‘Huh. At least now your friends get to die younger,’ said Roth with a savage grin. ‘What’s the youngest? Fifteen?’
‘Thirteen. A boy called Callum. Ran out of insulin within a week of surviving Takeover Day.’
‘Survival of the fittest, mate.’
McCormick shuddered as Roth’s fingers pushed into the gaps between his ribs, as if expecting to find a hidden clip of bullets.
‘There comes a day for most of us when the funerals start to outnumber the weddings,’ McCormick continued, ‘but if you look to the younger generation, the world always feels alive. It wasn’t what I planned when I set out to build people up to be the best they can be, but it’s a happy side effect. I tried to guide those who needed guiding. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. But it was always worth it, and it was always the right thing to do. I may not have had the easiest life, but I’ve lived it well.’
As Roth lay his fingers around the base of McCormick’s neck, their eyes met.
‘And what about you, Oliver? Where do you see your life going after this war?’
Roth spat a laugh, and took a defensive step backwards.
‘Oh, no. No. You’re not using your magical love powers on me. Eight of your friends were murdered by these hands. You of all people should know I’m unreachable.’
‘Nobody’s unreachable,’ McCormick answered. ‘You wouldn’t believe the kind of people I’ve had the honour of turning round. The world is full of young people who think their futures are already decided – that they’re supposed to be this kind of screw-up or that kind of failure, just because they’ve been told to believe it by the people around them. But once they’ve had someone tell them the truth, the realisation can be literally life-changing.’
‘And what is that truth?’
‘That even though we don’t get to decide what happens to us, we do get to choose how we respond. And even if people tell you your future is predestined, you have more control over your personality than you think.’
McCormick was expecting Oliver Roth to laugh. He wouldn’t even have minded: he was sure to go through worse that night. But instead, the teenager gave a curious nod. Perhaps his prisoner was offering him conversation that Grant, Marshall and Pearce could never hope to provide.
‘Is that what you’ve been telling your retard army?’ asked Roth. ‘Was it you who turned Ewan West from a school-hopping violent-minded moron to the sweet little do-gooder who thinks he killed me?’
‘Hey, you leave Ewan alone. He’s a good lad.’
Roth gave a confused face, as if wondering whether to laugh or fall silent. McCormick smirked, aware that he’d just tried to break up the war’s bitterest rivalry with a fatherly voice of reason, as if it were a playground argument between two young children.
‘Whatever,’ said Roth, ‘let’s be honest here. You don’t seriously believe people like me – the kind of guy you pray your kids don’t turn into – can be turned by anything you say? Do you honestly believe bad people can turn good?’
‘Why not? It’s as easy as good people turning bad.’
Roth smiled: a reaction McCormick did not expect.
‘It’s far easier for someone to turn bad than turn good,’ said Roth. ‘It’s human nature. We’re all crap people deep down.’
‘That’s just your own experience with corrupted people.’
‘No, it’s my experience with humans. Nobody’s truly good. If you don’t believe me, spend half an hour in rush hour traffic and watch how people act. Or even better, put a million of them in a giant walled prison and see what they’re like a year later.’
McCormick looked to the floor, unable and unwilling to hide the sadness in his face. It was difficult to argue against Oliver Roth, even taking his own helplessness out of the equation.
His sadness appeared to spread to Roth. When the teenager spoke again, he spoke in a sombre voice.
‘One second,’ he muttered, ‘I just need to do your face and then we’re done.’
Roth took a step forward, and only then did McCormick realise how long had passed in conversation. For much of their time together, Roth had not even been searching him.
Roth started to run his fingers around McCormick’s head, obviously just going through the motions rather than performing a genuine search. With the top of his body reached, McCormick knew how little time he had to complete his own personal mission.
‘All those youngsters from difficult backgrounds who I’ve helped over the years,’ he said, ‘most of them had something in common. It was their expression. Their eyes. Something in their brains showed in their faces – depression, self-pity, isolation… they all held something in their eyes that other people didn’t. But you know what’s strange, Oliver? I don’t see it in you. I see nothing negative in your face at all. Maybe you weren’t affected by your background, but experience tells me that’s impossible. I think you’ve grown used to hiding the hurt in order to look normal, and can pull off Oscar-worthy performances when important people are around.’
McCormick held his breath. All he had done was describe the Oakenfold students’ habit of masking their difficulties, but he wondered whether he had struck a hidden, vulnerable nerve with Oliver Roth. He had momentary visions of Roth losing his cool, and storming outside to grab a gun and shoot him in the head.
Instead, Roth did not react. He withdrew his fingers from McCormick’s head, his inspection over.
‘Actually,’ came his answer, ‘my upbringing was fine. Boring, actually. No hidden childhood abuse, no teenage depression, nothing. I had a good education, I was the smartest guy in school, and had a nice secure family life. But thanks for assuming I’m some kind of screw-up who went off the rails.’
A few minutes ago you were boasting about how many of my friends you’ve killed. But let’s ignore that for now.
‘You say you had an average upbringing,’ McCormick answered, ‘but something has always been missing from your life. You’ve never placed your trust in anyone, have you?’
Roth could have sent McCormick’s nose through the back of his head. Instead he maintained eye contact, and held a worried expression on his face.
‘You may never have been abused, Oliver, but you weren’t loved either. That’s why you don’t have the expression I was talking about. It’s not carefully hidden fear. It’s nothing.’
McCormick imagined that Roth had spent very little of his life in tears, of pain or joy. The teenager would not know how to deal with the sudden tightening of his throat, or the rippling of his exhaling lungs.
I’m the leade r of this boy’s arch – enemies , and in one conversation I must have offered him more compassion than any of the men he fights for.
‘You taught yourself that look of indifference,’ McCormick continued, ‘and you kept yourself cold and emotionless until you didn’t know anything different. But there’s help out there. You just need to start hanging with the right crowd.’
The portable lamps on the floor began to dim. There would not be much more time for conversation.
‘You must think I’m a terrible person,’ Roth muttered.
‘Terrible does not mean unreachable, Oliver. The only thing that could ever make you unreachable is your own choice to never be reached.’
Roth looked away from McCormick, as if he had been staring into the sun. McCormick was surprised when his captor picked his shirt and trousers off the floor, and offered them back to him. He had imagined being led to Floor B in his underwear, but perhaps this was Roth’s way of showing sympathy or respect.
‘You can put these back on if you like,’ said Roth. ‘We’re ready.’
McCormick slipped on his shirt and his trousers in turn, and when he looked up again he saw Roth’s fingers on the door handle.
‘You’re a fine man, McCormick,’ he said. ‘One of the best I’ve ever known. But if you tell anyone I said that, I’ll gut you myself.’
McCormick laughed, as if his captor were joking, and followed him
back to Marshall and Pearce.
Chapter 24
As he was led through the security door on the stairwell between Floor C and B, McCormick wondered how his friends could ever hope to reach the higher floors themselves. Even if all their enemies vanished into thin air, the mazy corridors and security provisions would make it virtually impossible.
Nonetheless, the others were coming. Ewan, Kate and Alex would not abandon him, nor would they be able to rescue him. McCormick’s biggest hope was that they just didn’t get themselves killed.
At the top at the stairwell, he was met with an electromagnetically sealed door. It was secured shut; his power cut had not disabled the magnet or made the door slide open like in the movies.
‘You use fail-secure locking devices?’ McCormick asked Pearce at his side. ‘Not fail-safe?’
‘What’s the difference?’ asked Roth.
‘Fail-safe electromagnetic seals unlock themselves in a power cut. Fail-secure ones don’t. You’ve chosen the dangerous one.’
‘So?’ spat Pearce.
‘What happens if you need to evacuate?’
‘What happens if a feral old man cuts the power?’
They value security over their own safety . That would surprise me, if I still had any expectations of these people.
Marshall had his gold-coloured keycard ready for the moment the power cut was sorted, and when the lights flickered on McCormick sneaked a look at Pearce’s watch. Twelve minutes past ten.
‘You didn’t think melting the generator would keep us in the dark forever, did you?’ asked Pearce.
‘No.’
‘Well, Grant’s a big fan of renewable energy sources. You wouldn’t think it – the son of Francis Grant abandoning his family’s obsession with fossil fuels. But we had a whole spring’s worth of solar power stored in industrial batteries, just waiting to be connected to the main grid.’
McCormick did not respond. Marshall swiped his keycard and revealed the carpeted corridor that led to his office. Pearce’s handgun prodded McCormick in the base of his spine, and forced him to tiptoe bare-footed into the bright and colourful Floor B. One level down from the villains’ bedrooms, this was as close as the Citadel got to a relaxed, cultured environment. McCormick had often wondered how Ewan and Charlie had felt inside that officers’ sector with its leather sofas, sky-blue wallpaper and fluffy carpets, but it must have paled in comparison to this corridor. He even spotted a recreation room, complete with table football and videogame consoles, and…
Wait – is that a real Monet painting? Seized from the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square?
McCormick was dragged into a wide, spacious room that dwarfed any of his university offices. One of Marshall’s walls was overloaded with a fancy collection of war photography, as well as a large television screen. The mahogany desk displayed good quality model fighter jets, a photo of his daughters, and another of his wife in a lesser quality frame. Hannah Marshall, if McCormick remembered right. Shannon had told him about some of the people she had known on Floor A, and there had been a little less venom in her voice whenever she had talked about Hannah. Perhaps Iain Marshall’s wife didn’t share his nature.
Turning around, McCormick could see why the nearest wall was so heavily decorated. The other three were filled from floor to ceiling with the biggest and brightest computer system he had ever laid eyes on. The AME computer was secured against Iain Marshall’s own office walls, each panel a foot thick and filled with a storm of circuit boards, LEDs, transistors, capacitors and other odds and ends that McCormick vaguely remembered from his old electronics classes. The whole three-walled computer seemed to be inside its own huge glass aquarium, filled with a blue liquid that McCormick assumed to be a cooling system. Any computer big enough to power such a feat of technological futurism was bound to need a lot of coolant, and McCormick was embarrassed that the thought hadn’t occurred to him before that moment.
Behind him, Pearce was laughing.
‘Bet you thought you could just come up here, find Iain’s desktop computer and put a bullet through the hard drive,’ he sneered. ‘Unfortunately, the computer for the AME shield is rather big. And protected with bullet-resistant glass.’
The final piece of the puzzle is right here in front of me. We may have done well tonight, but unless this behemoth of a computer is destroyed , we lose.
Once Pearce had stopped talking McCormick could hear faint gurgling sounds, which must have been the coolant liquids in the walls. If Marshall’s hearing was as good as his own, that gurgling must have been hell to work with, unless the impact was softened by the music that came from the speakers.
It didn’t seem like the kind of music that Iain Marshall would enjoy, given how well the rest of his office illustrated his personality. When Marshall spoke, he confirmed McCormick’s suspicions.
‘Great,’ Marshall snarled, as he joined Pearce and Roth in the middle of the room. ‘He’s playing Bach, in my office.’
‘Nothing wrong with a bit of Bach,’ came a heavy but lively voice from the entrance behind them, ‘he was the original father of harmony. Beethoven’s words, not mine.’
McCormick had heard the man’s voice before. Less than an hour earlier, on the other side of Roth’s radio. He knew the man’s identity without needing to turn around.
‘I’d have thought Bach was a bit churchy for your taste,’ McCormick replied.
A hand grabbed the bone of McCormick’s shoulder and turned him around, and he was met with the formidable sight of the most hated man on Earth. Dressed in the smartest of tailor-made suits, with a full head of shoulder-length white hair, the face McCormick had only seen on television had found its way into real life. The man greeted him with an entertained smile, his body giving off the enthusiastic energy of a televangelist. He clamped McCormick’s hand in a vigorous handshake, releasing him moments before cracking his finger bones.
‘My name is Nicholas Grant.’
‘…Dr Joseph McCormick.’
A discomforting smirk settled on Grant’s face as he glanced up and down his prisoner’s body. His head and shoulders swayed back and forth, as if he were a snake readying himself for a strike. After a judgemental shake of his head, his voice rose to a piercing bellow.
‘This is the man I got dressed up to meet?’ he asked. ‘I waited a full year to make contact with the great Joseph McCormick – the leader of the only rebel faction in Britain – the man who united thirty-two people on Takeover Day and turned them into an actual miniature army – the man whose soldiers spent a year burning and sabotaging their way through New London – the man who even convinced my daughter to live among him and his minions… and this is who I end up meeting? An exhausted man in torn clothing, gasping for his final breaths after a simple walk up the stairs, aged in his mid-sixties but with the stench of death already buzzing round him. And on top of that, the good doctor happens to be really fat.’
Wow. I’m glad he didn’t do my best man speech.
Grant dipped his head to meet his enemy’s. McCormick was tall compared to most people he knew, and he hadn’t met anyone taller than him in over a year, but Grant stretched towards seven feet. For the first time since completing his doctorate, McCormick stood before someone who made him feel insignificant. Not just in stature, but in authority.
‘This suit cost me three thousand pounds,’ Grant continued, ‘back in the days of the good old British pound, of course. Way back from my father’s last days in charge of his oil company. I haven’t worn it since his funeral. Tonight was my chance to take off my shirt and jeans and… well, dress to kill. What a let-down this is.’
‘You look like the kind of man who loves a good suit,’ answered McCormick. ‘Fancy offices for your staff, Bach over the speakers… I bet you get suited up daily, just to look good in front of your subordinates.’
The domineering figure spat a laugh.
‘I’m Nicholas bloody Grant. I don’t have to impress anyone.’
McCormi
ck could have smiled, were it not for the terrible truth behind Grant’s words. With the exception of Shannon, none of his friends had ever laid eyes on Grant in the flesh. For a year his friends had waged war against a name: an invisible figure with a larger-than-life reputation. Like gravity, or oxygen, or perhaps even the work of God, nobody saw Nicholas Grant in his physical form, but his impact was everywhere.
‘We don’t have much in common,’ Grant continued, ‘but I have to appreciate your drive to not impress people either. Your name will be forgotten the moment your friends are found and destroyed, but that doesn’t seem to discourage you. I like that.’
‘Oh, don’t try finding common ground between us,’ said McCormick wryly, ‘I’m sure I couldn’t possibly measure up to you.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Grant with a smile. ‘You mow down your enemies with the same mentality as me. You have only one goal, and anything and anyone is expendable in order to reach it. Isn’t that right? You must have known the death sentence you gave to Arnold Salter the moment you took his keycard, even if you released him to ease the weight on your conscience. And now his young ones will be cast into the Inner City. Always happens when a staff member dies. You must have known that too, but you took his keycard anyway. He had three kids, you know. And his wife died two years ago. His children only had a father to rely on.’
McCormick dipped his head.
I won’t let him make me feel guilty. He won’t trick me into think ing our side is as morally wrong as his.
‘Tragic, right?’ said Grant, seizing McCormick by a clump of his remaining hair and demanding further eye contact. ‘You see yourself as the deliverer of all things good, and the saviour of suffering people, but you and your servants tear apart the lives of the innocent just like I do. Leadership… isn’t it lonely?’
‘I’ve lived my life around friends… I could never be lonely. Not like you.’
‘Your friends are dying out!’ Grant shouted, half laughing. ‘Raj Singh lies dead and decapitated outside his old school. Last month Oliver took away Charlie Coleman. Before that we tortured Daniel Amopoulos to death, before that we found Rachael Watts’ body in the wreckage of a car, and before that Ben Christie—’
Tooth and Nail Page 25
