Truthseer Page 6

  Kit side-stepped, parried a vicious blow from another attacker and dropped him with a fist to the jaw. ‘I think he’s hiding behind the garbage bin near the gates.’

  Fin followed him at a run. They found the manager crouched miserably in the spilled garbage by the dumpster and dragged him back to the chaotic scene at the open rear doors.

  Kit kept a firm grip on his wrist. ‘Tell them to get everyone out before they’re all dead. You know where the damn thing really is.’

  ‘I’ll lose my job! I was given specific orders––’

  Kit dragged him through the doorway. ‘Tell them to let people out or we go all the way back to your office and have this discussion next to the bomb.’

  That did it. He told them. His security guards looked puzzled but obeyed. People started running in the direction of the open rear gates. A child discovered he’d become separated from his mother in the confusion of the fighting and ran back into the market looking for her.

  Kit went in after him.

  The explosion came in a blast of heat and noise that deadened hearing and flung bodies to the ground. The yard filled with smoke and rubble.

  10

  Jac’s transfer to the central clinic had gone a deal easier than her journey to the east side, probably because so many enforcers had been redeployed to the market. The clinic storeroom was similar to the one she’d just left, so she set up her tablet and handset next to the wall screen, forcing exhausted synapses back into heightened focus. Monitoring hacked enforcer messages wasn’t really what she wanted to do while Lizzie’s team needed help unpacking the extra bandages and sutures they feared they might need very soon.

  She made a list of the military commands; variations of, ‘Contain the crowd around the market to prevent terrorists reaching the security building to plant explosives.’ It confirmed her suspicions that the CO directing operations in the street was being deceived by someone further up the chain.

  Time seemed to drag with each passing minute, even as she dutifully noted the angry exchanges about smoke and crowds breaking through the cordon––

  Then, suddenly, all military personnel were recalled. No reason given and the messages abruptly cut off. Jac checked the time against the deadline Raine had passed on to her.

  They know! Every detail of the timing. Someone is ordering the enforcers out of harm’s way...

  She tried to call Raine in the forlorn hope that he might have another fragment of information that would make sense of all this, but the encrypted connection had gone down again. The sense of something being horribly wrong persisted in the empty silence that seemed to stretch from the cluttered room, past two city blocks to the street outside the market––

  She felt the shockwave as the doors and windows rattled in unison. Lizzie came through the door from the ward in a rush.

  ‘Was that it?’

  Jac looked round. Her hands were shaking. ‘I think it must be. All the enforcers were suddenly recalled two minutes ago and it felt wrong. They’d all been told to keep terrorists away from the security building, but someone at the top knew exactly when and where the thing was due to go off.’

  Lizzie made an effort to sound confident but it was wafer-thin now. ‘I’ve been setting up every bit of first-aid and trauma kit we have. We’ll be ready for any casualties the tigers bring in.’

  ‘I’ll come and help.’ Jac stood up and followed Lizzie out into the ward, the unspoken words hanging heavy between them.

  If our people are still alive to bring them here...

  Mechanically, Jac checked through the stacked equipment Lizzie had prepared. It looked woefully inadequate for the carnage she imagined they could be dealing with in a few minutes.

  The door from the adjacent vehicle garage opened and a blonde sixteen year old shuffled through in high-heeled shoes more suitable for dancing than shifting equipment. She was lugging a heavy box of medical supplies which she dumped on one of the tables with a groan.

  ‘Mirel!’ Jac gave the girl a welcoming hug, glad of a moment’s distraction.

  ‘Hey, Jac! I heard you were over here. Briefly, before heading back to your archaic woodland existence?’

  Jac waved a derisory hand at the piles of bandages. ‘Seems my stay in your sophisticated city just got extended. Did you see anything on your way here?’

  ‘No. I was helping transfer the new supplies Raine sent down from the Tarn. We felt the shockwave but we were behind a block of buildings.’

  Jac noticed the half-healed marks on Mirel’s arms, guessing they were legacy from the time she’d been attacked at the western checkpoint. She sensed a brittle edge to Mirel’s apparent banter and decided not to undermine the girl’s efforts to sound self-confident.

  ‘Mirel, how do you manage to always look so tidy?’ Jac waved a self-deprecating hand at her own set of shadow-coloured fatigues, borrowed from the store when she’d arrived.

  Mirel acknowledged the compliment with a wave of sparkly nail-polish. ‘I’m not that brilliant at the medical side of things so when I’m not hauling boxes I do the cheering-up bedside manner bit. Leaves the experts like Lizzie some space to be brusque and busy and hurry on to the next emergency. Still, compared to yesterday the ward seems to have calmed down. No new plague cases since they cleared out the rats––’

  An alarmed yell came from one of the volunteers in the adjacent garage. Jac ran towards the door, every nerve jangling with the certainty that events had caught up with intuition. Before she got there Razz pushed his way in past the nurses, carrying an unconscious woman whose leg dripped red through hastily-applied first-aid bandages.

  ‘Jac? Where?’ He looked wildly around the room.

  Jac pointed to the nearest empty bed, scooped up antiseptic, scalpel and sutures, and ran to his side. Razz laid the woman down, putting an extra twist in the tourniquet on her shattered leg.

  ‘Bomb just went off. More coming in.’

  ‘How many?’ Jac examined the ragged gash more closely as she cleaned it.

  Razz shook his head. ‘No idea. It was still all smoke and chaos when I left. I collected people from the street outside. We just grabbed the nearest and worst and brought them here. I haven’t seen the others who went round the back.’

  Jac looked up as more city-tigers came in with casualties. ‘This needs surgery beyond my skills––’

  Lizzie gripped her arm, pulling her away for one of the clinic surgeons to take her place. ‘Plenty you can do. Looks like Razz caught a bit of trouble.’

  Razz turned to leave. ‘It’s fine––’

  Lizzie stepped in front of him. ‘Not so fast! There’s plenty in your team so you can spare five minutes to get that arm patched before you go back.’ She pushed him into a chair. ‘Mirel! Give Jac a hand here.’

  Jac collected a first aid bag, glad to be back on familiar medic territory where she had the confidence and experience of six years’ training with her grandfather. Mirel started cleaning the bloody gash across Razz’s shoulder, her plastic apron not quite preventing splatters of red on the shiny pink dress underneath.

  Razz greeted Jac’s preparations with his familiar broad grin in spite of the pain. ‘Hey sister. I hear your amazing clairvoyant talents are still keeping us ahead of staz patrols?’

  Jac glanced at the deep slash on his arm, red oozing down dusky skin to drip off his finger ends. She reached for needle and sutures. ‘You’ll need six stitches in that. Right now my amazing clairvoyance is about as big a mess as my shopping was when I first met you. Hold still!’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh then. You can’t expect a shrimp like Mirel to keep someone my size still if you start makin’ jokes.’

  Mirel was still methodically mopping blood from his arm. ‘Rafael Aziz, that really is the nicest thing you’ve said all week. I was so worried I was puttin’ on weight.’ She kept up the inanities for a few more minutes, doing her best to distract him until the stitches were finished.

  While Mirel fiddled with gauze and ta
pe, Jac dropped the needle in a bowl of disinfectant and eased tired fingers.

  ‘Where did you collect that interesting cut?’

  Razz shrugged, wincing as he discovered it wasn’t the best thing to do with a newly-repaired shoulder. ‘Trying to get the last stragglers away from outside the glass doors when they blew out. I was lucky, I guess. I was shielded by a parked outlander jeep when it happened. Must have caught a glass fragment.’

  He heaved himself to his feet, picking up his torn jacket. ‘I have to get back. Don’t know how many more are still out there.’

  11

  Michael Parry stood a cautious few yards from the bench in the city park, staring down the street that ran through the city’s east side. The estuary with its long bridge and humped line of turbines lay beyond.

  The morning was overcast. Only a single pale ray of early sunlight filtered through the cloudbank to touch the grey water with a lone strip of yellow. Parry glanced uneasily over his shoulder. It was only a matter of time before someone noticed his deviation from routine to visit this place... but the street gave no hint that he’d been followed.

  It was the kind of park that didn’t gift much space to anything growing. Paved paths crossed and circled, linking access points from adjacent roads. Concrete benches intruded at regular intervals, masquerading as places of relaxation for a couple of dozen citizens if only they had leisure and inclination to use them. During his previous clandestine conversation with Raine there had only been one other person walking slowly through and now the place was deserted. Not surprising, really. Six twelve hour shifts each week didn’t give workers much time or energy for activities beyond basic survival.

  The light trapped between grey clouds and grey city concrete gave the few green patches in the park a kind of luminescence that seemed unnatural somehow. Every detail emerged etched in sharp layers, almost as if Parry were seeing them for the first time. He knew he was delaying because he didn’t want to start this conversation. It was going to be a conversation that would tell him in equally sharp and luminous detail how many well-meaning young dissidents he’d helped send to their deaths.

  It was like standing in a kind of purgatory, that in-between space preached by priests of the fragmented religions, the place where you waited anticipating the horrors of hell to come. He’d never really understood the need to invent a place like that for the afterlife when there were so many versions of it already in this one.

  The sequence of the day’s events kept replaying in his mind. All the alternative possibilities pushed themselves forward, mocking his decision to reject them. He could have challenged Burton, threatened to make public a strategy that pinned so many people in the danger zone by the glass doors. He could have rounded up a few enforcers from somewhere on perimeter detail, maybe convinced them he’d been transferred back to active duty, taken them in there to free the crowd.

  The real problem was the uncomfortable truth. The choice he’d made had protected his own career. Plausible deniability.

  He walked over to the bench, reached underneath for the hotspot socket he wasn’t even supposed to know about, plugged his illicit unregistered into the equally illicit analogue network used by the Resistance. How many more times would he be able to connect to the underground coms system before somebody noticed and reported him? What was the point of taking these risks if all he achieved was collusion in events beyond his control?

  Is it conscience––or is it just the hope that Raine might discover some news of Jess?

  He adjusted his fine-wire headset, heard Raine pick up.

  ‘It’s Michael. Did your people survive the explosion?’

  There was a dead silence before Raine answered. ‘I didn’t know it had gone off. As you’ve noticed, communications are unreliable at present.’

  ‘I’ll try to find out from this end.’ Parry knew the little he could offer by way of compensation was inadequate. ‘I heard they’re about to arrest everyone in that east side clinic of yours. Hygiene regulations. So get your medics out of there.’

  ‘Thanks for the warning.’

  ‘What I saw looked remarkably clean considering how overcrowded it was. Impressive, on almost no resources. I didn’t know the virus had spread so much. Burton said they played it down to avoid panic.’ Parry stopped, knowing words were not enough. He should have done more. Raine seemed to read his silence.

  ‘Michael, I’m aware of the risk you’re taking.’

  Parry didn’t need reminding how compromised he’d become. He hadn’t stopped glancing around since the start of the conversation. ‘I’d better go. I got the feeling there are other things brewing under the surface. Burton pulled the enforcers away from the market at the last minute to avoid casualties in the ranks, but he’s planning to send them back in to arrest anyone they can find. A few people he can accuse of planting the thing. And he’s becoming even more secretive. That’s never a good sign.’

  He cut the connection and walked back to his office, trying to work out how to find out if any of Raine’s people had been arrested. Raine would no doubt learn from his own team on the ground how many had been killed.

  *

  Jac’s handset buzzed. Raine, linked through from the hive. Desperate to know if his people had survived.

  ‘I’m sorry Raine. It’s still chaos. We’re relying on the ground team to pass messages and bring everyone in. I’ll call you, soon as we have more information. So long as the connection doesn’t die again.’

  12

  Parry glanced down the corridor, making sure no one was watching. He hadn’t wanted Joe inside the security building but there had been no time to fix an outside meeting while he was still checking for lists of people arrested at the market. He closed the door and took the flimsy printout from the young chemist’s hand.

  No effects of any form of nerve gas. All twenty-three individuals died of variant H5N1 virus. No indications of contact with sewers. They appear to have received medical care up to time of death.

  ‘Colonel. Excuse me.’ Joe looked nervously around at the stark discipline of Parry’s tiny office, shifting uncomfortably from one foot to the other. ‘You going to tell me what’s going on? You knew there was something wrong with the original path report, didn’t you?’

  Parry folded the paper and tucked it in his pocket. ‘Look Joe, I don’t want to put you or your family in danger. I’ll keep this hidden till I find someone trustworthy to show it to. Destroy any copies you’ve made and forget you ever saw it. For the time being at least.’

  Joe held out a thin brown envelope. ‘There’s something else. The specialist forensics were finishing off their investigation of some damaged coms equipment they retrieved from the western forest. They were ordered to send their findings to Burton immediately and only on paper. No digital copies. So with all the chaos around the city centre they asked me to bring it over. They said it just confirms nothing new to report.’

  Parry took the sealed envelope. ‘But they knew you were coming over here?’ Shivers of premonition crept up his spine. He’d hoped Joe had at least kept this visit secret.

  Joe shrugged awkwardly. ‘I’m not used to this undercover stuff. I let it slip. I made an excuse about it being Jess’ memorial anniversary. I think they believed it.’

  ‘Thanks Joe. Like I said, forget you were ever involved. I’ll hand this to Burton.’ Parry showed Joe out.

  He was still working on unsealing the envelope without leaving any marks Burton might detect, when a message arrived on his tablet.

  Report to President Moris in the Dome immediately.

  It was only the second time the president had wanted to speak to him personally. The previous meeting ten years ago had informed him that his views on negotiation in preference to firepower were weakening the security forces’ grip on control. His career advancement had been on hold ever since.

  Parry’s only thought as he walked over to the Dome was that this time career damage might be the least of his worries.
<
br />   *

  ‘Well, Colonel Parry, it appears we have a problem.’

  Parry didn’t reply, wondering which particular problem President Moris was referring to. Sending in Raine’s team to get people away from the market? Unauthorized review of Burton’s forged pathology report? Or indeed any of a dozen other incidents from the last few days, including conversations with a known outlaw. One careless slip and Burton would take smug satisfaction in serving him up to Moris in return for another step up the promotion ladder.

  No doubt that’s precisely what he’s just done...

  Parry looked around the lavishly furnished presidential office with its backlit pearl-glass walls and deep pile crimson carpet, wondering why Moris had bothered summoning him here if the plan was simply to arrest him. The last time he’d been here, ten years ago, Moris had been surrounded by an entourage of security guards and secretaries as if making a public example of the nonconformist colonel whose career he was wrecking with a few well-chosen words.

  This time, the security detail was parked outside the heavy door and no one else was present in the oversized room. An arrangement that suggested a heavy dose of plausible deniability would be attached to the coming conversation.

  He’d stood outside the building for several minutes before walking in, gazing at its ornamented, floodlit bulk and the oversized golden dome that gave it its name, wondering why the presidential palace was quite so hideous or whether it was just his personal associations with what it stood for.

  Or maybe just its power to make his life extremely miserable and probably short if this meeting went the way he suspected it might.

  ‘In fact, we have several problems.’ Moris reached out a pale manicured hand and flipped a switch, bringing the enormous wall screen to life.