“I hear the scuttlebutt.”
“And what do you think?”
“I have no opinions. I’m in the army.”
“Nicely put.” Kelty finally sat down and unfastened the top button of his shirt.
“I’ve finally made a breakthrough, you know,” he said unexpectedly.
“I’m happy for you.” Edward clamped his jaw shut. He was dangerously close to insubordination.
“Are you?” Kelty tossed the crust of his sandwich to the screaming gulls. “Really? I mean… off the record.”
“Is it worth it?” Edward flinched as soon as the words were out of his mouth but Kelty didn’t seem fazed.
“I’m hoping so, in the long run.”
They sat staring at the ocean for a while. Then Kelty began to talk, long chin resting on the arm draped over his knee.
“The Stopwatch Project exists because the army wants a weapon. One that will put an end to the struggle for supremacy on this planet once and for all.”
He swatted at an overconfident gull that had come too close, diving for crumbs.
“But it’s a struggle that can only be won at a terrible price.”
“You must agree with their aims, if you’ve spent twenty years working on it. Sir.”
“Drop the Sir, malarkey. I need to talk to someone.”
Kelty rubbed tired eyes. There were tight lines around his mouth and his hair seemed to have more white in it every day.
“It’s not a trick. Honestly.”
“I don’t see how this… weapon can work,” Edward said cautiously, still wondering if the exchange was some sort of trap. “You take a human, fill him full of insect Alarm Pheromone and let him release it in some hostile country. That correct?”
“Broadly speaking, yes.”
“What if it spreads right around the globe? How is that a victory for anyone?”
“Imagine a pheromone outbreak started in Asia.” Kelty seemed perfectly calm, as if he were discussing the weather. “In that dense population it would multiply like wildfire. Spread across Africa, Europe, China, India – everyone would go nuts. Too crazy to fire nuclear weapons or instigate any conventional response. Too mad to fly planes or sail boats. They’d just start killing each other with whatever came to hand. Rifles, farm implements, household appliances. You name it.”
“What would stop that outbreak reaching the USA?”
“The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.” Kelty pointed to the rolling waves. “The pheromone weapon is a human/ant hybrid. Human pheromones are strong – but they need to be amplified and carried by millions of ants to have a long range effect. No people or ants to carry the outbreak? It grinds to a halt.”
He crumpled up the sandwich wrapper and put it in his pocket.
“There are no people or ants in the ocean - and the only land mass that is near both Asia and the American continents is Alaska – with a small human population.”
“And it’s too cold for ants.” Edward suddenly understood.
“The plague would never reach America.”
“What about the survivors of your infection? The people who aren’t affected?” Edward jerked a thumb at himself. “People like me?”
“You’d be burying the dead for years. Most of the world would revert back to the Stone Age. We’d have won hands down.”
“And you call me a sociopath.”
“Let me give you a hypothetical situation.” Kelty looked at the sky, conjuring up a scenario. “You encounter a child you know is carrying an infectious disease. He is approaching a heavily populated area and you have no way of isolating him. What do you do?”
“A child?”
“A child.”
Edward Stapleton swallowed hard.
“I kill it.”
“And how would you feel about that?”
“I’d feel I just saved a lot of people.”
“And the child?”
“I did what I had to do. Took one life to save many.”
“My point exactly.” Kelty patted the man on the shoulder. “Having a sociopathic personality doesn’t make anyone a monster. Just makes it easier for them to kill.”
Edward Stapleton’s face reddened.
“Anyway,” Kelty continued. “The military swear they’d never actually use the Stopwatch Project. It’s just meant to be a… deterrent.”
“And you believe them?”
“Not at all, but I guess it never stopped me.” Kelty gave a short bark of laughter. “I thought of myself as a visionary.”
“That’s not a vision I’d like to have in my head when I try to sleep at night.” Edward didn’t try to conceal his distaste. If Kelty wanted honesty he would damned well get it.
“This planet is dying, Edward.” His superior lay wearily back on the grass. “Becoming buried under the weight of its human population. Unable to cope with the pollution we cause, the environmental changes we generate. We don’t think about it now, but in twenty years, we’ll begin to realise that we’re going to wipe ourselves out. By the time we do, if I’m any judge of human nature, it will be too late to reverse the process.”
“You want an outbreak to happen?” Edward felt his head spinning. “You could live with that?”
“Wouldn’t have to. Despite what I’ve done, I haven’t got a sociopathic personality. I’d be dead as well.”
The gulls screamed and weaved in the grey sky. Edward Stapleton looked around the deserted promontory. Tried to comprehend the enormity of what he was hearing.
“What’s it like?” Kelty pulled a bottle of water from his pocket.
“What do you mean?”
“To be like you. Not to be able to feel how others feel.” He twisted off the top and took a swig. “Not to be stopped by your emotions.”
Edward thought for a while.
“It’s lonely.”
“You know what turns certain sociopathic individuals into serial killers? I did a study of this, by the way.” Kelty offered over the bottle of water. “They don’t fit in. They don’t feel a part of society and, in some people, that’s enough motivation to take revenge on their own race.”
“You’re being a bit simplistic.”
“Why look for a complicated answer when an easy one will do?”
Edward took the bottle. His lips were dry and cracked by the salty air. The fresh water washed away the saline taste. He drank greedily.
“Now, imagine a place where everyone was just like you. You wouldn’t feel alone anymore.”
Kelty took the water back, splashed some into his hands and applied it to his face.
“You wouldn’t be swayed by prejudice, by religious ideas, by patriotism, by any of the things that make the masses kill. You’d actually deserve to inherit the earth.”
Edward thought about that for a long time.
“The problem is,” he offered eventually. “I can still tell right from wrong.”
He unclipped the holster on his belt and pulled out his pistol.
Kelty frowned.
“What are you doing?”
“Considering ending the Project.” Edward calmly swung the gun and pointed it at his superior’s head. “Feel like appealing to my better nature? How far do you think that will that get you?”
“This wasn’t on my study.”
“Don’t make me out to be a fiend, Colonel.” The soldier flipped off the safety catch. “I don’t have to give in to my demons.”
“Like I said.” To Edward’s astonishment, Kelty went back to staring at the rolling swells. “Sometimes you have to kill to make things better.”
“If you have any last words, now’s your chance. Not that someone like me will care.”
Kelty took a deep breath.
“I never told anyone this, but my real name is Markus Kirkemeyer. And when I was a child, my own father handed me over to the Nazis, because my mother was Jewish.”
Kelty unfolded his arms and put his hands behind his head, as if he were discussing a family outing.
“She and I were sent to a concentration camp. She died. I didn’t.” The doctor gave a thin smile. “My father and I had just attended one of Hitler’s Nuremberg Rallies.”
“What has that got to do with anything?”
“My father had always been a decent man. Patriotic, yes, but a decent man all the same. So why did he do something so horrific?”
Kelty took one hand from behind his head and removed a set of dentures from his mouth.
“In the camp I wash sho malnourished that, by the time the Americansh came, all my teesh had fallen out.”
“Please put those back.” Edward felt queasy at the sight. Without his dentures, Kelty looked like an animated cadaver.
“At firsht I thought it musht have been my fault.” He returned the teeth to his mouth. “That I was some kind of monster. Then I thought it must be because my father was a monster. Neither of these, as you can imagine, were acceptable explanations. So, I’ve spent my life trying to find another reason.”
The doctor closed his eyes and shivered.
“Then it came to me. You put a mass of people together and whip up their emotions? They lose all sense of who they are. Become immersed in the feeling of the crowd. It’s called mass hysteria.”
“Stop stalling.” Edward’s gun never wavered. “If you have a point, get to it.”
“Mass hysteria. The kind of total conditioning that overcomes reason. You find it at football matches. Lynch mobs. Political rallies. Fraternity parties. Wars. Religious gatherings. And it’s caused by human pheromones.”
“I’ve never heard that theory before.”
“Cause it’s mine.” Kelty thumped his heart. “Though I don’t see a Nobel prize heading my way any time soon.”
“I don’t think they give them out to mad scientists.”
“Very droll.” Kelty gave a chuckle. “Y’know, I was so grateful to the American soldiers who rescued me from the camp, I joined the US army myself. Served in Vietnam.”
The doctor seemed to have forgotten all about the gun.
“But when I came back to the States I found another kind of movement.” He grinned at the thought. “The Hippies. Peace and love. Change the world for the better. Fuelled by concerts and love-ins and hang-outs where everyone was together and hoping for a better world. People releasing pheromones that weren’t harmful but positive.”
Kelty treated the soldier to a knowing leer.
“I got quite into the free love thing, in fact.”
“That’s more information than I needed to know.”
Kelty stopped smiling and tucked his hands into the pockets of his army regulation shirt.
“It was a doomed movement, of course. Soon swamped by a world that was filled with hate. But it existed for a while.”
“And this means something?”
“Whether we’re talking about ants or humans, there’s more than one type of pheromone.”
Kelty’s eyes positively twinkled and, for a second, he looked much younger.
“The alarm pheromone makes insects attack anything that moves. Humans too, as we found out. But there’s also a type that makes insects co-ordinate their actions – the Mandibular Pheromone. If you could create a worldwide outburst of that type, people would be compelled to work together. All people Edward. Irrespective of race or religion.”
“Shame your research went in the opposite direction.”
“I still remember the Nuremberg Rallies.” Kelty sat up and stared out across the horizon, a lost look on his face. “And even though I was Jewish, and the tirade was directed against me? It still felt wonderful.”
He rubbed his temple, as if trying to alter the memory.
“For many years, I wanted to create a deadly pheromone plague. I wanted everyone under the influence of pheromones gone, leaving only those who could think clearly. Logically.”
Kelty gave a shuddering sigh.
“Oh yeah. Just what the Nazis preached. I was trying to create a master race. That’s how influenced I was.”
“And now?” The soldier suddenly had an inkling of where the conversation might be going. “Are you saying you’ve changed?”
“I fell in love with a lady, Edward.” Kelty seemed awed by this simple statement. “A bit late in life, I know, but it made me see things in a different light. Therefore, I’ve been misleading the powers that be about what I’m actually up to.”
He sighed.
“But I can’t do it for much longer without getting rumbled.”
Edward Stapleton slowly holstered his gun.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I like you and I’m going to need you.” Kelty felt safe enough to stand up. “So I’ll ignore the fact that you were a hair’s breadth from executing a senior officer.”
“Sure wouldn’t look good on my record.”
“Tomorrow afternoon, You are to come out here and stay put. Don’t go anywhere near the base. That’s an order.”
“Why? What’s going to happen, Dr Kelty?”
“I have a plan.” Kelty buttoned his shirt back up to the collar again.
“I’m going to try and undo the harm I’ve done.”
Edward rubbed his bare arms, where goose bumps had formed. The teenagers looked at each other. Millar nudged Gene.
“What happened next dad?”
“I did what Kelty told me. I was at the other end of the island when I heard explosions. He’d corrupted all the records and destroyed the base. I knew Kelty was responsible because I ran to Jackson Head in time to see him taking off in a boat with a woman. The one he loved, I guess.”
The wind gusted and Edward looked up, as if surprised to find himself back on the island.
“He even waved to me, can you believe it? Next day I was picked up by the US Navy.”
He pulled a stone from the grass and flung it at the base. It bounced off the ruined concrete, sparking a white puff of powder that was carried away in the breeze.
“I didn’t tell them about our… conversation. After all, Kelty spared my life.” A doubtful look slid over his face. “I suppose I trusted him, in the end.”
“Dad.” Gene bit his lip. “What you were saying about your…eh… personality? Does this mean you don’t love me?”
“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” Edward Stapleton reached out an arm. Gene shuffled over and his father pulled him close. “I’d give my life for you.”
“Eh… if the base was destroyed?” Millar asked shyly. “Why are you still on Fallen?”
“I’m part of Kelty’s great con.” Edward jerked his thumb at the blackened ruin of the MacLellan facility. “Obviously, I haven’t got time to go into it right now.”
He shook his head.
“But even I couldn’t have guessed just how far Kelty was willing to go.”
42
Calton Hill. Edinburgh
1996
Naish sat on a chipped green bench, coat fastened up to the neck. An icy wind blew across the top of Calton Hill, strong and cold enough to keep all but the most hardened joggers away. Even so, she counted a handful of people dotted across the scrubby green expanse. A well wrapped couple stood, hand in hand, gazing at the spires of the dozen gothic buildings pricking the grey Edinburgh sky. An old woman in a huge green jacket and fur hat read a book a couple of benches back and a lone dog walker pulled at the lead of his unwilling canine, a hundred yards away.
Despite the years, Naish recognised Kelty’s confident walk immediately, as he made his way over the brow of the hill. Hands in greatcoat pockets, briefcase under his arm, he looked neither right nor left. She rose when he reached her and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. Kelty’s thinning hair was pure white now and deep lines puckered his eyes and mouth. They sat down, huddled together against the elements.
“The wind is cold in October,” the doctor said conspiratorially. “But the birds will return in spring.”
“Quit pretending you’re in some spy movie
. There’s nobody watching. I didn’t spend years in army intelligence without knowing how to lose a tail.”
“That’s my girl. Now unfasten your coat so I can have a feel.”
“You really have missed me.”
“I want to be sure you’re not dumb enough to wear a wire.”
Naish unzipped her coat and Kelty quickly patted her sides.
“Thank you.” He glanced warily around. “Won’t you get into trouble for this?”
“Nothing I can’t handle,” Naish snorted. “I knew you wouldn’t talk to me, if I had… eh… company.”
“Then I’ll make this brief.”
“What exactly are you doing here?” The woman angrily fastened her coat back up. “You’ve been missing for months and the authorities sorely want to question you. Why were you stupid enough to surface again?”
“Is the Stopwatch Project still active?”
“Why would it be?” Naish flicked a golden leaf that had blown against her coat. “Sheridan base was destroyed. The Kirkfallen base is destroyed. There’s not a shred of data left.”
“Maybe the army should take a hint.”
“So what happened? Was Kirkfallen a repeat of Sheridan?”
“I’d have thought that was obvious.” Kelty blew into his hands.
“Then, what makes you think the Stopwatch Project will ever be reinstated?”
Kelty opened his briefcase and took out two newspaper clippings. One was regarding the Diamondback Massacre and the other about the identification of D.B. Salty.
“Dan Salty may have ended the outbreak at Diamondback, but he sure as hell didn’t start it. He’s a spent force.”
Kelty pulled another sheet of paper from the briefcase.
“This was faxed to me by army intelligence right after Diamondback. Salty’s adopted mother, Louise Walton, died in the slaughter. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out she must be Louise Martin – the only other survivor of the Sheridan disaster.”
“What of it?” Naish tried to sound nonchalant.
“Louise Walton had a sixteen year old son called Colin.” Kelty tapped his nose. “Sixteen? Is it possible Louise was pregnant when she was at Sheridan Base?”
The Kirkfallen Stopwatch Page 14
