Saskia Brandt: Deja Vu Part 3

'You couldn't stay in Oxford any more. You wouldn't have realised your potential.' David rubbed his sore neck. 'We've been through this.'

'I was the one who had to go through it, not you. Do you know what it was like in that school?'

'I got your e-mails.'

'I didn't get yours.'

Now his anger threatened to match hers. 'Jennifer, why did you call?'

'Where are you?'

'I'm at the old research centre in West Lothian.'

'c.r.a.p, already? What are you doing there?'

'I can't tell you that on the phone.'

'This isn't a phone, Dad.' The tone: amus.e.m.e.nt that the old duffer could even check his email.

David smiled. 'Hey, I figured out the encryption.'

'You mean your Ego unit did. Sounds like a nice toy.'

'He's clever, but a bit buggy. A prototype.'

David reached into his jacket. 'Do you know what I brought with me, Jenny?'

'Dad, listen for second. Go back.'

He did not remove his hand. 'Has someone been talking to you?'

'Dad? Go back.' She might have been five years old. 'Please now.'

Chapter Five.

The high ribwork of the orangery joined a sternum thirty feet above the floor. Premature night had turned its panes dark blue. McWhirter sat but David stood with his elbow on the mantel of the empty fireplace, spinning the ice in his whisky with metronomic tips of his wrist. Otherwise, the orangery was deserted. Rain invisible but there, like pa.s.sing traffic.

'Somehow,' said McWhirter, scratching the translucent skin of his knuckles, 'he broke into your old laboratory.'

'Tell me what it's like down there.'

'A steady five degrees. Structurally, it isn't safe. We've had two cave-ins.'

'His physical condition?'

'I thought you could take a look at him.'

'Medical school was a long time ago. Don't you have your own people for that?'

'You'll do.'

David abandoned the hearth for a winged chair opposite McWhirter. He noticed the broadsheet newspapers. Dead-tree editions for the old fossils of the Park Hotel. He disliked the malt, but sipped. 'So you want me to go down there. Triffic.'

'You know the layout as well as anyone.'

'I worked here. So did you. I'll guard the whisky and you go down. What say you?'

'The bomber knew this place too.'

'No argument. It was an inside job.'

'He knew where to set the explosives,' continued McWhirter, unblinking. 'He knew when the scientists would be in the hall and away from danger. He knew which project to bomb.'

David could hear the ping of his heartbeat. 'Aren't you a bit old to be playing games?'

'Just between us. We're alone. Did you do it?'

'My wife died in the explosion.' David let the moment stretch out until it snapped. 'My Helen. If I ever found the man who did it, I would kill him. Someone put you in charge of security, McWhirter, and they made a mistake. You've both had twenty years to get over it.'

McWhirter crossed his legs. The faded jeans were at odds with the smartness of the man David remembered. His crew-cut hair and combed moustache had whitened. He had a sailor's squint. McWhirter looked at his gla.s.s. 'Bruce has put Onogoro back online.'

'b.o.l.l.o.c.ks he has. It was destroyed.'

'Evidently not.'

'It needs a dedicated power plant just to boot.'

'Twenty years ago, maybe. Welcome to the future. The power spike is how we got wind of the whole business.'

'I thought the entrances were capped.'

'We cut through them.'

'"We".' David surveyed the neat, empty tables and chairs. 'So you and I are not alone in the hotel.'

'This is the future. n.o.body is alone anymore.'

'You got grumpy with age, McWhirter.'

'I was always grumpy. Now I've grown into it, like my ears. David?'

'What?'

'I can't send any more of my people down there.'

'But you want me to go down.'

'Think of this as an opportunity for reconciliation. He was your best friend.'

Idly, David put his nose into the whisky gla.s.s. 'He was. He was.'

Within a short hour, David found himself in the darkness beneath the hotel, cold and bugged by the black. His torch beam reflected from the airborne particles. Snowy ash. Something had stirred the flakes and he didn't know what. As he breathed, his spit evaporated in his respirator.

David remembered an air-conditioned expanse dotted with abstract art. Now there was just ongoing black. His feet settled feather-light, careful as an astronaut in moon dust, but the corridor sediment spilled nonetheless. His heavy-duty trousers snagged on cabinets, computers monitors, and stalagmites of gla.s.s. He stopped to twist around one of the many cables that looped down. Occasionally, the ceiling purred.

He fought against the silence but the silence won. Its negative pressure drew out the memories. Once: a guitar concerto. Helen, his wife, leading Bruce into the dining room of the new house, noting the layout of chairs, counting the paces between the kitchen door and the patio. He remembered the way Bruce laughed: his cackle was an excavation from the bottom of his chest.

There was another purr from the ceiling.

His tears grew, unwipable, behind his visor.

Ten metres ahead, a light bobbed. David thumbed off his torch. The far light remained.

'Bruce?' he called, m.u.f.fled.

He pressed forward. Cables snagged at his chin. He heard a sound from his teenage years. It was the tight creak of rigging when the sails took wind. He looked up and saw the ceiling distend. Dust rained, absurdly liquid. He scrambled forward but tripped. His head struck a rocky swelling of concrete. The world canted and he could not stand. Through his belly, he felt the ceiling collapse. In the stillness afterward, he understood that he had lost the torch. The corridor was black as burial. The collapse had missed him by centimetres.

The pip in his ear said, 'Professor Proctor, you have lost your telemetric connection to the surface.'

'There's been a cave in. Is there another way out?'

'Not directly. But the guard in your former laboratory is carrying an extremely low-frequency transmitter. You could send a message.'

'I think I broke the torch, Ego.'

'Your visor is equipped with a zero-light mode. Would you like me to activate it?'

'Please.'

McWhirter completed his nightly exercises with ten last press-ups on his knuckles. Sweat dewed his chest hair. He jumped into a crouch and pressed a towel against his forehead and each armpit. There were eight mirrors in his Victorian suite. The full-length gla.s.s in the living room showed him what he wanted. He walked through the French doors to a balcony set with hardy, dark green plants. McWhirter had such shrubs in his own garden, where they defined a pet labyrinth. He hung the towel on his neck and looked down the gravel runway to the emptied hotel - footlights marked its edges - while his sweat dried in the wind.

His telephone rang.

'McWhirter.' He sat on the bed and rolled his head to treat a crick. 'Go on. f.u.c.k.' He removed the towel and sat on it. 'No one is that lucky. He's gone. List Benson as missing in action, too. Send flowers to whoever wants them. No. No, it's never worth it. Cap the north entrance with RN4. I want it diamond hard. Tell the team we'll leave at noon tomorrow. Of course it's possible.'

Chapter Six.

David stopped in the doorway of his former laboratory and studied the ceiling. False colour belied the dark ruin on which the visor's zero light camera worked. Fire had taken the tiles. Exposed cables trailed. No doubt some of them carried power.

His first footfall crunched. He looked down at a human hand and jinked left into a filing cabinet. It rang like a gong. Five slow breaths later, he reached out to tap the knee of a crumpled man.

'Hey. h.e.l.lo.'

'May I help you?' asked Ego.

'There is a man here, wearing a suit like mine. Can you interface with it?'

'...Yes. I'm transferring data.'

The man's visor was opaque.

'Well, Ego?'

'The suit is in stand-by mode. The occupant's breathing became irregular two hours ago, then ceased.'

David undid the man's mask. Pressurised vomit bubbled out. David looked down two red eyes of nothing.

'He drowned, Ego. Can you a.n.a.lyse the air?'

'There are fine transition metals, some acids - chiefly sulphuric - and insoluble particles. The atmosphere is acutely carcinogenic. I would suggest that the occupant was exposed for too long.'

The man's right hand rested in the dust. He had written, 'Cant.'

'What was his name?'

'She is called Caroline Benson.'

David looked again. Of course. No make-up. He touched her shoulder and moved away.

The liquid storage device had once prompted a joke about LSD, but David could not remember which of team had cracked it. The transparent chamber was the size of a car, and the soup of liquid polymer, the tonnes of it, rolled in huge fronts of colour. Once it had reminded David of the surface of Jupiter. Now it reminded him of the vomit on Caroline Benson's lips. In contrast with the darkness, it was nova bright.

'Ego, I will place you beneath the forward stanchion of the device. Do you understand?'

'Perfectly.'

David slid Ego into the drifts of dust.