Strangled Silence

by Oisin McGann

  Even Dani showed up on television, labelled 'Amina Mir's Best Friend' on the banner, describing how Amina had changed in the last couple of weeks, how she had stopped answering her friends' calls, and had become distant, antisocial, a loner.

  Chi Sandwith was shown to be a stereotypical conspiracy freak. Much was made of his articles on abduction, on his more bizarre theories and his paranoid lifestyle. His neighbours, none of whom spoke with any ill-will, confided that he was considered something of a harmless nut who was tolerated in his eccentricities as long as he kept his weird electronics experiments under control. His parents' broken marriage was mentioned, as well as his younger brother, who had died in a car accident as a young child.

  Ivor was portrayed as an even more pathetic character. Allegedly addicted to sleeping tablets while in Sinnostan, he had been caught in a terrorist bombing that had cost him an eye and some facial scarring that had seen him released from service. It had resulted in him becoming a recluse – a condition compounded by posttraumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis that included hallucinations, delusions and, of course, paranoia. His recent win of over two million pounds on the National Lottery was reported to have made him even more insecure, and now the conspiracy he had been concocting in his mind was being given flesh by all the lunatics his money was attracting. The suicide of his friend, Ben Considine, had apparently cut the last few fragile threads of his sanity.

  This kind of character assassination took up most of the space in the reports. The trio's investigation into Sinnostan and the brainwashing process – Amina was really beginning to hate that term – was mentioned just often enough to dismiss it as fantasy. The military ridiculed the idea of soldiers being 'abducted' and experimented upon, consigning the idea to the same realms as UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster. The press had even got hold of Amina's pictures of Chi holding the surveillance drone – she had sent them to a number of servers, including her own email address at the Chronicle – suggesting that Sandwith, an electronics expert, had built the device himself in an effort to persuade the world of the truth of his theories. Naturally, the contraption did not actually work.

  The army withdrew MindFeed from schools, but vigorously defended it, denying that it caused aggression in any way and pointing out that if you wanted to find the source of behavioural problems in any individual, the first place you should look was the parents.

  Helena Jessop and Martin Mir observed this onslaught with growing outrage. They were only beginning to come to terms with the fact that their son had killed someone and this made it so much worse. They knew a smear campaign when they saw it and could not believe it was being aimed at their children. Amina was afraid that they would hold her partly responsible for Tariq's moment of madness, but in the beginning they were too concerned for their son and his victim to worry about blaming their daughter. As the attacks in the media continued, they recognized an agenda at work and set about trying to find out who was feeding all of this information to the reporters.

  But then came the day when Martin, in a moment of severe stress, settled down to the calming routine of stripping down and cleaning his gun at the kitchen table.

  Amina had been meaning to tell him that she had taken it – she really had. She'd just never built up the nerve. He realized the weapon had been fired moments after taking it out of the lockbox and when he discovered that four bullets were missing, he summoned Amina to him with a voice so level and reasoned that it terrified them.

  Confessing to her father that she had fired his Browning automatic at a UFO was the scariest thing Amina had ever done. She broke down crying before she finished, but he just stared at her with a stone-cold expression on his face.

  'What did we do wrong?' he asked quietly, once she had calmed down. 'Your mother and I . . . we can't understand where all this has come from. You have both . . .' His voice cracked, but he regained his composure before continuing. 'You both seem to have completely lost your minds. But all this madness is going to stop now. Tariq is going to stand trial for manslaughter . . . if we're lucky, it'll be manslaughter. The best we can hope for is a plea of temporary insanity, but frankly, your mother has covered enough murder cases and she doesn't hold out much hope. It's very possible that Tariq will be spending the next few years of his life in juvenile detention.

  'Amina, tomorrow you are going to take me to where you fired this weapon and you're going to show me this thing you claim to have shot down. And so help me God, if I'm not satisfied with what I see, you'll think Tariq got off easy. Do you understand me?'

  That night Amina took the home phone to her bedroom. She knew someone would be listening in on the call, but they weren't going to hear anything they didn't already know. She tried to ring Chi on his mobile four times, but could not get through. On the off-chance that he might have returned home, she called the house too, but only the answering machine picked up. Without much hope, she decided to try Ivor and was surprised when he picked up his phone on the third ring.

  'You're home?' she gasped. 'They let you out on bail?'

  'The million quid I was going to give to Shang is being held as evidence,' Ivor told her. 'The judge at the hearing thought that was more than enough leverage to keep me around until the end of the trial. Listen, I heard about your brother.'

  'Hard not to,' she snorted. 'The news can't seem to shut up about it.'

  'I'm really sorry, Amina. How's he holding up?'

  'Better than the other guy.' She winced. 'Sorry, that sounds awful . . . Mum and Dad met Alan's parents the other day. It was pretty traumatic. I've never seen Mum cry as hard as she did when she got home.'

  'There's something else I need to tell you,' Ivor said. 'I went round to see Chi, but the police are all over his house. There were bullet holes in one of the windows.'

  'Yeah. That was . . . that was me,' Amina replied.

  She glanced towards her bedroom door; she lowered her voice and told Ivor what had happened, explaining that Chi had taken the surveillance drone and gone into hiding. Ivor whistled in wonder. She didn't tell him where Chi had gone. Not over the phone.

  'C'm'ere,' he said. 'Can I pick you up? I've hired a car. There's something I need to tell you. And I'm going somewhere tonight: you might want to tag along.'

  Amina could guess what her parents might have to say about that, but at this point she was past caring. Tariq was being done for manslaughter, she was a public disgrace and her story had been ridiculed. Her mother and father held her in thinly disguised contempt. It felt like she had nothing to lose any more.

  'Sure,' she chirped. 'Beep your horn when you're outside.'

  Ivor got there in less than half an hour, drawing up in a bland, blue Toyota saloon. Thankfully, the reporters who had spent most of the week hanging around the outside of the house were nowhere to be seen. It was cold outside. Amina walked outto the car, turning to look back through the darkness at her parents, who were watching her, silhouetted in the light of the living-room window. Getting into the passenger seat, she hugged Ivor and gave him a kiss on the cheek, and he replied with a squeeze of her hand and an uncertain smile.

  'I'm glad you called,' she said, surprised at the shyness in her own voice. 'Not just because of this, I mean . . . I . . . it's just good to see you.'

  'You too . . . that's . . . it's good to see you too,' he stammered. He was about to take the handbrake off when he hesitated, turning to look at her. 'Listen, Amina. I know how I feel about you and I think you kind o' like me too, but . . . I have to ask: Is it me you're interested in, or . . . or is it my story?'

  She looked away, thinking for a moment. Then she met his gaze again.

  'I don't know. Is there a difference?'

  He smiled, then an uncertain expression crossed his features and he smiled once more.

  'Honestly? I'm not sure. I never thought of it like that before.'

  Ivor let it go at that, figuring that she hadn't given him a perfect answer, but it wasn't a half bad one either. Better than he'd hoped.
Pulling back out into the road, he started talking quickly.

  'The last time I saw Chi, he told me about a woman named Ellen Rosenstock. She came up with a process known as strobe interruption that could be used to—'

  'I know, I heard the recording you made of Shang,' she told him. 'So she invented the process they used on you?'

  'Yeah, right. Well, she started off using it on university students. Listening to what the news had to say about Tariq's freak-out, I wondered if she might have anything to do with the program the army was using in the school. If that's the case, then maybe he's not so responsible for his actions after all, yeah?'

  Amina nodded. She'd already considered the possibility that Tariq had been programmed into doing what he did. Anything was easier than believing he was a killer. That said, if he had been brainwashed, then it might well have been because of the questions she had been asking. That gave her no comfort at all.

  It also made her ponder the army's motives for using MindFeed in schools. Were they up to something more sinister than education? Perhaps they too were being manipulated by someone else.

  'So where do we start looking for her?' Amina asked.

  'You're not going to believe this, but she's in the phone book,' he said, chuckling. 'I decided not to call her, in case . . . you know.'

  Amina nodded. She knew.

  'Instead, I figured we'd just drop in on her and ask her a few questions. She has an address in Fulham.'

  'Cool.'

  He looked over at Amina and gave her that grin she was growing to love. It was nice to be sitting here beside him, as if they were just out for a drive, or going on a date somewhere. Doing something normal. But there was nothing normal about what they were doing. If Rosenstock was so deeply involved in this mess, she was bound to be well protected. They were taking a big risk in going to see her. Amina could see from the look on Ivor's face that he was feeling as reckless as she was. They had been through so much that they were done caring about consequences. If anything, they were feeling an insane giddiness. All that mattered to them now was getting to the truth and finding the proof to back it up. And if Amina could help Tariq, any risk would be worth it.

  As they drove, each filled the other in on what they'd missed. When Amina heard that Ivor had been shot, she insisted on looking at the wound. He was touched by the hurt in her voice, the pain in her eyes. She told him about Donghu. The Sinnostani's view of the war came as little surprise to Ivor now. She asked him about the charges against him.

  'They caught me at the scene, but their evidence is thin,' Ivor said, shrugging, his eyes on the road. 'My lawyer says they don't have much of a case so far. The murder weapon was found on the ground a few metres away, but there are no prints on it and I wasn't wearing gloves. They don't have a clear motive and Shang's been vilified as a terrorist so there'll be little sympathy for him. Can't say I've any for him myself.'

  His hand went up to his right eye, his fingers brushing against the eyelid.

  'Even so, you don't know what they're going to turn up on me if somebody decides to cook up some evidence. I wouldn't put it past them.'

  Amina put her hand on his, wishing she could do more than offer this scant comfort.

  When they reached the address in Fulham, a large Victorian house on a street of tree-lined, upper middle-class residences, they found a police car and an ambulance sitting outside. Their rooflights flashed ominously in the gloom, their blue light giving the pleasant street an air of sinister drama. Ivor pulled up twenty metres back on the other side of the road.

  'That's the house,' he muttered.

  Amina couldn't even muster any shock or surprise at what she was witnessing. A stretcher was being carried down the steps from the front door. There was a body lying still on the stretcher. The head had been covered up.

  'Do you think they knew we were coming?' she asked quietly.

  'Probably,' he replied. 'But they've been one step ahead of us the whole time. Maybe she was becoming a liability anyway. Either way, it doesn't matter. Everything we try and do, they cut the legs out from under us.'

  He fell silent, gazing out at the ambulance as it drove off without haste and without its sirens. A police officer spoke to two people standing on the path for a few minutes and then he left too. There was no attempt to cordon off the scene. There was no suspicion that a crime had happened here.

  'What now?' Amina looked at Ivor.

  His shoulders were slumped in defeat, his morose expression spoke of a complete loss of hope and it hurt her heart to see it. He didn't answer her. Taking a notepad from her bag, she scribbled some words on it and showed it to him. With a sigh, he read the words: Let's go see Chi.

  'Where is he?' he mouthed the word to her.

  She put pen to paper again, and wrote out Stefan Gierek's address.

  'First, though, I want to talk to someone else,' she said.

  1

  Stefan Gierek maintained a 'city base' with four other survivalist fanatics in an industrial estate in Cricklewood. All five had been casualties of the Sinnostan war and had devoted their lives to resenting the British government because of it. Chi's discovery of the surveillance drone had helped mollify Gierek and bought him sanctuary in the Pole's homemade fortress.

  Ivor, Amina and their guest parked the car in a city-centre car park and took a tortuous route through the Underground and by bus and taxi to the address, in an attempt to throw off any followers. There were few people on the streets and train platforms. Stopping at a payphone halfway through their journey, Amina made a phone call to alert Chi and his host that they were coming. A light rain drifted from the sky, dampening everything around them and giving the city a greasy, sleazy feel. The three travellers looked over their shoulders regularly, their eyes constantly scanning for any sign of a threat. Amina wondered again if she would ever be able to walk alone in dark streets without that near-constant edge of fear.

  It was almost midnight by the time they arrived at the decommissioned factory that served as home for Gierek and his trucking company. It was easy to see why he'd picked it.

  The walls, built to support the weight of some kind of machinery inside, were steel-reinforced concrete. The garage entrance and the few windows on the ground floor were covered with heavy steel shutters. The windows on the first floor were secured with horizontal steel bars, as were the skylights in the roof. There were no buildings adjoining the factory and the upper-floor windows had a view of the wide yard on every side. Gierek's four trucks were kept safely in the garage. CCTV cameras and motion sensors surveyed every inch of the floodlit exterior and the compound was surrounded by a high fence topped with razorwire.

  A few weeks ago, Amina would have considered this level of security for a trucking company a little absurd. Now, she found it comforting. Gierek came out to greet them, nodding at Amina and Ivor through the bars of the gate. The floodlights created a halo-like reflection around his broad, shaved head. He glared suspiciously at John Donghu, whose little figure stood hunched against the rain in a worn leather bomber jacket.

  'Who is that?' the Pole snarled.

  'A friend,' Amina told him. 'I told Chi about him on the phone. We can trust him.'

  With a grunt that could have meant anything, Gierek pressed a remote and the gate slid open far enough to let them slip through before closing again immediately.

  The interior of the building was as severely practical as the exterior. Half of the space was divided into two floors, with offices downstairs and living space upstairs. The rest was for the lorries: two DAF container trucks and two Mercedes tractors with sleeper cabs. They were in immaculate condition. A Land Rover was parked in front of them. There was enough equipment in the garage to carry out all but the most serious maintenance, including a heavy-duty winch hanging from a girder in the roof. A first-floor balcony encircled the garage space to allow access to the windows on all sides.

  Amina and Ivor studied the place for a moment and then looked at each other. It gave
them a gratifying feeling of safety.

  Part of the living space on the first floor was given over to a gym and the new arrivals followed Gierek upstairs to find Chi working out on a bench press, wearing a vest and tracksuit bottoms. Judging by the pale flab hanging from his chest and arms, this kind of exercise was a new experience for him.

  'Hi!' he exclaimed, growling against the strain of the weights. 'They've got me working on my cuts and going for the burn!'

  The others waited patiently for him to finish. There was a formidably fit-looking man spotting him, dressed in camouflage T-shirt and combats and sporting a high-and-tight haircut. Another three, equally butch, survivalists sat around the area. One kept his eyes on a bank of screens that showed the views of the surveillance cameras outside. Another was examining Chi's captive UFO, carefully peering through a magnifying lens at some of the electronics. The third one just stood leaning against a doorway, staring at the newcomers from behind mirrored sunglasses.

  'I heard about your brother, Amina,' Chi panted, as his training partner nodded to him and he finally finished his reps. 'I'm really sorry. If it's any comfort, I think he may have been set up.'

  'No, it's not much comfort and yes, I've already considered that he might have been set up,' she replied. 'Ivor and I went to talk to Ellen Rosenstock this evening. The others got there first. We've hit another dead end.'

  Chi's face fell, and he digested this news with a pensive expression, chewing his lip. Then he nodded to himself.