Delivering Caliban (6 page)

Ten

New York City

Monday 20 May, 9.50 am

The train was more crowded than the one he’d taken in Amsterdam, and grimier; but it suited Pope’s purposes.

He liked trains, preferred to travel using them instead of planes or even cars wherever possible. They allowed you a degree of mobility in times of crisis and they could be stopped suddenly when needed. They allowed you to think, in a way that wasn’t possible when driving. By the time the Amtrak carriage pulled out of Penn Station Pope was deep in thought.

The Grosvenor hit had been harder than he’d expected, but had still gone more or less according to plan. Pope had studied the layout of the apartment block several weeks beforehand, noting potential access points and discarding them immediately: the roof, the front door (obviously), even the windows of the lower floors. Entry through the service elevator hadn’t been difficult. Nobody took notice of a man in overalls and a cap.

The hard part had been Grosvenor herself. She was in her fifties, mahogany-tanned and hard as leather, and she’d reacted quickly when Pope had kicked the door open into her, bolting across the room for both her phone and her gun - she kept the two close together, something Pope noted with professional approval despite himself. Pope used a vase as a projectile, not hitting Grosvenor hard but causing her to lose her momentum and providing enough of a distraction that Pope was able to reach her before she could get the safety off her pistol. From then it had been more straightforward: a headlock, fingers against the carotids to subdue without killing or bringing on unconsciousness, and then the march across to the window.

Before Pope tipped Grosvenor out he removed his cap and stared hard at her face. The second he saw the understanding - the recognition, even - he heaved, sending the woman headfirst and flailing into the cold evening sky. He didn’t look down, just closed the window once more and made his exit.

Three hours and he’d be at Union Station, Washington, D.C. The first leg of the journey would be over. Pope let his eyes rest open a crack, as was his habit, and ran another part of the document through his memory.

*

27 July

I once asked Z about the name, Caliban. Had he given the operation the title? Yes, he’d chosen it himself. In that case I was puzzled, I said. Caliban represented the base, primal aspects of the human character, those untamed by civilisation and culture. Wouldn’t the title be better suited to trials of an aggression-enhancing product of some kind?

Z’s reply was interesting. He said years of experience had taught him that truth-telling was one of the most basic, animal features of the human psyche. It was only with increasing civilisation and socialisation that we learned deceit, subterfuge. Caliban, the operation, was about releasing the honesty within its subjects.

It made me want go back and reread The Tempest, to see if Shakespeare had considered this.

The next round of trials took place today. The numbers were greater this time. Twelve subjects in all. According to Z, fully half of them were volunteers; though as always I wondered just how voluntary the participation of a convicted felon in a clinical trial could be.

I watched four of the experiments. Grosvenor conducted them all, and seemed utterly drained by the end. Interrogation can be hard work. With three of the subjects she achieved results, the men breaking down within an hour, sometimes sooner, and confessing to deeds that were verifiable.

Only one of the subjects died that day. Z proclaimed himself satisfied with progress.

There was, after all, no great rush.

19 August

I have been here three months now. Twice a week a ship arrives carrying supplies; otherwise the Caribbean around us is as hot and blue and empty as might be expected. It’s a comfortable if unspectacular existence. My evenings are spent talking to Z and to the doctors involved, or researching in the compound’s small but well-appointed library. Some of what I need is available on the Internet, but access is restricted for security reasons so I dare not use it too recklessly.

Taylor suspects me, I think. He has taken an unusual interest in my work, more than is warranted. Once I looked up from my desk in the library to find him in the doorway, watching me silently.

One day I’ll set this journal down on paper, either through dictation or by typing it myself. For the moment, it must remain in my head, filed away day by day in the only place prying eyes can’t possibly see it.

15 September

How many more deaths can I allow? Today there were six, on the worst day since the trial began. Six out of eight subjects. A seventy-five per cent mortality rate. Unacceptable by anybody’s standards, even those of the product’s designers and creators.

Z shows his stress in restrained ways: a clenching of the hands behind his back, the faintest tightening at his jaw. But the pressure inside him must be enormous. Grosvenor and Jablonsky took turns conducting the interrogations today, and became so irritated with one another between cases they almost came to blows.

There’s talk of a huge shipment of new subjects early next month, perhaps as many as fifty. The product will have to be studied closely after today’s events; there might have been a contaminated batch used, but if not, then modifications will need to be made to the product before Z will allow it to be tested again. He can’t afford wastage like today’s.

I can prevent the next death quite easily. A simple phone call will do it, will bring the US Navy and the Marines down upon the island like a hailstorm. But it’s too soon. Open though Z has been with me, he continues to withhold the name I need. Blowing the whistle at this point will more than likely mean that the person who has furthest to fall in all this will escape.

Six weeks, I’ll give it. Taylor is already suspicious; it’s only a matter of time until Jablonsky and Grosvenor and Z himself see through my cover. Six weeks – and God knows how many deaths – and I’ll do it.

*

Pope stopped the flow of words at that point and switched his thoughts to John Purkiss. He had no way of knowing where Purkiss was at that moment, could only assume that his ruse had worked and Purkiss was wasting time and energy in Hamburg. Once news got out of Grosvenor’s killing, of course, Purkiss would be back on the trail. But there was no way he’d work out the pattern, no chance of his heading south and ambushing Pope there. At worst, Purkiss would be tearing Manhattan apart looking for him when Pope carried out the next stage of his plan.

And after the final one, after Z, there’d be no more.

Pope himself would disappear forever. He probably wouldn’t survive; but even if he did, what he would do with the rest of his life he had no idea. It was something he’d never considered. It was an irrelevance. His entire adult life had been shaped around his pursuit of the target that was now within his sights.

 
Numerically speaking, he’d achieved three quarters of his goal. Three dead, one to go. But his final target outweighed the others. That was why he’d saved Z until last. He wanted the man to know he was coming.

He wanted him to squirm.

Eleven

Charlottesville, Virginia

Monday 20 May, 6.40 pm

Nina ran.

Through the neon-emblazoned streets of downtown Charlottesville she wove, stumbling, the violin case bouncing at her back. The evening was crowded for a Monday, as though the population had spilled on to the streets in order to slow her down or maybe to jeer at her. Here a doorway yawned toothlessly at her; there an overturned trashcan spilled its debris across her path like an arm trying to trip her up.

There were no more watchers because everyone was a watcher. Everybody around her was an enemy to be dodged and fled from.

But there were no voices. Yet.

In her mind’s eye she saw Rachel’s body flung this way and that by the shots, her face crimson and almost accusing as her eyes met Nina’s for the last time.

She’d killed them both. She should have stayed away.

Nina slowed, the ragged breath sawing in her throat, and gazed about. Somehow she’d arrived at the Mall, the most congested place she could have picked. On her left was the Pavilion. She and the quartet had performed there many times.

Strolling toward her, coffee cup in hand, was a uniformed cop.

Nina did a back and forth shuffle that would have been comical in a slapstick movie: preparing to run one second, then starting toward the cop, then taking fright again. An authority figure, a public symbol of law and order and safety. She ought to feel reassured by his presence.

But the men at the door had been federal agents, or at least had been carrying ID that suggested they were.

The cop was looking straight at her. Grinning.

Nina took a step backwards, then another.

The hand on her elbow made her yelp. Close to her ear a woman’s voice said: ‘Whoah there. Steady.’

Nina stared round, saw that she’d backed into another cop. The first one had been grinning at her, his partner, not at Nina.

‘
You okay, miss?’

The male cop had reached her. Although the female one had backed off a little, Nina felt crowded, hemmed in.

She realised she was staring stupidly from one to the other.

‘
Fine.’ Had she said it? She wasn’t sure, so she repeated it, shouting too loudly this time. A couple of passersby glanced over.

The woman cop was running a careful eye over her. Nina didn’t like that. ‘You look sick, honey.’

Nina became aware suddenly of the hair slicked to her face with sweat, the shirt clinging to her armpits. She hefted the violin case, feeling it slipping, and immediately the cops were on guard, hands if not quite on their holsters then hovering in the vicinity.

They think I might have a machine gun in here
, she thought, and rammed down an impulse to laugh.

Once more her eyes darted from one face to the other. The woman cop looked sympathetic and a little concerned. The guy’s expression was more sceptical, as though he thought he was up against yet another student strung out on speed or acid on a school night while hardworking people like himself were trying to earn a crust. She was dimly aware that the more she glanced from one to the other, the crazier – or guiltier – she appeared.

Suddenly she had it: a way she could get help of a sort from them if they weren’t in league with the men who’d come to the apartment and killed her friends.

‘
Apartment eight, first floor, Allentown Heights,’ she blurted. ‘Adams Street. Two people are dead there. My friends. They live there. They did, anyhow. Some men killed them.’

Nina took a step back, colliding off another passerby who grunted at her. The cops were staring at her and at each other.

If they were with the men who’d done it, she’d have given nothing away. If they weren’t, they might check it out just in case.

And she realised her mistake. The cops would already have been called by the neighbours who’d heard the gunfire in the apartment. They’d be on their way, or there already, turning the place into a crime scene.

All Nina had done was make herself a suspect.

She turned and plunged into the jostling, scuffling crowd once more, trailing the cops’ confused shouts behind her.

*

Nina ran on, with no destination in mind, wanting only to be alone.

She’d been different, or at least had first realised she was different, at the age of around twelve or thirteen. It wasn’t long after her first period, when all kinds of weird stuff started happening to her: she grew, she spread out, she had bizarre and exciting dreams and thoughts.

And the voices had begun. Two of them, a man’s and a woman’s, both strangers. Sometimes they occurred together, sometimes one or the other on its own. Sometimes they spoke to her, but more often they spoke about her, again either to one another or as though commenting on her like a narrator at the beginning of a movie.

She assumed this was a normal part of puberty, and when she and a bunch of girlfriends at high school had been sitting around discussing boys and periods, she’d mentioned it. The others had stared at her, laughed at first, then edged away: not immediately but gradually, over weeks, until she was alone.

She didn’t speak to her grandmother about it. The family doctor was friendly and caring, and a woman herself, but although Nina booked an appointment with her she chickened out at the last moment and said to the doctor’s kind gaze that she was suffering cramps, which was true enough.

The first person she told was, in the end, her grandmother. But that was later, when she was eighteen and getting ready for college, and could take care of herself. Her grandma was horrified, not by what Nina was telling her but because Nina hadn’t told her before. She assured her grandma that the voices came only when she was stressed, like around exam time; that she could cope with them now that she’d learned they couldn’t hurt her; and that she didn’t need meds. In fact, she was only telling her grandma to prove to herself how confident she felt about having them under control.

But the voices, she came to realise, were only the latest manifestation of the problem. The Watchers had been there earlier. From when she was ten, possibly even before. They’d been at the dark crack of her door in the middle of the night, when the house was in darkness. She’d huddled against the headboard of her bed, the duvet crammed up against her mouth to stifle her screams, while the watcher, or watchers, had stood beyond the doorway in the blackness, staring at her. She’d never seen them, never heard or smelled them. But they’d been there, so vividly that she had told her mother about them.

Her mother had looked grave and had listened carefully, then had gone off to find her dad. When she came back, she held Nina close and whispered against her hair: ‘There’s nobody out there, baby. I’ve checked. I’ve checked with your father.’

It was only later that she realised what an odd comment that was.
I’ve checked with your father.
But of course, later she had the advantage of hindsight.

And now she had proof that there was indeed somebody out here. More than one person.

They were coming for her. And they were prepared to kill to get to her.

*

She’d been running for a half hour at least, doing crazy loops, seeing familiar landmarks repeat themselves around her. By now the intensity of the crowds around her had diminished: they were no longer staring at her but seemed instead to be deliberately, smirkingly avoiding looking at her. Nowhere did she encounter a man in a suit bearing down on her, or a uniformed cohort boxing her in.

She found herself in control enough to be able to take an inventory. She had her clothes: jeans, T-shirt, jacket (which she’d kept on at Rachel’s apartment – Rachel had offered to take it for her but she’d felt protected in it to some extent, as though swaddled). She had her violin, its weight on her back reassuring as ever. And – thank God – she had her wallet. Nina didn’t use a handbag, to her friends’ amusement. She kept her wallet in her hip pocket at all times, believing it to be less vulnerable to robbers than if it were in a bag perched on her arm. Nor did she own a cell phone. They made it too difficult to be alone.

Other things were in her favour: she was physically intact, if shaken. The drop from the window hadn’t hobbled her as it might have. The voices hadn’t started up – yet – so that distraction wasn’t a problem. And she had the entire rest of the continental United States outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, in which to lose herself.

There were downsides. She was being pursued by a group of men, number unknown, who had murdered her friends when they tried to intervene, and who were either government agents or able to pass themselves off as such and therefore had considerable influence and possibly resources at their disposal. She was in a highly fragile state of mind. And she was alone.

She dared not head for the homes of any of the other few friends she had; Rachel’s and Kyle’s deaths were already her fault, and the understanding of this was yet to hit her fully. She had no surviving relatives, not now that her grandmother had passed. She couldn’t approach the police, because either they were in on it or they were seeking her in connection with her friends’ deaths.

Nina stopped dead. She was back on Main Street, the Mall ahead of her. Over to the left was the Greyhound bus station, though it wasn’t the sight of the familiar building that had made her pause.

What was she thinking? She did have a living relative after all.

The recollection both triggered a surge of hope within her and repelled her. She stood, balanced on the dilemma like a highrise act.

The footsteps came behind her, running; and although she had no idea if they were a follower’s or belonged to somebody incidental, she made her decision and strode towards the bus station.