Headcase, p.21
Headcase, page 21
I swallow the pills.
‘Okey doke. Open wide.’
Kelly probes around the inside of my mouth, like a vet examining a dog’s teeth. His fingers are warm and fat. I haven’t eaten—really eaten—since I got here.
Just bite down, says a voice in my head. It’ll be worth the punishment.
I don’t.
Kelly finishes his inspection. ‘Good boy,’ he says, and takes the empty cup. ‘Enjoy your lunch.’ But he doesn’t go anywhere. He watches me walk up the corridor towards the lunch hall. I can feel the pills slowly dissolving in my gut, unknown chemicals making their way towards my brain.
I get to the shutter just as it rattles upwards, revealing bread rolls, salad and slices of roast beef. It’s Eli behind the counter this time. He fixes me with his real eye and stares just over my shoulder with the acrylic one.
‘Timothy,’ he says. ‘Beef or vegetables?’ He snaps the tongs in his hand, like a gator’s jaws.
‘Beef,’ I say, gloomily. It’s not going to stay in my stomach for long.
‘Damn right.’ He gestures at some lettuce. ‘That’s not food, is it? It’s what food eats.’
I wonder if Dasha has told him I’m a cannibal. ‘Right. Beef, please.’
‘There are two kinds of animals.’ Eli leans over the food. ‘Predators and prey. Now why the fuck would a predator act like prey? Can you imagine anything more pathetic?’
The line is growing behind me. ‘Nice talking to you, Eli.’
‘You too.’ He winks, like we understand each other, then drops some sliced beef onto a bread roll. I shuffle sideways to make room for the next person and squirt some ketchup on the meat, largely for the colour. I grab four packets of salt, too.
Kelly is still watching me. Acting like I haven’t noticed, I sit at one of the tables and start munching on my roll. I close my eyes as I chew, dreaming of a more satisfying meal.
A chair squeaks. I open my eyes to find Harmony sitting opposite me.
‘Hey,’ she says.
‘Hey,’ I say, my mouth full.
‘I want you to explain what you meant yesterday,’ she says. Remarkably straightforward. It makes me feel guilty about what I’m going to do to her.
‘Yesterday?’ I ask, acting confused.
‘At group. When you—’ Harmony stops, biting her lip.
I lower my voice and bow my head, talking to my food. ‘Don’t turn around. Kelly’s watching us both.’
This is only half true. I’m the one he’s watching.
‘You can see his reflection,’ I say, and point towards the window. Harmony sneaks a glance, and her eyes widen. She turns back to me.
‘Why?’ she asks.
‘Why do you think?’ I say this like it’s rhetorical. I don’t know the exact nature of Harmony’s delusions, so I’m not quite sure what I’m playing along with.
‘He’s one of them?’ Harmony whispers.
‘I haven’t ruled him out yet,’ I say, with no idea who they are. ‘I’m also suspicious of Dasha. She seems a little too eager to talk, you know?’
Harmony starts to nod, and then catches herself. Still wary.
I tear open all the salt sachets and stir them into my water. ‘I want to put my cards on the table. But I don’t know if I can trust you.’
‘How do I know I can trust you?’ she asks.
‘You don’t,’ I say. ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t trust anybody. Laugh, like I just made a joke.’
She chuckles. It’s very convincing.
I use the beef roll to hide my mouth as I talk. ‘Meet me in my room in thirty minutes. Make sure you’re not followed.’ I down the salt water in three sickening gulps.
‘I can’t come today,’ she says.
‘Why not?’
‘There’s a fly,’ she says. ‘It buzzes around the corridor every Wednesday. You haven’t noticed it?’
‘No.’
‘There’s a condenser microphone strapped to its belly,’ she says, utterly serious. ‘We can’t talk in front of it. But it’ll be gone tomorrow—that’s when they recharge it.’
This may be harder than I thought. My stomach growls. ‘Okay, tomorrow morning.’
‘I’m delivering the mail tomorrow morning.’ That’s the job Harmony volunteers for. ‘How about after lunch?’
I take a deep breath. ‘Okay. But right after lunch.’
‘Which room is yours?’
‘Three nineteen. See you.’ I stand up and take my empty tray over to the trash. Kelly is distracted, talking to Dr Kobald. I duck into the bathroom.
After checking that all the cubicles are empty, I slip into the one furthest from the entrance. I lock the door, hunch over the toilet bowl and jam my fingers down my throat.
The combination of fingers and salt water does the trick. There’s an internal lurch as my digestive system shifts into reverse gear. I dry-retch a few times before my abs clench inwards, my core shudders and everything comes back up. Shredded beef, mushed-up bread and two little white pills, only slightly dissolved. Stomach acid scorches the inside of my throat.
I spit out the last of the vomit. I’m tempted to scoop the meat out of the bowl, but that would only lead to more vomiting. I flush it away, tear off a square of toilet paper with a trembling hand and wipe my mouth.
When I open the door, Eli is standing there.
I’m too slow to hide a flinch. He stares at me with his good eye. The acrylic one is looking over my shoulder again.
‘Didn’t like the food?’ he asks.
‘Lunch was fine. I’ve been feeling a bit off since breakfast.’ I thump my chest for effect.
‘Since breakfast, huh?’
‘Yeah. You might want to keep your distance. Could be stomach flu or something.’
Eli grabs me by the throat and pushes me back into the stall, slamming me sideways against the wall. My skull hits the wood so hard it shakes. He grabs my wrist and crushes it. I claw at my neck with my other hand—but nothing happens. That hand is long gone, and I’m not wearing my prosthesis today.
‘Eli,’ I croak. ‘Don’t.’
‘You puked up your meds,’ Eli says. ‘You’re going to snap on us. Kill us all in our sleep.’
‘I’m non-violent,’ I lie, through a windpipe only a quarter inch wide. ‘I never hurt anyone.’
Eli looks from one of my eyes to the other and back again, the way people do when they’re trying to work out if you’re telling the truth. But soon I realise he’s just deciding which one to take.
He pulls a fork out of his back pocket.
‘No!’ I squeal and squirm, but his hand is like a band of iron around my neck. He’s released my hand to get to the fork, so I take a swing, but my fist just bounces off his bald head. He doesn’t seem to notice, concentrating as he lines up the tines of the fork.
I knee him in the groin, his soft flesh crumpling. He gasps, and his grip on my throat loosens just enough for me to lunge at him, slamming my forehead into his nose. There’s a wet crunch. His fake eye pops out and splashes into the toilet.
Eli gives a horrified screech, either because of what I did to his eye, or his nose, or his balls, or all of the above. He swipes at me with the fork, but it’s more of a stabbing weapon than a slashing one. The tines scrape harmlessly against my chest as I shove him backwards. He stumbles sideways and falls, one arm disappearing into the toilet. I turn and run, out of the stall and out of the bathroom, and find myself back in the lunch hall, puffing.
Harmony is gone. Kelly is still talking to Dr Kobald. Everyone else is eating. No one seems to have noticed the commotion from the bathroom. Occasional shrieks of terror are just background noise in this place.
I can’t hear Eli following. He’s probably still fishing his eye out of the toilet, and then he’ll want to wash it. I have a minute to decide how to play this.
If I tell Kelly and Kobald that Eli attacked me in the bathroom, they might not believe me. Eli has never displayed any violent behaviour while he’s been here, and I’m known to be delusional. And when they ask Eli for his side of the story, he’ll tell them I vomited up my pills. Just like he ratted out Seamus, who ended up restrained and forcibly injected.
I hesitate a second longer. Then I take a breath, steady my nerves, and go over to the coffee machine.
By the time Eli storms out of the bathroom, his arm dripping wet and his acrylic eyeball back in, I’m sitting at my usual table with a steaming cup of joe, acting like nothing happened.
He glares at me, then looks at Kobald and Kelly, then at me again. Calculating. I return his stare, challenging him. He’s the one in a tough position now. Is he going to walk up to them and say he saw me barfing up my pills? He may not be believed, since he made the same accusation about Seamus earlier this week. And then I would tell them Eli attacked me in the bathroom with a fork. Eli might claim he didn’t do it, but he’d have to explain the toilet water on his arm, and the fork he presumably still has on his person.
I watch him think all this through. It takes him a while. Then he sits down at one of the other tables without saying anything. For a while I think he’s still glaring at me, then I realise it’s the fake eye. It just happens to be pointed in my direction.
I take a sip of my coffee. Blake one, Eli zero—though I have a feeling the game’s not over. When I’ve finished my drink, I throw the paper cup in the trash and amble back to my room.
It’s nicer than a prison cell. There’s an empty dresser beside the bed, and carpet—albeit the stiff waterproof kind they use in homewares stores. The window has no bars across it. There are plastic hooks on the walls, but I haven’t hung any pictures. Just my prosthesis, the straps trailing like vines. The door has a lock, but I don’t have a key. I can secure it from the inside, so no other patients can sneak in while I’m asleep—only nurses, who have keys. But whenever I’m outside this room, it’s unlocked, and any other patient could just walk in and start going through my stuff. The simplest solution is not to have any stuff.
I sit on the bed. I try to plan for my talk with Harmony tomorrow, drawing a mental map of all the routes the conversation might take, checking that each path leads to the destination I want.
But the pills are affecting me, even though I only absorbed a little of them. My thoughts are as slippery as octopus tentacles, slithering out of my grip.
CHAPTER 28
Two weeks ago
What do you get when you reach into a blender?
A grey van with tinted windows and fake plates was parked in a loading zone next to the Atmospheric Research Unit. Zara and I strolled towards the building alongside the crowd of engineers and technicians, pretending the van was invisible. But as we passed it, I saw two men out of the corner of my eye, motionless behind the windshield. One to drive, and another to shoot, if that became necessary. So far, so good.
There should be two more agents in the back. One would grab Hazel Cuthbert and hold her down while the other injected her with something to keep her compliant for the rest of the journey. A crime boss I’d once worked for had a similar system. At the highest levels, the government and the Mob are indistinguishable—wealthy people who eat in Michelin-starred restaurants, reward loyalty over ability, and pride themselves on how untouchable they are. Sometimes the overlap reaches the lower levels, too.
Zara held my hand as we walked. She was wearing a shawl that covered the faint bite mark on her shoulder.
I was tired. That morning I’d woken up in the front yard, no shirt on, spider webs all over my hand. Following my footprints, I realised I’d been fiddling with the mailbox. Apparently my subconscious mind was expecting a package. But there had been nothing in the mailbox except a spider, patiently repairing the web I’d destroyed.
I’d used some of the Company’s supplies to make Zara breakfast while she slept. Sliced banana and honey on toast, with a cup of peppermint tea, to repay her for the gift of all the hands. But she hadn’t appreciated the gesture. She’d taken one mouthful and thrown the rest in the trash. I couldn’t work out what was up with her. I didn’t think it was the bite—she’d enjoyed that at the time. Whatever it was, she seemed to have forgiven me now. Her hand was cool in mine.
Wilcox had sent through a dossier—apparently Cuthbert had visited China on a student visa in 2004 and applied for a role at Space City as soon as she returned. Once she got it, she’d risen quickly through the ranks. Now that Rob Cho was dead, she would soon be the cybersecurity chief for the campus.
According to the swipe card logs, she’d been in the museum until late on Tuesday night. When Cho discovered the worm, his deputy was probably the first person he told, giving her the chance to kill him and cover it up. It all fit.
But I had questions. Had Cuthbert worked alone? Was it a coincidence that Cho had found the malware just as the MSS was trying flush out a CIA mole? And what was the malware actually for? I hoped we would be able to take Cuthbert alive.
The doors slid open, admitting us to the Atmospheric Research Unit, where Cuthbert had swiped in this morning. The receptionist, Holm, recognised us—I wasn’t wearing the wig, or the phoney moustache. They’d actually looked pretty good, but they were for travelling to and from the safe house. Here at Space City, people already knew me.
Holm was signing someone else in—a wizened man in a yarmulke. The receptionist’s piercings jingled as he nodded good morning to us. ‘Heard the news?’
I kept my face neutral. ‘What news?’
‘Another victim. Last night. Not ten miles from here.’
I was alarmed, thinking he was talking about the killer at Space City.
Zara was quicker on the uptake.‘The Reaper? Holy shit.’
‘I know.’ Holm nodded again. Like he’d needed us to affirm that this was shocking. ‘This time they killed an FBI agent.’
My heart skipped a beat. No.
‘Who?’ I demanded.
‘The Reaper,’ Holm said. ‘Keep up.’
‘Who was the agent?’ I realised I was yelling. Didn’t care. It couldn’t be her. I was already making deals in my head. I’ll give up my other arm. I’ll never eat another person. I’ll do anything. Just don’t let Thistle be dead.
Holm looked at me like I was nuts. ‘What, like the guy’s name? I don’t remember, man.’
‘But it was a guy? A man, I mean?’
Zara squeezed my elbow, and showed me her phone screen. She’d already brought up a news article: FBI agent found strangled. There was a photo. A man in a golf cap, smiling, his arm around someone else who had been cropped out of the picture.
The man was Ruciani.
Maybe I should have been shocked, or saddened. Ruciani and I had worked dozens of cases together. But the relief washed every other emotion away. It wasn’t Thistle. Nothing else mattered.
Zara was still holding me. ‘It’s okay,’ she told me quietly. ‘You’re okay.’
I took a breath. I couldn’t think of any excuse for my outburst other than the truth. ‘I knew him,’ I told Holm, who still looked perplexed.
His eyes widened. ‘Holy shit. I’m sorry. I didn’t—’
‘Yeah.’
We signed in without saying anything else. As we walked away, I took Zara’s phone and read the story. There wasn’t much information. Ruciani had been tasered and strangled at his home, like the other victims. Unlike them, his body hadn’t been left to rot—a neighbour saw someone visiting late at night and got suspicious. Rang the doorbell, no answer, called the cops.
‘I saw him just yesterday,’ I said.
‘I know,’ Zara said. ‘I was there, remember?’
‘Why would the killer switch from targeting empty nesters to FBI agents?’
‘Maybe Ruciani was getting too close for comfort. Didn’t you say he was on the task force?’
The hairs on my arm stood up. I was the one who’d suggested Ruciani start looking at who had access to IRS records. Now he was dead.
Maybe I’d gotten him killed.
‘Did he touch you?’ Zara asked.
‘What do you mean?’
Her voice was low. ‘Will the police find your DNA on his body?’
I thought back. Had we shaken hands? ‘No. No contact.’
I hoped no one had seen me talking to him. Zara was the only person who could vouch for my whereabouts last night. She couldn’t even alibi me for the whole period, since she’d gone out to meet Wilcox.
I told Zara, ‘I want to know about the Reaper’s other victims.’
Zara looked annoyed. ‘What for?’
‘It just feels like it’s not a coincidence, that murder happening so close to Space City.’
‘The victims were just middle-aged women no one would miss,’ Zara said. ‘None of them were employed here, or knew anyone who was.’
‘You don’t know that for sure.’ She couldn’t have researched it already.
She sighed. ‘Fine, I’ll look into it. But later—we’re busy right now.’
We could have asked the receptionist where in the building Cuthbert was. But he would almost certainly have called ahead. And our plan depended on arriving unannounced.
We hurried up the stairs to Rob Cho’s office. Since Cuthbert wasn’t at the museum, it seemed likely that she was here. Preparing to take over his position.
When we found Cuthbert, Zara was supposed to start with some innocuous questions. Then she would produce a cigarette and ask if we could keep talking outside. Once we were behind the building, the van would pull up and take Cuthbert. We would meet them at the black site later. I wasn’t sure an MSS asset would fall for that, but Zara seemed confident.
She knocked on the door.
No answer.
Zara knocked again. ‘Dr Cuthbert? It’s Sandra. They told me downstairs that you were here.’
This was a bluff, and either Cuthbert was calling it or she genuinely wasn’t in.
‘You want to break down the door?’ I sipped from my go-cup, which contained what looked like a raspberry smoothie. Zara had told me—affectionately but firmly—that I couldn’t just walk around Space City chewing on a severed hand. So I’d gotten creative.
‘Let’s ask around first,’ Zara said. ‘A broken door might raise questions later.’
