Cronix (17 page)

Eventually, Lola sulked in the darkness. To overcome the silence, Swaincroft peered into the rear view.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you, Mr Oriente…I hope it isn’t out of order, me asking you this, but I don’t think it’s something you’ve been asked not to discuss outside of the Delpy…”

Oriente frowned in the darkness. “Go on.”

“I was wondering what you were doing so close to London. I mean, you’d been living in obscurity for so long down in Dorking. What suddenly possessed you to come here?”

Oriente wondered whether he should tell them. While he had been forced by the authorities to reluctantly relive the ancient past, he desperately wanted to confide the puzzling events of the past month, to bounce the whole bizarre episode off a neutral mind. More than anything, he wanted to trust Swaincroft and Lola, to have some friends and allies.

“I was, uh, bidden, you might say.”

“Bidden? Bidden by whom?” Swaincroft glanced round.

Oriente sighed, realizing how crazy it sounded. “By a wolf, would you believe?” Swaincroft let out an incredulous laugh. “A wolf? A
wolf
told you to come to London? Was this the same wolf that attacked you?”

“I believe so, yes,” said Oriente. “Only it wasn’t just an ordinary wolf. Obviously.” He paused, wondering how far to go.
Fuck it
, he thought.
Tell them
. “I believe it was Doug Fitch.”

“Doug Fitch?” The name echoed from both Swaincroft and Lola simultaneously. Then the driver laughed. “Mr Oriente, Doug Fitch died a long, long time ago.”

“That's what I thought too. Until he appeared in the form of a wolf at my hut one night.”

“Listen,” said Swaincroft. “To help pay my fees at the university, I also run the Digital Age archives at the British Museum. I can show you footage of his funeral, if you like. You can see him lying in state. He’s quite dead.”

Oriente lit a cigarette, blew smoke out of the window. “You know what, Quin? I'd like to see that. Really I would.”

They dropped him off at the clinic. Back in his room, he undressed and lay on his bed, staring at the strange shapes the street light cast across his ceiling. As he stared, he saw a large insect scuttling across, a black shadow briefly bathed in the glow before disappearing again.

“What kind of a flop house is this anyway?” he muttered, turning his head on the pillow.

He thought no more of it, until a scuttling on the wall, just by his head, caught his attention. He flicked on the bedside lamp and recoiled in surprise: a praying mantis was hanging perpendicular off the wall, black globe eyes seeming to stare straight at him. His first instinct was to flick it away, but the bug seemed raised a foreleg preemptively.

“Wait,” said a tinny voice, barely audible. It took Oriente a second to realize it was coming from the insect itself. “I have a message for you. Don’t speak,” it added, as Oriente opened his mouth to express the fear that he might really, finally have gone mad. “I have a message from the wolf.”

“The wolf? You mean from Fitch?” Oriente croaked, leaning closer to make sure he didn’t miss a word.

“From the wolf,” the mantis repeated.

“Who are you?” whispered Oriente, realizing how ridiculous the scene would appear to anyone watching.

“I’m no one. Call me Jiminy Cricket if you like. Call me whatever you want. Our acquaintance is destined be short.”

The bug sprung to his shoulder to speak right into his ear. It enunciated precisely, like a foreigner with an ear for languages.

“You are doing well at the Delpy,” it said. “They are eating it up. Keep talking like that every day. Tell them everything. But next time they give you a night out as a reward for your entertaining history, go to a place called the Low Tide Bar. It's a gypsy joint on the river. When you go in, the first thing you must do – and this is vital – is go to the toilet. Take a leak, even if you don’t want to. Then go up to the bar and ask for a Wexler. He is a carpet beater, the best in the business. He will be waiting for you. He will help you escape when the time is right.”

“Escape?” asked Oriente. “Why do I need to escape? I would have been living freely in obscurity if your friend the wolf hadn’t shown up and lured me here in the first place. Who are you people anyway?’

“Shush now.” Jiminy Cricket raised a jagged foreleg. “Too many questions. Our conversation is over. Now crush me against the wall and throw my body out of the window.”

“What? I can’t just kill you,” Oriente said. “Christ, I only just met you. And now you told me your name too.”

“It’s not my name, for Chrissakes, I just made that up. Now come on now, slap me. Otherwise I’ll probably just freeze outside, and I can’t stay in here. Security risk.”

Oriente silently picked the creature up between his thumb and forefinger. He shook his head.

“I’m sorry, I just can’t. I’ll put you out the window.”

“Okay,” said the praying mantis, hanging from his forefinger. “I may make it through the night. Now remember, the Low Tide Bar, ask for Wexler. And go to the john immediately you arrive. Otherwise, the whole thing will be a disaster. A disaster. Got that?”

Oriente opened the window and a cold rush of air swept in. He held his hand out over the sill.

“Sleep well, Luis Oriente,” said the bug.

“You too,” he said, tossing it into the darkness, already wondering if he had dreamt the whole episode.

***

Professor Doug Fitch was in a foul mood. The debilitating African heat bore down like an amplification of the reproaches he had been scolding himself with all morning. He'd broken all the rules the previous night, after that little rat-fuck Stiney had compared him over dinner to Dr Mengele. Not that he'd given any credence to the accusation, but the fact that his assistant had even made it irked him. Stiney obviously included himself in the Nazi equation and was wallowing in some trough of self-recrimination, induced by the weeks they'd spent down here. It touched on those niggling worries that sometimes woke him at night, heart beating and wondering just how history would judge them, when history finally sniffed out what they had been up to out in this ever-sweating jungle. Unless they failed utterly, there was no way its searchlight was going to sweep harmlessly by. Posterity's harsh glare would throw him in stark relief, strip away the shades and nuances and pick him out in its merciless two-tone.

As a result, he had sulked over dinner with Stiney, chewing on a chicken drumstick so tough he felt like he was trying to eat his own jaw. Then he stalked off alone to a noisy bar in the nearest town, fifty miles away from the research station, where he had broken the two golden rules of living in Africa: don't drink the local beer and stay away from the hookers.

Fitch wiped the sweat off his forehead. The air conditioning was battling hard against the heat that pressed relentlessly through the walls like a vise. In general, the AC was winning, but there were pockets of resistance close to the door where the tropical rage still managed to leave its mark on his back and armpits each time he passed.

To add to his irritation, he'd noticed while driving down the rutted track into the facility that no one had removed the graffiti he'd ordered scrubbed off the front sign three weeks ago. Under the official title of ‘UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda Holding Facility 37,’ some wag, driven by relentless boredom and the unappetizing nature of the place, had scrawled "Welcome to the Ant Farm."

He suspected that, too, may have been Stiney’s handiwork. Luckily no one ever came out this way to see it.

Stiney was in the lab when Fitch arrived, a skinny, balding creature of indeterminate age, his sweat-blanched face oddly unlined and his perennial milk teeth set in deep pink gums.

"Hey Doug, you look pretty rough this ayem, man," he said with his nervous hiccup laugh. Fitch scowled at him and took a swig of water from the cooler.

"Everything ready?"

"Yep," said Stiney. His mood was always buoyant at work: the doubts only seemed to surface in the evenings, and then only sometimes. A real pro, despite his unappetizing appearance.

"Subject's being fetched from the pens now. Patrice ..." Stiney stared at the log sheet, bit the name up into manageable syllables. "Mbon...Mbon.. yumat...tu. Jesus, his name alone should have got him 15 years. Known to the UN tribunal as GK-154b, Category One Offender. Genocide. In our books, Case Number Seven."

"Program set up?" said Fitch.

"Yessir, we just truss him up and suck his mind right on out of head." He gave a mock salute accompanied by another feverish pant-hoot of laughter. Fitch’s scowl deepened.

The door opened and Rex and Kevin, the secret service musclemen who ran the security end of operations, came in. They were escorting a tall, surly black man in an open shirt and soiled trousers. They were all streaming sweat, and the prisoner had a wild look in his eyes, tugging at the flexi-cuffs on his wrists. He was an
interahamwe,
a member of the Hutu militia that had once run in packs through Rwanda, butchering their neighbors in their thousands with machetes and wooden clubs studded with nails: laboring day and night in blood to exterminate the Tutsis they'd branded cockroaches.

Fitch wondered what horrors this man had perpetrated before being run to ground in a refugee camp in the imploding superstate of Zaire, or Democratic Republic of Congo, or whatever they called the failed state these days. Always something democratic, in inverse proportion to reality. Fitch nodded to Rex and Kevin to strap the man to the bench. He didn't resist, appeared almost indifferent: perhaps he knew the weight of his crimes would always outstrip any conceivable punishment. He'd been a god of death in his time, now he was a mute prisoner in a jail cell. He only flinched his forearm muscles slightly as Fitch inserted the IV.

Stiney called out his vital readings as Fitch pumped the prepared syringes in sequence. Patrice Mbonyumatu's eyes lost their focus but didn't close. His heartbeat sank, the scanners plastered to his shaven head registered decreasing electronic and chemical activity. He'd been in this place several times before in the previous 10 months, and was used to the medical procedure and the bizarre dreams that always lingered.

"Still in echo," said Stiney. He clearly still loved this shit, in spite of himself: made him feel like Mr Sulu on the bridge of the star ship Enterprise calling out to Captain Kirk. But he kept his eyes on the readings as they dropped lower and lower: the stakes were too high to let his own mind drift for even a second. No doubt he'd save the moment in his head and go back over it later in bed, after a few snorts of coke and a bit of Fitch-baiting over dinner.

"Five hundred to six. Approaching void," he said. The killer's eyes glazed. Fitch turned on the receptor circuit, and looked at the Hutu again, almost envious: the mass murderer was having one of the most expensive drug trips in human history.

Fitch prepared the lethal dose.

"Void in ten," said Stiney, then read off a countdown. "Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Okay, we're in the void."

Fitch paused a few seconds more, looked at the face of the man he was about to kill. A blank mask already: the drug had cut all the moorings between his conscious mind and the outside world. Fitch squeezed the plunger.

"Mainload in," he said. Stiney turned the receptor circuit full on. Mbonyumatu's lungs caved in from the sudden flush of potassium chloride. His body heaved in reflex but was bound too tightly to move. His eyes rolled up in their sockets. Nobody else in the room made any movement. Forty seconds later, Fitch pronounced him dead and closed his eyes.

"What reading did you get?" Fitch said, looking at the string of drool hanging from the dead man's mouth. There was no response. He turned from the dead
genocidaire
to Stiney, who was staring at the screen of the outsize computer, so big it looked like some relic of the 1960s. Stiney was frantically stabbing buttons on a keyboard, too intent to respond.

"Oh my God. Oh my
fucking
God." His voice quavered with excitement.

"What?" barked Fitch. "Did we get something? Well, did we get something?"

The computer was spewing print-outs, scratchy graphs and jagged lines of readings. Stiney pulled a few of them off the printer.

"Oh yeah, we got something this time. It’s like … Jesus, it’s above ninety-three percent!"

"You are
shitting
me," shouted Fitch, grabbing some of the papers from his hands. Rex and Kevin sidled up behind him.

"So did it work?” said Kevin. “Does that mean we get out of this stinking dump now?"

Fitch said nothing, just brushed past the men and hurried down the corridor to the ops room where the sat-phone was rigged, as excited as Moses scurrying down the slopes of Mount Sinai.

***

The dark track ahead of the taxi was swallowed by pines swaying gently in the breeze from the Thames. The driver slowed down when he saw the faint lantern light twinkling on the river’s edge, hinting at the presence of the gypsy bar. Oriente had hired a cab because neither Swaincroft nor Lola knew where the hell the Low Tide bar was, lost somewhere on the eastern reaches of the river. Oriente paid the cabbie and, holding up his torch, could just make out a path through the reeds. He told his companions to follow him, and they plunged into the dark wood.