“They’ll be long dead, surely?”
“That’s what I thought, originally. But his daughter, Jessica, would be about 74 now, so could easily be alive. And his wife, Paula, was apparently going to be cryonically suspended as well. And I did some research and the company that arranged it for Mathew was the only one in the country that would have performed such a procedure, so if it happened it seems likely that she would be here somewhere.”
“Right…” he said cautiously.
“But I don’t know anything about how to trace people, or where the records for the clinic’s patients would be. Dr Warwick has made it clear to me that he does not expect me to work with any other cases like Mathew. So I just wondered if you knew who might know, or be able to find out about these things?”
“Why ask me?”
“Because you seem nice and you are the only person that regularly talks with Mathew. And I checked up on you and you haven’t got a specific reason for working on that floor, so I assumed that you must be doing it because you want to help, and, well, this would be helping. You must know people to have been able to arrange the work in the first place. I do have reasons to think that maybe you could be quite creative with personal files.”
Deon swilled the coffee round his cup and swallowed the last of it, his mind racing. Everything about working here had just fallen into place and now someone was asking him to get more involved. This must have been divine intervention, even if he didn’t like the way that she seemed to know something about him. He thought he almost sensed an element of intimidation.
“I could ask around, but…” he said, pausing for a while.
“But, what?”
“Well, they’re a little cagey about him, aren’t they? The doctors I mean. I don’t know if they’d understand someone at my level getting involved in this, it would have to be kept very quiet.”
“Well, yes, I thought that. Which is why I would appreciate it if we could keep this to ourselves. So do you know anyone? I could get access to the patient files for medical purposes, but they’re not on my database, so I need to know where to look. I need someone that’s been here for a few years.”
“Well, I’ve not been here long myself…”
“No, no, I realise that. But I don’t really know anyone here at all, and I thought that maybe you did. And as you’re working on something that I don’t think you’re exactly screened to do, I thought that I could help you keep that quiet if you’d help me.” She smiled as if she hadn’t just made a veiled threat.
“Ok. Could I let you into a secret, while we’re keeping things quiet?”
“Sure.”
“I can trace people and I can hack most systems. I used to do it for a living, but I gave all of that up to work with the sick.” Deon was quite pleased with this story. It made him sound sympathetic and yet let Rei know what he was capable of.
“Really? Why did you do that James?”
“It was something I did when I was kid. I was a tracer.” Rei looked blank. “I traced people for debt and back payments of loans. Critical, eh? It was all slightly illegal. I’m not proud of it, but it’s there, and if I can use that experience now to help someone that must be good.”
“I suppose so.”
“So…you need to find a… Jennifer?
“Jessica. Jessica Lyle.”
“Right, Jessica Lyal? Old fashioned sort of name, isn’t it? Date of birth?”
“Twenty-fourth of November 1994.”
“Ok,” said Deon, inputting the date into his c-pac. That should be fairly straightforward. Now, the wife: Paula did you say?”
“Yes. I have a date of birth, but obviously no date of death. But she must be here somewhere, so if I could access the patient details from the early part of the century we could find her.”
“Right. That’s harder. Early twenty-first century data tended to be stored electronically. The back-ups they used still exist often, but they can’t be read by anything that we’d have, and obviously I haven’t got access to any restricted areas or files.”
“No, but I have.”
He studied her. What was going on inside her head? Was this all as straightforward as it seemed? He didn’t have the luxury of time to decide.
“Well, it’s not impossible to get access into the system here I’d guess; as long as we do it from inside the network so we haven’t got to break through any security coding. It’s a bit like housebreaking. It’s much easier to route around in a house that you’re already in, then enter from the outside and then start looking for what you want. But I’d need your help to speed it up, and if it’s not done quickly they’ll see that someone’s digging around in the files. I don’t think either of us wants that.” She shook her head. “What time do you finish?”
“Sixteen hundred.”
“Fine. Meet me here at sixteen-thirty. Bring your access codes and we’ll see what we can find. But it’ll have to be secret; they’ll terminate my contract if they find out that I used to be a tracer.”
“Fine. They’ll terminate mine if they know that I am looking into back files of patients that are not allocate to me.” Briskly Rei got up and left Deon to muse on the good fortune that had come his way.
24
Rei was late for the meeting by forty minutes. Warwick had come to the ward to ask her about Mathew’s condition. He had seemed edgy and concerned, which was out of character and she hadn’t been able to get away from him easily. By the time she reached Deon he was within 2 minutes of leaving, having assumed that she’d changed her mind.
“Sorry James, I was held up.”
“No problem,” he lied, and they walked to a secluded room where Deon set up. He linked his c-pac into the database via a home-made interface he’d created a few years back. He was rather proud of his creation, even if it was a little Heath Robinson. He began searching.
“We’ll have about 45 minutes until there’s any chance that the system will realise that we’re not supposed to be in it,” he explained without looking at Rei. “If we haven’t got anything by then I’ll have to shut down and lock ourselves out of the database for two days, otherwise it’ll show on the records.”
“Fine,” said Rei, without really understanding his reasoning.
It took nearly 20 minutes to gain access to the inner sanctum of the system. Using Rei’s codes Deon worked on the database access mechanism until suddenly a firewall opened in the machine and a series of files appeared: Live Right, Turner and Brown, Medical Line Research International, International Transplants PLC, DNA Processing Ltd, and a host of other companies and their affiliates. They had entered the Live Right patient database. He traced through the companies’ databases looking for anything that seemed out of the ordinary. It was excruciatingly slow. Mathew Lyal was listed along with two dozen other names, but no files for Paula Lyal appeared.
“She’s not here, is she?” enquired Rei despondently.
“Not under that name, no. Hang on.” Deon entered the files of one of the other patients. I may never get another chance to do this, he thought, and this is exactly what I need for that Brading guy. “I want to examine the differences, if there are any, between the files on those people not revived, compared to Mathew’s. That might take us somewhere.” He flicked through the on-screen files quickly to check the data, but nothing out of the ordinary came up.
“James, you better hurry up,” whispered Rei, checking the time.
“Yeah, just let me check another couple.” He moved onto the next file. Still nothing. Each file had to be accessed separately, it all took too long.
“Come on, we have about 3 minutes left,” Rei said anxiously. “Can’t you load it onto your c-pac and do this later?”
“No, it doesn’t work like that on these old files. I’ve copied the ones I can get, but not all of these. It takes too long.”
“Well, can you hurry it up?”
“Yeah, ok. I can do this quicker if no one talks to me,” he snapped. “One more.”
/>
There was nothing on the files that looked any different to any of the other files. Except one thing he spotted near the last entry. There was a link to another file. He accessed it and the machine whirred as it moved into a separate database.
“Fucking hell,” he gasped through his teeth.
“What is it?”
“Look. This patient’s file was updated, not at the time of death like all of the others, except Mathew, but much later. This is last year. They tried to revive this one. Except it couldn’t have worked. See here, the patient was lost and ‘deposited’, whatever that means. But they ran a DNA test on her, and did something….”
“Come on, James, we have to get out of the system.”
“Wait, what’s this mean?”
Rei read the notes over his shoulder. “They operated on her, but that was dated after the unsuccessful revival.”
“What? What did they do?”
“See if there’s anything else.” He flicked forward and Rei kept an eye on the notes flashing in front of her. “They removed a great deal of tissue, and….hang on….her lungs, heart, spleen, and liver. Why would they do that?”
“That timer is counting down.”
“I need to read this James.”
“Sorry, I’m goin’ to have to leave this.” He clenched his fist as he watched the files appear slowly on the screen. It was too close, he had to pull out of the system.
“No, stay in,” Rei whispered through her teeth.
“We’re going to go over the schedule. It’ll show up.”
Rei read as quickly as she could, trying to memorise the files that flashed past.
“I’m pulling out, it’s too long,” and Deon, closed the files hurriedly and backtracked through the system, finally closing their access to it.
“Well?” he asked.
“They did several similar operations, although I could not see all of the case notes, but I got to see what they were removing from the patients.”
“So what were they doing that for?”
Rei was quiet. “I can’t think of a reason for doing that kind of operation, not after a patient was lost anyway. The only reason you would do that would be for a donor.”
“What do you mean?”
“A donor. Someone who donates their body parts posthumously for transplantation. It used to be quite common before artificial organs were created.”
“So why would they want a donor?”
“I can’t imagine a reasonable answer to that,” she said.
25
Philip looked at the files that Deon had input onto his c-pac. Deon had been apologetic that this was a small amount of the possible data. “The tip of the snowstorm,” he’d called it. You're a clever moron, thought Philip. The Walden Centre was certainly up to something that veered between illegal and immoral. The files were not exactly what he’d expected, but they included details of earlier attempts to restore patients from cryonic suspension. But why then go to the bother of actually reviving any of their frozen patients?
“What the fuck are you up to Warwick?” he said quietly to himself. He scanned the list of names, but nothing appeared to link them or sounded any alarms for him. He looked at the profiles. All were in their 20s or 30s, and all appeared to have died as a result of RTAs, whatever they are. Philip looked up the meaning of the letters. Anything he’d ever researched in the twentieth century was always full of these acronyms. It was annoying. But even when he’d discovered the phrase road traffic accident, he still couldn’t find any other links between them. On top of which, the information that the Walden Centre had released about Lyal said that he’d suffered from a heart defect, and hadn’t died as a result of an accident; road traffic or otherwise. It must be a coincidence, he decided. The traffic was heavier back then. He poured a small glass of scotch and stood at the window to his apartment, thinking through the events as Deon had explained them to him. The girl, Reiko, could be of use after all, that was for sure. He was going to have to try to meet her properly. Deon could arrange that later. But he needed to work out why this was happening as it was; it didn’t make sense to revive any of the people they had frozen in their clinic.
His c-pac beeped annoyingly at him and checked the alert: it was a message from Justine.
“Hi Philip, how are you?”
“Puzzled, pissed off, wondering where my story’s going. Usual stuff. What you got?”
“Your man Warwick.”
“Yeah, what about him?”
“He’s selling shares.”
“Many?”
“A shit load more than he bought through the company!”
“Yeah, I think he’s been buying them privately, he’s got a large holding in the Walden Centre.”
“Well, not any more, ’cos he’s just shifted twenty eight percent of the company and put another thirty percent on the market. And they’re not all in his name, either.”
“Shit, I knew he had extra shares but that’s more than I knew about.”
“Well, if you see him, be nice, ’cos he’s just about to make, well, I reckon about just over 500 million.”
Philip whistled through his teeth. “Anything else?”
“Not at the moment. But if you want to do anything on this story, do it quick, because if I was him I wouldn’t be hanging about in Britain for the investigation.”
“Thanks, I’ll check it.” He terminated connection and finished his drink.
So, Warwick ran some dodgy shares deal, had an illegal limb and organ factory, and now a piece of excellent publicity has allowed his shares to soar and get him the cash to get a ticket out of any investigation. Philip was probably the only one really onto Warwick, but Warwick would need to cover his tracks before he could leave the country, if that was his plan. And how would he do that? What will that mean for the clinic, and the people like Lyal in there? He ran a message through to Deon:
“Check something for me, pal. Can you access Lyal’s medical files.”
“Yeah, some of them, why?”
“See if there’s anything happening, anything like a transfer to another clinic, or change of personnel. Call me back when you know.”
“A transfer, no there’s not. Why?”
“How do you know?”
“Because I looked through some his files earlier and that wasn’t there.”
Philip was puzzled. “Why did you check his medical records?”
“There’s this girl here, a nurse or something, and she wanted me to look into his files ’cos he’s got a wife and kid, and she thought they might be here. Well, not the daughter, but the wife. Although to be honest I suppose that the daughter could be here, but anyway, we weren’t looking for her. She could be anywhere really. Well, not anywhere I guess, but certainly we’d be pushed to find….”
“James, the records?”
“Oh yeah, we’ve been looking in the old files, and she’s found all this weird old shit in there about operations and transplants and stuff, that’s what I sent you.”
“And this girl, she works with Lyal?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you get her to meet me?”
“Not sure, she was a bit cagey.”
“Well try.”
“Ok, I’ll do my best.”
“And can you copy me the information that you get?”
“Yeah. Will this pay?”
“James, this will certainly pay.”
26
The Beatles were singing Hey Jude when Rei entered Mathew’s room. He seemed a little brighter today, and was sitting on his bed, practising swinging his leg.
“Found some music you like, then?”
“Well, I’m really a jazz man, but this is good. It’s the first time I’ve heard anything like this in…” he trailed off, “well, in a long time. James showed me how to access other tunes through the data-thing but this was the only one it would actually allow me use. I’m not really sure why I couldn’t get anything else. But, yeah, The Beatles were coo
l, and I’ve got the whole collection here from Love Me Do to Let it Be, well technically Abbey Road was the final recording, but hey, it’s all there. You like The Beatles? I bet you’re more of a Rolling Stones person.”
“No, not really. I know Vaughan Williams. Were these people popular when you were younger?”
“Well, hardly. I mean, yeah The Beatles and The Stones were huge when I was kid, but I don’t really remember them. I was only getting into music in the 70s, and there wasn’t much good music from then on. The Beatles are just those bands whose albums you had, you know.”
“What are albums?”
“Albums, they’re, well, they’re collections of songs, all released together.”
“Like in an opera?”
“No, not really. Except for Tommy, by The Who.”
“Oh, I see,” said Rei, not really understanding at all. The music she’d studied had always told stories or been linked in ‘symphonies’ and ‘movements’. “So this isn’t jazz then.”
“No, no this ain’t jazz,” he said, shaking his head. People in this era really didn’t know their music. He made a mental note to play James some Beatles, and marked up All You Need is Love to play for him later. He would need educating in music too, Mathew imagined. “So how’s your day been?”
“Oh, good.”
“What do you do in your spare time?”
“Spare time. That is the time I don’t spend working, correct?” Rei said with a slight laugh. She was getting use to some of Mathew’s strange sayings.
“Yeah, your time out of work.”
“I don’t have much time out of work, Mathew. Perhaps if you get better quickly I can have some, then I could go to a ‘gig’ and see some ‘rock and roll’,” she replied, exaggerating the phrases she’d picked up while she attended to the work she had to perform.
“Do you not go out here then, when you’re not administering to me?”
“I wouldn’t go to many places in London, Mathew. People here are not friendly. I know few people, and much of the city is not safe.”
“Doesn’t sound like it’s changed much then.”
The Relic Keeper Page 11
