First Horseman, The (26 page)

He closed his eyes and his vision lit up like a red firework display as he saw into the capillaries of his eyelids. It would have been a fun lightshow if he had been feeling better, but instead it was just a blazing red inferno of sparks, which stopped him dozing off. He let out a groan and coughed. Sleep would come: he could feel it welling up in him.

How had so much gone so horribly wrong? Not long ago everything had been running like clockwork.

He was so hot – he might have been wrapped in a blanket. As he fell into a doze, strange distorted images flitted through emerging dreams. Flaming devils were running and jumping across blazing fields— he woke, his vision blurred. He rubbed his eyes. They were on a motorway he didn’t recognise and a freezing wind was blowing on his face. He closed the window and rubbed his eyes again.

A big blue road sign said ‘Gatwick’. A few moments later another told him that the distance to his destination was five miles.

He was burning up. He wiped the perspiration from his brow. This isn’t right, he thought. He took a piece of kitchen roll from his pocket and blew his nose, which relieved the pressure in his sinuses. As he folded the paper, he saw in it a large red blob. Then he felt warm liquid rush his nose. He put the kitchen roll to it quickly and tasted his own blood.

This was terribly wrong. His eyes were filled with tears that burnt. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hands and squinted at them. The tears appeared pink, not clear.

‘Cabby,’ he cried.

The driver glanced at him in the rear-view window and gasped. ‘Are you OK, mate?’

‘Take me back to where you picked me up.’

‘I can take you to A&E,’ offered the driver, whose face was lit with concern at the prospect of blood on his seats.

‘No, just take me back.’

‘OK,’ said the driver, ‘but if you change your mind, tell me.’ He picked up a box of Kleenex from the passenger seat and held it out to Renton, who snatched it.

Renton glimpsed himself in the driver’s mirror. His face was red, the whites of his eyes bloodshot. He was ill. It looked to him like Ebola. He thought back to the lab and the loading of the specimens: had one escaped and bitten him? It must have – how else would he have the disease? His high temperature was not an after-effect of the serum: it was the accelerated onset of the disease. Ebola took a week to incubate, perhaps as little as three days in the aggressive strain they had grown and enhanced. The serum had accelerated his metabolism and the virus with it. He had to get back to the lab. Cardini would know what to do. He might survive.

He could go to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases but he was known there by the medical specialists as the famous Cardini’s assistant and would be quickly recognised. Then if he pulled through he would only be arrested and spend the rest of his life in prison. He had to get back to Cardini. It was his only hope.

‘Please hurry,’ he said, his throat hurting with the effort.

‘I’ll go as fast as I can, mate,’ said the driver, coming off the motorway to go back in the opposite direction. ‘If you pass out I’m taking you to a hospital,’ he said.

‘OK.’

He had driven up the same roads like a lunatic only a few hours before but now he was cruising like an old guy in a clapped-out twenty-year-old banger. He didn’t want to attract any more attention to himself and risk getting waylaid by the police. There had been something very final in Cardini’s voice when he’d said it was Jim’s last chance to speak with him. Did he know something that Jim didn’t? He needed to get to the bottom of whatever the hell Cardini was up to.

Jim was used to things being linear in his world. One thing followed from another. This situation was fragmented into a mosaic and the picture it portrayed was a garbled mystery.

He had seen the TRT at work; he had felt it work on him. He had seen an ancient dying man made a generation younger. He had met a wonderful girl. He had killed two men and fought a maniac. The only common factor was Cardini, the daunting professor with a cure for death.

Everything revolved around Cardini, but he had no idea how it all fitted together. He knew something awful was going on so he had to find out what Cardini was planning.

At legal speeds the journey was excruciatingly slow. He wanted to travel much faster and so did the car, but he didn’t want his number plate flashing up on a traffic police computer somewhere, which might link him up with the road events of the day before.

Vehicle after vehicle passed him, passengers glancing at him as they went by. Some people smiled. One white-van passenger gave him the finger. Jim decided he was going to get a really boring car to add to the collection, a shabby old Volvo, perhaps, or a generic people-carrier. A million pounds’ worth of wheeled rocket wasn’t a sensible means of transport and he owned no vehicle that wasn’t flashy or extravagant.

He found himself wondering about Kate. Somewhere ahead, Stafford would be chaperoning her to her door in the bullet-riddled armour-plated Maybach, driving behind her at exactly the right distance and speed.

The miles ticked down slowly.

Cardini held out his once-quivering hand. It was as steady as it had been when he was a surgeon. The steady hand was the proof of cold blood and an incredible concentration, both vital to him as he tacked and spliced nerves, bound sinews and mated capillaries. He was proud of that work, but he had always been proud of himself, even as a child. All men were not born equal and they never would be. There was talent, there was breeding, there was the alpha human of Huxley’s Brave New World and there were the epsilons. Yet now there was no room for them all and the epsilons had to be purged, just as the weak shoots of a planting had to be thinned.

The cull would change everything. Death would make life more precious. In initiating a plague against man he would be its saviour. In the following decades, he would be the master of longevity and, as his knowledge, power and wisdom grew, of human biology. There would be no cutting down of his mighty oak, no felling of his majesty by aged decline. As other minds wilted, he would become an ever greater mental colossus. Within one or two generations he would be unassailable, the grey emperor of a new world, a latter-day Methuselah.

But things were not going to plan.

The hot-headed youth had torn his plans to tatters. Jim Evans, however, could be the perfect remedy to the very problems he had created. Under Evans’s patronage, Cardini would be unimpeded for decades, enough time for the world to be cleansed and for him to have transcended the intellect of other mortals.

Evans would provide the bridge to the fruition of his master plan and a simple solution to what had become a set of complex problems. All Cardini had to do was bend him to his will using the ultimate promise of eternal life. It had never failed before. In the end it would surely overcome Evans.

Jim drove slowly up the drive through the scrubby woods that surrounded Cardini’s hidden lab. He was starting to have second thoughts.

He should have called Smith – he still could. If he involved the authorities, though, he would never find out what Cardini was really up to and, knowing Cardini, the professor would simply use the serum to seduce someone very senior and get from him whatever it was he desired. As such, something worse might come out of an intervention from Smith: another patron to fund Cardini’s sinister plans.

Would Renton be there?

Renton hadn’t been an easy opponent, obviously high on the serum, but Jim had been able to take him on, even though he was wielding a knife – but what if it had been a machete or a fire axe?

He’d been an idiot to leave the gun at home and drive straight into Cardini’s trap. Sometimes he thought he was the stupidest guy in the world and right now was just one such time.

He could turn back even now. What could Cardini tell him that he didn’t already know? He wasn’t going to sell his soul for a promise of eternal youth. He wasn’t going to be a pawn in Cardini’s game for anything. The drug clearly turned a frequent user into a barking psycho. He had experienced the effect on his mind, which, even after a small dose, had been remarkable, but he didn’t long to take it again. It was like when he had driven along the motorway at 200 m.p.h. It had been thrilling but it had also been scary.

His nan had liked to say, ‘What you see is what you get,’ and as he had grown up, the phrase had morphed in his mind from a meaningless adage into something profound. There was little or no truth below the surface. If you wanted to know what the truth was, all you had to do was look at it with innocent eyes. When the market was going up, it was going up; when it was falling, it was going to carry on falling. Not much looked ugly that wasn’t; little looked beautiful that wasn’t.

This was an ugly situation, populated with terrible people up to something horrible. That’s enough evidence for me to turn around and head away from the whole set-up, Jim thought.

But instead it drove him on.

Renton had lost track of time. His world was a blur of strange images and the sickness that racked his body. He had to get back to the lab.

He wanted to ask how much further it was, but he didn’t dare utter a sound. He could taste blood in his mouth as it leaked from his gums and mixed with pooling saliva, which he forced himself to swallow. His heavy breathing filled his head with white noise as he shielded his face with his hands. If the seatbelt hadn’t held him so securely, he would have slumped forward.

He pulled his consciousness into a ball inside his crumbling body, desperate to hold out against his disintegration. He concentrated on making it to the next moment, surviving by willing himself into the future. The TRT would be healing him just as the accelerated virus was tearing his viscera apart. Streaks of pain, like thin needles skewering his trunk, came in showers, and he winced as they passed.

If he could get more TRT, it would boost his body’s fight against the infection. It had accelerated the effect of the virus but it could accelerate his recovery too. With enough serum, he dreamt in his delirium, his body would fight back and overwhelm the disease. He had to stay upright in his seat. He had to get back to Cardini.

The driver looked at his passenger in the mirror. The man was cradling his face like he was having some kind of migraine. He was worrying about getting paid, but at the building where he had made the pickup, there’d be plenty of people to bail out the guy if he wasn’t up to it. At a hospital he might be left holding the bag. As long as his passenger looked awake, he’d keep going to Cambridge.

The front door of the lab was locked. There were venetian blinds down across the main reception windows so Jim couldn’t see in. The door had no give at all, suggesting it was a lot sturdier than it looked. He peered at the entry system. You needed a swipe and possibly a pass code to get in. The door clicked. Jim stood back a pace to give himself room and turned side on. If Renton was on the other side he would be able to attack or flee.

The door opened slowly as if the person on the other side was also showing caution. There stood Cardini, looming large. ‘I’m so grateful that you came.’

‘Grateful?’ queried Jim, stepping forwards.

‘Yes,’ said Cardini.

Jim shrugged and walked in. The door clicked shut behind him.

‘Please come through.’

Jim followed.

‘We have had a torrid time in our short acquaintance,’ said Cardini.

‘Yep,’ said Jim, carefully registering everything around him. He might have to come back down the corridor in a hurry and wanted to know every little detail along the way just in case.

‘I must, of course, apologise for everything,’ said Cardini. ‘But I was eager to prove the value of my work to you as quickly as possible.’ He opened his office door. ‘McCloud was simply out of control.’

‘After you,’ said Jim, not wanting to go into the room ahead of Cardini.

As Cardini walked ahead of him into the lab, he said, over his shoulder, ‘McCloud was never satisfied and was constantly trying to force me to increase my dosages so he could be younger than I believed desirable.’

Jim sat down in front of the desk, Cardini opposite.

‘You see, Jim, some people are a law unto themselves.’

‘You mean people like you?’

Cardini appeared to think for a moment. ‘I suppose so.’

‘So what happened after I left?’

‘I was about to ask you that.’

‘I asked first.’

An expression of delight came over Cardini’s face. ‘Practically nothing happened.’ He threw his hands up. ‘A pair of serious men appeared unannounced and asked to see McCloud, and when he couldn’t be raised the staff set about looking for him. In the end, they discovered him and the other man in the lower complex.’

‘Then what?’

‘It was all very odd.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Clearly they knew something because someone must have tipped them off. Then more people appeared and there was a hive of activity. They took my details and basically told me to go.’

‘Didn’t they interview you?’

‘No. They asked me who I was, what I was doing there and what I had done the previous evening. I said I had seen McCloud in the evening, gone to bed and woken up in the morning for breakfast.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Yes. I am gambling that all the video of the day was erased. If not, we are all in the soup.’

‘Possibly.’

‘What about you, Jim? What’s your story?’

‘I drove to Raleigh and flew back here.’

‘And then what?’

‘Well, you know or you wouldn’t be asking.’

‘You came up to my lab and fought Renton in the tunnels below the university.’

‘Yes,’ said Jim.’ Your assistant was off his face on your drug and about to chop Kate – one of your old students – into little pieces, like one of those poor monkeys you keep.’

Cardini didn’t flinch. ‘I’m very shocked,’ he said. ‘I haven’t gone back to the main lab, as you can imagine. Not in the circumstances.’ He looked a trifle unsure. ‘None of this was meant to happen.’

‘Well, it has and it’s all your fault.’