Perfect People (28 page)

Skirting around the house, it took him some minutes to find the steel cover of the telephone cable. Firing the oxyacetylene cutter with his lighter, it took only seconds to sever the cable. Inside the house, he could hear the warning beeps signalling a line fault.

Swiftly now, he opened the kitchen door and went in. Immediately the phone warning beeps were accompanied by the much louder sound of the internal burglar alarm siren. There was no sound from outside. He took the gas cylinder from his pocket, pulled the gas mask on, and raced up the stairs.

Just as he reached the bedroom door it opened, and the naked figure of the male sinner stood in front of him. He fired the gas cylinder into his face and the man dropped to the ground without making a sound. Stepping past him he saw the female sinner groping for the light switch. He fired another long burst of gas at her and she dropped back against the pillow. Both of them would remain unconscious for a good thirty minutes. More than enough.

He went back down to the kitchen, ignoring the beeping alarm, which he figured would barely be audible outside the house. It took him only moments to spot the electric jug kettle.
Perfect.
He unscrewed the switch mechanism, disabled the cut-out, and screwed the switch mechanism back into place. Then he emptied the water out of the kettle, switched it on, pulled a couple of dry tea towels off a rack, bundled them around the base of it, stepped back and waited.

After a couple of minutes he could smell hot plastic. Another minute and he could see wisps of smoke. Then the jug kettle was on fire.

Standing well back, by the closed door, he took out the cylinder of liquid propane from his pocket, and twisted the valve. A jet of gas shot across the room towards the kettle, and almost instantly, a sheet of flame shot upwards towards the ceiling.

Then he opened the door and stepped back into the night. Within moments, the rush of air had turned the room into a fireball.

Safely back behind the shrubbery at the end of the garden, he removed the gas mask, and stood and watched as the flames spread. Soon his nostrils picked up the scents of burning wood and paint. His ears picked up the crackling of the flames. And then an even sweeter sound. Two infants crying.

He climbed a fence, and took the route to safety that God had shown him two nights ago, across the fields to the parking lot behind a small general store, where his little rental car sat in the shadows.

From: Kalle Almtorp, Swedish Embassy, Washington.

To: John Klaesson. [email protected]

Subject: Disciples

John,

I think you should be aware that the Disciples may have surfaced again.

An Iowa couple, Drs Laurence and Patty Morrison and their twins, Nathan and Amy, aged thirty months, were found dead in their burned-out ranch house two days ago. They too had been to the Dettore Clinic. The fire damage was pretty bad, and it is too early for the police to know the cause of the fire – but I just thought you ought to know.

Three deaths of three couples with twins, all of whom had been to the Dettore Clinic, is not enough to prove anything, but I would advise you to continue to be vigilant.

Of course I will keep you informed. To date there has been no progress in identifying any of these so-called Disciples of the Third Millennium, nor anyone behind them. They remain a mystery and an enigma.

I hope this email finds you and Naomi and your family well and thriving. I will be moving from Washington at the end of this year to a new posting in Malaysia, but I will endeavour to maintain vigilance for you.

Hälsningar!

Kalle

Reggie Chetwynde-Cunningham looked like the kind of boffin a casting agency might have suggested to a film director in search of an archetypal eccentric English professor. From behind his tiny desk in his cramped office in the Linguistics Centre, housed in Building B4 at Morley Park, he squinted at John through his monocle like some hawkish bird of prey

In his early sixties, the linguist had a weather-beaten face, intricately shot with broken veins, and mad hair. He was dressed in a shabby green tweed suit with leather elbow patches and sported a flamboyant paisley bow tie over a check Viyella shirt.

On the walls of his cluttered office were a couple of maps of ancient Britain, a picture of him shaking hands with Prince Philip, and a framed legend proclaiming:
A LANGUAGE IS A DIALECT WITH AN ARMY AND A NAVY – DR JOHNSON
.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Gosh, right, hmmnnn.’ His cherrywood desk was littered with biscuit crumbs, and more avalanched down now as he reached out, offering the pack of digestives to John, then took one himself and dunked it in his coffee. ‘Quite fascinating!’

One of the things John particularly liked about Morley Park was that, unlike at the universities where he had worked before where the average age was around twenty, making him horribly aware of his advancing years, the average age here was closer to fifty. It was a good feeling to be among the younger members of staff, even if only by a narrow margin. He chewed a mouthful of biscuit.

Reggie Chetwynde-Cunningham had been knighted some years earlier for services to national security. In his previous post he had worked at the Government Communications Headquarters, developing computer programs that could pick out the voices of known terrorists from among millions of landline and cellphone calls monitored daily. Now he headed a department on the Morley Park campus developing systems for controlling machines through either thought or speech.

‘Play the original again!’

A complex hi-fi system behind the linguist kicked into life, and moments later the crystal-clear voices of Luke and Phoebe filled the room.

First Phoebe. ‘Obm dekcarh cidnaaev hot nawoy fedied oevauoy.’

Luke responded, ‘Eka foe eipnod hyderlseh deegsomud.’

Then Phoebe’s voice again. ‘Olaaeo evayeh gibra snahele.’

‘Stop!’ Chetwynde-Cunningham barked. Then, looking at John and beaming, he said, ‘This is pretty impressive, you know.’

‘What language is it? Have you identified it?’

The linguist shook his head. ‘I had a play with it yesterday, actually, got a few of my younger colleagues to listen to it. One, a woman with small children herself. Everyone agreed there are patterns distinctive of language, but no one could put a name to it. Just to be sure, we ran it in on a computer program that can identify every known language in the world – all six thousand, two hundred and seven of them,’ he added with a touch of pride in his voice. ‘But there was no match, and of course there wasn’t going to be!’

‘Why not?’ John sipped some coffee and politely waved away the biscuit pack that the linguist again pushed towards him.

‘Well, you do hear of children born with the ability to speak other languages – people talk about it as evidence of past lives, that sort of stuff,’ he said with a rather dismissive tone. ‘But I’ve never heard a small child speak a foreign language convincingly. Sometimes, as with you and your wife, when the child comes from parents of mixed races, they will pick up smatterings of each of the parents’ languages.’

‘Is there some Swedish in this? My wife and I want—’

The linguist interrupted him with a vehement shake of his head. ‘Not Swedish. There’s no Swedish there.’ He helped himself to another biscuit and suspended it over his coffee cup. ‘Of course, you do get the phenomenon with twins, more usually with identical twins, where they create their own language as a means of excluding their parents – and the outside world in general. This seems to be what’s happening in your case.’

‘Their own language?’

Chetwynde-Cunningham nodded.

‘Can you make any sense of what they’re saying?’ John asked.

‘Oh yes, once you know the key, it’s a doddle – same with any code.’

‘
Code?
’

The linguist turned to his computer. ‘Print original on screen!’ he commanded.

Moments later the words appeared.

John peered at them closely, trying to see if he could spot what the linguist evidently had already. But after a couple of minutes he was forced to concede defeat. ‘I can’t spot the key.’

‘No, well, I’m not surprised. Take a look at the first line.’

John stared at it.

Then the linguist gave another command. ‘Reverse and sort into English!’

Moments later a second line appeared:

It was starting to become clearer to John but he still wasn’t quite there. The linguist gave a third command. ‘Insert missing letter through line!’

Now a third line appeared:

John frowned. ‘Jesus!’ he said, after some moments. ‘It – it was during a tea party – they—’

Chetwynde-Cunningham commanded the translation of the next two lines. John read them as they came up on the screen.

‘You’re saying this was spontaneous?’ he asked. ‘Not something they’d worked out in advance, somehow, John?’

‘They’re not yet two years old,’ John said. ‘I don’t think they’d have been capable of working this out in advance – I mean—’ He shrugged, unsure quite what he was thinking about this. He felt totally thrown.

‘The calculations to do this in their heads, in some kind of simultaneous translation, would be quite phenomenal. If it was just one child, one could think perhaps it was suffering from some brain disorder, some form of autism or temporal-lobe epilepsy, perhaps causing some glitch in the neural pathways. But the laws of probability rule it out for both children to have this.’

There was a long silence. John continued to stare at the words, thinking to himself, wondering how on earth they could be doing this. The linguist interrupted him.

‘If they are doing this spontaneously, John, then I think you’ve got some pretty remarkable children. They have a skill that I would think is quite unique. I’ve never heard of it before, ever.’ He gave John a look that should have filled him with pride.

But instead, John found himself feeling very uneasy.

‘I think we should take them back to see the psychiatrist, Dr Talbot, again, don’t you, John?’

John sat at the kitchen table, cradling his martini. He was unsettled and baffled by what the linguist, Reggie Chetwynde-Cunningham, had told him, and he was fretting about the email he had received from Kalle Almtorp.

Three couples who had been to the Dettore Clinic had been murdered.

Christ.

Three couples who had been to the clinic had all had twins. The murders had happened in America; that was one small blessing – the distance.

So far.

‘Did your linguist chap at work have any explanation for – for how they could be speaking like this? Talking perfect English backwards with every fourth letter missing?’ Naomi asked.

John shook his head. ‘He didn’t.’

‘We’ve been waiting for them to speak their first words to us, for them to say
Dada
or
Mama
, and they’ve said nothing and yet they’re speaking
perfect
English to each other in code. Doesn’t that spook you? It sure as hell spooks me.’

He stared ahead, pensively. ‘It does. It’s just so strange.’

‘Do you think that Dettore did something? That maybe he messed up some important gene and their brains are wired up wrong?’

‘I think that’s too early to speculate. I guess if they keep speaking like this we should take them to a neurologist.’

‘Don’t you think we should take them to one now?’

John walked over to the wall where the baby-monitor speaker was mounted and listened. ‘Are they awake?’

‘Yes, I was waiting for you to get back so we could bathe them together.’

She sat down looking pale. John watched her. He felt terrible. She buried her face in her hands. ‘After all we’ve been through. God, why is life so bloody unfair?’

‘We have two beautiful children, hon.’

‘Two beautiful freaks.’

John walked back over to her, rested his hands on her shoulders and kissed her neck. ‘Don’t ever think that. Luke and Phoebe are what we wanted. They’re smart. They’re much smarter than other kids their age. We just have to learn to adjust.’