Fourth Day (20 page)

I wasn’t returned to my subterranean cell after my audience with Bane, which was, I suppose, the one bright spot of the day.

Instead, Nu walked me back through the main building. The people we encountered stepped back to silently watch me pass. Even if they hadn’t been in Bane’s study that first day, this was a small place and they knew what had happened there. Or enough of it to regard me with curious and slightly fearful eyes, at any rate.

Their covert attention lay between my shoulder blades like an unscratched itch. I felt like what I was – a freak. Maybe that was the whole point of it.

Well, you asked for that, too
.

In the small entrance lobby, Nu ignored the door to the outside and headed off down another corridor, turning back when my footsteps paused behind him.

‘Come on then, love,’ he said, almost a challenge. ‘Taking you to new quarters, aren’t I?’

The last time I’d ventured into this part of the building,
it had been dark, and my only concern had been getting the team in to retrieve Thomas Witney from his apparent captivity.

Sagar had told me Bane liked to play mind games, but even
he
wouldn’t…

‘Here you go,’ Nu said, halting outside a doorway. ‘Home, sweet home.’

Oh yes, he would
.

They’d put me in Thomas Witney’s old room.

I threw a searching gaze at Nu as I moved past him, but he stared back blandly. Inside, the room was unchanged, with the single bed, the desk and the simple chair. The glass of water and the book were even still on the table by the bed, as if in deliberate provocation.

The only difference was a girl who was just in the process of throwing a new sheet over the bed. She straightened with a gasp at the sound of Nu’s voice. When she jerked towards us, I recognised the thin, nervous figure of Maria Gonzalez.

As soon as I saw her, I realised that finding out if Liam Witney was the father of her child was going to take a lot more than asking probing questions, or putting pressure on her to reveal the truth. The girl had the wild eyes and jittery stance of someone half a step from the edge. It was hard to credit she was the same girl who appeared, smiling and carefree, alongside Liam in the photograph on his mother’s office wall.

What kind of breakdown had she suffered, and – more to the point – what had caused it?

If we’d obeyed Sean’s instinct to take Maria out with us that night, I wondered, what would have become of her?
Even if she hadn’t been snatched away, like Witney, a stint with Epps would have done nothing for her clearly fragile state of mind.

Maria, meanwhile, gaped at us, immobile.

‘Here, let me give you a hand with that,’ I said, offering to take one end of the sheet, smiling.

Just for a moment, she clutched the ironed cotton closer to her chest, as if I’d caught her naked coming out of the shower and was now suggesting removing her towel. Her gaze flitted to Nu, as if seeking his approval, then she nodded to me, a little shyly, and released her grip.

I smiled again and we quickly tucked the sheet under the mattress, added a blanket, and folded the corners with military precision.

When we were done, Maria gave me a mumbled, ‘Thank you,’ but she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

‘Come along, love,’ Nu said from the doorway, an underlying tension to his voice. ‘Let’s give Charlie here a chance to settle in, eh?’

Maria flushed and nodded, scooping up the old linen she’d dropped onto the floor, and grabbing the book and the glass from the night table. I wanted to find some excuse to prolong her visit, build up some kind of relationship, but she was stretched taut as a bowstring with the urge to flee.

Nu’s arm across the doorway blocked her exit, spiking her unease. I shifted my stance, knew he registered the movement by the way he let his arm drop.

‘What’s the book?’ he asked, lifting it out of her grasp and staring, nonplussed at the old-fashioned jacket. As he turned it over in his hands, I saw the title. JD Salinger’s
The Catcher in the Rye
.

He pursed his lips. ‘Ever read it?’ he asked me.

‘A long time ago.’

‘Might as well hang onto this one then,’ he said, and put the book down onto the corner of the desk.

Maria took advantage of his distraction to make a bolt for it. We heard the slap of her shoes along the corridor as she hurried away. Not quite running, but not far off it.

Nu grinned and I turned towards him very slowly.

Bait her, and you’ll answer to me
.

I didn’t have to say the words out loud. His grin faded.

‘What’s her story?’ I asked. I didn’t expect to get the truth, but even the official lie might be instructive.

‘Mad as a box of frogs, that one,’ Nu said, dismissive, turning away. ‘You don’t want to pay much attention to anything little Maria says.’

I raised an eyebrow and the grin was back, full force, just before he closed the door behind him. I wasn’t at all surprised to hear the key turn pointedly in the lock on the outside.

So, I’d exchanged one locked room for another. At least this one had natural light and a few more creature comforts.

I sighed, kicked off my boots and lay on the bed with the pillows bunched up behind my head, thinking back over the stilted conversation I’d just had with Sean. Difficult to say a fraction of what I’d wanted to, over an open line with numerous eavesdroppers at both ends. The words were almost immaterial, but I replayed his defeated tone over and over.

There was a part of me, I knew, that almost wished he’d argued harder about the extra time I’d asked for, even
though I would have fought him for it, if he’d insisted. I supposed there was still a chance he was out there, at this very moment, watching the compound, and had identified where I’d been brought.

And, suddenly, I was achingly aware of the gulf that had opened up between us, and just how much I missed him.

I massaged my temples vigorously, as if that would help refocus me on the job. I’d come to find out about Maria’s son, I reminded myself. Why Thomas Witney had decided to stay, or what had made him afraid to leave, was a side issue.

I got up, restless, pulled open the single desk drawer, as if expecting it to be anything other than empty. The room was totally devoid of personality. Witney had lived there for five years, and yet had failed to leave a mark on the place beyond a half-drunk glass of water and a fifty-
year-old
book.

I picked up the Salinger, wondering how far he’d got with it, flipped through the yellow-edged pages. They riffled softly beneath my thumb, then jumped a section. I stopped, went back, opened the book up more fully and found, slipped between the pages down close to the spine, a flat key.

I picked the key out slowly, remembered Witney’s claim that it had been on his night table all the time. I’d thought he was deluding himself, but that wasn’t so. And if he was not a prisoner here, then he’d chosen to lock himself in at night.

So, who had he really been afraid of?

Bane said, ‘Tell me about your first kill.’

It was afternoon. I’d spent a couple of hours lying in my room, staring up at the ceiling, before the door had been unlocked by a motherly woman whose face was vaguely familiar from our surveillance. Her name was Ann, she told me, and she’d been with Fourth Day for a year and a half.

She took me to a small workshop at the rear of the main building, indicated that I should take a seat, as if keeping each other company was the most natural thing in the world.

On the workbench in front of her was a cheap dismantled radio, the type people throw away rather than repair, but she was soon absorbed in tracing the cause of its demise. I sat alongside her and listened as, without guile, she recounted her life story.

Abusive parents leading to an abusive husband, a downward spiral into alcohol and drugs, a brush with prostitution. All recounted in a matter-of-fact tone, punctuated by prosaic
requests to pass the soldering iron and to reposition the lit magnifier she was using to aid her painstaking task.

With her wiry greying hair tied back in a loose ponytail, she looked like someone my mother might have served with on a Women’s Institute committee. But for the rolled-back sleeves, which revealed the evidence of her past addiction comprehensively tattooed in the crook of both arms.

I’d asked her why she bothered to mend something costing maybe a few dollars when it was new. She explained it was part of what Fourth Day did, a kind of recycling and therapy, all rolled into one. ‘I have no artistic talent to create from scratch,’ she said simply, ‘so I bring things back to life instead.’ She smiled. ‘Both satisfying and productive.’

Afterwards, she peacefully delivered me into Bane’s study, leaving me there with a quiet smile and a quieter hand on my shoulder, as if commanding me to stay.

Now, I sat back in my chair. ‘Who says I’ve killed anyone?’

‘I know something of your history, Charlie, which I’m sure was your intention. Why else would you use your real name, if you did not want or hope for me to uncover your past?’

Yes, but how? And so fast
…

Bane sat motionless as I struggled to find a way into the story, then said, ‘Was it the man who cut your throat?’ and there was nothing to react to in that dark-brown voice.

I forced myself not to reach towards the faded scar that encircled the base of my throat. It took physical effort.

‘Yes, I killed him,’ I said, flat and even. ‘He had a knife. He broke my ribs, my cheekbone, and my arm in two places.’ I still had the calcified lumps on the radius and
ulna of my left arm, reminders of a pair of neat fracture lines that had saved me a shattered skull – his intention. Dazed, bleeding, scared, I’d thought I was finished. He had thought so, too.

I looked straight at Bane. ‘He was a rapist and a murderer. It was a split-second decision – him or me.’

‘A very sanitised version of events,’ Bane said. I flushed, but there was no condemnation in his tone. ‘John has told me something of your time in the military. That four of your brothers-in-arms beat and raped you. And yet you made no attempt to kill them. I wonder why.’

That was an image I didn’t want to return to, a whole series of them, in fact. Rape isn’t sexual, it’s all about power, so why did Bane make this feel like foreplay? I shifted in my seat, suddenly restless, unable to find a place for my hands.

‘I would have done,’ I said, chest tightening. ‘At the time I didn’t know how.’

‘But you had passed your Special Forces selection course, and were training for highly dangerous undercover work, I understand,’ Bane said, no trace of taunt about him. ‘How could you have been so helpless?’

I shot him a barbed look, but none of them penetrated that cool facade.

‘We’d all been through exactly the same unarmed combat courses. Whatever moves I had, they knew the counters,’ I said, bitter. ‘And there were four of them.’ I gave a short, mirthless laugh. ‘I was a first-class shot. If I’d had a gun I would have slotted all of them, but they were supposed to be my comrades. I was
supposed
to be able to trust them.’ And I heard the note of longing in my voice. It was the
betrayal as much as the violence that had charred to the bone.

‘How far had they gone before you finally believed what they intended to do?’

‘Too far.’

‘So, you were raped,’ Bane said, his words sliding softly over my skin like a verbal caress, ‘and afterwards you taught yourself the skills to prevent a recurrence, is that it?’

I shivered and my chin came up. ‘Wouldn’t you have done the same thing?’

He shook his head. ‘We’re not talking about me, Charlie. We’re not talking hypothetical “what ifs”. We’re talking about
your
life, what happened to
you
, because or in spite of the choices you made.’

The anger rose fast and hard, building up instant pressure behind my eyes, prickling in my vision. ‘You think I
chose
to be raped? You think I wanted that? Was asking for it?’ I demanded, harsh, almost shouting now. ‘OK, yes, afterwards, I trained. When I was past feeling bloody sorry for myself, and past the shame and the shock, I studied every discipline I thought might be of use to me. I vowed I’d never let anyone do that to me again. Ever.’

He took the outburst calmly. ‘So, you had already made the decision to kill, a long time before the opportunity presented itself?’

He made it sound calculated, cold-blooded, as though I’d cruised the streets like some damned vigilante, praying for my chance to get even. It took the heat and the colour straight out of me. ‘No! No, I…things were different.’

‘How?’

I took a shaky breath. ‘Because it wasn’t just me he was
trying to hurt. He’d taken…someone else. Someone I cared about. A friend. And when he was done with me, he was going to start on her. And I didn’t…I couldn’t let her go through that. Not knowing I was capable of preventing it. I couldn’t have lived with myself.’

‘So that was your catalyst,’ Bane said simply. ‘When you were driven to kill, it was not to save your own life, but somebody else’s.’ And watching me across the desk, he saw the dawning truth of his words, and gave a slight nod. ‘You are far from a lost cause, Charlie. However much you might wish to be.’

‘Logically, rationally, I know what I did was entirely justifiable,’ I said. ‘The police and the courts agreed…’

‘But?’

I looked down at my hands, clasped loosely in my lap. They were unremarkable hands, neither large nor small for my height and build, straight fingers, short nails. Capable hands.

Hands capable of killing.

I looked up. ‘The kind of people who become mothers do not kill people.’

Bane shook his head. ‘But surely parents are the epitome of the perfect bodyguard?’ he said, and it was the mild surprise in his voice that echoed, lasting through my mind. ‘And mothers are the fiercest of all.’

I waited until it was completely dark before I used the key I’d found in Witney’s book to let myself quietly out of my room and along the corridor. As I slipped into the tiny lobby area, I halted briefly, eyes closed, listening to the quality of silence around me.

After a moment, I turned away from the external door. I knew the security patrols had the area immediately surrounding the compound covered during the night, and they had all the equipment to do so. Going out there was foolish when we hadn’t spotted anything amiss in our previous surveillance. Whatever was going on here, it was happening inside.

I remembered the gun cases I’d seen as they’d brought me out of confinement, could calculate from the height and depth of them just how many there had been. A lot. Too many to be easily explained, that was for sure.

So, what was Bane up to that he needed to stockpile armaments? And was that why Thomas Witney had been silenced?

I gave myself a mental shake.
That’s not why you’re here, Fox!

I thought of the dossier Chris Sagar had put together from his time on the inside of Fourth Day, about their methods and their ideology. So far, they’d shown me little sign of the psychological brutality I’d been led to expect.

I guessed, after my initial outburst, they were waiting until I was deemed more stable before that began in earnest. Meanwhile, far from breaking me down, my sessions with Bane actually made me feel…better about myself.

Much better.

Maybe that was part of the process – lull you into a false sense of security, then take your legs out from under you.

I shook my head, stepped cautiously across the lobby and passed through into the corridor leading towards Bane’s study.

Along the way, I tried the handles of every door I passed. The ratio of locked to unlocked was pretty even. I found a storeroom, a kind of first-aid station with rudimentary equipment but apparently no drugs.

In the corner was a three-drawer filing cabinet – the most likely place to find any records relating to Billy’s medical history. I tugged experimentally at the upper drawer, marked A–G. Not surprisingly, it didn’t open, but the cabinet was an older type. It didn’t take more than a few moments to carefully walk it forwards far enough to tilt the upper half back against the wall to locate the exposed end of the locking rod underneath. I pushed it up, disengaging the locking system with a soft clunk, and smiled into the gloom. Another little gift from Sean.

Gently, I set the cabinet upright. The top drawer slid
open without complaint and I leafed through the manila dividers until I came to ‘GONZALEZ, B’. It contained a slim folder, listing the usual childhood illnesses and his blood type, which was O negative. The universal donor – too common to be remotely useful.

I shuffled the cabinet back into position without marking the floor. There wasn’t much I could do to relock it, but I’d just have to hope that was put down to oversight. At least it hadn’t been obviously forced.

I moved deeper into the building, remembering the admin office I’d seen that first day. I really didn’t expect the door to be open, but it was.

Inside, I found the layout as I remembered. Two desks at ninety degrees to each other, each topped by a dark computer flat screen, paperwork trays, and a telephone. More filing cabinets lined one wall with a small photocopier on top. Mundane, ordinary.

I hesitated. Working in close protection does not prepare you for searching an office, and I had no real idea what I was hoping to find. I almost turned back when a sheet of paper on the nearest desktop caught my eye and I canted my head to read it.

It was a list of names and addresses, maybe twenty of them, laid out in two columns in alphabetical order.

It could have been anything, from a Christmas card list to a roster for digging latrines, apart from the fact that half a dozen of the names had been crossed out. Last on the list was Thomas Witney. And there – just above him – his son, Liam. Both names had been struck through with a thin black line.

Quickly, I scanned the others, and something shimmied
down my spine as I recognised two more from Parker’s briefing on former Fourth Day members. Both had met sudden, violent ends.

I picked up the sheet, carefully noting its exact position on the desktop, and shoved it under the lid of the photocopier, hitting the ‘On’ button as I did so.

The machine let out an eerie glow as it powered up. Heart pounding in the darkness, I glanced over at the small window, knowing that any passing security patrols would be instantly alerted. Shielding the light as much as I could, I ran off a single copy of the list and switched the machine off again. It took for ever.

I put the original back on the desktop, lining it up precisely, folding my still-warm copy and shoving it inside my underwear, where they wouldn’t find it without a hell of a fight.

I slipped out of the admin office, had just reached the communal dining hall when I heard the unmistakable sound of the main outer door opening, and two sets of booted feet entering the lobby behind me.

I bolted across the dining hall on the balls of my feet. One door on the far side was slightly ajar. I dived through it, closing it fast and quiet behind me, and stood flattened against the wall, as if that would save me from discovery if they walked in.

Had they seen the light from the photocopier, or was this just a routine patrol?

Outside the door, I heard measured footsteps, indefinably male, growing louder as they approached. I shut my eyes, but there was no urgency in their even cadence.
Routine, then
.

I tried to control my ragged breathing as they passed and faded. It was hard to judge time but, maybe five interminable minutes later, I heard the steps retrace across the dining hall, and the outer door close behind them.

Only then did I relax enough to look around. I found myself in a small classroom with an old-fashioned blackboard and a jaunty alphabet frieze around it. Light came in from a line of windows set close to the ceiling along one wall. High enough for ventilation, but not for distraction. The room was probably used when the weather wasn’t good enough for the kids to have their lessons outside.

Unless little Billy had ever been asked to write an essay entitled ‘My Daddy’, there was nothing for me here. But, just as I was about to slip out again, something on a nearby desktop caught my eye.

A folded newspaper and a pack of cigarettes.

The newspaper I could understand, but the cigarettes were something else again. Bane was big on mind, body and spirit and I hadn’t seen or even smelt anyone here who smoked. It was not exactly the kind of teaching aid I expected anyone to use, unless they forced the kids to take a puff and throw up as aversion therapy at an early age.

I moved forwards, cautious. The pack was open and there was a loose cigarette lying next to it. Something about it tapped at the back of my mind. In the low light, I had to bend in close to see what it was. And the moment I did, realisation came down over me in a cold wash. In that instant, I knew exactly why it was there, and what kind of lessons were being taught in that classroom.

And I hoped to hell it wasn’t to children.