Lie of the Land (19 page)

He brought the meeting to end, saying that was enough for today, and trudged back to Room 22.

•

The tide was out, exposing mudflats at the head of the bay. Carl crunched along the shingle beach, past a line of small boats that had been dragged above the high-water mark. Paint peeled and flaked from two of them, exposing old rotting wood. The boats looked neglected, forgotten about. He stood, looking up at a big house, half hidden by trees, patio doors and a veranda facing the bay. He heard footsteps crunching on the shingle.

‘Hi,' said Howard softly.

Carl barely acknowledged the greeting. He patted one of the boats on the gunwale. It felt solid enough, but blue paint flaked off in brittle shards as he touched the wood. He rubbed the paint to dust between his hands.

‘Listen,' said Brindley. ‘I've been speaking to the committee, but I don't know what information they've actually absorbed and what's going over their heads.'

Out on the mudflats Carl spotted what looked like an old bicycle, its rusted frame swathed in seaweed. The sea was burying it, making the bike part of itself. He watched wading birds, long-legged and slender-billed, probing the edge of the tide. He tried to focus on what Howard was saying.

‘Anyway,' continued Howard, ‘I told them it would be a good idea if we plotted the delta field. You can help me, if you want. First of all, though, I reckon we should take a boat and see how far we can get.'

Carl roused himself, responding to the idea behind the words. He stood straight, attentive now. ‘Of course – a boat.' He smiled. ‘A boat. Why didn't I think of that?'

Howard shook his head. ‘There are coastal masts north and south of here, and masts on the islands you can see on the horizon. I wouldn't bet on a clear passage out of here.'

‘But it's a possibility, right?'

‘Yes, it's possible, though where we can go I don't know.'

‘Somewhere. Anywhere.'

‘We
are
somewhere.'

‘Somewhere else,' insisted Carl, his voice rising. ‘Taking a boat is a great idea.'

Brindley pursed his lips. ‘OK, I've put the idea to the committee, and George Cutler said his son Adam would take me out in his fishing boat. It's a bit rough today, I was told. Maybe tomorrow, if the wind drops.'

‘Can I come with you?'

‘Well,' said Brindley, ‘if there are fluctuations in the delta field – sizeable ones – then being in a boat might not be the safest place. There may be refraction effects because of the tide. We might not be able to turn the boat round in time.'

Carl shook his head.

‘I'll take that chance.' He was staring at Brindley, face to face. ‘Take me with you.'

Brindley nodded.

Carl pulled a single cigarette from his pocket. It was bent and crumpled. He looked at it for a second. ‘Do you have a light?'

Howard shook his head grimly. Carl looked at the cigarette again and put it back in his jacket pocket.

‘You know,' said Howard, ‘maybe here is as good a place as any to pitch up. Inverlair is one of the biggest notspots, that's why I came here.'

‘Yeah, well,' said Carl, picking at the flakes of paint. ‘I came here because of you. And, if it's all the same to you, I'd like to get the fuck out of here as soon as possible.'

•

It was after 11 p.m. and still daylight, the southern headland of Inverlair black against the glowing west. Carl could still see his hand in front of his face, the path up from the shore and the forms of the houses. There were stars in the darker east, a gentle salty breeze and each seabird so clear in the calling as their cries
pierced the quiet. The hours and days were mounting up, and the rest of the world was saying goodbye. For all Carl cared, Adam Cutler's fishing boat could drop him over the side where he belonged, down among the devouring shoals. Better the CivCon sharks than here, where there was no normal terror.

21

From an upstairs window Isaac watched his uncle's fishing boat come back into the bay. He ran down to the kitchen to pass on the news. ‘Uncle Adam is back,' he said, pulling a disgusted face. ‘With more fish.'

George was hunched over the sink, hands covering his face. He was shaking.

‘Grandpa?'

Without turning round George straightened up, ran his hands under the tap. ‘I dropped something.'

‘What did you drop?'

George splashed his face with water. ‘Never mind. It's fine.'

Isaac came over. ‘Is it cut?'

‘No.'

‘Let me see?'

‘It's fine,' he barked, quickly drying his hands and face. He threw the dish towel aside.

Before the boy's shock became tears, George whisked him out into the lobby, the mask of tolerance restored.

Down at the pier, a group of people had gathered. George gripped his grandson's hand, figured that if the boat was back so soon it must be bad news. The
Aurora
ploughed towards them, throttle easing back and into reverse as it neared the pier.

The expressions of those onboard told the story. Engines idling, the boat came to a stop, backwash lapping against the pier's barnacle-encrusted legs.

‘Just over three miles,' shouted Howard. ‘We went as far south as we dared and worked our way west and north.'

George sagged, letting go of his grandson's hand. His voice cracked. ‘Could you see any other boats?'

Howard shook his head. ‘Nothing.'

The sea looked inviting to George as the
Aurora
was tied up alongside. The urge to jump off the pier took hold.

He felt a little hand slip into his, squeezing. The pressure roused him.

‘Well, we know what we have to do,' George found himself saying. He spoke loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘We sink or swim. That's the choice. We were told it a few days ago, now we're hearing it again – that's all. We're going to get through this – all of us – together. We stick with the plan that Mr Brindley told us about at the meeting. Tomorrow we'll start organising jobs and work crews.'

Fair enough, that kind of pep talk. But what George really wanted to do was jump into the boat and race it out to sea as fast as he could, regardless of the consequences and blind to the reason for doing so. Despite that, his words had come out in a firm and clear voice. He wondered how that had happened.

George walked away, gripping his grandson's hand a little too tightly. As he climbed the rhododendron-lined path, he tried to remember when, exactly, the hotel stopped being a thriving business and became a huge empty building that ate his money. The process had been gradual. Like a heaving late-night party, people had slipped away, imperceptibly, until there were only a few stragglers left to face the dawn.

Inverlair Hotel had gone way beyond being a drain on his resources, he thought. It had become a mausoleum, and he was the caretaker.

•

Carl and Howard started their first sweep of the redzone at the roadblock, on the north road out of Inverlair.

‘We'll head down towards the sea first of all,' said Howard. He nodded inland, to the brooding massif of Ben Bronach. ‘Then we'll move up there.' He studied his deltameter-cum-phone. ‘Look, the reading at the roadblock today is weaker than it was when Gibbs put the roadblock up. We'll need a few sweeps of the bay to get an average.'

On the grassy verge, a fat bee bounced from stem to stem. Howard's plan seemed like a good one.

‘It's lovely here,' Carl murmured, looking out to sea. ‘It was pissing down yesterday and now it's like the Bahamas.'

They left the single-track road and walked down the grass slope to the rocky shoreline, then came back up towards the roadblock, Carl entering co-ordinates on Howard's palmpod like he'd been shown. Sheep and sturdy black-faced lambs scattered as they retraced their steps.

‘Don't take this the wrong way,' said Carl as they reached the road again, ‘but why didn't you go to the media about SCOPE? Something this big is hard to ignore, even with the PLC on our case. Someone would have published, spun it as a managerial issue. There must've been some way of getting it out.'

Sweat glistened on Howard's hairless head. He took off his jacket. ‘I was a partner in a firm, GeoByte Services,' he said. ‘Three of us in a management buyout. The other two were more finance and deal-making, but I wanted to stay in product development. It was my job to iron out the signal noise from other telecomms on the site-share. Anyway, I went to Len, one of the partners, a guy I'd known for almost twenty years. I told him the modelling results confirmed the resonance in the diarite filters when the transmitters were networked. So he said he'd have a look at my results.'

Howard cleared his throat. ‘A week later he still hadn't got back to me, fobbed me off when I asked him about the resonance
results. Then, when I was about to go to him again, we got a visit from the main contractor, their head of procurement no less, who starts talking about a new contract, a bigger one,
if
we deliver on SCOPE. And that's when things got difficult for me. I went to Len again, but there was no budging him. I could see what they were trying to do, the contractors, so I went to the Security Ministry, and another sympathetic hearing took place.

‘Two days later there was a break-in at the science park, my hard copies of the modelling report were stolen, and all my backup data – three months of research – was wiped. Flash drives, cloud accounts, everything.'

Howard looked straight at Carl. ‘I guessed then that CivCon would be monitoring me so I couldn't risk any kind of contact with you. And anyway, what would you have said if I'd phoned you up ranting about SCOPE and its two-hertz harmonic that might send people to sleep as they were walking in the street?'

‘I would have thought you were nuts. If you were lucky I would have checked you out and asked for proof.'

‘And I had none to show you.'

They pressed on in silence, Carl dropping back a little, lost in thought. What Brindley had said was plausible enough to dispel guilt, culpability. Could he have done anything different?

•

A few days later they were halfway through a second sweep of the bay. The first set of readings had given a maximum safe distance of 4.2 kilometres from Inverlair Hotel to the edge of what everyone now referred to as the redzone. They were about 400 metres above sea level.

‘These are the exact co-ordinates, no doubt about it.' He handed the deltameter back to Carl. ‘The field strength is much weaker than it was on the first sweep. Down to 120 microtesla again.' He frowned at the readings.

Here was something. Carl grabbed at the floating feather of hope with both hands. Twelve days and maybe SCOPE was conking out already. Never mind two to five years. Sitting on a moss-covered rock, Howard wiped the sweat from his eyes, frowning over his deltameter. Insects droned and hovered over the stewing bogs. He screwed the top back on his water bottle.

‘Both the delta field's magnetic and microwave components are still present, which means the nearest transmitter is still working. I don't know why the signal strength has dropped off. There can be temporary attenuations in a signal for all sorts of reasons.'

Carl's head dropped. ‘So, it's just a blip?'

Brindley pulled at blades of long grass. ‘I don't know.'

‘Why not? You built the fucking thing.'

‘Incorrect,' said Brindley, glaring at Carl. ‘But I think you know that . . . I think you also know that SCOPE was more than an emergency communications system. You
do
know that, don't you?'

Carl set off back down the grassy slope towards the village. He turned round, walking backwards. ‘Well, if there's one man who can tell the rest of us what SCOPE really was, it sure as fuck isn't me.'

22

Grief belonged in the past. He had no use for it now. George kept telling himself that. It was too soon, that was the problem, and if he'd been given to platitudes, he would have said that time is the great healer, or something along those lines.

When he was alone he felt naked before grief. It had reduced him to the core of what he was. It was testing him, interrogating the workings of his soul, responses that he had barely given a second thought to before. It was testing his stitches. Was he held together properly? Would he come apart?

He would endure, withstand the punishment, or he would disintegrate. For the time being, he'd let grief take him, but he knew there had to be a way out of it, a way of confining it, mostly, as an experience that was based on memory, not raw actuality. George kept telling himself all that but, for now, it was no use. Maybe one day he would find himself entirely focused on what he was doing: the past's ability to hurt him reduced to an intermittent and fading signal.

The bench was warm. George sat with his face to the sun, an empty space beside him that he could picture being filled by Alison. So many times she had sat there and he'd hardly been aware of her; now that she was missing, he could hardly take his eyes off the space she used to occupy, when the weather had allowed.

Simone and Isaac were round at Fiona's, so he had cried on his own, a trickle this time, rather than a torrent.

He'd noticed that his daughter wasn't letting him look after
Isaac as often as she had; whenever she went out she took the boy with her. Did she think he was incapable of looking after his own grandson? Through his grief, George felt a surge of anger. It fired off in several different directions: at Brindley and the journalist, at the bastards who dreamed up the SCOPE system, at his own daughter. Himself. Alison had been pissed off with his moods, his sullen sarcasm. If it hadn't been for that, maybe she would never have felt the need to go to Edinburgh for a break in the first place.

He tried to focus. There were important things to do now. The situation is what it is, he told himself, and now we have to think of the future, like Brindley said. What was that stuff he'd been talking about the other day? Drawing up work crews. Rationing the food according to age and sex and usefulness. Okay. Lots to be done.