Strangled Silence (14 page)

'I still don't understand what it's all for,'Amina
said softly. 'If half of what we're talking about is
true, there's a massive cover-up going on. But
what
are they covering up?'

'I have some theories,' Chi said. 'I think these
false memories are part of a programming process.
Whoever's doing this has to make these soldiers disappear
for three or four days. But what's the point
of making them disappear? I think it's so they can
be programmed as sleeper agents – y'know? Like in
The Manchurian Candidate
?' He looked furtively at
Ivor. 'Each one is being given a task and they'll be
activated by a phone call or something like that.
The false memories account for that missing time.'

'That still sounds far-fetched to me,' Amina
said, shaking her head. 'I mean, what are these guys
being programmed to do? Are they spies or . . . or
assassins or what? And if so, why not just pay
professionals to do the job instead of trying to rely
on some dodgy mind-control process? How could
the brainwashers be sure these pawns of theirs
would do what they're supposed to do? And
besides, I just can't see the military allowing hundreds
of their soldiers to be treated like this. I know
you think everyone in the establishment is a coldhearted
manipulator, Chi, but it's just not like that.
Most senior officers are decent, honourable men.'

Watching the incredulous expression cross her
pretty features, Chi was relieved he had not further
expounded his theory on experimentation by alien
abductors. Now that he had her respect, he was
keen not to lose it. He had already spent too much
time in the company of pale-skinned nerds raging
about shadowy government agencies responsible
for everything from the Martin Luther King
assassination to the Bermuda Triangle. But even so,
he was concerned that the fact that her father was
an officer in the military gave her an unbalanced
view of their activities.

'I think it's got to be something more
mundane,' she went on. 'Have you noticed how the
news reports on the war are always going on about
how few innocent civilians are being killed? There
are plenty of people who say the figures aren't
accurate, but nobody can get in there to do a proper
survey, 'cos it's too dangerous.

'Every war has its atrocities, but there hasn't
been any really big story about Western troops
committing something that could be considered a
war crime. There haven't been any photos of
torture or . . . or leaked memos on human rights
violations or any of that. I think these guys are
having their memories erased because they're
witnesses
. . . or even the perpetrators – no offence,
Ivor.'

'None taken.'

He was sitting there, gazing at her. She stared
back pointedly and he looked away. Did he just
blush? With his complexion, it was hard to tell.

'I don't think the military would use their
troops like guinea pigs for some kind of dangerous
experiment,' she added. 'But I wouldn't put it past
them to try and cover up war crimes. They've done
it enough times before and they're getting better at
it. There are always a few bad seeds that get out of
control and do something really shocking. I think
this mindwipe thing is just a really sophisticated
form of damage control.'

'All right,' Chi said grudgingly, looking over at
Ivor. 'So from your point of view, there are two
questions we need to be asking: What might you
have seen or done to make them mess with your
memory? Or: What might you be programmed to
do and when are you supposed to do it?'

They both waited for Ivor's opinion. He said
nothing, staring down the stairs as if lost in thought.

'I don't know about any of that,' he said at last.
'I can't deal with all this . . . this . . .' He waved his
hands around in a frustrated manner. 'All this about
war and conspiracies and all that. It's too big, too
distant to get my head around. I just want to know
what
they did to me and
why
. And I want to find out
who killed Ben. That's it.'

He told them about how he had waited for
Ben at the café, and about the threat written in
chalk on the pavement behind his chair. Amina
went pale, but Chi's breath quickened; he started
pacing back and forth.

'This is proof,' he said excitedly, his voice
louder but still trying to sound quiet. 'They've
slipped up. If they're worried enough to be making
threats, you
must
have rattled them. This is great!'

'I'm glad you think so,' Ivor said drily.
'Personally, I want to keep the one eye I have left.
I'd like to see how excited you'd be if you found
out an assassin was sitting behind you at lunch.'

Chi was loath to admit he found this prospect
genuinely thrilling. In his line of work, death threats
were considered the highest accolade; an acknowledgement
from your enemy that you were too
close for their comfort. He knew only two other
people first-hand who had received bona fide death
threats, and they were at the top of their game.
People in this category were proud to wear the
label 'Targeted'.

'Still, you've got to admit, it's encouraging,' Chi
said, shrugging. 'They wouldn't be threatening you
if you were just a delusional lunatic.'

'Unless the writing was a hallucination,' Amina
put in.

'Thanks for that vote of confidence,' Ivor
sniffed. 'OK, so what do we do next?'

'We concentrate on your story,' Amina told
him. 'We dig up as much information as possible
and see if there's anything about the bombing that
doesn't make sense. So far, all the reports I've found
have sounded too alike – almost as if they're all
getting their information from the same source.'

'I have a friend who could hack God's database,'
Chi added. 'I'll see what he can come up
with.'

'Oh, good,' Ivor said as they headed back
towards the stairs. 'I'm sure God will know what's
going on. Hey . . . Chi Sandwith. I suppose you
must get a lot of jokes about cheese sandwi—'

'No. Never. You're the first person to ever say
that – really.'

Amina stared up at the three monkeys sitting on
their plastic plinth on the shelf above
Goldbloom's desk. The ornament was a cheap tacky
souvenir; the type you'd pick up in a tourist area
while you were buying your key ring, fridge
magnet and novelty T-shirt. If it was British, it
would have a Union Jack stuck on it somewhere,
but this one was Japanese. She wondered if this
piece of kitsch was actually made in Japan – as so
many British souvenirs once were. More likely
Vietnam or somewhere like that. The monkeys on
the plinth had names: Mizaru covered his eyes,
Kikazaru covered his ears and Iwazaru covered his
mouth. See no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil.

Her mother had a framed picture of the three
monkeys on the wall of her study. She said it was a
reminder. They were supposed to symbolize the
idea that if you refused to acknowledge evil, then
you would not commit any. In journalism, her
mother said, it kind of worked the other way.

'No, we can't publish details from medical
records,' Goldbloom said, waking her from her
reverie. 'As well you should know. I don't think any
veteran would thank you for making his
haemorrhoids, halitosis and STDs public. And
people are particularly sensitive about mentalhealth
problems. You know you can be sued for far
more money if you sully someone's reputation than
if you cut their arm off ? Go figure. Anyway, where
do you think you're going to get these files from?'

'I know someone who knows someone,' Amina
informed him.

He smirked at her.

'Well, well. Aren't we connected? I'd be careful,
love. There's no harm in knowing people who are
willing to bend the rules on your behalf, but you've
got to be careful about where it can land you. If you
break any laws, this paper will not back you up,
y'understand? Don't go doing anything stupid –
and I say that in the full knowledge that youth is all
about doing stupid things you'll tell stories about in
your old age, but I'm serious. Don't screw around
with this.

'If somebody volunteers
their own
medical files,
that's fine, but it's illegal to obtain them any other
way. If you're going to succeed in making a credible
mental-health story out of this, you need interviews
from the "victims" and some expert testimony. See
if you can get a shrink to give you some quotes on
post-traumatic stress – all the better if he's done
work for the military.'

'OK, Joel. Thanks.' She turned to leave.

'Amina?'

'Yes?' She turned back.

'This could potentially be a real story,' he said,
eyeing her as he tapped the desk with his pen.
'Tread lightly, love, all right? Don't go stepping on
any toes and don't do anything to make me regret
letting you take this on.'

'I'll be on my best behaviour,' she said, giving
him a reassuring smile.

'And don't think you can melt me with any of
your mother's smiles; I've seen 'em all and she does
'em better. Now leave me be.'

Amina scooted out of the office in her
exaggerated impression of a lowly office temp. She
hadn't told Goldbloom anything about Chi, or their
theories about mind-control experiments on
abducted soldiers. As long as he thought she was
only working on a mental-health story, he might
leave her to get on with it. If he suspected it
was more serious, he would probably pull it off
her and give it to an experienced journalist.
She was determined that that would not happen.

It hadn't escaped her notice that he was giving
her a lot of attention. The managing editor did not
normally waste time dealing with office temps;
there were enough junior editors to do that. Amina
had heard plenty of stories about him from her
mother and suspected that he had been in love with
her years ago. It would be understandable if he felt
a bit paternal about her daughter. And Amina was
happy to accept any help he could give her.

She was passing his secretary's desk when she
heard Cathy give a startled gasp. Amina turned back
and saw the middle-aged woman staring in shock at
an open envelope. Her hands were shaking. It took
another moment for Amina to notice the small pile
of coarse brown granules sitting on the pine-coloured
plastic desktop. Cathy lifted her head,
confused fear in her eyes.

'I just opened the letter,' she said.

Amina stared for a second and then pulled
Cathy from her chair. The woman wrenched her
back and grabbed her handbag. Amina pulled
at her again in frustration. They had to get out of
there . . . fast.

'Hold your breath!' she cried, and then to
the people in the press room, 'Somebody call the
police! There's a letter here with brown powder in
it! Call the police!'

At first, everybody's reaction was to crowd in
and see what all the fuss was about. But then someone
said the word 'anthrax' and everything
changed. Within seconds, the fire alarm was ringing
and people were running for the stairs and
elevators. Amina held Cathy's hand as they hurried
down the stairs. Cathy was crying, her breaths coming
in short gasps.

'I'm sure it's just a scare, Cathy!' Amina said to
her as they turned to take the next flight down,
both of them stumbling in their high heels. 'It'll be
fine. It's just someone looking for headlines.'

Cathy was wheezing badly now. The alarm
bells created a sense of barely controlled panic in
the scuttling evacuees. Amina and Cathy reached
the ground floor and joined the crowd making for
the door. Cathy could barely breathe. Amina looked
at her in alarm. Could anthrax work that fast?
Maybe that weaponized stuff that armies developed
in secret fits of madness. Was this for real? Suddenly,
Amina wanted to be away from this woman and her
tortured breathing. She wanted to be out of this
building now. NOW! She felt a tickle in her throat
and coughed. For the first time in years, she raised
her eyes and uttered an urgent prayer to Allah.

They burst from the building into lashing rain
that soaked them in seconds. Amina's thin blue shirt
was heavily peppered with dark drops as she looked
around for a sheltered place to stand. Cathy was
hauling in strained breaths. Amina sat her down on
the edge of concrete plant pot in the relative shelter
of an abstract rusted iron sculpture in the shape of
a ship's bow. Cathy was struggling to open her bag,
but then she found the zip, tore it open and dug an
inhaler out of one of the pockets. She sucked in a
couple of blasts and her breathing started to return
to normal.

Amina watched with a mixture of relief and
embarrassment. She had been so caught up in her
desire to save this woman's life from a would-be
terrorist attack, she had almost killed her. All around
them, police sirens were howling, cars screeching to
a halt. Amina sat down beside Cathy and put her
arm around her. Water dripped from the sculpture
above them, soaking them still further, but neither
felt like moving just yet.

Chi strode down the alleyway that led to Nexus's
building. This was a complete breach of protocol.
They were supposed to steer clear of each other's
bases – better that they work as independent cells
with as few connections as possible. But Nexus had
been adamant; he had something Chi
had
to see and
it had to be done here.

The rain ran down on his shoulders, dripping
from his soaked trench coat. His baseball cap
offered little protection, but at least it kept the worst
of it off his glasses. The galvanized steel door in the
grimy brick wall was daubed with graffiti. Chi
rapped on it, pulling his collar up to stop the drops
running down the back of his neck. He heard two
sets of footsteps coming down the stairs inside –
sounded like Nex had company – and then the
door scraped open.

Nexus was looking as unkempt as usual. Several
days of sparse, fluffy brown beard clung to his face
and there were bags under his eyes. Chi would have
bet that the GREEN DAY T-shirt he was wearing
hadn't been changed in a while.

'Man. Hey,' Nexus said dully, his head twitching
to one side as he spoke. 'You're early. Eh . . .'

'Can I come in?' Chi asked pointedly, raising
his eyes to the sky in a meaningful fashion.

'Sure! Sure!' Nexus opened the door and stood
aside, his head still twitching as if he had some kind
of nervous condition. Too much time staring at
computer screens.

Chi had barely time to register his relief at
being out of the rain when a fist slammed into the
side of his face. He was thrown against the doorframe
and his glasses fell to the floor before another
blow to his chest hurled him back out into the rain,
landing him hard on his back in the mucky alleyway,
knocking the air out of his lungs. He winced,
feeling a bolt of pain go through the backs of his
ribs. He struggled to get to his feet. The ground was
hard, cold and wet beneath him but he was barely
able to move. Stefan Gierek's snarling face appeared
above him.

'Ah. Gierek,' Chi wheezed. 'Give us a hand up?'

The fist came down like a brick against his
face. Chi had never known such stunning pain.
Most of what followed was obscured by the
headache from hell. In flashes of juddering nerve
endings, he felt himself being dragged through the
door and up the stairs. His wrists and ankles were
bound with duct tape and then he felt a rope go
round his ankles too.

'Hey . . .' he mumbled.

The rope went tight and he was hauled feet-first
into the air. His headache went from fireworks
to high explosives and he wailed like a child.

'My badge,' Gierek said in a grating voice, as
Chi's senses began to come back and his eyes
opened. 'I want it back, Sandwith, you little pencilnecked
fudge-packer. And I'm not going to ask
twice.'

'Is there anything else you can tell us, miss?' the
detective asked.

Amina sighed and shook her head. She had
given her statement about the anthrax letter – the
fake
anthrax letter – three times now. She knew that
this was how the police did it, making you repeat
yourself to see if your story differed each time.
Never trust a single telling of any story. But it didn't
make it any less aggravating. The detective, Sykes,
who was taking the statement, was one of a team
from Counter Terrorism Command. A thin, mousyhaired
man with large freckles and a perpetually
sardonic expression, he had been questioning her in
painstaking detail for over half an hour; more than
enough time for her to adequately describe the few
seconds she had been standing in front of the
opened envelope, before draining the last vestiges of
oxygen from Cathy's panicked lungs by rushing her
down several flights of stairs.

She wanted to get out of there, to see her
friends and talk to them and maybe even have a bit
of a cry, and have them hug her and comfort her.
She was desperate to get rid of these shuddering
remnants of shock and relief that boiled around
inside her.

'That's all I know,' she said, in case a shake of
her head wouldn't be enough to convince the
detective.

His eyes lifted, wrinkling his brow in a way that
suggested there was far more she could tell him if
she would only try a bit harder, but he pursed his
lips and thanked her. All around them, in a room on
the ground floor of the
Chronicle
building, people
were being interviewed. Cathy was in the seat just
over from Amina. She too was being thoroughly
grilled.

Sykes stood up, patting down his crumpled
grey suit, and shook her hand.

'We're almost done examining the newsroom,'
he said to her. 'We'll be taking all of your post away,
but you can go back to work in a bit, I'm sorry to
tell you. Pity you couldn't have got the whole day
off, eh? Nice thing about these emergencies: everybody
gets a bit of a holiday. Not us obviously. But
normal people like yourself. Thanks again for your
time, Miss Mir. We'll be in touch if we need anything
more.'

She nodded to him, and was just getting to her
feet when he turned back to her.

'Oh! Nearly forgot,' he said, pulling a photograph
from his breast pocket. 'Happens sometimes,
you know. We're supposed to have these great
memories – police officers, I mean – but mine's like
a sieve. Expect you've an excellent memory, doing
all that journalism training . . .'

Amina regarded him with a quizzical frown,
unsure if he was mocking her or not.

'Can you tell me, have you seen this man
around at all?' He held up the photo.

It was a picture of a middle-aged man with
oriental features. He was clean-shaven with a small,
sharp goatee. Wide, black-framed glasses enlarged
inscrutable eyes and his black hair was swept back
from a jagged widow's peak.

'I don't think so,' she replied. 'Who is he?'

'Name's Anthony Shang – that's S-H-A-N-G,'
Sykes told her, slipping the photo back into his
pocket. 'Chinese national. A mercenary scientist
with known ties to a number of terrorist organizations.
Intelligence sources believe he may have
slipped into the country recently. He's a biological
weapons expert; this would be just the kind of
thing he could pull off.'