Strangled Silence

by Oisin McGann

  'I'm not, all right?' Chi protested, holding up the metal disc. 'It's the badge. Gierek caught one of his watchers once and pulled this off his jacket. This is what's making you see . . . what you're seeing.'

  Ivor looked at the chrome badge as if he'd only just noticed it. He took it off Chi and held it up to the light. He was wincing and pressing his hand against his side as if he was in pain, but he didn't say anything about it. Looking back at Chi's face, he frowned in thought.

  'What did you see?' Chi asked, with a hungry expression.

  'Your face . . . it was blank. I could only see your eyes. It was like you were one of the Scalps.'

  'It's the badge,' Chi said breathlessly. 'I think it may be alien technology. It looks innocent enough – there's no visible circuitry, or . . . or transmitter – even under a microscope – but it's definitely sending out some kind of signal. I think anybody who's been through the same process as you can pick up that signal – maybe they've put an implant in your brain that can read it – and it makes you unable to see the face of someone wearing this badge. It's like it gives you a blind spot. To anybody else, it just looks like a blank chrome disc.'

  Ivor was still staring at the object with a mixture of amazement and confusion.

  'What if it's much simpler than that?' he said softly. 'I couldn't see the badge when you were wearing it. What if I've just been programmed with some kind of post-hypnotic suggestion? When I see the badge, I'm supposed to block out the person's face and the badge itself.'

  Chi opened and closed his mouth like a goldfish for a moment, his heart sinking.

  'I never thought of that,' he admitted. 'Damn. Damn, I thought I finally had some proof that there was something out there.'

  'You have,' Ivor replied, pinning the badge back on Chi's chest and regarding him with an unsettled expression. 'You've proof that somebody out there's been messing with my head. I . . . I can't see your face, man. This is scaring the shit out of me. But why would anybody do this? I mean, I can't tell who you are, but I can see you've got no face! It's not exactly subtle.'

  'Maybe that's part of the plan,' Chi sniffed. 'Creating a myth. Can I take this off now? You're looking at me funny.'

  'Huh! Look who's talkin'.'

  Amina's mind was whirling when she returned to the newsroom. The place was quiet; only a few people were at their desks. Everybody was still out covering the alert at the airports. She wondered how many other stories like Mrs Atkinson's weren't getting written today because of the terrorist alerts. Then she wondered how often this happened. She remembered what Ivor had said:'War is loud. If you want to distract people's attention from something, there's nothing better than a bit of death and glory.'

  She wished she could call him up – just chat to him. There was so much to talk about and her friends would never understand. They wouldn't even believe half of it. It was a lonely feeling.

  The War for Liberty made the news in some form every day. It was big, scary and affected everyone. Their very way of life was under threat, or so they were always being told. The terrorists were out to get the people of Britain simply because they were trying to impose peace on some of the most troubled regions in the world. The more she thought about it, the more it seemed like the plot of some Hollywood action thriller – evil villains with paper-thin motives of world domination threatening the peace-loving democracy. She thought about Mrs Atkinson again and how her story had been eclipsed by a bolder life-and-death drama and asked herself what other stories were being blotted out.

  Chi had said Ivor's brainwashing had to have one of two purposes: to cover up something that he had seen or done, or to programme him to carry out some task at some point in the future. But what if he was only partly right? What if the cover-up was still going on? Maybe the whole war was a diversion to hide something that was going on in Sinnostan?

  Once again, Amina was struck by how little she knew about the country. It was constantly in the news, but she didn't know anyone except Ivor who had been there – or at least had been outside the safe areas – since the war had started. Any reporters who didn't travel with the military had to get their news from local Sinnostani reporters who risked their lives going into the isolated mountain regions where the insurgents operated. That was another thing: the insurgents were supposed to be trying to overthrow the government, but all the action seemed to be happening in areas of the mountains where hardly anybody lived. What was that all about?

  Everything about this war seemed to be held at arm's length. It was so far away and yet it dominated the news like some kind of gruesome soap opera. And then every now and again, a terrorist group would commit some atrocity in Britain or Europe or the States and rattle on about the West's crimes in the East, just in case the news coverage of such a distant, alien place was beginning to lose its flavour.

  Amina decided she needed to know more about the place itself, from someone who knew it well. The memory of the funeral card was never far from her mind and she knew Goldbloom would not take kindly to her persistence, but she had to know what was really going on over there.

  Charlie Stokes, one of the paper's longest-serving reporters, was sitting at his desk, typing away. He was a painfully thin chain-smoker who had to take regular fag breaks out on the roof to get him through the day, and would drag any inexperienced temp up with him to chat while he did. Like most addicts, he needed company. Amina wandered over to him, trying to look casual.

  'Hi, Charlie, whatcha workin' on?'

  'All right, Amina? Just putting the finishing touches to this piece – looking back on how the war started. Asking about all that nerve gas the terrorists were supposed to have.'

  'Oh, right.' She couldn't come up with a less direct way of asking, so she just came out with it. 'You've worked on a lot of the Sinnostan stories, haven't you?'

  He turned to look at her.

  'Yeeesss. Why?'

  'Who do we have over there – I mean, who has the paper got over there, who really knows what's happening?'

  'Tryin' to figure it all out, huh?' He chuckled, pulling a piece of paper from a drawer and writing a name and number on it. 'Good luck. One of our best guys is actually in London at the moment. His name's John Donghu. His blog is one of the most reliable coming out of that pit and he's a sound bloke when it comes to translating irate natives. Want to meet him?'

  'Do you think he'd want to meet me?'

  'As far as Sinnostan is concerned, he'll talk to anybody who'll listen. Wouldn't hurt that you're cute either. Buy him lunch and you won't be able to shut him up. Fancy comin' up to the roof for a smoke?'

  'I still don't smoke, Charlie.'

  'All right, all right. Fancy comin' up to the roof while I smoke then? You can drink some bloody mineral water or something.'

  Amina knew it paid to get the old salts on your side. Charlie got his choice of the big stories and he might one day ask for her help on one. Futures were made in the little conversations over coffee or a cigarette. And if Goldbloom found out she was still digging into Sinnostan, she'd need all the future she could get.

  'Sure,' she said. 'I could use some fresh air.'

  29

  - was convinced that they had scared off the girl, but and were not so sure. It was becoming clear that Sandwith and McMorris were still probing around, however, and something was going to have to be done. Sandwith would be given one more chance. They all doubted that he'd take it. McMorris had been spreading the word around the veterans that he would pay for any reliable information on the events in Sinnostan that had cost him his eye.

  'Plus he assaulted two of my men,'- growled. 'He didn't get anything out of them, but it will have given him reason to push harder now. It was something solid to grab onto. The bugger's not questioning himself as much as he was; he's looking outwards instead. He's become too dangerous. I think the conditioning may be cracking.'

  'Highly unlikely,' snorted. 'The programming was intensive. He tested low on the suggestive scale, but his response sco
res were excellent. McMorris was needy; he was addicted to sedatives – which Shang missed, of course. Our errant war correspondent's personality had big, gaping holes of need. He didn't want to resist the process once it started. You can't go wrong with that kind of foothold.'

  'Well, you did,'- retorted. 'Because now he's asking all the wrong questions . . . and he can pay good money for the answers. Who knows what worms will come out of the woodwork when they hear that kind of cash is on offer? Somebody somewhere will talk.'

  'So remove him,' she said firmly. 'He's becoming connected to too many other strands. Soon it will be overly complicated to take any direct action against him. Best to do it now while he's still an outsider.'

  'He'll be seen to,' assured her. 'We're getting sidetracked here. We still have a week to bring all the pieces together for Operation Renewed Faith. The shipment will be late getting to Sinnostan. The freighter was waylaid at Rotterdam. Customs were doing spot searches, but they didn't find the package. Even if they did, they wouldn't know what it was without testing it.'

  'And God knows how many would die if someone uncorked that particular genie,' - snorted.

  'You're sure nobody at MI5 has a hint of this?' asked. 'And you said MI6 had some of your people under surveillance in Sinnostan—'

  'The deal was done in the utmost secrecy. My people are the best,' - told her, glaring at her with his arrogant, sleepy-looking eyes. 'There are a few in each agency who know because they have to, but they also know that what we are doing is in the nation's interest. Nobody will interfere.'

  'And we won't be hung out to dry if it goes wrong?' pressed him.

  'It has gone too far for that, my dear,' told her. 'The stakes are too high. If this operation goes wrong, we'll all be found dead in our beds.'

  13

  John Donghu didn't want to be taken to lunch. He wanted four orders of sandwiches and he wanted them delivered. Amina was happy to oblige and after taking his order over the phone, she had the sandwiches made up at a local deli and put them on the Chronicle's account. Donghu gave her an address, which she found with difficulty. It was a garage in a lane behind a row of houses in Chadwell Heath. The rhythmic sounds of machinery carried from inside. When she knocked on the peeling navy paint of the wooden door, she was greeted with a yell over the noise. Pushing open the door, she stepped inside.

  The place was warm and heavy with the scent of lithograph printing: oil-based ink, thinners, cut paper and the hot, greased joints of the printing press. It was similar to the atmosphere Amina had grown to love after her visits to the Chronicle's printing floor. Seeing the giant web presses in action gave her a sublime thrill. The printing press here was a fraction of the size, but still took up nearly half the space in the small garage, along with a guillotine in one corner, a light desk with its long daylight bulb suspended inside a metal hood and several workbenches and sinks lining the walls. Every horizontal surface was covered in some form of paper or film or discarded metal printing plates. Stacks of printed material, some wrapped in plastic, others simply bound with twine, sat under the worktables.

  There were four men. Three of them were white, with two in their fifties and another in his twenties. They were all dressed in old clothes and aprons. The fourth man was small, barely over five feet tall, and had the oriental eyes and broad flat face of a Sinnostani. His skin was weathered a ruddy brown and he smiled with teeth the colour of beeswax. Amina's first thought was that he looked like a stereotypical Eastern bloc Communist, dressed in shapeless slacks, a heavy grey woollen jumper, cheap shoes and a large flat cap. There was something about his face that was immediately likeable and he strode straight over to her to shake her hand with his right one and take the bag of sandwiches with his left.

  'You're a star,' he said to her over the whirring, stamping press. 'Lunch is up, lads!'

  The men didn't stop working to eat their food, merely grabbing their sandwiches, nodding their thanks to Amina and going back to whatever they were doing. Amina sat up on a stool and tucked into her cheese salad wrap as she watched the oldest man using the guillotine to trim the latest stack of leaflets to come out of the machine. She looked at what was printed on them.

  YOUR TAX MONEY

  IS THEIR BLOOD MONEY

  Below, it listed the arms dealers who were making huge profits from the war in Sinnostan. Amina was not impressed. She knew that these leaflets would be handed out at protests or pasted onto lamp-posts and walls, but most would be thrown away or simply become litter. They did no good and just showed these operations up for what they were: amateurish, badly funded and smalltime. Her mother had no time for them and Amina was inclined to agree.

  'So you want to know about Sinnostan?' Donghu asked over the sound of the machinery.

  'Yes, please. Is there any chance we could go somewhere quieter?'

  'I like the noise,' he replied. 'Quiet makes me nervous. Too many years hiding from the secret police in the old Sinnostan, see? Lots of ears around back then. Getting like that here now.'

  'I don't think we're that bad yet,' Amina chided him with a coy smile. 'We're a long way from having the Gestapo knocking on the front door in the middle of the night.'

  But she was already thinking of the Scalps. Had they followed her here? Were they listening? And even if they were, what harm could she do talking to a man who published all his thoughts on a weblog anyway?

  'Used to be that way in Sinnostan,' Donghu told her. 'Now it's different. Now you get a knock on the door in the middle of the night and you don't know who it could be. Could be soldiers looking for insurgents, or insurgents looking for "traitors", or kidnappers just looking for someone to ransom. Or it could be some old dear tryin' to find her son who's been out on the town all night. The old women scare me most. Some of 'em have tongues that could cut you in half.'

  Amina had already decided to tell Donghu about parts of her investigation. There seemed to be no way around it; he would want to know why she was so curious. She explained that she was working on a story about the mental health of British soldiers coming back from the war.

  'This war, is it drivin' people mad? Good question!' Donghu said with a humourless grin. 'Most wars are insane, but this one is making less sense than any of 'em.'

  'What do you mean?'

  Donghu took a big bite out of his roast beef sandwich and kept talking.

  'Gah! It's like a war from some goddamned kid's comic book: good-guy soldiers and bad-guy terrorists. All these heroic-soldier stories and hardly any innocent bystanders with bits blown off them. Up until lately, hardly any civilians killed – only soldiers and "terrorists"! What kind of a war is that? Even Sinnostani reporters say the whole thing is short on dead bodies – and they're really looking! We want to show what your news doesn't – which is plenty. It's too weird. War is a nasty, complicated thing. But we watch it on your news and it's like a Hollywood production – all neat and tidy and exciting.'

  'But the aerial bombing and the smart missiles are supposed to be really accurate,' Amina put in. 'They go on about it all the time. That's why there've been so few civilians killed.'

  'Gah! How do you avoid killing wrong people when you blow up whole towns! No, it's weird.

  'And very goddamned hard to find sometimes too. It's like they're trying to hide the real war. I been out looking for it and it's always somewhere else. I seen fire-fights and stuff, but not much, you know? There been times that I been out there asking the locals about some battle that's supposed to have happened and people just shrug and shake their heads. They haven't seen nothing. But it's on film . . . on the news. I watch reports on Western news about fighting in places I never heard of. And I know my country. There been reports of terrorist attacks in villages I can't even find on a map.

  'Like I said, it's a comic-book war. I'm still waiting for them to bring out a range of toys.'

  Amina nodded. After reading so much about it, she'd been wondering about all these little, out-of-the-way locations.

  'It's
a big place though, isn't it?' she said. 'And everyone says it's hard to get into those mountains.'

  'Gah! There are people living in those mountains!' Donghu waved his hand dismissively. 'Getting pushed about by soldiers who are leading the reporters around. These soldiers, they're controlling everything the reporters see. Don't want bad press. But even the locals not seeing much terrorists. At least not until lately. Now we got all these foreigners coming in to fight the soldiers for us. Not like we asked them, mind you. They just showed up and joined in. Ha! Between them and your soldiers, we got a war of the immigrants! And now it's starting to creep into the towns. Now it's starting to worry us. We goin' to be one of those countries where the big boys come from outside and use our land as a battleground.

  'But this happens all the time, I just don't understand why Sinnostan. We got nothing the heavyweights are interested in. Just big mountains and thin soil and people tough enough to live off them. We got a little natural gas, no oil, no minerals worth mining. There's no diamonds or gold in our hills, no tantalum or—'

  'You've got terrorists,' Amina pointed out.

  'Gah!' Donghu shrugged. 'Like I said, they're not a natural resource – they had to be imported. A lot of those guys don't even speak the language. Even heard rumours that they got something else going on up there – something no one's talking about. Mind you, we know there are Special Forces units working out there – SAS and the like – hunting for the insurgents. But that doesn't explain some of the stories.'

  'What stories?'

  'Stories about lights in the night sky,' he said, looking at her. 'I mentioned it in my blog a few times, but it hardly gets noticed. You're out in the hills and suddenly you see these lights and a few hours later, you wake up lying on the ground. And some of the people who tell these stories swear that they've been searched, or they've lost time, or even been moved to a different location. A few even claim they been the subjects of some kind of experiment. Weird, huh?'