by D C Vaughn
Rebecca stumbled and fell onto the mattress, and as the door slammed so everything fell absolutely silent around her.
The nausea in her belly vanished instantly as though it had never been there, the pain that had been grinding its way through her skull for what felt like days disappeared and the infernal noise in her brain switched off as though somebody had pulled a plug. For a moment Rebecca remained on her hands and knees, her breath heaving through her as she stared at the old mattress, and then she listened to the blissful nothingness all around.
There were no noises. She saw no visions flashing before her eyes. The stabbing pains were gone. The silence was all consuming, broken only by her own breathing and the hiss of rain from outside the bleak shelter. There was no sickness, no paranoia, no doubt, no fear, nothing but the darkness and the silence. Suddenly, her limbs felt weak and all she wanted to do was lie down on the grubby, damp mattress and go to sleep for what felt like the first time in years.
‘Don’t,’ Colin said from nearby, ‘you need to stay awake just a little longer.’
Rebecca blinked, turned her head.
‘Feeling better?’ Colin asked with a sneer.
She didn’t know what to say at first. Colin was holding his face where she’d scratched him, and his nose was bleeding. There was no kindness in his expression, only a sort of disgust.
‘What is this place?’ she asked, her voice a whisper.
‘Former British Army shooting range,’ Colin replied. ‘They had a couple of small locomotives that provided a moving target for shooting practice. We’re in the abutments.’
‘The whats?’
‘The place where the soldiers shot from,’ Colin explained. He gestured to her prison. ‘It’s a Faraday Cage. Electrical currents can’t pass through it so it disrupts the signals.’
‘What signals?’
Colin pushed the abutment doors behind him closed and walked to the side of the cage. He looked down at her where she was still on her hands and knees, her body now bathing in the delight of being free of what felt like everything.
‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ he sneered. ‘And you call yourself a detective?’
He turned away, Rebecca on her hands and knees and running everything through her mind, and then with a sudden clarity that shocked her she realised why Greaves had been killed, why she’d been of importance to Colin, why she’d been feeling the way she was.
‘Oh my god,’ she uttered in horror, ‘there’s an implant in me?’
Colin coughed a bitter little laugh. ‘Congratulations, Einstein, only now when it’s far too late do you realise why you’re here at all.’
Greaves had been killed after he had talked to her. She had witnessed the attack on Sam and the footage in Colin’s house, of the people who had been implanted. Somebody had been watching her every move, her every thought. Suddenly she felt sick again, disgusted at what somebody, somewhere, had been doing to her.
‘When you were taken to hospital, there was a fear that you had bleeding on the brain after you were shot. Surgeons were going to operate, but MRI scans revealed that you were out of danger. You were checked over, and then transferred to a private room at the hospital.’
Rebecca nodded. She recalled waking up in a private room rather than the wards.
‘So?’
‘Neuray owns two of the operating theatres at the hospital,’ Colin replied. ‘On your first night in the hospital, you were transported to one of those theatres and you were implanted with a Neuray chip.’
Rebecca remained absolutely motionless as she stared at Colin. The idea that she could have been carrying one of those chips so appalled her that she didn’t know where to begin thinking about it. She recalled the screens in Colin’s home, the images of people going about their lives. And then suddenly she recalled Greaves’s death, just hours after she had met with him, her inability to understand how anybody could possibly have known that they’d spoken. The truth of it all rushed upon her like a black wave, darker and more threatening than anything else she had ever faced.
‘Dylan Carter’s been watching me,’ she gasped.
‘All the time,’ Colin confirmed. ‘Of course, that won’t be an issue because you’re not going to be seeing anybody else.’
Rebecca slumped inside the cage. ‘You work for Neuray.’
Colin smiled a cold little smile but said nothing as he retrieved Sam’s cigarette tin from his pocket and opened it. Colin reached inside and retrieved a small Flash RAM drive, no bigger than his thumb.
‘All of this trouble, for one little stick of data. That’s what so much is about these days, data. Information. What people like, what they say, what they do, all so that others can make them do, say and buy what they want them to. My country, it uses data to alter your elections, political campaigns, your security services, everything. Your reliance on the Internet and computers will be your downfall.’
Rebecca recalled Ashton’s warning, about the rise of Russia’s interference in the west, of its plans for the future.
‘You’re Russian,’ Rebecca said.
Colin said nothing as he walked across to a small bag propped against a wall in the abutment and opened it. Within was a portable tablet computer, and within seconds the blue screen glowed on his face as he took the data chip and plugged it in. Rebecca could not see much from where she was, but it was evident that the drive contained hundreds of files.
Colin chuckled and tutted to himself in a parody of concern.
‘Dylan Carter’s been a very, very naughty boy.’
Rebecca saw an image of Carter in her mind’s eye and she knew that he was behind everything. He would have been one of the few people who could have arranged for her movement to the private clinic, for the implant to be fitted without drawing suspicion. She thought about the supposed gunshot wound to her head, just the sort of thing to cover up the implant operation.
‘Carter,’ she whispered, appalled that he would have betrayed his country so. ‘Why?’
Colin glanced at her. ‘Why not?’ he asked, clearly enjoying her distress. ‘The technology was defunct, so he couldn’t sell it to the MOD anyway.’
Rebecca was mometarily startled. ‘Defunct? What the hell are you talking about?’
Colin said nothing as he shut the tablet down and tucked the data chip into his bag along with the computer. Rebecca could see that he was planning to leave, and she doubted that she would be alive when he did so. All she could do was play for time.
‘But why would Neuray implant me?’ she asked.
Colin looked at her for a long moment before he replied.
‘Having someone on the inside of the local police force that Dylan Carter could watch was something he considered to be a valuable asset to his plans. Unfortunately, he didn’t realise that you would be taken off the investigation of Sam’s shooting. So, we had to figure out a different way of getting you to locate the data that Sam stole.’
Rebecca closed her eyes, realising at last the scale of the deception. They’d needed her to clear up the last evidence of their dirty deeds, to locate Sam’s data and return it to them. She’d stolen it from Sam’s parent’s home, whom Colin had then assaulted, and now she herself would probably be under suspicion for complicity in the crime.
‘Sam’s parents saw what happened,’ Rebecca snapped. ‘They’ll identify you.’
Colin grinned without warmth. ‘I will be long gone before that happens, and so will you.’
The doors to the abutment opened. Rebecca saw a man walk inside, his jacket zipped up, his collar up about his neck and a baseball cap low over his eyes. In the light from the torch she saw a glint of metal in one hand, and then she saw his face. Forties, grey hair, unremarkable.
The man who had followed Greaves from Nandos. The assassin.
The grey man fixed his eyes on Rebecca. ‘It is done?’
The grey man had a surprisingly soft, quiet voice. Colin nodded, and Rebecca’s heart plunged through her body
like a dead weight.
‘We have it all,’ Colin replied. ‘Do what you will with her, but make sure there’s nothing left here, and I mean nothing.’
The grey man nodded. Colin glanced over his shoulder at Rebecca and offered her an apologetic look.
‘Nothing personal,’ he said. ‘The needs of the many, as you say.’
Colin turned and walked out of the abutment into the rain now crashing down in sheets in the darkness outside. Rebecca saw the abutment door close behind Colin, and then she was alone with the assassin.
‘You don’t need to do this,’ Rebecca said to him. ‘There must be some other way.’
The man said nothing. Rebecca could see that the weapon he was holding was a 9mm Luger pistol, mass produced, hard to trace. The bullets would be hand–made to avoid a paper trail. The hammer would be filed to hide its identity from police ballistics teams, same with the inside of the barrel. Rebecca was entrapped in a steel cage in a semi–buried abutment, miles from the nearest village, on a remote moor in the middle of the night in appalling weather.
Rebecca heard the sound of Colin’s car starting up and driving away.
There was nobody left to protect her.
The grey man cocked the Luger pistol and pointed it at her. ‘My apologies.’
Rebecca’s eyes flashed to the barrel of the pistol, and then a deafening crash filled the abutment.
***
XXVIII
The grey man whirled as Rebecca saw a man crash through the abutment doors and rush toward them, and for a moment she thought that she had been caught up in a horror movie gone wrong.
The man’s hair was thick and black, lank and sparkling with water, his features hidden beneath a hooded top but still partially visible, twisted with an unholy rage that provoked Rebecca’s already tortured emotions to twist with primal fear. His teeth were bared, his eyes wild and he emitted a hellish scream as he ploughed into the grey man and both of them flew across the interior of the abutment.
Rebecca leaped to one side of the cage as the men crashed down onto the cement floor, the grey man’s pistol pinned down as the intruder smothered him. Both men growled and heaved for purchase on the ground, and Rebecca screamed in horror as she saw the intruder sink his teeth into the grey man’s cheek and tear off a chunk of living flesh as though he were some kind of rabid animal.
The grey man screamed as blood spilled in torrents down his face, writhed in agony as the intruder reared his head back and began smashing his forehead down repeatedly onto the grey man’s nasal bridge. Rebecca cringed, primal terror surging through her as she witnessed her would–be killer being savaged by something that seemed to have come down from the mountains. Dull thumps echoed sickeningly through the abutment as the intruder’s forehead battered the gunman’s face, and suddenly the grey man was lying motionless in the light from the torch.
The intruder breathed heavily, leaned back on his haunches, the hood still concealing his face as he gathered his breath. He picked up the discarded pistol. Then, slowly, he turned to look directly at her.
Rebecca shrank back from that gaze, the darkness hiding whatever terrible evil lay within. The man stood and stalked toward the cage, his face splattered with blood that seemed as black as oil in the weak light. Rebecca retreated to the back of the cage, terrified and yet preparing herself to fight to the death against this horrific creature. The man reached out and unlocked the cage.
The cage door creaked open and the man reached in with one hand to grab her collar.
Rebecca snapped one hand out for it, opened her mouth to bite as hard as she could before trying to get past the intruder, but before she could he snatched his hand away, lunged into the cage and threw his arms around her shoudlers and almost lifted her off the ground as he buried his head into her neck and held her.
‘Becca.’
Rebecca’s heart flipped inside her as she recognised the voice. She could hardly breathe, the man was holding her so tightly, and then she realised that she could barely speak his name.
‘Sam?’
Sam squeezed harder and then he seemed to weaken and he fell to his knees, dragging her with him onto the grubby mattress, in a cold abutment hidden on a barren moor. She felt him shaking and heard him crying into her shoulder, and suddenly she was crying too and she couldn’t stop. She sat there with him for what felt like aeons, holding each other in the darkness until he seemed to regain control of himself and he leaned back, gripping her shoulders as he looked her over. Now, this close, she could see his face inside the hood.
‘Did they hurt you? Are you okay?’
Rebecca could barely speak. ‘I’m fine,’ she whispered. ‘I’m okay.’
In the darkness she reached up and gently pushed the hood back.
Even in the weak light she could see that he barely resembled the Sam that she knew. Thick stubble lined his normally clean jaw, his hair was a mess and there were dark circles under his eyes. Blood dripped from his nose and lips, a large swelling ballooning above his right eye where he had literally used his head to bludgeon another man half to death.
‘Sam, my God, what…, what happened?’
Sam watched her, still breathing heavily, and then he wiped away tears and rain with one sleeve and shrugged.
‘I got a bit upset.’
Rebecca stared back at him for a moment, recalled the sight of him raging in their apartment, the fury on his face. For a moment, she didn’t know what to say. She had never known Sam to be capable of any violence, let alone what she had just witnessed with her very eyes. Suddenly, she feared that she had never really known him at all.
‘Sam, have you ever hit me?’
The words fell past her lips as though of their own accord, as though somebody else had spoken them. She looked at the gun now in his hand. Sam looked at her oddly for a moment, then at the gun and the unconscious man beside the cage.
‘Of course not, you know I wouldn’t. This is different. He was going to kill you.’
Rebecca realised that Sam hadn’t understood the question.
‘No, I mean, did I report you for assaulting me, ever?’
Now, he looked at her as though confused. ‘No. Why, what do you mean?’
Rebecca knelt there before him and realised that Sam didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. Freed from days of confusion and paranoia, and despite the extraordinary trauma of the past few days, her brain snapped into motion and came up with a solution instantly.
‘Neuray.’
Sam didn’t need her to say anything more. ‘How much have you learned about what they’ve done?’
‘Everything,’ Rebecca replied. ‘They sent this man, and they implanted me after you were attacked.’
‘They implanted you too?’
She nodded. ‘Said I’d been winged by a bullet, up here.’ She showed him the medical dressing beneath her hair. ‘I think they used the attack on you as a cover for the surgery bruising.’
Sam rubbed his face with both hands as he absorbed this new information.
‘You’re right,’ he replied.
‘Sam, where have you been?’
‘Long story,’ Sam replied, then he held her shoulders again. ‘Listen, they probably implanted you so that they would see when I showed up again. As long as you’re in this cage they can’t see anything, so we’re going to have to work fast.’
Rebecca couldn’t believe that Sam had changed so much in so little time.
‘What do we have to do?’ she asked.
‘First things first, we need that chip out of your head,’ Sam said, and with one hand he gently stroked the side of her temple. ‘God, I was so afraid that I was going to lose you.’
Rebecca smiled, and from somewhere deep inside her she felt a tiny flame of warmth gust into life amid an immense blackness.
‘And I you,’ she replied. ‘Why couldn’t you have just got yourself a normal fucking job?’
Sam blustered a laugh. Rebecca caught herself trying not
to laugh with him. As if there could ever have been a more ridiculous situation; crouched here in the darkness in a crappy hole in the ground with a Russian assassin alongside them, laughing like idiots.
The sight of the dead man tempered the moment. Sam gathered his thoughts.
‘I need to get some things, then get that bloody thing out of your head.’
‘Let the police see you do it,’ Rebecca urged. ‘It’s the evidence we need to prove everything.’
‘It proves nothing,’ Sam replied. ‘But it will get you killed. Neuray won’t let anything get in the way of their bloody project now.’
‘The board of directors?’
Sam nodded.
‘Neuray’s technology was turned down by the Ministry of Defence, so they took it instead to the highest bidder. That’s where I think the Russians got involved.’
Sam gestured to the dead man with a nod of his head.
‘Same one who tried to shoot you?’ she asked.
Sam shook his head. ‘That was another one. We went into the water together after he’d opened fire. I thought that the best thing I could do was drown him. I got lucky, and none of his shots hit me or you.’
Rebecca felt a chill down her spine. Sam had been a great swimmer at school, she knew that. She’d seen the medals and trophies at his parents’ home. He’d drowned the Russian that had been pulled out of the river, and slipped away.
‘Why did you leave me?’ she asked him, not wanting to accuse him of abandoning her but at the same time needing desperately to know.
‘I didn’t,’ he said. ‘I stayed close by, but the ambulances arrived real quick so I had to get out of there because I was certain that Neuray were behind the hit. I felt that if Neuray thought I was dead, you might be left alone. I could tell you were still alive by the way they treated you before the ambulance left. Once I knew you’d survived, I just had to get away and figure out how to get this all into the open.’
