Year Zero (2000), page 18
She had to concede that one. It was the first really good point he'd made. The man in black had told her that he'd be back when he blacked her eye, and the possibility of bringing off a preemptive strike was definitely appealing.
"I want to see the rest of my file," she said, to prove that she was no pushover. "Everything you printed off."
"Sure," he said, immediately. "You can look through it while we're on the train. We can be on our way right now—unless you want a dessert."
Molly decided that even though Wingate was paying it wasn't worth holding out for a dessert.
41
They took a taxi to King's Cross. Oddly enough, it was the first time in Molly's life that she'd ever gone there to catch a train. Wingate was the kind of obsessive-compulsive who always kept an emergency supply of twenty-pound notes concealed about his person in case a pickpocket lifted his wallet, and he explained to Molly that didn't want to put two tickets to Bingley on his credit card, just in case his new employers were keeping tabs on him. They had half an hour to wait for the express to Bradford, and Wingate handed over the wallet-file while they waited in the queue to board it.
Molly was perversely disappointed by the contents of her file. There were extensive documents of a supposedly-confidential sort, culled from various sources. Their statistical sum was an account of her entire life since the age of eleven, lavishly decorated with all the discomfitingly slanderous comments that various schoolteachers, social workers, medical practitioners and probation officers had felt it incumbent on them to place on her record. There was also an exhaustive transcript of her various interviews with the Croydon cowboys, but this had been carefully sanitized so as to imply that the men in black were scrupulous boy scouts who treated their interrogatees with all possible politeness and consideration. There were elaborate appendices listing the results of various tests to which she had been subjected at Croydon. So far as she could tell, as she skimmed over the gnomic symbols, there was nothing in that section to indicate the nature of the object they had ripped out of her breast or any information recovered therefrom.
"According to the Extra-Special Branch," Wingate pointed out, a little breathlessly, when they were finally allowed on to the platform to join the mad rush for seats, "the only possibly-apocalyptic threat in the offing is the one concealed in your Trojan Horse viruses. If all that stuff can be taken seriously, you're the new Typhoid Mary—except that their analysts can't seem to figure out what the exotic DNA you've been spreading so generously is supposed to do, outside of cocking up my experiments by introducing a rogue unknown into the sample."
"It's not supposed to do us any harm, " Molly assured him, wishing that she could be absolutely certain of that herself. "It's not a disease, as such."
"According to the ESB, it's worse," Wingate insisted. "They reckon the viruses are vectors, like the mosaics we sometimes use to modify crop-plants. They suggest that the aim was to transform your clients—and they aren't certain yet that it didn't work. They hypothesize there might be some kind of activating trigger: maybe something to be taken orally, maybe something even simpler, like a spoken sentence or a musical tone. We're talking Invasion of the Body Snatchers here." She could tell by his tone that he didn't believe a word of it, even though the new owners of Peaslee Pharmaceuticals seemed to be taking it seriously. He was obviously still uncertain as to how much she believed.
"If the greys wanted to snatch our bodies," Molly said, "they'd have done it way back in 1897, when The War of the Worlds didn't happen. They're sophisticated people, even if they do look like the saddest cliché on the sci-fi market. Anyway, they aren't even the biggest kids on the block, and they'd probably have to reckon with our mother-race if they tried to fuck us up. Forget the ETs, Dr. Wingate—it's our own mad scientists we have to worry about. They're the ones with the Devil in their eyes and up their arses." She figured that if they were testing one another out, she might as well get as much early retaliation in as she could.
"Actually," said Wingate, as the northbound train drew away from the station, "I bitterly resent the demonization of scientists, and genetic engineers in particular. We're the ones who are working to ensure the future of the human race. We ought to be the heroes of popular fiction. I'm sick to death of seeing all of us cast as malevolent monster-creators. It's stupid and it's childish."
"Sure," Molly agreed, sarcastically, "but it makes good melodrama. Anyway, you're on the side of the angels. If HolIywood ever gets to tell the tale of our great adventure, you'll be the male lead. They'll forget all about the bad haircut and the horrid tweed jacket—all they'll remember is the stratospheric IQ and the grail quest. I'll probably get relegated to the love interest. Not, of course, that you actually have to do anything about that. I could really do with an action-hero type to take care of that part of the plot, but the only tall dark and handsome man I've met all year turned out to be a pussycat. Do you really think we can achieve anything in Bingley, Doc? This is going to be a hell of a washout if they won't even let us in."
"By the time we go in the last night-owls will have gone home," Wingate said. "The night-security's fully computerised, so the only thing that can possibly go wrong is that my palmprint hasn't been fed into the system and my swipecard won't work."
"You don't have much imagination, do you?" Molly said. "I can think of a dozen other ways things could go very badly wrong. On the other hand, I have the consolation of knowing that if we get into real trouble the greys will beam us both up into orbit. Probably."
He wasn't even a little bit convinced. "Just make sure you click that camera shutter whenever I give you the word," he said. "I don't care how barking mad you are, just as long as we get the pictures back to the embassy."
Molly decided that she might as well kill time by taking offence at that. He was a captive audience, so she spent the next couple of hours explaining to him exactly how "barking mad" she really was. She told him about the angel, and her interstellar tour, and who lived on the thirteenth floor of Arcadia House, and her meeting with the Devil, and why the Queen of the Fays had kidnapped Angie. She even told him what had really happened to her while his drug had thrown her lower brain functions into Stepford wife mode. It took a long time; she didn't finish until after they'd changed trains at Bradford and boarded the local hopper that would take them to Bingley. By that time, Wingate had gone quite pale.
"I always played it by the rules," he said, faintly, "until last night, at least—and a little self-defensive hacking is hardly a major infraction. You have to play by the rules, you see, because if you don't have science you don't have sanity. If you can't stay within the bounds of reason, anything goes. I never understood why people didn't like science, because I never understood how anyone could bear to live in a universe where anything goes. I never understood why anyone would want to live in a universe without rules, without science, without sanity."
"What's want got do with it?" Molly asked—although she knew, in her heart of hearts, that there was a manner of speaking in which want had everything to do with it.
For want of a nail, according to the poem, a battle had been lost and a nation with it. Two kids had to be worth immeasurably more than a nail—more than enough to lose a universe that was not only queerer than one supposed but queerer than one could suppose. She didn't say that to Wingate, though. She had told him more than enough already, and he was genuinely distressed by what he had heard, even though he didn't believe a word of it. From his point of view, this adventure was a desperate attempt to hang on to a sense of reality that he couldn't bear or afford to lose and he hadn't the slightest idea how far away from that goal he had already strayed.
42
Wingate paid for a room in the Cottingley Beck Hotel from his supply of ready cash. The desk-clerk obviously thought he had immoral purposes in mind, but Wingate hadn't taken advantage of her while he had her in his power at Peaslee and he didn't try anything now. He didn't have to ask Molly to undress in order to set up her equipment, and he was apologetically embarrassed about the modest rooting around that he did have to do. They didn't even sit on the bed together while they watched late night TV, waiting for the week's most unsocial hour to arrive.
They started walking at two, but it was after three when they reached their destination on the bank of the canal. Wingate was still clutching his briefcase as if it were some kind of security blanket, and the whiteness of his clenched knuckles betrayed his deep-seated unease. Molly guessed that this really was the first time in fifty-some years that he had ever stepped out of line.
The outer shell of the edifice that had been made over into Chiliad Science's northern headquarters had been erected in the nineteenth century, presumably as a woollen mill, but it had recently been fitted with an inner tegument of dull metal whose resolute opacity was clearly visible through all of the glassless windows. As Wingate had promised, there were no human attendants at the car-park barrier or the main door. Nor was there an intercom connected to some internal security-post—just a pad on which Wingate had to place his palm and a slot for his swipecard.
When the swipecard passed through successfully, the door opened and they passed through into a vestibule whose lights came on automatically. The security camera on the wall dutifully recorded Molly's unauthorised presence as well as Wingate's but it seemed that nobody was watching the live broadcast, and that no one would be any the wiser until they played back the tape. Wingate had to repeat the procedure to let them through the inner door, but it worked as well the second time as it had the first.
Again, the lights came on as they passed through. They found themselves in a corridor with half a dozen side-doors and a steel-clad lift at the far end. Wingate made straight for the lift.
"Get that camera ready," he said, plucking his mobile phone from his breast-pocket. Molly's phone was discreetly fastened to her belt. The lead connecting it to the camera was tucked inside her blouse, whose ample sleeves hid the connection to the camera. She had to be careful to keep the connection in place as she took the camera out of the pocket of her jeans.
Molly followed Wingate along the corridor. Neither of them heard the door that must have slid open soundlessly behind them, and the first Molly knew of anything amiss was the gloved hand that reached around her from behind and closed upon her mouth. A muffled voice in her ear whispered: "Gotcha!"
The whisper was purely for melodramatic effect. Wingate heard it anyway, and whirled around—but a second man in black was already moving past Molly, holding an obscenely large pistol before him. It was the one with the unkempt moustache who'd had a nasty run-in with Gloria that might well have cost him his faith in the deterrent power of pumpaction shotguns.
Molly saw Wingate's thumb close on the REDIAL button of his phone before he said: "What on Earth are officers of British military intelligence doing here? How dare you point that gun at me! I'm an employee of Chiliad Science Inc, going about my legitimate business."
"Sure you are," said the man who had hold of Molly. Now that he was speaking normally she had no difficulty recognising his voice. She'd heard it often enough. "And this is your star research subject. Can't thank you enough for bringing her in safe and sound. We might have had trouble, given the ease with which she's slipped through our fingers in the past, but now she's in a lead-lined building she won't find it quite so easy to float away—and there's not a soul in London who knows where she is! Incidentally, Dr. Wingate, there's not the least point in your aiming that phone at me. It was broadcasting long before you hit REDIAL, and I expect the battery's stone dead by now. We did have fun listening to your conversation on the train, though. You've exceeded all our expectations—couldn't have done better if you were a trained interrogator."
Wingate's face was as white as a fay's. It was pathetically obvious that he hadn't been in on the set up. "I'm an American citizen," he said, defiantly, "and the people at my embassy know that I'm here."
"Of course they do," said the man in black. "Who do you think told us you were coming?"
The lift doors slid smoothly aside behind Wingate. The man who stepped out was as tall as the one who held Molly but his smart suit was grey and his tie was silver. Only his hair was black. He was accompanied by a woman, so much older than he was that her blonde hair was certainly dyed. She was wearing a lab coat but if she was in the rejuvenation-serum business she certainly wasn't much given to testing her own products.
Wingate was still catching up. "The CIA tipped you off?" he said, wonderingly. "Chiliad Science has been working for the CIA all along?"
"Don't be ridiculous, Dr. Wingate," said the man who'd come out of the lift. "It's the CIA and all its parallel organizations that work for us. We're a global corporation with employees in fifty-two countries. We're the taxpayers, voters and citizens of the world."
Molly half-expected Wingate to collapse like a punctured balloon, but she wasn't entirely surprised when he went crazy instead. People stepping out of line for the first time after half a century of repression often went way over the top, in her experience.
Wingate slammed the black briefcase into the groin of the man holding the gun. It must have been a lucky shot—from Wingate's point of view—because his complexion turned lily white before he dropped the gun, clutched himself in agony and toppled like a dynamited factory chimney.
Wingate immediately hurled himself at the second man in black, but this time he had to raise the briefcase as if it were a battle-axe because Molly was in his way. Molly heard her captor chuckle as he cleverly deployed the only weapon ready to hand: her. The briefcase caught the tall man at the side of the head and sent him staggering back against the wall, but Molly and Wingate fell over in a terrible tangle.
Molly's opinion of Wingate went up by an entire order of magnitude as he put his lips very close to her ear and whispered: "There's a second feed the company doesn't know about. Take the pictures. Same time same place." Molly assumed that this meant that Wingate had jiggered the mobile phone so that it would send its digital signal to more than one computer, and had done so without the CIA's knowledge, and that he would meet her in the Atlantis Bookshop on the following Saturday if circumstances permitted. She slipped the tiny camera back into her pocket while they were still sprawled in an ungainly heap.
By the time Molly and Wingate got back to their feet, everyone was laughing except the man whose balls had been crushed.
"There's really no need for that, Dr. Wingate," said the black-haired taxpayer. "You're a little early for work, but I think we can forgive that. We can talk about it on Monday. We'll instruct the computer that you aren't to be readmitted before then, of course. Don't worry about Molly—Dr. De'Ath and I will give her the grand tour."
The grey-haired woman smiled bloodlessly as her name was mentioned, but it was the black-haired man who offered Molly a hand to help her up. "I'm Edward Hyde," he said. "I thought about changing it to Jekyll, or even Moreau, but that would have seemed like hiding my true self—and once I teamed up with Marjorie I realised that there were worse surnames in the world."
The man in black who'd been holding Molly until Wingate forced him to let go stepped forward as if to receive her into his custody again, but Hyde shook his head. "Please see that Dr. Wingate gets out safely, Mr. Wilson. You can leave Molly to us now."
The man in black looked as if he wanted to scowl at Hyde but couldn't quite muster the necessary irreverence. While his associate was still gasping for breath, Wilson took Wingate by the arm and guided him back the way he had come. Edward Hyde and Marjorie De'Ath stood aside to let Molly precede them into the lift, and when Hyde gestured expansively Molly did as she was bid. She still wanted to see the inside of the factory, although what Wilson had said about the greys being unable to levitate her out of a lead-lined building was a trifle worrying.
"Do I get to see Elvis?" she asked, by way of testing the water.
The lift doors closed. Hyde punched a button and the car headed downwards. If the buttons could be trusted there were no less than seven subterranean floors.
"My dear," said Dr. De'Ath, "you get to see everything."
"Including Christine?"
"Ah," said Dr. Hyde. "There, I'm afraid, we can't oblige. We have tried to find her—you can't imagine how hard we've tried—but we've drawn a blank. We knew that you couldn't be inveigled into a trap for anything less, so we doctored the record for Dr. Wingate's benefit. I'm sorry—but sending Mr. Wilson to pick you up didn't seem safe, considering that you slipped through his fingers on the last two occasions."
While Hyde was talking Molly looked him squarely in the eyes, fully expecting to see the Devil therein, but the scientist had more style than that. If the Devil were in him, he'd never let it show. When she turned away he obviously thought he'd won the contest, but she was only shielding her mobile phone while she hit REDIAL.
The doors opened again at the uppermost of the seven basements, and Hyde flourished his manicured hand yet again to indicate that she should go on.
The light was more muted down here, and instead of conventional doors the corridor that curved away into the bowels of the ex-mill, apparently following the arc of a great circle, was studded with great wedges of steel like the entrances to time-locked bank vaults. Each door was, however, equipped with a round observation portal at head height—head height, that is, for a man. Molly knew that she'd have to stand on tiptoe and crane her neck to get a clear sight of whatever was within each chamber.
"Please go ahead," said Hyde, politely. "We really would like your honest opinion on the merits of our work."
So Molly went ahead, with the tiny camera still clutched in the right hand that she had thrust into the pocket of her jeans—and even though Edward Hyde didn't have the Devil in his eyes, she found herself embarked on a tour so thoroughly Infernal that even Dante might have fainted in horror at the imagination of it.
