The Agent (An Isabella Rose Thriller Book 3)

by Mark Dawson

  Maia sat quietly on the side of the bed while Litivenko continued to record her observations.

  ‘Exudate levels have receded. The signs of early-stage healing – erythema, heat, oedema, pain and functional disturbance – they are already gone. Proliferation is advanced. The wound is already being rebuilt. New granulation tissue is already being generated. Angiogenesis is progressing normally. The fibroblasts are receiving far more oxygen and nutrients than would be the case for a normal person, and much faster, too.’

  She took a scalpel from the table. ‘This might sting a little,’ she warned.

  ‘It’s all right, Doctor.’

  Aleksandra pressed the edge of the blade into the healthy new tissue. She had to push down a little before there was any sign of blood.

  ‘I’m trying to draw blood with my scalpel. It shouldn’t bleed easily, and it doesn’t. The tissue is the right colour, no sign of poor perfusion, ischaemia or infection. The epithelial cells have almost resurfaced the wound.’

  Maia turned her head. ‘What does that mean, Aleksandra? Is it as it should be?’

  ‘It means it’s healing well. As we would expect.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘It certainly is. I understand the science, but I still find it remarkable what your body can do.’

  She placed the scalpel back on the table and gently pushed Maia’s head down so that she could look at the back of her neck. She ran her fingers over the skin and felt the small bump of the nano-transmitter between the C6 and C7 vertebrae. She had never grown used to the idea of it nestled there half a centimetre beneath the skin. Maia didn’t seem to mind it being there – why should she, since it had first been implanted when she was a little girl? – but Litivenko hated what it signified. It made her think of slave collars or tattooed numbers, signifying both ownership and servitude. She found it obscene.

  She took a breath and switched off the recorder.

  ‘How long will I have to stay here?’ Maia asked.

  ‘Not long. How’s your ankle?’

  Maia held her leg aloft and flexed it. ‘Fine. I have full range of movement.’

  Litivenko swabbed antiseptic cream over the small wound she had made with her scalpel and then refreshed the dressing. Maia waited patiently, the muscles in her back and shoulders flexing occasionally. Her physique was remarkable. There was barely an ounce of fat on her and, despite the fact that she was only a little heavier than Litivenko, the doctor had seen how prodigiously strong she was. Skeletal muscle, the muscle that was targeted in strength and conditioning exercises, typically made up around 45 per cent of the average person’s body weight. Maia – and the other subjects in the cohort – had levels of around 55 per cent, and that muscle was served by much more efficient blood vessels that supplied hugely increased levels of nutrients and energy. It made them stronger, faster and more resilient than any subject Litivenko had ever studied before.

  She taped the dressing around Maia’s shoulder.

  ‘Comfortable?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  Litivenko glanced self-consciously around the sterile laboratory. She knew that there were microphones and cameras everywhere, and she was acutely aware that Ivanosky might still be in the observation suite. Privacy was not a luxury that Maia had ever been accorded, and it meant that Litivenko would have to choose her words carefully.

  ‘What happened out there?’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean, Aleksandra?’

  The use of her first name still occasionally caught her by surprise. Maia was so dispassionate that any familiarity stood out. Litivenko found it unsettling, even though it was she who had told Maia that she should use it. Maia was excessively formal with everyone else: the doctors at Daedalus were all accorded their formal titles whenever she spoke to them or even referred to them in conversation with others. Litivenko had worked with Maia for ten years. Her main function was to address her from the standpoint of embryology, but she had effectively become her personal physician. Maia had been an eleven-year-old girl when their relationship had commenced. Litivenko remembered it very well: the girl had been quiet, preternaturally intense, and she never smiled. Conversation had been difficult. Litivenko had found the situation uncomfortable and, despite very clear warnings from Ivanosky that it would be dangerous to form an attachment, she had insisted that Maia call her by her first name.

  It was a small thing, but it helped. Despite early discomfort, the girl had quickly adapted to the suggestion. Litivenko had been pleased, but, after the first few operations when she had learned exactly what Maia was capable of doing, she had wondered if a strictly professional relationship might have been better, after all. Perhaps she would have been better with a buffer between them. Perhaps Ivanosky had been right.

  But Maia had no one else. She was just a girl, albeit a very unusual one, and Litivenko couldn’t withdraw from her.

  She looked up at the blank eye of the observation camera on the wall above them. She guided Maia across to the room’s table and two chairs and indicated that they should sit. ‘The operation. What happened?’

  ‘I explained it when I was debriefed.’

  The camera’s motor whirred as it adjusted so that they could continue to be filmed. ‘I know,’ Litivenko said. ‘I read the report. But they’re saying it doesn’t make sense, and I have to say, Maia, I know what they mean. It was Michael Pope and a teenage girl. Just two of them. And you had the advantage of surprise. It should have been easy. Was there anything else?’

  ‘She had a gun,’ Maia said, repeating the line that she had used again and again with the analysts who had debriefed her.

  ‘But you let her get it.’

  ‘Yes, Aleksandra. I made a mistake.’

  ‘You don’t make mistakes.’

  ‘This time, I did.’

  ‘There was nothing else? No other reason for what happened?’

  Maia paused, her jawline bulging almost imperceptibly as she bit down. ‘No, Aleksandra,’ she said. ‘I made a mistake. That was it. There’s no other reason.’

  Litivenko didn’t believe her. She lowered her voice even more. ‘If there was something else to explain what happened, you have to keep it to yourself. If they think you’re flawed in some way, if they think you can’t be relied upon to complete your orders, they’ll have no further use for you. You understand what that means, don’t you, Maia?’

  Litivenko wondered whether Maia was about to tell her something new, but instead she turned her head a fraction to look up at the camera and then looked back down to face her again. Maia held her gaze for a moment, long enough for Litivenko to recognise that she would have said more but for the fact that they were being observed.

  ‘It was a mistake,’ she said.

  ‘All right, Maia. I understand. I just want you to be careful.’

  She rose from the chair; Maia did, too.

  ‘Why are you talking like this, Aleksandra?’ she said. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘There’s no reason.’ Litivenko collected the clipboard with her notes from the table.

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  She swallowed, finding that her throat was suddenly dry. ‘I have to go now.’

  ‘You seem concerned about something. Is it something I’ve done?’

  ‘No, Maia. Nothing at all. You should rest. Try to get some sleep.’

  ‘When will I be sent out again?’

  ‘A week, maybe two.’

  ‘Will I see you tomorrow?’

  ‘Of course you will.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  She smiled shyly; the grin came awkwardly to her lips, as if it were something she was trying out for the first time. ‘I only have you to talk to, don’t I?’

  ‘You can talk to the other doctors.’

  ‘It isn’t the same.’

  Litivenko tried to swallow. ‘Get some rest,’ she said. ‘It’ll help finish your recovery. I’ll see you
later.’

  Maia nodded and watched as Litivenko made her way to the airlock. The doctor stooped to the retinal scanner and waited as the light played across her eye, leaving a tracer of blue that only went away when she blinked.

  Despite everything – despite all the evidence of Maia’s murderous potential – Litivenko still found herself harbouring tender thoughts towards her patient. Maternal thoughts. Maia was just a rat in a cage. She did as she was told. She followed orders without question, unthinkingly loyal. But, sometimes, when they were together and Litivenko could steer their conversations towards topics that were not connected to Maia’s physiology or the things that she was tasked to do, she saw flashes of vulnerability. Maia was just twenty-one years old. She had been in the programme from the moment of her conception. She had been taught that she did not own her body or her mind. She was chattel, practically stamped with a barcode. She had no independence. No life.

  That might all be true, but Litivenko doubted that even the programme that had moulded Maia into the weapon that she had become could completely erase the things that still made her human.

  She cast her mind back to the Snapchat conversation she’d had with William, her husband, when he had made the suggestion that they betray Daedalus and leave. He had explained that the encryption was unbreakable and that they were safe to talk, but seeing the words on the screen still felt reckless. It also made the idea real.

  William had worked hard to persuade her.

  She knew that he was right, but still she had said no.

  There were two reasons for her reluctance.

  The first?

  She was the only person in the facility who cared for Maia.

  The second?

  It was fear.

  Chapter Nine

  Litivenko took the elevator up to the third floor and emerged into the corridor with the offices that served the senior research staff. Her office was at the end of the corridor. One wall of the room was taken up with a picture window that offered a view of the countryside and, in the distance, the lights of Skopje. The skies were grey, veined with regular crackles of lightning. The storm had arrived first thing this morning and it showed no signs of moving on. Rain lashed down, smearing the glass, and rumbles of thunder boomed across the bleak hills. It was inauspicious weather, but, she thought, particularly appropriate for her mood. The course of events that she was about to instigate was serious and wrapped up in a sense of foreboding that she had found impossible to shift.

  She went over to the door and looked back into the corridor.

  It was quiet.

  Aleksandra closed the door, went back to her desk and woke up her computer. She had a potted plant on the desk and, hidden just beneath the soil, there was a small SanDisk memory stick in a plastic seal. Everyone at the facility was subjected to full searches when they arrived and left the campus. Random escalations could mean full strip searches, and no one was exempt. Aleksandra had smuggled the stick into the building by swallowing it and then waiting for it to pass through her system. With the waterproof seal, the stick had been undamaged. She took it out and laid it on the desk, tapping her finger against it as she contemplated, for one final time, the audacity and danger of what she and her husband were proposing to do.

  Aleksandra knew that she would be able to access the data. Their plan was ironclad. She had a Common Access Card, a smart card that was preloaded with the cryptographic keys and digital certificates that authenticated her identity and allowed her access to the data systems that she needed for her work. She had been assigned level three clearance, a significant level of responsibility, but not enough for her to access everything that she needed. But that was where William had come in. Her husband was a senior systems administrator at Daedalus’s data storage facility in Michigan and he had fabricated additional keys and certificates that would allow greater access. William had used his status to persuade forty other project employees to provide him with their login credentials. That allowed him to scale up Aleksandra’s reach and reduce the time she would need to gather the files they needed.

  She picked up the memory stick and tapped the end against the side of her computer. William had uploaded a set of macros that would automate the collection process and cloak the downloads from discovery.

  All she had to do was put the stick in the drive and tell it to get to work.

  She paused. That would be the point of no return. William was confident that their theft would not be noticed immediately. He had been thorough in his preparation, and the macros would be surgical in taking just the files that were absolutely necessary. The process of downloading the data would be quick and precise enough so as to avoid setting off any alarms. But Aleksandra and William were planning on disappearing, and as soon as their absence was noted, they knew that there would be a full security audit. They had seen it before when the procedure was activated before Christmas. A molecular biologist working on adjusting the abilities of mitochondria so that biochemical processes could be optimised had gone missing. The facility had been put into lockdown, and the resident asset – at that time it was Morpheus – had been dispatched to find the man.

  He had been discovered a day later, floating face down in the Vardar, his throat opened from ear to ear. The local police were underfunded, inept and corrupt. There had been no surprise when the death had been characterised as a robbery that had gone wrong. No one said anything, but they all knew: Morpheus had murdered the man and left him in plain sight as a warning to everyone else.

  Once you started work on the project, you couldn’t leave.

  The incident had disquieted Aleksandra. She had known the geneticist a little. His name was Franks. He had been a professor at Caltech before he came to work for Daedalus, a quiet man with a nervous laugh. They had shared dinner together in the canteen on more than one occasion.

  She had woken up several times with the image of him floating in the river still fresh in her dreams.

  She closed her eyes. There was no going back now. She aligned the memory stick with the port and pressed it home. She opened up the command menu and typed in the sequence of instructions that William had taught her. Information immediately sped across the screen, and the download bar began to fill.

  Aleksandra held her nerve, even though everything was telling her that she should take out the stick, discard it and forget the whole foolish enterprise. She bolstered her resolve with thoughts of William and the future together that they were planning.

  The computer buzzed: the download was complete. It had taken ten minutes. Aleksandra took the stick, wrapped it in a fresh plastic seal and put it in her mouth. It was as difficult to swallow as it had been the first time that she had tried, and she needed a glass of water to help aid the process along. She felt it scratch its way down her oesophagus until she couldn’t feel it any more.

  She switched off the computer, collected her coat and briefcase and left her office for the final time.

  Chapter Ten

  Aleksandra took the elevator down to the reception and waited in line to pass through security. There was a body scanner and then a team of guards who picked members of staff at random for frisking. She waited for her turn to pass through the scanner, watching the vigilance of the guards, and convinced herself that she was about to give herself away. These were not locals, they were imports from abroad with Manage Risk training. They were civil to the staff, but they were hardwired to be cautious, and Aleksandra had heard the stories of strip searches – and worse – for those who aroused their suspicions.

  She tried to look normal, but couldn’t decide what normality looked like. Impatience? Boredom? And concentrating on being normal just meant that she was sure that she was overplaying it. Her palms grew slick with perspiration, her gut was knotted with tension and her heart was beating quickly in her chest.

  Surely they could see how nervous she was?

  ‘Step forward, please, Doctor.’

  She did as she was told and passed thr
ough the scanner.

  It remained silent.

  No lights.

  No alarms.

  Nothing happened.

  She paused before the guard, still convinced that her guilt was plain on her face, but the man nodded his acknowledgement and then stepped aside. ‘Thank you, Doctor. We’ll see you tomorrow.’

  Aleksandra fought a moment of dizziness and continued on. There was an underground garage beneath the building. She took the elevator from the reception, stepped out and crossed the dark space to her Mercedes-Benz. She sat inside the gloomy cabin for five minutes, willing herself to be calm.

  The dizziness and nausea passed.

  She started the car and pulled out.

  The campus was just outside the hamlet of Petrovec, six miles to the southeast of Skopje and a five-minute drive to the airport. Aleksandra passed through Ognjanci and, as she left the tiny village, she saw the tail car. They had been following her for the past month. The agents drove a Cadillac Escalade with blacked-out windows. They didn’t try to be subtle. They wanted her to know that she was being followed.

  Aleksandra was many things, but she was no one’s fool. She had known that there were doubts about her dedication. It had started with a summons to attend a session with the campus shrink, where she had been asked questions about how she thought she was performing, whether she was enjoying her work and how she saw her role developing over the next few months. There had been a second session that had focused on whether she had any ethical concerns about their work, and then a third where she was politely informed that the director was concerned and had approved a programme of special measures that would include a much more thorough assessment.

  It had been the impetus that she and William had needed.