by Adam Blake
‘That’s unusual, isn’t it?’ Kennedy pursued. ‘That you could be part of the same message board group and not know each other?’
Opie shrugged. ‘Not really. How many registered members has the Ravellers board got? Last time I checked the counter, it was up over two hundred. There’s a counter on the front page so you can see when someone new joins – and a thread where they introduce themselves. They don’t all post regularly. I don’t. Not unless I’ve got an actual project on the go. I’d say I know maybe twenty or thirty of them well, and I could tell you the names of twenty more besides. Their screen names, I mean.’
‘You say “when you’ve got a project”,’ Harper began, but Kennedy clearly wasn’t interested in getting Dr Opie to talk about herself. She wanted to know about Stuart Barlow’s group and what they were doing. She rode over Harper’s question, which annoyed him a little – but she was ranking officer, and she had the right to take the lead in the questioning. ‘Did Professor Barlow ever talk to you about exactly what it was he was trying to do?’ she asked now. ‘What he meant by his new approach?’
‘Well, yes,’ Opie said, looking puzzled. ‘Of course he did.’
‘Why of course?’
‘Stuart and I were pretty good friends. I said I didn’t go to any of the conferences, and that’s true – but when the conferences were in London, sometimes I’d get a train down there and meet one or two of the people I knew after the sessions were over on the Friday or the Saturday. We’d go for a few drinks, maybe for dinner. I met Cath that way, and Stuart, too. He was really funny – like the cartoon of an absent-minded professor in a TV show. But he was one of the most intelligent people I ever met. I think that was why he never published. He found it hard to settle on one thing. He’d have an amazing idea, but then while he was working on it he’d have another amazing idea and just leave the first thing unfinished. He talked like that, too.’ She smiled, probably remembering some specific conversation, but then got serious again almost at once. ‘So, you know, there’s no way he wouldn’t at least mention something this big to me. He probably told me about it before he told anyone else.’
‘So you can sum up the project for us,’ Kennedy said, pulling Opie back on track again. ‘I think that might be useful at this stage.’
Opie looked – maybe a little longingly – out through the window at her class. Some of them were still shooting the occasional glance in the direction of the inner office, but for the most part they were working quietly. No riots in progress. They could all be surfing porn or playing minesweeper, but they were doing it discreetly.
‘Okay,’ Opie said, looking resigned. ‘Stuart said he wanted to use a brute force approach.’
‘Which means?’
‘Well, I’m not sure whether he knew what it meant when he said it, but what it came down to, in the end, was crunching the numbers. Digitising the Rotgut and then interrogating it using a really high-end software array that practically had to be written from scratch. That was why Stuart particularly wanted to have IT support. You see, he thought the best way to find the source document for the Rotgut was to—’
‘Wait a minute,’ Harper blurted. ‘Say that again. He wanted?’
Opie blinked, startled. ‘He wanted IT support. Because what he had in mind was going to involve hundreds of hours of—’
‘Does that mean you?’ Harper demanded, interrupting again. ‘Does IT support mean you?’
‘Of course it means me. I wrote the software and ran it. How else do you think I know about all this?’
‘But you said you weren’t in the team!’ Kennedy exclaimed, coming to her feet.
Dr Opie still looked mystified, but now she also looked scared and defensive. ‘I wasn’t,’ she said, involuntarily pushing her chair a little back from Kennedy, who was standing over her, evidently a little too close. ‘I was only doing search runs and filter runs for them. Support. Stuart, Cath and Sam were the team. They were the ones going to write the monograph, if it ever got to be published. I mean, you know, if they found what they were hoping to find. Stuart just asked me to do tech support, and I said yes. That doesn’t make me—’
‘What it makes you,’ Kennedy snapped, cutting Opie off, ‘is a target. If someone is killing the members of this group, why should they draw a distinction between you and the other three? You say you were only helping them out – but you talked to them, worked with them. From the outside, doesn’t it look like you were on the team?’
Opie shook her head, firmly at first, but the conviction drained away in three easy stages.
Shake to the left – you’re crazy in some very well-progressed ways.
Shake to the right – but then, there are a lot of people dead already.
Shake to the left – and you’re saying … oh dear.
She let loose an incredulous and slightly tortured-sounding laugh. Harper felt for her. Incredulity seemed like a reasonable response. If you live in the rarefied air of arcane theories and academic quibbles, you probably get to feel as though there’s at least a tower or two of good, clean ivory between you and the red, bleeding business of the world. But now the History Man was in town, and the walls were coming down. Just for a moment, he felt guilty about the part of himself that was enjoying this.
‘I’m not,’ Opie said again. ‘I’m not on the team.’ But it was a weak protest now. An appeal to a non-existent court of natural justice.
‘Tech support,’ Kennedy said, reminding her of her own words. ‘Professor Barlow wanted you to help him. Who else would know that? Did you talk about it on the board?’
‘Of course I did.’ Opie stood up herself now, confronting Kennedy for a moment or two with her fists clenching and unclenching in unfocused but strong emotion. ‘Of course I did. It wasn’t a secret. All I did was run the programs. I didn’t even read the print-outs. They didn’t mean anything to me.’
Kennedy opened her mouth, but changed her mind and closed it again. She turned to Harper, looking a question at him. He nodded. The specifics didn’t matter. What she was asking him was whether this party needed to change venues, and the answer had to be yes. They could be wrong about everything else: the accidents that had killed Hurt and Devani could just be accidents, and the break-ins at Barlow’s cottage and his office at Prince Regent’s amazing coincidences. The disappearing Michael Brand – Harper suddenly remembered that he still hadn’t mentioned any of that to Kennedy – could be a complete innocent who was just absent-minded about his address. It made no difference. They had only one priority here, and only one way to take it. They had reason to believe a witness was in immediate, physical danger. They had to bring her in.
‘Should I move the car around to the entrance?’ Harper asked Kennedy.
‘Yes,’ Kennedy said. ‘Thanks, Chris. Do that.’ Then she held up her hand – stop – and turned back to Opie. ‘Is there a back entrance?’ she asked.
‘What?’ Opie asked. She didn’t seem to see where this was going.
‘To this block. Is there another way out?’
‘Only the fire escape.’
To Harper again: ‘We’ll go that way, and we’ll go together. Dr Opie, we’re taking you into protective custody. Please collect any things you need to take with you right now. Obviously we’ll send someone round to your house later to pick up anything else you’d like to have – but it may be some time before you go back there yourself.’
‘I’m in the middle of a lesson,’ Opie pointed out, as though that was still an issue.
‘Dismiss the class,’ Kennedy said. ‘Or tell them to keep working unsupervised. Presumably they can be trusted to do that?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘We’ll explain to your employers – to the college authorities – that this was out of your hands. That it was our decision. And I’m sure they’ll find someone to cover your work while you’re away.’
Opie still looked unhappy, and she carried on arguing right up to the point where Kennedy picked up her handbag and
placed it in her hands. Somehow that both galvanised and silenced her. She collected a few items from the desk – a flash-drive, a purse and a few thick whiteboard markers – and dropped them into the bag. Then she gave Kennedy a reproachful, bewildered look, which perhaps was intended for God or Nemesis, and took a step towards the door. Almost immediately she yelped as if stung and went back quickly to the desk. She turned a few papers over, rummaged through the contents of a red plastic in-tray, and at last came up with a single folded sheet of yellow paper. ‘Password,’ she said to Harper and Kennedy. ‘For my files. I change it every week.’
‘You write your password down?’ Harper asked, slightly scandalised.
‘Of course not,’ Opie snapped, nettled by the implied disapproval. ‘But I keep a mnemonic in case I forget it.’
She went through into the main workroom. Harper and Kennedy followed.
The students all looked up from their work, knowing that something out of the ordinary was going down and curious to see what it was going to be. ‘We’re winding the lesson up a little early,’ Dr Opie said. ‘Any of you who want to carry on working can do so, up until twelve-thirty. And the due date for the database assignment stays the same, so please do use the time sensibly. I’ll see you all next week.’
The students all turned back to their screens, but it was clear from their brisk movements and sweeping up of stray belongings that most were packing up. Kennedy hustled Opie towards the door, keen to get to it before the general exodus began. Harper brought up the rear, the narrow aisle between desks obliging them to stay in single file. They had to step over bags and books left in the aisle, so progress was slower than it might have been.
Abruptly, Kennedy stopped. She turned to look at Harper, or maybe past him, her expression a puzzled frown.
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Those men looked—’
There was a sound like the scrape of a chair being pushed back. Something moved at Harper’s elbow. He turned and found himself staring into the face of a man maybe ten years older than he was, dark-haired and pale-skinned, dressed in a loose white shirt and light tan suit, their coarse fabric making them look hand-woven. The man was standing, had just come to his feet. He had an expression on his face of strange, detached calm, but the pupils of his eyes were enormous. Drugs, Harper thought: he has to be on something.
He put a hand on the man’s shoulder to make him sit down again. The man took Harper’s hand at the wrist, his grip like the inflexible bite of a handcuff, and twisted it suddenly, unexpectedly. Harper gasped and buckled at the knees as pain lanced up his arm.
He heard Kennedy shout, but didn’t catch the words. He struck out clumsily, with his left hand, and made contact, but the punch caught the man on the shoulder rather than the point of the jaw. The grip on Harper’s arm stayed as tight as before as the man returned the punch, catching Harper full in the stomach, forcing the breath out of him in an explosive grunt.
He found it hard to take an in-breath, to replace that lost air. The man let go of his arm, and to his own surprise Harper sprawled backwards, knocking over a computer on the desk behind him. He heard screams, and he could understand why. The man who’d just hit him was weeping, and his tears were dark red.
More screams. Harper tried to right himself, but his legs felt wobbly and didn’t want to take his weight. The man with the bleeding eyes, red runnels in his cheeks, stared at him for a moment longer – a stare of total contempt – before turning away.
Over the screams, Harper certainly couldn’t have heard the blood pattering to the ground between his feet. But he caught sight of one of the drops as it fell. He touched his stomach and felt the sticky wetness there, insinuating and terrible. He looked at his red fingers, and an incredulous laugh forced its way out of his throat.
The universe shrank to that redness. It was as hot as hell and tasted of iron.
21
Kennedy’s first and only warning was that doubled sense of déjà vu.
She walked past the man, feeling only a vague prickle of recognition. When she walked past him a second time, the memory clicked into place. He was the man she’d seen in the car park below, in the white Bedford van. But now there were two of him.
She stopped, forcing Harper to stop too, and turned. Almost instantly, she realised that her initial impression had been wrong. There were differences in the physiques of the two men, one being a little taller, a little bulkier than the other. A disparity in their ages – ten years, at least – and in their faces, too, or at least in their expressions. What looked like slightly trippedout calm in the face of the thinner man metamorphosed on the other’s broader features into a scarily robotic blankness. They were mostly alike in their complexion and the colour of their hair – and in the weirdness of their bearing, that wide-eyed stare that took in the whole world while barely acknowledging its presence.
Harper was looking at her expectantly, and she opened her mouth to say something, but hesitated, trying to frame in her mind a warning against a threat she wasn’t even sure was there. The second man, the one nearest to them, pushed his chair back and rose, the sound of the chair legs on the floor making Harper turn his head to look at him. After that, things happened so quickly they seemed to be pictures in a stroboscopic slide show, each impressing itself on Kennedy’s mind as a still image.
Harper was touching the man on the shoulder.
The man’s arm was out, connecting with Harper’s stomach.
Metal flashed, then didn’t because it was sheathed: sheathed in flesh.
Harper fell against a desk.
At some point in this flicker-book series, Kennedy yelled to the room at large, ‘Down! Everybody down!’ and stepped in to help Harper as he pitched over on to the floor. She aimed the simplest of karate punches at the man, the only one she’d ever practised: palm up, knuckles of the index and middle fingers forward, punching from the hip while advancing the same leg.
She didn’t even come close to touching him. The man leaned aside from the punch and stepped in closer to her, moving with terrifying, near-impossible speed while not seeming to be in any special hurry. For an instant Kennedy was staring into his face, and she realised that he was crying: red tears, like blood, running down his face. For some reason, the sight made her stomach lurch, and that instinctive revulsion saved her. She leaned back as though from some atavistic fear of contamination. The knife the man had used on Harper, its stubby blade obscenely crimsoned and trailing beads of blood like spray, parted the air in front of her chest and then, at the end of its arc, bit into her shoulder. The blade was so sharp that her shirt and jacket, the flesh and sinew beneath, didn’t even seem to slow it down.
Screams rose around her, sustained beyond all reason as though a rock star had entered a room full of teenaged fans. The man was off balance momentarily, and Kennedy kicked from the direction in which he was already moving, catching him way down on the leg. He lurched, his centre of gravity momentarily outside his base, and she clubbed him with her closed fist on the side of his jaw as he went down.
His twin – his twin who looked so very different from him, and yet so eerily alike – was standing behind him, at much the same angle to Kennedy. The effect was of peeling one layer of skin from an onion and finding the same structures, the same textures repeated underneath. But the second man had his arm out horizontally, straight from the shoulder, pointing at her. Not with an accusing finger, but with a long-barrelled handgun. His eyes, staring at her steadily over that matt steel barrel, were pale blue shot with red.
Kennedy had never before frozen up at the sight of a gun. Guns were familiar things to her: tools, dangerous but useful, and answerable to her will. In other people’s hands, they were to be feared, but she knew how to read a shooter’s body language and to get her dodging in early. You couldn’t move out of a bullet’s path once it was fired, but you had a reasonable window before then. Half a second between that tug on the trigger and the arrival of the payload: at the beginning of the half-sec
ond, the shooter committed himself. The interim was negotiable territory.
This time was different. Seeing the gun, Kennedy felt a sudden absence of will, a draining of thought. She stood still, not because she was frozen in place but because she couldn’t make herself decide to move.
‘Da b’koshta,’ the man said.
He fired three times, so quickly the sounds of the three shots seemed to overlap. Kennedy flinched and stiffened, expecting the arrival of death, expecting it to pass through her like a wind through corn.
Sarah Opie danced a short, brutal jig as the bullets all went home, and didn’t start to fall until the third had hit her.
The sound came later, mooching on to the scene like lazy thunder after the lightning had already gone by. Too late, much too late, Kennedy threw herself forward. The gun turned in a swift flick of motion to point at her head, but this time her punch was quicker and better aimed, and she knocked it aside. Stepping inside the man’s guard, she tried to lock her leg behind his and throw him, but the cramped space worked against her. She collided with the projecting edge of a desk and stumbled. Something caught her on her left temple and slammed her down. She hit the floor hard, random flashes of light and dark superseding each other in front of her eyes.
She tried to move, to lever herself up off the floor. As her sight came back in patches, the angles and the colours sickeningly wrong, she found herself staring into the eyes of Dr Opie. The woman’s lips, as white as her face, moved seemingly without sound, and her fingers trembled as they scratched at the tiled floor.
There was a lull in the screaming, and Kennedy heard, with dreamlike clarity, a small fragment of what Opie was saying. ‘A dove … a dove got …’
