Devour

by L. A. Larkin

  Yushkov barely hears him. Must he betray the woman who is so much more than a lover to save his sister? There has to be a way to keep both women safe. There has to be.

  Somebody is shaking him, calling his name. The room is moving, the walls swaying. He’s desperate to sleep. He drops in and out of consciousness.

  ‘You gave him too much, you fucking idiot!’ Flynn shouts at someone. He slaps Yushkov across his face. ‘Hey! Four minutes left, then Renata dies. Where is Olivia? Tell me.’ Flynn turns away. ‘Thought this stuff could make a buffalo sing. Why doesn’t it work?’

  Yushkov doesn’t hear the reply.

  ‘Olivia?’ he mumbles.

  ‘That’s it,’ says Casburn. ‘Where is Olivia Wolfe? She’s in danger. Tell me where she’s gone?’

  Yushkov can barely move his lips, his tongue like lead. He tells Casburn her location, unaware he has done it.

  ‘Right, I want everything we’ve got at the Excalibur Estate. Now!’ says Flynn. ‘This cunt may not talk, but she will.’

  Yushkov hears a brief argument but not the words. Casburn and Flynn. Somebody leaves in a hurry. Yushkov blacks out.

  He comes round suddenly; a bucket of freezing water has been flung over him. He pants and gasps in shock. Flynn grins, dried blood caked to his nostrils.

  ‘Thought you might like to see this,’ he says, holding up Yushkov’s mobile phone.

  Yushkov blinks water away and cranes his head forwards, trying to focus on the tiny screen.

  ‘Your SVR mates sent you a message.’

  The video begins. Renata is tied to the same bed, her stare empty as tears trickle down her filthy face. She whimpers, her mouth taped.

  ‘No!’ shouts Yushkov, straining against his handcuffs, jaw clenched, every muscle in his body tensed.

  A masked man steps in front of the camera. Holding a GSh-18, a semi-automatic pistol. Yushkov knows it well. Used by the Russian military, he is well aware what it will do to somebody if fired at close range.

  ‘I tell you, Vitaly, you could have saved her. But you failed. You failed your only living relative.’ He shrugs, lifting his hands and waving the pistol around.

  The masked assassin sits next to the woman writhing on the bed, her eyes wide with terror. He rips off the tape from her mouth and forces the gun between her teeth. ‘And now? You are alone.’

  The gun fires, the report so loud, so shocking, that Flynn jolts the phone, almost dropping it, even though he has seen the video before. Yushkov’s heart feels as if it has been ripped from his chest. He opens his mouth but he can’t speak. Her blood and brain matter is splattered over the wall behind the bedpost. The killer gets up, his white shirt speckled crimson. The camera zooms in on Renata’s face, her mouth still open. The back of her head has been blown apart and blood spreads out like a red halo over her grimy pillow. The video cuts to black.

  For the first time since he was a very young child, Yushkov sobs, his chest heaving.

  But there is a second video, taken at a different location.

  Sergey Grankin is looking sombre, hands clasped together as if to deliver a eulogy. The camera angle is tight but damask wallpaper and heavy curtains and a delicate floral-pattern teacup on a tray are in view, the room very British. He peers into the lens.

  ‘Yushkov, you have betrayed your country. Again. I missed my mark in Cambridge. I won’t make that mistake twice.’

  63

  Wolfe hides inside the porch of St Mark’s church, the only building on the twelve-acre Excalibur Estate exempt from demolition. She’s watching her grandmother’s empty bungalow, a two-bedroom, single-storey prefabricated shoebox, only differentiated from the other houses by the paint colour and the contents of the now overgrown garden.

  Wolfe remembers her grandma Mary as a hard-bitten woman with a sharp nose and even sharper tongue, who offered no sympathy for her daughter, Wolfe’s mother, when Wolfe’s dad walked out on them. Mary saw depression as an indulgence of the upper classes, and the only piece of solace she could come up with was to tell Catherine to ‘snap out of it.’

  The dawn light is enough for Wolfe to see the faded yellow exterior, now stained with mould. The chain-link fence is torn and the wooden gate hangs off its hinges at a forty-five-degree angle. She stares at the ‘Asbestos, Keep Out’ sign; at the steel mesh rectangles that cover every window and exterior door. All the abandoned houses in Mordrid Street are secured the same way. No matter. She knows a way in.

  All night she’s thought about Yushkov, wondering where they’ve taken him and what they’re doing to him. He’s suspected of stealing a deadly pathogen that has been used in a terrorist attack. She imagines him bound and beaten, subjected to who-knows-what torture. She rubs her temples, willing the thoughts away.

  ‘Why let them take you?’ she says aloud.

  But she knows the answer. Yushkov imagines Casburn will trade him to the Russians in exchange for Renata’s freedom. But Wolfe knows Casburn too well. If Yushkov cannot give Casburn the one thing he really wants - the person with the missing canister - he will not save Renata. Yushkov will be ‘disappeared’. He has sacrificed himself for nothing.

  Wolfe has spent much of her life working and surviving alone, relying on her wits to get out of danger, but now the weight of her isolation is crushing. For the first time in her life, she can barely function. Her interminable journey to this dump, the torturously slow trains, relying on her hoodie to conceal her face, furtively dodging security cameras and avoiding eye contact, made her feel like the criminal she is accused of being.

  The site has streetlights, but there is no power to the empty bungalows. A security guard drives around every few hours. A crack of a twig or a fox’s scream sends her heart racing, convinced the hunt is over and the police have found her. She told Yushkov where she would be. He will eventually tell them. A man can only endure so much pain.

  But she can think of nowhere else to go.

  Checking her watch, she bows her head. Renata is dead and, even though Wolfe is not a religious person, she says a prayer for her. With a heavy heart Wolfe darts across the road, down the side passage and into her grandmother’s tangled back garden. The roses have grown into crazy stick people and brambles engulf the back fence. Behind the fence is a row of Sitka spruces that block the sunrise. An A-frame swing, rusted, the seat broken, still stands in one corner. She remembers as a little girl calling to her brother, ‘Higher!’ as she swung through the air.

  The house is raised a foot off the ground by breezeblocks. She lies on her back in the dirt and scrambles under the narrow space between gravel and floorboards, dragging her backpack with her. She finds the hatch she’s looking for and hopes nobody has thought to seal it. Gas pipes, now disconnected, run under the floor and into the sitting room, where Mary had a gas fire installed. Wolfe pushes upwards against the small door but it doesn’t budge. She thumps at the cut lines with the flats of her hands until she finally loosens the seal formed by age, dust and damp. But a rug stops the door from opening fully. She takes a penknife from her pack, opens the longest blade and saws through the rug. Dust and tufts of hessian fall on her face. She coughs and keeps going until the hatch opens enough for her to squeeze through.

  The sitting room has no furniture. Wolfe runs her torch beam over the mildewed peach wallpaper and the grimy lace curtains. She slides her back down the wall and sits, her knees bunched up under her chin, running her fingers over the old rug beneath her. She wants to hear Cohen tell her she’s a fucking idiot but he’ll get his lawyers to sort things out. She wants to hear Butcher tell her to believe in herself, that he’ll talk to his mates in the Met and make sure she gets a fair hearing. She wants to hear Daisy’s Irish rebelliousness as she tells her to ‘Fuck the lot of them!’ Most of all she wants to have Yushkov next to her and see his wry smile. She wants him and her life back. And the only way that can happen is to find whoever stole the Psychosillius sample. Apart from a few bank statements that suggest Bruce Adeyemi has gambling debts, s
he has run out of ideas.

  Wolfe curls up on the musty rug, her face not far from a skirting board. She has come full circle, back to the house Social Services insisted she move to when her mother died. She falls into a fitful sleep. In her dreams, faces come and go. She is in the mess tent at Lake Ellsworth, toasting those brave enough to speak the truth. She is thinking of Nooria.

  ‘Sometimes the price is too high, I think,’ Yushkov says in a hushed tone. ‘Sometimes it is best to walk away.’

  Now she is with Trent Rundle in his tractor, crossing the Ellsworth Mountains, listening to his incessant chatter; now she’s watching Yushkov expertly handle the hot water drill; now she’s in the mess tent, surprised by Sinclair’s outburst about the innocent casualties of war.

  ‘Nobody cares, Olivia. What do the military call the women and children killed by drones? Collateral damage. How very compassionate.’

  Wolfe opens her eyes and sits up, wide awake. She dives for her backpack and pulls out the printouts in such haste she rips some of the pages, flicking through them, discarding the ones she doesn’t want. She opens Toby Sinclair’s file and searches for the death certificates. Wolfe finds them in Heatherton’s file, crammed there when they left the Porton Arms in a hurry. The death certificates are for Huma Sinclair, aged thirty-four, Sally Sinclair, aged eleven, and Ben Sinclair, aged nine. They all died on the same day, two years ago, in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

  She skim-reads a press clipping from the obituaries in The Scotsman. Huma Sinclair arrived in the UK when she was seven, with her family, as refugees. Her father was a teacher. His school had been burned down by the Taliban and he’d been almost beaten to death for trying to give girls an education. The family settled in the southern Glasgow district of Govanhill. She studied Medicine at Edinburgh University, met and married Toby Sinclair and became a family GP. They had two children. Huma had returned to Kandahar several times as a volunteer despite death threats. Two years ago she took the children with her, keen for them to meet her family. Toby was meant to accompany them, but could not because of his work. Huma and the children had been in Kandahar for a week when a US drone destroyed the house they were in and four surrounding buildings. The official statement claimed they were harbouring Taliban fighters, which neighbours and surviving family denied.

  She reads a quote from Toby.

  ‘I have died with them. I will never see my children grow up, never hear their laughter again or tuck them into bed at night. My wife was a beautiful, kind, giving person who died needlessly, trying to help the poor and sick in Kandahar. She wanted to inspire women there and encourage female education. She hated what the Taliban was doing and she would never have harboured terrorists. The Americans won’t admit they made a terrible mistake. They murdered my wife and children and I want them held accountable.’

  64

  Dr Stacy Price and Professor Gary Matthews are escorted down the narrow corridor of the Biomedical Sciences Department by two soldiers whose job it is to protect Porton Down and its lethal pathogens confined within. Wall-mounted cameras monitor every corridor and inside every lab.

  ‘I’m worried about Toby,’ Price says to Matthews.

  Matthews places a reassuring hand on her shoulder. ‘They’ll find him.’

  Price looks up at her much-taller colleague. ‘You don’t think he’d, you know, commit suicide like Michael?’

  ‘He’ll be okay, Stacy.’

  They turn a corner. Ahead is a hermetically sealed steel door with one circular window. On the door a sign says Caution! Authorised Personnel Only. BSL-4. Beyond that door is a changing room and shower facility where they will don their positive pressure personnel suits, affectionately known as ‘space suits’, with breathing apparatus. They must then pass through another hermetically sealed door, a vacuum room, and an ultraviolet light room before finally entering the lab currently dedicated to finding a way to kill Psychosillius. The doors are synchronised so that, if one is open, the other stays closed, like an airlock on a spaceship.

  Off other corridors, similar high-containment labs hold stocks of drug-resistant tuberculosis, exotic strains of flu, the SARS and MERS viruses, plague, anthrax, botulism, ricin and the Ebola, Marburg and other haemorrhagic fever viruses. Deliberately infected animals ranging from mice to monkeys, in cages, are on the floor below, and, below that, the huge steel vats of the effluent decontamination and self-contained waste disposal system.

  Dr Price and Professor Matthews are early, the first to arrive. They are ten feet from the first door to their lab when Price stops so suddenly, the soldier behind ploughs into her.

  ‘What’s that?’ Price asks.

  The mid-section of the door looks as if it has been in a fire, the steel charred.

  Matthews peers over the top of his bifocals. ‘It can’t be, can it?’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asks the senior ranking soldier.

  Price swallows hard. ‘A possible leak. Stay where you are.’

  Price edges closer, followed by Matthews. The steel has blistered, as if it were suffering from smallpox, and through a three-centimetre hole they can see into the room beyond.

  Price’s hand whips up to her mouth as she gasps.

  Matthews swivels round to the nearest soldier. ‘Alert security. Psychosillius is no longer contained. Every lab in this facility is threatened.’

  The soldier responds by smashing the glass wall-mounted box and presses a red button as the other soldier uses his two-way radio to alert his commander.

  Security roller doors above the main entrance and exit to the building slam to the ground. They cannot leave. Claxons wail all over the seven thousand-acre site. At the perimeter fence, red lights flash. All hell breaks loose.

  The Secretary of State for Defence, Harold Brennan, taps his pen on his green gilded leather desk blotter as he contemplates his impending meeting with the PM regarding the sinking of the Queen Elizabeth, and how in God’s name it was allowed to happen.

  There’s a knock at the door and the Permanent Under Secretary, Jillian Warwick, pokes her head round the door.

  ‘Apologies, sir. There’s a problem at Porton Down.’

  Forty-year-old Warwick is built like a tank and isn’t the slightest bit fazed by Brennan’s scowl.

  ‘Very well. Come in and shut the door.’ Warwick does as she’s asked. ‘Well?’

  ‘Psychosillius is no longer contained. It’s eaten through a BSL-4 lab door. The site is in lockdown, but it can’t be secured. Doors, fences, even CCTV cameras are corroding.’

  Brennan stares at her. ‘And? The pathogens? Are they secure?’

  Warwick shakes her head. ‘Afraid not, sir. The glass and sealants will remain intact, but anything steel is collapsing - biolab doors, storage canisters, even the air filtration and effluent systems.’

  ‘Jesus!’ says Brennan. ‘I’ll get on to Thorneycroft. You contact every BSL-4 lab in the UK. Find out what they can take from Porton Down. But keep this under wraps. If it gets out, we’ll have a nationwide panic.’

  ‘I think that’s going to be hard to avoid, sir.’

  ‘And convene COBRA.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Warwick races from the room.

  Brennan picks up the phone and uses a secure line to dial General Sir Charles Thorneycroft, the Chief of the Defence Staff and head of the British Armed Forces.

  ‘Charles,’ says Brennan, ‘We have a national security issue.’

  65

  There can’t be a man, woman or child in this country who doesn’t know your face and yet you have disappeared. Not even I can find my little robin. All night I’ve been at my computer, scanning news bulletins, listening to police radio.

  Distant acquaintances and even so-called friends are falling over themselves to do the ‘I knew her when . . . ’ and the ‘I always knew she was a bad one . . . ’ interviews, supplying the worst photos of you they can find. There’s a hideous one of you as an angry teenager. If this ever gets to court, they’re going to have to empanel a
jury of people who’ve been living under a rock. Good luck with that.

  ‘We have breaking news,’ says a TV reporter. ‘Armed police have surrounded a derelict house on the Excalibur Estate in Dulwich Hill. Fugitive Olivia Wolfe is believed to be hiding there.’

  I catch my breath and lean closer to my monitor. Armed officers in bulletproof vests carrying semi-automatic carbines. Tangled garden. House all boarded up. I inhale, imagining I can smell the damp and see the broken tiles and peeling wallpaper, and you hiding inside.

  A memory goes off in my head like a mortar round, splattering primary colours across my vision. I blink rapidly, and grip the desk, battling dizziness.

  I have my hand on your shoulder, as you sit at your laptop. I don’t know where we are; the room is unfamiliar. A hotel room. Outside, there’s shouting in the street and car horns honk and the air is thick with dust. Suddenly I know I’m in Mosul. Before we ran for our lives. Before the grenade attack.

  ‘You’re good at this stuff,’ you say, looking up at me. Your hair is shorter - a pixie cut. How I prefer it. ‘Please, just take a look. It’s running so slow.’

  I’m going to be late. For what, I can’t remember. But I nod and we swap seats and I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I am whole. No scarring. My long blonde hair falls over my shoulders. I have make-up on, the lipstick a pale plum: I’ve just recorded a news update for CNN. Our eyes meet and you smile at me in the reflection.

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ I say.

  You don’t know how difficult that was to say. You’re not listening.

  You peer at the small screen over my shoulder, pointing at something, your cheek close to mine. I turn my head and kiss your translucent skin. You pull away as if I’ve given you an electric shock, rubbing your cheek, shock in the O of your perfect lips. It was then I knew you would never love me the way I loved you.

  Is it me, or because I’m a woman?