Strangled Silence (21 page)

Nobody in the house had left the envelope in
Amina's room. Each of them assumed one of the
others had dropped it in and she let them go on
thinking that. She resisted the urge to tell her
parents her suspicions; like all of the leads she had
gathered with Chi and Ivor for their story, there
was no solid evidence to prove that somebody had
come into the house during the night. They would
say she was imagining things, or that she must have
picked up the envelope inside the door and carried
it up with the rest of her post. Or something like
that.

It was hard to know which was scarier: the
thought that an intruder had come into her room
while she slept, or the fact that after all the time she
had spent working on this story, there was still not
a scrap of proof to show that anything was actually
happening. It was as if the more she tried to get a
grasp on what was going on, the more it slipped
through her fingers. When she turned it all around
in her head, she wasn't even sure what the story
was
.
Ivor had his implanted memories and his nightmares
and the disturbing Scalps people who were
watching his every move. Chi had been investigating
for a couple of years and had plenty of . . .
material, but no sense of the true nature of the conspiracy
– if that's what it even was. When she really
thought about it, they had nothing tangible. Maybe
they never would. Maybe there was no great
conspiracy, just a bunch of mentally disturbed war
veterans and the theories of some over-imaginative
conspiracy nuts.

But then there was the card that had been left
on her bedside table. Sitting down on her bed, she
looked at it again.

Sending you our deepest condolences on
the loss of your mother, Our thoughts
are with you and your family at this
difficult time.

A shiver ran through her and she crumpled up
the funeral card, tossing it into her wastepaper
basket. She needed to talk. Her first thought was to
call Dani or one of the other girls; but it would be
too hard to explain, to make them take it seriously.
Then she considered Ivor, who would understand
what was going through her mind at least, but . . .
no. It would be a bit weird. And she was in danger
of crying and she didn't want to seem weak to
him; she didn't want to lose his respect. For a
moment, she thought about calling Chi – and
rejected that idea immediately.

Deciding she didn't want to be on her own, she
went next door to Tariq's room.

The nihilistic phase he was currently exploring
had taken its toll on his decor. The walls were
painted a dark red, almost black, and were marked
with scrawled graffiti in marker, chalk and even
some scratched into the plaster with the point of a
compass.

LIFE IS DEFINED BY DEATH.

GOD IS A CREATION OF MAN TO EXPLAIN HIMSELF.

DON'T READ THIS!

WE HAVE CEASED TO EVOLVE, NOW OUR WORLD
ADAPTS TO SURVIVE US.

And there were plenty more, all equally morose
and reflecting her brother's prematurely worldweary
personality. She dearly hoped he would
cheer the hell up soon. This was worse than those
six months when he'd decided to start taking Islam
more seriously and berated the rest of the family for
failing to show the proper respect to Allah. He was
always going around, squawking '
La ilaha illallah!
'
(There is no God but Allah!) in his adolescent
about-to-break voice, and kept waking her in the
middle of the night to pray. He only stopped when
she threw a fit and threatened to hit him with her
hockey stick. A few months before that, he'd complained
about not being Christian like all of his
friends on the base where they'd been living. And
before that, he'd been expelled from two different
schools for getting into fights. He had a savage
temper.

Even so, there was something comforting,
something lovely and
normal
, about Tariq's teenage
angst. Absent Conscience was still playing on his
stereo when she walked in. He was dressed in
his black gothic best, lying on his bed and reading
Sun Tzu's
The Art of War
, probably just so he'd be
able to impress people by quoting from it. Amina
was sure he would already have underlined some of
the best bits.

'Hey,' she said.

'Hey.'

'What's up?'

'Not much. What's up yourself ?'

'Nothing. Stuff,' she said, shrugging. 'Y'know.'

Tariq noticed how she was standing, leaning
against the wall with her shoulders hunched. She
wasn't dressed yet and it was almost lunchtime.
She looked pale too. He sat up, put the book down
and crossed his arms.

'OK, I'll bite. What's wrong?'

'Nothing,' she assured him.

And then she started talking.

She told her brother about Ivor and Chi, and
about the story they were all working on. It all just
came out of her, even though she hadn't meant it
to. She knew she was being indiscreet. The Scalps
could be listening to every word she said, but they
had just shown her they were one step ahead no
matter what she did. Maybe they would leave her
alone when they heard how frightened she was.

She told him about the Sinnostan vets with
fake memories and hallucinations, the three-day
disappearances in the war zones, the film of the
unconscious soldiers from Gierek's helmet camera,
about Ben Considine's apparent suicide, about
the plastic surgeon named Anthony Shang and the
unrealistic wounds that Agatha Domingues had
found on the soldiers. Amina described the
surveillance they were all under, telling her brother
about the devices in Ivor's flat and the watchers
with no faces and the message left on the ground in
chalk at the café. And then she told him about the
card. By this time she was crying.

She went back into her room and took the card
out of the bin, bringing it in to show Tariq. He had
an incredulous look on his face, but it was obvious
that she was genuinely upset. Taking the crumpled
card, he flattened it out on his desk and looked at it
and then back at her.

'Wow,' he said softly.

Amina just nodded, wiping the tears from her
face. She felt better, having got it all out of her
system, but now she'd got Tariq involved.

'I'm in over my head,' she said to him. 'We all
are. None of us have any idea who these people are.
Even if we did, we don't have any evidence – any
believable
evidence – that something is going on. We
don't even know
what's
going on.

'I feel like I've been acting out some bloody
Famous Five
adventure and now I've just discovered
these are real villains – the kind who don't care that
you're just a kid; who'll . . . who'll . . . wrench out
your teeth and smash . . . your . . . your kneecaps
and dump your cut-up body in a canal. You know:
the type nobody ever reports to the police because
they know where your family lives and you're
terrified they'll . . . they'll . . .'

She stopped, feeling suddenly drained. Tariq
exhaled softly.

'You need to tell Mum and Dad about all this,'
he said. 'If half of this is true, you're in deep shit
here, Mina.'

'I'll talk to Ivor and Chi first,' she replied
hoarsely. 'And maybe Goldbloom too, although I
hate to think what he'll make of all this. You know,
Mum was threatened on a bunch of occasions 'cos
of the stories she was working on, but I never really
thought about what that meant. There were a couple
of times when Dad actually asked her to drop a
story. She never did.'

'Yeah,' Tariq muttered. 'But we've never had
anyone break into our house to deliver a funeral
card before. That's really freaky when you think
about it. No broken windows or locks, no
alarm . . . they just came in and left without a trace.'
A look of realization came over him. 'Bloody hell,
Mina! What if this wasn't the first time!'

'Don't, Tariq,' she moaned, holding her hands
up. 'I may never sleep again as it is.'

The trip to Chi's house on the Underground
seemed to take for ever. Amina tried to ignore the
feeling that someone's eyes were crawling all over
her. The train was about half full and whenever she
looked up, there always seemed to be somebody
just turning to look the other way. She was an
attractive girl; she was used to being looked at. But
this was different. Now all of the men who eyed her
up no longer wore expressions of excited interest or
concealed lust; they all appeared more intent in
their observation. The women – and she knew it
was always the women who stared more – were
no longer measuring her up as a rival; they were
assessing her as a target.

There was no way to be sure about any of
this. It could just have been her imagination, her
newfound paranoia reading into things. They
couldn't
all
be watching her. Most of these people
– if not all of them – were just going somewhere;
taking the Tube with no thought of tangled conspiracy
plots. But now Amina was looking at the
world through new eyes and was suspicious of
everything she saw.

The gaunt-faced man in the suit sitting across
from her, with the briefcase lying on the seat beside
him. Could there be a weapon in that case? She had
caught him looking at her a couple of times already.
Or the young woman with the hair-wraps and the
backpack standing near the door, holding onto the
rail, her body swaying with the motion of the train.
Amina could see her face clearly in the reflection
on the window, which meant that she could see
Amina's. Or the stocky man with the beard further
down on the other side, tapping on the screen of his
PDA with its little plastic stylus. There were a few
occasions when he lifted it high enough to get a
picture of her with its camera.

Allah help me, she thought. I've caught Chi's
disease.

Chi was not surprised. She babbled out her
fears as soon as he opened the door, showing him
the funeral card. He in turn told her about the visit
from the CTC officers. Amina suggested they take
what they had to Goldbloom and see what he made
of it. They needed help with this.

'No,' Chi said, shaking his head.'This is our story;
if we get mainstream people involved, the corporate
interests will come into play. They won't do anything
if they think they'll be taken to court, you know – or
lose their precious advertisers. And half the time they
just take the government's word for everything anyway.
But we're wild cards! Unpredictable! The fact
that somebody's worried enough to threaten us
means we've got them rattled now.'

'We've got
who
rattled?' Amina threw her hands
up in exasperation. 'Rattled about
what
? We're
snatching at shadows here—'

The doorbell rang. It was Ivor, and he was
grinning. Chi followed him back into the study and
watched in bemusement with Amina as Ivor
whipped three copies of a paperback out of his bag
and held one up.

'He wrote a bloody
book
!' he exclaimed.
'Anthony Shang wrote a bloody bestseller! So
much for being top secret!'

He looked at their faces.

'What's wrong now?' he asked.

After the three of them had talked it out, they still
could not come to any consensus about what to do.
Chi was keen to chase up on the leads they had
without any outside involvement; Amina wanted to
get help from Goldbloom and the
Chronicle
; Ivor
was worried for his two younger friends and asked
them to give up on the story before something
more serious happened. He felt he had nothing to
lose, but he didn't want to put them in any danger.

In the end, the three of them decided to hold
off making any decisions until after they had all
read Shang's book. Amina still had plenty of articles
to search through from the newspaper's archives
and Chi wanted to get back to his contacts to see if
they had any news. Ivor had already tried to get in
touch with some of the other veterans he'd known
in Sinnostan, but none of them would admit to
suffering the same symptoms. He said he'd try
again, and this time he was going to offer rewards
for any solid leads. It was time to start spending
some of his money.

'This is what I've been afraid of doing all
along,' he told them. 'It's why I'm being watched –
because rich people can cause more problems than
poor ones. But you two need to look like you're
backing out. I'm going to get all the wrong kind of
attention for this and there's no point you taking
any more risks – at least' – he raised his hand against
their protests – 'until it's absolutely necessary. So
don't call me, don't email me, don't come near me
until I tell you it's OK, right?'

The other two reluctantly agreed.

Ivor and Amina took the Tube back into town.
He sensed that she was uneasy and noticed how she
kept looking around her. Overcome with a sense of
sympathy for her, he chatted with her about
normal, everyday things. She was just a kid with big
ambitions, much as he'd been a few years ago. But
she'd been living in a sheltered world and now it
had been tainted by the pervasive fear he had
endured ever since he'd returned from Sinnostan. It
was deeply unnerving to know that something was
wrong with the world around you, but you didn't
know what.