Exposure (31 page)

Hank nodded thoughtfully. “Hmm, like you say, difficult but not impossible.”

By this time Helene was through the looking glass at the bottom of the rabbit hole. Either that or both Hank and Charlie were completely psychotic. Helene was favouring option two.

“What are the other plans?” said Hank.

“Well,” said Charlie, “I reckon it would be much easier to test the gold while it was in transit. Assuming they move the fake gold around to keep up appearances, at some point it’s got to be loaded into a security van.”

“Marvellous,” said Helene to herself, “after having successfully broken into Fort Knox and having escaped without a stain on our characters, we’re going to hijack a bullion transfer. Why didn’t I think of that?”

Charlie shot her an irritated look. “We don’t hijack it: we hack the details of the security company they’re going to use, find out where and when the transfer will take place, and make sure that our ‘staff’ are the ones that are available. It should be pretty easy to set up a fake company and siphon off the intel we need.”

“Sounds good so far,” said Hank, “and Plan Three?”

“Pretty similar to Plan Two,” said Charlie, “except this time we check on the gold
before
it gets onto the security van. We clone a couple of high level staff passes at the bank, make duplicates, and then when the transfer is about to take place, make sure that we’re in the staff corridor when they’re moving the bullion on one of those steel trolleys that they use.”

“How would you get the time to test the gold?” said Hank thoughtfully. “I’m not seeing how that would work.”

“The schedule would be tight,” agreed Charlie. “We’d have to time it perfectly so that two of us were in the lift with the gold when it was being sent up to the ground floor. One person starts chatting to the guards, the other drops the nitric acid.”

Hank nodded. “And, of course,” he said, “we film the whole thing, every last test.”

Charlie smiled. “You took the words right out of my mouth.”

They both looked at Helene.

The sound of blood rushing through her head was almost deafening. It was like looking up at six feet of overhead wave just before it broke over you, pounding you into sand on the seabed.

“If we get caught,” she said slowly, “which we will – there are one of two possible scenarios that could occur: one, we end our days in solitary confinement in some well-hidden containment facility that makes Guantanamo look like a holiday camp. That’s the best case scenario. Or they just catch us, then torture us to find out what we don’t know and can’t prove; then they shoot us and bury us in an unmarked grave – just like Wally.”

Charlie looked at her. “Then we don’t get caught.”

Helene sighed. “Is there any way on God’s green earth that I can talk either of you out of this apocalyptic madness?”

“Nope,” said Hank.

“Fraid not,” said Charlie, his eyes bright with excitement. “Besides, I thought you liked a challenge.”

Helene shook her head. “A challenge, yes, a suicidal mission for people with a death wish, no.”

“If you’re really not into this, Helene,” he said quietly, “I can’t force you. You’ve come up with some good ideas but it isn’t hard evidence. I’m sorry, but it’s not. I won’t blame you if you’re not up for this anymore: I’ll help get you a new identity and you can live anywhere you like in the world. But you won’t ever,
ever
be able to go home. But if that’s what you want...”

She stared at his face, the planes of his cheekbones, the curve of his lips, memorised and as familiar to her as her own aging face in the mirror. Then she thought of Barbara, hiding like a thief for three years; the nameless man rotting away in the Warm Creek Nursing Home; the staff who had been fired from there for saying what they’d seen; Mrs Jenkin half terrified out of her well-starched skin; even Bill, food for maggots somewhere in Japan – all the people who were just collateral damage on the journey.

She felt sick with fear, a compression, a twist of the gut. But something in her said, No, I will not go quietly into the night; I won’t be bullied by thugs in suits; I won’t be hunted by a democracy in wolf’s clothing.

She looked up and spoke, her voice steadier that she’d expected.

“Okay. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Let’s see this thing through.”

Hank bent down and hugged her. “I knew you wouldn’t let us down, honey. It’s just not in your DNA.”

Charlie grinned at her.

“I have no idea how you just talked me into this,” said Helene, a reluctant smile creeping across her face. “There’s obviously a case of crazy on the loose and we’re all infected.”

“Crazy isn’t such a bad place to be, honey,” said Hank comfortingly. “I’ve been there for years.”

Helene didn’t doubt it.

“So, what do we do now?” she said.

Hank looked at Charlie as he spoke. “We get the Gene Genies on the case. Oh boy, they are gonna love this! What a ride!”

Hank was right. The Gene Genies, when congregated that evening, showed remarkably more enthusiasm for the new challenge than they had for the dull, unrewarding slog of unravelling decades of mining reports from across the globe. Despite that, they’d done a good job: an amazing job, in fact, considering the very little time they’d had to work on it. It was clear to Helene that none of them could possibly hold down a day job. She wondered how they earned a living then she shook herself: what an immensely stupid question. These people were so bright they could produce enough mental energy to run an entire power station. It was probably a good thing that she was giving them employment: who knows what mischief they could conjure up without the present focus. Yeah, right. Working out how to break into a Federal Reserve bank was such a useful life skill to acquire. Helene could hardly imagine how she’d lived without it for so long. On the other hand she wasn’t sure it would help her to live much longer either.

But now the gloves were off and the Genies were working with a purpose that could have shown up a President’s re-election campaign team. Even the Roadrunner was back on board now that he (or possibly she) had a hacking job worthy of attention.

While the men folk went about their plans, Helene trawled through the data the Genies had sent in on gold mining. It soon became clear that it was a pretty thankless task: records were sketchy from a number of countries, mostly those whose human rights records seemed to be the poorest. From what Helene knew of the way blood diamonds were mined, she had no doubt that the two things often went hand-in-hand.

Her head was spinning from the tables of figures, some in imperial tons, some in metric tonnes. Then there were the different grades of ore mined and, in a few cases, the weight of ore moved rather than the gold found. Helene suspected she detected signs of a bored Genie in that particular example: probably the one who had Batman for a personal logo. She promised herself she’d be having words with that young man (or woman) later.

Having spent the whole day at the figures, she came to two conclusions: one, it had been a bloody lousy idea of hers to attempt to analyse a hundred years of gold mining records; and two, the US figures just didn’t stack up. Whichever way she twisted and turned, the US appeared to have sold huge quantities of gold – most of which they didn’t appear to have either bought or mined in the first place. It was evidence, of a sort. Not enough – but not bad. It certainly added weight to her theory if not the sort of evidence that a court of law would willingly admit. But maybe enough to embarrass a worried government?

Suddenly a thought occurred to her.

“Hey, look at this,” she said. “I think I might be onto something.”

Charlie looked over at her. “What have you got?”

“I’m not sure… China has been buying a lot of US gold…”

“Which we knew already,” Charlie reminded her.

“Sure, sure,” said Helene, trying to get her thoughts in order, “but look who else is buying up US gold: not Russia – they can dig up their own, but several oil-rich countries in the Middle East…”

Charlie shrugged. “That’s no surprise: they’re planning against the day when their oil reserves dry up and they need to base their economy on something else. They’re following the Swiss model of basing their currency on gold reserves. Woah! Is that Iran you’ve got there?”

“Yup,” said Helene. “Now
that’s
going to embarrass the US government just a tad but there’s another country who’s been buying even more…”

“I’m waiting for the finale,” said Charlie.

Helene smiled briefly.

“Germany,” she said.

Charlie looked surprised. “Okay, not what I was expecting you to say. Firstly, how can they afford it with the Euro at rock bottom and the costs of reunification and secondly, how does this affect your theory?”

“It’s odd, isn’t it,” said Helene. “How they afforded it, well, their economy is one of the strongest in the Euro-zone and if they keep pushing, they could well be on their way to being head of the United States of Europe. But think about this: if they found that they’d got landed with a load of phoney US gold, how’s that going to look?”

Charlie shook his head. “Not good.”

“No, not at all,” she agreed. “Well, they’re not going to admit that they’ve been shafted big time by the Yanks but it’s going to make the NATO friendship mighty shaky if they can’t trust the US. After all, the UK government is already looking towards Russia as the big cheese in the world market: our faith in the shoulder-to-shoulder with the US has been severely shaken by the way they’ve treated the UK as second-class citizens – which we are. But what if the UK isn’t the only country that’s looking eastwards? We could end up with an economic and political bloc from the Irish Sea to the Russian border with China – and the US would be totally out in the cold.”

They were both silent.

“You know,” she said, turning to look at Charlie who had been poring over blueprints of air conditioning ducts and electrical cables, “if we really can get the evidence of fake gold, we...”

Suddenly an alarm sounded inside the pod.

Hank lumbered into the bedroom, his face ashen.

“Intruders,” he yelled. “We gotta go! Now!”

Helene hoisted her grab bag and pushed her coat inside with her laptop. Charlie was already at the top rung of the stepladder, gun in hand.

Hank had his own version of a grab bag: a necklace of memory sticks and a diamond bracelet that looked genuine. Plus something that looked horribly like a grenade, cradled in one beefy mitt.

“Ready?” Charlie hissed.

Then the door of the pod was wrenched open.

Charlie fell backwards, crashing into Helene, who landed hard on her bad hip. A bolt of pain sliced through her and she cried out. Hank had been faster: when he’d seen her fall, he’d skipped out of the way and tossed the hand grenade up and out of the pod. The percussion of the explosion deafened her and smoke poured into the confined area.

Choking, Helene flung out her hand trying to find her grab bag. She could feel Charlie shouting her name through muffled eardrums. Then something was thrown down into the pod and she felt another, smaller explosion vibrate through the floor.

Tear gas! Her eyes immediately spilled over and her lungs started to burn. Abandoning attempts to find her grab bag she tried to crawl away from the fumes. She could hear Hank bellowing out some atavistic war cry and the ricochet of gunshots whined above her. She covered her head with her hands and tried to re-orient herself.

Another tear gas canister exploded behind her. Helene struggled to breathe. As she passed out she thought she heard the crackling of a fire fight echoing through the pod.

Chapter 22

Darkness.

Helene knew she was awake but her body didn’t respond to the commands of her brain. My God, I’m paralysed, was her first thought. But then she realised she had been secured with her hands cuffed painfully behind her back and that she was seated on a hard chair. Her feet were tied to the chair legs and her eyes were covered with a piece of material. When she tried to open them she was aware of a bright light behind the mask.

She experimented with moving her tongue and found that her throat was dry and her lips papery.

“Water,” she said hoarsely. “Please, can I have some water?”

There was no reply. A wave of nausea and panic threatened to overwhelm her.

Instead, with her other senses immobilised, Helene concentrated on calming herself and listening. She was sure there was someone else in the room. She thought she could hear them breathing, but the longer she listened, the less certain she became.

She tried moving her chair, but somehow it had been fixed to the ground. Nevertheless, there was a faint echo from the scrape of her feet which made her think the room was concrete and quite large. She could feel a faint breeze of cooler air on her left cheek but she didn’t know what that meant.

Years ago, as a journalist about to go into a war zone, she’d been sent by her employers on a survival training course, specifically designed for non-combat personnel. She forced her brain to recall those lessons. She knew she had to try to converse with her kidnappers: to try to make them think of her as a person rather than just a bankable asset. Whether or not that applied to being taken by secret US security services she couldn’t say, but with other options scarce, it seemed worth a try.

She tried to speak again, although the dryness of her mouth made it feel like she was talking with cotton wool wadded up in her cheeks.

“My name is Helene La Borde,” she rasped. “I’m a journalist. I’d really like some water. Could you give me a drink, please?”

There was no reply, just the hollow echo of her own voice mocking her efforts. Still, she had the unshakeable belief that there was someone else in the room. And somehow that was more disturbing than being alone: the idea that there was someone there, watching her, studying her in silence – an interesting scientific experiment.

Make human contact, her training insisted.

“I’m a British journalist,” she said again. “My name is Helene La Borde. Can you tell me why I’m here?”