“We’ve got hundreds of these things in our lab and none of them do anything. Well, nothing like what I’ve just described. They tick over and look impressive, a neat combination of animatronics and micro-circuits. And sure, they mix organic matter and cell technology, but not in a very complex way. They even emit low level electro-magnetic waves, which is why it reacted so badly to the x-ray your friends organised.” He sat back in his chair, waving the device in front of him as he spoke.
“The point of these things isn’t what they do, it’s who they lead us to. A good old-fashioned bluff. Classic cold war tactics. Like I said, the world might have gone high-tech but human psychology remains the same.”
Jack looked at the device, thinking of the nine patients in the lab, thinking it was a high price to pay for a bluff that might not pay off. It was only a matter of luck he hadn’t suffered the same fate as them.
“I had two questions, Sir Clive. You’ve answered the first but not the second. What do you want with me?”
17
Later that night, as Amanda nestled in the crook of his arm, sated and sleepy after their love-making, he thought about Sir Clive’s offer. Part of him had known what the man was going to suggest before he said it, but he still wanted to hear it out loud. Let the last device be taken. Let the people who’d attacked the ward and murdered nine people cut it from inside him. The only way for the bluff to work. The devices had to be sold as a group of ten. The information they’d leaked in the run up to the theft had stated that specifically. Without a sale they’d have no idea who the players might be in a future cyber war. No way of making an effective pre-emptive strike.
His head was telling him not to do it, to forget it and get back to the routine of his student life in Cambridge, but his heart was saying something different He’d been presented with a choice, a challenge, the chance to prove himself. As he wrestled with the decision he thought about Paul, his brother, the dark thoughts he had bottled up and placed out of reach. Childhood memories too painful to revisit.
Paul was three years older. A lifetime when their ages were eight and eleven. They were playing in the snow outside the Herefordshire army base. A winter day, the cold air cutting through their wool scarves as the evening sun dragged the last minutes of daylight below the horizon. Jack was throwing snowballs, his brother ignoring him, saying they needed to get home. He remembered getting angry, he remembered trying to get his older brother’s attention. Paul was dad’s favourite, the strongest swimmer, the fastest runner. He always tried to act the grown up. Wouldn’t rise to Jack’s taunts.
“Hey Paul, look at me, look at me Paul, bet you can’t do this,” Jack had climbed on to the edge of the frozen lake, edging out cautiously, sliding his feet.
“Look at me Paul, I’m the best skater and you can’t do it cos you’re a stupid scaredy cat,” he shouted, skidding over the ice, almost at the centre. “Scaredy cat scaredy cat sitting on the door mat!”
“Come back Jack, don’t be stupid,” his brother finally replied. Only eleven years old, but already he knew the difference between stupidity and bravery.
Jack realised he had Paul’s attention around the same time he realised the ice underneath him was starting to give way. A sharp crack, an unearthly creaking, like an ancient wooden ship. Then the black water seeping up onto the frozen white surface, covering his wellington boots. He turned towards his brother, his face no longer taunting. His face a picture of undisguised panic.
The cold came upon him suddenly, paralysing, engulfing him in darkness. The world turned upside down. He flung his arms outwards, trying to grab at something, anything, but all he felt was ice, the water filling his mouth as he tried to scream.
The next thing he remembered was hands pushing him upwards, pushing him towards the edge of the lake, smashing the ice in front of him, breaking a way through. He scrambled forwards, reached for the side, his fingers grabbing at the grass beneath the snow, numb to the knuckles, gasping for breath, coughing up water and rolling onto his back.
Paul climbed slowly up the bank, stood over him, bent double.
“Idiot,” he said, shaking his head, holding out his arm. Jack was too cold to cry. He reached up and took his brother’s hand. They walked home in silence.
The coughing started two days later. Nobody thought anything of it. Paul had never had so much as a cold before. Then the fever. His mother and father consigned him to bed, thinking it was flu. By the time the doctor saw him he was worse, pains in his chest, clammy skin, blood mixed with the phlegm he coughed up. They took him to hospital. Acute bronchial pneumonia. Lungs full of fluid. Too late for the antibiotics. Jack remembered his parents by the hospital bed, their backs to him. Loud cries from his mother, his father silent. Broad shoulders heaving up and down, wracked by grief.
Jack blamed himself. No matter what anybody else said, however much they tried to reason with him, he knew it was fault. He knew it and what was worse, his father and mother knew it, despite what they said.
Jack shuddered. “What is it?” Amanda’s voice heavy with sleep, pulling him into the present. He must have woken her.
“Nothing, sorry Mands.” She mumbled something and drifted back to sleep. Jack was relieved to hear the sound of her voice, the real world rescuing him from the past. He owed his life to Paul. His brother. The hero. Who knew what Paul would have become if he’d reached adulthood?
The men who’d died, the nine patients next to him in the ward. Did he owe something to them too? Did he owe his country something? He’d been presented with a choice, a challenge, the chance to prove himself, to make amends. He checked his watch. 24 hours to decide whether or not he was willing to go through with it.
There was someone he had to talk to before making the decision. The one person who could help him, a man who had spent 20 years putting his career as soldier before and above anything else, before his wife, before his children. A man he hadn’t spoken to for the better part of three years. A man he did his best to avoid. His father, Archie Hartman.
18
Harvey Newman drove his Lexus SUV out of Centurion’s head office on Wiltshire Boulevard. From the air-conditioned building to the air-conditioned car with its soft leather seats, surround-sound stereo. Such pampering. He’d given up soldiering 20 years ago but he still couldn’t get used to the luxury of his civilian life. The complacent ease with which rich West Coast folk glided through their cosy existence.
He knew he was one of them, if not in spirit, then at least in terms of the money in his bank account. Enough money to get invited to the Polo club, to all the right cocktail parties and tennis tournaments. As if he gave a damn. In a town that made its millions from the entertainment industry, he’d never felt at home. Centurion was his baby. His business. He’d built it up from scratch, from a rag-tag group of mercenaries paid to protect oil interests in West Africa to a billion dollar defence contractor advising the Bush administration on security in Iraq. More money than he’d ever dreamed possible. Modern warfare was an expensive and risky business and the last three presidents had shown themselves to be more than happy to farm it out to private companies like Centurion.
No, the L.A lifestyle didn’t suit him. Give him the unforgiving desert sun any day, the ice-cold nights that followed, or the steaming heat of the jungle, the need to live on your wits. That was where he felt alive. Not here, surrounded by gym-buffed men who wouldn’t know how to throw a punch if their pay check depended on it.