‘What do you think it’s worth as an ultimatum? As something to bargain with?’ said a stunned Alice.
‘It’s worth getting your kids back. Our people released. The elevators turned back on. It’s worth whatever we decide it’s worth, if we play our cards right. It’ll kill our public approval, but it might just get the job done. And if needs be, we’ll destroy the city and the system which infests it and start over with something better.’
Seemingly unconcerned by the gravity of his words, Maalik switched on the monitors and began to run the operating system, beckoning Alice closer.
Chapter 21
GREY WALLS. GREY carpet, a grey which not only showed up every piece of dirt and stain but would always in itself look dirty. Almost but not quite the same cinereous shade as the floor in the former bank, except of course for the rust-coloured stains. Grey drawers and cupboards. Councillor Ryan Granier examined his new surroundings with a manic energy.
‘Councillor?’
Ryan snapped back to attention. He found himself staring into the eyes of the rotund woman sitting in front of him.
‘Are you back with us, Councillor Granier?’
Ryan nodded, looked away and tried not to meet her gaze. The grey room was in fact the medical bay in the New Cairo Police Department building.
The woman in front of him was Dr Tasnim Albrecktsson, a psychiatrist under contract with the police force. She was a dowdy-looking middle-aged woman with a gruff personality that Ryan would never have placed on a shrink, and at that moment her voice seemed to resonate at the exact frequency ideally suited to annoy him.
‘What is it?’ he muttered.
‘Ah. Right, now that you’re present, let’s try and get through the basics. Have you been sleeping well?’
He hadn’t been sleeping well, no. Ava had been giving him help for that. Ava, who—
‘I’ve been sleeping fine.’
Dr Albrecktsson looked him up and down for a moment, then typed the response into her terminal. ‘Have you experienced mood swings or erratic emotional states since your kidnapping?’
There were his panic attacks, his sudden turns to anger. Sometimes, when he had been left alone with nothing to occupy himself with, he’d felt depressed. He’d told Ava …
‘No.’
Again, Dr Albrecktsson scanned him, and said only a curt, ‘If you say so.’
Ryan looked up. ‘What have you written about me?’
‘Your demeanour has swung back and forward about five times since you entered this office, Councillor. You took about two minutes each time to answer those questions, and I’m pretty sure you weren’t fully aware of our surroundings for most of that period. I’ve noted that you’re suffering from Acute Stress Disorder, and probably the seeds of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I saw your medical report; anyone who’d been in your situation would have similar diagnoses. We can take some scans, some blood work to confirm.’
‘So my answers were …?’
She shrugged. ‘I wanted to see if you were being cooperative or not. A warning to myself, or to whoever else you may see in the future.’
Ryan stopped for a second. ‘Uncooperative? I thought you said I wasn’t aware for the big pauses?’
‘Lying. It’s fine, it’s a symptom of your condition, but it’s unhelpful for us and it’s potentially damaging for you. Internalizing your trauma makes it harder to stop reliving it.’
‘So what do you want me to do?’
‘I want you, starting from the beginning, to tell me what happened from the moment when you were kidnapped. Or backwards from today. Whichever you find easier.’
A faint smell of burnt meat.
‘I can’t.’
Dr Albrecktsson leaned forward, a look of concern on her face. ‘Is it too traumatic, or are you having problems remembering?’
‘It’s …’
Ryan stopped. The burnt meat smell grew more and more intense.
With nothing better to do, Ryan practised his walking. The newly arrived operatives had all disappeared, leaving the base emptier than it had been in days. Even when they didn’t engage with him at all, they were something, a distraction, colourful and energetic, a whole new network of people and interpersonal relationships to watch. For two days, they had been something new and stimulating. At the very least, unlike the safe house’s regular inhabitants, they spent most of their time camped out in the large foyer he had access to. It was the closest he had been to social engagement outside of the conversations he’d wrangled out of Ava, Vik or Kanak. Without this to occupy him, physio seemed like the thing to do. Still confined to crutches, he fine-tuned his balance, experimented with different gaits. His confidence built and he began to speed up his pace.
After a while, his expedition was interrupted by the intrusion of two of the newer non-combat personnel: Hoshi Smolak, a bespectacled accountant in his forties, and a stout, pockmarked computer genius named Suman Chaudhri.
‘Is there a reason you’re pacing?’ asked Suman.
‘Boredom.’
‘I can imagine that, yeah,’ said Hoshi, nodding. ‘You never really think of being someone’s hostage as getting quite dull after a bit, but I guess you really don’t have anything to do here.’
‘I get tortured every so often, that livens things up,’ said Ryan, suddenly bristling. Hoshi looked uncomfortable.
‘Did you hear the latest news then?’ said Suman, breaking the tension. ‘Your father’s lot think they’ve identified someone they’re pretty sure is the person who created the Soucouyant virus.’
‘They’ve got what?’ They had Ryan’s attention now.
‘A hacker who apparently killed a bunch of bio-augmented people a few years back. It’s weird. She actually helped us out a bit with regard to bringing down your father’s company, using a stolen identity.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Zala Ulora.’
That rang a bell. Something from a long, long time ago.
‘I think I remember her father,’ said Ryan. ‘Dr Kweku Ulora. He was the project lead on the IntuitivAI development; I remember meeting him. There was some issue there, he got charged with corporate espionage. It was pretty big; he ended up escaping the city before the police could track him down.’
Hoshi looked over at Suman. ‘Did she mention any of that to you?’
‘Not a word of it,’ Suman replied. ‘Check it out.’
Hoshi entered the name into his portable terminal’s network browser. A series of news articles from eight years ago appeared. Most of them revolved around Dr Ulora’s daughter, Zala, escaping the city – she’d been accused of three counts of murder, and he fled with her. It appeared that it was only after Dr Ulora had left that the allegations of corporate espionage came out.
‘Computer expertise, a hatred of bio-augmentation – it doesn’t sounds implausible,’ said Ryan.
‘I’m pretty sceptical that she’d be behind the Soucouyant virus,’ said Suman. ‘She’s good, but she’s not nearly as good as whoever coded it, unless she had one arm tied behind her back whenever I’ve seen her work. But it wouldn’t surprise me if she knows something. Maybe her old dad isn’t really dead, and he created it out of revenge.’
‘You know,’ Hoshi said to Ryan, ‘if your father’s people wind up finding her, and a cure is released, it’ll get you off the hook. You might be out of here sooner than you think.’
‘Maybe,’ said Ryan, trying to remain non-committal.
Babirye Granier was already in tears by the time she walked into the room, and the moment Ryan saw his wife, he began to cry too. Babirye ran to the side of the hospital bed, stumbling around a doctor and throwing herself onto Ryan. He embraced her until his muscles ached. It was the first time he had held her since the morning he had been taken. From behind her, Hafiz and Dalin, his boys, came into view and joined the embrace.
‘I’m amazed you guys recognize me, I look terrible,’ said Ryan, unable to stop smiling.
‘You
look pretty scruffy, yeah,’ replied a beaming Hafiz. He reached up and brushed his hand against Ryan’s two weeks’ beard growth.
‘Are you back for good?’ asked Dalin.
‘I’m not going to be going anywhere for a while.’
‘Not for want of this leg: it’s been put back together pretty well,’ said the doctor, examining the large scar. She seemed to be both fascinated and surprised. ‘It’s expensive stuff they used, a proper high-grade flesh binder. They did what they did for the video, then patched you right up. Your face, too. It’s not great, but they used proper contracting masks on you.’
‘Still hurt at the time.’
Babirye looked down at the ugly gash on his leg, and covered her mouth in horror. ‘It’s fine, Babs, it’s not as bad as it looks,’ said Ryan, though the look of concern on her face did not diminish. ‘Did you have to come from work?’
‘I’ve been on leave since you were taken, you idiot,’ said Babirye, sitting on the edge of his hospital bed. ‘I tried to keep busy, but they sent me home. Everyone in New Cairo’s been holding their breath for you.’
The boys climbed up onto the bed. Dalin crawled right into the doctor’s line of sight and over onto Ryan’s lap, hugging his father tightly. Hafiz stayed distant, less sure of what to do. Ryan realized it must have been a terrifying two weeks for those on the outside. He reached out to his son, and slowly Hafiz allowed himself to be drawn into his father’s embrace with his brother. Ryan hoped desperately that they hadn’t seen the tape of him being mutilated on the news. Eyes squeezed shut as he clutched his sons to his chest, he didn’t notice the Secret Service agents gathering outside.
‘So what is your father really like?’
Ryan looked up at Hoshi, unsure how to reply. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I worked in the accounts department of FanaSoCo for fourteen years, then I came here as part of a movement to fight against him. You get a very skewed impression of a person when he’s the adversary of every group in which you’ve worked for the better part of a decade and a half.’
‘He’s …’ Ryan stammered, unsure as to why on earth he would want to have this conversation but complying none the less, ‘he’s very much like how he comes across, I think. I mean, when I hear people talking about him, it sounds a lot like how I used to think of him.’ Ryan chose his words carefully. His father was distant, yes, but distance was different from negligence, a difference which felt important to him. ‘There wasn’t really a “High Councillor Granier” and a “Daddy”. I think that when you’re in a position like his, which requires such a specific, formidable type of person to do it, there isn’t really space in there for another kind of mindset.’
Hoshi nodded. ‘That … definitely makes sense. I mean, his home life has been in the papers for years. Yours too. He never seemed to let up on the High Councillor persona. Detached, disinterested, that kind of thing.’
Ryan thought back to weeks before, when his father had tried to explain to him why he wanted to stop people leaving the city. He had spent hours talking economics, voter strategy, demographics, slowly exhausting every logical reason Ryan put forward for voting against it; not one had swayed him. As the debate went on into the early hours, his father had looked him in the eye and told Ryan that he would not be the person to allow the plague they faced in New Cairo to be unleashed upon the rest of the world. Whatever the price the people of the city paid, it would be worth the time it bought the surrounding cities and settlements, the rest of the continent and other continents beyond. It was an unholy burden, and High Councillor Tau Granier would not ask anyone else to shoulder it while he was still able to.
Ryan’s eyes clouded. ‘Those aren’t the words I’d use.’
For the first time in Ryan’s life, he didn’t realize that his father had entered the room. It was the sound of his bodyguards escorting him which attracted Ryan’s attention and when he looked up his gaze fell upon a hunched, weary man. He walked slowly over to the side of the hospital bed, standing next to Babirye.
‘You’re safe,’ he stated.
Ryan stared at his father.
An awkward moment of silence passed between the two of them.
‘Do you know when you’ll be able to resume work?’ his father said, with a veneer of affected peppiness that didn’t suit him. ‘We need to get the votes taken on some of these bills.’
Babirye leapt to her feet and glared at Tau Granier. ‘Tau, they tortured him! He will be back at work when he is good and ready!’
‘There is … we have important things that need to be done!’ the older man stammered, suddenly on the back foot.
‘Oh please,’ huffed Babirye. ‘You know he’s going to lose the quarantine vote, just do it without him and let him recover!’
‘No, I need to be there for that,’ said Ryan, trying to pull Babirye back, but she ignored him and continued to round on Tau. Behind him, the bodyguards seemed unsure of what to do.
‘Only you – only you! – the king of New Cairo – would walk into your own son’s hospital room, stand by his bed as he recovers from imprisonment and torture and make it about you!’
Never before had Ryan seen his father shrink back. He met his gaze for a moment. His father’s expression made him seem lost and, for the first time that Ryan could remember, strangely powerless. Tau Granier turned and wordlessly left the room, his entourage close behind him. Ryan watched as he disappeared down the hospital corridor and out of sight. He wanted to say something, but the exchange had left him speechless. Babirye fumed next to him; Hafiz and Dalin clung tightly to his chest, both alarmed at their mother’s outburst.
‘So who was it who fixed you up?’
The doctor was leaning back over his scarred leg, admiring the work. Ryan realized his fists were clenched. ‘Their medic. The others left me as I was. She patched me up. She helped me a lot.’
The doctor smiled. ‘I guess even terrorist cells can’t keep a consistent level of evil across the board.’
After a while, Suman and Hoshi went to resume their duties and Ryan was left to sit in the main room of the base, alone with his thoughts once more. In the time since he had been kidnapped, the possible creator, or at least the possible distributor of the Soucouyant virus had come to light. The virus had appeared so suddenly; perhaps there was a way to make it go away again. Ruined limbs and organs come back to life. An end to the fear and anger in Naj-Pur. It would be hard to let this Zala woman avoid being executed if she was guilty, but perhaps they could coax a way to stop or reverse the virus out of her, or at least a way to protect against it if they were able to appeal to her better nature.
Lost in his thoughts, he didn’t notice Ava until she was standing over him, prodding his arm. ‘I unlocked the front door. We need to go into the other room, now.’
He spun round in his seat and looked up at her. She nodded. Ryan pushed himself up from the chair, compensating for the still weak muscles in his left leg, and placed his crutches under his arms. Hobbling into the side room where he’d first awoken, he sat down in a chair across from the open door, looked out into the main floor space of what was once a bank, and waited.
For several minutes, there was nothing. Ryan leaned over towards the blacked-out window, and thought he saw shadows moving outside. He felt a curious nervousness, almost like stage fright.
Through the doorway, he saw the front door of the building open slightly.
Showtime.
‘So what happened to get you back here so quickly?’
Dr Albrecktsson sat patiently behind her desk. He was back in the medical office; until he was assigned a proper psychiatrist, he had her number. Her stare still made Ryan uncomfortable. He’d delivered public addresses to crowds of thousands. This was different. He was vulnerable here. He could be hurt.
‘I lost my temper at a doctor who was examining my leg at the hospital yesterday. I practically screamed the hospital down.’
The doctor leaned forward. ‘I’d have thought that you�
��d be good at containing your emotions, considering your professional life.’
‘I’ve had to contain my emotions at gunpoint for two weeks. I guess I unloaded some of that.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘She …’ Ryan licked his lips. ‘She was mocking the medic they had at the safe house, the one who patched me up and helped me escape.’
‘Okay,’ she nodded encouragingly. ‘Was there anything else that might have contributed towards the outburst?’
‘There was a … a pretty tense situation between my wife and my father just before. Could that have been it?’
‘Increased agitation is a symptom of your PTSD, Councillor.’
‘I know, I know. But it’s more than that. I … you’ve seen the news reports of what happened in that safe house, right?’
‘I’ve not seen the news, but I got the report from the investigative unit about an hour ago. It was worse than it needed to be.’
‘It went wrong and I caused it. It’s my fault.’
‘Oh?’ said Dr Albrecktsson. ‘It wasn’t their fault, for kidnapping you, or allying with a dangerous cause? It wasn’t the Security Force personnel’s fault for not pursuing non-violent options?’
Ryan shook his head. ‘It was my fault because I get it. I get the NCLC’s point. I feel like their cause was right and I feel like I punished them for doing what they believed in.’
‘You think that they were right to kidnap you?’
‘It did a whole lot more to keep them alive than my meaningless Council vote will.’ Ryan leaned forward on the desk, staring down at the floor as he spoke. ‘And now, people who were scared of being imprisoned and torn from their families have watched as their worst fears became real.’
‘You were imprisoned and torn away from your family,’ she replied tersely. ‘Look, come with me.’
Ryan followed her out of the office and down the hallway of the New Cairo Police Department. They walked into a large, nondescript room with one wall taken up by a monitor. On it were two groups of pictures: a large one higher up, with dozens of smiling headshots, each in dress uniform, and a smaller one below, made up of faces including Maalik, Kahleed Banks, the Yu twins, and a number of others who had been with Alice Amirmoez’s group. Ryan noticed that Alice herself was not on there, but said nothing.
The Hive Construct Page 22
