The Reviver (25 page)

Jonah glanced at her, then back. The shape had gone.

*   *   *

Jonah spent the next morning taking some trainees through footage from six revivals. Only one of them had been his, from four years before: an armed robber, shot dead by police and mishandled at first by Jonah. The atmosphere had been tainted, the dead man’s colleagues having escaped and severely wounded a civilian and an officer in the process. Anger and retribution had surrounded the revival, and Jonah’s approach to it had been too aggressive.

He winced as the footage played, watching his own errors, his younger self missing the signs that his tactics were failing. It was hard to watch, but as it was one of the cases he intended to use for his talk at the symposium at the end of the following week, he would have to get used to seeing it.

He paused the footage to allow the class to comment. They got the general idea, and when at last they saw the approach shift, they seemed genuinely impressed as Jonah’s gentle coaxing became a conversation, establishing trust and a mood of confession, turning it around as precious seconds passed. The dead man gave away enough for the police to find his colleagues.

At lunchtime, Jonah ate at his desk, letting his mind go blank as he stared out the window.

Across the road, deep shadows were being cast by the afternoon sun. Under the awning of the bakery where he’d bought his sandwiches that morning, in the deepest of the shade, a figure stood. It was little more than a variation of the dark, and he had to look for a few moments to be sure there was anything at all.

But then he felt the hairs rise on his arms and neck. He knew it was there. He knew it was the same figure he’d seen the day before. He leaned further towards the window, straining to see it, feeling ridiculous for the thought that crossed his mind, the thought that said,
Don’t let it see you.

The figure looked up. Jonah snatched himself back from the window, far enough to be out of its line of sight.

A hand fell onto his shoulder and he jumped. ‘
Christ!
’

‘Whoa!’ said Never. ‘What’s up with you?’

‘Nothing,’ he muttered, moving back toward the window and stealing a glance. The darkness in the shadow was gone.

‘O-
kay
 … Just wondered how it went this morning? The training?’

‘Went fine,’ said Jonah, his eyes and his mind still bolted to the place the figure had been. He shook it off and looked around. ‘When do you get to babysit?’

‘I’m due to take three of the trainees onsite later, if anything comes up.’

‘Well, they seem capable enough, they’ll behave.’

‘Yeah, it’ll be fine … So, uh, Beth mentioned the house? Yesterday? Pretty extreme. News is still vague about it, and there’s no mention of Harker yet.’

‘I hope it won’t be long before they go public with it. The curiosity’s killing me.’

‘So do they know who those guys were targeting?’

‘There’s speculation that it’s an Afterlifer campaign. Maybe involving arson. Hugo’s looking into temporary additional security here. And when…’ He had a sudden urge to look at the bakery again. He glanced and froze. The figure was back. ‘Look out there. Please.’

‘Where?’

‘The baker’s. Can you see someone in the shadows? Standing outside?’

Shading his eyes, Never looked to where Jonah was pointing. As he did, the figure looked up, and Jonah could feel its gaze. He wanted to pull away from the window again, but this time he stayed where he was.

‘
Do you see it, Never?
’ It was clearer now, hunched shoulders, long coat. He wasn’t imagining it.

‘Nobody there, mate.’

Jonah continued to stare.

‘You look exhausted, Jonah. Are you OK?’

Jonah took a deep breath and looked Never in the eye. ‘I’m not sure I am. I think…’ He looked back to the street, to the shadow where – now – there was nothing. ‘I think the Harker revival’s catching up with me.’

‘Then you should get home. You’re all done here, right?’

‘I’ve got some odds and ends to get through.’

‘Come on, that shit can wait. Go home. Maybe take a few more days off. I’ll let Hugo know.’

‘But what about the trainees?’

‘We can cover it, Jonah. Go.’

When he left the FRS building, Jonah crossed to the bakery and stood in the shadows he had been watching, feeling nothing at first. Then he looked up to the window by his office desk.

The figure was there, looking out at him.

*   *   *

As he walked home he sensed eyes at every corner, and caught glimpses of the figure in patches of darkness along the route. He lowered his head, his pulse quickening and cold sweat dripping from him by the time he reached the door of his apartment. He entered, and his cat padded toward him, unworried and purring.

Eager for calm, Jonah spent the rest of the afternoon reading the paperback of
David Copperfield
that Sam had bought him for Christmas, and which hadn’t been picked up in three months. He tended to read books in occasional bursts; it was only when work was quiet that he found himself in that frame of mind, and work was rarely quiet for long. Given how tricky Harker had been, he thought it would be at least a couple of weeks before Hugo allowed him to do another revival. He suspected he’d get more reading done, if nothing else.

After three hours, hunger took him into the kitchen. He microwaved a chicken curry, grabbed a can of Coke and sat in front of his PC, browsing the latest news. He sat up when he saw the police had gone public at last with Daniel Harker’s death, although they still hadn’t revealed the link with the raid on the house.

He found the most recent report.

It opened with shots of the FRS building, the road to Harker’s home, and the house he’d been found in, while the voice-over summarized the little information that had been made public: ‘Daniel Harker’s body was found in the cellar of a rented house. Despite the condition of the body, a revival was attempted two days ago here at the Forensic Revival Service. Police announced that the revival was successful but gave no other details. Another police statement is due tomorrow.

‘Mr Harker’s daughter, who had flown from her home in England following her father’s disappearance, is believed to have been present at the revival but was not prepared to comment.’

The picture cut to a shot of Harker’s daughter driving up the lane to the Harker home, reporters barking questions at her. The camera closed on her grim face as she drove by.

The report continued: ‘The revival is a tragic and ironic end to the life of Daniel Harker, the man who made his career by breaking the story of Eleanor Preston, the first known reviver, twelve years ago.’

The report cut to archive material, an overview of Daniel’s life. Jonah was familiar enough with the details, but he watched all the same. Little things annoyed him, liberties taken for the sake of easy journalism. But the thing that grated most was the way they presented Harker as an opportunist and his career as a fluke: he happened to be in the right place and milked it for what he could. They gave him no credit for how he paved the way for revival to become accepted.

His novels didn’t even rate a mention. Jonah knew the first three had been modest successes, but Harker’s fourth had taken flight onto bestseller lists around the world. His alias had been an open secret. Not even to get a mention was disappointing …

He thought of the next book he’d been planning, existing only in handwritten notes in his home, ideas that were just beginning to come together into …

Jonah swore, knocking over his Coke.

Just as with Nikki Wood, his thoughts had not been his own.

He understood the figure in the darkness. He knew who had been lurking there, following him since the burnt-out house.

It was Daniel Harker.

19

The next morning Jonah called Stephanie Graves. By noon, he was back under the scanner, Graves waving away his protestations about how awkward a situation he was putting her in.

She took him to her office afterwards. ‘There is evidence of remnants,’ she said. ‘Strong evidence. You should have been fine with the revival, even though it was such a difficult one. I don’t understand why the BPV increase didn’t take care of it.’

Jonah felt his cheeks burn. ‘Sorry. I just grabbed my old medication and took an extra half pill.’

Graves frowned. She opened her mouth to speak, then paused and shook her head. ‘Not the smartest thing to do, Jonah. But it was the right dose. It should’ve been fine. Maybe I should have insisted on a longer break, or only let you take on easier cases. Whatever the reason, right now rest is what you need, more than anything. The remnant effect you experienced with the girl was short-lived. Hopefully the same will be true for Daniel Harker. I’ll give you a three-day course of a cocktail that will clear this. It’ll leave you feeling odd, so be careful. It’s a powerful memory disruptive and it may make you extremely drowsy. Take it each night before you go to bed. You’ll experience some disorientation and further drowsiness in the mornings, but that’s normal. It’ll soon wear off. Your symptoms should stop. Let me know at once if they don’t. I’ll brief your office counsellor. You need weekly assessments, then come back for another scan in a month. I want to be sure this time. Once you’re clear, simple revivals only until we see how you’re getting on.’

‘You said the remnant was strong. How strong?’ Graves squirmed a little. There was hesitance there, reluctance. ‘Please?’

‘It was particularly strong, Jonah. I’ve seen stronger, but not often.’

‘How bad can this get? It scared me. The feeling of being watched. Seeing something follow me…’

‘Your mind’s way of interpreting these stray thoughts. Unsettling, but it’ll pass.’

‘And then when Harker’s thoughts began … I felt like I was watching someone else think. Like I wasn’t in charge. Like I was a spectator. How can that happen?’

‘Jonah, most researchers in the field dismiss remnants as unwanted memories, like post-traumatic flashback. You and I know they’re more than that. There’s a theory that the normal way we understand other people is by actually carrying a model of them within us, like a simplified simulation. The brain’s ability to do that is what drove the explosion in the complexity of human social interaction. The better we know someone, the more detailed the simulation of them becomes. We’re starting to be able to view the workings of the brain with a resolution fine enough that we might expect to
see
these simulations, but so far there is nothing to distinguish them from our own thoughts. It makes sense that the brain simply creates them using the mechanisms that drive our own consciousness. Jonah, I think that in the most extreme form of remnants, the mind deals with the unusual waves of activity, and the corresponding triggering of unfamiliar memories, by separating that activity,
quarantining
it, so that it acts as a fast track to forming one of these internal representations. If you have ever imagined how another person would feel in any given situation, or what they would say, then what you’ve been experiencing is just a more extreme version of that. The delusional feeling that your thoughts are not your own happens because you have a well-established internal model for someone who is essentially a stranger. At heart, though, it’s based on a perfectly ordinary mental process. It’s not something you need to be afraid of. The medication I’ve given you will fragment those memories enough to let them dissipate naturally.’

‘But how bad can it get, Dr Graves?’

She sighed. ‘Do as I’ve said: get plenty of rest, and you’ll be fine. We’ve caught it before it went too far.’

Too far,
Jonah thought, wondering what exactly that meant. ‘Have you ever had a case where it did?’

Graves paused, looking past Jonah for a moment. Then she nodded. ‘Once, six or seven years ago. A high-rated private reviver. He did a stint as a forensic reviver in Toronto, but he had problems and returned to private work south of the border. The private revival firm he worked for referred him to me after he’d been following the wife of one of his subjects. She’d reported it, and he’d been arrested, drunk. He insisted he
was
her husband. The tests showed he had four clear remnants at that point, all strong. And one strong enough to leave him so confused that he believed he was somebody else, for a time. That’s the worst I’ve ever seen. The delusion was compelling. Recovery took months.’

Jonah nodded. He couldn’t help pressing for something more. ‘What happened to him? Did he ever work as a reviver again?’

‘I advised him not to.’ Graves went to a cupboard and returned. She handed him a small clear pill bottle. Inside were three yellow tablets that looked like they’d take some swallowing. ‘Here. They work like a charm. The second-worst case I ever saw was a forensic reviver. With these pills and one month of rest that person had a complete recovery and went back to work, with no further episodes. You’ll be fine. Remember, take one just before you sleep. When you’ve finished the course, Daniel Harker won’t trouble you again.’

*   *   *

Back in his flat, Jonah started writing an email to Hugo Adler to let him know what had happened. As he wrote it, he wondered if he should tell Never the details. He decided it would be better to leave him out of it and save him the worry.

He thought about Stephanie Graves, and how keen she had been to spend that expensive scanner time on him – and then promise more later. Perhaps she had seen an opportunity for a case study, like the other case, six years before.

Then it occurred to him: six years ago, Graves had still been part of Baseline, and the case had pertained to forensic revival. The close ties between the FRS and Baseline meant there was a good chance that the prior case she had mentioned would be somewhere in the FRS archive. Whether Jonah would have clearance to view such documents was another question, especially with remote access, but he thought it was worth a try.

With the email to his boss unfinished, he logged onto the FRS system, brought up the archive and tried searching for relevant terms. In the list of hits he saw a document by Stephanie Graves entitled ‘A summary of factors affecting BPV remnant suppression’. There was an additional reference number beside it. He clicked on it.