Road (A Joe Tiplady Thriller Book 2)

by John Sweeney

  ‘I’m lapsed.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means I’m a Catholic but my batteries have been taken out.’

  ‘Imagine going to Confession but if you lie, that shows up on the meter. Imagine the power that gives your priest, whatever you call him. But Scientology uses 1950s technology. Dominic is doing something with twenty-first-century tech. He looks at your brainwaves, your hot centres of emotion, your buttons. Then he switches on the stimulus to change those brainwaves, so that he can control your buttons.’

  ‘What stimulus?’

  ‘Dominic uses mind-mapping technology to work out what you’re thinking. Then, if he doesn’t like your thoughts, he hits your buttons to alter them. To change the way you think.’

  ‘That’s mind control.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘How does it work?’

  ‘First, he places you in a room and you go online; you’re encouraged to do whatever you fancy. Me, I looked at clothes, houses, swimming pools, then a few guys, discreetly, in the background of the normal ads, then back to shopping, back and forth, to and fro. Then it gets more intense. You wear a skull cap with wires coming out and you’re shown thousands of images on a screen, and the air is scented with dozens of different smells, different sounds. The algorithms . . .’

  ‘The algorithms?’

  ‘You cannot defeat the algorithms. They log what excites you, what disgusts you, and they grade everything, so pretty soon the algorithms know the secrets of your soul. They calibrate exactly what you like and then they give it to you, exactly the way you like it. To begin with.’

  ‘To begin with?’

  ‘The first stage is the cheese in the mousetrap.’

  ‘And the second stage?’

  ‘Dominic is a dentist.’

  ‘He’s a doctor, no?’

  ‘A doctor of dentistry. The “client” has two big molars taken out, one on either side of the jaw. In their place go two fake teeth, in them two receptors that, with the help of the algorithms, can read your brainwaves and then transmit them to external monitors controlled by Dominic. If they detect particular patterns of thought, the teeth emit an electromagnetic pulse to the optical part of the brain, generating phosphenes.’

  ‘Phosphenes?’

  ‘Flashes of light. So you think good thoughts and nothing bad happens. You think bad thoughts and your brain sees phosphenes. After a time, the flashes get stronger and stronger and your head hurts. You stop thinking the bad thoughts and think nice, the flashes stop. You’re a gay film star who is pretending not to be gay. You start thinking bad, the lights flash, you stop it and – hey presto! – you’re not gay anymore. You think really bad stuff – that, say, ISIS is good, bombing America is good – that gets you more and more phosphenes, so many flashes of light you go blind. At the top of the dial for too long, the TMI can kill.’

  ‘Luke McDonald, the film star. I saw him on the road to Fort Hargood, driving fast, he almost ran me off the road. Is he a client?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Jameela gave a bitter smile. ‘Everyone says he’s gay. He says he’s not gay. I know he’s gay because I used to select the images, thousands of them, prior to him being plugged in. And I know exactly what floats Luke McDonald’s boat. Men. So Luke pays good money, millions and millions of dollars, to look at pictures of hunky men, and then the algorithms start hurting him so that he is forever seeing lights in his head, he’s smashing himself against a wall of pain. Then he looks at beautiful women, the kind he sleeps with in his films, and the lights go out and his head doesn’t hurt and Luke gets turned on by women, even without being zapped. Through Luke’s recommendation, Dominic is beginning to get TMI into Hollywood.’

  ‘There was a black guy. Samson?’

  ‘Samson is a prize specimen for TMI. He was a gang member in East LA, a psycho, killed four or five men, always no witnesses. The LAPD gave up trying to nail him. And then he got introduced to Dominic, got plugged in and now he’s the perfect citizen.’

  ‘Too perfect. I only met him briefly but, and maybe I’m exaggerating this, I felt there was something wrong, a suppressed hysteria about the man.’

  ‘Plugged in, see? Samson became a secret friend, an ally. He wants out but doesn’t know how to get unplugged.’

  ‘But you got out?’

  She lowered her eyes. ‘It was because of Ham. It was all right when he was a baby, an infant, but he was growing up fast and soon I feared that Dominic would have him plugged in to TMI. So I became a secret rebel. I spied on Dominic, I started to learn about Komodo.’

  ‘What’s Komodo?’

  ‘Well, you should know. You work for them, don’t you?’

  ‘I work for no one but myself.’

  ‘You work for the CIA, I’m sure of it.’ Something dark crept into her tone, an edge, not quite there yet, of a paranoid suspicion.

  ‘No, that’s not right,’ Joe said. ‘I have never worked for the CIA. I used to be in the IRA and then I woke up from my brainwashing. I became a special needs teacher in London, that’s as far away from being some kind of James Bond as I can imagine. My background dealing with difficult kids was one of the reasons I was selected by Dominic.’

  ‘But you know them – you know the CIA?’

  ‘There’s a man I know, who used to be a friend of mine, he’s in the CIA. He gave me a reference which Dominic picked up. Because I spent so long on the run from the IRA, I know how to hide. That gives me my one skill, finding people. I can step into the shoes of someone who doesn’t want anyone to know where they are.’

  ‘You found us and you stole my son.’ Again that edge of darkness in her voice.

  ‘What I did was wrong, so wrong that I have come from the far side of the planet and, at the risk of being arrested for practising psychiatry without a licence in Hungary, got you out of the nut farm.’

  ‘You did that.’

  ‘So tell me more about Komodo.’

  ‘Dominic mind-bends gangsters, movie stars . . . losers like me.’

  ‘You’re not a loser.’

  ‘So he went to Virginia and knocked on the door of the CIA and said, “I hear you’ve got a problem with lowlifes getting brainwashed into joining ISIS. Give me a lot of money and I can help you.”’

  ‘And they did.’

  ‘They did.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘The development budget for the Komodo programme is 1.2 billion dollars.’

  Joe whistled. ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ he said.

  ‘But it’s a con,’ said Jameela. ‘You think bad, you get maxed out. That works, that bites. You think nice, for a time. And then your body learns to lie to the algorithms. It tapers off. Luke, the gay film star, he’s still gay. Samson the sociopath, he still wants to kill people. Me, I’m still a crazy bitch determined to save my son. Once Komodo got going, Dominic spent more and more of his time in what he told me was Luxembourg. I know the man’s mind; I’m the mother of his son. He adored me, once. So I work out some of his passwords and I discover that he’s running Komodo so that everything is deniable. It’s not in the US jurisdiction, not on any budgetary platform anyone can find.’

  ‘So he’s un-brainwashing ISIS wackos in Luxembourg?’

  ‘Albania. He pretends he’s in Luxembourg, but he’s at this secret facility in the wilds, near some place called Tropojë. And then I get lucky. I use one of his passwords I’ve guessed and discover he’s got two logbooks: one of all the cases that have worked, showing that the clients have been reverse-brainwashed into thinking that the West is cool and ISIS are bad; and a second logbook, showing all of the bad cases, the ISIS psychos who stayed psycho. And the people in the second logbook, he maxes them out, they die.’

  ‘Shot while trying to escape?’

  ‘Natural causes.’

  ‘And the ratio of good to bad?’

  ‘Over its first full year, twenty-three bad, none good.

  ‘So Uncle Sam is paying Dominic 1.2 billion dollars for
murderous batshit?’

  ‘Correct. Bullets are so much cheaper. I put together the evidence that Dr Dominic Franklyn is defrauding the US taxpayer by staging a con game and killing people – bad people, maybe, but nevertheless killing them – to perpetuate the con. So I go to the FBI.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The FBI agents get shut down by someone high up. And then Dominic appears, in the middle of the night, back from “Luxembourg”. He turns the dial full on, and zaps me, eleven hours straight. That’s the video that shows me screaming and screaming and screaming. Then there’s some big panic and I’m entrusted to Samson while Dominic has to go back to “Luxembourg”. Samson is ordered to keep me in lockdown but he lets me be, and then I unlock more secrets and it gets really bad. The ISIS guys, they’re smart. They’ve worked out how to void TMI.’

  ‘They can void a 1.2 billion-dollar programme?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘And the magic bullet is?’

  ‘You hang on to a piece of metal and stand in an exposed place in the middle of a thunderstorm. With a lightning bolt comes an electromagnetic pulse, an EMP. Scissors cut paper, EMP cuts TMI.’

  ‘You sure?’

  She unrolled the sleeve of her right arm, and on it was a fine red tracery. ‘That’s what you get if you’re struck by lightning,’ she said. ‘The only way I could escape from Fort Hargood was to stand in the middle of the desert holding a garden fork in my hands, high above my head. The lightning strike burnt my arm, knocked me twenty yards off my feet, but it short-circuited the TMI receptors in my teeth.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just get your teeth pulled?’

  ‘Dominic is no fool. You pull your teeth, you get zapped to the max, you die.’

  ‘So you risked being fried?’

  ‘To become free, to get your own thoughts back – it’s worth the risk. I got hit by a billion volts to become free. It was the most frightening thing I’ve done in my whole life, worse than going to Raqqa, but I’d do it all over again, no question. I owe my freedom to Dominic’s fastidious attention to detail. Without him listing a series of suicidal attempts by plugged-in ISIS guys frying themselves during thunderstorms, I would never have known how to void Komodo.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then I take Ham and I run. Dominic has a lock on the government in the USA. The only other place I know, apart from LA, is Syria, but Syria in the old times, not now. In Damascus I bumped into my old high-school flame, Rashid. He’s cool, he’s a doctor, he’s saving lives. Rashid, he does his own thing, but he’s working with the Free Syrian Army against Zarif, against ISIS, with a rich guy called Qureshi, who runs it – what’s left of it, anyway. Rashid keeps the power on in Syria, that means hospitals have electricity, people can eat, see at night. That means he deals with both sides. To do that, he and his boys dress up as ISIS security, the Amn. The CIA know all about it. They pay for it.

  ‘Rashid and I, we hook up. I know Dominic will try to come for me – or rather, send someone like you to find me, so we make the video in Damascus, and Rashid’s men play spear-carriers. The message is simple: Don’t follow me. But then Zarif’s people come for Qureshi and lock him up, and Rashid is on the wrong side of the wire, in Raqqa. Qureshi sends word to me to get him out, but by the time I get there, Rashid’s already in a cage. We end up in a cage too, Ham and I. And then an ISIS man, someone who had grown sick of evil, he gets us out, he lets us go free.’

  ‘Where’s Rashid now?’

  She let out a long, low sigh.

  ‘He went back to Aleppo. He’s a surgeon; they need him. When we were at school together, we were sweethearts, but I dumped him because I thought he was too pious, too conservative. He never took any risks. I’ve never been more wrong about someone in my whole life. Well, I was wrong about Dominic, too. I thought he was a good man and in reality he was a monster. And I thought that Rashid was boring, but he is a hero.’

  Her eyes were wet. She paused to wipe them, then continued: ‘The ISIS man who saved the three of us, he cut my hair, glued a great beard onto my face and dressed me up as a Hisbah. I looked good as a religious policeman. We hightailed it on a motorbike to the Kurdish lines. They almost shot us dead, we’d forgotten that we looked like ISIS. I hit the brakes on the motorbike, ripped off my beard and said, “I’m a woman, you idiots.” The Kurdish fighters couldn’t stop laughing, they said it was the funniest thing they’d seen in their whole lives. Rashid and Ham were laughing so hard they were almost sick. Rashid went to Aleppo and Ham and I carried on through Turkey. We almost drowned crossing the Med – many, many others did. We struggled through the Balkans. Ham’s jaw was broken when a van reversed into him. We almost got to Austria. But then you stole my son.’

  ‘We’ll get him back.’

  The black eyes held Joe’s, not believing him.

  ‘We’ll try our best to get him back.’

  ‘To kidnap him?’

  ‘No. Dominic’s got too much money, he’s too well connected with the Agency.’

  ‘With your Agency.’

  ‘I’m not CIA and the people I know in it, they’re at the back of the class right now.’

  ‘So we lose.’

  ‘So we fight. We go back to the States and take Dominic to court and try to get Ham back. Fighting is better than despair.’

  ‘I’ve got no money. You cannot defeat the algorithms.’

  ‘We’ll get Dominic’s algorithms to fight among themselves. He paid me well. I’ll get you a lawyer. I’ll pay for it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So I can sleep at night. I kidnapped a boy from a good mother and returned him to a bad father.’

  She looked miserable. ‘But the mother was mad.’

  ‘The mother was a bit mad, but mostly she was good. But the father, he was bad-bad.’

  ‘It’s not going to work. We’ll lose.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Joe said, stretching. ‘But this way maybe you and I get to sleep at night. If we don’t fight, you don’t get Ham back and I can’t sleep out of shame, out of guilt over what I did.’

  They went to their separate beds, Joe, for once, not troubled by nightmares but lost in a deep and seamless sleep. Who knows what woke him? Perhaps some atavistic awareness of threat; perhaps a tread on a creaking step. The knife glinted in the moonlight.

  Maybe she didn’t mean to kill him, maybe she did.

  ‘You can kill me,’ said Joe, his voice still slurry with sleep. ‘I won’t stop you. I don’t love life; I hate myself too much to love life. But if you do kill me, you stand no chance of ever getting Ham back. They don’t return children to convicted murderers.’

  The knife fell on the wooden floor with a clatter.

  LOS ANGELES DISTRICT COURT HOUSE, CALIFORNIA

  Under the glare of the strip lighting, the court usher’s black toupee rainbow-shimmered as naturally as a slick of diesel oil in a mountain stream. He was middling-old, slender, conservatively dressed in a brown suit, had a wicked underbite and a pale moon-face. His demeanour was that of a mourner who’d realised he’d gone to the wrong funeral. He came out into the vestibule and gave the nod, and the two parties filed solemnly into the courtroom, treating the other side as if they weren’t there. Next to the father sat his two principal case lawyers, and behind them a further thirteen associate lawyers and sundry experts. Behind the banks of lawyers sat Luke McDonald, one of the most famous film stars in America, his agent, his agent’s private eye and the star’s three-strong personal protection team. Behind them were two government agents – and behind them, three government lawyers.

  Next to the mother sat one lawyer. Five rows back, on the mother’s side, was just one more person, Joe Tiplady. By mutual consent, the hearing was private, so there was no public, no media.

  Once the usher had closed the doors, he also sat on the father’s side.

  Her Honour Ernesta Mujillos tapped her gavel tentatively – she had a distaste for histrionics in her courtroom – and the summing-up
began: ‘There is no decision by this bench more fraught with difficulty than choosing between competing narratives from a loving father and a loving mother over custody of a child. Both sides have set out evidence that the other is some kind of monster, and this bench has the duty to make a ruling which will deeply and profoundly affect mother, father and child for the rest of their natural lives. For the benefit of the court record, I shall now rehearse the competing arguments made by both sides . . .’

  After an ocean of time, Joe stood up, nodded at the bench and walked out for a coffee from the courthouse vending machine. The courthouse was twenty-two storeys up, and the vestibule boasted a view of miles of metal and glass threading this way and that on the freeway below, as well as the flat dullness of the LA burbs drifting towards the foothills. The sky was grey, overcast. One dollar and twenty cents bought him a plastic cup containing liquidised cardboard, but it was better than listening to the judge’s rehash of the legal argy-bargy. Time and again, the truth had been chiselled into dust. The story was both hideously complicated – that was the way of it when the lives of ordinary people got tangled up in the world of spies, of play and counter-play, of feint and counter-feint, of cross and double-cross – and all too simple. But very little of it had been heard in this court.

  He fished out his phone, switched it on and flicked through the news. In France, an ISIS fanatic had beheaded an elderly priest while he was serving Mass in Normandy. More grim news – not just for the world, but also, he feared, for the interests of justice in the courtroom he’d just left. He finished his coffee with a grimace and returned to listen to the verdict.

  Ernesta Mujillos tapped her gavel gently and called the courtroom to order. But there was nothing gentle about her determination of the facts: she found that Jameela Abdiek had lied repeatedly under oath; had repeatedly endangered her son, Ham; had constructed a series of monstrous fabrications about her estranged husband, Dr Dominic Franklyn; had failed to provide a scintilla of reliable, independent evidence to support her fabrications.