Strangled Silence (29 page)

Not that it mattered. He closed the files and
ejected the disk. Chi didn't have time to take on
any more projects. Ivor's revelations had given him
a definite direction and unless Nex had information
that was relevant to this investigation, he'd have to
wait his turn.

Ivor had told Chi to keep Amina out of the
loop for now. They were both uneasy about involving
her any further, even though she had already
done a lot of the legwork. The fight with the Scalps
men had shaken Ivor and convinced him that any
threat was to be taken seriously. Chi still felt an urge
to call her and tell her what was going on. They
couldn't keep her out of it for ever, so how could
they protect her? And even if they could, he knew
she'd be outraged at the idea. The very thought of
it made him smile.

He checked his emails, half hoping that she'd
got in touch, but there was nothing from her. In
fact, hardly anybody in the network had responded
to his emails either. They were normally more
prompt than that. Chi wondered if there was a
reason for their silence.

It was getting late and he was growing hungry.
Putting the PC to sleep, he wandered into the
kitchen to find a little present from Roswell lying
in the middle of the floor. A dead mouse.

'Ah, Jesus, Ros! How many times do I have to
tell you . . .'

Picking it up by the tail, he was about to drop
it into the bin when he spotted something sticking
out of its mouth. With his fingernails, he pulled the
tiny roll of paper out of the limp creature's throat as
if drawing a joke from some macabre Christmas
cracker. Unrolling it, he read the words that were
written upon it:

Knock knock!

Who's there?

Ike.

Ike who?

I could have killed your cat, but I thought it might be
a bit predictable.

Despite his trembling hands and chattering
teeth, a grin spread across Chi's face. He had made
it! He had been Targeted! Holding the dead mouse
up like a trophy in one hand and the note in the
other, he raised his face to the ceiling and let out a
roar:

'Yes! Yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes!'

Then, realizing it was unlikely that it had in fact
been Roswell who'd left the mouse in the middle
of his kitchen, Chi ran back into his study and
woke up his PC. From here he could monitor the
status of his intruder alarm. It was still active. He
opened up the software that controlled the cameras
he had installed throughout the house and checked
the one in the kitchen. He ran it backwards until he
spotted the man opening the back door and calmly
walking into the kitchen, holding the dead mouse
by its tail. The man was wearing a tracksuit and a
baseball cap that hid his face from the camera. Chi
watched as the guy put the mouse on the floor and
left again.

That had been forty-five minutes ago, while
Chi was sitting at his desk. He checked the alarm
status again. It was working fine.

'Jesus, they're good,' he said softly, suppressing
the urge to be sick.

His breath was coming in stops and starts. He
felt dizzy and thrilled and terrified all at the same
time. This was it – he was on the edge now. His
thoughts went to Nexus and to other martyrs to
the cause; all those who'd died in car accidents, or
house fires or unlikely suicides – his particular
favourite was the guy who'd shot himself in the
back of the head . . . twice.

Chi gazed at the man on the screen and his
whole body went cold. His home had been broken
into while he was right here in his study. He should
have called the police, but he thought it might be a
bit predictable.

Ivor finally found a phone box that was working.
He thought he'd lost whoever was following, but
he couldn't be sure. He would watch the street on
either side of him so that he could at least check
they weren't listening. Chi had warned him that he
could be tracked by satellite surveillance, so he'd
taken a route under as many trees and subways as
possible. Holding the digital recorder to the earpiece,
he checked it was on. He dialled the number
on the piece of paper. The phone rang once.

'Ivor McMorris?'

'Yes. Who is this?'

'That's none of your concern.' The voice was
nasal, precise and had a slight American twang to it.
'All
you
need to know is how much I know. All
I
need to know is that you are willing to pay my
price. Are you?'

'Yes.'

There was a pause and Ivor sensed the definite
air of relief in the other man. Whoever this was, he
had his own problems. Ivor might be able to use
that.

'I need proof you can do what you say,' he said,
his chest tight with pent-up breath. 'If you want this
money, you're going to have to be pretty convincing.
Tell me what's going on.'

'I'll tell you what's going on,' the voice replied.
'But you're not going to believe some of it. You lost
your eye in a bombing, but for a long time you've
had the feeling that the memories of the event were
too exact – too perfect, yes? That's because – as
you've probably worked out – those memories are
false. They were implanted by a process of
conditioning known as strobe interruption.

'Strobe interruption uses flashing lights to
disrupt the brain's neural activity, causing you
to black out. It can also be used to disorientate you,
confuse you and ultimately leave you extremely
vulnerable to hypnotic suggestion.'

'I've heard about something like this,' Ivor said,
almost to himself. 'The stories of epileptics having
their fits set off by flashing lights.'

'Yes,' the man said, sounding mildly irritated at
being stopped in mid-flow. 'The US military
learned a lot from helicopter crashes in Vietnam.
The rotors spinning against the sun created strobing
effects that caused pilots to black out. Strobe interruption
has taken this to its most refined form.
Used skilfully, pulsing light at the right frequencies
can be used to flick switches in your brain for a
variety of effects. Now it has been combined with
sensory deprivation. They cut you off from the outside
world, assault your senses with abrupt changes
between silence and deafening noise, project
manipulated imagery into your face and start telling
you what they want you to think. It is devastatingly
effective in reprogramming the human mind.'

'I know,' Ivor muttered. 'But what's it all for?
Why did they do it to me?'

'You are only one of many, Mr McMorris. You
are but the smallest pixel in a much bigger picture.
It started off with one man. This man had to be
convinced that he had seen something he had not.

'Members of the government wanted to pass a
law. They were after more power, more control.
They wanted to introduce the Drawbridge Act. You
know it?'

'Of course,' Ivor said. 'All the . . . the antiterrorist
powers. Searching without a warrant,
holding somebody without trial . . . arresting someone
for not having their ID card . . . all that stuff. It
got passed.'

'Yes. Lots of new powers. It got passed because
of what one man saw. He was a reporter with an
international reputation for honesty and objectivity,
who was taken to interview a terrorist leader hiding
out somewhere in Sinnostan. He was shown an
arsenal of chemical weapons intended for Britain.
But there was no interview and there were no
chemical weapons. A few well-placed intelligence
agents set the whole thing up; a group of "black
ops" people you veterans have taken to calling the
Scalps. That reporter was the first "civilian" victim
of strobe interruption. Because of his report,
nobody objected to a law aimed at fighting
terrorism. They were protecting the country. The
Drawbridge Act was passed. The government got
more power over its people. Simple!'

Ivor detected a tone of the lecturer in the man's
voice. This guy was only getting into his stride. He
was
enjoying
talking about this.

'But the plan backfired. All of a sudden, people
were asking why nothing was being done about
these terrorists hiding in Sinnostan. They demanded
action. These maniacs had to be stopped before they
came to Britain! But nobody in the government
wanted a war – everybody remembered what
happened in Iraq. What a mess that was! Years of
civil war, hundreds of thousands of innocent
civilians dead – all to stop weapons of mass
destruction that didn't exist. They couldn't afford to
make that kind of mistake again. Sinnostan kept
protesting that there were no terrorists, but who
could trust them? Their leader was a tyrant and
probably a sympathizer!

'Most of the government did not know that
the chemical weapons threat was fake, but a few
more were told. They were all still convinced they
were protecting their country. They concocted a
plan to create another illusion to cancel out the first
one: they would pretend to have the chemical
weapons destroyed and the terrorists all killed by a
team of SAS. Simple!

'The politicians didn't ask how it would be
done. They didn't want to know. An SAS unit
boarded a plane. During the flight, the soldiers were
gassed and then brainwashed into thinking they had
carried out their raid. Two were even wounded to
make it all the more realistic. The destruction of the
'chemical weapons' was filmed and released to
the media. Simple!

'But then people began asking how we could
be sure that all the chemical weapons had been
destroyed? It wasn't long before the conspiring
politicians found themselves in an impossible
position. They would have to send an invasion force
into Sinnostan.'

Listening to this absurd story, Ivor felt a sick
sensation building in his stomach. He knew
where this was leading; he just couldn't believe it.

'So a force was assembled. The Sinnostanis
protested some more. But they were a poor country
with only a small army. They were ignored. Britain
was backed up by America, Russia and China. In
they went. Just a few thousand; enough to make a
convincing show of searching the mountains, not
enough to actually achieve anything. They had to
find some terrorists – otherwise they'd look like
fools and warmongers. The Scalps arranged for the
occasional patrol to 'make contact with the enemy'.
The soldiers came back raving about the terrorists
they had seen. Sinnostan protested most vigorously.

'The military felt overstretched in this big,
mountainous region. They demanded more troops.
The public demanded that all the terrorists be
hunted down. While all this was going on overseas,
the politicians discovered they could do pretty
much
whatever they wanted
at home as long as it
looked like they were protecting the country.
Anybody who disagreed with them was branded
unpatriotic, or even a traitor.

'But to maintain the illusion of a war, there had
to be casualties. The Scalps were tasked with keeping
up the pretence, but the politicians didn't want
to know how. Most of them managed to convince
themselves that there really was a war going on out
there. The strobe interruption process went into
overdrive, with its own base in Sinnostan. A surgical
team was brought in to mimic wounds to fake the
effects of battle.'

Ivor's stomach gave a heave. His right eye was
starting to ache. He swallowed, taking a deep
breath. There was no war. There was no war. It was
too much for him to grasp.

'But . . . but how could the soldiers just disappear
for days?'

'Most didn't, officially. The patrols would be incountry
for at least that amount of time. The Scalps
called their reports in over the radio whenever it
was required.'

'The roulette wheel,' Ivor rasped. 'That was
for—'

'A bit of vanity, really. It was imperative that we
keep the choice of wounds random, so we used the
roulette wheel. A spin of the wheel decided who
got what. Each wound had a number – sometimes
more than one. Increased odds were given to the
most common injuries, some you see in battle more
than others. Number thirteen was a head wound,
fifty was abdominal. Each casualty got three spins of
the wheel. The mind-control process took the spins
into account too. Numbers eight or twenty-two
were extreme post-traumatic stress, for instance.
And twenty . . . Well, twenty was the loss of an eye.'

Pain lanced through Ivor's scarred eye socket.
His dead eye felt alive; it pulsed with an agonizing
heat, but it felt alive. Ghost pain, the torment of a
missing body part. It started to spread through the
right side of his head.

'You said "we",' he wheezed.

'What?' the man replied uneasily.

'You said "
we
used the roulette wheel". You're
Shang, aren't you?'

There was silence on the other end of the line.
Ivor gritted his teeth, trying to suppress the overwhelming
rage he felt towards this man.

'You took my eye. For . . . for what? For a
fucking
PR stunt
. How many soldiers have you
operated on in this "war". How many have
you killed?'

'I didn't kill anyone,' Shang retorted. 'That
wasn't my job.'

'You bastard! YOU UNBELIEVABLE
SADISTIC BASTARD!' Ivor screamed down the
phone. 'You took out my
eye
, you fucking monster!
You—'

'I was just following orders,' Shang told him
calmly. 'You can shriek all you want, I don't care.
Frankly, you're the least of my problems. By talking
to you, I'm signing my own death warrant. If you
want the people responsible for this, I can give
them to you. But it's going to cost you one million
pounds . . . in cash, of course.'

Ivor slumped against the inside of the booth,
exhaustion overwhelming him.

'How could they do it?' he said in a voice
that was barely more than a whisper. 'Were they
out of their minds? Were they completely bloody
mad?'

'Grow up,' Shang snapped at him. 'The
politicians got an enemy that keeps the public
scared and obedient. That gives them power. And
they achieved this by having a war where there are
few soldiers killed and almost no civilians . . . Or at
least that's what they had – it's started heating up a
bit over there. That's why I quit. The military is
hunting a threat they believe to be real . . . or
rather, they can't admit they're hunting a threat
that isn't real. And the Scalps? They're doing what
they do best – screwing with people's minds.
And they're loving it – they're getting to test all
kinds of new toys out there. And all concerned
firmly believe they're doing their best to protect
their nation.

'But it's all a mess now. It's completely out of
control, and the Sinnostanis? We invaded their
country
.
It was only a matter of time before the terrorists
we claimed were there would turn up for real.
There was no war, but there's one there
now
.

'Anyway, we're getting off the point,' he said
abruptly. 'Let's talk money.'

Chi sat listening to the recording of Shang's
confession with a rapt expression. When it was
finished, he played it again. Ivor sat waiting for his
reaction. He had informed the bank he'd be withdrawing
the money before he'd even made the call
to Shang the previous evening, but he still had to
wait for that much cash to be prepared. In the
meantime, he had come back to Chi to keep him
in the loop. After listening to the recording for a
third time, Chi pursed his lips and hissed for his cat,
who wandered into the study and jumped up into
his lap.

'Smoke and mirrors,' he said, almost to himself,
as he stroked Roswell's ginger fur. 'There is no war.
Jesus, this is bigger than Kennedy, bigger than
September the eleventh . . . this is bigger than anything.
We've gotta be careful here. Wow . . . Wow!
This testimony is going to blow things wide open.
We have to assume that they're already out to nail
Shang before he talks, and the same goes for us if
they find out we've heard this. You're meeting him
the day after tomorrow?'

'Nine a. M. in Liverpool Street station,' Ivor
told him.

'Smart,' Chi said, nodding. 'Crowds and lots of
escape routes. Still, you know that's where it could
all go wrong, don't you?'

Ivor shrugged.

'What else can I do? I have to know.'

'Tell me about it,' Chi chuckled. 'We all have to
know. There is no war. Jesus – how did I not see this
one coming? And this stuff he talked about . . .
strobe interruption. That's—'

His face went blank for a moment. His fingers
drummed against the edge of the desk and his lips
moved but no words came out.