The Happier Dead (31 page)
“Come on then,” he said.
Miranda hesitated, and a slight hint of confusion troubled the smooth marble brows.
“We’ll do it together,” he said. “You said it had to be voluntary. Well, I’m volunteering. You keep hold of his hand, and I’ll take the other. We’ll do it together.”
“You’re lying.”
“No. I thought I could go on. But I don’t want to. I need another push, I know that now. To be free. And afterwards, I will need the Treatment, and MRT. Afterwards, I will beg you to help me.”
“Let me do it. Let me save you that at least.”
“If you do it alone, I won’t want to forget. I’ll only want to pursue you. I’ll live to destroy you. But if we do it together I can be free to have the Treatment. How can I live with it, if I’ve done it myself?”
He edged forward on the roof. He could see Miranda wavering. She wanted to believe him. She wanted to think he was weak. His ankle still throbbed from the fall in the sewers.
Feet don’t fail me now,
he begged himself, and as he moved, his begging became a prayer. He began to make promises. He would give up the job. They would leave London together. He would never go out on nights again. He would give up his dreams of his youth. He would be grateful every day. He would quit drinking. Never another drop. He would never hurt another man. He drew closer. He crossed the threshold of the storm. He felt the rain on his skin. Somewhere along the way, his thoughts became prayers. He would give his own life for Harry’s, give it gladly. He prayed to the love for his sons. The only thing that existed outside of him. The rain plastered his hair to his head, and streamed down into his eyes. As he edged closer, Nottingham Biosciences had fulfilled the promise of their slogan – he no longer lived in fear of his death.
He held Miranda’s eyes in his own like a hand in his. They were wild and skittish, the madness which her intelligence must have concealed for some time beginning to obtrude. She was desperate to believe in him. He sensed her need as he drew closer, her supreme loneliness drawing him in. He was whispering to her, not words exactly, but a sound like words, a comforting sound like the soft sound of the sea. He took Harry’s hand. It was tiny in his own. It was the answer to his prayers. Miranda’s eyes filled with gratitude as she pulled back to gather the momentum for the swing that would carry his boy out into the air.
For a fraction of a second, there was the consummation of their two beliefs, each one impossible if the other were to be true. In that single instant, Harry was both saved and sacrificed. But the impossibility could not hold. With a sudden yank, Oates tossed his son away from the ledge, on to the lead sheeting of the roof. At the same time, Miranda’s expression ignited with the knowledge of his treachery. He grabbed for her, and she screamed, the sound set to an eerie echo by the steel sky above and the flooded court below. He tried to pull her away from the drop, but the force required to save Harry had unbalanced him. She was tiny beside Oates, but her fury gave her strength. She caught hold of his outstretched arm, and jumped, and the two of them pitched over the edge into the storm.
15:00 HOURS
WEDNESDAY 27 NOVEMBER
2035 (REAL WORLD)
L
ONDON HAS HAD
some bad mornings. Most cities don’t know what it’s like to wake up with whole streets, whole districts gone, but London does. Dawn on 6 September, 1666. Dawn on 8 September, 1940. And then the smaller outrages. The people with their riots, the prophets with their bombs, the developers with their diggers. It might be because the city is old, but there are older cities. It might be because the city is unlucky, but the streets of London haven’t felt the tramp of an invader’s boot in almost 1,000 years, and how many other cities in Europe can say the same?
Something in the city wants to rise and fall. Something wants to remind the inhabitants that what looks like permanence comes down in a violent minute. One day a building, and the next a patch of sky strung on the washing line between the two buildings either side. Whatever the reason, Londoners are good at tidying up and carrying on.
Most of the damage done by the rioters was cleaned up within the week. The police deployed rubber bullets and water cannons the night after the looting on Oxford Street, and the army were all ready to come in, but really the riot was spent. There had been a couple of bad fires in the East End, but architects were sharpening their pencils even as the last tendrils of smoke and steam wafted from the rubble. The only real casualty had been the Great Spa, which had been engulfed in flood and fire. The fate of the mighty dome hung in the balance, with structural engineers still poking in the foundations to see if it might be saved.
Certainly London seen through the plate glass windows of the café on the third floor of the National Theatre looked quite unchanged. The only sign of the rioting was on the front page of a copy of the
Evening Standard
, and even there the disturbances had lost their hold on the headlines, slipping to the bottom right hand column. A frenzy of opinion formers had descended on the events like carrion on the carcass of a beached whale, picking them apart with sharp little insights. Eventually there would be nothing left but the bones of history.
Eustace Morrison folded the paper and set it down on the metallic surface of the table in front of him. He stared out at the river. The tide was so low that the grey water had receded to reveal the mud banks below the stone parapet of the Embankment. White gulls circled against the white sky. A curtain of drizzle hung across the view like mild static across a television screen, as if Morrison and the world were not fully tuned in to one another.
He saw his contact running across the open space where the skateboarders practised their jumps, holding a folded newspaper up over his head. Morrison had bought him a cup of tea in anticipation, and he removed the saucer he had placed over it to keep it warm. He disappeared from view beneath the parapet, and a few moments later came to the table brushing water from the sides of his raincoat. When he sat down he had to remove his glasses, which were both steamed with the heat and flecked with raindrops.
“So?” he said taking up the tea without a word of thanks.
“I’m afraid that so far we’ve made very limited progress,” Morrison said.
“Five days and they haven’t managed to find a thing?” Putting the tea down, he scrubbed at the droplets of water with the end of his tie, but this served only to smear the lens. He squinted myopically to focus on Morrison, and it gave him a look of extreme skepticism.
“We’ve recovered equipment we believe may have been used. But nothing of MRT, either the results of the experiments or the scientific process itself.”
“But you’ve accessed the Avalon mainframe?”
“Yes.”
“Is it encoded? Erased, what?”
“We think it’s possible the information was never actually stored on computer.”
“That’s ridiculous. Everything gets stored on computers. And a process that complex, there must be documentation.”
“From the interviews we’ve conducted so far it would appear that the vast majority of the work on the project was conducted by Miranda exclusively, and performed from memory. She did use assistants, but on an extremely strict rotation, so that not one of them assisted with sufficient frequency to understand the wider context.”
“We expect the Chinese to have developed a viable alternative to the Treatment within the next three to five years. When the British government loses its monopoly on the granting of Treatment licences, we will have to rethink an entire generation of foreign policy.”
“May I be candid?” Morrison asked.
“No you may not.”
Morrison waited politely whilst his contact sipped his tea.
“I hate candour. It’s just another word for rude. Or rudeness, rather. Oh alright, fine, be candid if you must.”
“Our foreign policy will soon be someone else’s problem.”
“Ah yes. You’re taking retirement next year, is that right?”
Morrison nodded.
“What have you got planned?”
“Natasha and I are selling Oakley Street. We’re going to move down to our house in St Cezaire.”
“Permanently?”
“Well, not forever.”
“I see. Well, they say the climate’s good for old bones.”
Morrison smiled faintly.
“What about that man you had, Rob something?”
“Detective Chief Inspector Oates.”
“That’s the one. Shot that black boy right in the middle of One New Change. They love that at the Home Office, as I’m sure you can imagine.”
“He failed to retrieve any of the papers from the Mortal Reformers. But our intelligence is that he did at least try.”
“Does he know anything about MRT? He must have been the last person to speak to Miranda alive.”
“We haven’t had the opportunity to debrief him just yet. He’s only just come out of intensive care. He’s in Royal London Hospital with his family.”
“And your recommendation on the investigation into the shooting? Or would you prefer to wait until you’ve had the chance to interview him?”
Morrison nodded to himself.
“Play it straight.”
“Play it straight?”
“If he murdered the boy let him go down. But don’t make it so.”
“Well, alright. You are an odd fish sometimes.” He drummed his bitten nails on the table once. “I’d best be getting back. You’re sure you won’t stay with us? Compulsory retirement only applies where necessary. We could always arrange a Treatment licence…”
“But not for Natasha.”
His contact said nothing.
“It’s kind of you to ask me,” Morrison said, “But no. I think it’s time to leave.”
“Oh well. Are you having some sort of leaving do?”
“No.”
“No. Can’t say I blame you. I can’t stand that sort of thing either. Half of them are pleased to see the back of you, the other half couldn’t care less. The one or two who do care, you’ll see them again anyway. Keep well.”
“And you.”
“I just wish it wasn’t such filthy weather. Filthy weather and good news I could handle. Or bad news and a lovely clear day. But filthy weather and bad news… hmph!”
His companion left him sitting alone in the theatre café. Morrison watched him once again through the streaming plate glass window as he ran for the cover of Waterloo Bridge, heading past the rough sleepers in the direction of Whitehall. He had just disappeared from view when the lamps on the South Bank flickered into life. Outside, the clouds were hastening the end of a brief day.
When physicist Robert Strong – newly unemployed and single – is offered a hundred thousand pounds for a week’s work, he’s understandably sceptical. But Victor Amos, head of the mysterious Observation Research Board, has compelling proof that the next round of experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider poses a real threat to the whole world. And he needs Robert to sabotage it.
Robert’s life is falling apart. His work at the Dark Matter Research Laboratory in Middlesbrough was taken away from him; his girlfriend, struggling to cope with the loss of her sister, has left. He returns home to Scotland, seeking sanctuary and rest, and instead starts to question his own sanity as the dead begin appearing to him, in dreams and in waking. Accepting Amos’s offer, Robert flies to Geneva, but as he infiltrates CERN, everything he once understood about reality and science, about the boundary between life and death, changes forever.
Mixing science, philosophy and espionage, Libby McGugan’s stunning debut is a thriller like no other.
