by John Sweeney
‘Plug in?’ Joe asked.
Franklyn gave a self-deprecating laugh. ‘Veronica, you make us sound like miracle-healers. We simply do our best to help some people develop their full potential, and help others who may have been told, falsely, they have troubled minds.’
‘Charitable?’ Joe asked, perhaps too sharply.
‘Charitable, often. Where clients have some access to resources, then we do reluctantly accept donations.’
‘So you’re a psychiatrist?’
‘Not in the formal sense, no,’ said Franklyn.
‘But you’re a doctor?’
‘I’m a doctor of philosoph—’
‘Mr Tiplady, you’re not here to cross-examine Dr Franklyn about his qualifications,’ Veronica cut in sharply. ‘Suffice to say that you are sitting opposite a pioneer whose technologies will one day be recognised internationally as equal in power to discoveries like the double helix or quantum physics. Dr Franklyn is, in this very facility, unravelling the DNA of the mind’s workings.’
‘Very good,’ Joe said. ‘By the way, I didn’t catch the name of this facility.’
‘Fort Hargood,’ said Veronica. Joe frowned a little. ‘It was a military camp during the Second World War,’ she explained.
‘I see. And Jameela, she was a patient?’
‘Not at all,’ said Franklyn smoothly. ‘The tragedy is, she was one of the most effective nurses we ever had. She understood the benefits of the technologies I was working on better than anyone. Her oneness with the technology was so complete – and I fear this sounds unprofessional – I fell in love with her.’
Joe chanced a look at Veronica’s face. Again, her eyes were focused on the barren land beyond the fort’s fake greenery.
Franklyn continued: ‘We married, had our son Ham, short for Hamal. The name is Arabic for “lamb”. Ham was our little lamb. It was a happy time.’
‘So what happened to Jameela? What went wrong?’
Franklyn gestured to Veronica, who flipped open her tablet again and pressed play on a different video file. The Jameela of the candlelit photograph had gone. She was the same woman, but sickeningly different. A moronic emptiness in her pupils, staring, staring, staring into the camera, great black bags under her eyes, her once-gorgeous hair pinned back harshly, a hawkishness to her nose not to be seen in the candlelit photo. You couldn’t make out where she was or what she was wearing because the framing of the image focused solely on her hating, hateful face, which was lit up in a pool of light, the background fuzzy and in shadow. In the Avalon photograph she had wriggled with loveliness and life; here the whole force of her being exuded something so dark it was beyond description. The image was video, but it was locked in stasis for thirty seconds or so, and then everything got so much worse. First, the whites of her eyes fluttered in their sockets, and then she started to scream, her face reddening all the while, her voice rising in pitch and tone. The sound grew in intensity until it became an ear-piercing shrieking: ‘La! La! La!’, Arabic for ‘No! No! No!’ Beauty had turned to Monster, her eyes huge in the frame, twin pools of psychosis. And then her face buckled, the screaming stopped, all force gone, and she began to sob quietly, almost silently. Then the video ended.
‘Quite mad,’ said Franklyn.
‘Mad,’ echoed Veronica.
‘When was that video shot?’ asked Joe.
‘Earlier this year,’ said Franklyn.
‘Where?’
‘Here.’
Out of the window, high noon had passed and the shadows were, ever so slightly, beginning to lengthen. Joe gazed out at the greenery close by and the deadness beyond, the three images of Jameela haunting his mind’s eye: the vivacious beauty; the wannabe suicide bomber; the woman as mad as mad can be.
‘When did she leave with the boy?’ he asked.
‘One month ago.’
‘July?’
The doctor nodded.
Something bleeped and Franklyn fiddled with a device clipped to his belt, then studied Joe. ‘I’m being called away, I’m afraid. Is there anything else I can help you with?’
Joe couldn’t think of anything, so said nothing.
The doctor’s grey eyes bored into Joe as he took his right hand and clasped it in his own.
‘Find my son, Joe. Find Ham and bring him home.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ said Joe.
Franklyn smiled graciously, and then he was gone.
Joe asked Veronica for the video.
‘I’ll email it to you.’
‘That would be foolish.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Ever heard of the NSA?’
She bit her lip. It was, perhaps, the first time he’d had the better of her.
‘To send me an email with that video attached . . .’ said Joe. ‘Well, that would be a schoolboy error.’
Her whole being was a study in contrition.
‘Load it up onto a clean flash drive.’
‘I’ll do that right now.’ She disappeared, then reappeared with a USB stick and a piece of paper, on which was typed an address in downtown LA and a telephone number. She told Joe that, to communicate with her, he should write to her. No email. The telephone number was never to be used unless it was a life-threatening emergency. She added that on the flash drive was a file on Jameela, confidential, not to be shared. Joe nodded.
She led him back through the labyrinth of opaque glass, downstairs to the entrance hall, and opened the door. Out front, his Beetle had appeared, driven there by an enormous black man in a janitor’s overalls, who got out and stood by the car, his eyes staring at the ground. He’d fixed the soft top.
‘Thanks for fixing the top,’ said Joe. ‘And you are?’
‘Samson, sir.’
‘So, Samson, how did you start the car without the key?’
‘Trick I learnt in East LA, sir, before I met Dr Franklyn, when I was baa-aad.’ The way Samson said ‘bad’ made Joe wonder whether he ever regretted becoming good.
Veronica wished him luck. Joe smiled to himself, suspecting that he would need it, got in the Beetle and headed back down the track. The steel gate opened as he approached the silent, all-seeing eyes of the CCTV cameras watching over Fort Hargood. He may have been heading towards a world of trouble, but it felt good to get out of there.
Once through the gate, he gunned the Beetle. It burbled happily and he slammed in a tape – the car was so old it boasted a tape deck – of The Wolfe Tones, and sang along at the top of his voice:
‘Contentment of mind is not found in a city . . .
And though I have travelled the wild world all over
There’s nowhere on earth that is dearer to me . . .
And fishermen’s boats make their way by Dingle Bay.’
A dip in the road by a wall of rock offered shade, some respite from the sun, but then the road ran uphill and he was staring directly into a hot orange ball. He was lowering the sun visor to shield his eyes when a huge black SUV came bowling straight at him. Joe swerved and the SUV missed him by half an inch, if that, but not before he got a long hard look at the man behind the wheel. He was staring beatifically into the distance, headphones plugged into his ears, his high cheekbones, thick bush of blond hair and extraordinarily fine teeth every bit as telegenic as when Joe had seen him in countless films. Luke McDonald, one of the most famous film stars on the planet, was going, fast, to Fort Hargood.
TIRANA, ALBANIA
They sat around a conference table the shape of a coffin in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a palazzo built in the time of King Zog, light and spacious on the higher floors, Ruritanian on the mezzanine and a cosh in the basement. Commander Ramiz Bejtullah of the State Intelligence Service was reading out his report in a flat monotone; the underlying message: nothing of interest here. Dressed in a Christian Dior suit of charcoal grey, a crisp white shirt and mauve tie, Bejtullah’s jacket was hung over his shoulders, perhaps because, Agim mused, his arms were too grand to go through its s
leeves. A smooth and elegant functionary of the secret state, Bejtullah had a future.
Agim was the past. They were all here to bury his investigation into the four corpses the shepherd had found at the top of the mountain: the one mutilated and burnt, the other three just burnt. Agim was the rustic from Tropojë, after all.
The ministry’s officials were out in force, as were the police, represented by Agim, his boss, his boss’s boss and his boss’s boss’s boss. Three goons from the secret police were there to lick Bejtullah’s boots, as well as four Americans: some kind of military guy, chunkily built, dark hair in a crew cut; two clerks from the embassy who Agim had seen before; the fourth was old, the oldest man in the room. Slight, with a beard but no moustache and a gap between his teeth, he wore a black suit that had seen better days, a white shirt and dark-purple tie. He looked like a preacher down on his luck. When he smiled – which he did, often – he gave the impression of being simple, even perhaps an idiot.
Between the four Americans sat an interpreter from the foreign ministry – a man, bespectacled, with a high forehead and a forlorn expression, who gave the foreigners a running commentary in English and everybody else the impression that he was too talented for work of this nature.
‘Four corpses were found in the high country, north-west of Tropojë’ – Bejtullah droned on – ‘in various stages of decay. Due to the passage of time and the effects of the immediate environment – high winds, rain storms, etc. – it has unfortunately not been possible to diagnose the exact cause of death . . .’
Of course it hasn’t, thought Agim.
‘In addition, the national police service has brought to our attention the deaths of three more men, found at the bottom of the mountain . . .’
Seven in all? This was bigger than Agim had imagined.
‘The three bodies were so severely damaged in the fall that, again, it has unfortunately not been possible to establish the precise cause of death . . . The seven dead were of different nationalities: one Tunisian, one Moroccan, three Saudi Arabian, one Syrian and one Iraqi-American.’
Aha, thought Agim, that’s why the Americans have turned up: they have an issue of care in relation to their half-citizen.
‘We believe,’ continued Bejtullah, ‘that all seven were economic migrants seeking a new life in Europe, and they may well have fallen foul of the leader of the smuggling gang responsible for their illegal entry into Albania. This man has been apprehended and is currently refusing to cooperate with the authorities, claiming that he was not responsible and is not a smuggler.’
So Sotir the half-wolf was giving the intelligence people a hard time, thought Agim. They’d have a devil of a job understanding a word he had to say. Good for him, poor fellow. The idea that he was some smuggling boss, living up in the mountains with the eagles – that was just too stupid, even for the intelligence people.
‘So, to summarise: the interior ministry of Albania and the special security police are grateful to Police Sergeant Agim Neza of Tropojë . . .’
Sergeant? They’ve demoted me as well as staging this farce.
‘. . . for bringing our attention to this tragedy. The loss of life of economic migrants from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa in Europe is becoming a distressingly frequent reality. Now Albania, too, must shoulder this burden, though we note that the loss of seven lives, if compared to the loss of thousands crossing the Mediterranean, is small by comparison. One more observation: the loss of life has nothing whatsoever to do with the facility—’
‘What facility?’ Agim instantly regretted asking his question out loud.
Perhaps there was a flutter of suppressed anxiety on the Albanian side of the table, but the four Americans were impassive, in the dark, the translator not having conveyed what Agim had said. Bejtullah smiled smoothly at him and said in a personable way, ‘This question is above your level of responsibility.’
‘Po, por kjo është një pyetje e drejtë,’ said someone in fluent Albanian. Agim was astonished to realise that the speaker was the American fool with the gap in his teeth, but not quite as astonished as the interpreter, who stared at the fool open-mouthed. Seeing as there was no response, the old man repeated himself in Albanian and then in English: ‘Yes, but it is a good question.’
More silence. The American continued: ‘A mund t’ju pyes, çfarë objekti nuk ka të bëjë me këto vdekje?’ And again he translated for the benefit of the other Americans: ‘May I ask, what facility has nothing to do with these deaths?’
‘Who is this guy?’ hissed Bejtullah, in Albanian, to the official next to him.
‘I don’t know,’ the official hissed back. ‘He’s not a regular at the embassy.’
Whoever this man was, thought Agim, he was not such a moron; in fact, not a moron at all.
‘In fact’ – the old fellow reverted to Albanian only – ‘there are a number of issues I’d like to raise regarding your report, Mr Bejtullah, for which, much thanks.’ His Albanian was extraordinarily good, as if he was born and bred in the back streets of Tirana.
‘First of all, perhaps you can expand on your theory that the seven men were in some way economic migrants heading from the Middle East and North Africa to northern Europe. Why would any such person embark on a route that would take them via the highest mountains in northern Albania? There has been some people-trafficking through Albania but not much. The only conceivable through-route from these mountains would be into Kosovo and then across to Serbia or Montenegro, which are two of the most difficult and troubled border crossings in the whole of Europe. But even in that eventuality, the main road and mountain passes are at around one thousand feet high. Four of the dead men ended up on a mountain seven thousand feet high, and three at the bottom of the mountain, but still six thousand feet up. No one walks for days through mountains when they can go by road. So your theory that they were economic migrants is incredible. Which leads me on to the next point. You’ve arrested a shepherd on the basis of a theory that makes no sense. And in addition to the nonsensical motivation, why would the supposed killer report those killings to the police? You are confusing an innocent and helpful member of the public with the true killer out of administrative convenience.’ The non-idiot smiled his strange, gap-toothed smile. ‘Or out of laziness.’
Bejtullah visibly smarted at the suggestion.
‘To reassure everybody around this table,’ the old man said, still smiling, ‘this mistake happens all too frequently in the United States of America.’
No one around the table felt reassured.
‘In puzzling cases like these,’ he continued, ‘it’s always best to go back to the primary evidence. Let’s have another look at the photographs of the dead.’
Bejtullah turned to the official next to him and whispered something in his ear. The official, emboldened, said, ‘Excuse me, sir, but with respect, some of these issues touch on matters of Albanian national security.’
‘Likewise on American national security,’ said the non-idiot, smiling once more.
‘What’s your locus in this?’ snapped Bejtullah.
‘Locus? I’m in Tirana,’ the old man replied.
Agim cupped his mouth with his hand to hide his glee.
‘If the national security of the United States is at issue,’ said Bejtullah, ‘you have to demonstrate your credentials. We were informed that you were an analyst from the embassy. Is that correct?’
‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’
‘Who are you?’ Bejtullah rasped in English, his voice absent of all its previous oiliness.
‘My name,’ said the old man, replying in English, ‘is Ezekiel Chandler, an—’
The American sitting next to him finished the sentence: ‘And Zeke is with the Central Intelligence Agency.’
‘Now that’s cleared up,’ said Zeke, returning to Albanian, ‘I’d like to ask you to look again at the photographs.’
Opening a folder in front of him, Zeke took out seven colour photographs and pedan
tically organised them in front of him, one by one. ‘Seven dead men. All have clearly been burnt – some so badly there is evidence of charring. Only one is burnt and mutilated; three, it would appear, have only been burnt; three have been burnt and have also sustained the tissue and skeletal damage you would expect from falling from a great height.’
Zeke stopped to extract an eighth photograph, taken by Agim, of the lookout post, standing high above the precipice with only one thin rail of metal separating whoever was on the post from the drop below.
‘The lieutenant posits the three men were hit by lightning while standing on this lookout post, and fell backwards onto the mountain to be recovered by the shepherd.’
‘This is nonsense,’ said Bejtullah.
‘Oh?’ said Zeke, smiling.
Agim was beginning to wonder whether Zeke’s smile wasn’t a smile at all, but more like the click an automatic weapon makes when you switch the safety off.
‘One can put forward a further hypothesis,’ Zeke went on, ‘that the three found by the police at the foot of the mountain died in exactly the same way, by lightning, but when electrocuted, their muscles went into spasm and they were projected forwards. They were all dead long before they hit the ground. Casual examination of this photograph of the lookout post allows for the possibility that anyone who was on it and hit by a bolt of lightning could fall either forwards or backwards. The literature says that people who are hit by bolts of lightning have been found up to several feet from where they were standing at the moment of impact.’
A fan in the ceiling flicked away at the air, as uselessly as it had done under King Zog, Mussolini, Enver Hoxha, and now democracy, sort of.
‘So, we seem to be looking at six dead men, at least, who killed themselves by self-electrocution.’
‘I repeat,’ said Bejtullah, ‘this is nonsense.’
‘Oh,’ said Zeke. ‘So you have ruled out the Lichtenberg figures?’ He said the phrase ‘Lichtenberg figures’ with the same intonation that someone else might say ‘glass of milk’.