by Jon Evans
“Yeah,” Keiran says. “No kidding. OK. Redundant, but thanks.” He hangs up.
“Who was that?” Danielle asks.
“Just Trurl. Telling us what we already know.”
Danielle nods. “Listen,” she says to Sophia. “Didn’t you ever wonder how your father got sick?”
Keiran takes a sharp breath. He suddenly understands where she is going with this line of questioning.
“How?” Sophia looks at her like it is the stupidest question imaginable. “It’s cancer. It’s a random function. A protein unfolding the wrong way one day.”
Danielle opens her mouth to suggest something horrible –
– when something even worse occurs to Keiran. Pieces of the puzzle assemble in his head. According to Trurl, Sophia’s phone just came alive. It wasn’t Sophia who turned it on. Her phone is nowhere to be seen. Someone else has it, and turned it on. Someone in the Mirage. And that means –
“No,” he says, leaping to his feet. “It’s a trap. It’s a fucking honey pot.”
“What?” Jayalitha asks.
“We were meant to come here, weren’t we?” he asks Sophia. “Just not quite so early. We were supposed to find your phone, not your face, weren’t we?”
Sophia doesn’t answer. Danielle and Jayalitha look stricken.
“We need to be leaving,” Keiran says, “right now.”
* * *
The Mirage’s elevators are located in an alcove off the main hallway. The three of them wait in that alcove on the seventeenth floor. Seconds crawl by. Keiran has to restrain himself from jabbing the glowing call light again and again. Danielle, next to him, holds the gun concealed in her purse. Keiran holds Sophia’s laptop under his arm. They have left the hacker prodigy unceremoniously bound to her bed and gagged with a pillowcase. They had to spend two precious minutes restraining her, lest she call security.
The elevator indicator chimes. The call light goes out. The elevator immediately in front of them opens.
Laurent looks out at them.
Danielle, Keiran, and Jayalitha freeze for a fatal instant. Laurent does not. He takes one step towards them; the next step turns into a spinning kick that hits Danielle’s wrist so hard the gun goes flying out of her purse and clatters against the wall behind them. He lands, spins the other way, and an elbow slams into Keiran’s temple. Keiran topples as if hit with a sledgehammer. He barely feels himself hit the ground. He tries to get up, but his limbs flop uselessly, misobeying his commands. He can see and hear clearly, but can’t seem to direct his arms and legs, it’s like he is trying to command a video-game character without knowing how the controls work.
From his supine position he sees Danielle, her face distended by fear and wrath, as if possessed by some desperate, primal force of destruction, an avatar of Kali or Durga. She opens her arms and literally leaps at Laurent. He ducks and spins, almost avoids her entirely, but she catches him with her left arm and wraps herself around him, pulling him awkwardly to the ground from behind. Out of the corner of his eye Keiran sees Jayalitha duck into the elevator. He tries to get up. Danielle and Laurent are tangled together only a few feet away, he has to help her. But he can’t even prop himself up on an arm without falling back down again. All he can do is watch.
Danielle tries to bring a knee up into Laurent’s crotch, but he has crossed his legs, protecting himself. She tries to head-butt him, ram her forehead against the back of his skull, but he is already moving, twisting like a snake in her grasp, and instead her head connects with his shoulder. Half-dazed, she still holds him like he is her only hope. Laurent grabs one of her fingers and bends it back viciously. Keiran hears the snap as her finger breaks. Still she does not let go. The elevator doors begin to shut.
Laurent gets to his feet, Danielle still half-draped on him but sliding off now. He tries to intercept the closing doors, and Danielle wraps her arms around his waist and bites him through his shirt, like a wild animal. Laurent yowls with pain and arches his back involuntarily. Red blood seeps from the corners of Danielle’s mouth. The elevator doors close, with Jayalitha safe behind them. Then Laurent brings his arm back sharply and hammers his elbow into Danielle’s head with a sickening thunk. Danielle’s whole body sags, but somehow, incredibly, she keeps hold of her opponent, until he grabs her by her waist, lifts her off her feet, and slams her bodily down onto Keiran’s fallen form.
The world goes dark.
Part 6
Lazarus
Chapter 37
Danielle doesn’t want to wake. Dimly aware that reality is bright and cold and painful, she fights to stay in sleep’s cocoon as long as she can, forever if possible, that wouldn’t be so bad, to spend her life in a coma’s warm oblivion. It sounds better than waking and facing the world. The world is so much bigger and crueller than she.
But her body’s demands for attention seep into her consciousness like blood into water. She is cold. Her head hurts. Her hand hurts. Her stomach is queasy. The whole world seems to be moving in a strange way, rocking sluggishly from side to side, like a slow continuous earthquake. The body cannot deal with these sensations by itself any longer. Attention must be paid.
It is the cold that eventually forces her into action. She gropes clumsily around without opening her eyes, hoping to find some blanket, and instead her fingers encounter the headboard of the bed she lies on, wood carved into some sort of elaborate pattern, whorls and ridges like a relief map. It occurs to her to wonder where she is, and that is the end of sleep. Her eyes open and immediately shut. The incandescent power of the light above her seems to approach that of the sun. In her eyeblink of vision she saw that the room was tiny but luxuriously appointed, illuminated by a crystal chandelier in the shape of a painfully bright octopus, furnished with two small beds made of some kind of dark wood. The word mahogany comes to her unbidden. Both beds are entirely unfurnished, bare mattresses. A man sleeps on the other bed, someone she knows. The beds are hard against the walls with a channel maybe a foot long between them. The wall by her feet is slightly concave, and inset with a strange circular window, through which cloud-streaked sky can be seen.
She has to fight to call to mind the name for this type of window. Porthole. Yes. She must be on a boat. A very nice boat. With the man whose name eludes her. Her head and hand hurt very much, she knows this abstractly, and the motion of the boat makes her feel nauseous, but there is some kind of disconnect between her and her nervous system, she is aware of the pain and sickness without viscerally feeling it.
How did she get here? She tries to remember the last thing that happened to her, but the door into memory will not open. She casts about for any recollection at all. Jagged, kaleidoscopic images flicker through her mind. Her boyfriend Gavin, in college. Scuba diving on the Baja Peninsula, in her crazy years. Riding a motorcycle through Hampi, in India.
That last is the key that opens the lock. Her eyes snap open and she takes a sharp breath as memory floods into her awareness. Kishkinda. Shadbold. The man who lies next to her is Keiran. The last thing she remembers is wrestling with Laurent. Clearly she lost.
Keiran is still asleep. No; unconscious. His breaths are fast and shallow, nothing like the respiration of deep sleep, and his body glistens with sweat. Like her, he wears only underwear and a T-shirt, the same black You’ve Been 0//nz0r3d shirt he wore in Vegas. Danielle makes herself sit up, swings her legs to the right, into the narrow crack between the beds. The carpeted floor is very soft. The air mostly smells like a hotel, but also, faintly, of salt, iron, and diesel.
There is a three-foot gap between the heads of the cots and the door, which is solid wood, with an L-shaped metal handle protruding from it. She reaches out, turns the handle, pushes. The door shifts a little but is locked.
The middle finger of her right hand is grossly swollen, bigger than her thumb and almost purple. It dangles across her ring finger at a sickeningly unnatural angle. She remembers Laurent breaking it. It has not been set. She wonders how long they have b
een here. She is aware of the stream of desperate pain-signals sent by that finger, but somehow they seem not to pierce her.
“Drugs,” she says aloud. Her mouth is so dry only a hiss comes out. She looks at her arm, sees a fresh needle mark. That explains the depth of her sleep, the slowness of her thoughts, her immunity to pain and thirst. But this sensory invulnerability will not last long. Her waking testifies to that. Soon she will be in terrible pain. Her skull hurts both externally, where Laurent struck her, and internally, where a devastating headache broods, waiting to erupt. She looks around for water. There is none. Not even a pot to piss in, not that her drug-calcified body will need that anytime soon.
She reaches out and shakes Keiran, careful to use her left hand. Eventually he twitches awake and his dilated eyes open. She waits for his addled stare to become awful comprehension.
“They got us,” she says.
“Yeah. What about Jayalitha?”
Danielle tries to remember. “I think she got away.”
“Where are we?”
“I think we’re on a ship. His ship. Shadbold’s.” Danielle gets to her feet, unsteadily, her balance would be tenuous even without the slow rise and fall of the floor beneath her, and looks out the porthole. She sees no land, no other boats, not even any birds, nothing but sky and cloud and the vast furrowed sea, gleaming like steel in the midday sun, so enormously monotonous that it looks like a false background, something from a movie or video game.
“Your hand,” Keiran says.
Danielle looks down it. “Yeah. It’s gonna hurt.”
“They could have set it.”
“I don’t think our well-being is their number one priority.”
Keiran rubs at his eyes. “I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this.”
“No.”
“I’m very glad I’m on drugs right now.”
“They’re wearing off,” Danielle says.
“Don’t remind me. Look.” Keiran points to a curved mirror set into a top corner of the room. “One-way glass. There’ll be a camera behind it.” He waves to it limply.
“I wonder why he didn’t just drop us in the ocean,” Danielle says.
“I guess they still want something from us.”
“I’m cold.”
“Me too. Come here.”
They curl up on Keiran’s bed, animals seeking warmth. It is barely big enough for both of them. Danielle cradles her wounded hand in her good one instinctively. It is hurting more and more. His breath is damp against her neck. Her headache is beginning to throb, in waves that seem to come in time with the motion of the ship.
“Maybe,” Keiran says, “maybe Trurl and Klaupactus tracked us somehow. Maybe they can send some kind of help.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“It’s possible.”
Danielle would shake her head, but it hurts too much. “No it isn’t. Don’t be an idiot. No one’s going to come. And they’re not going to let us get away. Not this time.”
Keiran swallows. “Yeah.”
“I sort of just hope they get it over with soon.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s true.” It is hard to feel frightened of death when she is in great pain, sick and miserable, bereft of hope. Life does not seem precious when it hurts this much.
“I’m sorry,” he says eventually.
“Don’t be. I got me into this. Not you. I’m sorry they got you too. But I’m glad I’m not alone.”
“It’s an honour to keep you company,” Keiran says, a faint hint of amused vitality entering his voice. “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
They both fall silent. Danielle closes her eyes and tries not to notice how much she hurts. Amazingly she manages to drift back into sleep for a little longer. She is woken by Keiran detaching his limbs from hers, then slowly climbing over her.
“What is it?” she asks.
“Just looking around.”
He pushes the door a few times, provoking a dim rattling sound. “Padlocked,” he mutters. He examines the porthole, probes the mirror in the corner, lifts the mattresses from the beds and looks at the riveted steel slats underneath. Danielle watches without comment. The drugs have worn off fully now. Her broken finger and ravaging migraine burn with white-hot pain, and her stomach is so uneasy from the ship’s motion, and maybe the drug hangover, that she has to concentrate on breathing slowly and not throwing up.
“No getting out of here,” he says, sitting down on the other bed with an air of defeat. “No lock on this side, much less anything to pick it with. Pity. I’m a two-time DefCon Lockpick Challenge champion. How’s that for an epitaph?”
“Even if we got out,” Danielle says, and doesn’t bother finishing the sentence.
“Yeah. We’d still be fucked.”
“Come back to –”
She stops. There are footprints in the hallway, boots on metal, coming towards them. The sound of a key in a lock. The door opens. Laurent is there, along with two burly men in olive-drab uniforms without insignia, and a tall Indian man in designer finery. The same Indian man who imprisoned Danielle in that hut in Kishkinda, who struck her with the lathi and threatened her with worse, six months ago. Vijay.
“It’s time,” Laurent says, his face a stern mask. He avoids Danielle’s eyes.
Chapter 38
They are marched, hands cuffed behind their backs, down a narrow side hallway, panelled in teak, in which alcoves display marble and alabaster antiquities. Then they enter the wide central hall of glittering mirrors and chandeliers that confirms Danielle’s suspicions; they are once again on Shadbold’s superyacht Lazarus. They ascend the marble staircase adorned by a bestiary of carvings, and emerge into a galley so clean and well-appointed it looks like a TV set for a cooking show. The food-smells make Danielle’s stomach roil. Past the galley they continue into a small dining room, a whole wall of which is a single window that reveals an expanse of pale deck and the endless ocean beyond. The sunlight is bright and Danielle has to squint. Vijay and the two burly guards remain in the dining room; Laurent, Keiran and Danielle continue through another door into a small library, a room maybe fifteen feet square, lined by ornate bookshelves, with a mahogany table in the middle and four Aeron chairs.
Sophia is sitting in one of the chairs, her blonde hair pinned up into a bun, a Vaio laptop in front of her. She looks uncomfortable. There is a large jade bowl, full of water, in front of one of the other seats. Laurent guides Danielle to that seat, then Keiran to the one opposite. They sit without protest or comment. Laurent does not sit in the last seat; instead he moves to stand behind Danielle. She looks at the bowl of water and remembers the way Laurent interrogated that man in Paris, what feels like so long ago.
“This conversation will be gentler for all of us,” Laurent says, “particularly Danielle, if you are as forthcoming as possible.”
“Don’t bother with the threats,” Keiran says tiredly. “I don’t care any more. I’ll tell you whatever you want.”
“Very sensible of you. We only have three questions. Once you’ve answered them we’ll helicopter you back to shore. On the understanding that you never speak of us again.”
Keiran says, “Don’t bother with the lies either.”
“The first question is technical. Sophia reports that you have access to some extraordinary computer network. You will tell her how to take it over.”
“Shazam,” Keiran says. “Yes.”
Danielle looks at Sophia, and wonders if her paleness means she is seasick or wrestling with her conscience. There was something she wanted to say to her. Of course. Keiran has begun a lengthy technical discourse, and Sophia has begun to tap at her laptop in response, but Danielle interrupts about thirty words in. “You poor thing,” she says loudly to Sophia. “You’re so smart. But you were too close to it to see it, weren’t you?”
Sophia stops typing. Everyone falls silent for a moment. And then, simultaneous with Laurent’s sharp “Don’t wa
ste our time,” Sophia asks, “What do you mean?”
“Your father,” Danielle says. “It never even occurred to you to wonder, did it? First you make a name for yourself as a teen super-genius. Then your dad gets sick. Then you happen to stumble across Jack Shadbold, and he gives you a job, wins your loyalty, and puts you to work. Don’t you see it?”
“No. See what?”
“That wasn’t coincidence. Shadbold infected your father. With the same drugs he uses to give the people at Kishkinda cancer. So he’d have someone to use the military tools he found. Someone he could rely on to be as loyal as a dog.”
Sophia sits up very straight and stares at Danielle. “That’s insane.”
“You really think Shadbold’s going to cure your father? No. He’s no good to him cured. Your dad will be kept in great pain, on the edge of dying, for as long as Shadbold can, as long as Shadbold needs you, and then he’ll kill you both –” and then a strong hand grabs Danielle’s hair and forces her face into the jade bowl of water.
After the initial shock she gives up her instinctive thrashing attempt to escape and just goes limp. No point trying to fight. Her lungs begin to ache, as if they are compressed in an ever-tightening clamp, and then they cramp with the agonizing need for breath, and she begins to fight again, she can’t not, her muscles spasming almost at random, as the world goes dark around the edges, as her mouth opens up involuntarily to try to breathe water, her body betraying itself despite her fevered attempts to stay in control, the tiny part of her brain that can still think understands that Laurent isn’t just shutting her up, he’s killing her, as simple and final as that, this is the moment of her death –
– but at the last possible second her head is pulled back up into the air, she can breathe again, two great rattling whoops followed by a coughing fit that sounds like an artillery fusillade. She breathed only a little water in but it takes a whole minute to get it all out, during which she isn’t aware of anything but her lungs. By the time it is over she feels exhausted, her core muscles so worn from the coughing that she can barely sit up. Her chest aches with every breath like her lungs are full of broken glass.
