by Matthew Hall
‘Down.’
Whimpering and sobbing Razia dragged himself on his belly down a flight of concrete steps.
Black followed him, detecting the stench of unwashed bodies mixed with disinfectant as they descended.
They arrived in a tiled room that had the oppressive feel of a laboratory. While Razia groaned at his feet, Black aimed the beam of his torch into the room’s centre. Behind the bars of a steel cage the size of a prison cell, four emaciated human figures crouched on their haunches, covering their faces with their hands. They were barefoot and naked. Two males, two females. In the corner of their cage was a steel toilet bowl and a basin and in its centre a steel sphere, mounted on a pole, that rose some three feet from the ground.
Black briefly shut his eyes and looked again to ensure that what he was witnessing was real.
‘Are these experimental subjects?’
Razia didn’t answer.
Black shone the torch around along the margins of the room. There were workbenches, computers, monitors, cameras, all of them rendered redundant by the lack of power.
‘Please, I’m bleeding –’
‘What’s wrong with them? Why are they behaving this way?’
‘They are not suffering … If anything, they are more content than they have ever been. This existence is simple and rewarding for them.’
‘You believe that?’
‘I do.’
Black saw that he was serious and not for the first time in his life struggled to comprehend how such an intelligent mind could be so devoid of feeling.
‘And your goal is what, exactly? To programme us like machines?’
‘There is no morality in knowledge … what can be known will be known … by whatever means. If not by me, then by someone else.’
‘That much is true,’ Black said.
A spark of hope ignited in Razia’s eyes, as if he thought that at last they had found common ground.
‘Where’s the key?’ Black said.
‘Really. It’s no good –’
‘Where?’
The sight of the pistol trained at his forehead prompted Razia to raise a trembling finger and point to a shelf at the far end of the room.
Black retrieved it from the hook on which it hung, unlocked the cage door and stood back. The four figures inside remained hunched and squatting, refusing to move.
Black cajoled them. ‘Come on. Out. Go.’
His urgings fell on deaf ears. Black realized for the first time that their eyes were all focused on the sphere in the centre of the cage.
‘Why are they doing this?’
‘They would rather die than leave this room,’ Razia said. ‘The sphere – it’s all they live for.’
‘Go. Get out!’ Black kicked the bars, hoping to frighten them into quitting their prison, but Razia’s victims recoiled and curled into themselves even more tightly.
‘Even if you dragged them out, they would scream to be let back in … Three million dollars, Mr Black.’
Black turned the beam of light back on Razia’s face. Was this what evil looked like – a pleading child in a man’s body? The pathetic shells in the cage were easier to fathom than he was.
Razia blinked and cocked his head slightly as if he might yet charm his way out of his predicament.
Black had seen enough. He stooped down to grab Razia by the collar and with his remaining strength dragged him across the floor, screaming and protesting, and hauled him into the cage. He slammed the door and tossed the key into the far recesses of the room.
‘Goodbye, Razia. I trust you’ll be as happy as they are.’
58
They found him the following afternoon quite by accident. One of the younger boys had kicked the football far off into the trees. Isabel sent some of the older ones to look for it and made Rafael, the silent one, go with them. A short while later, Rafael came running back, breathless and frightened.
‘What’s the matter?’ Isabel asked, not because she expected an answer but because she made it her habit to speak to him like any of the other children.
‘El hombre … el hombre está muerto.’ The man. The man is dead.
Isabel and María Luisa exchanged a look of alarm.
‘Rafael? Which man?’
‘El amigo de señor Finn.’ The friend of Mr Finn.
He led them to a spot some distance down the slope beyond the far edge of the clearing. The prone figure was almost hidden in a clump of ferns. Unconscious but not dead, he was bleeding, badly dehydrated and running a high fever. Five boys, including Rafael, helped carry him back to the mission house, where Isabel made up a bed in the corner of the large and spacious room. Together with María Luisa, she sponged him with damp cloths, dressed and disinfected his wound and rigged up a saline drip which they retrieved from their emergency medical supplies.
Their efforts seemed in vain. The fever grew worse. During the early evening Black fitted, before collapsing into an even deeper torpor, from which they were certain he wouldn’t recover. By the early hours his pulse was barely detectable. The two missionaries prayed over him and commended his soul to God.
Black dreamed that he was swimming across a dark and bottomless lake with no shoreline in sight. Somehow, he knew there was a monster of unspeakable size and horror lurking far beneath its surface. He was caught between an instinct to lie still and float in the hope of becoming invisible and an equal urge to swim as fast as he could away from danger.
Night was falling.
Live or die.
He swam for his life.
He saw the outline of what he took to be a spit of shingle and made for it, only to find himself among a clutter of debris that frustrated his progress. At first he took the obstructions for pieces of wood and a sign that they must have drifted out from a human settlement on nearby land, but then he realized that they were the bloated, drowned bodies of men. And the harder he swam, the more he encountered, until there were so many bobbing corpses pressing in on him from every side that he could make no progress in any direction.
And then he felt a stirring beneath his bare feet and the sense of something vast and cold coiling upwards towards him from the bottomless depths.
He opened his mouth to scream and it flooded with freezing water.
Black woke with a violent shudder. The startled eyes of a boy stared back at him.
‘¡Está vivo! ¡Está vivo!’ He’s alive! He’s alive!
The boy ran away, calling out the same words over and over.
Black blinked, still partially trapped in his nightmare, unsure if he was awake, asleep, alive or dead. His mind searched for anchors in this unknown place. He was beneath a roof thatched with palm leaves, in a room with walls made from rough-hewn planks. At the far end was a table covered with a blue cloth, a wooden crucifix sitting in its centre. Bright sunlight flooded through an open window behind it. He became aware of voices – children’s voices – and of the smell of cooking.
Children … The mission.
A wave of relief swept through his body. And as he realized where he was, fractured images of his agonizing slog through the jungle returned to him.
A woman wiping her hands on her apron hurried through the door and came to his bedside. It was Isabel. She crossed herself and picked up a water bottle with a drinking spout like an outsized child’s beaker.
‘Mr Black. You’re awake.’ She seemed astounded, as if she had witnessed a miracle. ‘How are you feeling? Does your shoulder hurt?’
‘A little.’
‘You need to drink.’
She bent over him and lifted the spout to his lips. He drank deeply. Mouthful after hungry mouthful. When he could drink no more, he saw that the boy had reappeared and was standing at Isabel’s side holding a long wooden object. It was a bat. A cricket bat carved from a single piece of wood, with a flat front and curved back. He held it up for Black to see, as if searching for his approval.
‘Your friend made it for him,’ Isabel said. ‘A
ctually, they made it together.’
‘Señor Finn,’ Rafael said.
Black smiled.
The boy smiled uncertainly back at him.
‘It was Rafael who found you. You were very lucky. You would have died otherwise. Maybe when you’re feeling better, you can play with him.’
‘Yes. Tell him I’d like that.’
‘Cuando se siente mejor, Rafael.’ When he’s better, Rafael. She turned to Black. ‘You must be hungry.’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I’ll get you some breakfast.’
She bustled out as quickly as she had entered.
Black eased his legs over the edge of the bed and tried to sit up. A tearing pain in his shoulder forced him back on to the pillow. Rafael put down the bat and extended his hands in an offer to help. His expression was so eager that Black couldn’t refuse him.
‘Gracias.’
The boy hooked his hands under Black’s good shoulder and helped him up.
Black planted his feet on the floor and caught his breath.
‘Bueno,’ the boy said, screwing up his nose and taking a step backwards.
‘Oh … I see. I stink.’ Black sniffed an armpit. ‘My God, I do.’ He waved a hand in front of his face, mimicking Rafael’s pained expression.
The boy laughed like it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. And Black laughed with him. They laughed until tears streamed down their cheeks.
Six days of convalescence, followed by eight more trekking across the Brazilian border to the Mucajaí River, where he traded his pistol for a canoe, gave Black all the time he needed to think through the events that had begun with Kathleen Finn’s phone call. He paddled for four more days and made his way, ragged and unshaven, into the small provincial city of Boa Vista with few doubts left in his mind. It brought a peace of sorts. Mostly it allowed him to make peace with himself, to move beyond anger and accept that he must have been acting for reasons of his own. Reasons he hadn’t dared form into words.
Such are the forces that drive us. Unconscious. Unknowable. Overwhelming.
He roamed like a tramp along the broad, straight boulevards until eventually he chanced on a street market where he found a trader willing to exchange his GPS unit for a mobile phone and a few reals, the local currency. He made for a cheap café and filled his empty belly with steak, beans and cold beer. Sated, he sat back in his chair, smoked a cigarette and listened to the old men gossip as they played cards.
It was a fine afternoon to be alive.
59
The city sat beneath a pall of cloud and fine drizzle. Typical British August weather. Black stared out from the shuttle bus from Heathrow Airport at the familiar sights of west London. The office buildings alongside the elevated section of the M4 motorway and the slate roofs of a multitude of terraced houses spreading out in all directions combined, as they always did in the mind of the returning traveller, to create a sense of deflation at the dullness of it all. Excitement and unpredictability belonged on foreign shores, this drab vista seemed to say. This was a land where orderly lives were lived quietly, behind closed doors.
Black was at once depressed and vaguely comforted by the scene. Part of him longed to melt anonymously into the grey suburban streets.
The bus rumbled on through Hammersmith to Cromwell Road and finally to Knightsbridge where he disembarked with nothing but a nylon rucksack and the cheap set of clothes – picked up from a Brazilian market stall – that he was wearing. He headed north on foot, angling west across Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens to emerge at Queensway. Here he made his way along the parade of tatty souvenir shops and restaurants and found a café that provided assorted services to tourists, including passport photographs, cheap international calls and internet time. He handed over five pounds for an hour at a well-used terminal, brought out the notebook he had filled during the long flight across the Pacific and began to type.
His statement ran to five full pages. When he had finished he emailed a copy to his solicitor, which he followed up with a call from one of the café’s payphones. The bewildered man at the other end of the line was Ian Watkin, a lawyer who occupied a small office in the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye and whose work seldom strayed beyond the settling of wills and the buying and selling of properties in the surrounding countryside. Nevertheless, he knew Black’s history and represented many other past and present members of the Regiment.
Watkin took careful notes and in an anxious voice read them back: ‘I am to forward your statement immediately to as many of the following as I am able to contact: the Director, Special Forces, the Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, the Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Defence, and the Clerk to the International Criminal Court. And if anything should happen to you, I am to publish the statement online and alert all media outlets.’
‘Correct.’
‘I’ll do my best … If you don’t mind my asking, are you in trouble, Leo?’
‘I’ll let you know later. How are Jane and the girls?’
‘Very well, thank you.’
‘Glad to hear it. Speak soon.’
Black glanced over the banister from the floor above and saw Towers step out of the lift. He made his way noiselessly down the carpeted stairs and along the short length of corridor. Towers was turning the key in the lock when the sound of approaching footsteps caused him to glance to his right. A momentary look of alarm crossed his face and just as quickly vanished again.
‘Leo! How the devil are you?’
‘Not too bad, all things considered.’
‘Excellent. Ha. I wondered what had become of you. Thought you’d gone native.’ He hesitated, holding the door partially open as if uncertain whether to go inside.
‘I could murder a cup of tea,’ Black said.
‘Of course.’
Towers entered the flat. Black followed.
They passed through the short hallway and into the sitting room, Towers shrugging off his jacket as they went.
‘I keep getting calls from some Russian drunk who claims we owe him a pension.’
‘That would be Buganov. Our pilot.’
‘Well, I told him he can buggerov.’ Towers laughed and hung the jacket over a chair. ‘Been back long?’
‘Flew in this morning. Alone, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh. I am sorry to hear that … What happened?’
‘Not entirely sure. It was very confused. You know how it is.’
‘Of course. I did manage to see some satellite images of the aftermath … Well, at least you’re back in one piece.’
‘Any news of Colonel Silva or Cordero?’
‘None at all, I’m afraid.’ He smiled regretfully. ‘But, overall, I think you can count your efforts a success.’
Black nodded. ‘Any chance of that brew?’
‘Coming up. Make yourself at home.’
Towers bustled through to the kitchen. Black listened to him filling the kettle and slid open the drawer beneath his desk.
‘You’ll be glad to know that Drs Bellman and Sphyris are extremely grateful for your assistance,’ Towers called through. ‘And they’ve been most helpful. Most helpful indeed.’
‘We were separated.’
‘So they said. They called the Embassy from the airstrip at Platanal. We sent in a plane from Guyana to pick them up. A few cuts and bruises, nothing major … They thought you were shot.’
‘Caught a round in the shoulder. A kind missionary helped me fish it out.’
‘Well, they were most apologetic for leaving you. Apparently they didn’t have much choice.’
‘Apologies accepted.’
Towers returned with two mugs of tea and handed one to Black. ‘There we are. Just like mother made it.’
‘Thank you.’ Black took a seat on the sofa while Towers perched on the hard-backed chair at his desk.
They looked at each other in silence. Finally, Towers shook his head with an expression somewhere between exasperation and relief. ‘I don’t know what to
say, Leo. I admit, I feared the worst.’
‘No such luck.’
‘I should have known better. It’s a shame about Holst but, in any event, I hear his work is rapidly being replicated by others.’
‘I’m sure.’
Towers became suddenly earnest. He started to speak at high speed as if desperate to unload his thoughts as rapidly as possible. ‘This is dangerous technology and we need to be abreast of it. I’ve spent the last three days debriefing Bellman and Sphyris at a safe house and what they’ve had to say is chilling. Holst had perfected a neurochemical reaction powerful enough to overcome the human survival instinct itself. Bellman suspects Sabre had been bankrolling him for several years. He planned to use her research to industrialize the means of delivery and Sphyris was supposed to model future applications. The aim was to programme human behaviour, just like you’d programme a damn computer.’
Black observed Towers’ eyes lose their focus as he was swept up in the intensity of his monologue. ‘Bellman’s nanoparticles would have delivered Holst’s chemicals to neurons isolated by Sphyris. Things minute enough to be absorbed through the pores of your skin. It could have been applied to almost any product or ideology you care to mention. Imagine, Leo – opening a packet of washing powder, swiping the screen of a new phone or going to a political meeting and being delivered a dopamine hit powerful enough to ensure your lifelong loyalty. And then there are the military and industrial applications: soldiers and workers unwittingly programmed to operate like machines. Can you even begin to comprehend? That much power in the hands of an outfit like that?’ He paused and smiled. ‘The Committee are delighted, by the way. Over the moon.’
‘Do we have control of this technology now?’
‘Rest assured, Leo. Rest assured.’
‘And Mathis and Daladier?’
‘Already in detention. The only question is whether they’re extradited here or whether our American friends find grounds to indict them in the US. Either way, a suitably dismal future awaits. Good news on Pirot, too, and the young woman we suspect helped hook Bellman in the George V. The French picked them up attempting to board a flight to Cayenne. They’re currently in the tender embrace of the Directorate General for External Security in Paris.’