stock.”
We sat for a while in silence, looking out over the water. The smaller styxosauruses swam up to gently headbutt the larger one, presumably their mother. Slowly she came around and joined them back in the water, departing with one last disapproving look in our direction.
“I know I’ve asked this before, but what now?” Miranda asked as we watched the trio swim away.
I thought about that for a moment and realised that I didn’t actually know. Instead, I told her, “Well I, for one, am going in search of a towel.”
My House, Oxford
There is something about having a truly gorgeous woman wandering around your home wearing just a towel that every man should try at least once in his life. Admittedly, Miranda was technically wandering around the house in two towels since one was wrapped around her head, but it was still a situation that sent warm tingles to parts of me that actively welcomed warm tingles.
We’d dried off at the water board headquarters, but had then been forced to wait on site until the clean up team had secured the lab and summoned divers to go down to look for the body of the Siren. She had taken one hell of a jolt of electricity (although technically it was made up of five individual jolts) and I couldn’t believe that she had survived, but then I hadn’t believed in the Loch Ness Monster a few days before and my job required a lot of believing in things that other people wouldn’t even consider. I certainly wasn’t going to be satisfied until they brought the body up, which they had, but it had taken a while since the Agency doesn’t keep a lot of underwater units on standby on dry land. The nearest team had needed to be brought in from the west coast of Ireland, which wouldn’t have been so bad had the Irish Sea Tunnel not been undergoing scheduled maintenance on both bores, forcing them to come over on the Manx bridges with all the congestion that entails. It would almost have been as quick to send an airship for them.
The divers hadn’t located my gun by the time that we quit the scene, which meant that I was going to have to report it as missing rather than broken and the paperwork on that was a good deal more involved and long-winded. They had found the bodies of the rest of Helliman’s team, though, at the very bottom of the reservoir weighted down with rocks and with scalpels sticking out of their eyes, ruling out mass suicide as a likely cause of death.
After leaving the forensics crews to go over the mess that had once been the water quality testing laboratory, we’d driven back to Oxford and to my house. The investigation in Slough was pretty much over since I had no further leads to go on, so I had contacted the hotel and had our things brought over to the Water Board headquarters, allowing us to change out of the draughty lab coats that had been the only dry clothes that we had been able to find and into our own clothes. Miranda had, of course, made her white coat look like a quality fashion statement.
Dry, though, isn’t the same as clean and we’d spent time submerged in a body of water that had been used as a toilet by the Loch Ness monster (and its children) for an indeterminate amount of time. That the stuff we drank was supplied from that same body of water offered up another reason not to drink anything that came out of the tap, no matter how much it had been filtered, cleaned and disinfected. The first thing we had done on our return was to hit the shower and now Miranda seemed happy enough to wander around in her towelling costume rather than slipping into something a little more practical and less revealing. Not that I was complaining.
It had been a hell of a day and I just wanted to unwind and thought that I had deserved it. A bottle of chilled white wine came out from the fridge, a takeaway was ordered from the local Polish restaurant and the big screen plasma TV was switched to the Fire Channel, currently showing an ornate tiled hearth with a coal fire slowly burning down to embers.
“Mmmm, that’s nice,” Miranda murmured as she entered the living room and took the wine glass from my hand even though there was an empty clean one for her by the bottle. “Shame it’s not a real one.”
“They’re very strict about the smokeless zone around here,” I explained and poured myself out another measure into the other glass. “If there’s smoke coming out of your chimney then your house better be on fire.”
She sat down on the far end of the sofa, arranging herself comfortably with her legs tucked under her. The towels had given way to a kimono-style dressing gown tied at the waist that still conspired to reveal as much of her as the towels had done. Her hair was still wet since I didn’t possess a hair dryer and she hadn’t thought to bring one. She watched me over the rim of the wine glass for an uncomfortably long time, but I have been trained to be comfortable with being uncomfortable for long periods.
Eventually, she asked, “Is he dead?”
“Your brother? I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t have thought so,” I theorised. The truth was that I had absolutely no idea and I was making this up as I went along. “You don’t go to such lengths to kidnap someone just to kill them and the fact that they were using a Siren would suggest that they wanted to control your brother rather than just get rid of him. Now she’s gone, of course, he’ll get harder to persuade to do whatever it is they want him to do, so we’re really up against the clock now.”
“And all your leads are dead,” she added, a little gloomily.
“Suspects yes, but not my leads,” I tried to reassure her, though the truth was that the investigation had hit a brick wall almost as hard as our boat had hit the Styxosaurus snowii. True, I hadn’t expected to progress as far as actually having suspects in such a short time, especially the kind that were willing to kill both each other and me, but now, just when time seemed of the essence, the brakes had been firmly applied to the investigation. “Tomorrow we go back to your brother. Whoever took him has enormous resources, which means that they could have taken almost anyone, but they chose to take him specifically. Why? Why him, specifically? What can he do for them that nobody else can?”
Her shrug was so eloquent that I wondered if she wasn’t part French. “I don’t know. He’s just a chemist. A good one, but not out of the ordinary.”
“Oh, he’s out of the ordinary all right,” I assured her. “Nobody does everything that these people have done to control someone who is in the ordinary. He knows something that they need to know or can do something that they want him to do. It’s got to be there in his past, so we’re going to take his past work history apart and go through it from C to V.”
“You don’t give up easily do you?” she said with a slightly hopeful smile playing around her lips.
“Not when people try to shoot me and stab me and electrocute me,” I replied. “I kinda take that sort of thing personally.”
“And tonight?” she wondered and the smile turned as seductive as any Siren’s
voice could ever be.
“I’ve put clean sheets on the bed if you don’t mind bunking here,” I told her. “I could sort out a hotel room for you if you’d prefer, but it would be harder to ensure your safety.”
“And what about you? Where will you sleep?” she asked batting her eyelashes at me in a playful fashion that was playing havoc with my blood pressure. “I wouldn’t want to deprive you of … anything.”
“Oh me and this couch have a long-standing acquaintanceship,” I assured her, wondering how much further this case was going to take me above and beyond the call of duty. There’s only so much one man can be expected to withstand.
An Unpronounceable Quarry In Wales
Explosions usually make people duck, cringe or throw themselves bodily to the floor under the nearest table looking for a protection that the flat packed furniture is never going to be able to provide. That’s mainly because most people don’t expect explosions. Things blowing up is not a normal part of daily life. Not for normal people anyway. The man opposite me, who had introduced himself as Jamal Khaled (and I had no reason to doubt him on that) barely even noticed the huge, echoing report that shook the entire length, breadth and height of the portacabin in which our meeting was taking place.
The quarry that Miranda and I were visiting had far too many Ys in the name for anyone human to be comfortable in trying to get their tongue around. Those that did managed the feat only with the generous amount of phlegm that was needed to lubricate the parts of the vocal chords, throat and mouth that were being twisted into unnatural shapes to create the sounds required. The hole in the ground was located somewhere south east of Aberystwyth. The hills of Wales were all around us, but since we were so high up on the side of one, most of the others towered below, rather than above, us. The hills were mainly composed of slate and shale, but there were still pockets of coal to be found and some granite outcroppings as well. It is a documented fact that most of the stone monuments of prehistoric and old historic times were quarried out of the ground in Wales and then hauled all the way to the circles that they were to grace. Whilst the historians of the Agency had long since understood that most of the ancient circles were actually monuments to ancient man’s wicked sense of humour, having no purpose other than to have a good laugh at the confusion of those who came after, that information had never been passed on to the general public. What would it serve to let everyone know that the stones of Avebury that they have been marvelling at for centuries were nothing more than prehistoric man’s way of thumbing his nose at the younger generations? In terms of difficult practical jokes, they certainly put the crop circle fad to shame.
Khaled had graduated from University of Wales’s Faculty of Advanced Demolitions with an advanced degree in blowing large chunks out of the ground without taking large chunks of his workforce with them. Years of carefully planning the placement of increasingly smart explosive charges to shear off just the right amount of rock without bringing the whole face down had given him a resistance to loud bangs that not even a rock group drummer could profess to. As the sound of the explosion rolled around the portacabin and on its way, he merely stopped speaking until the noise level returned to something he could be heard over. He simply waited out the sound, twisting the wedding ring round on his finger whilst he waited.
“No, Arnie was never employed in the demolitions branch of the company,” he continued as the echo of the blast rolled away across the Welsh hillsides. “I knew him when he worked for me in the company labs back in Bangor. I was head of exotic projects there for a while, but I missed the thrill of blowing stuff up. I applied to go back to Demolitions, but the closest place they had was here in the Quarrying department, so here I am. It has its own rewards.”
“‘Exotic Projects?’ ” I admit that I was stumped as to what a quarrying and stone supplier company might consider to be an exotic project.
“Absolutely. Arnie came in not long before I rediscovered that I had the destruction bug and transferred out. I don’t think that he stayed much longer after I’d gone. In fact I believe that he only worked on the one project whilst he was there.”
“And what was that?” I was almost afraid to ask.
“It was a preservation project,” was the surprising response. “The company was asked to come up with ways of preserving the stone architecture of old buildings and ancient monuments. The aim was to arrest, or to slow down at least, the corrosive effects of pollution and the weather on some of our more fragile buildings. If I remember correctly it was a government sponsored programme.”
“Was it successful?” I asked, not seeing how this got me any further forward than I was before.
“No, I don’t think it was,” Khaled shook his head and dislodged a little dust that had settled there, shaken from the ceiling by the blast’s vibrations. He didn’t seem to notice. “In fact I think that it’s still running. Arnie had some interesting ideas about chemical coatings for the stonework that would toughen them up against the elements. They didn’t so much coat the stone as chemically alter it into something much more resistant. I think that he got as far as testing on some samples, but there was a bit of a side effect.”
“Side effect?” I prompted.
“They all exploded,” he said with a shrug. Blowing things up was something of a theme around here. “Not exactly what you’re looking for in a treatment for the preservation of ancient monuments.”
That much I could work out for myself. This was rapidly turning into another dead end. “I don’t suppose that any of his research took him to Egypt did it?” I asked in something akin to desperation.
“Egypt?” Jamal barked a single, short laugh. “His research didn’t take him outside of Bangor let alone overseas. There wouldn’t be anything there worth quarrying anyway. It’s all sandstone, you see. Far too soft that is. That’s why the pyramids are in such a mess and the Sphinx has no nose.”
I resisted the inevitable urge to ask how it smelled.
“Now if they’d built it out of granite, better Cornish that Welsh to be fair, those pyramids would still be looking like new.”
“Well, thank you for your time anyway. I won’t waste any more of it,” I stood and we shook hands. His trembled slightly, but his file had explained that a lifetime spent within the shock radius of all but continuous commercial explosions had set up a sort of sympathetic resonance within his muscles so that he always exhibited a residual shakiness. I considered that a good reason not to hang around for too long, but then I was probably less at risk since people seemed to find me a lot less sympathetic than most. “It’s a long drive back.”
“You came here by car?” he asked with understandable surprise. The roads through the heart of the Welsh valleys would have seemed twisty even to a sidewinder snake and the car, off the computer-controlled network this far out, couldn’t get anywhere near the top speed that its manufacturer rated it to. It was also quicker to get back down to the main roads on the English side than to wind our way to the nearest station with a direct train to Oxford. “We have a company teleporter you know.”
I did know, I had checked, but corporate networks were almost as unreliable as the main public conduits and a flashback to the hotel with the broken air conditioning near Abu Simbel Central had been enough to put me off that idea. “Thanks, but I prefer not to.”
“Oh, I see,” he nodded knowingly, not knowing that what he knew wasn’t worth knowing because it was utterly incorrect knowledge.
“Well there is a direct airship link from Pontypridd to Oxford,” Jamal suggested, explaining, “It stops there on the way to London and I sometimes have to take samples and stuff there.”
Taking explosive chemicals through the teleportation system was not something any sane person would consider.
I thanked him again and went into the temporarily peaceful world outside.
“Any luck?” Miranda queried. She was balanced on the bottom crossbar of a white wooden safety fence that ran around the edge of the huge
open wound that had been carved into the body of the earth. It was enough to discredit the various Gaia theories that had been advanced by the lunatic fringe (where ‘lunatic’ was not referencing the very real problems faced by lycanthropes everywhere) about the planet being a single entity capable of defending itself against the damage that we were inflicting upon it. Surely a bite this big should have led to some sort of response.
“Apart from an illuminating critique of the construction materials used in building the Giza pyramids, no,” I admitted.
“I won’t say that I told you so,” she said, twisting herself around so that she could look at me. She wobbled on the fence alarmingly and I took a step forwards to steady her before I had even really thought about it. The drop beyond was quite considerable and the bottom was still shrouded in the swirling mist of pulverised rock dust that was taking its time to settle. It was all too easy to imagine her body falling into that boiling mass to be broken on the recently sheared rocks below. The Agency had looked into ways of removing human imagination in order to combat the problem of so many agents giving in to gibbering terror in the face of unimaginable horror, but had found the aftercare costs too prohibitive.
“And I thank you for not doing so,” I replied ironically, letting go of her arm almost as soon as I had touched it.
“At least at the chocolate place we got some sweets out of it,” she complained.
Her brother had spent a while working checking the distressingly high number of chemicals that went into mass-produced confectionery at the biggest British producer’s site in Bournemouth. Now the home of Confectionery World, we had been forced to take the tour (and the free samples) before being allowed in to speak to the operations manager, who was offering us more bars even as we walked out of his office. It currently looked like a sweet shop had been brutally murdered and dumped in the boot of the car.
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. - the Curious Case of the Kidnapped Chemist Page 14