Breaking Point (28 page)

‘I have a saying. Live by the sword, die by the sword.’ Maclyn stopped pacing and stood very still. ‘There was a man called Sol who helped arrange for a large shipment of cigarettes and cigars to be stolen from one of my warehouses. He now understands the saying very clearly. Live by the sword, die by the sword. And I thought, when I get Maitland down here, how do I get him to tell me the truth? You see, if you understand something, how it works, what its mode of action is, that makes it all the more terrifying. Ignorance is bliss. Knowledge is agony. So I thought, a failed scientist. What does he know about?’

A biting pain seized Reuben’s neck. He was being pulled back, off balance. Then something stopped him toppling over. A fist in his spine pushing him forward, his neck being yanked in the opposite direction. No way of breathing. The tube passing through his oesophagus, not his trachea. He didn’t fight it. He stayed still, conserving his breath, biting his teeth hard
against
the tube, screwing up his eyes, waiting for it to end.

Maclyn started talking again, and Reuben opened his eyes. ‘We’ve had a bit of a scout around, Valdek and me. Car products, household cleaners, that type of thing. The stuff kept under sinks and in garages. You know the kind of items.’

Maclyn opened the brown cardboard box, tilting it so that Reuben could see its multi-coloured contents. A blue plastic bottle of bleach; thin purple meths in clear plastic; a lurid orange bottle of Mr Muscle drain cleaner; a half-empty green Fairy Liquid bottle; a white container of floor polish; a black and white tin of oven cleaner; some Pine Fresh bathroom solution; a silver litre of engine oil; an off-white cylinder of limescale remover. Reuben’s eyes began to blur. The colours faded and melted. He remained as still as he could, desperate for air. He was dizzy. The intense burning in his neck cut through the light-headedness, his brain starved of oxygen.

Maclyn took out the objects and lined them up on the table, from smallest to largest. ‘Experiments, that’s what you scientists do. Injecting things into animals. Testing, that’s what you call it. Putting a substance into a defenceless animal and seeing what happens.’ Maclyn bared his teeth.
‘Now
you’re the defenceless animal, Maitland. And I’m going to play at being the scientist. How the fuck does that sound?’

The choker loosened. Reuben tried to answer but couldn’t. He was breathing too hard, fighting for air. Maybe thirty seconds of suffocation, but it was enough. He had to think fast. He had never carried out any animal work. Not because he was against it, but because it was virtually irrelevant to forensic research. But as James Crannell had said, animal work happened, and was often necessary. Mouse models of cancer underpinning fundamental findings. Reuben glanced down at Maclyn’s dog and knew it was pointless arguing. This was fucked up, and getting worse. Maclyn was coming apart at the seams. He inspected the bottles again, a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. Bleach. Acids. Alkalis. Solvents. A basic chemistry set of nasties.

‘Valdek,’ Maclyn instructed, ‘pass me it now.’

A large tattooed right arm appeared in Reuben’s line of sight, the lead slackening for a second. He’s gripping with his right, Reuben thought. Anything, any information, any clues that could help. He squinted at the object in Valdek’s hand. It was plastic, white and opaque. Wide at one end, then quickly constricting. A funnel. He
watched
Maclyn push it tight into the tubing which projected half a metre from his mouth. Then Maclyn picked up the orange bottle of Mr Muscle.

‘Loves the jobs you hate,’ he read from the label. ‘We shall see.’

11

THE SUBSTANCE WAS
clear. Reuben tried to guess what it contained. Surfactants, SDS, bleach, maybe some caustic alkali. He did a quick calculation. Five litres of blood in his body. If he ingested just twenty millilitres of cleaner – the rough volume of the funnel – that would be one part per two hundred and fifty. A ludicrously high concentration. Despite himself, he pulled against the chain. Valdek gripped him hard, yanking on the choker, cutting off the air.

He watched Maclyn step forward. He brought the bottle up to Reuben’s face. Maclyn moved it slowly. Eye to eye, sucking it all in. Then he raised the funnel and poured the bottle. A coldness flooding straight into his stomach. The chain being released, blood flowing again. Reuben
coughing
and gasping, the drain cleaner starting to pulse around his body. As he sucked in desperate lungfuls of air he sensed the scorching heat in his veins. Almost instantly he was sick and dizzy, wanting to scratch through his skin and get it out. A headache. A blinding, crashing wave spreading into his cortex, hacking its way through.

Maclyn’s words spilled out, half heard. ‘According to the bottle, we’ve got sodium hypochlorite, amine oxide, sodium hydroxide. “May result in chlorine gas being released. Highly caustic and corrosive.” Nasty stuff, Dr Maitland. Bad enough if you get it on your skin. But under it … I think, Mr Kosonovski, we can conclude that Mr Muscle Sink and Plughole is not safe for human use.’

Reuben started vomiting. Valdek pulled the chain tight, blocking his throat. Reuben felt his gut spasming, the liquid contents of his stomach forcing their way up his oesophagus with nowhere to go. A small volume found its way through the plastic pipe and dripped on to the floor. His stomach convulsed again and again, obscene retching noises in his ears, the fluids trapped. For the first time he saw that he was going to die here in the depths of the city, just like five men and women had on the Tube over the last ten days.
Underground
, with two pitiless psychopaths. Drain cleaner in his stomach, leaking into his circulation; slowly choking, needing to be sick but suffocating on his own vomit.

He saw Lucy and Joshua sitting at the kitchen table, gently indenting its soft wooden surface with their presences. He pictured his son alone in his bedroom, retreating into books and toys, an only child. He flashed through images of GeneCrime, of what he could have achieved if he’d decided to take the job, of being back on the inside, of coordinating manhunts and tracking killers. He saw Judith giving birth to a tiny pink baby with achingly small fingers and toes. He saw Moray going about his business, lurking at the fringes, meeting suits in airports and car parks. And as his stomach convulsed over and over, and his head throbbed, and his veins itched and burned from the inside, the images and pictures in his brain started to recede, until all he could see were blinding flashes of white. His knees buckled and he hit the floor hard. The chain had been released and he was breathing fast.

‘Next, Dr Maitland, let’s step it up. Limescale remover or bleach? What do we think, Valdek?’

Reuben didn’t hear the reply. He was too busy
trying
to be sick. Deep painful retches that racked his diaphragm. He started convulsing. He knew he was going into shock but couldn’t do anything about it. An echoing voice that didn’t seem to be in the room rattled into his consciousness.

‘You know, I’m growing much less interested in hearing what you want to tell me. The more I think about it, the more fun it would be simply to put you out of harm’s reach. You’ve always been a clever bastard, Maitland. But when you’re dead, it doesn’t matter how big you think your brain is.’

The edges of Reuben’s vision started closing in fast.

12

REUBEN CAME ROUND
like someone had stabbed a litre of adrenalin straight into his heart. Maclyn Margulis was grinning at him, a bottle in his right hand. He placed it back on the table. Reuben couldn’t focus on the label. Maclyn had dosed him with something else. He was alert, wide-eyed, twitchy. His stomach felt like it had been kicked and stamped on. There was still an itchy burning in the veins leading down the left side of his neck and into his chest. Reuben scanned the bottles on the table. He tried again to focus. A white container of floor cleaner had been pulled out of line. What the fuck was in it? It didn’t feel good. He was shaking like he had full-blown flu.

He tried to sit up. Suddenly he was being lifted by the neck. Valdek was pulling on the
choker
, forcing him to his feet. Reuben tasted blood mixing with the acid of recent vomit. Either his stomach was bleeding or his mouth was. He was stiffening up, deep aches in the flesh of his arms and legs. His heart was racing, a magnified thump in his ears. There was a cold wetness under his arms and across his forehead. Maclyn was running his fingers over the line-up of bottles, transfixed, lost in the process. Reuben started coughing, a sharp hack that stung his throat. Maclyn looked up.

‘Enjoy that one?’ he asked. ‘Seems to have perked you up. Thought the drain cleaner had finished you off. Valdek kicked you around a bit, but that didn’t seem to help. But the floor cleaner has really done the trick.’

Reuben tried to speak. He was sweating and feverish. Noises came out that sounded like someone else was saying them, the tube still impeding his words. ‘Maclyn. I’ve told you the truth. There’s nothing else.’

Maclyn stepped forward, inches from his face. Reuben focused on the square jaw, its muscles twitching; the white teeth, gnashing together as he spoke. ‘I don’t want anything else. I just want you to die slowly and painfully. We gave you some of the meths while you were out. Didn’t seem to
do
a lot. Let’s try the next one.’ He brought the bottle of limescale remover into Reuben’s line of sight. ‘I’m actually enjoying this. And I think Rico is too.’

Shivering, aching, wired and sick, Reuben tried to do the chemistry. Sodium hypochlorite plus methylated spirits plus limescale remover. Chlorine. That was the danger. If the hypochlorite reacted with whatever was in the limescale remover, he was fucked. A slow certain death, being dissolved from the inside, organs failing one by one, blood vessels leaking, nerves losing their protective sheaths and misfiring. He felt a sudden empathy for the Tube victims.

‘But if that doesn’t do the trick,’ Maclyn said, reading his mind, ‘then I guess we go for the bleach. I’ve been saving it, but the time is almost right.’

Maclyn twitched as he wrestled with the safety cap. Reuben saw the colourless fluid in the neck of the bottle. Maclyn was trembling with excitement. Behind Reuben, Valdek was as silent and still as ever. He started to pull tighter, cutting off the air again. Reuben knew it was over. If this didn’t fuck him, the bleach would.

Maclyn let him see the funnel again, up close, the open bottle tilted towards him. For a moment
he
thought Maclyn might pour it into his eye. But he didn’t. He lowered it slowly towards the funnel. Reuben felt the coldness as the fluid sank down into his stomach. He pictured the process. The fluid would enter his digestive system, flood through into his hepatic veins, trip through his liver, return to the heart, get sucked into the left ventricle, be fired around the head and the torso and the limbs. He saw the fine capillaries of the lungs, the kidneys, the gut. Fragile, beautiful, slender vessels acutely vulnerable to toxins.

There was a knife of pain in his stomach, and almost instantly in his lungs. A cold, crippling gouging that stopped him breathing. It didn’t matter what Valdek was doing with the choker. This was far worse. Reuben’s fingers went numb behind his back. Please, not chlorine. Anything but chlorine. He tried to cough but again his windpipe was crushed shut. He had a sudden sense of imminent collapse. And then he hit the floor again.

13

WHAT BROUGHT HIM
round were the noises. Penetrating echoes that rattled around his brain like stones in a tin can. Three loud metal crashes at the far end of the room, the gnawing whine of a drill or a saw for a few seconds, and the unmistakable screech of tyres on a car park floor. Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement, and then he heard a shout.

‘Margulis, stay the fuck where you are!’

Lying on his side, his cheek against the cold concrete floor, blinking hard, Reuben watched Maclyn and Valdek react. Everything was turned through ninety degrees. Four men approached, walking slowly. They were cautious, guns drawn. He saw Maclyn reach inside his jacket, Valdek take something from the back of his jeans. Other
shouts
echoed through the space. Reuben kept shivering, lapsing in and out, trying to follow what was going on. But he couldn’t move – his arms and legs tied, his torso stiff, his whole body continually shuddering and jerking.

Maclyn was first to fire. He walked towards the four men, not looking for cover, just firing off round after round, screaming at the top of his voice. The shots reverberated in Reuben’s ears, unnatural and distorted, so loud he felt they would burst his eardrums. There were flashes of light, a hint of smoke in the gloom. Valdek edged to the side of the room, in the shadows, firing twice, creeping along behind Maclyn. There were more shots, rapid bursts, the amplified ching of metal on stone. Reuben’s eyes wanted to close but he forced them to stay open and focus. He knew he was on the edge, in a limbo between passing out again and hallucination. Time was bent out of shape. He had no idea whether the sounds he could hear and the flickers of movement he could see had been going on for seconds or hours.

Maclyn reloaded and continued to walk forward. He fired again. From the side, Valdek took aim at the men some twenty metres away. A couple of them had dropped to the floor, firing on their stomachs. Then Maclyn seemed to sway.
He
dropped his gun. Valdek stayed where he was, aiming another volley of shots. Maclyn collapsed to his knees. He grabbed at his side, then toppled forward on to his face. Reuben sensed the dull slap of flesh and bone against concrete.

There were more shouts, lost in the echoey distance. Reuben peered through the poorly lit room. The four men all seemed OK. They changed their aim, closer to Reuben. Two more shots emanated from Valdek, just three or four metres from where he was lying. And then Valdek cried out. An angry, defiant roar. A wounded animal. He squeezed the trigger and started to run. Straight at them. Shouting and screaming, picking up momentum. Reuben’s stomach retched, a dry heave that made his eyes water. The blurred motion of Valdek changed. He was toppling forward. The sharp crack of a pistol, and then another three, one after the other. It was impossible to tell who was shooting, or whether all of them were. Valdek’s legs stopped working. One splayed to the side. He crashed down into the floor, almost in slow motion. His head and neck hit first, a heap of muscle and bone. He was almost touching distance from Maclyn.