by Blake Banner
I turned toward the end of the assembly line, where more boxes were being loaded onto pallets. I crossed the floor and as I approached I saw that what were being churned out there were small, white plastic bottles, about three inches high and two inches across. They were also labeled HEALTHFIX™. They were being packed into small, blue boxes of twelve, and these in turn were going into the big, cardboard boxes.
A health supplement. A dietary health supplement.
I picked up one of the bottles to inspect it and a voice bellowed behind me, “Hey! Who the fuck are you?”
Twelve
I grew up in a very privileged family near Boston and attended the best private schools. So I usually speak with a generic east coast accent. But my mother was an English aristocrat and I spent ten years in an elite British regiment, so it is just as easy for me to switch to what the Brits call cut glass English. For some reason that was what I did right then, and it worked.
I looked at him like a dog had just left him on the sidewalk and I had accidentally stepped in him, and said, “Would you care to explain this to me?”
I pointed to the blue box that was now a bottle short, as I slipped the bottle into my lab coat. He didn’t expect my reaction and he didn’t expect my accent. He hesitated. I snapped, “I am waiting!” Before he could answer I said, “What is your name?”
Stupidity always responds to authority. His reaction was automatic. “Ferguson, sir, but…”
“Have you any idea of how lax security is on this plant?” I pointed at him. “I can tell you that London will not be impressed!”
He blanched. He hadn’t known that London needed to be impressed. But now that he did, he was worried. He was out of his depth and beginning to panic. I sighed. I was clearly losing patience. “I can’t waste time on your incompetence! Where is your supervisor?”
“In the… he’s… but you…”
“Take me to him immediately!”
He looked relived and nodded. “Yes, this way.”
He walked quickly, like a man who is trying to get away from a responsibility, and doesn’t know he is hurrying into the arms of his executioner. We were approaching a prefab office against one wall. Through the window I could see a man at a desk. He was looking down, either at a screen or at some papers. There was nobody else with him. The whole place seemed to be run with a minimum of personnel. What military personnel there was was all around the perimeter, keeping people out. But on the inside there was practically nobody. Both facts made sense.
My guide looked at me nervously as we approached the door.
“I will need to tell Mr. Price your name…”
I snapped, “Epsilon!” and he shut up.
Ferguson knocked on the door. A lazy voice said, “Come in,” without looking up and we stepped through into the office. Ferguson opened his mouth to speak and I shot him through the vertebra at the base of his skull. He never even knew that he’d been killed. He is probably still wandering around the plant, wondering why nobody will talk to him.
Mr. Price frowned and looked up when he heard Ferguson hit the floor. By that time I was sitting on the corner of his desk with the Sig on my lap pointed at his crotch. A direct threat to a man’s crotch will tend to make him cooperative. He turned very pale and asked me, “Who are you? What do you want?”
I can be a wiseass sometimes, so I did my best imitation of Colin Firth and said, “Now is not the time for existential questions, Mr. Price. Now is the time for you to give me your shipping ledger.”
“What?”
I smiled and glanced over at Ferguson. I looked back into Price’s eyes and let the smile slip. “Don’t try to understand, Mr. Price. Just do as I tell you and you might leave this place without exploring the existential mysteries in depth. Am I being too abstruse for you, Mr. Price? Would you like me to be more direct?”
“No!” He pointed at a shelf behind me. “I have to get it…”
I nodded and he stood carefully and walked to the shelf. “What period?”
I shrugged. “The most recent. Put it on the desk.”
He returned with a large, black lever arch file and placed it in front of me. I said, “Sit. Explain.”
He was sweating and his hands were shaking. He opened the file and started to talk.
“This covers the period from last January to the present. Here it lists all the shipments out of the plant, here are their destinations, quantities, and at the back, here, are the manifests for each shipment.”
“How much does Maddox pay you to keep quiet about this stuff?”
He swallowed hard, but his eyes had turned shifty. “Mr. Maddox is a very generous employer. Are you a cop?”
I raised an eyebrow. “What if I am?”
“You talk funny.”
“I’m CIA.”
He spoke in a rush, like verbal diarrhea, “I’ll turn state’s evidence. I’ll tell you everything you need to know. Cut me a deal and I’ll give you the whole lot.”
I shot him between the eyes. Now he could explain to Ferguson what had happened. I picked up the ledger and walked out. I needed to find out what these damned tablets were, and I had a hunch I would get that information in the huts. But I also had a hunch I was running out of time. Three bodies so far, and sooner or later somebody was going to find one of them.
I crossed the hall again and went back through the small office. The guy at the computer was still there. He stretched and yawned and said something to me and laughed. I smiled grimly and said, “You got that right.” And carried on through.
I was back in the unloading area where the conveyor belt was. My truck was gone and a new one had taken its place. I could see the driver still in the cab, reading a magazine. I walked purposefully toward the entrance holding the ledger under my arm like I was engaged in some important job. As I passed through the doors, I glanced under the conveyor belt, saw that my bag was still there and wondered if I would soon need it. Something told me I would.
The first of the green huts was about fifty yards from the hangar. I could see the wire fence, and beyond it, the armed guards patrolling it with dogs—Rottweilers and Alsatians. I glanced around. There were four or five people, mostly in blue coveralls, and they were all doing their own thing. They didn’t seem to be aware of me. I walked, gazing down like I was working out some knotty problem involved in making pills out of sunflowers, and came eventually to the first of the huts. The door was open, so I stepped inside.
I was in a lab. It was like a cross between a lab and a greenhouse. There were a lot of electronic machines that to my uneducated eye looked like mass spectrometers, powerful microscopes and DNA sequencers. There were others which I could not identify. There was a long table down the center of the room that held racks of test tubes and the kind of toys Professor Frankenstein might have got excited about. Lying on this table were a number of sunflowers and glass jars of varying sizes. I drew closer to have a look. I wasn’t surprised to see that the jars mostly contained the small, golden bugs. Some were dead, others were alive.
I strolled along a few steps and a man entered from the far end, where the lab joined at right angles with another hut. He was tall and stooping, with heavy glasses. And he was wearing a lab coat, like mine. He looked a little surprised to see me. I smiled at him and continued looking at the things on the bench. He said, “Weitz, I don’t think I know you.”
“Zwally, I’m visiting. How’s it going?”
He shrugged and spread his hands. “We’re going to have to wait for the field results before we can make any kind of determination. For now it looks hopeful and the first trials seem to indicate a drop in activity in the prefrontal cortex. But as I say, until we get the results from the field tests it is impossible to be more definite.” He paused. “Don’t mind me asking, but are you a scientist or are you from administration? Normally I am informed…”
I took a few steps closer and sighed like that wasn’t an easy question to answer. “My background is in science, Weitz,
and I confess that is where my interest lies. But I was roped into administration. So they have me paying visits to make sure things are staying on track, on budget and on time.” He grunted and I sighed again. “But personally I don’t think science works like that. Am I right?”
“You’re not wrong.” He had sat at a microscope and was adjusting the lens as he peered into it. He had clearly lost interest in me. My mind was racing. A drop in the activity of the prefrontal cortex was ringing bells in my memory. I said, “Essentially we are talking about an action not dissimilar to sodium thiopental.”
He laughed without humor, as though I had been absurdly simplistic.
“At its very simplest, you could say so, but the potential here goes far, far beyond sodium thiopental. This is like the ion drive to the combustion engine.”
I leaned against the table and shrugged. “Sure, but I mean, in principle, it is basically the same thing, right?”
He looked up from the microscope and turned to face me, like I was getting on his nerves.
“In that it interferes with the neural activity in the prefrontal cortex, yes. But it goes so far beyond that. We are talking about inhibiting neural networks that are engaged in subjective, moral thought. Have you any idea what that means?” He laughed in a way that said I was stupid. “We are stimulating networks that recognize and obey authority. Have you any conception of what that means - for society?” He shook his head. “No, my dear Zwally. This goes very far beyond sodium thiopental.”
He turned back to his microscope. I nodded. “Sure, of course, I see that.” I opened the ledger and said, “Remind me now, you head up…”
He stopped what he was doing and stared down at his bench. I knew I had overplayed my hand and started working out what my strategy was going to be. He turned to face me and narrowed his eyes. “I lead the research here, Zwally, and you would know that if you were visiting from Admin.”
“Of course I would, if I were visiting from Admin…”
“So who the hell are you?”
The voice came from behind me and I knew I was seriously fucked.
“His name is Lacklan Walker, Dr Weitz, and he is a very dangerous man. Make one move, Walker, and you will be shot dead where you stand. Now put your hands in the air and turn to face me.”
I put the ledger on the lower shelf of the bench, raised my hands and turned to face Maddox. He wasn’t taking any chances. He was holding a semi-automatic and he had six armed guards with him, all pointing assault rifles at me. He snapped, “Cuff him! Take him to the truck depot.”
They all six advanced on me. One of them yanked my arms behind my back and slapped a pair of cuffs on me. When he was done, the one in front of me smacked me in the jaw with the butt of his rifle and put my lights out.
Thirteen
I woke up with the feeling that somebody had stuck a steel girder in my skull and was jumping up and down on it for fun. There were various other pains too, like dull blades being threaded through my chest. I opened my eyes and slowly the stabbing pains in my chest began to make sense. I was hanging by my wrists and my lungs were beginning to go into spasm. I groped with my feet to find something to stand on, but there was nothing.
I raised my eyes. My wrists had been duct-taped together and slipped over an iron hook that was suspended by a chain from a steel girder. I looked around. I was in a large garage-cum-depot. There was a truck over to one side with the hood up. Just beyond it there was a small office. On my left, there was a stack of fuel drums by the entrance. And standing in the entrance were three silhouettes smoking. One of them was Maddox. Another I didn’t know—a guy in a suit with black shades. The third was his driver. That wasn’t good news.
Duct tape is a really useful tool for quickly and effectively immobilizing somebody. But it has one drawback. If you can nick it in just the right place, it will rip very easily. Trouble was, the way I was hanging, it was going to be almost impossible for me to do that, because it was holding all my weight, and I could barely move my hands.
I saw Maddox turn and look at me. He said something to the other two and they threw down their cigarettes and crossed the floor toward me. Their steps and their voices had a strange, metallic echo in the dark, cavernous building. Maddox spoke first.
“I’m going to make this simple, Walker. I made you an offer and you turned me down. Now I am going to kill you. The choice you have is to die quickly and painlessly, or die slowly and in pain. Tell me what I want to know and I will put a bullet in the back of your head, give me trouble and I will have you sobbing and begging for your mommy.”
I smiled. He didn’t know my mother. “How about if I tell you more than you want to know?”
He frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“You’re seeing the small picture, Maddox. You’re thinking about Marni and her father, you’re not thinking about the people who might have got behind them in the last twenty years; the people who might have got behind Marni while she was at Harvard.”
He glanced at the guy in the suit and confirmed my suspicion. I directed my words to him now.
“Think about it. You think an operative of my class is cheap? My father was fond of Marni, but you think a son of a bitch like him would put himself at risk to help her? You think you were the only people who noticed her research? You think nobody else noticed she was following in her father’s footsteps?”
Maddox was squinting at my face. “What are you saying?”
“Uh-uh. I want a third option. I can be damn useful to you, Maddox. You haven’t got a single man who is up to my standard.”
The guy in the shades smirked. “Said the guy hanging from the meat hook.”
“I ain’t dead yet, pal, which is more than can be said for seven of your men. And I haven’t got started yet.”
“Cut the crap. Where is the girl?”
“Give me a third option and I’ll tell you.”
Maddox shook his head. “You are in no position to negotiate.” He turned to his driver. “Don’t kill him. We’ll drag this out till Christmas if we have to.” He turned back to me. “We’ll start with beatings. After that we’ll start removing things.” To his driver he said, “Call me the instant he offers to speak, understand?”
“Sure thing, Mr. Maddox.”
The guy was as strong as he was stupid, and he was really very stupid. He started by pounding my ribs and my stomach, which made me vomit. That is surprisingly hard to do when you are suspended by your wrists. It is also hard to tense against the blows when you are strung up like that. All I could do was take it, and ride the pain. After ten or twelve blows, when I was lingering between nausea and unconsciousness, he went behind me and delivered two shattering punches just below my shoulder blades. The pain was indescribable. My lungs went into spasm and because of the position I was in I could not breathe. I felt myself on the edge of panic and my breath rasped in my throat as I kicked with my feet and tried to haul myself up to relieve my lungs.
The son of a bitch laughed. He must have realized I was approaching cardiac arrest because he took hold of my legs in a kind of bear hug and raised me enough to let air into my lungs. Then he dropped me, sending shards of pain piercing through my lungs again. As I gasped he slapped my face with his open hand, enough to hurt but not enough to stun or numb me. I began to wonder how long I could hold out.
He gave me a few more back-handers, then turned and walked away. After five minutes he came back with a piece of wood about five feet long, two inches thick. Then he settled down to beating me with it on my arms and on my legs. I have no idea how long it went on. It may have been half an hour, it may have been an hour. In the end I had the strange experience of being completely numb in a world of pain. I could hear myself groaning, but I didn’t realize it was me.
Somewhere in the fog of agony I heard Maddox’s voice telling his driver to stop. “Is he alive? I told you not to kill him!”
“I owed him, Mr. Maddox…”
“You damn fool! Ge
t him down! If he’s dead…”
I felt myself being lifted down and laid on the floor. Maddox knelt and slapped my face. “Bring some water.”
I was in pain. But the gorilla’s beating had been more skillful than Maddox realized. I was nowhere near death. The ape had done exactly what his boss had told him to do, but he was too stupid to know how to tell him. I acted up, moaning like I was delirious and slipping into coma. It would at least give me a chance to recover.
I felt myself drifting, heard a shambling of feet as though from another room, or another world, and then the shock of cold water made me gasp and choke. I was wide awake now, but weak and still in a lot of pain. I rolled my eyes and moaned like I was half dead. Maddox said, “Give him a couple of hours, then we’ll start cutting bits off.” Then his voice grew louder. “You’d better have recovered by then, Walker. Being able to talk is the only thing standing between you and weeks of excruciating pain. Think about that.” To the Ape Man he said, “Keep an eye on him. I’ll send someone to relieve you in an hour. And for fuck’s sake, don’t do any more to him.”
I gave them fifteen seconds, then opened my eyes. Maddox was gone and so was the guy in the suit. The Ape Man was over by the door, sitting on a drum of diesel, smoking a cigarette. I gave myself another thirty seconds to recover my strength and looked around me for something sharp. About five feet from my head there was a dirty steel trolley. I could see several tools poking out from the top shelf, but I didn’t want to risk standing up in the state I was in. On the lower shelf I could see a screwdriver. I quietly reached out with my arms, but I couldn’t quite make it. I braced my feet and pushed. I slid a foot. I looked at Ape Man. He was examining the tip of his cigarette, like he was trying to remember how it got there.