by Jon Evans
Laurent sits next to her and closes the door. She looks at him.
“Where are we going?” she whispers.
“Far.”
Chapter 26
Danielle doesn’t recognize the airport, but knows from the brief duration of their limousine journey that it must be London City, near the docklands; Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and Luton are all much further away. The limousine door opens into a hangar, an enormous building home to three small jet aircraft. One of them is active, lit up. Stairs ascend to its yawning entryway. Laurent escorts her up into the cabin. She expects bus seating like a regular airplane, but instead there are two tables with six plush chairs around each. A burly black man stands before the cockpit door and watches as Laurent sits her down at one of the tables. Laurent descends from the airplane. Danielle looks at him through the window as he hustles Keiran up the stairs. Keiran leans on him the whole way, his jaw slack, drooling a little. Once Laurent has eased Keiran into his seat, the black man pulls a lever on the side of the aircraft, the stairs fold into the side of the plane. As the engine begins to hum and throb beneath them, Laurent closes all the window panels. They latch shut, unlike on commercial aircraft.
“Where are we going?” Danielle asks. Her mouth is desert-dry.
“The less you say, and the less I say, for the duration of this journey, the better it will be for all of us. Understand?”
After a moment Danielle nods. She thinks of tales of Argentinian political prisoners, thrown out of airplanes from ten thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean, a hundred miles offshore, to disappear forever into the maw of the wild sea.
“Buckle up,” Laurent says.
Danielle attaches Keiran’s seat belt and then her own. Keiran is breathing quickly and his shirt is damp with sweat. She can tell, somehow, maybe by the smell of him, that he is too drugged to be afraid like her.
The takeoff is short and bumpy. Laurent reads the same Celine novel he has been working his way through for two weeks. Danielle is somehow insulted that he had the presence of mind to bring it with him. It somehow diminishes what they are doing; her life is being changed, and is at real risk, she can feel it, but to him it is only another errand.
Danielle doesn’t wear a watch, and Laurent took her cell phone before they left the flat. She cannot guess how long the flight lasts, her heightened emotional state distorts her sense of duration. Anywhere from one to three hours. She is relieved when the timbre of the engine changes, and the pressure gap in her ears tells her that they are descending. She had not really believed he meant to drop them into the Atlantic. Surely there are easier ways to murder them and dispose of their bodies. And surely even the real, revealed Laurent is not such a monster as that.
The relief, and the end of the anxious waiting, outweigh her fear of what might await them, dungeon or gallows or boardroom, at their destination. She is almost impatient to land and disembark, onto an airfield that seems utterly deserted but for a helicopter that looks like some kind of gigantic insect. Green fields surround the hangar and single administrative building next to the runway.
The black man remains on the airplane. Keiran leads them onto the helicopter, occupied by a single pilot, blond hair spilling from the back of his headset. The passenger compartment consists of two fold-up padded benches facing one another, front and back. Keiran still seems dazed, as if he just woke up. Laurent straps Danielle and then Keiran into safety harnesses. Keiran remains silent, but he is paying some attention to his surroundings now, like there is a three-dimensional movie going on around him, and he dares not interrupt for fear of inciting the rest of the audience’s anger.
“Listen,” Laurent says, his voice low and intense. “I’ve pushed the decision of what to do with you up to a higher level. That’s all I can do for you. I would prefer that you live, but when we get there, your fates are out of my hands. Do you understand?”
Keiran doesn’t react. Danielle slowly nods.
When the pilot starts the motor the noise is overwhelming. The whole craft throbs with the engine’s bone-rattling pulse. Danielle has never been on a helicopter before and the sensation is bizarre and overwhelming. She gasps when they lift off and the pit of her stomach drops nauseatingly away. Around them she sees endless green fields, dotted in the distance by little houses, villages. She sees mountains to the east, peaks emerging from a sea of clouds, their snowcaps stained crimson by the dying sunlight. They must be the Alps. And the glittering blue sea beyond the coastline ahead of them, the Mediterranean. Are they going to Corsica? Africa? Can a helicopter, even one of this size, make it across the Mediterranean Sea? And why not just take the airplane?
The answer becomes apparent about half an hour later, when they swoop down towards a single discontinuity in the endless sheet of rippling blue. From a distance the ship looks tiny, a child’s toy with a mainmast the size of a matchstick, but as the helicopter descends with graceful precision to the landing pad’s giant X, Danielle realizes that the mast is more than a hundred feet high, and the ship itself half again as long. They have landed on the aircraft carrier of yachts.
* * *
Keiran is filled with a great lassitude, a warm blissful stupor. But the drugs are wearing off. He feels a part of what is going on now, rather than a spectator in a body belonging to someone else. His limbs react to his commands again; he fumbles with the safety harness but manages to disconnect it by himself. His memories of everything up to the helicopter ride are incoherent fragments, vague recollections of shock and terror as two men broke into his flat and overpowered him in a few fleeting seconds. It feels long distant, years ago.
The last thing he wants to do is stand, but he forces himself, totters off the helicopter with Laurent’s aid. He supposes abstractly he should be terrified or furious, but the comfortable lethargy of whatever drug they injected him with is so overpowering that he can manage neither. He does manage an interest in his surroudings. He has never been anywhere so luxurious. Even the exterior surfaces of this megayacht, exposed to sea and sun, are polished and beautiful. The mast is of some dark alloy, probably titanium, and the massive sail a pale luminous grey.
The helipad is behind and level with the sail, on a building-like projection on the aft of the ship, they have to climb a ladder down to deck level. As Keiran waits for Danielle to descend, machinery goes into motion all along the mast and mainsail, ropes coil smoothly through burnished-metal pulleys, and the sail shifts a little to port, presumably to better catch the light breeze. Not a single other human being is visible on deck. Keiran realizes with something like awe that the sail is entirely automatic, run by actuators and solenoids and engines commanded from some computer within. He gapes for a moment at this shining array of conspicuous electromechanical consumption, wanting to know the details of how it works, wanting to see the software, before Laurent pulls on his arm.
Behind the helipad, at the absolute stern of the ship, a pair of WaveRunner personal watercraft, the aquatic equivalent of motorcycles, are strapped onto the deck. As they pass an open door at the stern of the ship, he sees within an elaborate collection of scuba gear; tanks, hoses, spearguns. It occurs to Keiran that Danielle is an expert scuba diver. A fact that could conceivably work to their advantage – but not with a veteran soldier and lethal martial artist like Laurent watching their every move.
The yacht’s interior is almost comically opulent. Light spills from golden candelabras and crystal chandeliers onto hallways lined with original art, Persian rugs on teak floors, rooms full of mahogany and ebony furnishings. Every surface gleams, every light glows; but for all its palatial luxury, the yacht feels cold, impersonal, a museum not a home. They pass a marble fireplace that could roast a horse; Keiran associates it with a metal tube that protruded from the aft deck above them.
They descend a spiral staircase whose sides are filigreed with stone carvings of hundreds of birds, each one unique, and whose marble banister is an endless chain of smoothly carved animals. It is like something out of
a dream, as is the elegant white-haired man in tuxedo and tails who waits for them on the deck below. For a moment Keiran wonders if this old man is who they have travelled so far to see. But no: he is only hired help.
The septuagenarian butler leads them down a main hallway that runs down the center of the ship like a spine, a hall of mirrors that rivals Versailles, its effect only slightly diminished by the airtight bulkhead walls that protrude every thirty feet or so, from which doors are ready to slam shut in the name of safety. Keiran feels slightly dizzy, partly from the drugs, partly the surroundings. The doors are covered with abstract, filigreed metal designs, one of them recognizable to Keiran as the Mandelbrot set, and have no handles or knobs, they open automatically in response to a touch. There are data jacks in all the rooms, and discreetly placed cameras in the corners of every ceiling. Keiran realizes with awe that the entire yacht is automated. Every system, every moving part, is controlled by an electronic nervous system whose intricate lace runs the entire length of the ship, this automation reducing the necessary crew to a handful.
Keiran’s mind begins to automatically connect dots; even with sedatives still in his bloodstream, he can’t not solve problems, it would be like looking at words without reading them. A yacht like this likely belongs to someone with a technical background, a scientific fetish, someone who trusts machines over people. Keiran knows that Jim Clark, the three-time dot-com billionaire, owns such a vessel. Not this one, Clark would probably be appalled by such ornate ultraluxury, but Keiran feels safe concluding that their host is likely some kind of scientist or engineer.
They turn off the hall of mirrors into a room that feels slightly more lived-in; carpets are slightly disarrayed, doors are closed instead of flung open for display purposes. Keiran notices an antiseptic smell that reminds him of a hospital. The white-haired butler opens the double doors beyond this antechamber, and red sunlight floods the hallway.
The extraordinary room revealed beyond is at the absolute bow of the ship, a triangle about forty feet on a side. Its entire forward wall is a pair of single gigantic windows, one-way Keiran is sure, which form the midsection of the ship’s prow. Its floor and others walls are barren gray metal. Through the windows, the sun is setting behind the intensely blue, wave-torn Mediterranean.
In the middle of this triangular space, there is a room within the room, an entirely self-contained bubble of transparent plastic that takes up most of the available space; the rest of the room is little more than a walkway around this bubble’s perimeter. It is apparent from the way the plastic bulges that it is pressurized. A two-chambered airlock-like projection allows access. Inside the first chamber, a portable shower stall stands next to a rackful of white environmental suits, the kind that people who work in industrial-strength clean rooms wear.
Within the bubble, a single hospital bed is surrounded by banks of monstrous and extremely clean machinery. Keiran recognizes a rack of blade servers, but the rest are medical devices unknown to him. Two nurses in clean suits stand by the machines, one of them making notes on a Palm Pilot. Plastic pipes and electrodes extend from this machinery and into the man who lies in the bed. Only his head is visible, hairless and wrinkled as crumpled newspaper. The hospital smell is overwhelming.
“Mr. Shadbold will see you now,” the butler says.
“Jesus Christ,” Keiran says, beginning to regain his vim.
“No,” a cracking voice booms, seemingly from all around them. Keiran starts, then realizes it emerges from two pillar-like speakers planted on either side of the airlock. “But I do hope to rise when the stone is rolled forth from my tomb. Walk around to the front.” The accent is South African. The voice is mostly whisper, eerily amplified.
Danielle looks at Laurent, who nods. Keiran leads the way around the bubble to the western extremity of the dome, and turns to look at the hospital bed. Their host looks only barely human. A ropy growth has erupted from his throat, and in places its livid grey-red mass has burst through ragged holes of dry, overstretched skin. It reminds Keiran of dissecting an animal in school when a teenager, the fleshy blobs of organs inside his frog. Traces of blood feather the white sheets near where the cancer actually emerges from his body. A plastic tube runs straight through this growth and into his throat, and shudders slightly in time with the rise and fall of his frail chest. Two more plastic tubes protrude from his ribcage and connect to the largest machine. Liquids pulse through both tubes, one pale blue and the other blood-red. It takes a moment for Keiran to realize that this is in fact Shadbold’s blood, circulating through the attached machines.
“I’m not as old as I look,” Shadbold croons. “But Blair intends to kill me.” He raises a feeble hand to touch the horrific growth that envelopes his neck, and winces. “Meet Blair. Dennis Potter, the great television writer, when he had a cancer he named it Rupert, after his archenemy.” He speaks with a strange cadence; eight or ten words, a brief pause, then more words, in time with the monotonous rhythm of the machine that breathes for him. “I named my cancer after two Blairs. Tony and Eric. You know Eric better by his nom de plume. George Orwell. If not for the misguided socialism they represent, Blair would be eminently curable today. We have sacrificed progress for the brass calf of equality. Does that sound monstrous? Do I seem a monster to you?”
“You mean physically?” Keiran asks, kicking himself for it a moment later, usually he holds his tongue and analyzes all possible responses before speaking, but his drug-addled brain has betrayed him.
Shadbold’s papery chuckle hits some resonant frequency and reverberates horribly through the room. “The sins of my flesh are indeed very great. Most of my organs have been externalized. Doctors tell me I should be dead. But I’m not ready yet. I built a billion-dollar empire with my bare hands. I won’t die like this. Not yet. Not without a fight. Maybe not ever. I will walk again. Does that sound insane?”
“Shadbold,” Keiran says. “I’ve heard of you. Basic patents, right?”
“Well done, Mr. Kell. Yes. I was a scientist. An inventor. Now I am a patient. My friend Blair is slowly choking me. Metastasizing. Spreading through my body. The only reason I still live is that my doctors’ medicines are years ahead of the rest of the world. You already know why that is.”
“Kishkinda.”
“Precisely. A month after any drug company dreams up a possible anti-cancer drug, we are already testing it. They might think of beginning human trials seven years later. It isn’t hard to borrow their formulas. We have made incredible strides. I’m not as doomed as I look. There is hope. Testable, verifiable hope. I intend to walk again.”
Keiran looks away from the torn, desiccated ruin that is Shadbold’s body. It is hard not to pity him.
“Democracy,” Shadbold says, “that last refuge of the madness of crowds, declares it wrong to experiment on human subjects, but right to let them die in their own filth by the million, of poverty and curable diseases. Lest someone dare whisper the truth that all men were created unequal. If we hadn’t let myopic visions of so-called human rights get in our way, poverty would be a dying nightmare, we would be on the brink of affordable immortality. But I digress. A dying man’s privilege, to rage against the dying of the light. But what if I’m not dying? What if the new drugs we are testing now, what if they work? What if Blair is curable? What then?”
“You tell us,” Keiran says.
“Then I shall live. A thought which may turn your stomach. But so shall others. Think of that. Thousands of others. Millions. But if my work is discovered before it bears fruit, the tests will be stopped, political volcanoes will erupt, the scientific data will never be used – and all those who suffer from the same cancers I do, manageable cancers, curable cancers, will be condemned to needless death.”
Shadbold pauses. Keiran can’t think of anything to say. The drugs in his bloodstream, this dreamlike place, this talking corpse animated by machines – it’s all too much, too grotesque. He doesn’t even feel afraid. All he feels is numb.
/> “I have brought you here to answer a single question,” Shadbold says. “Answer it truthfully. If I do let you return to your world. What will you say about me and my work? What will you do?”
After a moment Danielle opens her mouth. Keiran shoots her a sharp look. They lock eyes for a moment, and then, thankfully, she falls silent. For once Keiran is sure that he knows better than Danielle how to deal with another human being. If Shadbold still counts as human. Because Jack Shadbold too, in his own way, is a hacker. And this is a test. If they answer wrongly, they will not leave this ship alive.
“We don’t know,” Keiran says calmly. “And even if we claimed to, you could never trust anything we say under this kind of duress.”
Danielle gapes at him.
“But what you can be sure of,” Keiran continues, “is that disappearing us will have complicated and unpredictable repercussions. Danielle comes from money. Her family will investigate. And a half-dozen of the world’s best hackers are close personal friends of mine. Then there’s the Foundation.You’d best consider all the consequences very carefully before you drop us into the Mediterranean.”
“Dying men don’t care about consequences,” Shadbold says.
“How fortunate for us that you’re not dying.”
And Shadbold’s horrible laughter fills the room again. “Oh, I do like you, Mr. Kell. I would applaud, if I could.”
“I’m flattered.”
“I’m glad I agreed to see you before deciding your fate. I can deal with a rational man like you. You never believed in the fight, did you? You were only honouring a debt. I respect that. Debts must be paid, personal and business, contracts must be enforced. But you, Miss Leaf.” He pauses. Danielle tenses.
