A Cage of Butterflies

by Brian Caswell

Greg got the message.

  “Why?” He mouthed the word soundlessly, a look of confusion ghosting across his face.

  Chris motioned him over to the desk-lamp, and pointed under the green glass shade. Nestled in one corner, almost invisible, was a tiny and disturbingly familiar black disc. Greg looked back at him, and raised his eyebrows. With the slightest movement of his head, Chris motioned him outside.

  “How long have they been bugging us?” It was a pointless question, but Chris answered anyway.

  “If I knew the answer to that, I’d’ve known the damned thing was there before I passed on a few choice comments on chrome-dome’s parentage to Gordon this morning. Mind you, I don’t regret it; people who listen in on private conversations deserve to hear the truth. About themselves, at least …”

  “That’s a fine one, coming from the electronic eavesdropper of the decade.” Greg’s attempt at humour was forced. Sitting on the ground under the gum-tree, they were assured of privacy, but the discovery had unnerved him a little. “How’d you find it?”

  “By accident. I blew a bulb, and I noticed it when I was screwing in the new one. Even then I almost missed seeing it. It’s not a bad hiding-place. I must remember it for future reference. D’you think it means they’re on to us?”

  “Who knows? It’s my guess they put it in to try and find out what effect the visits with the Babies are having – if any. We must be frustrating the hell out of them, with just enough meaningless tidbits to keep the visits going, but no real sign of a breakthrough. I don’t know what Larsen expected to get from a bug … I just hope he didn’t end up getting too much.”

  “Who knows? But I’d be willing to bet that there’s a whole lot more than one of them scattered around the complex – and that doesn’t include the ones I planted.”

  “Well, what do we do now? I suppose it means that we do most of our talking out here.”

  “Maybe. But I think I can work out a way to find the rest of them. If I can, we’ll still be able to use them to our advantage.”

  “How …” Greg began the question, but trailed off as Chris stood up.

  “Later … right now, I’ve got to think.” They were all used to it. Chris was thinking. Planning. It was no use talking to him now. He wouldn’t hear you.

  Greg watched him walk away towards the complex, then he stood and followed, murmuring to himself as he went. “I suppose we’d better warn the others.”

  Silently, he prayed that it was not too late.

  November 5, 1990

  “It just means we’ve got to be more careful about what we say. At least indoors. I don’t think he suspects anything involving the tank. Like Greg said, it probably only means he wants to find out how the visits are affecting us. It’s just his way of saying he cares.” Mikki’s wry smile matched the tone in her voice.

  “But isn’t he going to get a bit suspicious if we keep going outside to talk? I mean, he’s not as dumb as he looks …”

  “He couldn’t be!” Gordon cut in on Lesley’s query, as he often did, but she didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t mind much that Gordon did. In fact, she smiled at his comment.

  Chris looked a little too pleased with himself. He liked to bide his time, to wait for the right moment, and he had obviously decided that this was it.

  “It’s not a problem. Especially as we will be able to pinpoint exactly where all the bugs are. Actually, he’s probably helped us. We can feed him any crap we want to, and provided we can make it sound convincing, he’ll never even guess he’s being had.”

  Mikki frowned. “What did you mean, ‘pin-point exactly where the bugs are?’ Have you been holding out on us?”

  Chris just shook his head, smiled, and with a theatrical flourish produced from his pocket a small black box, that looked for all the world like a TV remote-control.

  “What is it?” Katie obligingly supplied the inevitable question.

  “It’s a bug-detector. I designed it last night.”

  “A bug-detector?” Lesley was less patient than the others with Chris’s theatrics, but he didn’t seem to notice her tone. He was in exposition mode.

  “Actually, it’s a multi-band radio frequency detector. Most listening devices operate on a reasonably narrow frequency band – especially the type Larsen put in my room. I just jury-rigged a simple multiband receiver with a reasonably sensitive range-control adjustment, and wired it up to activate a simple LED – that red light in the centre of the box.” He pointed to the gadget in his hand.

  Lesley cut in impatiently. “The end result of which is?”

  “The end result of which is thatwhen I point this thing in the direction of an operational listening device – a ‘bug’ – it detects it. Simple as that. The aerial is mono-directional, and has a very limited range, about three metres, so if I do a sweep from the centre of any room, it should only take a few seconds to pin-point the location of any unwanted ears.”

  “Very impressive, but can we be sure it will pick up every one of them? It’d only take missing one to stuff us completely.” Mikki tried not to sound sceptical, but the situation was affecting her normally optimistic outlook.

  Chris just smiled. “Trust me.”

  And the way he said it, she found that she did.

  November 7, 1990

  …And lost inside the Emptiness

  Of crying out in Silence to myself,

  I dreamed of Sharing …

  Being part of Someone-part-of-Me,

  And on that hope I leaned

  And waited for the Waiting-time to end.

  …And lost inside the Emptiness

  Of measuring Emotions by the Tears

  That never wet the Eye,

  I dreamed of Touching …

  Mind-on-mind with Someone-touching Me,

  And on that hope I dwelt

  And waited for the Waiting-time to end.

  … And then inside the Emptiness

  I Touched, and Shared with Someone-like-Myself,

  And in the Sharing …

  Being, Living, learned to Love,

  And in that Moment, smiled

  And bade the endless Waiting-time goodbye.

  “Oh Katie, it’s beautiful.” Susan held the page gently, running her fingers slowly over the words of the poem.

  “Yes, I thought so.” Katie smiled softly as she turned her face and their eyes met for a moment.

  “When did you …?”

  “Me?” As understanding dawned, the young girl’s smile widened to a grin. “Oh, I didn’t write it. I’m just the secretary. Pep wanted us to have it. ‘To understand’, she said. I guess she didn’t feel right asking Larsen for a typewriter. Not in his present state of mind. The punctuation’s mine, though. None of the Babies is very good at that.”

  “I see …” Susan murmured the words distractedly, but her eyes were scanning the lines again.

  And her heart was breaking.

  November 10, 1990. 11.30pm

  Katie screamed.

  “What is it?” By the time Mikki had thrown off the covers and the shock of awakening, turned on the reading-light and made her way across to the young girl’s bed, Katie was sitting up and pointing at the window. “Kate, what’s the matter?”

  “He was watching us. Through the window. Staring at us like …” She trailed off, leaving an unspoken threat hanging in the air.

  “Who? Who was watching us?” Mikki’s voice was nervous now.

  “The man. He …”

  “Which man? Come on, Kate, try to calm down. What did you see?”

  “I’ve never seen him before. He doesn’t live here. He was dark and he was staring in through the window. Then I screamed and he disappeared.”

  “Are you sure you weren’t just dreaming?” Greg’s question came from the doorway. Awakened by the disturbance, he had arrived to investigate “in true hero style”, as Lesley was heard to remark later in the day.

  “I wasn’t dreaming. He was really there. I saw him in the light of the
moon. Staring.”

  By now, the others had arrived, yawning and wiping the sleep from their eyes. Gordon, practical as ever, made the obvious suggestion.

  “Well, we’d better check things out, hadn’t we? We can’t have strangers spying on our girls, can we?” He didn’t sound very convinced about the whole thing, but they took him up on his suggestion and moved outside.

  At the door, they ran into Larsen with MacIntyre in tow.

  “What’s going on here?”

  In a few seconds, the whole situation had been outlined to him; though his swift appearance on the scene of the disturbance suggested to the more cynical among them that he already knew, via his “secret” ears, as much about what had happened as they did.

  A quick search revealed no skulking peeping-Toms; nothing more sinister than a few moon shadows. Then Chris, kneeling detective-style outside the window of the girls’ room, discovered something which made him whistle slightly.

  The others gathered around, and in the light of four or five torch beams, they examined, pressed into the soft soil of the narrow garden-bed, a perfect pair of large and distinctive boot-prints.

  XXIX

  GREG’S STORY

  They found the hole the next morning, just behind a clump of trees at the western end of the grounds. Someone had taken a pair of bolt-cutters or heavy-duty tin-snips to the mesh of the fence, and cut out a neat, metre-square section, from ground level up; just a comfortable size to crawl through – and back. If they didn’t know someone had been inside, they’d probably never even have found the hole, it was so out of the way. The position was well chosen. Whoever had done it had “cased the joint” pretty carefully.

  That was what I told MacIntyre when I was talking to him the next day.

  “What do you think they’d go to all that trouble for?” I asked him. I loved to put him on a spot; to ask him questions I knew he couldn’t possibly answer and watch his face.

  Poor jerk. I suppose in his own way he was quite smart. I gather he was a bit of a whiz-kid himself in his early days at Uni. Before he channelled himself.

  Channelling happens quite often, you know, to people who don’t read. Anything outside their own area of obsession, that is. That was the excuse I used to give my Maths tutor when he’d rouse on me for reading books when I should have been studying the finer points of advanced calculus. I didn’t want to hurt the poor guy’s feelings by telling him that his passion, the sole reason for his existence on this planet, bored me stupid; I was twelve years old at the time, and still had moments when I tried to avoid hurting people’s feelings.

  It doesn’t worry me so much any more. Especially not with people like Big Mac. Anyone who’d let Larsen lead him around by the nose like some kind of pet bear couldn’t have enough self-respect – or self-awareness – to have his feelings hurt.

  Anyway, I kept pressing him, trying to get him to slip up and reveal something that Larsen didn’t want us to know – even though we probably already did. Partly, it was for fun, just to see him squirm, but mostly I just wanted to drop him in the crap with his boss. If he’d said anything “incriminating”, I’d probably have found a way to mention it casually to Larsen, accidentally letting him know where I’d learned it. Then sit back and wait for the fireworks.

  It was disgustingly childish behaviour, I know, but I make no apologies. I didn’t like the bastard – almost as much as I didn’t like his damned boss. And besides, it served our purposes to keep them at each other’s throats as much as possible.

  I’ll say this for him, he side-stepped the curly questions quite well. But I could tell he was worried about the hole in the fence and what it might mean.

  And I suppose, given the nature of Larsen’s “business” and the kinds of people he was doing business with, he had every reason to be worried.

  After all, the complex wasn’t exactly designed to be high-security. The cyclone fencing around the perimeter was more cosmetic than functional, unless you wanted to keep out the occasional wallaby, or a wombat that wasn’t in the mood for digging. It certainly wouldn’t keep out the sort of person who might be interested in finding out what was going on inside the main buildings.

  As the previous night’s events had proved.

  Even without the break-in, we had Larsen even more confused than ever. Knowing the location of all his “devices” was a godsend.

  Lesley was the best at it, but even Katie got in on the act. We’d talk “secretly” with each other about the feelings and “flashes” that we got whenever we were in the room with the Babies. Flashes that made absolutely no sense, but which served to send Larsen and his little clones running off down blind alleys, wasting valuable time and resources – while we got our secret plans arranged.

  There was an awful lot to consider. It was like a giant game of chess, with ourselves as the pieces … The finer details have never been my strong point. In chess or in life. I’m more an … inspiration player. I trust my instincts. But we needed a few more steady heads to add balance. In the end, to succeed, any strategy relies on a thousand tiny but important details far more than it does on inspiration. That’s why I rarely beat Mikki at chess. And that’s why I was so terrified that something would go wrong.

  And the introduction at this late stage of a new player and a new group of pieces only made the game that much more complex, and gave us more details that could go wrong.

  Who had it been?

  I could sympathise with Larsen’s dilemma. Obviously, nobody from inside the complex would have had any logical reason to cut their way in. That left outsiders. And he only had fourteen million or so of those to choose from … not counting overseas interests; which, given the possible consequences of his research, was a real consideration.

  And how far would they go?

  He was on the phone to Brady early the next morning, requesting extra security – and receiving a predictably abrupt refusal. I think the little gnome was regretting the fact that he’d ever got involved with the whole project in the first place.

  Unless … and here was a thought … unless it was Brady himself who had organised the break-in. Perhaps he didn’t trust Larsen to reveal everything he had learned. Anyone who had the nerve – or the ego – to try to blackmail a multinational corporation, might just have the nerve – or the stupidity – to try to double-cross a multinational corporation. Maybe Brady was scared that Larsen was selling out to the opposition. I wondered if Larsen had considered that possibility. If he had, it was just another brick added to his worry load.

  It was hard not to feel sorry for the poor slob. Well, not too hard …

  * *

  Of course, there were no “outsiders” really. Unless you consider Erik an outsider – which depends a lot on your point of view.

  He’d cut the hole in the fence early on Saturday evening, while everyone else was having dinner, then he’d taken a pair of size twelve hiking boots, which he’d picked up in a disposal store in Nowra, and pressed them into the soft soil outside the girls’ window, before sending them on a one-way trip to the municipal tip.

  It was risky, but it was a calculated risk. Without the mysterious “outside threat”, there would be too much later that we’d never be able to explain.

  So the “dark man” became the scapegoat for anything mysterious that happened in the whole complex from then on. He’d cut holes in fences, break into storerooms. Once he even tried to use a crowbar on the door of the Babies’ building. That was Gordon’s idea. It scared the crap out of Larsen, who was inside the building at the time. He noticed the damage when he was leaving and was on the verge of calling the police before he thought better of it.

  After that, we decided to give the mysterious intruder a short holiday. He’d established his presence, and we didn’t want him to outlive his usefulness before he was ready for his ultimate act of terrorism.

  Larsen had bitten his fingernails down to the elbows, and would probably have started on his toe-nails if he could have re
ached them. He was that nervous. With Brady on the one hand, and now this new threat, he was really stuck between a rock and a hard place. And he wasn’t enjoying it one little bit.

  But I sure was.

  Then, to top it all off, two days later – at eleven-thirty in the evening, coincidentally – he received a phone call from the boatyard.

  Apart from his work, Larsen had only one passion, and that was his boat. A beautiful ten-metre half-cabin job, with twin inboards and an ocean-going hull. He spent whatever free time he allowed himself, which hadn’t been too much lately, messing about on the Lisa-Marie.

  She was named after the daughter he rarely saw, who had left at the age of ten to live with her mother, when the poor woman finally grew tired of playing second-fiddle to conference papers and research grants. Lisa-Marie was in her late twenties now, and the ex-Mrs Larsen was now very ex. The father-daughter bond had always been rather strained and there wasn’t much there – at least not on her side. It crossed my mind that there was something deeply psychological in his choice of a name for the vessel.

  Anyway, the guy from the boatyard phoned to report that a dark figure had been seen jumping down from the Lisa-Marie and running away, and would the Doctor care to take the trip down to Shoalhaven to check that everything was all right? No, he hadn’t seen the incident personally, it had been reported by a passer-by, who thought the guy looked a little suspicious.

  Larsen didn’t think to inquire, but if he had, he would have discovered that the security-conscious “passer-by” bore an uncanny resemblance to Susan, who just happened to be “visiting friends” in Sydney at the time.

  Of course, when Larsen arrived at the boatyard, the Lisa-Marie was fine, except for the distinctive smell of petrol, leaking from a slightly damaged fuel-line.

  “I’d get that looked at,” the guy at the boatyard told him. “Things like that can cause terrible accidents. There’s nothing quite as bad as a fire on a boat.”

  And the seed was sown …

  XXX

  Breaking Point