Perfect People (32 page)

She ran, stumbling, down the side of the house, then all the way around on the wet, boggy grass, screaming out their names.

Then she stood, frozen with fear, soaking wet, by the back door to the kitchen.

They had vanished.

‘Please, God, no, don’t do this to me. Where are they? Please, where are they?’

She ran back into the house. The phone was ringing. She dived into John’s study and grabbed the receiver. ‘Yeshallo?’

It was John.

‘They’ve vanished!’ she shouted at him. ‘I had a call from someone and they’ve vanished. Oh Christ—’

‘Hon? What do you mean? Vanished?’

‘THEY’VE VANISHED, JOHN, THEY’VE FUCKING VANISHED. I LEFT THEM IN THE CAR OUTSIDE THE HOUSE – OH GOD—’

‘Naomi, hon, tell me, what do you mean? What do you mean, they’ve vanished?’

‘THEY’VE DISAPPEARED, YOU STUPID MAN, THAT’S WHAT I MEAN. VANISHED. SOMEONE’S TAKEN THEM.’

‘Someone’s taken them? Are you sure?’

‘I don’t know. They’ve vanished.’

‘When? Where – I mean – where have you looked?’

‘EVERYWHERE!’

‘Have you looked in the house?’

‘THEY WERE OUTSIDE IN THE CAR, FOR GOD’S SAKE!’

‘Check the house. Have you checked the house?’

‘Noooo,’ she sobbed.

‘Naomi, darling, check the house. Have a look around the house. I’ll stay on the line. Just check all the rooms.’

She ran into the drawing room. Then upstairs along the corridor, water running down her face. Their bedroom door was closed. She pushed it open, and stopped in her tracks.

Luke and Phoebe were sitting contentedly on the floor, absorbed in a tower they were building from Lego bricks.

She stared at them with a mixture of relief and total disbelief.

‘I – I’ve – found them,’ she said. ‘They’re OK. I’ve found them.’

‘They OK?’

Backing out of the room she said, quietly, ‘Fine. They’re fine.’

‘Where were they?’

Feeling confused, foolish, she said nothing.
Had she brought them in, taken them to her room and forgotten?

No way.

‘Where were they, hon?’

‘In their room,’ she snapped. ‘In their bloody room.’

‘Are they all right?’

‘Luke and Phoebe? Oh yes, John, they’re fine, they’re absolutely fine. They’ve been thrown out of playschool, now they know how to get out of my car all by themselves, and they refuse to say a bloody word to me. If that’s how you define
all right
, then yes, they are
all right.
Our designer babies are
all right
. They’ve obviously been born with
all right
genes.’

‘I’m cancelling my meeting and coming home, hon. I’ll be there in half an hour.’

‘Go to your meeting. Don’t cancel that. We have enough problems. Go to your meeting.’

‘I can come straight home.’

‘Go to your bloody meeting, John!’ she shouted. ‘Your children don’t need you. They don’t need me. They don’t need anyone.’

John sat on a chair in the children’s room, preparing to read to them as he did every night. Over the past few weeks he had read them
The Gruffalo
, Pooh Bear stories, ‘Cinderella’, ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, and various Mister Men stories.

They just lay silently in their cots, eyes open; he had no idea whether they were listening. And they never gave any reaction when he finished.

After he had kissed them goodnight, he walked heavy-heartedly downstairs and mixed himself a drink in the kitchen. Naomi was on the phone to her mother.

A strange thought suddenly crossed his mind. Were the children
punishing
them for what they had done? For tampering with their genes? He dismissed that, instantly. Then he took his drink through to his den and sat down in front of his laptop, and watched a dozen new emails appear.

One was from his chess opponent, Gus Santiano, in Brisbane.

Damn.
It must have been a week at least since the man’s last move. Guiltily, he opened it.

John frowned. Had the man been drinking? His last move had been a defensive pawn against an early king’s bishop attack. What on earth was he talking about? Was Gus Santiano playing with another opponent somewhere else and got them confused?

He emailed him back, saying he didn’t understand.

To his surprise, ten minutes later he got a reply, with an attachment.

John opened the attachment. To his astonishment, there were six emails from him to Santiano, dated daily during the past week, each giving a fresh move, as well as six replies.

Impossible! There was no way he could have done this without remembering, absolutely no way.

He called up the chessboard program, and keyed in the instruction for it to go sequentially through this latest game. The moves Gus Santiano had attributed to him were smart, he could see that clearly. Very smart.

But he hadn’t made them.

He double checked the emails again. All of them had been sent from him, from this computer. But no one else used this computer; and it couldn’t have been Naomi, she didn’t play chess.

Baffled, he pulled an olive out of his drink and chewed on it, thinking.
Six moves.
Was it a hacker? Possible, except he didn’t leave the computer online either here or at the office.

He did a search through his Sent Items box, and sure enough, found each of the emails. Next, he highlighted one and checked the source. It showed the email was sent from this computer at 2.45 a.m. last Saturday. The next one was sent at 3 a.m. on Sunday. The next at 2.48 a.m. on Monday. The following three at similar times on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, today.

Am I going nuts? Sleepwalking and playing chess?

He swallowed down most of the martini in one gulp. But the usual buzz he got from the drink didn’t happen. In the middle of the night someone was using his computer, playing chess for him. Either it was a hacker or—

He looked up at the ceiling.
Oh, sure, John, your two-and-a-half-year-old son and daughter are creeping downstairs in the middle of the night and playing chess, beating the pants off a semi-finalist in last year’s Queensland open chess championship. Explain that?

He couldn’t. He didn’t have any explanation. He was baffled.

‘I didn’t want to worry you – but on top of everything else, I had a strange phone call this afternoon,’ Naomi said hesitantly. ‘Probably nothing.’

John chewed his mouthful of cod; as with almost everything she touched in the kitchen, Naomi had cooked it to perfection. Trying to keep one ear tuned to the television news, he replied, ‘What kind of strange? By the way, this is delicious.’

‘Thanks, it’s a new recipe I’m trying out. You don’t think the mushroom sauce is too rich?’

‘No, it’s delicious. Who was it that called?’

‘Someone from the States, asking if this was the Klaesson household – and if I was Naomi Klaesson. A man. Then he hung up,’ she said.

John looked at her; she had his full attention now. ‘When was this?’

‘About three o’clock his afternoon.’

‘He didn’t give a name?’

‘No.’

John’s eyes went to the window; unease, like silt in a disturbed pond, rose inside him. ‘Three? Do you have any idea where he was calling from?’

‘I checked the caller ID. It just said
international
. Why?’

He was calculating in his head.
East coast time. Central time. Pacific time.

Yesterday, in the office, he’d received a similar call. A young man with an American accent had asked if he was speaking with Dr John Klaesson. When he’d replied that he was, the line had gone dead. He’d had a colleague with him in the office at the time and although it had bothered him a little, with the distractions of work he hadn’t given it any more thought.

Now, suddenly, it was bothering him a lot.

His call had come at 2.45 in the afternoon. West coast time, that would have been 6.45 in the morning. East coast time, more probably 9.45. New York, perhaps? Anywhere. A reporter trying to following up on the Dettore story? Perhaps. Hopefully it was no more than that.

Except a reporter would have called back.

He toyed with the fish, cutting off another piece, pushing it around in the sauce, wondering whether to tell Naomi. He decided that after her distressing time at the playgroup this was not the moment to tell her about the phone call. Nor was it the moment to tell her about his most recent chess game against Gus Santiano. Instead he asked, ‘How much has Phoebe grown in the past year?’

‘Two and a half inches,’ she said.

‘Which is the same as Luke, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how many periods has she had?’

‘One.’

‘The pills seem to be working,’ he said.

‘So far.’

‘Yes. So far. Which means they might go on working. OK? And if they go on working, she’ll keep growing normally. Right?’

A reluctant nod.

‘Let’s be optimistic.’

After the meal John went back into his den. He’d never bothered setting up a password for his laptop before, but now he went into the control panels to create one.

When he had finished, he returned to the chess program, made his opening move for the next game with Gus Santiano and sent it. Then he settled down to work.

At a few minutes past midnight he shut his computer down, then went into the kitchen and listened to the baby monitor. The only sounds were the rhythmic breathing of sleep. He crept upstairs and tiptoed along the corridor to Luke and Phoebe’s room, opened the door and peered in.

He could see them both, in the weak glow of the Bob the Builder night light, fast asleep. He blew them each a kiss, closed the door and went to his bedroom. Naomi was asleep, with the bedside lamp on and a book open on the duvet. She stirred as he entered.

‘Wassertime?’ she asked sleepily.

‘Just after midnight.’

‘I was dreaming – you and I were being chased by Luke and Phoebe; they were in a car and we were on bicycles; they kept telling us they didn’t want to hurt us because they loved us, but if we didn’t pedal faster they would have to run us over.’

He leaned over and kissed her. ‘Sounds like a classic anxiety dream.’

‘It was spooky. I kept telling them,
You’re our children, you’re meant to love us, you’re not supposed to run us over
.’

‘
And what did they say?’

‘They just giggled.’

‘Go back to sleep,’ he said softly. Then he removed his clothes, put on his dressing gown, went through into the bathroom and brushed his teeth.

But when he came back into the bedroom, instead of getting into bed, he took his torch from the drawer in his bedside table, switched off Naomi’s lamp and made his way, as silently as he possibly could, back downstairs and into his study.

There, just by the light of his torch, he unfolded the sleeping bag he’d taken out earlier from the linen cupboard, climbed into it and curled up on the tiny sofa.

At five in the morning, after a few hours of very fitful sleep, and suffering painful cramp, he abandoned his vigil and went up to bed.

The Disciple was happy. That fear in the infidel woman’s voice had felt so good.
Be thou in the fear of the Lord all the day long. Proverbs 23: 17.

Her fear was still flowing through him, energizing him like fuel. It gave him strength, power; it was so good he was tempted to call her again and release some more from her, let that flow into him as well. But that would be greed; and greed was a sin. God had been good to him, leading him to where the infidels lived. He must not reward Him with indulgence.

So now, his head swimming with the pleasures of Mrs Naomi Klaesson’s fear, he sat at his desk, his laptop open, logged on to the internet, on to Google Earth. He saw the globe of the planet.

He moved the cursor, entered the name
Sussex
, hit a key and zoomed in until the screen was entirely filled by Sussex and parts of surrounding counties. Eagerly, he devoured the names of the towns near to the infidels’ home.

Worthing. Brighton. Lewes. Eastbourne.

He had never been to England. There was a Brighton in America, a Brighton Beach, he recalled. But otherwise, these names meant nothing to him. This place, Sussex, these towns, their names came out of the screen so solidly, so real, he felt he could hold them inside his heart.