Once Bitten (22 page)

“They think I might try to help you,” I whispered.

“And would they be right?” he asked, putting his left arm over my head and leaning against the door. He spoke with a slight Slavic accent that jarred with the redneck outfit. He pushed his head forward so that his face was just inches from mine. He let go of the toothpick, leaving it stuck between his back teeth, and put the other hand against the door, trapping me between his arms. Not that he needed to physically hold me there, I was as hypnotised as a rabbit in front of a snake. I looked down at the floor, unable to meet his gaze.

“Don't look away,” he said quietly. I lifted my head but after a few seconds I dropped it again.

He took his right hand off the door and gripped my chin, not hard enough to hurt but there was no doubting their strength as he raised my head. He was slowly chewing the toothpick and had the same amused look in his eyes. “Don't look away,” he repeated. "Just take it easy and look at me.

Where did they take Annabelle?"

“Annabelle?”

“Terry, then. Where did they take Terry?”

“I don't know. I honestly don't know.” I tried to look away but his grip tightened on my chin.

He looked deep into my eyes. I don't know what he was looking for, whether he could see the veins pulse in my neck and was counting the beats, of if he was measuring my breathing rate, or if he was seeing how much sweat was oozing out of my pores, but whatever he was doing I knew without a shadow of a doubt that he was able to tell whether or not I was telling the truth as accurately as any mechanical lie-detector.

“Did they tell you where they were holding my friends?” he asked, his voice steady, almost friendly.

“No. No, they didn't.” It was hard to speak with his hand holding my chin. The words came out sort of slurred.

“Will they allow you to see her?”

“I don't think so. No, I'm sure they won't. They don't trust me.”

“Why not? Why don't they trust you?”

“They think I'm in love with her.”

He smiled and with a few chewing movements transferred the toothpick across his mouth. “And are you?”

I hesitated, but only for a second. There was no point in lying to him. I looked straight back at him. Right into his eyes, as blue as the desert sky. “Yes,” I said. “I am.”

“Did they mention a man called Hamshire?”

“The geneticist?”

He raised his eyebrows and stopped chewing. “So they did talk about him.”

I tried to shake my head but his hand refused to move. “No, they didn't. But Terry talked about him. Before they got her.”

“But the men who took her didn't speak of him?”

“No. No, they didn't.” A sudden thought struck me. “They did say they were holding others like her.”

“Did they say if they were being held together? Or separately?”

"They didn't say. But I got the impression they were at one place. The ones in the US,

anyway."

“Did they say what they were doing with them?”

“Research.”

“Sugar was one of them, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Did he say exactly what his research was?”

“Genetic engineering,” I said. “He's trying to isolate the longevity gene and slot it into human DNA.”

The man snorted with disbelief. “That's what he told you, huh?” For a moment I felt the hand tighten as if he was about to squeeze my skull and burst it, then just as suddenly he relaxed. “You think he wants everyone in the world to live forever, do you?” He laughed, and it was a cruel sound, loaded with irony. “Think what that would do for the economy, Dr Beaverbrook. Imagine telling a garbage collector he was doing to live forever. Or a secretary. Who'd do the menial tasks in a society where everyone lived for ever? Wake up and smell the coffee. It would be used to keep a few key people alive for ever. People with money. With power. But first, they'd get rid of us. Me and Terry and the rest of our kind.”

“I don't understand.”

“Sugar is working on a virus which will recognise the longevity gene. Hamshire had seen some of their research papers. He'd been hacking into a couple of Government computers while doing research at Cal-Tech. We think that's how they got him. From what he read, it looks as if Sugar wants a virus that will enter the walls of all cells but only bind to the amino acids which make up the gene that allows us to live forever. And once it binds it will change configuration and become toxic. Lethal. It will hone in on our DNA and kill us, without harming humans in any way. They plan to introduce it into the atmosphere or the water. Sugar's plan is to design a virus with a very short half life, of the order of a few weeks. Within a year none of us will be left, and they can then begin consolidating the gene into their own cell nuclei. There will be a new order in the world. I don't think it would be a world that you would be comfortable in.”

He stopped. “I shouldn't be telling you this,” he said. He pushed himself away from the door and stood in front of me, his hands on his hips. “You know nothing, Dr Beaverbrook. Nothing that can help me.” He looked disappointed, and I realised then that Sugar had at least been partly telling the truth. The vampires had hoped that I would lead them to Terry. And to the rest of the captive mutants. And now that I had proved otherwise I was obviously no use to them. His hand moved forward and I flinched but all he did was seize the door handle and twist it. He grinned at my discomfort. “No, that's not what I'm here for,” he said. “If it was up to me, I'd probably do it, but she said no. She likes you, believe it or not. And she doesn't want you hurt. Crazy girl, huh?” I moved out of the way and he opened the door and strode down the pathway. He didn't even bother to look back as he walked to the pick-up truck and drove off.

The Prison And that was the last time I saw her. Until today that is. Ten years, that's how long it took, ten years of trying to convince them that I was on their side, that I regarded Terry Ferriman as nothing more than a laboratory animal to be studied. I knew that if I ever let on just how much she meant to me then they'd never let me see her, so for the first eight years I didn't even try. I stayed with the LAPD but started to do some research work at UCLA, initially an extension of my criminal work but I gradually moved into the effects of ageing on intelligence and behaviour and particularly comparisons between chronological, biological, functional and subjective age. It was interesting research in its own right, notwithstanding that my main reason for doing it was to get to see Terry again. At any one time a person's age can be classed as in those four ways - how old he is in years,

how old his body actually appears to be, the status level the person holds in society, and how old the person feels inside.

Take me for instance, sitting at my military desk with Terry's picture in front of me, the orange light of the computer screen reflecting off my face. Chronological age? No problem - forty-six.

Biological age? Well, if I'm brutally honest I'd have to say my body is that of a man a good ten years older. I can't read or drive without glasses, four of my teeth are capped, my hair is thinning.

My hearing is nowhere as good as it used to be, especially with high frequency sounds. I can't get through the night without getting up to go to the bathroom at least once. My skin is losing its elasticity fast which accounts for the sagging around my jowls and the wrinkling.

Functional age? I guess I've done well, and achieved quite a lot during my academic career.

Even being modest I'd say I've achieved as much as most academics would have done by the time they were sixty. I was in a rush, I suppose.

Subjective age? I dunno. Inside I feel exactly the same as I did when I was sixteen. I know a few more tricks, I know how to handle situations because I've been through them so many times,

but inside it's still the same teenager, the same insecurities, fears and desires.

The lighting flashes behind me again, a double flash. How would I rate Terry's age?

Chronological - something close to four thousand, I suppose. Biological - in her late teens.

Functional - God, it would take a normal person, even a highly successful businessman, hundreds of years to acquire the assets she has. Subjective? That I didn't know. I couldn't comprehend how it must feel to live so long. Maybe she too still felt as if she was sixteen.

Anyway, over the years I developed a program similar to the Beaverbrook Model which through question and answer could determine the four ages of a subject. Much of the work I did involved measurement of fluid intelligence, the ability to solve new and unusual problems. Fluid intelligence peaks at adolescence and then declines steadily, whereas crystallised intelligence, the knowledge and skills acquired in life, increases up until the start of adolescence and then increases only slowly until it plateaus in old age. I published a stack of papers in the best psychology journals and though I kept working for the LAPD I managed to travel overseas a lot to interview some of the oldest people in the world - in Ecuador, Russia and India, incorporating the results into the computer model. I put in a few other features too, so that the program got into a person's psyche more thoroughly than ten years with an analyst.

Unlike Sugar and his researchers, I made sure I published as much as possible, and I knew it would be obvious to them that the work I was doing could be helpful in their hunt for immortals.

Used properly, my new research could be used to identify members of the population whose functional and subjective ages were way out of kilter with their chronological and biological ages.

I kept applying for access to Terry and the rest of the immortals - for research purposes, I said.

Eventually permission was granted by some agency or another and a team of six agents came and picked me up at home in a limousine with darkened windows, darkened so that I couldn't see out. I told them I needed the Toshiba computer and they allowed me to take it with me. One of the agents took a chrome gun-like thing out of an aluminium case, placed it against my upper arm and pulled the trigger. Everything went hazy, and then black, and when I woke up they'd taken my watch and the Toshiba and I was in what could have passed for a Holiday Inn bedroom except for the fact that there were no windows. There was a TV and the papers were delivered every day and I could choose my own food from a leather-bound menu but other than the food deliveries I didn't see or speak to another human building for two weeks. I was in quarantine. Before they'd allow me to see her they had to be convinced that I wasn't being followed. No conversations, no phone calls, no letters. After two weeks a guy in a white coat unlocked the door and gave me another shot. When I awoke I was lying on a bunk in a steel-lined room. The first thing I saw was a remote control television camera staring at me. I guess it was being monitored continuously because within seconds of my waking up the door was unlocked and two beefy men in grey overalls came in. Someone had taken off my clothes while I was unconscious and had dressed me in a pale blue overall with “VISITOR” stamped across the front in large white capital letters. One of the men handed me a styrofoam cup of warm water and I drank deeply to wash away the bitter taste that coated the inside of my mouth.

“You'll soon feel better, the effects disappear quite quickly,” said a voice at the door. I looked up to see an elderly man with a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles perched on the end of his nose. He had a kindly face, topped with a mane of white hair, and he spoke with a vaguely French accent. He sat down on the bunk beside me and felt for my pulse. Satisfied, he shone a small torch into my eyes, nodded, and pronounced me fit.

He disappeared as quickly as he'd arrived and another man arrived, this one younger and fitter and wearing a dark blue suit and carrying a clipboard. It was a check-list of things I was not to disclose during my conversation with Terry (though she was referred to throughout as The Inmate),

mainly news events, the date, time of day, location of the prison (not that I knew it), that sort of stuff. When he'd finished reading the list out to me he handed me a pen and made me sign at the bottom before he, too, left the room. The two guards then escorted me along the corridor to a lift.

Both carried M-1 carbines and the safeties were off, their fingers never leaving the trigger guards.

They tapped a six-figure code into a small keypad to call the lift and when it arrived the doors hissed open to reveal another grim-faced guard, wearing a similar uniform but holding an M-14 assault rifle at the ready.

There was no way of telling how far down the lift went but it fell quickly enough to make my stomach heave and it was a full thirty seconds before it came to a halt and the door opened. Two more guards were waiting for me, almost doubles of the ones who'd led me to the lift God know's how many floors above and they escorted me along another metal-lined corridor, their steel-tipped boots echoing as they walked. My bare feet slapped on the cold metal floor. The overalls were all I was wearing, I could feel that I was naked underneath the cotton material.

There were television cameras at regular intervals along the corridor and as we passed them I could hear the whirring of a servo-mechanism as they turned to watch us go. At the end of the corridor was what looked like another lift but after one of the guards tapped in another six-digit code and pressed his thumb against a small square of illuminated perspex the doors opened to reveal a square room, about the size of a school classroom.

At the far right side of the room was a panel of booths, each with a plastic bucket chair facing a steel wall in which was set a square pane of glass about a meter square. Through the glass I could see a matching row of seats, facing towards me. To the right of each window was a telephone, not the modern sort but the old-fashioned black Bakelite type, the sort you see in old movies. I heard the doors close behind me. The two guards stood at either side with their guns at the ready, their eyes watchful, almost fearful. They said nothing but I guessed that I was supposed to sit in one of the booths. There was no indication which I was supposed to use and as I approached the line of chairs I saw that there was nobody on the other side of the glass. I sat down and waited, the plastic cold against my backside through the thin material. Beyond the glass I saw a smaller room, also metal lined, and a single door with no handle or visible lock. The walls were also featureless though there were what appeared to be ventilation grilles set into the ceiling.

After five minutes or so (there was no way of telling how long because they'd taken my watch)

the door opened and a guard came in carrying an automatic rifle. He walked into the room, his eyes flicking from left to right, then stood to one side. Behind him I saw Terry. She looked small and frail, pretty much the way I'd first seen her in De'Ath's interrogation room more than ten years earlier, her hair loose around her shoulders, her skin pale and her eyes lowered. She was wearing a robe which looked as if it was made from the same material as my overalls and which ended just below her knees. They'd given her a pair of brown plastic sandals for her feet and she was having trouble walking, but that wasn't because of her footwear, it was because the bastards had chained her feet together. There were big chrome clasps above each ankle joined by a chrome chain which couldn't have been more than eighteen inches long which meant that she had to shuffle rather than walk. My heart went out to her. Her arms weren't chained which surprised me at first but then I realised that they were more concerned about inhibiting her movements than of her attacking anyone. They had assault rifles and by the look of it she had nothing, just the robe and the sandals.

If they were as thorough with her as they had been with me then I knew that she'd never come within a million miles of anything that could conceivably be used as a weapon. She walked into the middle of the room and another guard followed her in. I saw a third guard close the door behind them but even though it was made of steel several inches thick I could hear no slamming or grating sound. The glass was obviously completely soundproof and, for all I knew, probably bullet proof as well. Terry was in her own sterile world, completely insulated, and almost certainly had been for the last ten years. The guards in her room took up positions on either side of the door,

their fingers on the triggers of their rifles. Both of them were wearing miniature headphones I noticed, small black ear pieces with wires running round their necks and disappearing into their overalls. Were they constantly receiving instructions from some central command point, or were they using music or white noise to blot out anything she might say to them? I had no way of telling.

Terry raised her eyes and saw me for the first time. Her face broke into a smile then it quickly disappeared, as if she'd thought she'd seen a friend but then realised she'd made a mistake. Was that because she wasn't pleased to see me, or because she didn't want them to know how she felt about me? Did she still feel anything for me? God, I was so bloody confused, about her, about my feelings, about what I should do.

I stood up and said hello, even though I knew she wouldn't be able to hear me through the glass.

She mouthed hello back but stayed where she was in the middle of the room as if she was afraid of approaching the glass screen. I knew I had to play it cool, too. They had only allowed me to see her because they thought I was on their side, that I wanted to study her, to find out what made her tick. Any sign of affection and they'd pull me out immediately, I was sure of that. God, I so much wanted to take her in my arms, to press myself against her and to bury my face in her long, black hair, to seek out her lips with my own and to kiss her until she couldn't breath. I motioned for her to sit down and she shuffled forward, her hands slightly forward for balance, and lowered herself into the chair. She pulled the chair forward so that she was right up against the small shelf that ran under the glass partition. There was a matching shelf on my side of the glass and I followed her example, getting as close to her as I could. I picked up the phone on my side of the glass and there was a crackling noise like static. I nodded at her phone and she picked it up gingerly with her left hand as if afraid it would give her a shock. She used her right hand to brush the hair behind her left ear and then pressed the receiver to it.

“Jamie, how are you?” she asked quietly.

“I'm fine, Terry. Just fine. How are they treating you?”

She looked deep into my eyes. Her right hand moved slowly on the shelf, making small stabbing movements with her extended index finger.

“I've been in better hotels,” she joked. Her right hand moved up as if to brush the hair behind her right ear, but as she did she made a small cupping gesture. She was signing to me. The sign for Listen. THEY LISTEN. She was telling me that the conversation was being listened to, though I'd already figured that out for myself. They'd be crazy not to monitor what was being said, and they'd be sure to record it, too, so that experts could go over it afterwards. I couldn't see any television cameras in the two rooms, but they'd been everywhere else so I was pretty sure they'd be watching us here, probably through concealed cameras, in the ventilation grilles maybe. Terry had obviously realised that because she put her hand back on the shelf where it would be shielded by her body.

I nodded to let her know that I understood. “You're not hurt, or in pain?”

Terry began signing individual letters with her right hand. It was slow, but she couldn't use the normal word forms that made up the deaf and dumb language because they were very expressive and often required both hands and the guards would have spotted it straight away. So as she talked she spelt out words, letter by letter.

“Sometimes, but there are lots of doctors here.” I M-I-S-S Y-O-U.

“They feed you OK?” I signed back, keeping the movements to a minimum. M-E T-O-O.

“Yeah, but it's never the same with plastic cutlery, you know?” I L-O-V-E Y-O-U. “How long has it been, Jamie?”

That was one of the things I wasn't supposed to tell her because they were trying to disorient her sense of time. “How long do you think it's been?” M-E T-O-O.

She shrugged. “Eight years, maybe.” C-A-N Y-O-U...

“A long time, that's for sure.”

“Not really, not for me.” .....H-E-L-P M-E?

“What do you mean?” H-O-W?

“I mean it's not that long for me, in percentage terms.” E-S-C-A-P-E. “For you eight years represents, what? A fifth of your life? Twenty per cent? Have you any idea how small a part of my life eight years is, Jamie? It's nothing. It's the equivalent of you waiting for a taxi.” P-L-E-AS-

E.

“Do you get bored?” H-O-W?

She shrugged. "I guess so, yeah. T-E-L-L T-H-E-M They let me have books. No newspapers.

No television. No radio. W-H-E-R-E I A-M. I asked if they'd let me have my cello a couple of years back but they haven't decided yet. T-E-L-L T-H-E-M Do you think you could do anything about that?" L-E-V-E-L 1-8.

“I can try. T-E-L-L W-H-O? Is there anything else you want?”

“Shit, Jamie,” she said angrily. A F-R-I-E-N-D “I just want to get the fuck outta this place, but we both know they're not going to allow that, don't we? W-I-L-L V-I-S-I-T I'm here for ever. You know, they don't allow me to have any visitors. Y-O-U S-O-O-N. Not one. And they won't let me use the phone. Ever. In all these years I haven't seen one single person who hasn't been carrying a gun or wearing a white coat. T-E-L-L H-I-M Except for you. You're the first friend they've allowed in to see me. THREE O-T-H-E-R-S H-E-R-E. I'm so glad that you came. A-L-L How did you swing it?” L-E-V-E-L 1-8.

Terry wasn't stupid, I knew that she already knew why I was there, she was just talking to cover the sign language, that it was the silent conversation which was the real one, but I still flushed and the spoken answer was an embarrassment. “This isn't just a social visit, Terry. W-H-E-R-E You could help me with some research I'm doing.” A-R-E W-E?

She frowned, and I realised she'd probably assumed that I knew the location of the prison. She had no way of knowing that even after all this time they didn't trust me completely and that it was only after I'd agreed to be drugged that they'd even let me inside the place.

“What sort of research?” she said frostily. M-A-R-I-O-N.

“It's for a paper I'm working on.”

“What sort of paper?” P-R-I-S-O-N.

“For one of the clinical journals. I'm doing some research into ageing and its effects on thought processes.”

“Another computer program? Like the Beaverbrook Program?” I-L-L-I-N-O-I-S.

I nodded. I knew about Marion Prison, all right. It's the super-maximum security facility built by the US Federal Bureau of Prisons to replace Alcatraz. Only the worst of the worst end up there,

and all of them are kept in virtually permanent solitary confinement. At least two were cases that I'd worked on. Really bad cases. God knows how she expected to get out if they were keeping her eighteen levels below the prison. I'd seen pictures of the facility, surrounded by a double thirtyfoot-

high fence and bullet-proof watchtowers. It was escape proof.

She sneered, but her hand continued to talk. It was hard to keep the two conversations separate in my head, I kept wanting to answer her sign language verbally and vice versa, and I was occasionally stumbling over my words and stuttering and I had to force myself to keep looking at her face and not down at her right hand. She seemed to be having no problems, though, her voice sounded perfectly natural and now she was letting her anger show.