Authors: N David Anderson
Rei wondered how she would continue her search through the clinic’s archives. None of it was easy. James, or whoever he really was, had allowed her to access the database, and she could not do that on her own. Her own security level allowed her to view some files and with a little creativity, and some physical trawling, she could get enough information to fill in the gaps. What she needed now was some way to link this all to Mathew, which it almost certainly did. Meanwhile she had other things to do. All of this undercover work was in danger of taking over her actual job.
The crowd outside the clinic was larger again today. Each day more people joined it, and the over-zealous treatment of the protesters by the police had only given the demonstration a greater sense righteousness. The police now kept a careful vigil from the far end of the street; looking menacing in their black uniforms and faceless helmets, but they had not charged again. It had been an embarrassment for all involved: two dead, thirteen wounded, and one critically injured. This was not the way that peaceful protests were supposed to be handled, Rei thought as she passed the first cordon of officers. She glanced at the crowd, contemplating just how peaceful they were. Many of them carried bags and small backpacks, which could contain anything from knives to missiles. The entire staff had received instructions about their personal safety, and had been asked to speak to no one who they suspected could be from the press or an action group. This, in effect, could of course be just about anyone at all. Rei had felt especially vulnerable since James had been attacked, although there seemed some confusion about whether the mob or the constabulary had been responsible for that, and James wasn’t able to clarify this.
Near the entrance to the clinic Rei took the prearranged diversion and headed through the alley to the fire escape that allowed the staff access to the building for the time being, until someone worked out how they were getting into the facility and blockaded that as well. She walked beneath the building workers’ scaffolding that had stood here for 15 months while the air-conditioning system was being corrected, and entered the hospital, passing two men fixing a screen to the wall with a nail gun. The repairs to the building seemed to be immeasurable, and there always seemed to be two workers for each job. She put her eye to the scanner and the door to the restricted elevator slid open with a clang. It was one thing that puzzled her. She knew people would often buy their jobs and changing a security card, or bribing a guard to take no notice of it, was easy. But James was regularly on the 54
th
floor, so he must have re-jigged his security access code to accept his own retina scan, otherwise he’d have no way to gain entry. It was an area of their security that she’d been told was virtually impossible to by-pass. It was one of the things that made her trust him, in a bizarrely converse way. If he had that sort of skill, and was not working for an underground group, he must have some greater altruistic motive, she thought. It made some sense in a strange way.
She spent most of the morning working her way through charts and schedules, making sure that there was time for Mathew’s exercises between the chiropractor, the osteopath, and the councillor. Then she checked his statistics and medical intake, looked at his progress charts and arranged an upgrade on his mobility exercise from tomorrow. He was now able to walk with just a stick most of the time, and could be considered almost fully mobile. His physical body was in good shape; it was his mental state that she had less idea about, and until he opened up more they wouldn’t know how he was really coping. She made him a coffee, which he insisted on drinking from a china mug, which she found beautifully quaint (once she’d found one), and entered the locked area where he was still held in isolation.
“Good afternoon Mathew. How are you feeling?”
He slipped off the c-pac that he’d been using and smiled from the chair where he usually positioned himself.
“Yeah, good, you know. Good as… at any rate. Bloody battery’s gone on the PDA,” he said, gesturing at the c-pac.
“It’s not a PDA, whatever one of those is, and it is not powered through batteries,” she replied with a smile, activating the device. “It just has a little trouble recognising your accent.” She spoke generally as she whisked about his room setting and resetting the monitors, then settled on the seat next to him.
“I have some news,” she said gently. “I don’t know exactly yet, but it looks as if we may have managed to trace your daughter.”
“You’ve found Jessie? Is she coming here? Where is she now?”
“Wait, wait, just a second. I said it looks as if we have traced her. No one has spoken to her, and it’s not confirmed. We have come across several people in the country and one of them might be Jessica. We don’t know for sure yet. And we won’t contact anyone until we’re certain who they are, and even then, it may be best if you were to make the first contact. We will look at that problem when it arises. At the moment we are waiting for confirmation from their data of who exactly they are. And they may be the wrong person, so you must be patient. Also, I’m not precisely authorised to do this for you, so I need you to keep this completely to yourself. Only you, I and James, the porter with the bad teeth, only the three of us know anything, so don’t mention it to anyone else.”
“Yeah, sure, but if you can make contact, that’s going to be so good. I just want… I just need to be able to…” and Mathew broke off, placing his hand across his face. “I need to speak to her. I thought I’d never see her.” He looked across at Rei, with eyes that should the loss he felt. “She’s still my little girl, whatever’s happened. Rei, I have to see her again. I have to.”
Deon was pleased with the progress he’d made tracing the Lyal daughter. He had narrowed down the search and was beginning to feel some certainty that the he had the right person. It hadn’t been easy though. Old people so seldom changed their details and that meant that they surfaced on file checks less, and in addition several of the candidates weren’t registered to any communication network. There wasn’t really any reason that he could see for people to try to stay out of contact, but that was exactly what many older folk seemed to want to do. Of course Deon himself
did
want to remain untraceable and anonymous, but he had a good reason. Until the problems with the massacre at Fort Burlington had blown over he needed to keep a low profile, and somehow he knew that Mathew would help that. This was God’s work he was undertaking now, and nothing should stop that.
And as traipsed through the rain he tried to think positively about his role in the events that were unfolding. He felt dejected at the slowness of the pace that the Truth was being revealed to him, and the weather and this job were depressing. He wasn’t a hospital porter, and had no real desire to be one, but the work he must do every day was critical to his cover, and that meant that he could gain some access to Mathew. But if events did not change soon he may have to construct a new plan. There was a limit to how long he could keep up the pretence. His account details would be available for inspection now, and if the authorities checked he would be discovered, and it was always possible that even in a corporation the size of the Walden Centre someone may have known Peacock, and recognition would lead to investigation, which would result in detection. No one seemed to have missed Peacock or spotted the deception. It seemed sad that James had no friends to notice his absence. But then Deon had none to speak of, only Mathew, Rei and Philip. Perhaps by assuming the persona of James he had befriended him in some way. Unless, he wondered, he had actually become James Peacock now. This was a thought that plagued him sometimes. He made a note on his c-pac to consider this further, and sent the memory bank contents to back-up. No, he was fairly certain that he was merely using James’ identity to achieve a result. He would have to be careful that he wasn’t uncovered, that was still important. It was a fine line he trod.
Someone called to him from a distance and he stopped to locate them, but couldn’t see anyone else in the vicinity.
He’d been concerned when he awoke this morning that things were coming to a crisis point. The number of protesters outside the clinic had swelled, and the threat of violence seemed on the increase since the police had attacked in order to control the mob. He had been there, and that increased his belief that he was intrinsically linked to these events. The news reports that he’d viewed today before leaving his dark lock-up suggested that there was a growing feeling of discontent in the public about the treatment of Mathew. Apparently some debate had managed to achieve the unlikely event of temporarily uniting opposing religious factions against the resurrection. Deon remembered the story of the Pharisees who had spoken against Christ. Within the Christian Church, he knew, there were many different factions, and Caroline had always reminded them at Unit that they needed to remain united. “If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand,” she had said. The true messiah had few followers and many enemies, and Deon knew which side he needed to be on, and what the stakes were. The world should have ended, he’d been told, but it hadn’t. It had, however, shifted vastly in the last few weeks. There were greater things at risk here than his detection. He’d had this reaffirmed by one of the other news stories, which told how Bishop Peter Ross had been murdered on the doorstep to his own house in the early hours of the morning as he returned home. God’s own were being struck down, as the Disciples at Unit had been, and Deon realised that he was linked to the ending of this carnage and re-glorification of the true religion.
He had reached the crowd before he realised where he was and ducked through the safety of the prepared route into the building just before stumbling into the angry assembly. He gained access to the elevator in the usual way he had established and set about his errands for the day, wondering when the revelations of the work he was to perform would be made. As he pushed his trolleys along the cold and anonymous corridors of the clinic he thought to himself,
It must all be happening soon
, and this thought filled his mind and obliterated all others as his mental capacities fogged over, leaving him with the feeling that he was viewing his world through the light of an entrance to a tunnel that he remained lost in.
As Mathew found himself feeling healthier, so time tended to drag. The hours spent in a catatonic state were replaced by troubled insomnia and depressing boredom. Between being left alone by Rei at the end of the day and her return the next afternoon he often spoke to no one. He had a series of exercises on his legs to perform, and he tried to make this into a type of competition. Each day he’d try to do ten more cycles, or circumnavigate his room five more times. But it always ended with him lying on the bed and trying to find some music or listen to the narration on the c-pac he’d been lent. He was getting more used to operating it now, although the way it refused to recognise his voice infuriated him, and he disliked the tingling sensation that he got when he operated the ethervision. Would it really be so hard to connect a QWERTY keyboard or have a couple of buttons on the machine that you could just press, he thought. Rei had shown the rudiments of how to use the machine and set up some history lessons for him, but he couldn’t cope with the over-friendly voice telling him about wars that for him still seemed years in the future, happening in places that he’d never heard of. The history made no sense, and so he stopped listening and concentrated on connecting more music, until he eventually had found a way to link the small machine to a system that allowed him to play a tiny selection of the more popular jazz standards. Occasionally it beeped and announced an update, which he soon realised must be when another device linked to it had information input to it. These were usually nonsensical and he often wondered what James had the machine connected to. Messages about God, religious relics and missions rambled inanely on and on, and he tended to ignore the strange communications.
The exercises gave him a chance to meet people, although he’d hardy call them communicative. It seemed that only Rei and the rather intrusive porter James ever wanted to speak. His only opportunity to talk was to the counsellor that he saw every other day. She allowed him to talk about whatever he chose, although rarely spoke back to him, except to prompt him to delve deeper into his own thoughts.
“How have you been since last time?”
“The same really, nothing changes here for me.” He tapped his knee absently as the silence between them dragged.
“Have you been having any dreams?”
“I can’t remember. It’s strange, that I don’t seem to dream at all now. Not that I ever remember, at any rate. I sort of daydream a lot, but nothing when I sleep. Is that odd?”
“What would you like to dream about?”
Mathew thought as he sat in the quiet room. The world he wished he would dream of was gone forever. What his daydreams provided was not what he wanted.
“I think about Paula and Jessie most of the time. But, when they are out of my thoughts it’s not my life when I was with them that I find myself focusing on. It’s me when I was a kid. I think about holidays and places we went, especially before mum died. And think about dad a hell of a lot. Which is weird, because I didn’t really think about him at all that I remember for most of the last 10 years; I mean the last 10 years for me…’
“Yes, I know what you mean. Go on. What do you think about when you remember your father?”
“Trips mainly, and going away places in the summer. And the old house, ’specially my room. I spent quite a bit of time in there. The house always seemed much quieter after mum died. Dad used to be at work a lot. And then he’d come home and be upset. He used to drink quite heavily; I remember that. He beat mum quite badly a couple of times. Then when she died he got worse. I don’t know if it was just ’cos mum had died, but sometimes he’d be furious, he’d really lay into me, then just cry and cry afterwards. He had a belt that he’d use; big brown thing that he kept in a drawer. He never wore it, it was specifically for me, so I always knew what was coming when he got it out. There was a gun in the house, an old World War II Luger, he said he got it from his dad. I always liked the idea that we had a piece of history in the house; something tangible that connected me to the past. Like a relic from another time. I don’t know what he had it for, and I used to wonder if it actually worked. He always told me it did and I was never allowed to touch it. Then one day, I can’t remember why, I found out that it did work; I was about 13, me and dad went into the woods and shot at some rats with it. Sometimes I’d just think about where that gun was kept and whether I could use it if I had to. I remember getting beaten so bad once that I just lay on the bed in my room, and tried to think when I could get it and use it on him. That’s a terrible thing for a kid to think about one of their parents isn’t it? But, well, that’s how he made me feel. He could be so vindictive and evil at times. So I think about him and the house, and being a kid, being at school. I think about that sort of stuff a lot.”
And as he lay in the room that evening those thoughts flooded through his mind again and again. The c-pac beeped to announce a message, then ranted stating “Keep an eye on what’s real but remember that I may be James. Maybe Deon isn’t real anymore.” It didn’t make any sense, as usual. Mathew counted the hours until Rei was due to return the next day and he could have a real conversation with a human who seemed genuinely interested in his welfare. He wondered if she would have any news about Jessie.
He never suspected the chaos that was about to unfold around him.