Reviver: A Novel

by Seth Patrick

  ‘Where the fuck have you been?’ said Never.

  ‘Long story. I’m fine. Don’t fret.’

  ‘Easy for you to say. I’ve been ringing since before noon.’

  ‘Honestly, I’m fine. I’ll explain later.’

  It took a few more reassurances before Never sounded appeased. Jonah ended the call.

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Annabel. ‘Your wife?’

  Jonah smiled and shook his head. ‘Friend of mine. He gets worried about me.’

  Annabel sipped her coffee. ‘What, does he think he’s your mother?’ It was just a flippant remark, but after a moment’s delay her face fell. ‘Shit, Jonah, I didn’t mean to…’

  It took a few seconds for him to understand. ‘How did you know about my mom?’

  She glanced down. ‘My dad told me about you, years ago. When he interviewed you. He told me about the accident, and what happened with your mother.’

  ‘Sixteen when he talked to me. Fourteen when she died.’

  ‘I couldn’t believe how hard it must have been. You’d lost both your parents, and…’

  Jonah said nothing, letting Annabel finish the thought. She closed her eyes for a moment. ‘Shit,’ she said at last. ‘So, do we get any special discounts as orphans?’

  Jonah laughed, loud and hard. ‘That is in really bad taste.’

  Annabel shrugged. ‘There’s a phrase for it. Incongruity of effect. It means when things get really fucked up, you grow an equally twisted sense of humour.’

  ‘Then we’re in deep trouble.’

  She smiled and nodded, and they fell into silence, drinking their coffee.

  Annabel set down her cup. ‘So why does your friend worry about you?’

  Jonah looked at her, baffled by how comfortable he felt at the prospect of talking about it. ‘He found me. Two years ago, I’d been working too hard, under pressure. Something happened, and things spiralled. I took time off and withdrew, and he made sure to keep in contact with me day to day. I resented it, but I hadn’t understood that he’d seen something in me that nobody else had. A week later I wasn’t answering my phone. He broke into my apartment. I was unconscious on the floor of my bathroom, soaked in vomited alcohol that was peppered with every medication I’d been able to find. And now he worries about me.’

  ‘Does he have reason to worry?’

  Jonah looked down. ‘Not anymore. I’ve been OK.’

  He was waiting to see if she would ask the obvious question. Wondering if he would answer.

  She took a deep breath before she spoke. ‘What had happened? What had happened that made things get so bad?’

  He said nothing, eyes to the floor. He wondered what it meant, that he had been comfortable talking of his suicide attempt yet couldn’t tell her about Dominic Pritchard.

  ‘I shouldn’t have asked,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  They sat in silence. After a few moments, Jonah got up. ‘I should go,’ he said.

  ‘If you want to,’ said Annabel. ‘Or you could stay and do what my dad asked. Help me.’

  ‘I’m a reviver. That’s all I can do. I’ve no idea what use I can be.’

  ‘You can make more coffee,’ she said, and smiled.

  He found his dark mood lifting just enough to allow him to smile back. Why not, he thought. If he had penance to do, he may as well get on with it. ‘I’ll help. Where do we start?’

  Annabel leaned over the side of the couch and came back with a thick folder of paper. She let it drop onto the coffee table with a heavy thud. ‘We start here,’ she said.

  21

  When Annabel opened the folder, Jonah stared at the picture on the top sheet.

  It was the man who had been at Daniel Harker’s front door that day. The face in the picture was much fuller, though, not nearly as gaunt as he remembered. The eyes were just as cold, however. ‘Did you show any of this to, uh, your father?’

  Annabel nodded. ‘He recognized him too,’ she said. ‘On the page underneath you’ll see a man called Peter Welsh. They believe he was the one my father called Ginger. Look a few pages down, you’ll see the scene photographs from the house where they were found. You can tell that corpse is Peter Welsh. There’s enough of his face left. For the others, matching the names to their remains will take longer.’

  ‘I saw Welsh’s body. I was there.’

  Annabel’s eyes widened. ‘Was there a revival attempt?’

  ‘On Welsh? They’d hoped so, but no chance.’ Other pictures, then: things he hadn’t seen that day, images taken inside the house, close-up shots of charred masses, the white of the skulls visible where the incinerated flesh had come away from bone. Jonah flicked back to the first few pages. The picture of the cold-eyed man, the information below it identifying him as Felix Hannerman. Then a smiling image of the man Daniel had called Fats, identified as Brad Grimmet.

  ‘You recognize him as well,’ Annabel said.

  It hadn’t been a question. Jonah’s expression made it clear that he did. ‘So the police know who they were.’

  ‘They’ll keep that information quiet for now. Six bodies. Not all of the house was destroyed, and they found enough items left intact to identify the men. All of them were associated with Afterlifer protests. Hannerman had been in prison twice over it. But it was minor stuff. Nothing they had done suggested they’d be capable of anything like this.’

  ‘And what about Tobias Yarrow?’

  ‘There was almost nothing on Yarrow. Forty-eight years old, only trouble he’d ever been in was a fight in a bar ten years back. Alcoholic, and at the time he’d just separated from his wife of ten years over the drinking. He was one of the six bodies they found in the house. It was easy to match his corpse to the name, because his face was in perfect condition.’

  Jonah sat up, astonished. ‘What? They said nothing about a body in good condition.’

  ‘The police didn’t find him until thirty hours after the raid, when the house was considered safe enough – and cool enough – for a thorough search. He was in a freezer, presumably for weeks. Shot in the head and decapitated. They’d made sure he wouldn’t be talking to anyone.’

  ‘Did they find anything on what they were planning?’

  ‘They were prepared to kill, and prepared to die in a way that would stop them from being revived. They’d built dozens of incendiary devices. The thinking is that they were planning a widespread firebomb campaign.’

  ‘Hannerman and his friends were scared of something specific. Unity. That has to have been their target.’

  ‘I agree, but the authorities are going down the same path my dad took. To them, these people are cranks. Why they’re doing this is almost irrelevant, it’s expected to be a mishmash of paranoid drivel. The priority is to find anyone else involved, and so far they’re confident there was nobody. Each of these men seems to have cut off contact with friends and family at least a year ago. Hannerman was wealthy enough to fund the entire thing. The only person we know of who might have answers is the one Yarrow called Fifteen, someone who knew about the development of BPV.’

  ‘Do the police have anything on that?’

  ‘The police are out of it. The murder investigation is effectively over. Now, everything is with an FBI domestic terrorism unit. They’ll be trying to identify someone with the nickname “Fifteen”, but … My dad talked about this last night. He didn’t think they’d find anyone.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Dad told me how Yarrow had brought up the name. “Let’s call him Fifteen.” Looking pleased with himself. Dad thought the nickname was Yarrow’s own invention. His little private joke. If we want to find out, we need to identify Fifteen ourselves.’

  * * *

  Jonah got back to his apartment before 6 p.m. He shut the door behind him with an overwhelming sense of relief at being home.

  Marmite scampered out from a corner and looked him over with suspicion. Jonah knelt down and reached out, tensing as the cat gave his hand a wary sniff. At last, Marmi
te meowed and started to rub against his legs, purring.

  Jonah relaxed. He headed to the kitchen, cat in tow, and swore when he saw the remains of the glass that had shattered there the night before, the one he had dropped when Daniel Harker had come for him. It was hard to believe that so little time had passed.

  He set the folder Annabel had given him on the kitchen table, cleaned up the glass and put down some cat food. Marmite had been his excuse to leave, one Annabel had been amused by, but the truth was that the situation had become too much for him. He had needed to get to familiar territory.

  With Alice Decker, he’d thought at times that he was losing his mind. With Daniel, that was exactly what had happened. And however ashamed Daniel had professed to be, Jonah was angry. Anger and guilt, not a healthy mixture.

  He sat down at the kitchen table with a beer and opened the folder. Annabel still had the digital originals saved on her laptop; Jonah had promised to read through the file by the next evening, and then they would compare notes and see what their next move could be.

  A thought struck him, and he pulled the pill bottle from his pocket. He set them on the table, looking at them with the same wary eye Daniel Harker had the night before. Later, he thought. When he’d done all he could for the night.

  Before he had left, Annabel had told him what else she’d obtained. Given the connection between BPV and Andreas Biotech, which her father had already noted, she had hunted out a wide selection of articles about Michael Andreas and the companies he owned. She had also included old payroll records.

  ‘Christ,’ Jonah had said. ‘Police information, and now this? It must be seven shades of illegal.’

  ‘I know a guy in London.’ She’d thrown him a coy smile.

  ‘London?’

  ‘The information age, Jonah. You can break laws in every country without having to leave your bedroom.’

  He had shaken his head, and while the illegality of it was way outside his comfort zone, something else had left him more unnerved. The way she’d said, I know a guy in London, and the way he’d found himself feeling about it.

  Jealous.

  That had been the point when he realized he had to get out of there.

  * * *

  Jonah read through the notes. For a few moments he looked at the image of Felix Hannerman, thinking of the gaunt face and cold eyes of the man who had come for Daniel Harker. Hannerman’s profile was more extensive than those of the others, perhaps not surprising as he’d been the one with previous convictions. He came across as a spoilt rich kid who had grown into a confused, angry man, his dislike of revivers put down to a botched job when his mother died, and the effect that had had on his family. His father had taken his own life when Felix was twenty, leaving Hannerman and his sister Julia alone in the world with no other close relatives. Julia had dealt with it by relocating regularly, travelling country to country and staying for no more than a year or two, having little contact with her brother. She was currently thought to be in New Zealand, but they had yet to track her down to give her the news of her brother’s death.

  Jonah thought about what it would be like for her, her life interrupted by the news of her brother. He’d seen it firsthand – relatives of those who had died after committing terrible crimes. Trying to come to terms, overwhelmed by an awful shame, a terrible guilt. As if daring to grieve at all made them somehow complicit. It struck him as one of the worst kinds of grief.

  He read on, going through the articles on Michael Andreas and the companies he had founded or bought. It was all vaguely familiar, Andreas having been such a big contributor to Baseline. The part he really remembered, though, was the press focus on the morbid interests Andreas had, and the suggestion that he wanted to outrun death. In particular, his dabbling with cryogenics, something that had crossed Jonah’s mind after the Lyssa Underwood case, given the nature of the body preservation systems being used.

  Outrun death. The thought brought to mind what Daniel had said to him on camera, speaking with Jonah’s own lips: If you could make this last, it’d be a hell of a way to cheat death, don’t you think?

  By midnight, he had gone through two beers and was working on another. He’d moved over to the couch to be more comfortable and had read through everything but the payroll information. Looking it over, he knew it was pointless. No salaries, no job descriptions, no dates. Forty dense pages of unsorted names, with payroll and social security numbers and a variety of abbreviations.

  They could prove useful as potential contacts, people Annabel could get in touch with and see what they knew. But she wanted Jonah to look through the names and check if there were any he recognized from Baseline who might open up more to Jonah than they would to a journalist calling them out of the blue. Until she’d said that, it hadn’t occurred to him that Jonah’s past in Baseline was the reason Daniel Harker had thought he might be useful.

  Jonah assumed that the abbreviations beside each name identified which of Andreas’s companies the employee had worked for, as they seemed to match the information Annabel had included about those companies: Andreas Biotech, Reese-Farthing Medical, Sankley OptiSen, MLA Research. The smallest was MLA Research, with over eighty staff. Given how many names were listed on the sheets he held, Jonah wondered if it actually covered everyone who had ever worked for these companies. He marvelled again at how the hell anyone could get hold of this kind of information.

  He skimmed the names. Halfway through, he got thirsty and swigged his beer, but the thirst was stubborn. He continued skimming, then stopped suddenly and set his drink down. Anxious, he went to fetch the bottle of pills from the kitchen table.

  It hadn’t been ordinary thirst.

  He went back to the couch, pills in his pocket. Thirst was one thing, but if anything really out of the ordinary happened, he wouldn’t take any chances. He’d take a pill at once and get to bed.

  By the time he’d reached the end of the names, it was two in the morning. He yawned, exhausted.

  ‘I’m done,’ he said. ‘More tomorrow.’ He took the pill bottle from his pocket and went to open it.

  He stopped and set the bottle down. A hunch. He told himself it was stupid. Even so, he took up the payroll names once more, going back to the middle third, the part when he’d felt the thirst hit. He read.

  Again he felt it, thirst growing so slowly that it was impossible to really pin down when it had begun, even to a specific page. But the implication was clear.

  Harker’s remnant was still present, enough to see something Jonah had missed.

  ‘What is it, Daniel?’ he said.

  He took the six pages he had got through before the thirst had hit and went through the first three again. Nothing, even after waiting to the count of sixty. He was narrowing it down. He went one page at a time with the rest, waiting a minute after each. Thirst for the third page.

  He started to read the names on that page aloud, and as he did he noticed something. Dotted throughout were French names, possibly French Canadian, flagged as staff in MLA Research. Armand Dion. Isabeau Poulin. Lafayette Girard. Xavier Vernet. Delphine Lavoie. It tallied with the company information he’d read before. MLA Research was Canadian. It had started up in Montreal, then a decade ago it had moved to Toronto.

  Victor Eldridge had worked for the Toronto Forensic Revival Department. Could he have been doing other things, on the side? Sure, his name hadn’t been in the list, but what if …

  He shook his head. Coincidence, he thought. Nothing more.

  But could it be what Harker was drawing his attention to?

  He read out only those names again, a sixty-second pause between each.

  Armand Dion.

  Isabeau Poulin.

  Lafayette Girard.

  Xavier Vernet.

  Thirst.

  He stared at it. Repeated it aloud. Xavier Vernet. That was what Harker was showing him, but he couldn’t see why. Was it a name he should recognize from Baseline? Perhaps it was a name familiar to Daniel but n
ot to Jonah?

  He said it again: Xavier Vernet.

  Then he got it. Jonah swore and took a pen. He circled the name and in the margin wrote the man’s initials, pressing hard on the page, drawing over the lines repeatedly to thicken them.

  He laughed.

  ‘Shit, Daniel. And I thought the Eldridge thing was a stretch. All these names. The chances of us finding someone who fits can’t be that low…’

  But he knew this was what Daniel had been trying to tell him. And he knew there might be something there.

  Jonah took out the pill bottle again and looked at it. Then he stood, walked over to the apartment door and set it on the shelf beside his keys. It can wait, he thought. Right now, we need all the help we can get.

  It was almost three in the morning, and his exhaustion was catching up with him fast. He took the page with Xavier Vernet’s name into his bedroom and left it on the bed while he got ready. As he slid under the covers, he looked at it again and smiled. He knew that, however much of a red herring it turned out to be, Annabel would appreciate what he’d found. And that felt good.

  Xavier Vernet.

  XV.

  Fifteen.

  22

  Jonah woke eager to tell Annabel what he’d found and called her before ten. He said nothing of the continued presence of Daniel, claiming to have simply noticed Vernet’s name. She sounded intrigued but sceptical; two hours later she called him back with a single instruction. Be at the airport by 1 p.m. She hung up, and none of his subsequent calls were answered.

  With no option, he headed for Richmond International Airport without any idea what he was about to do. When he arrived he called her again. This time she took the call, and told him which check-in desk to get to.

  As he approached, she smiled at him. He smiled back, trying not to notice how good she looked. He pushed inappropriate thoughts out of his head.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘It checked out, Jonah. Vernet worked on BPV. I called MLA Research and told them I was with human resources in a big pharma company out East. I had that company’s website up just in case they gave me anything awkward. Told them Vernet had applied for a position and had given them as a reference. I asked them to confirm various things.’