Birdkill (26 page)

‘I’ll be fine. Honestly. I have some homework to do anyway.’

He darted back to the bed, leaned over and kissed her. ‘You’re a little wonder. Know that?’

She basked. ‘Yup.’

Mariam, showered and smelling of soap, padded around the house in one of his stolen hotel bathrobes. He had a collection of them in a walk-in closet off the bathroom. This one was gorgeous, fluffy and just short enough to be scandalous. She’d never heard of the Hatta Fort Hotel and wondered where it was. The logo seemed a bit Arabesque.

She ran her fingers over things, books and sculptures. Shapes and sensations. Her senses were electrified, she loved exploring him in these objects he had accumulated. She wanted to hold them and pull them into her, like she pulled him into her. Took him up and let him become part of her. And so these things, this Mdina glass vase and that little grotesque yellowed ivory netsuke; the cannon ball doorstop and the tiny, delicate bronze of a dancing girl, these things were him and the life he had led to bring him to her.

His books. Sun Tzu and TE Lawrence rubbed shoulders with Dan Brown. Did he really read Dan Brown? There were older books, too. She pulled out an edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, an early, untrimmed copy. The Tenniel illustrations were printed as glossy plates, glued down onto the pages.

For some reason, the book brought a shudder to her. It dropped open to the plate of the caterpillar smoking
argileh
and she slammed it shut and put it back on the shelf.

He’d told her to help herself to anything she wanted. She wanted coffee and rooted around in his kitchen until she got what she needed. Curling up on the sofa with a steaming black coffee and a little bowl of chocolate biscuits, she loaded the PST file into Outlook, made sure it was in offline mode and started to page through General Tom Parker’s emails.

She created a folder and started to paste the interesting ones into it. Soon she found herself making sub-folders just so she could keep on top of the trails she was uncovering. She opened a spreadsheet to try and keep track of the relationships and movements of money, influence and favours. She needed a mind-mapping tool more than a spreadsheet.

There was another maternity clinic, in Toronto. And one in Ohio. More missing mothers deprecated, more necessary measures defended. A moratorium enforced by a scandalised American contingent worried about this all getting out if someone joined the dots.

Mariam followed the dots right enough. Duprez’ death started to make sense. And Mariam started to feel truly afraid as she wallowed in a multi-dimensional mesh of intrigue and corrupted vested interest that linked the British and American intelligence and military communities with a multibillion-dollar programme of what could only be described as eugenics.

And the web stretched to Prime Ministers and Presidents. Duprez’ collection of archived emails, in a way that poor Buddy’s poor collection could never hope to aspire to, lassoed the great and glorious into an intrigue that was truly, awesomely, explosive. Mariam’s mobile rang, shocking her into spilling coffee onto the dark wooden floor. She reached for it. ‘Mariam.’

‘Kelly. What the fuck did you do to my laptop?’

‘Your laptop?’

‘Kingsthorpe said you were fixing it. And fix it you certainly did, I can’t sign in.’

She breathed. ‘I changed your sign-on password. It’s Kelly.’

‘How did you do that? What the fuck were you doing with my computer in the first place?’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘I’ve got time.’

‘I don’t. Look, do you want to maybe meet for a discreet coffee tomorrow somewhere?’

He caught her tone. ‘How about our café?’

‘That’d be perfect. Eleven?’

‘Eleven. It’s a deal.’

She remembered Robyn and felt guilty. If she was wrapped up in all this, she was most certainly in danger. She would ask Clive to go down to the Institute with her after the meeting with Kelly. Robyn had to get out.

She let the mobile drop onto the table and carried on with her deep dive into Tom Parker’s world of Aryan supremacy disguised as military efficiency. Copying, pasting and archiving as best she could, she was chilled by how far and wide the whole thing stretched. And by how the spider in the centre of the web wasn’t Tom Parker at all, but a fat British spy called Jolyon Raynesford. And the man he served.

Robyn had her new classroom, in truth one of the coach-houses in the stable block. It had been converted sympathetically, a modern room with black beams across the roof, white painted walls and stonework. Low bookshelves lined the walls and the desks were more like workstations.

It was a refreshing environment compared to the Portakabin, but something had changed and the kids were surly and uncooperative. Even little Jenny, wearing the red jumper she had worn the first day Robyn had spotted her playing with the others in the clearing, wouldn’t meet her eye.

She had dismissed them early and sat looking at the empty room feeling desperately tired and wanting just to throw in the towel and walk away. She still had her head in her hands when Simon Archer walked in.

‘What’s up?’

‘Lesson was a disaster. I’m just not sure I’m cut out for this. Maybe Hamilton was right, maybe I should take some time out and make sure my head’s sorted out.’

He perched on one of the desks, his foot swinging. ‘Come on, that’s a bit drastic. What do you think went wrong?’

‘We were talking semiotics last week, I took it back to early influences in defining our character, egos and ids and parental input in defining the signs we accept and use in society. I might as well have brought the devil into the classroom and invited him to eat them all. I thought it would blow over after the weekend, but it clearly hasn’t.’

Archer frowned. ‘I’ve told you before about the past, haven’t I? Most of the kids had awful relationships with their parents. They weren’t understood, their talents either ignored or actively repressed. They were troublesome, precocious, inquisitive and challenging. For some of them, the Institute is the nearest thing to a stable home life they’ve ever experienced. And you took them back to that.’ He slipped off the table. ‘Come on, they’ll get over it. You’ll need to signal you want to focus on the future and they’ll come around. Let’s get out of here for now and get some fresh air. You look like you need it.’

She almost blurted that they none of them had parents at all, but manage to give Archer a grateful smile instead. She brushed her hair back over her ear and picked up her handbag. ‘Fine.’

They walked down the corridor towards reception and the front door. ‘Are you okay after yesterday? You looked like you’d taken a really nasty turn.’

‘Yes. I had a quiet evening, slept early.’

He held the door open for her. The air outside was clear after the classroom fug and she breathed in deeply. Archer turned to her. ‘Look, I’ve got a couple of books on classroom management for gifted kids. They’ve been invaluable to me, maybe you’d like to borrow them. I’m not saying you need them, just that it’d give you some solutions to focus on rather than worrying about how things are going badly.’

‘Sure. That’d be good. Thanks.’

‘They’re in my study. Come along, I’ll throw in a cup of decent coffee.’

They walked past the pool and gym towards the reception building, bird sound in the woodland surrounding the car park. Archer was reaching for the door handle when a deafening clangour broke out, a siren so loud she dropped her handbag, clapping her hands to her ears and screwing up her face.

‘Burglar alarm!’ Archer shouted. A strobe lamp flashed, transforming the reception area into a disorientating nightmare. Archer dived in, wrenching open a cabinet on the wall and punching a code into the keypad. The wailing and pulsating flashes continued. Robyn started to feel sick. Archer pulled a bunch of keys from his pocket, twisting one into the panel. He swore, but Robyn could only see his lips moving. Even with her hands over her ears, the noise pained her. Archer ran down the corridor and she followed him automatically. Hamilton’s study door was thrown open and he stood framed in the dim background. ‘What the hell is going on?’

‘Alarm.’ Mouthed Robyn as she passed him. Archer had thrown open a door under the stairs and was busy inside a grey cabinet Robyn guessed was the fuse box. The peace was so sudden it staggered her. She leaned against the wall, her heart beating a tattoo in her chest. She wondered the punishing sensory overload hadn’t triggered another fit in her.

As if she suffered from fits. She quailed at her own adaptability.

Archer emerged from under the stairs. ‘Wow. That was certainly effective. I’ll have to call the cops. Hang on a second.’

She followed him back up the corridor. ‘Cops?’

‘Alarm’s linked to the police station in town. They’ll get an alert if it goes off and one if it loses power.’ He picked up the reception telephone and dialled a number scrawled on a card pasted onto the wall.

‘Couldn’t a burglar just call them?’

He grinned at her. ‘You have to have a PIN number.’ Into the handset he intoned ‘Hamilton Institute’ and then pressed a four-digit combination. Which was, Robyn noted, 2541. He hung up.

Two breathless security guards tumbled through the door. Hamilton was still standing in his doorway. ‘Would someone please tell me what the hell is going on?’

Archer wandered over to join them. ‘The alarm went off, Lawrence. I’ve had to disable it.’

Robyn caught a glimpse of the screen behind reception that displayed the security camera images. It was blank. She noticed a printed email in the ‘in’ tray, subject New ID Card For Ipshita Mehra. An insane idea hit her and she snatched at it. Sure enough, an ID card was pinned to it. She folded it and slipped it into her pocket. She stepped away from the desk thinking of any distraction to throw at Archer. The guards were doubled up catching their breath back. Robyn regarded them disdainfully. ‘They’re not terribly fit are they?

Archer followed her gaze. ‘Not terribly. Let’s hope they can fix this thing.’

‘What happened?’ The guard who had turned Robyn back from the Institute gates straightened up.

‘The alarm’s up the Suwannee. You’ll need to fix it.’

The guard shook his head. ‘I’ll have to call head office for an engineer.’

‘Well bloody well get on with it, man.’ Hamilton barked. His study door slammed behind him.

‘I’m not sure he’s in the best of moods,’ Robyn noted.

‘Come on. Coffee. We can leave these guys to fix that system. Where’s your bag?’

‘Oh, I dropped it outside when the noise started. Hang on.’

Robyn pushed open the door and reached down for her bag. It was full of snakes, a Gordian knot of shiny smooth bodies sliding over each other. She lifted the bag, straightening up and searching for the small figure she knew she’d find, standing and staring at her.

Sure enough, there he was. She held his eye, her chin up, and plunged her hand into the writhing mass. They were cool to the touch, rubbery. The shock of their reality hit her a second before the pain of the bite. She snatched her hand back, a pair of glittering eyes fixed on her, its fangs buried deep in the back of her hand and blood welling up around the scaly jaws clamped on her. Its body whipped. She dropped the bag and shrieked.

Archer had her shoulders in his hands, was shaking her. ‘Robyn! Robyn! What’s wrong?’

Her bag lay on the ground, spilling its contents. The screen of her mobile was cracked. Her hand was untouched. And Martin was nowhere to be seen.

Robyn patted Archer’s arm. ‘It’s nothing, I just got a shock. Can we get that coffee please?’

FIFTEEN

Into The Darkness

It was two o’clock in the morning and Robyn stood in her bedroom wearing black jeans and a black sweater. She had bought both in town that afternoon after her second class, which went as badly as the first. Her coffee with Archer earlier had been awkward, as well. All in all not a great day. She had been flustered by the incident with her handbag and Archer had been puzzled by her shock at what was clearly nothing at all.

She had spent all day planning for this. The security system was down and likely to remain so until at least tomorrow. This was her chance to take a look at the mysterious Institute and she had decided she had to take it. There was no shining path forward for her, she had nothing to lose except perhaps the last vestiges of her sanity.

This was the only thing she could think of doing other than fleeing and she needed Mariam’s strength for that. They had talked at length that afternoon, Mariam unwilling to talk about anything to do with the Institute on an open line but promising to make all clear when she came down the next day. She had sounded shifty and afraid, kept saying she couldn’t talk on the phone. Robyn had told her of her plan to get into the Institute and Mariam had told her not to do it. It was too dangerous.

Which just made Robyn all the more determined to go through with her plan.

She had googled the name and there were a lot of Ipshita Mehra’s out there, but only one was a specialist in cognitive science with a Master’s from Cambridge, four years’ work at MIT in the department of cellular and molecular neuroscience and a Doctorate from the University of Tübingen. Image search matched the photo on the ID. Smart lady, thought Robyn, flicking the ID card between her thumb and forefinger.

She pulled on the pair of gloves she’d bought. They were fine black calf leather and expensive, all she could find in town. She opened the catch on the window and pushed it out, sliding over onto the fire escape below. She pushed it back as flush to the frame as she could, then padded down the metal stairs. Rounding the building, she slipped through the shadows and behind the school building. She headed into the woodland, finding the wall into the Institute. She paced herself, ran at it and jumped, clamped her hands onto the top to heave herself up. She felt a muscle straining and the rough surface scratching the costly leather.

She lay on top of the wall looking along its shadowed path into the deep gloom. She lowered herself down the other side and struck out into the woodland towards what she thought was the researcher’s accommodation block.