Strangled Silence

by Oisin McGann

  And she knew just where to get it.

  32

  Tariq knew he was becoming a disappointment to his father. Unlike his father, he had no military ambitions. The prospect of a career in the Royal Marines held no attraction for him whatsoever. Who'd want to spend their life getting ordered around and having a loudmouth sergeant bellowing at them for not folding their clothes right, or for failing to do enough press-ups? What kind of a life was that?

  Martin Mir was not an unreasonable man. He would have been happy to see Tariq show any kind of ambition at all. But Tariq was not in an ambition frame of mind and he saw no reason why he should be planning how to spend the rest of his life at the tender age of fifteen.

  It was hard enough trying to survive school. Amina's mix of looks, brains and popularity made her path through the world of education appear effortless. Tariq, on the other hand, seemed to stumble from one mismatched class to the next, suffering his education much as one would the pulling of a succession of bad teeth.

  Now he was going to have to ask to move school again. He couldn't take the torture any longer and he was afraid of what he was going to do. He didn't want to be expelled again. His parents wouldn't stand for it. His father would send him straight to press-up school if that happened.

  Tariq knew they wouldn't understand, no matter how he tried to explain. He was in hell. His head buzzed with angry, conflicting thoughts. It was almost impossible to sleep. Most nights, he lay there, drifting between a restless doze and frustrating wakefulness. The coming of every morning meant facing his torment, tired, depressed – already beaten. Something had to give. He had to get out of that school.

  To his surprise, Amina was home when he got in. She was coming down the stairs carrying her handbag, looking pale and distracted.

  'Hey,' she said.

  'Hey,' he replied. 'What's up? Thought you'd be at work.'

  'Had to take a half day to do some stuff,' she told him, tucking her bag behind her as if he might grab it from her. 'How was school?'

  'Gimme a break!' he snorted.

  'I was just asking.' Her tone was distant, as if her mind was miles away. She reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped him before he closed the front door. 'I'm off. See you later, yeah?'

  'Sure.' He threw his bag into its place under the stairs. A thought occurred to him. 'Hey! Did you find out any more about that mind-control thing you were working on? It's just that this game they've got us playing in school is—'

  'Look, Tariq,' she sighed, putting her hand to her face in an exasperated gesture that reminded him of their mother. 'Nobody's brainwashing you with a computer game, all right? Computer games don't rot your brain. You're a teenager. You'll be screwed up for a few more years and then things'll work themselves out, yeah? Everybody thinks that school is messing with their minds. Look at all those kids who go shooting up their classes with a semi-automatic because they can't cope. They think the world's out to get them. But you know what? It isn't. And believe me, I know the difference.'

  Tariq stared at her with a quizzical expression.

  'Bloody hell, I can't decide who's more patronizing: you or the army guy in class. At least he's getting paid to talk crap. Why don't you go stuff yourself, you snotty cow?'

  Amina went to say something, but held back, turning and walking out the door instead. The door slammed shut and Tariq glared at it for a moment, his face twisted into a sneer. Who the hell did she think she was? A few years older than him and she was acting like one his teachers. Sometimes he felt like just . . . As he stood there, fuming at her words, he was struck with an idea. 'Look at all those kids who go shooting up their classes with a semiautomatic because they can't cope.' Yeah. The schools were terrified of that kind of thing. Everybody was. Everyone was waiting for the next kid to snap and commit another massacre.

  Tariq pounded up the stairs to his parents' room, opened the wardrobe and reached up for the lockbox that sat on the shelf above the hangers. He would never hurt anybody – he wasn't crazy – but a good scare would knock some sense into Alan Noble and his mates.

  Sitting down on his parents' bed, he ran his hands over the ribbed surface of the graphitecoloured lockbox. It was about half the size of a briefcase and made of hardened steel. This was the box where their father kept his Browning Hi-Power 9mm automatic. Tariq tapped in the combination on the keypad. He had worked out the combination number years ago; it was 1664: the date that the Duke of York and Albany's Maritime Regiment of Foot was established. The fighting force that would become known as the Royal Marines.

  He would just scare the assholes – he wouldn't take the safety catch off. He wouldn't even put any rounds in the clip. It would be a simple matter of catching them somewhere quiet. Point the weapon at them and pull back the hammer for that loud click. For just a few seconds, he'd be that lunatic that every school dreaded. He smiled in grim anticipation. They'd absolutely piss themselves.

  The automatic would be back in its box before his father even knew it was gone. Chances were, Noble and the others wouldn't tell a soul about what had happened. The more he thought about it, the more sure he was about doing this. He was a desperate man. Drawing in a shaky breath, he opened the case. Tariq stared for most of a minute before releasing the breath in a gasp.

  The gun was gone.

  When Amina reached Chi's house, the feeling of being watched was palpable. It was almost as if the Scalps had withheld their presence from her before, but now they were allowing her senses to pick them up on some subliminal level. Her skin was crawling around her neck and shoulders as she rang the doorbell.

  Chi let her in without a word and immediately returned to his study, where he began walking back and forth, running his hands through his hair. Amina had the definite impression that he had been doing this for some time. The place was in a state of chaos; she would have suspected it had been ransacked except for the way the untidy piles appeared to have been categorized. He pointed at the PC and she sat down, pressing 'Play' on the media player window that dominated the screen. Shang's hollow, phone-distorted voice told its story. Amina listened, a weight growing in the pit of her stomach. She played it again when it was finished. She had expected to feel relief at finally discovering the reason for everything they had experienced – instead, she felt only a horrible empty fear.

  'That's it?' she said quietly. 'There's no war? How . . . how can that be? How is that possible? How can you fake a whole war? God, all those soldiers killed . . . maimed. That's insane.'

  Chi nodded. He kept pacing, his lower lip red from where he had been chewing it.

  'It wasn't real, but it's real now,' he said hoarsely, as if he had been shouting all afternoon. 'There are terrorists there, there's real fighting. We can't prove there's no war because they've created one out of nothing. The illusion's been replaced by the real thing. We're screwed. All day, I've been trying to work out what we can do, but I can't think of anything. Without proof from somebody on the inside, we are absolutely screwed.'

  'But we have this!' Amina pointed at the screen. 'People will have to listen to us if we show them this.'

  'They've already done a job on him though, haven't they?' he replied. 'Even if we could prove it really was him speaking, he's been discredited. They've already changed the world's perception of him. He's a terrorist now – nobody can believe a word he says and he's not alive to back it up.'

  'It would still stir things up,' Amina insisted.

  'Sure, enough to get us killed, maybe,' Chi retorted. 'But enough to bring the whole thing down? I don't think so. I've seen attempts like that before – and for things far less important than this. This lie is so big, nobody will believe it's possible unless they're forced to.'

  He stopped pacing and gazed at her with a helpless expression.

  'You know what else is getting me? Shang was dead before we got there. We knew he must be desperate to risk exposing himself like that. He really had to have that money. He was so dangerous they would have nabbed
him as soon as they found him, but they only got to him when he reached the meeting point. Somehow, they found out about the meeting.

  'We can guess they weren't tracking him, because they'd never have let us get that close. Ivor called him from an anonymous callbox . . . They could have listened in if they got the number in time, but . . . I don't know. The only other time Ivor would have mentioned the meeting is here, in this house. In my house.'

  Amina could see that this had disturbed Chi more than he was willing to admit. She supposed that after all his precautions, he had considered his home safe from prying eyes and ears.

  'I've scanned the house a dozen times,' he said softly. 'I've turned the place inside out. I can't figure out how they did it.'

  Amina felt a deep sympathy for him, seeing his defences collapsing like this. She had learned enough about this business by now to know that they were amateurs playing a professional's game and they had survived this far by sheer luck as much as anything else. Despite his greater awareness of their adversary, Chi seemed to have lived in a bubble of delusion as far as his security was concerned.

  'Maybe they've got some kind of transmitter you can't pick up?' she offered helpfully, prompting a dismissive sniff from the disgruntled electronics expert. 'Well, why not? Or maybe it's something they switch on after you've done your scanning? They might know your routine. You know, they could just wait until you're off-guard.'

  'It's possible.' He shrugged. 'But the room's insulated against thermal imaging, I've got a copper mesh in the walls and doors that act like a Faraday cage to prevent radio signals passing through, and there are no windows from which to pick up sound vibrations passing through the glass. Even then, I monitor for all forms of transmission and I routinely search the place for recording devices – anything that's new or out of place, any trace of unexplained metal or electrical activity or . . . or . . . anything. If you can think of something I can't, please enlighten me.' He paused for a second. 'That said, I know they can get in without setting off the alarm, so maybe I'm not as smart as I think I am.'

  He told her about the man who had left the message in his kitchen.

  'A dead mouse?' she exclaimed, shuddering. 'They're pretty twisted, aren't they? Whatever happened to just saying "Shut up or you're dead" or something like that?'

  'Suppose it's scarier to be weird.'

  'Still, at least your curiosity didn't kill your cat, huh?'

  'Ha ha.'

  Amina's eyes fell on Roswell, who was curled up asleep in a pile of papers in one corner.

  'Hey, maybe Ros is on their payroll,' she said in another lame attempt at a joke. 'She's selling you out for tuna.'

  'Oh, you're on form today—' he sneered, but then stopped.

  Walking over to where his cat was dozing, he picked her up, ignoring her sleepy, irritated protests. Sitting down at his worktable, he looked her over. She glared balefully back at him, but the hold he had on the back of her neck kept her still. Chi unbuckled her collar and held it up to the light. As soon as he released his grip on the cat, she bounded away to the other side of the room. Squinting at the collar, Chi tilted the buckle one way and then the other.

  'Damn,' he said. 'This has been fiddled with.'

  The leather of the strap folded round one side of the buckle and was held in place by a stud. He took out a penknife and prised the stud out, but instead of coming out in one piece, the top popped off, revealing a tiny hollow inside.

  'Bastards,' he grunted. 'Bastards bugged my cat.'

  He picked up a needle and jammed it into the device, disconnecting it. Switching on a magnifying lamp that sat on the table, he peered through the lens at the hollow stud.

  'Best work I've ever seen,' he muttered in reluctant admiration, as Amina peered over his shoulder. 'The chip is half the size of anything I could get my hands on . . . the mic is tucked inside the fold of the leather, but it must still pick up sound. I'd love to know how they managed that. Hell, the thing doesn't even need batteries! See these contacts on the underside? It runs on the electricity in Roswell's body. They just wait for her to come outside, attract her over with . . . I don't know, a bit of tuna, and just download the new material. Clever, clever, clever. Damn, they're good.'

  He looked up at Amina, fear written on his face.

  'I have no idea how long this has been here. I haven't taken her collar off in ages. We have to assume they've been able to hear every word we've said from the start.'

  Amina was abruptly conscious of how vulnerable they were here, the two of them alone in this big house.

  'Let's get out of here,' she urged him. 'I need some air.'

  'Sure, just let me get something upstairs.'

  Chi understood Amina's need for people and light and noise, but the complete failure of his countersurveillance had shattered his confidence. He didn't want to leave the house. He wanted to talk to his mates online, or surf through his files or the web looking for new leads, new connections. What he didn't want was to think about what this all meant.

  He had hidden Nexus's stuff in a concealed compartment in the base of his bedroom wardrobe. Pulling out the backpack, he opened it up and checked through it. It would be easy enough to get the fake IDs changed so that he could use them himself. The credit cards were next to useless without the pin numbers, but Chi had enough cash put by in readiness for a time like this. The disguise kit might come in useful, and he was certainly going to keep the can of Mace handy.

  He wasn't sure if he wanted to run just yet – maybe they had let him find out just how impotent he was so they wouldn't have to bother killing him. Presumably it was less risky to simply neutralize the threat somebody posed rather than bumping them off altogether. These thoughts flared through his mind, throwing themselves against the wave of fear that loomed on the point of overwhelming him. Maybe they were sitting in a van or rented room somewhere, laughing at him and his pathetic little quest. Maybe he'd never been in any danger at all.

  Even so, he wanted to be ready. He and the others in his network always talked about the possibility of having to 'disappear' before somebody did it for them, and he had made half-hearted plans to do just that. But he never really believed it would be necessary. He believed it now.

  There was a small gap in the curtains that covered the floor-to-ceiling window. He went over to them, opening them wide to gaze out at the night sky. It was hard to see any stars over the city lights. Chi yearned for the days when he had just been chasing UFOs and aliens. The dark side of human nature was so much more terrifying than extra-terrestrial bogeymen. He felt like he'd been kidding himself this whole time. Why watch horror films when you could read a history book or just turn on the news and see it for real? Because horror films gave you a way out. They told you it wasn't real. Chi chuckled to himself, shaking his head.

  He was neck-deep in reality now . . . and all because of an illusion of war.

  The sight of a dark grey disc, almost invisible against the evening gloom, made him start. It dropped down out of nowhere to be framed by the window and he stared at it in disbelief. A beam of pulsing light flashed in his face and he blinked, but was unable to take his eyes off the unidentified flying object. It was only as he started to faint that he remembered the significance of the strobing lights. As he collapsed to the floor, Chi could have sworn he heard gunshots and the sound of smashing glass.

  Amina. He knew they'd come for him eventually, but Amina was here too. She didn't deserve what they'd do to her. This was his last thought before he blacked out.

  28

  Chi woke to find Amina kneeling next to him, gently slapping his face. There was the smell of smoke in the air. The smell came from the muzzle of the gun she held in her hand.

  'What the hell happened?' he asked, sitting up.

  'You've got a UFO out in your front garden,' she told him. 'We better get out there. Your neighbours are getting curious.'

  Amina talked as they hurried down the stairs. She had come up to check on him. She probab
ly didn't like being alone in the house and he couldn't blame her. The lights had just started flashing in his face as she walked in and on impulse, she had drawn her father's automatic from her bag and started shooting. Evidently she was a good shot; she had hit whatever the thing was despite standing in a lighted room, shooting through glass at a target hovering in darkness outside.

  'Like you said,' she sniffed as she opened the front door. 'If you want to keep a secret, don't stick flashing lights all over it.'

  The thing lay on the grass, where the Furmans, Chi's next-door neighbours, were already inspecting it from the far side of their wall. Front doors were opening up and down the street. The gunshots were attracting a lot of attention and Chi was grateful for every bit of it. The more witnesses, the less likely he and Amina were to be dragged into an unmarked van and driven away.

  'What's going on, Chi?' Gary Furman asked. 'Bit late in the night for loud experiments, isn't it? You haven't been messing with explosives again, have you?'

  'Nothing to worry about, Gary,' Chi reassured him as he stared down at the object, which was about a metre wide. 'It's just a prototype surveillance drone a black ops group have been using to keep tabs on me. It was trying to disable me with strobe lights but Amina here shot it down. I don't think it'll be giving us any more trouble.'

  Furman smirked and shook his head, exchanging a look with his wife. They knew enough about Chi's bizarre interests to know when to take him seriously. This wasn't one of those times. Some of the other neighbours looked at each other with the same expression. Chi glanced around and grinned at Amina.

  'Sometimes the truth is too much explanation for people,' he giggled softly.

  The drone was a cloudy grey disc a little over a metre in diameter. It had four turbofans that could move independently and a series of lenses around its edge that looked like they might be cameras of different kinds. There were three bullet holes in its top edge. Chi lifted it up to look underneath. It weighed little more than a large model airplane. A tube set into the underside looked as if it could project the focused light that had knocked him out only minutes before. The whole thing appeared to be seriously state-of-the-art. He could only guess at what kind of technology lay under its skin. He was going to have fun finding out.