Birdkill (27 page)

A motion sensor kicked in and she found herself bathed in floodlight. She dived for the shadow of the woodland, a rhododendron giving her the cover she needed. She let her hair down onto her face and peered out, expecting to see a guard, but nothing moved. By the time her heart had slowed, the light blinked out. She moved cautiously along the margin of the wood. The back of the building had no sensor and she slipped across the grass to hide in its shadow.

Robyn had no interest in either the researchers’ living quarters or the kids’ block nearby. It was the domes she had come to see. She slid along the shadowed wall to the corner and broke across the open ground between the block and the trees beyond. She moved doubled up, reaching the far woodland. Secure in its shadow, she followed its curve around towards the domes, the kids’ accommodation block obscuring the staff quarters now. The three obsidian mounds reflected the febrile crescent moon on their jet glass.

Robyn’s shadow detached itself from the wood, a faint shape on the dark sward. She made it to the first dome, pausing to catch her breath. She hugged the glass, her face darkly reflected. She slipped into the square doorway set into the dome and swiped Ipshita Mehra’s ID card against the little chrome panel of the card reader. The door slid back and Robyn hesitated at the threshold.

She stepped into the dome.

The lighting came on slowly, its dawning filling her with the dread of discovery. Logic told her the glass must be opaque, else they would have lit the whole area up every Thursday night. She gazed around her, the space dominated by a central mezzanine circle balanced on a single pillar, a door set into it. The dome seemed huge compared to its size from the outside. Either side of her were two curved walls, a little above head-height. She strode into the centre, the two long curves were repeated in front of her, quartering the huge space. There were openings by the glass to her left and right. She veered to her right, the long white curved walls pressing in on her, curling to form entrances. She turned into the space behind the wall. It looked like a large, white operating theatre, there were five padded white couches on trolleys, each with a stacked trolley of instruments topped with a screen parked by it. A set of instruments hung on each trolley. Complex lighting systems extended from the curved wall, convex discs of metal with LED arrays set into them at the end of the armatures.

She backed away into the opposite entrance. Here there was a set of some ten padded white and chrome armchairs with screens in front of them. The buckles on the soft leather straps on the arms of the chairs and again down at their feet glittered.

Disoriented by the strangeness of it all, Robyn sidled back into the central area under the mezzanine disc. She pressed the lift button with her gloved finger and it pinged softly. The door slid apart and she walked into the brushed stainless steel interior. The panel on the lift wall had five buttons, M, 0, -1, -2 and -3. So the dome was three stories deep underground.

She pressed M and waited as the lift briefly rose and settled, the doors sliding open with a soft hiss. Robyn stepped out, taken aback by the sense of enormous space around her, the jet hexagons of the dome’s glass glittering in the glare of the lighting, the four curved areas below her visible from above as she paced the railing around the mezzanine to look down on the two areas she had wandered into, the other two similarly laid out with couches and sofas. There were desks up here, white units moulded smoothly into the floor bearing slim Apple notebooks opened with dead screens. She tapped a touchpad and was rewarded with a request for a password. She tried 1254 and achieved ‘access denied’.

‘Hello?’ The voice echoed in the dome’s vast space. Robyn recoiled from the railing and ran into the lift. She hit -3 and prayed she’d pass the 0 level before the voice realised the lift was on the move and tried to stop it. It dropped, the panel displaying 0 and then -1. Her heart was like a pump action gun in her chest, blap blap blap.

-2 slid past, a glimpse of vertical tanks of some sort through the lift’s glass doors. It opened at -3 and the lighting came on, the darkness giving way to a vast open space lit from all angles by a soft glow cast by the featureless walls, floor and ceiling. She cast around for something to keep the doors jammed open, but the huge room was like the inside of a crucible, glittering ceramic white and featureless. It must stretch below all three domes, this common space. It was warm down here. She pulled off her sneakers and placed them between the two sliding doors. The doors banged to and recoiled. The sneakers bounced but stayed where they were. There would be only so many repetitions before they slid out of place and let the lift rise again. She had to hope for another exit. She ran out into the white vastness in her stockinged feet, a feeling of liberation filling her as she struck out into the white expanse. Shapes flickered into being around her. It was some sort of simulation room, she tried to focus on the actual dimensions of the room but the projected images were becoming stronger and the smooth whiteness around her was assuming forms she was finding it harder to distinguish from reality. Sound began to rise up from around her, disorientating as she fled across the flickering whiteness.

The shadows began to harden, seemed to form concrete walls and partitioned spaces, rooms within the room. The surfaces coruscated madly, a distressed planking became unfinished concrete, splashed and patched. She held her hands out against it and found substance jarring her. Sobbing for breath, she played along the wall with her palms against the smooth white surface that insisted on appearing to be canvas, oilcloth, the textures started to rub against her fingertips; marble, granite, coal. The dust assaulted her nostrils.

A button. She focused on it like a drunk, owlish and disbelieving. She pressed it, her gloved fingers smeared with coal dust, black on black. The lift doors opened. She dived in, hitting the back wall painfully with her shoulder. She jabbed at the panel by the door, hitting the 0 button. She waited as her stomach lifted, her tattered mind on the edge of rebellion.

The door opened. The dark space around her started to glow with light and she guessed she had found another dome. She sprinted for the entranceway, the layout of the dome’s ground floor the same as the one she had entered, four curvilinear spaces and a central pillar.

She flashed the card at the panel, the door slid open. She saw the faint blush of light from the dome to her right and instinctively ran around the opposite side of her dome, striking across the dark grassland for the obscurity of the woods.

Robyn collapsed on the damp ground and gasped for breath, the rich leaf mould in her nostrils. She threshed on the soft surface, spasming as she tried to rid her mind of the alien shapes and sounds from that huge room, assuaging the fear that coursed through her veins and had her fighting for each blessed ice-cold lungful of earthy air.

Eventually she stilled, lying on the cool ground. She got to her knees and stood, propping herself up against a tree. She limped through the stygian woodland, careful to stay in the deep shadows. Leaves dripped around her. Reaching the wall, she despaired. There was nothing left, no energy in her. She was drained. Robyn let her forehead fall against it, the rough bricks pressing into her soft skin. After a despondent eternity, she forced herself to pace away and spring at the wall, throwing herself up onto it, her still-gloved hands scrabbling for a purchase against its topmost bricks. She hung there, no strength left to pull herself up. The pain drove into her shoulders and she dragged herself upwards, agony coursing through her wrists as they ground into the coarse brickwork. She sprawled on to her back, lying on top of the wall, gasping.

Robyn calmed slowly, her breathing coming under control and the slow sounds of the woodland coming to her, the occasional drip of water from a leaf and a tree creaking. She heard murmuring voices before the flash of a Maglite swept along the wall and across the woodland. She averted her face, listened to their feet scuffling as they followed the course of the wall, shining the light into the trees. She caught a whiff of cigarette smoke and wanted a smoke herself, more than she’d ever wanted to smoke in her life. The heavy tread of booted feet and clink of equipment hanging from their gilets were directly underneath. Robyn held her breath.

A dog barked somewhere in the distance. The heavy feet moved away. Robyn waited until she could no longer hear them, then crouched before lowering herself as quietly down the wall until she was stretched out, her fingers straining to keep their grip on the edge. She bucked and twisted to land, letting her body crumple to absorb the impact.

Birds were starting to sing and there was a faint hint of steel on the dark horizon as she stole up the fire escape, exhausted and disoriented. The window had closed and she tried to prise the frame open but it was tightly sealed. A fresh wave of fear hit her and she grabbed at it, but the gloves made her hands clumsy. She pulled her right glove off, hooked her nails into the crevice and pulled.

It opened. She slid through the gap and pulled it closed behind her. She hunkered down and recovered her breathing again, letting her heart slow and trying not to think about anything beyond calming herself. She staggered to her feet and tottered to the bathroom. Turning the light on, she realised she’d left a muddy trail. Her socks were soaked and her feet numb. She pulled off the other glove, they were both scuffed and torn. Her hands were a state, her wrists looked like she’d attempted her life, welted and cut by the rough edges of the brickwork.  She started to pour a bath, letting dollops of bubble bath plop out of the bottle into the warm stream. She pulled off her jumper, red ridges criss-crossed her torso.

She ached all over, her shoulders were throbbing and, lowering herself into the hot water, her scraped hands and wrists stung.

Robyn tried to make sense of it all, the domes and the strangeness of that huge room underneath them. The projected images flickering into life around her, the sense that somehow she understood where she was even while she was confused and flying from them, whoever they were. Perhaps she was even fleeing herself. She wasn’t sure she knew anymore and the lack of a boundary between reality and imagination scared her terribly.

She woke at eight in a cold bath. She gripped the edge with her sore hands and pulled herself creakily out, grabbing a towel and wrapping herself. She slid her feet into her slippers. Moving like an old woman, Robyn picked her way downstairs and called reception.

‘Heather? It’s Robyn. Look, I’m sorry, but I’ve eaten something that’s really disagreed with me. I can’t come in today.’

‘You sound pretty rough. Not a problem, we’ll cover for you no bother. I’ll let Simon know.’

‘Thanks. You’re a treasure.’

‘Yeah, a sunken one. Cheers.’

Robyn dragged herself back up the stairs, the banister cool under her fingers. She sat on the edge of her bed and tried to reprise the events of the past evening. Lying back, she closed her eyes and returned to the white room deep underneath the domes.

She was back in Zahlé. The school building was in front of her. A taxi had just dropped her off. She was staying in a little bed and breakfast run by a fussy French Lebanese lady called Francine, a devout Maronite with Views. It was a new beginning for Robyn, whose life had been peppered with new beginnings since her bankrupt father had fled Britain and given her a gypsy childhood that had left her with a lifetime’s urge to travel.

She walked up to the blue double doors, bougainvillea bushes either side of them, the pink papery flowers clustered against the dusty leaves. She pulled the right hand door open. It had a brass handle and scratch plate buffed by a million hands.

Void.

Mariam looked up to see Brian Kelly come through the door of the busy café. He seemed hunched in his heavy greatcoat. He paused at the counter to order and came over to her, rubbing his reddened hands. ‘It’s bloody Harry Willy out there. How are you, darling?’

‘Can’t complain.’ She closed her laptop and slid it into her bag. ‘What are you working on now, cat stuck up tree? Man dead in graveyard?’

‘Don’t be bloody cheeky. The story got pulled. It is what it is.’

‘It’s craven is what it is. The public has a right to know about this.’

Kelly shook his weary head, the baggy eyes searched her face. ‘Oh dear. We do have ourselves an idealist.’ He shrugged off his coat and scarf. He waggled a finger at her. ‘Know the trouble with people like you? You get innocent folks hurt.’

She shrugged. ‘What happened to talking truth to power?’

‘So what’s the story about my laptop?’

‘I had to get at your email. Duprez had sent you a copy of the files he had obtained, just before his Google account was shut down. Google accounts take a while to close, they don’t go instantly. I got the files.’

‘Not that it makes any difference to us now the story’s spiked, but what was in them?’

‘Dynamite, Kelly. Sheer bloody dynamite. Odin is a multibillion-dollar joint programme between the Americans and the Brits to develop augmented humans, sort of anthropoid GMOs. It’s pure Nazi eugenics with a nasty streak of battlefield enhancements added in. Super-intelligent, super-motivated people who can be turned into monstrous killing machines by the addition of a trigger drug. They’ve murdered tens of people with their experiments and trials. Including the mothers of every single child at the Hamilton Institute bar one and she’s the one I’ve talked to. They were all deadbeats. The mothers. Hamilton groomed them, cleaned them up and then had them impregnated by his hand-picked soldiers as part of his breeding programme.’

Kelly held his hand up to stem the tide. ‘Whoa, there, darling. Can you prove that?’

‘I have a list of every single child at the Hamilton Institute. Their births are a matter of record. So are their mothers’ deaths. And one of the Parker emails refers to the unacceptable risk of terminating what he calls ‘the carriers’. Parker’s in charge of the American side of things but the top man on the Brit side is none other than the chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence. Together, they’re bankrolling Hamilton to mess with the heads of something like forty stolen children.’