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Tower’s space launch facilities in North Africa: rocket gantries silhouetted
against the rising sun; platinum missiles hurling themselves into the wide, blue
desert sky.
“And what happens to the infected?”
“They’ll be euthanized and incinerated.”
Lee swallowed.
“I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with this.”
Harrell eased himself into an armchair. “There’s no reason not to be.
This is purely a security contract. It’s just like guarding young offenders or
illegal immigrants. You keep them detained and you process them. If they’re
clean, they leave by the front door; if they’re infected…”
Lee felt a shiver at the back of his neck.
“What?”
Harrell blew into his fist and opened his fingers, miming smoke.
“They leave via the chimney.”
Lee’s stomach tightened. On unsteady legs, he walked around and took
a seat behind his desk. Picking up a pen, he tapped the end nervously against
the palm of his opposite hand.
“I’ll have to think about it.”
The other man’s jowls settled around his collar like candle wax around
the top of a cheap restaurant wine bottle.
“In which case, I’d have to advise you to think quickly. We won’t ask
twice.”
Outside, the rain thickened, falling like static from a monochrome sky.
It splashed onto the wooden decking of the balcony, and into Harrell’s
abandoned wineglass, diluting the remaining orange juice.
“What’s in it for me?”
Above the sound of the rain, Lee heard pots clatter in the kitchen. Kerri
and Lewis had been staying with him for the past fortnight, since Kerri’s release
from hospital. With Heather dead and her assets in the hands of her
inhospitable family, they had nowhere else to go.
Harrell sniffed.
“Have you ever considered politics, Mr. Doyle?”
A plane whined overhead. Lee placed the pen on the desk and pushed
back in his chair. The casters whispered on the wooden floor.
“I’m just a software engineer.” His modesty was a default response, one
he often used as a way of evading questions. Harrell didn’t fall for it.
“Decide quickly,” he said. “And perhaps, while I’m waiting, you could
offer me something a little stronger than fruit juice?”
Lee stumbled to his feet. He glanced at the mantelpiece, where a smooth
pebble sat between framed photographs and plastic trophies—a prize gathered
by Lewis on a trip to Brighton the day before, and the first and only gift Lee’s
son had ever given him.
“Of course.”
He walked over to the drinks cabinet and reached for the scotch. As he
poured, his heart hammered against the lining of his chest. He’d lost his wife
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the night the Reefs first came; almost lost Kerri in an outbreak. If further losses
were to be avoided, something had to be done. Lone Tower squads had been
rounding up changelings for months now. Several had already died in custody
and been quietly vivisected in the corporation’s laboratories, the secrets of their
rewritten DNA funneled into a hundred research and development projects.
Taking control of the camps would merely be a way of formalizing the process,
only this time with government backing. The potential rewards—both in terms
of finance and science—were staggering. One of the changelings recovered
from the Cornish debacle had been perfectly adapted to life underwater, with
gills, webbed appendages, and a vastly increased lung capacity. Suppose
somewhere, one of the Reefs spat out a human being capable of surviving in
space without expensive air tanks and pressure suit? He could barely imagine
how much something like that would be worth.
“Sod it,” he said, letting his accent slip. “I’m in. The shareholders would
kill me if I walked away from a government contract.” He passed one of the
drinks to Harrell, who enfolded it in meaty fingers.
“So, you’ll do it?”
Lee bit his lip. He knew he was doing the right thing, the responsible
thing; yet still felt as if he was about to agree to something huge, dark and
irrevocable. He knocked back the whisky from his glass and swallowed hard.
The fumes made his eyes water.
“Yes.”
THREE DAYS LATER, they came for Kerri.
A Lone Tower security squad pulled into the car park of his building in
an armoured troop carrier with blacked-out windows and Lone Tower logos
on its sides. There were five of them, and they all carried assault rifles. Waving
a signed court order, they simply walked through Lee’s bodyguards, who
found themselves outgunned and legally outmaneuvered.
When they came through the front door of his apartment, Lee blocked
their path.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Yes sir. But there are to be no exceptions.”
“I could fire you right here, right now.”
“Wouldn’t do any good, sir. We’re hired through a subcontractor. You’d
have to take it up with them.”
Two of the men restrained him while the other three marched Kerri from
the building. Her hands were cuffed but her chin remained high and defiant as
if, somehow, she’d always known this would happen.
Lewis kicked and screamed for his mother. Lee held him back as the
doors slammed and the truck drove away.
As it vanished from sight, the boy twisted in his grip and buried his face
in Lee’s shoulder.
“It’s okay.” Lee put a hand to the back of the kid’s head.
“No, it isn’t.” Lewis’s fingers clawed at Lee’s shirt. “You let them take
her.” He pulled away, features screwed up like a fist, an index finger held out
37
in shaking accusation. “You’re a monster. You let them take her. You let them.”
He turned and ran. “I hate you; I hate you; I hate you!”
38
7.
THE LIMOUSINE EMERGED from the underground garage, nosing its way through
shouts and placards. Hands banged the windows. Feet kicked the bodywork.
It pulled out into the street and a shoe hit the rear windscreen. Then they were
clear and moving through the city. On the back seat, Lee Doyle loosened his tie
and undid the top button of his shirt. Despite their hatred of him, he couldn’t
summon any animosity towards the protestors. Let them shake their
handwritten signs and shout their slogans. They weren’t his problem anymore;
he was leaving, and he was taking Lewis with him. Looking through the
smoked glass window at the black taxis and red buses, he knew these moments
in the car were the last he’d ever spend in London with his son, so he tried to
drink it all in with his eyes—the tourists and pigeons flocking together in
Trafalgar Square; the brick-faced pubs and narrow side streets; the bus stops
and Underground stations. He tried to stuff it all into his head so he’d never
forget; so, he could carry it with him on the journey ahead.
Beside him, hunched up against the far door, Lewis had plugged into
his tablet. He had his earphones in, mainlining aggressive skater music. He
; hadn’t spoken since the ride began and had barely looked up from the screen.
The past few days had been tense for them both, and Lee preferred this silent
treatment to the usual tantrums and shouting.
Between them on the seat, a locked steel briefcase held Lee’s few
remaining possessions: some personal papers; an old USB memory stick; a gold
pen; some sheep’s wool; a gold ring; a lump of clear Perspex containing a single
Alpine snowflake; a plastic bullet; the pebble his son had given him; and
enough money to get them where they were going. He’d had to abandon
everything else. He’d left his penthouse apartment unlocked and his Porsche
on a South London street with the windows open and the key in the ignition.
His stock portfolio had been signed over to a children’s charity and his modern
art collection donated to the National Gallery. Beside his son, the only things
that mattered to him were the items in the briefcase and the clothes he wore.
Following instructions, the driver took them out along the A40, towards
Oxford. Lee had a helicopter standing-by at a private airfield near High
Wycombe. By the time they got there, it was fuelled and ready to depart.
At the cabin door, he paused to take a last breath of England. The air
smelled of hot concrete, aviation fuel and cut grass. Inside the cabin, he tried to
help Lewis strap in, but the boy shook him off. The kid didn’t want his help;
didn’t even want to be here. Lee had pulled him from school without notice,
against the protestations of the staff. Now, they were the only passengers.
Through the small window at his elbow, he saw the limo retreating. The driver
had been well paid and meticulously briefed; the car would be found the
following morning, abandoned in a service area close to the Severn Bridge with
Lee’s handwritten suicide note pinned to the centre of its steering wheel. A pair
of his favourite shoes and a gold Rolex would be found on the bridge itself, as
39
if discarded by their owner. Lee rubbed his face with his hands. If his ruse
worked, he and his son would be presumed drowned, their bodies washed out
to sea on the estuary’s tide.
Overhead, the rotors were turning. Lee closed his eyes and imagined the
hardness of sun-warmed stone blocks, the smell of sheep shit and fresh grass,
and the thudding downdraught of an army chopper wending its way
southwards, following the river down the length of a Welsh valley. He
squeezed the armrests. Memories were forged iron links, fettering him to the
past. The only way to smash free was to become somebody else, to shed his
past like a spent ammo clip and take on a new identity. As the tarmac fell away
and the greys of the airfield shriveled into the green and yellow squares of the
Buckinghamshire countryside, he imagined crumpling his life in his hand like
a discarded, half-written letter.
Goodbye, Lee Doyle.
Fall away in the downdraught.
HIS PHONE RANG as the helicopter crossed the inundated coast between
Portsmouth and Chichester.
“Yes?”
“Mister Doyle? It’s George Tyson.”
“Who?”
“Bullock’s man.”
“What do you want?”
Lee looked out of the rain-streaked cabin window. They were so low the
helicopter’s skids almost kissed the water; its rotors whipped spray from the
granite grey swell.
“We found her, sir.”
Lee’s heart seemed to pause in his chest.
“Where is she?”
“The camp on Anglesey.”
“Can we get her out?”
“We’re already trying.”
He let out a long breath and wiped his free hand across his mouth. He
had scarcely dared believe she would still be alive.
“Have her taken to the launch facility.”
“I will see to it.” The man gave a polite cough. “And sir?”
“Yes?”
“I think you’d better take a look at the news.”
Lee killed the call and used his phone to access a live TV feed. The
pictures were the same on all the channels. The British army had stormed into
the Lone Tower quarantine camp and research facility on Salisbury Plain, and
the resulting footage had gone viral. At first, Lee tried to shield his son’s eyes
from the images; but when the boy struggled, he gave up. He didn’t have the
strength to resist. All he could do was watch in horror as the soldiers tried to
help the emaciated prisoners. A shaking cameraman walked around the lip of
one of the ‘tanks’—the large metal rooms where prisoners were systematically
40
drowned, and their skeletons bleached to kill off any lingering infection.
Mounds of gleaming skulls lay in a trench out behind the building, waiting to
be covered over and buried. Other trenches had already been back-filled with
concrete—row upon row of them, stretching away towards the barbed wire at
the camp’s perimeter. Enough, the voiceover suggested, to house five thousand
bodies, perhaps more.
In response, Lone Tower security personnel and scientists were being
handcuffed and bundled into camouflaged lorries. In London, military police
took control of the House of Commons and the government fell, live on air.
Shamed politicians were led from the building with towels covering their faces.
Lee Doyle, the head of the company operating and making a profit from the
death camps, had been declared a fugitive and an enemy of humanity. An army
spokesman promised that the new martial authority would do everything in
its power to locate him and bring him to justice.
Tears running down his face, Lee watched the reports cycle over and
over, the same gristly images of the camps—and the pictures of his own face—
repeating in a sequence he knew would torture him, waking and sleeping, for
the rest of his life.
He’d known things were bad; he’d just had no idea how bad…
Without taking his eyes from the screen, he pulled the gold pen from the
briefcase. It was the same pen with which he’d signed Harrell’s contract,
believing he was doing something to help save humanity from the scourge of
the Reefs; the same pen he’d used to lend his stamp of approval to reports and
planning documents that had eventually led thousands, maybe hundreds of
thousands, of men, women and children to their deaths. He wanted to drop it,
to throw it away. Instead, he closed his fist around it. He would never let it go.
He would carry it with him now, wherever he went. Thanks to its gold case, it
had always been a heavy pen. Now, clasped in his hand, its weight was almost
more than he could bear.
TWO HOURS AND forty minutes after crossing the English Channel, the jet
touched down at the Lone Tower launch facility in Algeria.
Stepping from the plane, Lee put a hand to shade his eyes against the
desert glare. Sweat broke out beneath his shirt. The heat here was an order of
magnitude greater than it had been in London.
The Hammaguir facility lay in the desert southwest of Béchar. It
comprised a brace of runways and a cluster of prefabricated buildings; a few
Fuller domes; and a new, white-painted water tower. He
at mirages shimmered
at either the end of the runway. The first French satellite had been launched
from here in 1965. Now, Lone Tower owned the place, and, for the past five
years, had been using it to launch payloads into orbit.
Aware that he would never again ride in his private jet, Lee pocketed a
small cardboard book of complimentary matches as a souvenir. The cover had
the Lone Tower corporate logo printed on the front.
With Lewis in tow, he made his way across the sand-blown tarmac to
the main building at the edge of the airfield, where he was welcomed by one of
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the project leaders, a stocky former NASA employee by the name of Constance
Marcelene.
“Welcome to Algeria,” she said.
Lee gave her a thin smile. The three of them were alone in the arrivals
lounge.
“I want three spaces on the next launch.”
Connie’s heavy mascara blinked at him.
“Three…?”
“Me, Lewis, and one other.”
The woman frowned. “But it’s only seventy-two hours away. We have
the crew assigned, most of the cargo loaded...”
“I don’t care.” Lee un-shouldered his bag and let it fall to the floor. “Do
whatever it takes, but you have to get us on that flight.”
Connie pursed her lips.
“Things are at a crucial stage,” she said. “The Widening Gyre’s going to
leave next week, whether we’ve finished loading or not. With all due respect,
Gareth L Powell Page 6
