Fletcher (11 page)

The article which had been snagged on my search contained several photos of a sleek RailTech chopper. It seemed to be a commentary on foreign aid, but I couldn’t tell whether the opinion was positive or negative. It didn’t matter; the photos held the real information.

One of the shots had been taken with a clear view into the cockpit. Sitting next to the pilot was a familiar dash of black hair—Zachary. The next few photos were worthless, far too grainy and amateurish, but the last one confirmed my suspicions. Two spaces behind Zachary, strapped in tightly with a combat helmet in his lap, sat Razorjaw.

So, Razorjaw had been working for Zachary. Was it his idea to infect the water supplies? I hoped not: it would be a shame to kill such a charming individual. I dug deeper.

Enterprising individuals had set up massive databases of passports that had gone in to and out of Africa, until the airports all went off the grid. It wasn’t strictly legal, but there was no one to enforce it. They fleeced their users for access, but it was solid, reliable information, especially from the countries further north.

I put in a request for male passports going into Libya for about a week before the article had been posted. As a second thought, I added ‘FirstName=Zachary’ to the query. Once I found his entry, I requested ten on either side, chronologically. There was a ticking sound as my credits spun down in the top right corner.

Razorjaw smirked from a poor-quality photocopy. Born January 14
th
, 1981, making him almost one year older than me.

“Hello, Eric,” I whispered.

#0398

“I saw it on the news today, in someone’s apartment. South Africa is falling apart at the seams. Almost distracted me from my kill. Some crazy virus, Ebola on steroids. Or whatever it is viruses take to get big and strong. Virus vitamins.

“Apparently this thing is appearing all over the world. Time to get out my gas mask.”

14: Quisling

My mystery man was Eric Strauch. Even the name was crisp and clipped. Germanic in origin, but I didn’t want to read too deeply into that. This information gave me the burst I needed, and I continued working through the early hours of the morning.

RailTech already knew about me. They had hired me, many times. They just didn’t know that I was behind the break-in. That’s where I took my solace.

Eric Strauch had worked in munitions companies since he graduated with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. Foreign places weren’t so foreign to him; he’d worked with Corsolite, Demitev and Black Tide before RailTech. He was no novice to armed combat either; all three companies had put him in the field. He held patents—in his own name, rather than a company’s—for personal reactive armour, sets of stabilising turret designs and high-endurance undercarriages for armoured vehicles.

He was also married, with a son, something to keep in mind. I wondered how he kept up the façade of a loving husband... Maybe he didn’t. Maybe his whole family knew about the grinning flesh that crawled beneath the skin.

Before 2012, he had lived in a penthouse suite near the centre of the city. I had no reason to believe he’d moved; it was the spot least affected by the chaos. He probably hadn’t seen a single rioter. I’d assume his family lived with him, but I couldn’t be certain.

The flash stick had been downloading while I conducted my search. Nothing had been corrupted from the hot removal. I backed up the data in a series of TrueCrypt units, hiding them in image files and distributing them across the internet. This was partly for my own safety, and partly for the file’s security. I sent a message with a link to Vincent, although he’d have to wait for the upload to complete before he could collect anything. If he didn’t want to play nice on the phone, hopefully he’d respond over the internet.

The search into Strauch—that could be a title for a Sherlock novel—continued. I mapped out his family and his movements. The SUV identifier came from a small city, about eighty kilometres to the west. It had been assigned a pre-emptive army detail and had survived 2012 without damage. I felt that Strauch probably had another home here; it seemed like a safer place to keep the family. I made a note to do some more digging.

I stuck this information on a clear wall on the second floor. Red marker for what I knew for certain, blue for conjecture and black for side notes. I carried on into the late morning, before I decided to eat.

My teeth cut through my toast, and I realised something. I hadn’t fed what’s-her-name for
days
. I hadn’t watered her either. How long had it been? Two days? Three?

I traced back. I had ducked downstairs when Zachary was getting ready. That was two days ago. Oops. In my defence, it was a lot easier to forget about something when they weren’t screaming every few minutes.

I filled up a bottle and grabbed some bread before going down to level four. She hung—limp and emaciated—from the wall. I unbolted the bindings on her arm and grinned as she hit the floor. Her lips were dry and cracking; the impact caused them to slowly seep blood onto the tiles. A breath lightly disturbed her hair. I rolled her onto her back and put a wet cloth in her mouth. She almost choked, but the rest seemed to go down her throat. I gently cleaned her face, moistening her eyes and skin. She lay on the border of consciousness for a long time, slowly taking in water. I knew better than to feed her right away.

I soaked the cloth again and lay it over her mouth. She didn’t struggle. Before leaving, I left the bread next to her and checked the restraints on her ankle.

The uploads were going slowly. I guess that’s what to expect when I was bouncing fifty gigabytes into several separate servers. Three percent. Stopping most of them wouldn’t help; the limiting factor was the receiving speed. It would take a day or so to complete; so be it. I decided on another nap.

***

A hoarse shriek pulled me back into the land of the living. Who’s-her-face had woken. The sound amplified, slightly, as I descended the stairs.

She had moved from where I’d left her, by as much as her restraints allowed her. The bread had vanished, along with the water. She was huddled up, crumbs scattered everywhere. Her noise stopped as I walked in.

She didn’t seem happy to see me. A little rude, considering all I’d done for her. I’d dressed her burns and cuts, fed her and watered her and stopped her from dying more than once. Maybe that was her gripe; maybe she wanted to die.

I spent a few minutes staring at her from across the room. She ventured into eye contact once or twice, but rapidly withdrew her gaze.

“Still hungry?” I asked.

She nodded, slowly. I kept my distance. I didn’t feel like putting fear into her system again.

“Thirsty?”

Another nod. I ducked out and got more food and water. She didn’t start screaming again. When I returned, she’d shifted some of the hair out of her face.

“This should last the next few days. Can I get you anything else?”

A confused look graced her face. Behind my concerned stare, I burst into laughter. I had bigger things on my mind—tracking down Eric, parsing the RailTech files, maybe a stroll in the sunset. Killing wasn’t the order of the evening.

She slowly nodded her head towards the two bodies. The lab’s desiccators had been turned on full, which probably didn’t help her dehydration, but they still smelled terrible. Her voice was almost immaterial.

“Can you take them away?”

The next few minutes were spent detaching the bodies from the ceiling. Tim’s face had gone a horrified purple, thanks to the pooling blood. The long incision down his chest had dried to cracking point.

Two more for the furnace.

They had nothing of value on their persons: I’d gone through their pockets when I had taken them in. A quick check for jewellery and piercings, and I slid them into the fire.

She seemed more comfortable with them gone. I suppose staring into the faces of your dismembered colleagues would probably put a pall on the general mood. In the space of an hour she had finished almost half a loaf of bread and a few more bottles of water.

“Careful,” I warned. “You’ll get sick.” She slowed down and looked at me.

“Please let me—”

“No, no-no-no. You were doing so well. Don’t reduce yourself to begging now. What’s your name?” I ventured.

“What?”

“Your name.”

“Do you even care?”

“No. But I need a name. Otherwise my internal narrative sounds stupid. It’s going to be ‘dead-girl-with-forks-in-her-eyes’, if you force me to get creative.”

A tear fought its way through the semi-bravery and struggled down her cheek.

“Amanda.”

“Well, that might not help. So many syllables. Nothing shorter? A nickname?”

The surreality of my request was getting to her.

“Wh—”

              “Forks-in-eyes, going once, going twice—”

                            “Quiz!”

“What?”

“My friends call...called me Quiz. Quisling. I’ve always been good at getting into groups and places. I was the girl on the inside. Quiz.”

“Well. Hello Quiz. Your eyes are safe for now.”

I now skirted the line between sadism and empathy. I was interested to see if any Stockholm action would go down, but I doubted it. It would take a lot more than imprisonment to make normal people dependent on me.

“I’m going to go now, Quiz. I’ll see you later. Behave.”

Her lip trembled. For extra kicks, I flicked the lights off as I left.

***

Seven percent. Huzzah. My toast had gone cold, but it didn’t matter. Eating is either for pleasure or sustenance. To waste time on the second is as great a mistake as to not spend time on the first. This, of course, was sustenance-food.

I started browsing through the data. Zachary had separated it into folders by month; I opened up the files from the last two and poured them all into a massive archive. A few encrypted archives were in each folder, but it seemed like most of the content wasn’t protected. I looked for anything to do with Alastor Cartwright or John Rourke, or their apartments. My computer hummed for a few seconds, and a long list of results started appearing.

I quickly realised that there would be a slew of false-positives. Of course there would be: Rourke had been employed by RailTech at the time of death. Accounting records were the most common, detailing his salary. I whistled: it wasn’t trivial. RailTech had him listed as a senior research manager. I assume that meant he was in charge of corralling scientists into the right direction. Not an easy job, I’d imagine. There were no results for Cartwright, but I hadn’t expected it to be that easy. RailTech wasn’t the kind of company to pencil “Kill civilians indiscriminately” into their schedule for anyone to see.

I browsed Rourke’s subdivisions. Most of his research teams were involved in biological and structural chemistry. Words like “high-durability crystal lattice” and “selectively permeable barrier” stuck out, but I was largely lost in the swathe of scientific jargon. I could have used the Helix library, but I’d rather take it to Valerie than risk feeling stupid. The latest update under Rourke had a large molecular diagram attached, labelled “AEROAR”.

Aeroar?

It definitely seemed to be his biggest project, accompanied by pages and pages of data: protein sequences, adsorption and diffusion rates. The methodology may have been in Spanish. I wished that I’d never skipped class during biology to start fires and spy on neighbours.

Actually, that’s a lie. I wouldn’t trade that for the world.

“High-throughput mutagenesis was employed so as to ensure maximum adsorption and diffusion in all forms.” I half-expected the word “superheroes” to crop up. I kept scanning for something I’d recognise. The conclusion made more sense; I zoned in on a paragraph titled “Implications for future work and impact”. It had been translated into corporate-speak; I was fluent.

“Despite future investment showing promise for further innovation and progress—”: regardless of what comes next, keep giving us money.

“—we conclude that the AEROAR molecule meets expectations and requirements sufficiently for in-field deployment”: we’re done, your turn.

“Ultimately, we feel that AEROAR will drastically increase the effectiveness of project 429 deployment”: we did a good job! Keep the money coming.

I added to my spider-diagram and switched the focus to project 429. This level of investigation was the often-futile attempt to make infinite variables visible in a finite scale. There were too many possible links and potential conjectures: the best investigators worked first to map out the connections which we knew existed before moving on to those we had to look at further. In this way, we attempted to reduce infinite possibilities to a singular truth.

It wasn’t a perfect science, and was never fully successful. Instead, the blurry noise of possibility was slowly replaced by a grainy image of what actually happened. The picture was never crisp, and it was usually not in colour either. The goal wasn’t a perfect picture, though; it was to see the next course of action.

Project 429 sounded like something from a movie. “Project 429: Last Resort”. Daniel Craig would probably get cast as the lead role. The villain would have a cat. As I dug deeper, it looked like I was going to be disappointed.

It seemed like RailTech had stretched an intensive, highly professional bodyguard programme over several departments. The ‘product’—teams of three assigned to locations and persons—had not been released yet. The training was impressive: all 429’ers had undergone training exercises in North Africa before and after 2012, along with a rigorous battery of physical and mental tests. Every unit contained a long-range counter-sniper, a demolitions expert and an experienced team captain. All three members had medical training and were required to take courses in hostage negotiation, defensive and offensive strategy and surveillance. They were equipped for almost anything from direct assault to biological warfare.

Units were not selected, but applied to be a part of the programme. They had not been forced into teams; instead, each group comprised friends and partners whose synergy had been checked and tested. I could only imagine the cost of their services. I wouldn’t have to wonder for long: every document mentioning the project referred to deployment in an imminent sense.

Project 429, coming soon to shelves near you.

This was clearly RailTech’s current baby. I could link Rourke’s department to project 429 via the AEROAR compound. Some kind of performance-enhancing chemical? I couldn’t be sure. I bundled the files into an archive and put it onto a flash stick. It would be faster to deliver it to Valerie in person. Was there any link between Rourke and project 429?

Infinite possibilities for a finite space. I selected all files from the week before his death and scanned them for the number 429. Two pertinent results: one referring to a respirator shipment and the other, a conversation between two codenames: ‘ECSH’ and ‘MECT’.

“JNRE non-compliant with 429. See attached. –MECT”