The Increment

by Chris Ryan

  'And you are?'

  Matt hesitated, running the risk-and-rewards calculations through his head. Tell this man who they were and they might be discovered. Lie to him, and they could lose his trust. 'My name is Matt Browning,' he replied. 'This is Eleanor Blackman. We're trying to find some information about a drug that was tested at the Farm, about five years ago.' He paused, looking at Caldwell intently. 'It might save some lives.'

  Caldwell laughed: a dry, hollow laugh rooted in anger, not amusement. 'The Farm?'

  'What did you do there, Mr Caldwell?' asked Eleanor.

  Her voice was gentle, Matt noticed: she was probing him, trying to put him at his ease, open him up.

  'Me? Just a lab assistant, nothing special. I used to deliver the drugs that were being tested, then monitor the results. That's what it was mostly about. Checking for side effects.'

  'There was a drug called XP22,' said Matt. 'About five years ago. It would have been tested on soldiers. Were you involved with that?'

  Caldwell sighed. A look of sadness drifted across his face, as if some memories he thought long buried had suddenly been brought back to life. 'XP22?' he said. 'You know about that?' He looked at Matt more closely, suddenly afraid. 'You didn't take it, did you?'

  Matt shook his head. 'But a friend of mine did. He died.'

  Caldwell bent down. With his gloved right hand, he started gripping the stem of a rose, clipping it with his shears. 'Quite a few men did.'

  'How many men had the drug tested on them?' asked Eleanor.

  'About fifty,' said Caldwell, turning to look at her. 'All soldiers, all serving. They were brought in, given the drug, then kept under observation for the next week. Of course, there are fewer than that now,' said Caldwell. He clipped the stem of another rose, holding the bright red flower in his hand. 'There were side effects. Five of them became uncontrollable. Monsters. They had to be transferred.'

  'Transferred?' said Eleanor, puzzled. 'Where?'

  Caldwell laughed: that dry, laugh again. 'That was just the term we used. The Farm was full of euphemisms. When we said they were transferred, what we meant was they were taken away.' He paused. 'And we never heard what happened to them.'

  'Shot?' said Matt.

  Caldwell shrugged. 'That's all I know about XP22,' he said. 'It was a nasty drug, it should never have been used. Nobody should ever have touched it.'

  'There may be other side effects, longer term,' said Eleanor. 'We need to find out who those other men were.'

  Caldwell shook his head. 'Then you are on your own,' he replied. 'I never knew the names. The men who came into the Farm didn't have any. They just had numbers.'

  'The names,' said Eleanor, her tone more insistent now. 'We have to have the names. How else can we help these men?'

  Matt could see a look of fear drifting across Caldwell's face, like a small, dark cloud moving across the face of the sun, blocking out all the light. His expression darkened, and his lips started to tremble. 'I've said enough. It's dangerous.'

  'The names,' repeated Eleanor.

  'No,' said Caldwell, his tone rising. 'I told you, I've said enough.'

  He turned, starting to walk back in the direction of the house.

  'We've got a sample from one of the dead men,' Eleanor called after him. 'Will you test it for us?'

  'Don't be ridiculous,' said Caldwell. 'I don't have any equipment here.'

  In the distance, Matt could see a police car advancing along the brow of the hill. Eleanor was following Caldwell, reaching out to tug on his sleeve.

  'We have to go,' Matt barked suddenly.

  Eleanor looked round, and saw the determination in Matt's eyes. He was already walking back to the car. 'Quickly,' he shouted. Eleanor followed him, her head bowed down, her expression concentrated.

  Behind him, Matt was aware of Caldwell turning round as well, walking more quickly, following Matt and Eleanor towards the car.

  'There's only one thing I can tell you. The money,' he said. 'Check out the money.'

  Matt turned around. 'The money?'

  Caldwell stood close to them, his gardening shears still held in his hands. 'The key thing about XP22 was . . . the way it was being paid for.'

  Matt looked towards the hill. There were a dozen questions he still wanted to ask. But the police car was less than half a mile away.

  The woman was walking by herself. Her head was held up high, looking into the sky. She was wearing a short black skirt, and a black T-shirt: her legs and arms were bare, and her skin had tanned a deep rich brown in the fierce summer sun.

  'That's her,' said Matram, pointing from the front seat of his Lexus.

  'In the black T-shirt?' said Trench.

  Matram nodded. 'Let's wait and see where she goes,' he said. 'Follow her home, and take her there.'

  It had not been hard to track Gill down. Abbott had told Matram all about her. Matt's childhood sweetheart, his fiancée, they had split up when he got sent on the Ukraine mission. That didn't matter. If anyone was likely to know where Matt was, it was her. A playschool teacher, thought Matram with a smirk. She might be able to control a rowdy toddler, but I bet she can't control us.

  There had been no sign of her at the Last Trumpet. Through the Firm, Abbott asked the local police to check her out. There had been no sign of her in Marbella at all. She had vanished into thin air. But that was not the same as hiding. They had run a credit-card check on her, and she had used her ATM card two days ago. At the Barclays Bank on Putney High Street. And she'd used her mobile phone yesterday: the call transmitted through a base station based on the Upper Richmond Road. That was the key. She was staying somewhere in the Putney area.

  Easy, realised Matram. She'd need money again soon: only twenty pounds had been withdrawn last time. She was one of those people who thought they spent less if they didn't take out much cash. If they waited at the bank, they'd find her soon enough.

  And when they did, she would lead them to Matt. They would torture the information out of her. And if she didn't, well, Browning would fly to her corpse, the same way a vulture flies to a fresh piece of carrion.

  He pulled the Lexus away from the kerb, nudging it slowly down the street. She'd already stopped at Starbucks for a coffee, and picked up a newspaper. Now she was walking about thirty yards ahead of him. She turned at the top of the road, strolling down the Upper Richmond Road, then took a left on to an avenue filled with big, suburban houses. She stopped at Number Twelve, looking around. Matram pulled the Lexus to a halt outside the house.

  Gill turned the key in the latch.

  'OK,' barked Matram. 'Take her. Now.'

  Ivan, Eleanor and Matt were standing in the kitchen of the safe house. They had switched to another building, also one of the old IRA safe houses, but this one in Tooting: Ivan insisted they had to keep moving to maximise their chances of staying alive.

  Every other opportunity to test the brain tissue had been blocked. 'If we can't do the test,' said Ivan 'we have to think harder. There's something missing about this story. Something we don't know.'

  'What?' demanded Eleanor.

  'Think about it,' said Ivan. 'The Increment is slowly killing the men who took the drug. One by one. But if this is really a MOD operation, then you wouldn't do it like that. You get all the guys picked up on the same day, get them sectioned, then deal with them in your own good time.'

  'What are you saying?' said Matt.

  Ivan shrugged. 'Just that we don't have all the answers yet.'

  'Perhaps it is to do with the money?' jumped in Eleanor. 'Caldwell said there was something strange about the way XP22 was paid for.'

  Ivan smiled. 'Then that's what you need to find out.'

  Matt checked the van, scrutinising every inch of the vehicle, making sure nothing could be left to chance. It was a blue Ford Transit, with E.H. STEVENS, CLEANING SERVICES, stencilled on to its side in thick yellow lettering.

  'You wait here,' he whispered to Eleanor. 'I'll only be a few minutes.'

&n
bsp; He stepped out of the Escort, checked the road, then walked quickly towards the parked van. It was early evening, and the roads around west London were already clogged with traffic. He skipped past a pair of courier bikers, then walked casually along the street. One driver was sitting in the front cab of the van; a black man in his mid-thirties, dressed in blue overalls, sipping a bottle of Orangina. Alone. The radio was playing, tuned into Talksport. Matt could hear the presenters discussing the heatwave: the latest prediction was for it to last right through until September, and two more deaths from heatstroke had been reported. 'Sweltering,' jabbered the presenter. 'I don't think we can take much more.'

  Matt checked the pavement. Empty. He doubled back, climbing up into the passenger side of the van. 'Hey.'

  The driver looked round, his face a mixture of confusion and surprise as he saw Matt's fist hammering towards him. The punch landed just on the side of his cheek, twisting his head round. The bottle went flying from his hand, crashing against the window, then falling to the floor. 'Fuck,' he shouted. 'Fuck.'

  The second blow landed hard on the back of his neck. The flesh was soft, the muscles loose and out of shape, Matt noted, as his fist pushed hard into the nerves. The driver's head fell forward, splitting against the steering wheel. 'Sorry, pal,' muttered Matt as he checked that he had lost consciousness. 'You were the wrong man in the wrong place.'

  Taking advantage of the few seconds during which he had lost consciousness Matt bundled the driver over the seat, into the back of the van. He tied some rope around his neck, then slotted a gag into his mouth.

  Reaching across the dashboard, Matt grabbed the keys. 'Do you think people are less civil to one another in this unbearable heat?' the Talksport presenter was saying. 'Call and tell us what you think.' Matt walked to the back of the van. Opening it up, there were uniforms, plus buckets, clothes and detergents. Matt took two uniforms, two buckets and a mop, then ran back across the road.

  'OK,' he said, climbing back into the Escort. 'We're all set.'

  The Tocah building loomed out of the street like a tree in a desert. Matt pulled the Escort up into a parking space, and changed into his overalls. At his side, Eleanor did the same. As she peeled down her trousers to climb into the cleaning gear, Matt couldn't help from noticing the pale softness of her skin, and the tapered perfection with which her thighs melted into her hips.

  'You look nice,' he said, looking at her, grinning.

  'I scrub up good,' Eleanor replied, waving her mop at him.

  They walked steadily across the road. Most of the workers were streaming out of the building, heading towards the tube and the bus stops. The women were dabbing their foreheads as they moved from the air-conditioned building to the sultry early-evening heat; the men were taking off their ties and jackets as they prepared for the journey home on hot, crowded, unreliable trains.

  'Ready?' said Matt, looking towards Eleanor.

  'Frightened,' she replied.

  'It's normal to be afraid,' answered Matt. 'The trick is to control it, confront it, not succumb to it.'

  'You've learnt some psychology.'

  They stepped away from the main entrance, walking around the side of the building. Cleaners were the underclass of corporate life, Matt noted. Nobody looked at them, nobody spoke to them, and nobody paid them any attention. They slipped into and out of buildings like ghosts: they moved only at night, and to most people they were completely invisible. Perfect cover.

  'Passes,' snapped a security guard, sitting behind a glass screen, his TV tuned to Big Brother.

  Matt flashed a pair of passes that had been tucked into the pocket of the stolen overalls. The guard's eyes flicked upwards, his expression bored and contemptuous: even down here in the minimum-wage underground of the organisation, there were subtle grades and distinctions. The guards clearly considered themselves a class above the cleaners, and this one wasn't about to lower himself by taking the trouble to check who they were.

  You're in hot water when they discover who you just let into the building, pal.

  The works lift ran down the back of the building, all the way to the twelfth floor. Like most modern office blocks, there was a set of main lifts for the executives and their secretaries, and a service lift for the cleaners, guards and manual workers. 'Up one flight of stairs,' said Matt.

  They walked together up the concrete stairs. A small doorway was cut into the side of the wall. Matt pushed it aside, looking down. The lift shaft soared thirty floors upwards, a gloomy, dark display of cables and wires, hanging loose in the blackened air. Eleanor gasped. 'Wait for the lift to come down, then jump on top of it,' Matt muttered.

  He glanced upwards. All around him, he could hear the sounds of the machinery whirring, and he could smell the oil that greased the levers and pulleys of the lift shaft. 'I did regiment training in counter-terrorist special ops. In case some terrorists took over a building and we had to go in and flush them out. It never happened, thank Christ, but if it had, we were ready for them.'

  Eleanor gripped his hand tighter. He could feel the sweat on her palms. Above them, he could hear the lift descending. The chains and levers rattled as it dropped through the shaft, stopping twice then three times; each time the noise of metal clacking into concrete echoed down towards them.

  'Use the fear,' whispered Matt into Eleanor's ear.

  The lift swished past them, a blast of air pushing out of the door as it raced downwards. It stopped on the ground floor, two yards beneath them. 'Now,' whispered Matt.

  He stepped down. He held on tight to Eleanor's hand, forcing her forwards. They landed softly on the metal roof of the lift, Matt's hand rising up to Eleanor's throat to stifle the scream he could feel rising within her. 'Keep totally quiet,' he whispered. 'We're about to move.'

  Gill didn't struggle. They don't when you take them by surprise, reflected Matram. Like rabbits trapped in the headlights of an oncoming car, they are paralysed by fear. Their muscles seize, and their brains shut down. They can't move and they can't react.

  Snaddon and Trench moved in first, Matram hanging back to guard the street. Gill had the key in the lock, about to open the door. She had turned round, looking up, seeing Snaddon approaching her. She hardly reacted. That was the advantage of having women in the Increment: a woman could approach another woman without provoking fear. Snaddon thrust her hand up towards Gill's mouth, clasping her hand tight over her lips. Trench followed swiftly behind, grabbing her arms, twisting them sharply behind her back. Gill would have screamed in pain, but the hand over her mouth prevented any sound from escaping from her lips: instead, the scream travelled within her, sinking down into her stomach, making her ribcage shake with confusion and anger.

  At her side, Matram leant down to pick up the keys that had fallen on the floor. He glanced out on to the street, making sure they had not been seen, then calmly opened the door. Snaddon pushed Gill roughly inside, casting her down on the floor, then sitting astride her chest, slapping her sharply across the face.

  Matram looked around the apartment. The main room was simply but smartly furnished. There was a sofa, a plasma-screen TV, some shelves, and a reproduction of Andy Warhol's portrait of Jackie Kennedy on the wall. A kitchen led off to the sitting room, and there was a bedroom behind that, leading out on to a small patio garden. From the PlayStation positioned underneath the TV, he judged this was probably a man's apartment. She was just borrowing it for a few days.

  There's going to be quite a mess to clean up when he gets home, thought Matram. You don't see that on your PlayStation.