by Rob Aspinall
Philippe finally spoke. “A bargaining chip. In case—”
“In case what?” Nathan asked, itching to know.
“In case I wanted out. I was undecided until Oslo. Thanks for making up my mind.”
Nathan shook his head. “What, you thought you’d cut some kind of deal?”
“To get out,” Philippe said. “Yes.”
Nathan took a seat next to Tucker and folded his arms. “Come on, Philippe. You know it doesn’t work like that.”
Philippe shrugged. “It was worth a shot.”
“If you were unhappy in your role, all you needed to do was say,” Tucker said. “A man with your talents … You could have stepped into Nathan’s shoes within a year,” he continued, resting his fine china cup on its saucer.
“Yeah, if you like crappy spod trainers,” I said.
Everyone ignored me, as usual. I hated it when people did that.
“Type A’s are supposed to neutralise security threats,” Philippe said. “Since when did that include pregnant secretaries and teenage girls?”
“Since you do whatever the goddam hell I tell you,” Tucker shouted, slamming a fist on the table, rattling the cup and saucer.
“What would you have us do?” Nathan asked. “She was a security risk, just like the secretary.”
“We must protect the missions, the objective, the people we have in place,” Tucker said, mopping up his spilt tea with a serviette and regaining his cool.
“What exactly is your objective?” I asked. “Scumballs of the year?”
Nathan and Tucker laughed and shared a look.
“Wait,” Tucker said in mock shock. “She thinks we’re the bad guys.”
“Well, duh,” I said.
“No, no, no, you got things the wrong way up and down, darlin’.”
“We’re a peacekeeping organisation,” Nathan said.
“By peacekeeping, you mean keeping people quiet?” I asked.
“Our work presents grey areas. Compromises,” Tucker said, with so much regret in his voice I think he almost believed it.
“Some are willing to compromise more than others,” Philippe said, restless in his chair, struggling to keep a lid on himself.
“Aw, listen to Mother Theresa here,” Nathan said. “More confirmed kills than Ebola.”
“Have you taken a look out the window lately?” Tucker asked, standing up out of his chair and pacing in front of said window, listing out a separate problem on each finger. “You’ve got dictatorships, tribal genocide, global warming, global terror, broken religions, two thirds of the world’s population living in poverty, AIDS, famine, energy shortages, water shortages. Let’s see, what else?”
I was going to suggest slow internet and replacement bus services, but I let him keep talking.
“Oh, yup,” he said, “God-darn Twitter rage, cyber bullying, gang-rape epidemics, the refugee crisis, the ageing crisis, economic crashes, superbugs, the migrant problem, sex trafficking. Y’all want me to continue?”
He almost had me convinced. I didn’t realise things were that bad. I suppose they were. They definitely weren’t getting any better.
“Humanity has crossed a line, my friends,” Tucker said, returning to the table.
“You don’t get to draw a new one,” said Philippe.
“We’ve been redrawing the line since Hiroshima,” Nathan said.
“Did you know I had a heart bypass last year?” Tucker asked me. “Had to change my whole lifestyle. Exercise. Meditation. Diet. The works.”
“Yeah, so what?” I asked.
“After you’ve been eating all those little green veggies for a while, all the germs and viruses trapped inside come pouring on out. And it’s nasty. I mean, real nasty.”
Tucker poured himself a glass of Perrier and took a sip.
“I was spewing and crapping like a goddam volcano, but a few days later I feel better than a baby in a barrel o’ titties. My bad meniscus clears up. My pecker wakes up. And the quack says I’m healthy as a saddle horse. The wife’s real happy too.”
“Nothing like a good detox,” Nathan said, crawling up the man’s bum hole.
“It was a rough old rodeo at the time,” Tucker said. “But when you come out the other end, everything works a darn sight better, believe me.”
“So let’s cut the shit here,” I said. “This detox. What you’re really talking about is killing people. Flushing out the human bacteria.”
“Hey, the little lady catches on fast,” Tucker said to Nathan.
“What numbers are we talking?” Philippe asked.
“About four or five?” Nathan said, checking with his boss.
“Yup, four or five,” said Tucker.
“Million?” I said. “Jesus.”
“No, billion,” said Nathan. “Of course.”
Four or five billion? My eyes nearly popped out of my skull.
“Have you all gone completely insane?” Philippe said, the lines on his forehead bunching up.
“It’s an insane world, Mr Vazquez,” said Tucker.
“So that’s what Project Maelstrom was all about,” I said. “Emptying the human trash.”
No wonder they wanted it kept quiet. No wonder they wanted me dead. It was the secret to end all secrets. Bigger than me, Giles or Philippe could ever have imagined.
Philippe shook his head. “Destabilising the world economy, creating a culture of terror, establishing a power block in the Middle East. Turning superpowers against each other. That was all just the start, wasn’t it?”
“And don’t forget the Spider Web thingy,” I said.
“Natural disasters,” Tucker said, swallowing down a burp. “An inevitable result of climate change.”
“What else have you got planned?” Philippe asked.
“You know how we do things here,” said Tucker. “We like to mix it up a little.”
“To the naked eye, it will all seem completely random,” said Nathan, taking a pain au chocolat from a plate of pastries on the table. He bit the head off it and smiled.
“So the whole world will fall and you’ll pick up the pieces,” Philippe said. “You’ll step into the power vacuum and rebuild.”
“Not a rebuild, a reboot,” Tucker said. “We’re pushing the reset button is all.”
“They’ll never let you get away with it,” I said.
“Who’s they?” asked Nathan, between chomps.
“The governments. The armies.”
“Mmm, well it’s lucky we’re covered by a treaty,” said Tucker. “Signed by all JPAC member states. All seventy-three of them.”
“Who would agree to a thing like that?” I asked.
Tucker gave me a pitiful look. “Haven’t you learned yet, Miss Walker? Given a big enough why, people can bear almost any how.”
“That was Freud, wasn’t it?” Nathan said, like a kid at the front of the class, after a gold star.
“Nietzsche,” Philippe said, I think just to rile him.
“Either way,” Tucker continued, “any members who didn’t agree will now be part of the problem, rather than the solution.”
The sultan in the desert.
The congressman in the Hamptons.
The Russian in Paris.
It was all falling into place. All the secret movers and shakers either assassinated or stiff-armed into signing the treaty, with JPAC Type A’s like Philippe and Inge doing the dirty work for Nathan’s own personal death squad.
The list was a programme of coordinated genocide, arranged in such a way to look like the natural consequence of humanity’s endless screw-ups. The likes of Tucker and Nathan would be gods in a brave new world big on resources and small on bodies. Enough dead to make room for a JPAC regime. Enough alive to work and build and consume. Giles’s theory was staggeringly close to the mark.
Surely, this kind of thing only happened in movies. It didn’t feel real. My stomach felt queasy.
“Now if you’ll excuse us,” said Tucker, standing and but
toning his blazer over his sixty-year spread, “we’ve got a busy old day.”
A pair of armed guards marched into the room and stood directly behind us.
“I wish I could say the future looks bright for you, Miss Walker,” Tucker said, strolling towards the door. “But it’s about to get real damn dark.”
“What about the list?” Philippe said. “Don’t you want to know what we know?”
“The list has changed,” Nathan said, slapping pastry crumbs off his hands. “You should know. You did text us on Clarence’s phone. Or didn’t you think we’d find his body?”
Nathan shook his head, as if disappointed in Philippe. “We ran the Taipei mission to sucker you in. Senator Tucker didn’t think you’d show, but after the Reichstag, I knew you’d be back.”
“And anything you folks know,” Tucker said, “we’ll soon know too.”
Call Me Teddy departed without even so much as a See y’all. Nathan escorted us forty floors down in the elevator, but let the guards take it from there.
“Answer me something before you go,” Philippe said to Nathan as we were pushed out into a dimly lit corridor. “The Reichstag. You were going to destroy the euro by blowing up parliament? Spread panic with a dirty bomb? Pin it on the Russians?”
“Actually, that was just the cover story,” Nathan said, holding an elevator door. “It was more of a live field test.”
“What kind of test?” I asked.
“A new biochemical weapon,” Nathan said. “Custom-manufactured. Precision radius. Timed contamination period. State-of-the-art stuff.”
“To what end?” Philippe asked.
“Oh, you have no idea,” Nathan said, smiling like a snake and letting the elevator doors close.
29
Cold Shower
The guts of the mountain. Not so glitzy as the Hive. No natural light. Dim and cool and scary like a real underground lair ought to be. We were marched down a maze of gloomy corridors wide as roads. Pushed into separate cells behind solid steel doors that shut with an ear-shattering bang. My magnetic cuffs were removed and I was told to get undressed. I stripped down to my smalls, shivering in the dank cell.
“All of it,” said the female guard, like a snappy dog.
Reluctantly, I went full-frontal. I’d never felt so vulnerable.
“And the watch,” she said.
I slipped off the watch and tucked it inside one of my boots. I handed the whole caboodle over.
The guard folded the clothes in a neat pile and zipped them up with the boots in a clear plastic bag, quickly spirited away by a junior soldier.
“If you’re gonna run me a bath,” I said, as she walked out of the door, “I’d like some bubbles and a radio.”
She returned a few minutes later in full waterproofs. She turned on a giant hose and blew me back against the wall with a blast of Arctic water. I screamed until my throat hurt. With the cold shower over, she threw a towel and orange jumpsuit at me. Once I was dried and changed, they cuffed me again and dead-man-walked me into a bright, white circular theatre with two medical benches and the homely whiff of disinfectant.
Philippe was wrestled in wearing the same hideous orange outfit. Two soldiers took up their positions inside the door.
Some mad professor type with hair even whiter than his coat wheeled a big, boxy machine across the room, while a female assistant prepared a couple of worryingly large syringes. What awaited us on those benches? I wondered. Torture? Euthanasia? Doubted it was a nip and tuck.
Philippe winked at me. “You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah. I’m about to die, thanks to you,” I said.
“Thanks to me?”
“Taipei was your plan. I should’ve gone it alone.”
“Like in Berlin?” Philippe said. “You were doing a fine job.”
“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t stolen that list,” I said.
“And you definitely wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t gone snooping around that church.”
“Of all the organs, they had to give me yours. What kind of assassin carries a donor card, anyway?”
“An assassin who wants to be unidentifiable, you stroppy, ungrateful little girl.”
“Oh, shut up, Mr Droopy.”
“What did you call me?”
“You heard,” I said, wiggling my little finger.
Without warning, Philippe lunged forward. I moved faster and hit him with both hands across the face, the best I could manage still in cuffs. The guards stepped in. I swung a roundhouse kick into a soldier’s face. Philippe took the other one out with a head-butt and a knee to the ribs.
We pulled the sidearms from their holsters and broke out of the room, hanging a right down the corridor.
“Mr Droopy?” Philippe asked.
“It was all I could think of at the time.”
“You’d have made a good actress.”
“Who said I was acting?”
We rounded the next corner, straight into a wall of soldiers chatting around a water cooler. They dropped their little plastic cups and drew their weapons.
“Oh, thank God you guys are here,” I said. “A couple of prisoners got out and stole our uniforms.”
They weren’t impressed. Or convinced.
“Damn,” I said. “I really thought that was gonna work.”
Moments later, we were being de-cuffed and strapped to those benches with guards positioned on both sides of the door and the mad professor prepping his kit. His assistant, a chunky Hispanic woman with nice, kind eyes, unzipped my jumpsuit part-way and attached heart-monitor pads to my chest.
“What’s a girl like you doing in an underground lair like this?” I asked her.
“I could ask the same of you,” she said, slipping a shower cap attached to a mess of wires over my head. The cap was full of tiny holes. The assistant squirted thick, tingly blue gel into each one.
Philippe got the same treatment.
Widescreen monitors displayed our heartbeats, brainwave patterns and vital signs.
“What are you doing with us?” Philippe asked.
“Just a little data collection before we get started,” said the mad professor in a Dutch accent. “It’s not every day I get one subject with an organ taken from the body of another. It’s a chance to see how our clone organs are doing too,” he said.
“And I must say,” he continued, ogling the numbers on the screen like they were porn, “both of you are showing some quite remarkable activity, especially you, Lorna. Your brainwave activity is incredibly plastic. Chaotic. Almost like your brain is constantly rewiring itself. Even taking into account your age.”
“Then it makes sense to keep the both of us alive, right?” I said. “You know, like, study us further and stuff.”
The mad professor turned and smiled. “If only that were possible. Unfortunately, it’s out of my hands. In fact,” he said, leaning over me with an impossibly big syringe, “keeping you alive is the least of my orders. This won’t hurt,” he continued. “But once the drug kicks in fully, say in around ten minutes, you will tell us everything you know.” He then brought the needle closer to my vein, the skin on his hands spotted and yellow, like a plucked and buttered chicken. “Every … last … detail.”
“Dr Vogels,” his assistant said, “shouldn’t we start with the other prisoner? With him being the larger of the two?”
Dr Vogels paused for a moment. “That way we can question both at the same time. Of course, Angelica. Quite correct.”
He turned his attention to Philippe, who tensed up beneath his restraints. It was no use. They were solid metal, mechanised and locked tight to the bench around our wrists and ankles. Professor Pain stuck him with the needle and busied himself for a couple of minutes, printing out our charts on the boxy machine he’d wheeled into the centre of the theatre.
“Dr Vogels,” Angelica said. “The girl. Shouldn’t we …”
“Ah yes, yes, yes.”
He picked up another needle a
nd wandered over to me. The old man no doubt knew his stuff, but he seemed forgetful. I wondered where they’d dug him up from. Probably got struck off the medical register for falling asleep performing surgery and had no choice but to JPAC it up.
He stuck me with the needle too. I glanced at the clock again. He’d only plunged it halfway down when a deep rumble shook the whole theatre like an earthquake. The screens blinked and red lights flashed on and off in tandem with a siren.
“Contamination in Zone Five,” came a Siri-esque female voice over a hidden PA system. “Emergency containment initiated.”
The door to the theatre unlocked itself as a fragment of rock broke from the ceiling and smashed into a tray of surgical tools. Dr Vogels withdrew the syringe from my arm, with half the clear liquid inside. Unsteadied by the event, he had to be helped out of the room by Angelica.
This was Philippe’s cue. He uncurled his right fist where he’d kept the key he’d snatched from the belt of one of the soldiers during our little scrap. Suddenly, he had one arm free.
The guards never stood a chance.
30
Cheesy Garlic Balls
In Philippe’s mountain cabin, we’d spent a whole day planning it out.
“Whatever happens in Taipei,” Philippe said, cleaning one of his guns with a cloth, “let it play. I’ll make sure we’re just where we need to be.”
“Okay, but what about when they catch us?” I asked, picking up part of the stripped weapon.
He swiped it off me like I couldn’t be trusted with it. “They won’t kill us immediately. They’ll want to know what we know. Most of all, they’ll want to know why I went rogue. That means taking us to a secure facility. Somewhere with equipment and specialists. Someone high up the chain.”
“There’ll be two parts to the escape,” he said. “The first will be through a staged fight.”
We stood toe-to-toe outside the cabin, hands bound with tape. I hit Philippe hard in the mush. He told me to hit harder. I gave him a real two-handed stinger. Both fists across the bridge of his nose.
“Good,” he said, as if I’d just tickled him. “There’ll probably be two guards. One will go for you first because you’re smaller and weaker.”
