Evil Genius

by Catherine Jinks

  Cadel wasn’t worried. He had a feeling that, if there was any real danger, Thaddeus would have ordered him home long ago. This hunch proved to be correct; when he attended Brendan’s Embezzlement class, he found that Douglas and Phoebe were both present. So after the class he returned to Hardware Heaven, where he remained until late afternoon. Com also stayed. He was still there when Cadel left.

  Cadel wondered, briefly, if he slept there every night, in front of his computer.

  TWENTY-SIX

  ‘What happened to your face?’

  Mrs Piggott was in the kitchen when Cadel arrived home. She was mixing herself some kind of alcoholic drink with the milkshake maker.

  Cadel cursed his luck.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing? Don’t give me that. You look like you’ve been hit by a truck!’

  ‘I do not.’ Cadel was annoyed. It wasn’t that bad. ‘I fell over.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call me?’

  Cadel shrugged. He was trying to get out of the kitchen. He wanted to talk to Kay-Lee.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Mrs Piggott, glancing at her watch, ‘I suppose I should take you to see a doctor, but I’ve got a client waiting for me – I’m already late –’

  ‘I don’t need to see a doctor,’ Cadel replied firmly. ‘It doesn’t even hurt.’ It did, but he wasn’t going to say as much. ‘I’m fine. It happened yesterday. Thaddeus had a look at it.’

  ‘Dr Roth had a look at it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s a medical doctor, is he?’

  ‘He said I was fine.’

  Fortunately, Lanna seemed to accept this. Perhaps she just wanted to, because she was late for an appointment. After informing Cadel that he could order pizza for dinner – or maybe heat up a couple of boxes of Lean Cuisine – she whizzed off in a cloud of expensive perfume.

  Cadel breathed a sigh of relief. He went to his computer and typed out a message to Kay-Lee. Excitement at work today, he wrote. Unpopular teacher struck down by mysterious illness. There’s probably a formula for that, drifting around; in fact newspaper headlines are often written to a ‘formula’. ‘Unpopular Teacher Struck Down By Mystery Illness’ – how would you reduce that headline to a nice, tidy equation?

  Nobody’s much concerned about the sick teacher, probably because the staff all hate each other. It’s interesting. I’ve been trying to get a handle on the politics of that place – in a spirit of scientific curiosity. I’ve got a feeling that it might be important.

  He wrote and wrote, about computer glitches and health and safety issues and ‘a girl who was attacked in the library toilets’, wishing at the same time that he could write about defeating Dr Vee’s virus, and being jumped on by Dr Deal, and having to cope with the threat of a deadly organism. Going to see Thaddeus three times a week was all very well, but on the days when he didn’t, Cadel was often desperate to talk to someone. Someone with whom he could be completely honest, without worrying about the impact his honesty might have. Someone whom he could trust.

  While he waited for Kay-Lee to reply, he ate a microwaved frozen pizza, a packet of chips, a cracker, a bowl of soggy corn flakes and a chocolate bar, thinking about Dr Deal. He had a class with Dr Deal the very next day. Would it be safe to go? Probably. With so many witnesses around, Dr Deal wouldn’t try anything. Cadel didn’t think he was going to try anything anyway. After all, Dr Deal wasn’t called Dr Deal for nothing. If possible, he liked to negotiate his way out of a problem; that was his specialty, in fact. He didn’t think the lawyer would resort to violence.

  Not against someone who wasn’t a young girl.

  Cadel wondered if Dr Deal had ever attacked Gemini, and what the twins might have done if he had. He wondered what had actually happened to those girls. Nothing in Luther’s online reports suggested that Niobe had been tracked down, but she could still be in danger. Cadel’s heart sank at the thought of Luther Lasco. Luther was to blame for what had happened to Gemini. The scar he had left on Jem’s cheek was the cause of the whole sorry mess in which the twins had become embroiled.

  Oh, well, Cadel told himself. The twins weren’t very bright, anyway. Not like Kay-Lee.

  After finishing his meal, Cadel expected to find Kay-Lee’s reply waiting for him when he returned to his computer. But he found nothing. Disappointed, he reluctantly attacked his Embezzlement homework, which kept him busy for another thirty minutes. By seven o’clock, however, Kay-Lee still hadn’t replied.

  Cadel waited up. He organised his data on the institute staff, wrote a few Partner Post emails, sorted out his finances and finished an essay for Maestro Max. When Lanna arrived home at eleven – alone, because Stuart was away – she told Cadel to turn off the lights and go to bed. So he was forced to wait in the dark until she had gone to sleep before checking his email for the last time.

  Still nothing.

  He didn’t sleep very well. The next morning he sent another message to Kay-Lee, asking if she was all right. On the train to the institute he fretted about her. Could her computer be down? Could she be on holiday? She hadn’t said anything about going away.

  Then again, how much did he really know about her? Almost nothing.

  Upon reaching the institute, Cadel went straight to Hardware Heaven. He checked his email – still no luck. He poked around, looking for information on Kay-Lee that he hadn’t already dug up from the various databases open to creative hackers. He knew her address, of course, and her date of birth. He knew her mother’s name and her father’s name, her Higher School Certificate results, her nursing exam scores (they weren’t so terrific, oddly enough) and how much she made on the job. He knew that she regularly shopped at a particular supermarket, and sometimes bought her clothes in a city department store. He knew that she had a drivers licence, one sister, two credit cards and a subscription to a craft magazine.

  Cadel knew all these things, and they amounted to absolutely nothing. When he considered them (especially the craft magazine), he felt as if he didn’t know Kay-Lee at all. And though he tried very hard that day, he was unable to track down much more information. He did find out that she had lived in Drummoyne and worked briefly at a big teaching hospital, before moving to the nurses’ quarters at Weatherwood House. But what did these facts amount to?

  Very little, in Cadel’s opinion.

  He kept checking his email, with no success. And he had to drag himself away from his computer more than once; he had classes to attend, after all. The first was with Dr Deal. It was in the morning and took place in Lecture Room One. When Cadel trudged down there at ten o’clock, he wasn’t concerned that he was about to confront the lawyer for the first time since their meeting in the men’s room. Cadel was far more worried by his failure to receive any kind of response from Kay-Lee. It was distracting. It was distressing.

  ‘Hi,’ said Gazo, when Cadel arrived. So far, they were the only two who had turned up. ‘Did you hear about Doris?’

  ‘Huh?’ said Cadel.

  ‘Did you hear about Doris?’

  ‘No.’ Cadel wasn’t particularly interested, but tried to pretend that he was. ‘What about Doris?’

  ‘They took her away.’ Gazo’s tone was mournfully self-important. ‘Abraham told me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He was in the labs, and she was in the labs, doing some kind of Contagion project, and Luther came, and they took her away.’

  Cadel blinked. He tried to focus his mind.

  ‘Who’s “they”?’ he said sharply. ‘Luther and who else?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘What do you mean, “they took her away”? Did they drag her away? Did she walk away? What?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘It was Adolf and Luther,’ a voice suddenly interjected. The voice belonged to Abraham. He had approached them noiselessly, padding down the corridor in enormous rubber-soled shoes. He was wearing dark glasses and a jacket lined with sheepskin – though it was quite a warm day for early
May. His hair didn’t seem to be growing back, and his white scalp gleamed.

  ‘Oh. Hello,’ said Cadel.

  ‘They cornered her in room 309,’ Abraham revealed in a tired voice. ‘There wasn’t any fuss. They said they wanted to talk to her about anything she might have found on the floor of the labs. They were talking about the vial.’ Abraham swallowed. ‘I know, because they asked me about it, too. Last night. They talked to me for an hour.’ He wiped his fist across his shiny forehead and shivered, pulling the sheepskin jacket tightly around him. ‘They really gave me the third degree.’

  Cadel winced. ‘You mean . . . ?’

  ‘Did they hit you?’ Gazo demanded.

  ‘No, no.’ Abraham hunched his shoulders irritably. ‘Nothing like that. They just went at me. On and on. Anyway, I knew that wasn’t really why they wanted Doris.’

  Cadel frowned. ‘Oh?’ he said.

  ‘I was in 309 myself when they found me, last night, and they did it right there. Closed the door and got stuck in. They didn’t make me go anywhere else. There’s something fishy going on, with Doris.’

  ‘But you were with her, weren’t you?’ Cadel pointed out. ‘I mean, perhaps they wanted a bit of privacy, don’t you think?’

  Abraham shook his head. ‘Nah.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘They didn’t know I was there,’ Abraham admitted. ‘I was . . . I was in the supply cupboard.’

  ‘The supply cupboard?’

  Abraham scowled. ‘Sometimes the light gets too much for me, okay?’ he snapped.

  At that moment Kunio joined them, with Dr Deal following close behind. If the sight of Cadel affected the lawyer in any way – if his eyes flickered or his hands shook – Cadel didn’t notice. He was too busy processing the image that had leapt into his mind, of Abraham cowering in a cupboard, shielding himself from the electric light.

  Then Dr Deal greeted them all and the moment had passed. After unlocking the door to Lecture Room One, he stepped back to let his class in. When Cadel glanced up, the lawyer wasn’t looking in his direction.

  Whether this averted gaze was deliberate or not, Cadel had no way of knowing.

  When he and the lawyer finally did make direct eye contact, they did so without a change of expression. Dr Deal was explaining the difference between battery and assault when Abraham’s nose started to bleed. The blood gushed out, soaking his handkerchief, his sleeve, and Cadel’s supply of tissues (which Mrs Piggott had insisted he keep in his bag, for emergencies). It was unnerving. After losing quantities of blood, Abraham was at last forced to excuse himself. He didn’t really have a choice. He had run out of tissues and turned a deathly colour.

  Dr Deal, who had been speaking steadily through all the furtive nudging and dabbing, watched Abraham go without pausing in his discourse on the Butchard v Barnett case. He did, however, catch Cadel’s eye. Cadel returned the look blandly, determined not to reveal anything.

  ‘. . . Assault is the threat of force to the person of another, while battery is the application of that force,’ Dr Deal was saying. ‘These days, there’s a lot of confusion between the terms, but let me put it this way: if I were to threaten to punch someone if they didn’t shut up, and then I punched them – well, that would be a case of assault and battery, punishable by law. Of course, I’d have been a bloody fool to do it.’

  Cadel dropped his gaze. Dr Deal, he knew, was trying to apologise. Cadel hoped that nobody else in the class realised this, but one quick scan of the room left him satisfied. Now that Abraham was out of the picture, Cadel was the only student who had the ability to understand what was going on. Kunio was still floundering, defeated by his imperfect grasp of English. Gazo was too slow. Besides, they were both distracted by Abraham’s retreat: the faltering steps, the trail of blood, the banging door.

  Only three left, Cadel suddenly realised. Three out of the original eight in the class.

  He swallowed, and glanced at the clock over the door. It had been twenty-seven hours since Kay-Lee had sent her last message.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  For the rest of the day, Cadel kept checking and rechecking his email. He had to leave his computer at three o’clock for an Embezzlement class, and again at five because he had a session with Thaddeus. Most of the time, however, he was able to stay at his keyboard, combing through staff databases, keeping an eye on his electronic mailbox, and sending off the odd message to Kay-Lee, in the hope that he would finally get a reply.

  He didn’t.

  At lunchtime, Gazo came looking for him. ‘I won’t stay long,’ he assured Cadel, scanning the room nervously for Dr Vee. ‘Just dropping off a sandwich.’

  Cadel watched in astonishment as Gazo placed on his desk a paper bag containing a chicken sandwich wrapped in greaseproof paper.

  ‘You’re bringing me lunch?’ Cadel gasped, and Gazo shrugged, almost bashfully.

  ‘I know you get caught up, and that,’ he said, obviously pleased at his own thoughtfulness. ‘I fought you mightn’t eat, so I brought you somefink. It’s not much,’ he added. ‘There’s mayonnaise on it.’

  Cadel stared, dumbfounded. Was Gazo trying to suck up to Dr Darkkon’s son for selfish reasons? Or, even worse, did Cadel’s appetite genuinely matter to him? Cadel feared the latter.

  ‘Gazo,’ said Cadel, ‘are you sure you’re cut out for this place?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Gazo’s tone became defensive. ‘It ain’t no big deal. I didn’t make that sandwich, I bought it.’

  ‘Well, thanks.’ Cadel was reluctant to become involved in a long discussion about friendly gestures, and how they didn’t belong in the Axis Institute. Any further talk would simply encourage Gazo to hang around longer. ‘Thanks, Gazo.’

  ‘Did you hear about Carla? She died last night.’

  ‘I know.’ Cadel had been plugged into the electronic grapevine. ‘Poison.’

  ‘Really? Poison? Wow,’ said Gazo, his eyes widening behind his mask. ‘What kind of poison?’

  ‘Look – uh – I think you’d better go,’ Cadel advised. ‘Before Dr Vee gets back.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘We can talk later,’ said Cadel, ignoring Gazo’s obvious disappointment.

  ‘Sure. No problem.’ Gazo nodded, and began to back out of the room. ‘Enjoy the sandwich!’ he said, before disappearing.

  Cadel didn’t enjoy the sandwich. He didn’t even sample it; he had gone right off institute food. The Axis mailboxes were now full of reports on Carla’s condition, which had finally been diagnosed: she had been poisoned with a fatal dose of thallium. Nothing could have been done to save her, since the effects of the poison couldn’t be reversed once it had been in the stomach for more than half an hour. Gloomily, Cadel read through the emails that Luther Lasco was dispatching in all directions. The thallium, Luther assured Thaddeus, had not come from his own stash. Like the rest of his poison supply, his own stock of thallium was completely secure. Had Carla read the early intervention training material distributed to every staff member, she would have known that symptoms like vomiting, diarrhoea and joint pain often meant more than a tummy bug. By the time she’d started to lose feeling in her toes and fingers, it had been too late.

  I can’t stress enough, Luther wrote to Terry, the importance of early intervention in poisoning cases. At the Axis Institute, there is no such thing as a harmless tummy bug. Thallium, he added, was tasteless and colourless, and in this case had probably been administered in the labs, since Carla had been at work for more than three hours before being whisked away in the ambulance.

  Luther advised Terry to have the labs thoroughly searched once again. Anything edible was to be removed and destroyed. The taps in the bathrooms had to be tested. Meanwhile, he said, he was working the source for further information.

  Cadel wondered who, or what, this mysterious ‘source’ might be. Just before leaving the institute, he found out. One last sweep through the network uncovered an encrypted message sent to Terry from Thaddeus. Cadel dec
oded it easily, to discover that Thaddeus wanted Terry’s urgent assistance in disguising Carla’s death as something ‘trouble-free’. They had identified the culprit – Doris Deauville. They had identified the agent – thallium. Was there any way in which Carla’s rapid decline could somehow be blamed on natural causes? Or would they have to resort to more drastic action? They couldn’t afford to have the coroner order an autopsy, so the corpse might have to be disposed of.

  Doris Deauville, thought Cadel, swallowing hard. He wasn’t surprised. Though he did wonder why Doris, the expert poisoner, had used a poison that left traces of itself in the victim’s body. Surely there were other, undetectable poisons? He remembered the twins talking about a certain substance – insulin, was it? Or something else?

  Maybe Doris had simply lost her temper and used the first thing that came to hand. Whatever the reason, Cadel preferred not to think about it. He was far more concerned about Kay-Lee. On his way from the institute to Thaddeus’s office, he decided that if he hadn’t heard from Kay-Lee by eight o’clock that evening, he would call Weatherwood House. Just to make sure that she was all right. He didn’t have to reveal who he really was. He could pretend to be collecting for a charity, or something.

  When Cadel arrived for his appointment with Thaddeus, Wilfreda informed him ‘that the doctor had been delayed’. She bared her blackened teeth at him and suggested that he wait in the upstairs office. Then she asked Cadel if he would like something to eat. A biscuit, perhaps? A drink?

  ‘Yes, please,’ he replied. Wilfreda kept one jar of chocolate biscuits under her desk, doling out the contents when she was in a good mood.