Something Coming Through, page 28
part #1 of Something Coming Series
‘Suppose I leave now?’ Fahad said.
‘I have the code to unlock the hatch. You don’t.’
‘Suppose you tell me what that is,’ Fahad said.
‘Suppose you calm down,’ Henry said, giving Fahad a flat unforgiving look.
Fahad glared back, hands knotted into fists. The two of them like little boys facing off in a playground.
Chloe said, ‘I think both of you should calm down.’
‘That’s it. Take his side,’ Fahad said.
‘I really, really don’t want to spend any more time in this stinky little can with you two. But Henry’s right. We have to sit tight until it’s safe to leave.’
‘Look on the bright side, kid,’ Henry said. ‘We only have to wait two days. It could have been a lot longer. We caught a lucky break with this holiday. Some of the people we smuggled up and out had to wait far longer before they could break out. Two days? It isn’t anything.’
Fahad started to say something, and Henry held up his hand. ‘No more discussion. The Prof paid for this trip; you agreed to go along with her plan. This is part of it.’
Chloe said, ‘If you can send text messages, I bet you can connect to the local internet, too. Give us that, at least.’
‘Good idea,’ Fahad said. ‘We can do some research on the local web.’
Henry held up his phone. ‘All this does is send and receive encrypted text messages via an HF rig in the chassis of the can. No voice transmissions, no email or web browsing…If you want to see what kind of porn Mangala offers, kid, you’ll have to wait until you can buy an actual phone.’
They could look out at the new world through the spyhole camera, at least. A view of stacks of shipping containers mostly, glimpses of men and women in high-vis vests and hard hats, cranes and big forklift trucks. The clanging sounds of containers being shifted, the deep vibrations of heavy vehicles going past. An arc of sky the colour of evening, trains of high thin clouds, unvarying light and shadows. Daylight here lasted as long as the planet’s year, thirty-one days, and the night was another year.
Fahad pulled out his sketch pad and drew the black room, tore off the page, drew it again. And again. He told Chloe that he was beginning to think it was important. ‘We have to find the spires. Where they were. And then we have to find this.’
Henry studied one of the cast-off drawings. ‘If this black room is inside a spire, then what’s inside the black room?’
‘I don’t even know if it’s a room,’ Fahad said.
Henry turned the sketch upside down. ‘Perhaps it’s a view of the inside of Pandora’s box. Or the inside of your head. A mess of tangled lines leading nowhere in particular.’
‘Perhaps it is the kind of thing where each person sees what they want to see,’ Fahad said.
Later, after Henry had drawn the curtain around his couch and gone to sleep, Fahad brought Chloe a cup of tea: a peace offering. They sat together, whispering. Fahad asked her if she trusted Henry.
‘He knows what he’s doing.’
‘I don’t mean can he do his job. I mean can we trust him?’
‘We both made a deal with Dr Morange,’ Chloe said. ‘And we both believe that she would keep to it, or we wouldn’t be here.’
‘But the thing is, she’s not here to make sure the bargain is kept. And if Mr Harris thinks that what I need to do will get in the way of what he has to do…You see?’
There it was again. His unappeasable need to avenge his father’s death. Henry had told him that when this was all over, after they’d found whatever it was that Ugly Chicken wanted them to find, he could go to the local police and tell them everything he knew. And when Fahad had shrugged, said that the English police had already let him down and the police on Mangala probably wouldn’t be any different, and besides, they’d probably arrest him, for being some kind of illegal immigrant, Henry had said that the Prof would make sure the bad guys stood up in court for what they’d done. ‘If the police blow you off, she’ll hire lawyers, private investigators. Whatever it takes.’
Fahad said now, to Chloe, ‘Besides the question of trust, I have doubts about this so-called plan. Dr Morange promises to help, but it turns out that she cannot protect Michel, and this Dr Babbel person cannot even organise a truck. And now we have to sit here and hope we aren’t found…’
‘It’s just a little hiccup,’ Chloe said. ‘And what you want to do, you can’t do it on your own.’
‘I am not crazy or foolish. I know what the people my father worked for are like. And even if I did not care about my own life, I must think of Rana. Who I had to leave behind, like a hostage. So don’t worry, okay? I’m not going to do something dumb. But the people who killed my father, they’re going to pay for it. I won’t give that up.’
His bristling toughness and naive vulnerability turned Chloe’s heart. Like Neil, like her, he’d had to grow up fast.
She said, ‘You need Henry and you don’t like it. But don’t forget that he needs you, too. If he could find this place without your help, you wouldn’t be here. Me neither. We’ll do the one thing, and then the other. I’ll make sure that Henry sticks to the deal. That’s why you asked me to come, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but was that me, or was it Ugly Chicken? And did you agree to come because you wanted to, or because he wanted you to?’
‘The scientists couldn’t find him in my head, so I guess it’s me.’
‘Just because they couldn’t find him doesn’t mean he isn’t there,’ Fahad said. ‘I thought I was using him to get what I want. That it was like a deal we had made. He used me; I used him. But now I’m beginning to wonder if you can bargain with something so old and clever and strange.’
Chloe asked him if he felt any different, now he was wearing the bead.
Fahad shook his head. ‘But that’s okay. Rana says that he’d been asleep when she found him, that she woke him up. Dr Morange told me that it was possible that he became imprinted on her. Like chicks – the first thing they see after they hatch, they think it’s their mother because that’s what they expect to see first. And if it’s something else, a person, a dog, they follow them around anyway. Or it could be that he was able to make a direct connection with Rana, her nervous system, her brain, because she wore him against her skin. She showed me, the doctor, differences in our brain scans, said that if I wore the bead all the time it was possible that he’d find a way to speak to me, too. She’s very smart, but even she doesn’t really know anything about him. Just guesses. I wonder what else he has done, how much he has changed me…But how could I ever know? How can I know which thoughts are mine, and which aren’t?’
The poor kid.
Chloe said, ‘One thing we do know, he’s making us itchy and impatient. Eager to get going, now we’ve brought him home. Angry and frustrated because of this delay.’
Fahad smiled. ‘So I should be patient, because it is a way of resisting him.’
‘I think we should make this thing our thing. We should do it because we want to do it.’
Fahad said, ‘Do you think he affects Henry, too?’
It was a good question. Chloe hadn’t thought about it before. Henry was a stubborn old geezer, practical, direct. She imagined that even his dreams were austere. Technical drawings of machine parts, battle plans with clashing arrows.
The day crawled by. Fahad retreated into his video games again. Henry woke up, did a hundred push-ups using his left arm, a hundred using his right. Chloe found it hard to sleep. The constant noise and vibration of heavy machinery outside; her thoughts racing around and around the same grooves.
The next morning, Henry used his phone and said that they would be out in a few hours. A little later he said, ‘Hear that?’
Fahad frowned. ‘I don’t hear anything.’
‘Exactly. The shift is over. It’s the holiday. Everyone in the city will be partying.’
They had already packed their go bags. They ate a last meal, tidied up and checked that they’d left nothing behind that could identify themselves. Henry tore up Fahad’s drawings and fed the pieces into the toilet.
And then there was nothing left to do but wait. At last, Henry’s phone beeped. He punched the code into the hatch’s lock, turned the wheel, swung it open. The cardboard cartons had shifted and toppled during the voyage; they had to restack them to clear a path to the doors of the container. Henry inserted a thin strip of aluminium in the gap between the doors, worked it up to the top and twisted, worked it to the bottom and twisted again. Something gave with a metallic snap, and Henry put his shoulder to one of the doors.
Cold air blew in, the air of another world. It smelled of iron and electricity.
38. The Shooter
Mangala | 30 July
Skip’s body had been found behind a boxy steel-framed storage shed at the edge of a ploughed field. Red dust scudded over the field, silting between the furrows, drifting across the service road. Long shadows everywhere, the crimson glare of the low sun.
Vic examined the splash of char where Skip’s hire car had been set alight. He hoped that his partner had been dead before he’d been tipped into the boot. It was a lousy way to go any way you cut it.
He said, ‘Where’s the car now?’
‘We store it behind the station,’ Karl said. ‘These electric cars do not burn as badly as those with petrol engines, but there was nothing left for forensics.’
‘Except the body.’
‘Well, yes. Of course.’
‘Any tyre tracks?’
‘The ground is too dry. There has been no rain here for more than ten days. The strange thing is,’ Karl said, ‘your friend was shot twice in the head at close range. We found both casings near the car: .38 Smith and Wesson Special. We also found some .45 ACP casings, and two .45 rounds recovered from the wall of the storage shed. The rounds lacked rifling marks. They were fired from a generic printed gun, perhaps.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘I hear there is a glut of them in Petra. Our local criminals mostly favour hunting rifles.’
Vic knocked that one right back. ‘You’d think someone visiting from the city to do a murder would stand out amongst the righteous farmers around here.’
‘Ordinarily, perhaps. But because of the storm all kinds of people have been passing through.’
‘That’s all you found, .45 ACPs and the two .38s? No nine-millimetre casings?’
Skip had been carrying a police-issue Glock 17, firing nine-millimetre Parabellum recoilless rounds.
Karl said, ‘You think perhaps your friend shot at his attackers? We did a grid search, and Chris swept the area with his metal detector. We found only what I told you. I’m sorry.’
‘Show me where you found these .45 ACPs.’
They walked along the access road to a spot by the ditch between the road and the edge of the field. Vic studied the ground, looked back towards the storage shed squatting under the mad red sky.
He said, ‘You found just the two rounds in the wall?’
‘As I said.’
‘And how many casings?’
‘Thirteen. The shooter fired off a full clip.’
‘I wonder what else he hit, apart from the side of that shed.’
‘I do not know what or who he hit,’ Karl said, ‘but I think someone hit him. We found blood spatter here, and a thin trail of it back towards those greasewood bushes. And someone broke into Doc Demirkan’s on the night your friend was killed.’
‘A medical surgery?’
‘Doc Demirkan is a veterinarian.’
‘Someone wanted to fix themselves up without troubling the medical authorities.’
‘I think so. One other thing you must know,’ Karl said, ‘is that we found a thumbprint on one of the casings. No one local. Or at least, no one local in our records.’
‘Did Skip mention that he was going to meet anyone?’
Karl shook his head. ‘No one called him while he was with me. According to the owner of the café, he ate alone and left alone. That was the last time anyone saw him.’
‘Apart from the bad guys, and this mysterious shooter. Maybe he arranged to meet Skip here, but the bad guys got to Skip first.’
Vic was thinking of John Redway’s friend. David Parsons. He saw Skip waiting in his car, saw him stepping out when another vehicle came along the service road, thinking it was the person he was supposed to meet. But it was the bad guys, shooting him as he came towards their car, then dumping his body in the boot of his car, setting fire to it. And meanwhile the man who had set up the meet, creeping along the ditch to get a view of what was going on, saw the bad guys climb into their vehicle, and raised up and shot at them as they went past…
He said, ‘There’s only one motel in town. It could be that the bad guys were watching it, saw Skip check in and recognised him, and decided they wanted to find out what he was up to.’
‘Or perhaps they were watching me, and saw me meet with your friend,’ Karl said. ‘I confess that I do not like that thought, but we must consider it.’
‘Because they could be watching us now.’
‘Of course.’
‘If they are,’ Vic said, ‘we might have a chance of finding them.’
They drove through town, west along the river to the location of the shootout, at the edge of a flat and empty field, near a copse of spiky white trees. The vehicles involved had been towed away, but Karl walked Vic through the scene. A Suzuki jeep had been badly shot up, windscreen starred and smashed; two RVs burned to charred frames squatting on tyre rims. They had still been burning when Karl and his husband and Winnetou’s volunteer fire team had arrived. Nothing they could do but let them burn out, Karl said.
One of the trees had burned, too. Standing stark black amongst its pale neighbours, shedding skirls of fine black ash into the wind. The river curved beyond the trees. There was a low building about a kilometre away in the other direction, nothing else but fields and patches of native vegetation fading into a brown haze.
‘There are two boats beyond the trees, at the edge of the river,’ Karl said. ‘Someone shot them up.’
‘It sounds like they shot everything up,’ Vic said.
‘Pretty much,’ Karl said. ‘We find nine-millimetre, .38 and .45 casings. And a good deal of 5.56 millimetre casings – at least one person had an assault rifle.’
‘And someone used the ray gun.’
‘Yes. That is what your partner called it. It set fire to one of the trees, and a little later was used to set fire to the RVs. We find four bodies in one,’ Karl said. ‘The fifth man we found later, at the docks.’
‘Is your witness reliable?’
‘Ove Lassen. Yes, of course.’
‘Is that a Swedish name?’
‘Danish. I know him well. A good man.’
‘He owns this place?’
‘He’s a neighbour. The owner and his wife have eight children, all under the age of ten. They drove upriver three days ago, after they harvested their produce. But they keep a few pigs, and Ove stopped by to feed and water them. He saw the vehicles in the fields, heard gunshots, and called it in.’
‘And he saw the ray gun in action.’
‘He said it was like a flash of intense blue light,’ Karl said.
‘Did he see who fired it?’
Karl shook his head. ‘He was about a kilometre away, and did not care to get any closer.’
‘Sensible man.’
Vic looked all around. A bleak, empty place. Someone had set up here, and someone else had got the jump on them. Drury v. McBride. Or McBride v. Drury.
They drove to Karl’s office and Vic fired up his tablet and brought up the image of the fingerprint card for David Parsons. The right thumbprint scored a ten-point match with the print pulled off the cartridge.
‘So this shooter is some kind of spy?’ Karl Schweda said, after Vic had explained about the two so-called businessmen. ‘He followed your friend down here?’
Vic said, ‘Or he followed the bad guys, then spotted Skip.’
They were sitting in the kitchen of the little apartment above the office and the two-cell jail now, eating Karl’s five-alarm chilli.
‘So where do you want to take this, Investigator?’
Vic forked up some chilli. Man it was hot, but in a good way. ‘It looks like we have two ways to go. There’s the shooter, David Parsons. And there are the people who killed my partner. Either they’re amongst the dead you pulled out of those RVs, or they’re long gone.’
‘You think downriver, to this Site 326.’
‘Possibly. Probably. But Parsons, if he’s hurt, might still be around. And it’s possible a couple of the bad guys are still here, too. Waiting to see who else turns up.’ Vic thought of the two women he’d seen boarding up a house, said, ‘How many empty properties are there, in and around town?’
‘Forty, more or less,’ Karl said. ‘Chris has made a list.’
‘Plenty of hiding places,’ Vic said. ‘Maybe you could print out that list. And a map would be good, too.’
39. Drive-Through McDonald’s
Mangala | 24 July
One by one they stepped out onto the surface of the planet: ordinary poured concrete, a bright yellow feathery weed caught in a crack, shivering in the chill breeze. The shuttle loomed above them, casting a vast shadow across container stacks and low buildings.
Chloe wondered if she should say something, some kind of small step/giant leap shit, but Henry was already leading Fahad to the far end of an aisle between two stacks, and she hurried after them. Her jacket turned red, then blue, then red again as she walked past different containers. A stocky man in a high-vis vest and a hard hat was waiting by a low-slung vehicle. John Cerdan, according to the ID badge clipped to his vest. Fahad hung back, saying he thought the contact was a woman; Cerdan said, ‘You mean the Doc? She waits outside. I take you to her, but you must do everything I tell you. For a start, put on these.’
They donned the vests and hard hats that he handed them, hung visitor badges strung on lanyards around their necks, and climbed into the vehicle. Cerdan drove at a good clip past row after row of containers, past a crane perched on four struts that each terminated in pairs of wheels with tyres taller than a man. Fahad wanted to know if their driver worked for Dr Morange?
