Down: Trilogy Box Set (90 page)

“What about me?” Molly asked.

“Make your own bloody tea. You okay, luv?”

The boy nodded and tucked in. “Will you be staying?” he asked.

“I don’t think your mom will like that,” Christine answered.

“She won’t mind.”

“What would we do with ourselves while you’re in school?”

“It’s term break for a whole week.”

In the kitchen Molly told Christine the boy had told her that his dad didn’t live with them anymore and that his mum was often mad at him.

“There’s more booze in the cupboards than food,” Christine said. “He’s a sweet little boy who deserves better than a drunk for a mum.”

Molly shrugged and helped herself to some of that booze. “Well, leave her ropes loose enough so she can wiggle free and let’s get back on the road.”

“I don’t want to leave.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What it sounds like. I’m tired of running. I want to settle in for a while. This is a nice house. Roger’s a treat. Don’t you miss being around children?”

“Excuse me, missy?” Molly said. “Isn’t there one tiny problem you’re forgetting?”

“Monster mum? No I haven’t forgotten her,” Christine said. “I think mummy dearest needs to sober up for a week. Do her a world of good.”

Murphy finished his supper and pushed his tray away. He got up and began pacing back and forth to the side of the bunk beds.

“Stir crazy?” Rix called down from the top bunk.

“Might say.”

“It’s a gilded cage, mate.”

Murphy leaned his back against the locked door of their Dartford detention cell. “Do you know how many times I dreamed of having good food, a soft bed, flush toilets, tele?” he asked.

Rix didn’t have to answer.

“But I’ll tell you this: I’d trade it all for knowing our girls are safe.”

The TV in the next cell switched on very loud.

Murphy pounded on the door. It had taken a while but Alfred, the sixteenth-century oaf in the adjacent cell had learned how to operate the TV, but he was woefully hard of hearing. He’d been given headphones but he kept forgetting how to use them.

“Come on guards!” Murphy shouted. “Make him put on the bloody headphones.”

The guards in the hallway responded and soon quiet was restored.

Rix dangled his feet off the bunk. “I reckon they’re doing fine. They’ll be on the run, breaking into empty houses, eating up a storm, sleeping in comfort, hopefully finding some good wine along the way.”

“It’s Hathaway I’m worried about.” Murphy said his name like a curse word.

For thirty years, every single day in Hell had been dominated by their hatred of the man. Hathaway had murdered them, but that wasn’t the worst of it. He and the band of rovers he’d joined had made it their mission to terrorize them and their pitiful village of Ockendon, returning time and time again to wreak havoc and pick off their fellow villagers one by one.

Rix hopped down and helped himself to a soda from the mini-fridge. “I will take his head one day and when I do, I’ll keep it in a box and take it out from time to time and play footies with it.”

“So you’ve said.”

Rix grabbed Murphy by his collar and shoved him against the wall, dropping the soda can on the floor. “Tell me about all your triumphs then, Murph. What’s your record in draining the fucking swamp?”

Murphy didn’t fight back. In fact he dolefully agreed and Rix let him go, waving at the security camera to let the guards know they needn’t intervene.

“Hathaway won’t find them,” Murphy said.

Rix turned on the TV and cranked the volume so they could talk without being picked up on the cell’s mics. “He tried. He found her ex.”

“Yeah, but it was a dead-end.”

Rix retrieved the soda from under the bed and popped the tab, spraying cola everywhere. “For old Gareth it was a very dead-end.”

“You think Christine will try to find her mum?” Murphy asked, his mouth close to Rix’s ear.

“Maybe yes, maybe no.”

“Well, maybe we should be straight with Ben.”

“Let’s be honest, Murph. We want our girls back. They’re running and I’m sure they’re scared. We miss them so much it hurts. But if they’re found, they’ll send all of us back to Hell. That’s their intention, isn’t it? We love them too bloody much to have them return.”

“Damned if we find them, damned if we don’t,” Murphy said.

Rix nodded. “We’re fucking damned all right.”

Trotter set his fiery eyes upon his desk blotter. He habitually looked downwards while he was hearing something he didn’t like. He waited until his aides had stopped talking before raising his head and fixing them with a withering gaze.

“Off the grid,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” one of the analysts said. “Very much so. No digital fingerprints of any sort.”

“And what about actual fingerprints?”

“Sorry?”

“Giles Farmer has real fingers, has he not? And real toes, and real legs, and a real face. If you’d done as I asked and had real operatives with real eyes on him he wouldn’t have been able to slip the noose.”

“The lawyers …” The analyst looked like he regretted saying the word and Trotter punished him by jumping down his throat.

When the tongue lashing was over they all sat in silence until Trotter composed himself and said, “Let me see the list of everyone Farmer called, texted, Facebooked, Tweeted, emailed, anythinged in the past month.”

He took the dossier and paged through it.

“It’s a bloody lot of people,” Trotter said.

“He’s rather well-connected,” one of the analysts said. “Having said that we’ve applied certain filters to prioritize and probability-weight his contacts based on the closeness of his relationships, length of friendships, prior support for his conspiracy theories. We’ve narrowed them down to just over a dozen people who we believe are the most likely to be harboring him. It’s the last page of the dossier.”

Trotter glanced at the alphabetical list. The first name was Melissa Abelard, the last one, Chris Tabor. All but three had London addresses. Ian Strindberg was not on the list.

“I assume that aware, as you now are, of my views on surveillance that you have eyes on all these locations?”

The analysts nodded.

“And what about electronic surveillance?”

“Telephones, Internet, yes,” an analyst said. “Getting listening devices into all these houses and flats would, I’m sure you’d agree, be challenging, and would have to be ex-judicial and therefore subject to a level of detection risk. But if you …”

“No, that will do for now,” Trotter said, checking his clock. “Keep me posted. I’m late for another meeting.”

He logged into the videocon of the conference already in progress from a secure facility in Whitehall. Trotter had never intended to sit still for all of it since he was quite sure the level of scientific mumbo jumbo would have been a waste of his time. He had watched Leroy Bitterman’s opening remarks earlier in the day; now he wanted to hear the conclusions and judging from Bitterman’s comments, the meeting was down to the short strokes.

Trotter used his trackpad to train the cameras successively on each quadrant of the conference table. Previously, he had reviewed the security clearances of the participating physicists and had voiced the concern, notwithstanding their confidentiality agreements, whether they could be trusted with the enormity of the disclosures. Now, studying the strain evident on their faces, he continued to worry about them keeping their mouths shut. Bitterman had insisted that these were all top-level people who had solid track records as government consultants and besides, what choice did they have? Outside experts were required.

“I don’t know how to shut down the portal we’ve created, Mr. Trotter,” Bitterman had said. “Do you?”

The CIA, FBI, and MI5 had all signed off on the meeting and finally Trotter and MI6 had reluctantly agreed.

Anton Meissner, professor of high-energy physics from MIT, politely raised his hand and Bitterman acknowledged him.

“Most of us here today have participated in the Hercules experiment in one way or another over the years,” Meissner said, “and I don’t think there were any dissenters to the final protocols which contemplated raising the collider energies in a stepwise fashion. We all thought it was right to explore lower energies before proceeding to 30 TeV, not because we had outsized concerns about strangelet production, but because it just seemed prudent.” He angrily pointed at Henry Quint who was present at the back of the room having not been afforded a seat of honor at the table. Singled out, Quint bowed his head. “Henry, I don’t know what possessed you to leapfrog to thirty but now we’ve got a heck of a mess to clean up. The problem is, none of us knows how to fix this. We’ve got self-propagating waves of poorly understood and highly exotic graviton-strangelet quantum fields, that’s clear enough, but I don’t think we’ve got any experimental apparati for testing ways to shut these fields down. It’s going to be down to theoretical models.”

Marcel DuBois, from CERN in Geneva, agreed and said, “I think we have to throw a lot of supercomputing power at the problem. It would be helpful to broaden the base well beyond those physicists here today, Leroy. Each of us could suggest additional people.”

Bitterman shook his head. “Our goverments are mightily worried about leaks. The UK, in particular, is determined not to have panic and unrest among the civilian population. I’m afraid we’re going to have to restrict information flows to this group only.”

“I think that’s a bad idea,” Evan Kirkman from Oxford said.

“We’ll agree to revisit the decision,” Bitterman said. “But for now it has to stand.”

Greta Velling from the Freie Universität of Berlin

said, “Look, someone’s got to say it, so let it be me. You’re planning on firing up the collider again in nineteen days. That can’t be a good thing. I’m not saying we know it will make things worse but I don’t see how it can improve the situation. The aberrant quantum fields are bound to propagate further even if we were to shut down the collider as soon as our people return.”

“So you would advocate what?” Bitterman asked.

“I would say, don’t run the collider again,” Velling said. “Find the extra-dimensionals who haven’t been rounded up, bundle them with the ones you’ve caught, and figure out what to do with them. Hopefully we won’t have additional transfers.”

“And strand our people on the other side?” Bitterman asked.

Velling said “Yes,” at the same time that Trotter shouted it out loud to himself.

“Well, I say, no,” Marcel DuBois said emphatically, slapping the table hard. “Emily Loughty worked for me. I know her very well. We all know her and like her. She’s braver by far than all of us put together and we owe her, the equally brave men who undertook a rescue mission, and the poor people who got swept up in this disaster, the full measure of our support. I suggest we all go home, sharpen our pencils, and use our brains to solve this problem.”

Trotter scanned the faces of the scientists and when he saw that Velling had few if any supporters he clicked off the screen and threw a pen across the room.

Antonio had finally arrived.

Seated in his saddle he drank in the vast palace soaring over the muddy streets of the sprawling city. To him it was still Rome’s Borgia Palace, and though King Cesare was headless in a rotting room, he suspected that Romans would continue to call it by that name for a long time.

He munched on a rind of crust waiting for his emissary to return. All his men were dog-tired. They had journeyed from Paris to Rome at break-neck speed, some falling from their saddles in exhaustion.

“For Garibaldi!” he had cried to rally them. “For Italia!” But only to himself he had said, “For Caterina.”

Caterina Sforza, Borgia’s beautiful and tragic queen, trapped in her ornate cage for centuries by her monstrous husband, now freed from her yoke by Garibaldi’s uprising to live as a free woman.

When last he saw her, the smell of gunpowder permeating the inner sanctum of the palace, he had wiped the blood of the destroyed Borgia king from her cheek. She had asked his name and he had proudly introduced himself. She had said the words which he had repeated to himself many times a day: “I do not know my fate, but if your master does indeed spare me, I would know you better, Antonio.”

Now with the Macedonians advancing from the Aegean, Caterina had to be saved again. And when he did, he would be bolder this time. He would master his shyness and ask to know her better. Much better.

His emissary returned and gave Antonio the news he was hoping to receive. Caterina was well and would receive him that very evening. As they spoke, provisions were being delivered from the palace to Garibaldi’s nearby palazzo, where Antonio and his soldiers would be bivouacked.

Antonio rode to the palazzo giddy with anticipation. He would wash away his grime and try to find some suitable clothes. He would lubricate himself with wine—just enough to loosen his tongue, but not enough to turn it foolish. He would not lay with her that night, even if she wished it. First he had to attend to the defense of Rome. Later, when the Macedonians had been sent fleeing back to their ships, then he would claim his prize and all his miserable years in Hell would, at least for a night, fade from memory.

It was dark when Antonio and his lieutenants rode to the palace. The streets were calm, the taverns they passed filled with knots of merchants, the only men with money to spend on another man’s beer. The approach to the palace was lit with torches. Passing through the outer portcullis, which was manned by rigid guards, Antonio wondered who these men were. Caterina’s private soldiers? Remnants of Borgia’s guard? Garibaldi loyalists? He would have to know this if he was to mount a defense of the city. If there were any question as to their mettle, he would replace them with members of his own brigade.

In the inner courtyard he dismounted and led his contingent of soldiers inside through galleries festooned with the magnificent oils that Caravaggio had painted under Borgia’s patronage.

He caught sight of himself in a large mirror, one of the palace’s treasures, and while he was pleased at the way his long black hair flowed from under his new cap, one of Garibaldi’s lent by a servant at the palazzo, he self-consciously realized he had forgotten to have his dusty boots cleaned. That weighed on his mind while he waited in the throne room, hands clasped behind his frock coat.