Die Twice (25 page)

The line of chairs was bookended by a pair of square wooden frames. They were held up with scaffolding and filled with narrow parallel louvers, which were angled toward the ground. An electric fan stood behind each one. They were large, industrial models like they use on movie sets, mounted on battered mobile stands. And in between each fan and frame, I could see a tripod. Each tripod had a metal cylinder clamped to it. The size and shape of the cylinders was familiar. They were just like the one I’d found in the machine shop in Gary. The color was the same, too. Matte green. But at the top, things looked different. The normal clamped-down lids had been replaced with black spheres, about four inches across. They were peppered with tiny holes. And a thin radio aerial snaked out from the top of each one.

The kind of aerial you use to trigger remote explosive devices.

I was studying the base of the closest cylinder, checking for tell-tale yellow markings, when the screen went blank. Nothing happened for five seconds. Then a caption appeared:

Live subject exposure test #2
Variant A
Spektra IV (no BMU8)

A bar at the bottom showed the date, which was almost eighteen months ago. There was a clock, which was showing just after 6:00
A
.
M
. And there was another figure for elapsed time. This seemed to be frozen on one second, but as I watched it jumped forward to ten minutes and then kept running. The black screen bled away, and the interior of the tent became visible again. Everything looked the same, except that now the line of chairs was no longer unoccupied. A person was sitting in each one. There were
men. Women. Boys. Girls. Toddlers. Geriatrics. Some looked strong and healthy. Others were frail and feeble. At least one of the women was pregnant. All the people were different in some way, like some kind of carefully constructed social cross-section. But they also had one thing in common. They were all strapped down.

There was no sound to go with the picture, which I was extremely glad about. You could see people’s mouths opening and shutting as they yelled and screamed. Some fought and struggled against the straps, heaving and pulling and wrenching with all their might. Others sat quietly, almost serenely, waiting for their fate. I scanned along the line and saw a pool of liquid appear under one woman’s chair, near the center. It grew steadily then flowed off the concrete platform and splashed onto the ground, twelve inches below. But no one around her cared. In fact, no one even noticed. Everyone’s attention was taken by a sudden movement at both sides of the room. The giant fans had sprung into life. Their curved blades started slowly, then spun faster and faster until you could only just make out a gray blur behind the protective wire mesh covers. And it may not have been visible to the people in the room, but thanks to the camera I could see another thing that had changed. Something at the top of the cylinders. As soon as the fans had reached full speed, a tiny red LED light on each one flashed three times. And after the final time, they remained illuminated.

Most of the eyes in the room remained locked on the fans, but a few people started to glance at their neighbors. Fear and helplessness were etched clearly into their faces. A couple of them started to struggle again. Then the person third from the left—a boy, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old—was suddenly thrown back in his seat. His legs straightened out like staves and his neck bent so far back that his head seemed to disappear. All I could see was the underside of his chin. He hung there for a moment, rigid and still. Then his body began to shake. He was twitching so fast and so hard
you’d think he had hundreds of volts running through him. The movements were so violent you wouldn’t have been surprised if one of his legs, or even his head, had been torn clean off his body. The fit lasted maybe thirty seconds without any sign of letting up, then stopped as suddenly as it had started. It was as if someone had thrown a switch and the kid was freed to slump back down, torso sagging, legs slack, head lolling to the side.

It was impossible to know this for sure, but I imagined the inside of the tent was completely silent. The nineteen survivors were all fixated on the dead boy. The people nearest him were trying to look away. And failing. The ones at the far end were craning their necks and stretching for a better view. All their faces were pale and shocked. No one was unmoved by what had just played out. Things seemed tense, but a few notches down from hysterical. They stayed that way for maybe a minute. Then the woman at the end on the right jerked back in her seat. The same thing happened to the next two people in line—a man, and a girl who looked less than ten years old. They started thrashing at virtually the same moment, and before they collapsed another nine people had succumbed to the same fate. The computer screen was a mass of uncontrollable movement. It was such a frenzy my eyes could hardly make out what was happening. But within a minute, the outcome was clear. Thirteen people were dead.

Everybody had died except for the three to the left of the central point, and the four to the right. And while I knew they were alive—I could see their rib cages move as they breathed—I couldn’t say they were unaffected. As the people nearer the edges were in the midst of their final agonies, I’d noticed the ones in the middle were starting to sag. Their legs had grown limp, their eyes had closed, and their chins had rolled down onto their chests. I expected that someone would come to release them, or treat them, or at least find out what state they were in. But nothing happened. The scene
was static for another two minutes. Then I noticed the LEDs on the cylinders were no longer glowing red. The fans slowly wound back down until their blades were stationary again. And just as the last one stopped spinning, the screen faded softly to black. It was inert for ten seconds, this time. Then another caption appeared. It looked for all the world like the next installment in a series:

Live subject exposure test #4
Variant A
Spektra V (inc BMU8)

The information bar at the bottom showed that a day had passed since the video sequence I’d just watched. The clock said we were back to six o’clock in the morning. The elapsed time had reset to one second. I kept an eye on it, and once again it sprang forward to the ten-minute mark. The black background dissolved. And I saw that another group had been brought into the tent. The mix of age and gender and condition was similar to the first sample. The range of reactions was equally broad. And the people were strapped to the chairs in exactly the same way.

The fans began to turn. The LEDs on top of the cylinders flashed red, then stayed lit up. And the people began to drop. They jolted back, convulsed, and collapsed like they were in some kind of macabre ballet. I watched them suffer through the same cycle of agony as the victims from the first group. Only this time, there was a difference. Every single person died. It took less than four minutes, and there wasn’t a single man, woman, or child in that tent with a breath left in their body. Not one out of the twenty there’d been to start with.

I closed the computer and waited for my stomach to untie itself. I knew there’d been no way to stop any of what I’d seen. In fact, there wasn’t really anything to have stopped. It was only a recording.
The actual events had occurred eighteen months ago. They’d unfolded in some unknown location. It may not have been on the same continent as me, let alone a place I could have reached in time. And I had no idea who was responsible for it.

All of that was true. But none of it was any consolation. So I reached for my phone and called Lucinda.

“Have you watched it?” she said.

I didn’t answer.

“I thought so,” she said. “Pretty sick-making stuff, wasn’t it?”

“Where did it come from?” I said.

“The Spektra gas? You know where. You saw the emblem on the cylinder. And you know I can’t name the place over the phone. Just in case.”

“No. I mean the video. Who made it? Who did those—what did they call them—exposure tests?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did they get the gas? Was it sanctioned?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is this some kind of arm’s-length bullshit? Did the government want the data without getting its hands dirty?”

“David, I just don’t know. But I can’t believe they’d do that.”

“No. They just happened to be hiding a secret video of someone else doing it. That’s bound to be a coincidence.”

Lucinda didn’t answer.

“So either the government colluded with the experiments, or they lost the asset,” I said. “Either way, it stinks.”

“To high heaven,” said Lucinda. “Put like that.”

“So what else do we know? Where was the video made? Can we identify the location?”

“I don’t think so. There’s no audio, so we can’t do a language or dialect analysis. And I doubt you can gather enough detail through the windows for a database match. Or even a manual comparison.”

“What else can we do? What about the background files from the Web site? Is there anything in those we can work with?”

“No. Everything’s been stripped out. They’re content only. But I have found out a couple of other things since we spoke.”

“You’re an angel. Tell me.”

“OK. Well, first, did you notice that the video said the difference between the two clips was something called BMU8? The first time the gas had it, the second time it didn’t?”

“It was the other way around. That seemed to be the difference between Spektra IV and V. Whether it had this BM stuff.”

“Oh. Right. The other way around. But do you know what BMU8 is?”

“No. Never heard of it.”

“Nor had I. So I checked. Turns out it’s something quite simple. A stimulant. It aids breathing.”

“So why’s it added to the Spektra gas?”

“I’ve just been reading about it. Turns out it’s a technique they borrowed from the knockout gases that SWAT teams use. When they first tried them, it nearly always went wrong. If they pumped in enough gas to take down any hostage takers, for example, who were usually young and fit, it would kill any hostages who were old or ill or vulnerable. So, they added the stimulant to cut down on collateral damage.”

“But with a poison gas, you want as many fatalities as possible, surely?”

“You do. But with poisons, you’ve got the opposite problem. If a person doesn’t breathe in enough gas to kill them straight away, they might just go unconscious or end up restricting their airway or something. That reduces the volume of poison they ingest, and increases their chance of being resuscitated. Adding the stimulant increases the chance of instant death, and makes a higher yield achievable from a lower initial concentration.”

“So you’re saying it makes the gas more lethal?”

“Yes. Paradoxical, isn’t it?”

I didn’t have an answer to that.

“Oh, wait,” Lucinda said. “Actually, no. I’m not saying it’s more lethal. Something’s either lethal, or it’s not. You can’t have degrees of lethal, obviously. What I’m saying is, it’s more practical. It can be deployed more easily. Either by inexpert personnel, or against targets with more diverse levels of fitness.”

“Such as civilians?” I said. “By them, and against them?”

“Exactly. Which brings me to my next point. That country you asked about. The Republic of Equatorial Myene. I put the word out on the grapevine for information. And something interesting has come back already. Word is, a coup is on the cards.”

“It’s in Africa, Lucinda. Of course a coup’s on the cards. There’ve been two hundred since 1960, alone. Attempts, anyway. It’s a standard political tool, in some places I’ve been to.”

“I understand that. But this is a serious one, apparently. I’m hearing that the rebels have some major-league backing. Money. Weapons. Mercenaries, ready to help them fight.”

“Are you sure? Most coup attempts turn out to be all talk and no trousers.”

“I’m hearing that it is, David. And it would explain the government being so keen on acquiring Spektra gas. Imagine whole villages being wiped out by one guy in a jeep. It would take a single cylinder. That would be quite an incentive to stay loyal to the regime.”

“One cylinder? Wouldn’t most of the gas just blow away?”

“No. Not if they have the right kind. On the videos, did you see the captions saying ‘Variant A’? That signifies the indoor version. It’s a fraction of the concentration. And the external type will be loaded with additives to make it more dense. Keep it close to the ground.”

I didn’t reply.

“I know what I’m talking about, David,” she said. “I was in the Balkans before New York, and we were all trained on this stuff.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I believe you. I was just thinking, coup attempt or not, we need to keep the Myenese and the gas apart. On separate sides of the ocean, preferably. And on that, there’s something else I need to check. Call me if anything else breaks?”

“I will. But I might have to increase my price to two lunches.”

The more I thought about the video, the less I liked the idea of the Myenese getting their hands on the cylinders of Spektra gas. Or of McIntyre continuing to be on the loose. The only link we had to either was the consulate’s IT guys, but I couldn’t put in a direct call to them. Hassling them would only slow things down. But at the same time, I was impatient for news. That just left me with Fothergill. I guessed he was busy, since he hadn’t returned my call from earlier. I was a little annoyed about that. I was still mulling it over, and wondering if he was worth another try, when his number appeared on my phone.

“Richard,” I said. “I was just thinking about you. Any sign of a rabbit?”

“Perhaps,” he said. “A bunny, maybe. A chink of light at the mouth of the burrow, at least. The Tefal-heads have found something. We think we know how Tony was communicating with his contacts.”

“Have you got a number? Let me have it. I’ll try to get hold of them right away.”

“No. It’s more sophisticated than that. It seems they were swapping messages via an Internet dating service.”

“Online dating? Are you sure he wasn’t just lonely?”

“Positive. This came from the other guys’ computer, remember.
It was hard to spot. The messages were coded, but they’d kept enough of them for our boys to break their system.”