The Victoria Vanishes (37 page)

'They showed us the paperwork,' said Jackie Quinten.
All of the babies had been signed over to the state by their mothers. One was an orphan whose parents had died travelling to Britain from Ethiopia. Another was abandoned in a McDonald's bag by heroin
addicts. Everyone I spoke to at
Theseus was committed to helping the children. They told us it would just be one safe short-term drug trial. I saw them every day. Harold Masters saw me with the little Ethiopian boy and said, "You could always adopt him when he leaves here." But I couldn't, you see. I'd been turned do
wn before, af
ter some trouble with my stepson. And Jocelyn had faced problems with alcoholism. None of us thought we could truly adopt, not for a minute, but we grabbed at the opportunity to look after the babies during the day, and were paid a little extra.

'It was Carol's baby that got sick first. He started crying and couldn't stop, until he could
barely draw breath. It all hap
pened so quickly, on the third and fourth days of the test. One after the other they went blue—cyanosis, the doctor said— and their little hearts just stopped. They held a single funeral on the Friday, just hours after the last autopsy. A terrible afternoon. It didn't stop raining, and the graves couldn't be filled in because of flooding. We were never told what had gone wrong. We were paid our bonuses, reminded of our loyalties to the company, and that was that.

'But I couldn't stop thinking about my little boy. I had to talk to someone, and so I
called Jocelyn. One time we per
suaded Carol and Joanne to join us, and shortly after that we began holding regular meetings in different pubs.'

'It got back to Theseus that you had re-formed your group of friends,' said May. 'It looks like Masters sold you out for a contract to fix the security leak.'

'But we wouldn't have gone to the press,' said Jackie miser-ably.
'We just needed the comf
ort of conversation, some assur
ance that we weren't responsible for what had happened. What I don't understand is, how could they take such drastic action against us?'

'Well, I'm afraid even we can't te
ll you that,' said Bryant, ris
ing to leave.
'I'll call on you again.'

'I'll be going home in a while,' said Jackie. 'If you like, I can cook you a meal and help you answer any other questions you might have.'

'Thank you, no.' Bryant smiled sadly.
'Our work is not quite finished.'

'She doesn't understand how anyone can conceive of killing witnesses to what amounted
to a humanitarian defence proj
ect,' said May as they left University College Hospital,
'because she doesn't know who commissioned it. Masters said it went all the way to the top. I can guess whose signature was on the order to test the anti-toxin. Did you know Theseus is an Anglo-American operation? There's a chap called Senator Nathan Maddock who fits the bill very nicely. A hard-line right-winger with the ear of both the President and the Prime Minister, the man who tells British Defence what to do. But I don't think even he would have agreed to act without Masters's assurance that the remedy was completely untraceable.'

'What level of panic woul
d induce a company used to han
dling state defence contracts to hire the services of a mental patient?' Bryant wondered as they walked through falling rain toward May's car. 'Didn't they stop to consider how many things could go wrong in that scenario?'

'You can look at it this way,' said May.
'Theseus survives.'

'Only because we'll never be allowed to go public with the story. We don't even have a unit anymore.'

'And we can't go public, Arthur, because nobody there will ever acknowledge what happened, even if any one person had possession of all the facts.'

'They
know,
John. And we could let them know that
we
know. We could get in there.'

'No, no, no.' May shook his head in vehemence. 'We have nothing left, Arthur. As of this
minute, we have no official sta
tus. What are you going to do, kick the door down and blast everyone with a shotgun?'

'You just said we have no official status. We're off the radar.' Bryant was forced to shout in order to compete with the traffic on Euston Road.
'This may require guerrilla tactics.'

'Don't you think you're a little too old to be thinking about bringing down the government?' asked May.

'I've been thinking about it all my life,' said Bryant with a twinkle in his eye.
'Might as well go out with a bang.'

47

pandora's box

A
rthur Bryant passed two six-foot butterflies and a red rubber nurse tottering on platform heels before he started to wonder if he really was hallucinating this time.

On Sunday morning at eight o'clock, the only people on the streets of King's Cross were backpackers leaving their hostels and thematically dressed denizens of a large nightclub, all of whom looked very much the worse for wear.

The courtyard door leading to the refurbished office complex behind York Way had been left discreetly ajar by the overqualified Polish cleaners who nightly restored workspaces to their functional glory. Slipping inside, Bryant crossed the new cobblestones and once more found himself before the gates of Theseus Research.

What an arrogant name,
he thought, peering through the bars at the brushed-steel logo adorning the sea of darkened glass before him.
Theseus was both mortal and divine. His father, Poseidon, was the god of the ocean. Appropriate, considering that Dr Peter Jukes had been washed up on shore, a victim of its turbulent currents.

Bryant had studied the tidal charts and suspected that, as much as he wanted to blame Theseus, suicide could not be ruled out. He supposed no-one would ever get to the absolute truth surrounding Jukes's death.
Such is the path of vigilance,
he thought.
Each single mystery precipitates a dozen more. Then again, Theseus was thrown off a cliff after losing his popularity, so perhaps the company directors might find it best not to behave too much like gods.

Mandume, the Namibian guard, was in his usual place. Providing twenty-four-hour s
ecurity for Theseus Research re
quired three men, but Bryan
t had calculated the shifts cor
rectly. His obvious respect for the security officer and his performance of general doddery politeness stood him in good stead. Mandume saw him and smiled, happy to approach. He even opened the gate slightly to chat.

'Hi there. Any luck with your walking club?'

'We've decided to reroute our tour through another part of town, but thank you for asking. I missed you yesterday, when I came to visit my grandson.'

'My day off,' the guard told him.
'I went to visit my little boy. He lives with his mother.'

'It's difficult to know where to take the kids sometimes, isn't it?' said Bryant, as if he had any clue at all about children and divorced parents.

'He likes dinosaurs, so we went to the Natural History Museum. You know that place?'

'Certainly, I've been there many times. I daresay they shall put me there when I retire. A joke.' The guard had looked blank, but now smiled.
'Why don't you bring your boy here to see where his father works? I'm sure he'd be interested.'

Mandume's smile vanished.'No, no, not here.'

He's heard something,
thought Bryant.
Secrets have a way of es
caping.
'When I came here yesterday I stupidly forgot to leave my grandson's christening gift. His wife gave birth to a baby boy. I wonder, could I go and leave it on his desk? It would only take a moment.'

'Where is your grandson today? Could you not give it to him yourself?'

'No, he has to visit his wife in hospital, and they're not al-lowed to use cell phones inside, so I can't call him.'
The lies,
he thought,
they trip from the tongue so easily I'm almost ashamed of myself.

'Or if I can't leave it on his desk, perhaps you could. I'd be very grateful. No child's birth should go uncelebrated in the eyes of Our Lord, don't you agree?' For a fleeting moment, Bryant wondered if he was overdoing it.

Mandume looked so unc
omfortable that Bryant felt bad
about pushing him. 'I could le
ave it behind reception, in the
janitor's
room '

'But he may not get it then. He goes straight up to his desk from the car park. You know how things can go missing in a building this size.'
Time to show that you've got more front than Selfridge's,
thought Bryant.
'Look, I know you're not allowed to go to the laboratories. They are underground, aren't they, and require security passes. But I'm also a government employee, and I'll be happy to sign responsibility for the package myself.' He gave Mandume a fleeting glimpse of his police pass. 'You see, I'm actually a policeman. So surely you could go up to the second-floor reception desk and leave it there.'

The guard glanced back at the building nervously. Bryant knew it was bristling with cameras. 'Sure, I am allowed up there. I can go wherever I want.'

'Thank you, it's a small thing but he'll be so very pleased.' He passed the small, ribbon-tied box and card through the gate.

'Hey, no problem. You take care of
yourself.'

He trusts me,
Bryant thought guiltily as he turned away.

Paradoxically, the idea had come from Harold Masters himself, and his revelation at the beginning of the week that a crystal vial containing the blood of Christ was liable to hold germs that would be dangerous in a modern environment. It had set Bryant thinking, and reminded him that they were employing a man with connections in such a field.

Dan Banbury had done a brilliant job at short notice.
If he ever goes to the bad we'll all be in danger; the lad has a terrible knack for such things,
Bryant thought, eyeing the innocent package.

Going to the press about Theseus would require leaving a trail back to the PCU, so Dan
had suggested that an appropri
ate way to deal with the company was to send them a message showing that their secret was out. Inside the chocolate box was a soluble membrane filled with a colourless, odourless fluid. Banbury had whipped it up in Kershaw's lab from ordinary household ingredients, usi
ng a recipe detailed on an anar
chists' Web site.

It would take approximately five hours for the membrane to dissolve at room temperature, releasing the chemical through the slotted plastic base of the box. As it evaporated, the ex-posed oily particles would be
drawn into the working ventila
tion system and would cling to every surface inside the building.

The chemical components would induce mild nausea and vomiting, but would have no
lasting effect. However, the of
fices would need to be evacuated and quarantined while every-thing was cleaned. In a nice touch, Banbury had thought to include the photographs of the four women who had died because of what they knew. Res
ignations would no doubt be ten
dered, questions woul
d be asked and new brooms would
discreetly sweep clean, but u
ltimately the company would sur
vive.

As he walked away, it occur
red to Bryant that the only per
son to get hurt by his actions would be the guard.
They'll fire Mandume and remove his security status,
he thought gloomily.

48

the
last
fAreweLL

O
n the following Wednesday morning, Arthur Bryant stood motionless in the rain on Gray's Inn Road, watching the iridescent carapaces of black taxis chug past King's Cross station.

Beyond the railway tracks, cranes were moving girders with regal slowness, replacing the demolished Victorian housing blocks with vast glass boxes.
London is becoming an alien place to me,
he thought,
polyglot, splintered and patchwork. But I think I'm actually learning to like it this way. Perhaps we can finally be whoever we want to be.

Once there were recognis
able London types, ranks as dis
tinct and separate as bird families were to twitchers. They had been replaced by fluctuating, in
stinctive tribes. Now, the occu
pants seemed united by tension and velocity.