Proxy, page 23
One such place, she remembered, was only a short walk from where she stood.
Dead branches and leaves crackled under Amy’s feet as she stepped up to the chain-link fence, which was supported on metal posts driven deep into the soil. She could see the outline of a security camera on top of a fence post, its lens angled away from her.
Keeping parallel to the fence, Amy walked to her left until she found a wooden gate exactly where she remembered it.
Innocuous as it appeared, the gate was secured with exactly the same kind of security apparatus as Raphael’s offices, minus the retinal scanner. Since her keycard had still worked in the Telop building, there was no reason to think it might not work here as well…although she doubted that would still be the case by the time morning arrived.
Swiping the card down through the reader set into the wooden gate, Amy laughed with unbridled delight when it immediately clicked open.
Following an old and rutted path, Amy soon caught sight of a cottage nestled between two forested hills, its windows dark. Stacy, she remembered, had been conceived there during one of Isaac’s visits, and while Raphael had been away on one of his interminably long business trips.
She kept moving, letting her feet guide her. Thirty or so minutes passed before she came across another, much larger building silhouetted against the night sky. Unlike the cottage, a number of its windows shone with light.
From far away came the faint buzz of a security drone on its automated patrol.
Amy kept going, slipping past outhouses and a stables until, at last, the Edwardian mansion David Markov had once made the base of his power revealed itself to her. Once the home of a wealthy merchant, it had lain in disrepair for decades before being refurbished at enormous cost while Raphael had still been a boy.
This, now, was Raphael Markov’s home—and it had been hers, albeit briefly, until it became her prison.
Self-doubt gripped Amy in its steely talons. Turn back, a terrified voice said from somewhere deep inside her. For God’s sake, turn back.
Birds called to each other through the night. From within the house, nothing stirred.
She reminded herself why she was there. Raphael had spent nearly every minute of their marriage lying to her, and she didn’t believe for a second that divorce had made him any more truthful. Even if he didn’t know Stacy’s current whereabouts, then he at least had to know why Isaac picked this moment to step back into the world of the living—and why some stranger had tried to kill their daughter.
Her doubt faded, replaced by a wave of anger as clear and sharp as if she had dived into a winter lake.
There would be no more dismissing her. This time, there would be answers.
Her feet carried her forward as if of their own volition, towards a door around the rear of the building that led into the kitchens. The door swung open with ease. Moonlight illuminated counter-tops and work tables within the darkened interior.
Amy waited and listened. The house was silent but, she knew, certainly not empty. There were always members of the domestic staff moving around at any hour of the day or night. She crossed the kitchen and stepped through a door, moving with excessive care so as to make as little sound as possible.
Soon, she entered a narrow corridor that ended at the bottom of a short flight of steps leading upwards. Ascending to the next floor, she paused on hearing the creak of a floorboard somewhere ahead.
Moving a few steps back down the stairs to where the shadows would better conceal her, Amy watched as a door on the landing ahead of her creaked open. A member of Raphael’s staff emerged, closing the door behind him and walking down to the far end of the corridor before moving out of sight.
Almost there.
Ascending further, Amy came to the third floor, where she remembered Raphael kept his home office. Before her stretched another wood-lined corridor, and this time her ears detected a faint electronic beep from behind a door at the far end.
A plaque mounted on one wall of the corridor read MEDICAL STAFF ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.
Her brow furrowed. What this meant she couldn’t even begin to imagine. Medical staff? Did Raphael have some condition he’d been concealing from the world?
There was no point speculating. A door to Amy’s right stood slightly ajar, and she eased it carefully open, expecting to see the bathroom she remembered had been there. Instead, to her confusion, she found someone had turned it into a storage room filled with racked server units, their status lights blinking from out of the darkness.
The lines of Amy’s brow deepened. What could Raphael be doing at home that required so much computer power?
Amy stepped back out into the corridor and looked towards the door of Raphael’s office. One trait both Raphael and his father shared was the inability to cease working even when they had returned home. If she would find Raphael anywhere, it was there.
Except...something wasn’t right. It wasn’t anything she could put a finger on; rather, her skin prickled as if all the angles of the corridor and the surrounding house were subtly wrong.
Voices came from downstairs, and Amy heard someone ascending the same steps she’d climbed only moments before. One voice was recognizably Raphael’s.
Gripped by a sudden panic, Amy stepped back into the server room, easing the door most of the way shut. If she were to confront Raphael, she would rather do it when he was alone and away from his security detail.
Moments later, she glimpsed Raphael stepping past the server room and on down the corridor.
He was, she saw with relief, quite alone.
Another second passed, and Amy heard the chime of an electronic lock followed by the sound of a door opening. She waited a beat, then eased the server room door the rest of the way open and slipped back out into the corridor.
The door to Raphael’s office, at the far end of the corridor, now stood ajar.
It was now or never.
Steeling herself for a confrontation, Amy stepped quietly towards the half-open door, noting that the light coming from within was dazzlingly bright.
Her sense of wrongness intensified, enough so that she hesitated for a moment before continuing.
Moving soundlessly, Amy stepped around the half-open door and looked into Raphael’s office.
Except it wasn’t an office any more. Instead, she saw something that more closely resembled a high-tech surgery.
Raphael stood across the room from Amy, his back to her and his attention focused on a large, adjustable hospital bed. The bed had been raised, but Raphael blocked her from seeing if there was anyone in it.
If there was, they were hidden from her sight, beneath a vast tangle of what looked to Amy like thousands of glistening, almost organic-looking tendrils, drooping down from immensely complicated-looking machinery suspended from the ceiling directly overhead.
Amy shuddered inwardly. The machinery looked almost alive, somehow, like some vast, synthetic anemone. The tendrils twitched from time to time, many looking as fine as threads.
The breath caught in her throat when Raphael stepped past the bed and towards a shelving unit. He took down a box and reached into it, taking out what even she recognized as a proxy applicator.
Now that Raphael had moved away from the bed she could now see that it was, in fact, occupied, by a small and frail-looking figure. Much of the upper part of the figure’s head was concealed by the tangle of thread-like tendrils, but the face was, she realized with a shudder of horror, quite recognisable beneath its oxygen mask.
It was David Markov…or, judging by what she could see, what remained of him.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
AMY
It took Amy another moment to understand what she was seeing.
David Markov’s skull lay open, its interior seemingly packed with the thread-like tendrils descending from the apparatus suspended above his bed. As if, thought Amy, someone had wired him directly into the monstrous machinery above him.
Raphael, still unaware he was being watched, turned back towards the bed. Amy automatically moved back from the door, but he still didn’t see her, so intently focused he seemed to be on whatever he was doing.
She peered cautiously back around the door and saw her ex-husband lean over the prone, ruined body of his father. With growing consternation, she watched as he placed the proxy applicator against the old man’s neck.
Then he stood back up and repeated the operation, this time placing a second bead in the applicator and firing it into his own neck.
As much as she’d tried to avoid thinking about such things over the years, Amy by now understood the basic principle by which proxy worked. It had become such a ubiquitous technology that avoiding news about it had become almost impossible. She also knew that David Markov had been in a reportedly vegetative state for years now. She had long presumed David’s Catholic faith was the only reason he’d kept the old man’s body in this state of prolonged misery.
She had also presumed the elder Markov was being kept in some hospice far from Raphael’s sight, but instead he was right here, in the family mansion.
The revelation came slowly, but with building force as the disparate parts of the mystery welded together in her mind.
If Raphael was proxying with his father David…then the man standing before her wasn’t Raphael at all, but David Markov proxying through his son’s body.
How long, she wondered, had the old man been proxying through his son, her ex-husband? How, given David Markov had supposedly been reduced to a vacant, mindless shell, was it even possible?
Even as these thoughts raced through Amy’s mind, she took notice of the look on the old man’s face. Rather than lacking in expression as she might have expected, his lips moved soundlessly behind his oxygen mask, his face twisted up in an expression of anguish and horror.
Only then did she fully accept the truth of it, that Raphael was in there somewhere, trapped in the horrific wreck of his father’s body. And for how long?
Raphael, meanwhile, had moved back around the bed and towards a computer monitor sitting on a counter.
Somehow Amy found the wherewithal to raise her left arm and use her bracelet to snatch a brief video of the scene before her. Then she stepped quietly back from the door into the corridor, her lungs aching in her chest.
Any desire she’d felt to confront Raphael—no, she reminded herself; the man she had thought was Raphael—fled. Now, she wanted only to warn someone.
Retreating as quietly as she could, Amy slipped back inside the server room and put in a call to Ray Thomas.
As incredible as it seemed, so much that had happened over the years since her divorce made far more sense if David Markov had been in control of Raphael’s body for much, if not all of that time. He’d ceased to travel abroad for business, spending most of his time between his home here and his offices in London.
A lot of people had made the exact same decision in the wake of three pandemics, so it was hardly unusual. But perhaps there was another reason Raphael had given up travelling: a proxy session lasted four or five hours at most, which meant David couldn’t have risked straying too far from his true body. He’d have had no choice but to renew the proxy link at regular intervals, up to five or six times daily.
The more she thought about it, the more it made sense...and the more it made her skin crawl. David Markov had found a way to keep control of his company, and for the first time in a very long time she felt something approaching sympathy for her ex-husband.
Nobody—not even Raphael—deserved what he was suffering through.
“Miss Cotter?”
Amy nearly let out a gasp when she heard Thomas’s voice in her ear. “Raphael isn’t Raphael,” she blurted in a hurried half-whisper, moving deeper into the server room and turning her back to the door. “He’s really David, his father. I think he’s been proxying with Raphael all these years.”
“What?” Thomas sounded befuddled. “Miss Cotter, you’re not making any sense. Can you please repeat that?”
“It’s Raphael,” Amy repeated, touching her bracelet and sending the video she’d taken to Thomas. “I’m at his estate. He’s—”
Behind Amy the door burst open, and a figure moved swiftly towards her, clamping one hand over her mouth and dragging her backwards out into the corridor. Thomas’s voice sounded tinnily from her bracelet, demanding to know what was going on.
A fist slammed into Amy’s stomach. Rough hands held her upright, even though she wanted to double over from the pain. Then whoever had hold of her let her go, and she collapsed onto the floor of the corridor.
She crouched, coughing and spluttering and trying desperately to suck air into her lungs.
“Good job, Arthur,” she heard Raphael say. “You can go now.”
“But, sir—?”
“Now,” Raphael said, more firmly this time. “And you saw none of this. Understood?”
“Sir,” said Arthur, and she heard the sound of boot heels retreating along the wooden floor of the corridor.
She tried to get back up, but a foot slammed her back down. “Stay where you are, Amy.”
“You’re not Raphael,” she said, her voice barely more than a harsh croak.
“I think,” said David Markov, “what with Stacy nearly being murdered and kidnapped by unknown assailants, you’ve been through more mental stress than you can cope with.”
“How could you do this to your own son?” she rasped. “How could anyone do that to another human being?”
At last she was able to lift her gaze sufficiently to meet the eyes of the man standing over her. He had something in his hands.
David Markov, as she now knew him to be, leaned down until they were almost face-to-face. “I think,” he continued, “that it’s quite understandable how all this stress made you want to kill yourself. It’s a terrible tragedy.”
She tried again to get upright, and once again she was slammed back down. Then Markov kneeled on her back, forcing her flat even as she struggled and twisted and fought.
Then something pressed against the back of her neck, followed by a sudden, sharp sting.
“Miss Cotter? Hello?”
Ray stared at his bracelet, perplexed and suddenly, deeply worried. He tried again to call her, but without success.
Ahead of him, through the windscreen, he could see Finch’s car. At first Finch had driven aimlessly, but now he appeared to be moving with purpose, heading deeper into the countryside.
Raphael isn’t Raphael, Amy had said. He’s David.
Christ, he thought. It was impossible. Not when the old man had apparently been vegetative for years.
His bracelet blinked, drawing his attention. A glance at his wrist revealed that Amy Cotter had sent him a video file shortly before they’d been cut off. He pushed it onto the hire’s dashboard and let it run while he kept one eye on the road and one hand on the manual steering wheel.
He watched with increasing horror as Raphael Markov—or at least, the man he’d always believed to be Raphael Markov—leaned over the still-breathing body of his father and injected it with a proxy bead.
Ray swallowed to try to get some moisture back into his suddenly bone-dry mouth. Lifting his bracelet to his mouth, he called another number.
“Emergency services,” said a brisk professional voice. “Which service do you—?”
“I’m concerned for the safety of a woman named Amy Cotter, formerly Amy Markov,” he said, cutting the man off. “She’s at the country estate of Raphael Markov, the head of Telop Industries. She’s his ex-wife. I have reason to believe her life is in serious and imminent danger.”
Ray ended the call and swore in the close, hot confines of the cheap little hire. He’d have to get rid of the bracelet.
What the hell had Amy been thinking, going anywhere near Raphael Markov at a time like this?
Or the man they’d all thought was Raphael, if he could believe what he’d just seen.
Slowly Ray began to realize just how much he had underestimated Amy Cotter. She’d shown considerable guts and intelligence by getting so close to Markov. And if the police responded in time, David Markov—if it really was him—might think twice about harming her.
For a moment he thought about abandoning his pursuit of Finch and going to her aid. But it would take hours to get to the Markov estate—much too late to be of use.
Up ahead, Finch took a right. Ray turned the wheel to follow, his thoughts a whirl of confusion and revelation.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
DAVID
Once he’d had Amy dealt with, David Markov boarded an air taxi parked on a broad expanse of lawn next to the Markov family mansion. His consciousness was secure inside Raphael’s skin for at least the next six days, thanks to the hopscotch proxy he and Finch had developed.
The taxi rose into the air, banking over the forest and rising high enough for London to become visible on the horizon. As he settled back, David relished, as he had so many times over the years, the strong muscles and taut, smooth skin of his stolen body.
Twenty minutes into his journey, Lovatt squirted a message to him that came with several video attachments. David displayed them on the curving interior of the taxi’s windscreen and watched as a dark-skinned man walked in and out of the Abbey Rush Treatment Centre several times over the course of a day, on one occasion accosting Finch as he entered the building.
Lovatt had already identified the man responsible for threatening Zachary Finch, but David recognized him on sight: Ray Thomas, the Metropolitan Detective Inspector who’d refused to take a bribe to keep that little bitch Stacy Cotter from dragging the Markov’s name through the mud. The scandal had cost Telop hundreds of millions in plummeting share values.
Was it possible, he wondered, that Thomas had found out about their experiments on patients using hopscotch? Or had something else brought Finch to his attention?
A little while later, another message came through: his technical staff had traced Amy Cotter’s call to a bracelet that most likely belonged to Ray Thomas.
Dead branches and leaves crackled under Amy’s feet as she stepped up to the chain-link fence, which was supported on metal posts driven deep into the soil. She could see the outline of a security camera on top of a fence post, its lens angled away from her.
Keeping parallel to the fence, Amy walked to her left until she found a wooden gate exactly where she remembered it.
Innocuous as it appeared, the gate was secured with exactly the same kind of security apparatus as Raphael’s offices, minus the retinal scanner. Since her keycard had still worked in the Telop building, there was no reason to think it might not work here as well…although she doubted that would still be the case by the time morning arrived.
Swiping the card down through the reader set into the wooden gate, Amy laughed with unbridled delight when it immediately clicked open.
Following an old and rutted path, Amy soon caught sight of a cottage nestled between two forested hills, its windows dark. Stacy, she remembered, had been conceived there during one of Isaac’s visits, and while Raphael had been away on one of his interminably long business trips.
She kept moving, letting her feet guide her. Thirty or so minutes passed before she came across another, much larger building silhouetted against the night sky. Unlike the cottage, a number of its windows shone with light.
From far away came the faint buzz of a security drone on its automated patrol.
Amy kept going, slipping past outhouses and a stables until, at last, the Edwardian mansion David Markov had once made the base of his power revealed itself to her. Once the home of a wealthy merchant, it had lain in disrepair for decades before being refurbished at enormous cost while Raphael had still been a boy.
This, now, was Raphael Markov’s home—and it had been hers, albeit briefly, until it became her prison.
Self-doubt gripped Amy in its steely talons. Turn back, a terrified voice said from somewhere deep inside her. For God’s sake, turn back.
Birds called to each other through the night. From within the house, nothing stirred.
She reminded herself why she was there. Raphael had spent nearly every minute of their marriage lying to her, and she didn’t believe for a second that divorce had made him any more truthful. Even if he didn’t know Stacy’s current whereabouts, then he at least had to know why Isaac picked this moment to step back into the world of the living—and why some stranger had tried to kill their daughter.
Her doubt faded, replaced by a wave of anger as clear and sharp as if she had dived into a winter lake.
There would be no more dismissing her. This time, there would be answers.
Her feet carried her forward as if of their own volition, towards a door around the rear of the building that led into the kitchens. The door swung open with ease. Moonlight illuminated counter-tops and work tables within the darkened interior.
Amy waited and listened. The house was silent but, she knew, certainly not empty. There were always members of the domestic staff moving around at any hour of the day or night. She crossed the kitchen and stepped through a door, moving with excessive care so as to make as little sound as possible.
Soon, she entered a narrow corridor that ended at the bottom of a short flight of steps leading upwards. Ascending to the next floor, she paused on hearing the creak of a floorboard somewhere ahead.
Moving a few steps back down the stairs to where the shadows would better conceal her, Amy watched as a door on the landing ahead of her creaked open. A member of Raphael’s staff emerged, closing the door behind him and walking down to the far end of the corridor before moving out of sight.
Almost there.
Ascending further, Amy came to the third floor, where she remembered Raphael kept his home office. Before her stretched another wood-lined corridor, and this time her ears detected a faint electronic beep from behind a door at the far end.
A plaque mounted on one wall of the corridor read MEDICAL STAFF ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.
Her brow furrowed. What this meant she couldn’t even begin to imagine. Medical staff? Did Raphael have some condition he’d been concealing from the world?
There was no point speculating. A door to Amy’s right stood slightly ajar, and she eased it carefully open, expecting to see the bathroom she remembered had been there. Instead, to her confusion, she found someone had turned it into a storage room filled with racked server units, their status lights blinking from out of the darkness.
The lines of Amy’s brow deepened. What could Raphael be doing at home that required so much computer power?
Amy stepped back out into the corridor and looked towards the door of Raphael’s office. One trait both Raphael and his father shared was the inability to cease working even when they had returned home. If she would find Raphael anywhere, it was there.
Except...something wasn’t right. It wasn’t anything she could put a finger on; rather, her skin prickled as if all the angles of the corridor and the surrounding house were subtly wrong.
Voices came from downstairs, and Amy heard someone ascending the same steps she’d climbed only moments before. One voice was recognizably Raphael’s.
Gripped by a sudden panic, Amy stepped back into the server room, easing the door most of the way shut. If she were to confront Raphael, she would rather do it when he was alone and away from his security detail.
Moments later, she glimpsed Raphael stepping past the server room and on down the corridor.
He was, she saw with relief, quite alone.
Another second passed, and Amy heard the chime of an electronic lock followed by the sound of a door opening. She waited a beat, then eased the server room door the rest of the way open and slipped back out into the corridor.
The door to Raphael’s office, at the far end of the corridor, now stood ajar.
It was now or never.
Steeling herself for a confrontation, Amy stepped quietly towards the half-open door, noting that the light coming from within was dazzlingly bright.
Her sense of wrongness intensified, enough so that she hesitated for a moment before continuing.
Moving soundlessly, Amy stepped around the half-open door and looked into Raphael’s office.
Except it wasn’t an office any more. Instead, she saw something that more closely resembled a high-tech surgery.
Raphael stood across the room from Amy, his back to her and his attention focused on a large, adjustable hospital bed. The bed had been raised, but Raphael blocked her from seeing if there was anyone in it.
If there was, they were hidden from her sight, beneath a vast tangle of what looked to Amy like thousands of glistening, almost organic-looking tendrils, drooping down from immensely complicated-looking machinery suspended from the ceiling directly overhead.
Amy shuddered inwardly. The machinery looked almost alive, somehow, like some vast, synthetic anemone. The tendrils twitched from time to time, many looking as fine as threads.
The breath caught in her throat when Raphael stepped past the bed and towards a shelving unit. He took down a box and reached into it, taking out what even she recognized as a proxy applicator.
Now that Raphael had moved away from the bed she could now see that it was, in fact, occupied, by a small and frail-looking figure. Much of the upper part of the figure’s head was concealed by the tangle of thread-like tendrils, but the face was, she realized with a shudder of horror, quite recognisable beneath its oxygen mask.
It was David Markov…or, judging by what she could see, what remained of him.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
AMY
It took Amy another moment to understand what she was seeing.
David Markov’s skull lay open, its interior seemingly packed with the thread-like tendrils descending from the apparatus suspended above his bed. As if, thought Amy, someone had wired him directly into the monstrous machinery above him.
Raphael, still unaware he was being watched, turned back towards the bed. Amy automatically moved back from the door, but he still didn’t see her, so intently focused he seemed to be on whatever he was doing.
She peered cautiously back around the door and saw her ex-husband lean over the prone, ruined body of his father. With growing consternation, she watched as he placed the proxy applicator against the old man’s neck.
Then he stood back up and repeated the operation, this time placing a second bead in the applicator and firing it into his own neck.
As much as she’d tried to avoid thinking about such things over the years, Amy by now understood the basic principle by which proxy worked. It had become such a ubiquitous technology that avoiding news about it had become almost impossible. She also knew that David Markov had been in a reportedly vegetative state for years now. She had long presumed David’s Catholic faith was the only reason he’d kept the old man’s body in this state of prolonged misery.
She had also presumed the elder Markov was being kept in some hospice far from Raphael’s sight, but instead he was right here, in the family mansion.
The revelation came slowly, but with building force as the disparate parts of the mystery welded together in her mind.
If Raphael was proxying with his father David…then the man standing before her wasn’t Raphael at all, but David Markov proxying through his son’s body.
How long, she wondered, had the old man been proxying through his son, her ex-husband? How, given David Markov had supposedly been reduced to a vacant, mindless shell, was it even possible?
Even as these thoughts raced through Amy’s mind, she took notice of the look on the old man’s face. Rather than lacking in expression as she might have expected, his lips moved soundlessly behind his oxygen mask, his face twisted up in an expression of anguish and horror.
Only then did she fully accept the truth of it, that Raphael was in there somewhere, trapped in the horrific wreck of his father’s body. And for how long?
Raphael, meanwhile, had moved back around the bed and towards a computer monitor sitting on a counter.
Somehow Amy found the wherewithal to raise her left arm and use her bracelet to snatch a brief video of the scene before her. Then she stepped quietly back from the door into the corridor, her lungs aching in her chest.
Any desire she’d felt to confront Raphael—no, she reminded herself; the man she had thought was Raphael—fled. Now, she wanted only to warn someone.
Retreating as quietly as she could, Amy slipped back inside the server room and put in a call to Ray Thomas.
As incredible as it seemed, so much that had happened over the years since her divorce made far more sense if David Markov had been in control of Raphael’s body for much, if not all of that time. He’d ceased to travel abroad for business, spending most of his time between his home here and his offices in London.
A lot of people had made the exact same decision in the wake of three pandemics, so it was hardly unusual. But perhaps there was another reason Raphael had given up travelling: a proxy session lasted four or five hours at most, which meant David couldn’t have risked straying too far from his true body. He’d have had no choice but to renew the proxy link at regular intervals, up to five or six times daily.
The more she thought about it, the more it made sense...and the more it made her skin crawl. David Markov had found a way to keep control of his company, and for the first time in a very long time she felt something approaching sympathy for her ex-husband.
Nobody—not even Raphael—deserved what he was suffering through.
“Miss Cotter?”
Amy nearly let out a gasp when she heard Thomas’s voice in her ear. “Raphael isn’t Raphael,” she blurted in a hurried half-whisper, moving deeper into the server room and turning her back to the door. “He’s really David, his father. I think he’s been proxying with Raphael all these years.”
“What?” Thomas sounded befuddled. “Miss Cotter, you’re not making any sense. Can you please repeat that?”
“It’s Raphael,” Amy repeated, touching her bracelet and sending the video she’d taken to Thomas. “I’m at his estate. He’s—”
Behind Amy the door burst open, and a figure moved swiftly towards her, clamping one hand over her mouth and dragging her backwards out into the corridor. Thomas’s voice sounded tinnily from her bracelet, demanding to know what was going on.
A fist slammed into Amy’s stomach. Rough hands held her upright, even though she wanted to double over from the pain. Then whoever had hold of her let her go, and she collapsed onto the floor of the corridor.
She crouched, coughing and spluttering and trying desperately to suck air into her lungs.
“Good job, Arthur,” she heard Raphael say. “You can go now.”
“But, sir—?”
“Now,” Raphael said, more firmly this time. “And you saw none of this. Understood?”
“Sir,” said Arthur, and she heard the sound of boot heels retreating along the wooden floor of the corridor.
She tried to get back up, but a foot slammed her back down. “Stay where you are, Amy.”
“You’re not Raphael,” she said, her voice barely more than a harsh croak.
“I think,” said David Markov, “what with Stacy nearly being murdered and kidnapped by unknown assailants, you’ve been through more mental stress than you can cope with.”
“How could you do this to your own son?” she rasped. “How could anyone do that to another human being?”
At last she was able to lift her gaze sufficiently to meet the eyes of the man standing over her. He had something in his hands.
David Markov, as she now knew him to be, leaned down until they were almost face-to-face. “I think,” he continued, “that it’s quite understandable how all this stress made you want to kill yourself. It’s a terrible tragedy.”
She tried again to get upright, and once again she was slammed back down. Then Markov kneeled on her back, forcing her flat even as she struggled and twisted and fought.
Then something pressed against the back of her neck, followed by a sudden, sharp sting.
“Miss Cotter? Hello?”
Ray stared at his bracelet, perplexed and suddenly, deeply worried. He tried again to call her, but without success.
Ahead of him, through the windscreen, he could see Finch’s car. At first Finch had driven aimlessly, but now he appeared to be moving with purpose, heading deeper into the countryside.
Raphael isn’t Raphael, Amy had said. He’s David.
Christ, he thought. It was impossible. Not when the old man had apparently been vegetative for years.
His bracelet blinked, drawing his attention. A glance at his wrist revealed that Amy Cotter had sent him a video file shortly before they’d been cut off. He pushed it onto the hire’s dashboard and let it run while he kept one eye on the road and one hand on the manual steering wheel.
He watched with increasing horror as Raphael Markov—or at least, the man he’d always believed to be Raphael Markov—leaned over the still-breathing body of his father and injected it with a proxy bead.
Ray swallowed to try to get some moisture back into his suddenly bone-dry mouth. Lifting his bracelet to his mouth, he called another number.
“Emergency services,” said a brisk professional voice. “Which service do you—?”
“I’m concerned for the safety of a woman named Amy Cotter, formerly Amy Markov,” he said, cutting the man off. “She’s at the country estate of Raphael Markov, the head of Telop Industries. She’s his ex-wife. I have reason to believe her life is in serious and imminent danger.”
Ray ended the call and swore in the close, hot confines of the cheap little hire. He’d have to get rid of the bracelet.
What the hell had Amy been thinking, going anywhere near Raphael Markov at a time like this?
Or the man they’d all thought was Raphael, if he could believe what he’d just seen.
Slowly Ray began to realize just how much he had underestimated Amy Cotter. She’d shown considerable guts and intelligence by getting so close to Markov. And if the police responded in time, David Markov—if it really was him—might think twice about harming her.
For a moment he thought about abandoning his pursuit of Finch and going to her aid. But it would take hours to get to the Markov estate—much too late to be of use.
Up ahead, Finch took a right. Ray turned the wheel to follow, his thoughts a whirl of confusion and revelation.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
DAVID
Once he’d had Amy dealt with, David Markov boarded an air taxi parked on a broad expanse of lawn next to the Markov family mansion. His consciousness was secure inside Raphael’s skin for at least the next six days, thanks to the hopscotch proxy he and Finch had developed.
The taxi rose into the air, banking over the forest and rising high enough for London to become visible on the horizon. As he settled back, David relished, as he had so many times over the years, the strong muscles and taut, smooth skin of his stolen body.
Twenty minutes into his journey, Lovatt squirted a message to him that came with several video attachments. David displayed them on the curving interior of the taxi’s windscreen and watched as a dark-skinned man walked in and out of the Abbey Rush Treatment Centre several times over the course of a day, on one occasion accosting Finch as he entered the building.
Lovatt had already identified the man responsible for threatening Zachary Finch, but David recognized him on sight: Ray Thomas, the Metropolitan Detective Inspector who’d refused to take a bribe to keep that little bitch Stacy Cotter from dragging the Markov’s name through the mud. The scandal had cost Telop hundreds of millions in plummeting share values.
Was it possible, he wondered, that Thomas had found out about their experiments on patients using hopscotch? Or had something else brought Finch to his attention?
A little while later, another message came through: his technical staff had traced Amy Cotter’s call to a bracelet that most likely belonged to Ray Thomas.
