The Relic Keeper (10 page)

Philip was pleased how the day had gone. Warwick had been so full of himself that he’d blabbed about the clinic far more than he should have, and then his chance meeting in the bar had proved more successful than he could have managed had it been arranged. Deon was instantly recognisable, and apart from one small moment when he’d pushed too hard, he hadn’t suspected a thing. The guy was now convinced that Philip would pay him for info, and was going to start coming to him and sooner or later would start telling Philip more about his life before he assumed the personae of James Peacock. Philip just hoped he could find the money he needed to pay for it. Next month’s rent was looking shaky now. And he wouldn’t possibly tell a soul about it because he thought he was acting as an informer. And on top of all of this it was always possible that there really was a story about the clinic that Philip could uncover.

The girl, Reiko, was a dead loss though. There didn’t seem a chance in hell that she would dish anything on her employers. That was the problem with these sorts; they come to Europe because they feel that they can do some good in the poorer countries, then get screwed by their employers, and then their sense of loyalty takes over and they start defending the fuckers that exploit them in the first place. Reiko seemed, well, nice really, but Philip didn’t think that she’d add much to the story. She wouldn’t break patient confidentiality, she’d trust her employers, and Philip would bet his life that she had no idea that Deon – or ‘James Peacock’ as she thought of him – was one of the only people to survive a major massacre, and as such had to be the main suspect. Still it wasn’t time to go the police yet, not until he had more to go on. He was chasing a story, not a criminal. Least not until a reward was put up.

He had several reasons for this choice.

Firstly, the story would be better if he could claw out more information. This meant that he needed to gain Deon’s trust, and that, he thought, was already happening. Secondly, he just had a gut instinct that Deon was not the sort of person to be involved in a conspiracy of that kind. He didn’t know exactly why, but having met him he didn’t strike him as a mass murderer, and Philip had come across a few in his time. Being in the army meant you came across a sizeable number of psychopaths and sociopaths. Men who hated everyone, or were obsessed with the idea of taking lives, and became addicted to the strange feeling in your gut as you watched the life drop out of someone’s eyes. He didn’t have any of the traits that haunted people who’d killed, and Philip certainly knew what that was like. Ok, looks are deceiving, and Deon was certainly not the most law-abiding citizen in Britain, but he also seemed to have a zest for life and sense of conscience that made his involvement in the massacre unlikely. And that meant that Philip couldn’t share this information with the police, who were not noted for their compassion or to taking into account some journo’s gut feeling.

It was two days later when Philip received a note from Deon about the Walden. He had to give it to him; the guy was good; he’d managed to obtain information that Justine hadn’t, and in a shorter time. Not only had Deon swapped his identity with this James Peacock character, he’d hacked into some the clinic’s database and copied some files that had to be highly confidential. Philip now had account details, staff information, and personal letters from and to Warwick. The stuff was good, but there was little about cryogenics or the cryonic programme; which was strange. Obviously the clinic wanted to keep their techniques secret, and maybe this operation was separate from the rest of the work undertaken there. But for there to be next to nothing sounded alarm bells in Philip’s head. Still, first he had to concentrate on what he had, not what was missing.

He studied the data for nearly eight hours continuously. Even the call of the unopened bottle of malt was ignored. There was nothing particularly immoral or illegal in any of the files, but there seemed to be omissions and, reading between the lines, Philip got the impression that there was a plan being carried out.

Warwick had been with the clinic for eight years and had acted as Chief Executive for six, as he’d stated in their interview. His salary included options for shareholding in the Walden Centre, as well as in the parent company, Medical Line Research International. Warwick had gradually built a share portfolio in the former of these two, without taking out his options on the latter. He had started relatively small, but had increased his holding dramatically over the past two years; partly through his share option and, it seemed, partly by illegally buying shares personally from other investors. He now personally owned 48 per cent of the shares in the Walden. But the Walden hadn’t been making the kind of money that Philip had been led to believe, even with his access to the accounts that Justine had supplied. According to her it varied from heavy debt several years ago, to a position today whereby it was scraping together a small profit. The commonly held idea that Warwick had turned it into a major player was evidently untrue. That was for the patients, but anyone who had access to the accounts – the real ones, not the expurgated ones published – could see that it was not a sound investment. However, reading the accounts at source painted a different picture. The profits created by the clinic had increased since Warwick took over, especially since he’d been targeting the Far East. But these profits weren’t reflected in the accounts. Money had been moved within the organisation, and then simply disappeared from their records. The accounts were artificially low, which meant one of two things to Philip. Either Warwick, possibly with the help of someone else within the centre, was skimming money from the clinic into his own account, or the money was being redirected around the company into some secret project or account. The more creative aspects of the accounting had started around 3 years previously; about the time the cryonic programme was started.

You sly old bastard
, thought Philip.
You’ve kept your company running at a minimum level of profit while you bought shares for less than their market value, and all the time you knew you were working on a medical breakthrough.
Only someone with Warwick’s arrogance and over confidence would have the nerve to try something like that quite so blatantly. And now the Walden Centre’s share price had rocketed.
Just let me watch you sell those shares pal,
thought Philip. But there was still more to the story. Where was the rest of the money, and why was the cryonic programme so bloody secret? Philip sent a message to Deon:
Good work, but need more on cryonics.
Then he poured a drink, sat back, and waited.

“James?”

He ignored her, and carried on staring at his coffee.

“James!” repeated Rei louder. Deon looked up, remembering the name he was using. The fog was heavy in his head today.

“Yeah. Sorry, I wasn’t really listening.”

“Can I join you?” Rei asked, nodding at the table he was eating at in the clinic’s canteen.

“Yeah, please do.” He gulped some coffee down and let Rei sit next to him.

“How you doing?”

“I’m fine. Tired, though. I’ve been up with Mathew most of the night. You know, the patient on his own up top. He has been a feeling a little low and the pain in his left leg bothers him.”

“Must be hard on him.”

“I know. You speak to him a lot don’t you?”

“No, not really. I don’t work on the 54
^th
floor.”

“Oh! He showed me the c-pac you left him. He says it was good to talk to you. I know you’re not really supposed to communicate, but I want to do what is best for him, and I do think that constant communication is good. I’m not going to report you or anything.”

“He just seems a nice guy, but a little lonely,” he said, letting his guard down a little. The girl was a bit stiff, but he didn’t think she was threat to his operation. In fact, she could be the only way to really get anywhere with it. He willed his consciousness to push through the mist.

“You can’t really understand what he’s going through can you. Waking up alone in a strange world.”

“Not much we can do though except be there for him, is there?”

“Well, yes and no. That is what I wanted to ask you.”

“Go on.”

“Well, he was married with a daughter, you know. And he has been asking about them quite a lot recently.”

“They’ll be long dead, surely?”

“That’s what I thought, originally. But his daughter, Jessica, would be about 74 now, so could easily be alive. And his wife, Paula, was apparently going to be cryonically suspended as well. And I did some research and the company that arranged it for Mathew was the only one in the country that would have performed such a procedure, so if it happened it seems likely that she would be here somewhere.”

“Right…” he said cautiously.

“But I don’t know anything about how to trace people, or where the records for the clinic’s patients would be. Dr Warwick has made it clear to me that he does not expect me to work with any other cases like Mathew. So I just wondered if you knew who might know, or be able to find out about these things?”

“Why ask me?”

“Because you seem nice and you are the only person that regularly talks with Mathew. And I checked up on you and you haven’t got a specific reason for working on that floor, so I assumed that you must be doing it because you want to help, and, well, this would be helping. You must know people to have been able to arrange the work in the first place. I do have reasons to think that maybe you could be quite creative with personal files.”

Deon swilled the coffee round his cup and swallowed the last of it, his mind racing. Everything about working here had just fallen into place and now someone was asking him to get more involved. This must have been divine intervention, even if he didn’t like the way that she seemed to know something about him. He thought he almost sensed an element of intimidation.

“I could ask around, but…” he said, pausing for a while.

“But, what?”

“Well, they’re a little cagey about him, aren’t they? The doctors I mean. I don’t know if they’d understand someone at my level getting involved in this, it would have to be kept very quiet.”

“Well, yes, I thought that. Which is why I would appreciate it if we could keep this to ourselves. So do you know anyone? I could get access to the patient files for medical purposes, but they’re not on my database, so I need to know where to look. I need someone that’s been here for a few years.”

“Well, I’ve not been here long myself…”

“No, no, I realise that. But I don’t really know anyone here at all, and I thought that maybe you did. And as you’re working on something that I don’t think you’re exactly screened to do, I thought that I could help you keep that quiet if you’d help me.” She smiled as if she hadn’t just made a veiled threat.

“Ok. Could I let you into a secret, while we’re keeping things quiet?”

“Sure.”

“I can trace people and I can hack most systems. I used to do it for a living, but I gave all of that up to work with the sick.” Deon was quite pleased with this story. It made him sound sympathetic and yet let Rei know what he was capable of.

“Really? Why did you do that James?”

“It was something I did when I was kid. I was a tracer.” Rei looked blank. “I traced people for debt and back payments of loans. Critical, eh? It was all slightly illegal. I’m not proud of it, but it’s there, and if I can use that experience now to help someone that must be good.”

“I suppose so.”

“So…you need to find a… Jennifer?

“Jessica. Jessica Lyle.”

“Right, Jessica Lyal? Old fashioned sort of name, isn’t it? Date of birth?”

“Twenty-fourth of November 1994.”

“Ok,” said Deon, inputting the date into his c-pac. That should be fairly straightforward. Now, the wife: Paula did you say?”

“Yes. I have a date of birth, but obviously no date of death. But she must be here somewhere, so if I could access the patient details from the early part of the century we could find her.”

“Right. That’s harder. Early twenty-first century data tended to be stored electronically. The back-ups they used still exist often, but they can’t be read by anything that we’d have, and obviously I haven’t got access to any restricted areas or files.”

“No, but I have.”

He studied her. What was going on inside her head? Was this all as straightforward as it seemed? He didn’t have the luxury of time to decide.

“Well, it’s not impossible to get access into the system here I’d guess; as long as we do it from inside the network so we haven’t got to break through any security coding. It’s a bit like housebreaking. It’s much easier to route around in a house that you’re already in, then enter from the outside and then start looking for what you want. But I’d need your help to speed it up, and if it’s not done quickly they’ll see that someone’s digging around in the files. I don’t think either of us wants that.” She shook her head. “What time do you finish?”

“Sixteen hundred.”

“Fine. Meet me here at sixteen-thirty. Bring your access codes and we’ll see what we can find. But it’ll have to be secret; they’ll terminate my contract if they find out that I used to be a tracer.”

“Fine. They’ll terminate mine if they know that I am looking into back files of patients that are not allocate to me.” Briskly Rei got up and left Deon to muse on the good fortune that had come his way.

Rei was late for the meeting by forty minutes. Warwick had come to the ward to ask her about Mathew’s condition. He had seemed edgy and concerned, which was out of character and she hadn’t been able to get away from him easily. By the time she reached Deon he was within 2 minutes of leaving, having assumed that she’d changed her mind.

“Sorry James, I was held up.”

“No problem,” he lied, and they walked to a secluded room where Deon set up. He linked his c-pac into the database via a home-made interface he’d created a few years back. He was rather proud of his creation, even if it was a little Heath Robinson. He began searching.

“We’ll have about 45 minutes until there’s any chance that the system will realise that we’re not supposed to be in it,” he explained without looking at Rei. “If we haven’t got anything by then I’ll have to shut down and lock ourselves out of the database for two days, otherwise it’ll show on the records.”

“Fine,” said Rei, without really understanding his reasoning.

It took nearly 20 minutes to gain access to the inner sanctum of the system. Using Rei’s codes Deon worked on the database access mechanism until suddenly a firewall opened in the machine and a series of files appeared: Live Right, Turner and Brown, Medical Line Research International, International Transplants PLC, DNA Processing Ltd, and a host of other companies and their affiliates. They had entered the Live Right patient database. He traced through the companies’ databases looking for anything that seemed out of the ordinary. It was excruciatingly slow. Mathew Lyal was listed along with two dozen other names, but no files for Paula Lyal appeared.

“She’s not here, is she?” enquired Rei despondently.

“Not under that name, no. Hang on.” Deon entered the files of one of the other patients.
I may never get another chance to do this
, he thought,
and this is exactly what I need for that Brading guy
. “I want to examine the differences, if there are any, between the files on those people not revived, compared to Mathew’s. That might take us somewhere.” He flicked through the on-screen files quickly to check the data, but nothing out of the ordinary came up.

“James, you better hurry up,” whispered Rei, checking the time.

“Yeah, just let me check another couple.” He moved onto the next file. Still nothing. Each file had to be accessed separately, it all took too long.

“Come on, we have about 3 minutes left,” Rei said anxiously. “Can’t you load it onto your c-pac and do this later?”

“No, it doesn’t work like that on these old files. I’ve copied the ones I can get, but not all of these. It takes too long.”

“Well, can you hurry it up?”

“Yeah, ok. I can do this quicker if no one talks to me,” he snapped. “One more.”

There was nothing on the files that looked any different to any of the other files. Except one thing he spotted near the last entry. There was a link to another file. He accessed it and the machine whirred as it moved into a separate database.

“Fucking hell,” he gasped through his teeth.

“What is it?”

“Look. This patient’s file was updated, not at the time of death like all of the others, except Mathew, but much later. This is last year. They tried to revive this one. Except it couldn’t have worked. See here, the patient was lost and ‘deposited’, whatever that means. But they ran a DNA test on her, and did something….”

“Come on, James, we have to get out of the system.”

“Wait, what’s this mean?”

Rei read the notes over his shoulder. “They operated on her, but that was dated after the unsuccessful revival.”

“What? What did they do?”

“See if there’s anything else.” He flicked forward and Rei kept an eye on the notes flashing in front of her. “They removed a great deal of tissue, and….hang on….her lungs, heart, spleen, and liver. Why would they do that?”

“That timer is counting down.”

“I need to read this James.”

“Sorry, I’m goin’ to have to leave this.” He clenched his fist as he watched the files appear slowly on the screen. It was too close, he had to pull out of the system.

“No, stay in,” Rei whispered through her teeth.

“We’re going to go over the schedule. It’ll show up.”

Rei read as quickly as she could, trying to memorise the files that flashed past.

“I’m pulling out, it’s too long,” and Deon, closed the files hurriedly and backtracked through the system, finally closing their access to it.

“Well?” he asked.

“They did several similar operations, although I could not see all of the case notes, but I got to see what they were removing from the patients.”

“So what were they doing that for?”

Rei was quiet. “I can’t think of a reason for doing that kind of operation, not after a patient was lost anyway. The only reason you would do that would be for a donor.”

“What do you mean?”

“A donor. Someone who donates their body parts posthumously for transplantation. It used to be quite common before artificial organs were created.”

“So why would they want a donor?”

“I can’t imagine a reasonable answer to that,” she said.