Proxy, page 4
Tip turned and disappeared back into the office kitchen. Ray watched through the door as the private investigator pulled open one kitchen cupboard after the other at the same time that he spoke to his contact at the Metropolitan police.
He ended the call and came back through, grasping a roll of paper towels which he tossed underhand onto Ray’s lap.
“Get that mess cleaned up,” he said, his mouth twisted up in disgust, “then I’ll make you a cup of tea and you can tell me all about it.”
Ray ripped a fistful of paper from the roll and cleaned up as best he could before carrying the sodden mess through to the toilet and flushing it away. He rinsed his face and mouth at the sink and resisted the urge to check for bruises that he could still feel, even if they weren’t on his own body.
By the time he re-emerged from the toilet, Tip had prepared a bucket of soapy water. He handed it to Ray along with a scrubbing brush.
Ray just stared back at him.
“Come on Ray,” said Tip, looking aggrieved. “You’ve met the landlord. Just imagine how much more of a total pain in the arse he’ll be if that linoleum gets stained.”
Ray glowered and snatched the brush out of Tip’s hand. Then he got to work scrubbing and mopping with more paper towels.
At least it kept him from thinking too much about what he’d just been through. Once he’d finished, he collapsed into a chair next to a scarred metal desk and watched as Tip took a seat across from him.
“There you go,” said Tip, handing him a fresh mug of tea.
Ray took a sip. The tea was lukewarm and had enough sugar in it to stun a horse.
“I could tell Harry was onto me,” said Ray, putting the mug back down with a grimace, “even before I got face-to-face with Stokes.”
“Ah.” Tip eyed him speculatively and not without a hint of sympathy. “So how did you wind up vomiting all over my nice clean office?”
“They waterboarded me.”
Tip’s eyes widened slightly. “Could have been worse,” he said. “At least they didn’t go after your—well, Marky’s—nuts with a pair of pliers.” He licked his lips. “Did you…tell them anything?”
“I told them my real name,” Ray admitted.
Tip stared back at him with a mixture of fury and astonishment. “For fuck’s sake, Ray!”
“You ever proxy with someone, Tip?”
The other man visibly shuddered. “Christ, no. You know I haven’t. That’s what you’re here for.”
“Being tortured under proxy feels exactly the same as if they were doing it to my own body. Stokes knew exactly what he was doing. He knew I’d tell him anything to make him stop.”
Tip gnawed at the knuckles of one hand. “And did you tell them anything about me?”
“No,” Ray said with all sincerity. Although in truth, if Stokes had expressed an interest in that information, he wouldn’t have hesitated to provide it. “The proxy session ended before he could ask anything more.”
“Just your name?”
“That, and some details you told me about the case and what the Met has on file about Stokes.”
“Shit.” Tip balled one hand into a fist and pressed it against his mouth. “That’s on me, I think. It’d have been smarter not to tell you anything.” He sat back in his chair, thinking as he stared at the ceiling. “Let’s just see if they corner Stokes or not, then figure our way forward from there.”
And if they don’t? Ray wanted to ask. Instead, he stood, feeling wobbly on his legs.
“I’m going home,” he said. As he turned towards the door, he paused and looked back at the private investigator. “You’ll try not to be late with my fee this time, yeah?”
Tip gave him a look as if the very idea he might be less than prompt in such matters was inconceivable. “Of course it won’t be late,” Tip huffed, pulling a pair of spectacles out of a pocket and sliding them onto his nose. He tapped a small button on the side of the spectacles and reached out to touch a screen visible only to him. “Good work, Ray,” he added distractedly, then paused and looked over at him. “I mean it. I couldn’t do what you do in a month of Sundays.”
Ray did his best to ignore the implied suggestion that this only proved how much smarter Tip was. He stepped out through the front door of the P.I.’s office and into a narrow corridor with a stairwell at one end and a window at the other.
Walking over to the window, he pressed his forehead against the cold glass and closed his eyes for a moment. Stories abounded of proxy investigators winding up with severe psychological damage. The number of suicides wasn’t exactly cheering either.
Long ago, Ray had promised himself he’d never become one of those stories; but today had been worse than most.
Once he’d made his way back outside and onto the London streets, Ray touched his bracelet and called a cab. One pulled up to the kerb just moments later; it looked surprisingly intact for this part of London, or at least, none of its windows were broken. Then again, the graffiti that covered nearly the whole of the vehicle’s exterior, including the windows, made it just about impossible to see what horrors might lie within.
As it turned out, however, the interior was in perfectly fine condition. Ray collapsed into the rear of the taxi, his bracelet emitting a faint chime as the cab deducted his fare. There was a bottle of Glenlivet waiting for him at home—one he’d been keeping especially for a day like this.
Maybe if he could drink himself to sleep, there’d be less chance of him waking up screaming in the middle of the night.
It didn’t work.
Later that night, Ray jerked upright in bed, each breath coming fast and hard. He’d dreamed he was drowning, trapped, at the bottom of a deep well, his lungs cold and heavy, invisible hands reaching up to drag him down into ink-dark depths.
His bracelet, lying on its charging point on the bedside table, buzzed again. Good news, he knew from long experience, never arrived in the middle of the night.
Even so, he mumbled a voice command, and the bracelet changed from red to green.
“Hello?” Ray said, slipping the bracelet onto his wrist.
“Mr Thomas?”
Ray had expected to hear Tip’s voice. Instead it was that of a woman. A glance at the screen of his bracelet showed him that the call was anonymous and encrypted.
“Who is this?” Ray demanded, his voice sharp.
The woman took so long to reply he started to think she might have hung up.
“My name is Cotter,” she said at last. “Amy Cotter.”
Christ, thought Ray. It can’t be her.
Ray forgot all about the pain and trauma of the day before and sat up, suddenly alert. “Do you usually call people in the middle of the night, Miss Cotter?”
“My apologies,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “But I wouldn’t be calling unless it was an emergency.”
An emergency? What kind of emergency had the ex-wife of Raphael Markov calling him in the middle of the night?
“Tell me what it is, Miss Cotter.”
“It’s about Stacy, Mr Thomas.” He heard a catch in her voice, like she was struggling to keep from crying. “It’s about my daughter.”
CHAPTER
THREE
ISAAC
“Mr Sizemore?”
Isaac squinted into the light from a lamp placed in the middle of the desk between him and the man addressing him. The light was blinding—intentionally so, since the lamp had been angled to shine directly into Isaac’s eyes. The rest of the room was layered in shadows.
A name floated up from the depths of Isaac’s memory: Finch.
Yes, he remembered now—the man addressing him was called Finch.
Why, he wondered, was it so hard to remember anything? Why did his every thought feel as if it were shrouded in thick, grey fog?
“Isaac,” Finch asked again, leaning forward and into the light. He had thinning brown hair, his narrow features twisted in a contemptuous scowl. “Answer the question.”
Yes, thought Isaac; he was beginning to remember Finch now. They had met before like this, hadn’t they? And they had known each other before as well, a long time ago.
Finch glanced at a sheet of smart-paper on the desk separating them, reading something scrawled there. “Lewis,” he asked, looking up and past Isaac’s shoulder with a frown, “how much did you give him?”
“Exactly what you told me to,” said a voice from behind Isaac.
Isaac felt his eyelids grow heavy, his head tipping forward on his shoulders.
“Isaac,” Finch barked. “Please stay awake.”
Isaac forced his eyes back open with reluctance. He tried to raise a hand to keep the light from shining in his eyes, but found he couldn’t. Glancing down, he saw that his wrists were bound with leather straps to the armrests of a wheelchair.
That seemed strange. Or did it? He had been strapped into this wheelchair before, hadn’t he? How many days had he been here…wherever here was?
He looked back up in time to see Finch eyeing him with a look akin to hunger. Finch leaned back again, his face fading to a barely perceptible silhouette behind the desk lamp.
“Our last talk together didn’t go so well, did it, Isaac?”
Gripped by inexplicable panic, Isaac twisted his wrists inside their restraints, desperate to get free. But the straps were tight—excessively so—and it hurt. A lot.
But the more he twisted them, and the more it hurt, the more clearly he seemed able to think.
“That’s not my name,” he said. His tongue felt thick and unwieldy in his mouth.
Finch made a clucking sound in the back of his throat. “We’re back to that, I see.”
“My name is…”
Isaac tried to focus. But his name was Isaac, wasn’t it?
Confusion flooded him.
Or was his name Dominic Fiori?
Suddenly he wasn’t sure what to think.
Rows of lights flickered behind Finch’s head, drawing Isaac’s attention. He squinted into the shadows and the lights resolved into a mobile medical monitor. It sat against the wall behind Finch. Graphs flickered and shifted on its screen.
Isaac could always think more clearly when it came to machines. They were, he had found, so much simpler than people. Judging by what he could see, the machine was measuring someone’s heart-rate and skin conductivity. His, presumably; Finch must be using the monitor as a crude lie detector.
He twisted his wrists a little more, trying not to look obvious about it. The leather tore his skin and he bit back a sharp hiss of pain.
The clouds fogging his mind parted a little.
“Were you about to say Dominic Fiori?” Finch asked him.
Isaac nodded. “Yes.”
“You have a driving licence in that name,” Finch replied. “And a birth certificate. But they’re fake. Your real name is Isaac Sizemore. You were one of Telop’s star researchers until you disappeared.”
Another twist of his hands inside their restraints, and Isaac stifled a grunt. He felt warm blood trickle down one wrist, invisible in the shadows.
Yes, he remembered Finch more clearly now; a jumped-up research assistant always waiting for a chance to get in tight with both Raphael Markov and his father, David Markov.
Waiting, Isaac had always suspected, for him to slip up.
Another memory came flooding back, from what must have been only days before. He’d blown a tyre on a lonely midnight road somewhere in the Scottish Highlands. Halfway through changing it, an unmarked van had pulled up next to him. Two men wearing plastic Halloween masks had got out and grabbed him before he could so much as stand up. One had pushed something into his shoulder and then—
And then he was here.
“I want,” Finch continued, “to know why you left your job at Telop so abruptly all those years ago.” He paused. “And why you did what you did.”
“Did what?”
“I’m talking about proxy, Isaac. Stop playing games. We were colleagues once. Equals. I’d like us to be again.”
“You were never my equal,” Isaac snarled. “I remember you. You never had one original idea in your life.”
Isaac could still only half-see Finch’s expression in the shadows, but he nonetheless caught the glint of barely repressed fury on his interrogator’s face.
“Raphael,” Finch continued, his tone carefully neutral, “has invested heavily in the attempt to track you down. You did valuable work for him and his father, and then you threw it all away for nothing. He wants to know why.” He glanced back down at his notes. “He also wants to know why you arranged to meet with some journalist.”
Isaac’s mind seemed much clearer now—and not just, he sensed, because of his self-inflicted wounds. He twisted his head around to try to see the orderly still standing behind him. Had the man given him a lower dosage of amobarbital than he had overheard Finch instructing him to?
Yes, Isaac decided. He must have. And if so…why?
In that same moment, and while Finch was distracted by whatever was on the sheet of smart paper, the orderly stepped forward until he was standing next to Isaac’s wheelchair. When Isaac glanced up at him, the man gave Isaac the faintest conspiratorial nod.
Isaac stared back up at the orderly, dumbfounded, then felt an electric shock of realisation pass through him.
My God, he thought, quickly looking back down at the desk before Finch could see his expression: had Zero found a way to proxy with the orderly?
“Isaac?” Finch asked, clearly noticing something in his expression. “What is it?”
Isaac brought his chin back up, regarding Finch through narrowed eyes. “I would rather die,” he said carefully, “than do anything for the Markov’s ever again.”
The muscles around Finch’s jaw tensed. “That’s unfortunate,” he said. “Especially since we found it necessary to waylay Stacy on her way to meet the very journalist she’d arranged for you to talk to.”
Isaac felt himself grow rigid. “What are you talking about?”
“Let’s just say that an…associate of Raphael’s intercepted Stacy. What happens to her next depends largely on your cooperation, Isaac.”
“She…” Isaac swallowed with difficulty, his lips and throat bone dry. “Where is she?” He demanded, straining against the cuffs.
A greasy smile spread across Finch’s lips. “I think that’s enough for now. I’m sure the next time we meet you’ll be much more open to talking.” He glanced at the orderly. “Lewis, take him back to his room. Then I need you back here.”
“Sir,” said Lewis.
Isaac heard a door open behind him, then hands took hold of the wheelchair’s handles, spinning it around before pushing it through the door.
“Zero?” Isaac whispered once they were out in the corridor.
“Not yet,” the orderly warned him in a low voice. “I’ll come and speak to you later.”
Joy flooded Isaac’s chest and his cheeks grew damp from his tears. “I’m so glad to see you,” he said. “How did you—?”
“Later,” Zero promised him.
Later that night, Isaac woke to darkness and sensed he wasn’t alone. He sat up on his cot and saw a silhouette standing at the open door of his room, a collection of keys hanging from one meaty hand.
The man stepped further into the room and Isaac saw it was indeed Lewis.
But was Zero still proxying with the orderly? It had been hours since their brief snatch of conversation following Finch’s interrogation. Surely by now, Zero’s proxy link with the man would have run out?
“Zero?” Isaac asked regardless, his throat dry and scratchy.
“It’s me, Doctor Sizemore,” the orderly whispered in response. “I need to get you out of here as soon as possible.”
“Not yet,” said Isaac, levering himself up from the cot. “Close the door so we aren’t overheard. How did you even find me here?”
Zero did as he was told and shut the door before turning on the light. The room contained five other cots, all empty.
“After you disappeared,” Zero explained, “I hacked into several security databases and tracked down the licence plate of the van that took you. The van is registered to this institute, the Abbey Rush Treatment Centre.”
“And how did you manage to proxy with Lewis Finnegan?”
“I accessed this facility’s security network and ran an analysis going back six months that strongly suggested Mr Finnegan had been availing himself of medical supplies from secure storage cupboards and selling them for a profit,” Zero explained. “I emailed him anonymously and told him I wouldn’t go to the police so long as he agreed to proxy with me at certain prearranged times and places. He agreed. I contacted a local proxy dealer via the darknet, and had a proxy bead delivered to his home with instructions for when and how to inject it.”
Isaac couldn’t figure out whether to be appalled or amazed at Zero’s ingenuity and ability to improvise a solution to his kidnapping. “That’s…that’s very good, Zero,” he said with sincere appreciation. “Even so, it’s important to me that no one is hurt as a result of our actions. Not even someone as unpleasant as Lewis Finnegan.”
“Of course not,” Zero replied. “I would never deliberately injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to—”
“You don’t need to explain to me, of all people,” Isaac reassured him. “Now tell me what you know about Stacy. Is she safe? What has Raphael done with her?”
“I know very little on that front, Doctor Sizemore. And I can’t ask Doctor Finch too many questions without arousing his suspicions. But I believe an attempt to kidnap or otherwise harm Stacy was made shortly after she arrived in London. However, that’s largely conjecture on my part.”
“And the source of your conjecture?”
“An overheard phone conversation between Doctor Finch and someone I assume to have been Raphael Markov. From that I deduced they had paid someone to kidnap Stacy. The tone of the conversation and Finch’s wording suggested this attempt hadn’t gone to plan, but again I lack any details beyond that.”
