Headcase, p.13
Headcase, page 13
Dasha shoots a delighted and triumphant look at me, like the fact that Dr Kobald gets massages is proof that he’s also a pervert with a dog-sniffing fetish.
‘And there might be a four per cent chance that it’s something more serious, like meningitis or osteoarthritis,’ Kobald continues. ‘So I’ll consider those possibilities. But I’m not going to spend an equal amount of brain power ruminating on things that are possible but vastly improbable, like …’ He trails off, realising that he doesn’t want to put any crazy ideas in our already crazy heads.
‘Ants have infested your spinal column,’ someone suggests.
‘You’re turning into a giraffe,’ someone else puts in.
‘Right,’ Kobald says, and quickly changes the subject. ‘So how do we decide what’s likely?’
‘Someone might have injected you with poison while you slept,’ Seamus says, still thinking about Kobald’s neck.
‘One technique you might try,’ Kobald says, undeterred, ‘is to pretend that someone else is describing your situation to you. Ask yourself how likely it would seem. Sometimes we have more clarity when we’re thinking about other people than when we’re thinking about ourselves.’ He has his kindergarten voice on again.
Casey squirms in her chair. She’s smart enough to know that if someone else claimed to have a secret celebrity friend sending coded messages, she would think they were crazy.
‘Thank you for sharing, Casey,’ Kobald says. ‘I think we’re making real progress. Harmony?’
The woman next to me stiffens in her seat.
‘Would you like to share what you’ve been working on?’ Kobald asks. ‘Or something you’ve struggled with, that we could unpack as a group?’
Harmony swallows. ‘No, I’m doing okay.’
Kobald claps his hands together, but gently, so they hardly make a sound. ‘Great! Tell us all about it.’
Harmony looks around. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘my delusions are decreasing in frequency and intensity.’
Everyone nods, even though she’s clearly parroting a textbook. Kobald remains silent, letting her fill the space.
‘I haven’t had any hallucinations lately,’ Harmony adds. ‘Auditory or visual.’
‘Now, you know there’s no judgement in this room.’ Kobald gestures at the group. ‘We’re all here to support each other. But it’s important that we’re honest about what we’re going through.’
‘I’m being honest,’ Harmony says stubbornly.
‘Well, that’s good news,’ Kobald says. ‘Can you tell us a little about the techniques you’ve been using?’
‘Just, uh, deep breathing, and mindfulness.’
‘So, when a troubling thought enters your head …’
Harmony shoots him a suspicious glare. She’s complained in the past that someone is monitoring her thoughts. She said she woke up one morning and found a tiny transmitter on her pillow, which had apparently fallen out of her ear during the night. When she brought a nurse to look at it, the object had vanished, leading her to believe that other patients—or perhaps even hospital staff—were part of the conspiracy.
‘… how do you deal with that?’ Kobald finishes.
Harmony clears her throat. ‘I acknowledge the thought, then let it go.’
Kobald smiles.‘You let it go. That’s very good, Harmony.’ He turns to the rest of the group. ‘Remember, thoughts are funny things. If we try to push them away, often they bounce back, with more force. But if we accept that the thoughts are there, they lose their power over us. We can decide what, if anything, to do with them.’
‘No one is spying on me,’ Harmony says. ‘It’s safe to go outside.’
It’s unclear whether she’s trying to convince Kobald or herself. Either way, it doesn’t seem to be working.
‘Thanks, Harmony,’ Kobald says. ‘Seamus, how are you feeling today?’
As the discussion moves on, I shift my chair a little closer to Harmony’s. She pretends not to notice.
‘Hey,’ I whisper.
She looks over. The woman whose family has stopped visiting. The woman no one will miss.
I speak so quietly it’s little more than mouthing the words: ‘I believe you.’
‘About what?’ she asks warily.
‘It’s not safe to talk here,’ I say, and look up, as though there are cameras in the ceiling, which there aren’t. But she follows my gaze. It’s the beginning of a rapport.
I sit back in my chair and pretend to focus on the discussion, feeling Harmony’s thoughtful eyes on me.
Soon she’ll come to me.
CHAPTER 16
Two weeks ago
What kind of punch works best on a fish?
I woke up with blood in my mouth and a fork in my hand—the long, two-pronged kind you use on a barbecue.
I sat up, disoriented. A shaft of sunlight cut through a gap in the cardboard that covered the bedroom window. I was in the safe house, on a sleeping mat that was slowly deflating through twin punctures near my hip.
The house was half-built. There were no kitchen utensils. Zara and I had been living off granola bars and drinking straight from the faucet. Where had I gotten a barbecue fork?
I quickly ran through the previous night in my head. That cop had chased me, and I’d nearly drowned in a stormwater channel, then Zara had taken me here and stitched me up, touching my face with her soft hands, and after that—
What? It wasn’t coming to me.
Whose blood was I tasting?
And where was Zara?
I scrambled off the mat and hurried into the hall. I didn’t dare shout her name in case she didn’t respond. My feet left smudges of mud on the floor. I passed a balled-up towel—that’s right, I remembered showering before bed, to warm up after nearly drowning. So why was I dirty?
I entered Zara’s bedroom. There was a lump under the blankets. A dark blob at one end that might have been her hair. Heart pounding, I peeled the blankets back.
Zara lay there, motionless.
‘Zara,’ I whispered.
She didn’t move. She was curled on her side, her body like the hook of a question mark, her shins making the tail, one ankle tucked behind the other. A tank top and loose cotton pants hid most of her skin, but I couldn’t see any stab wounds or bite marks.
I crouched over her. Her chest rose and fell. The blood in my mouth must have been my own, leaking from the inside of my cheek.
I was a sleepwalker, and I sometimes woke up holding strange objects. But this was a new record. To get this fork, I must have used the abandoned ladder in the yard to get over the fence and started rummaging through the neighbours’ stuff, all without waking up. Either that or I went to the store and purchased it.
Sleepwalking I could live with. Sleep-stealing or sleep-shopping could get me in trouble. And what if it kept escalating? What other things might my body do while unsupervised?
I watched Zara for a moment, her hair fanned out across the thin pillow, the curve of her neck, her bare arms. They looked soft. Juicy.
I quickly backed away. My foot caught one of the straps of her backpack, and it scraped loudly across the floorboards.
Zara opened her eyes. They focused on me. ‘Hey, you,’ she said sleepily.
‘Hey.’
‘You okay?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What are you doing?’
I kept the fork behind my back. ‘Just checking on you.’
She yawned. ‘Are we late?’
The sun was up. I needed to get to the FBI field office, and she needed to visit the Houston PD. ‘Probably.’
‘All right.’ She stretched like a lioness. Then she seemed to wake up properly and remember we weren’t a couple. She quickly gathered the blankets around herself. ‘Give me a minute to get ready.’
‘Right.’ I went back to my own bedroom and dressed quickly. When I found the syringe, I saw what looked like saliva residue around the tip. Maybe I’d been sucking on it during the night like a baby with a bottle. Didn’t look like I’d managed to get any out, but I wondered if there was a casual way I could ask Laurie about side effects.
Soon a woman I didn’t recognise emerged from Zara’s room. She had streaks of grey in her hair, horn-rimmed glasses and a string of pearls around her neck. Her cheeks were rounded, her posture stooped.
The stranger held out a hand. ‘Jean Barnes. Mayor’s liaison.’ She sounded like a New Yorker, the vowels slightly drawn out.
‘What’s in your mouth?’ I asked.
She opened wide. Dull pink circles sat between her teeth and her cheeks, padding her face. ‘You think they’ll buy it?’
She knew they would. She just wanted a compliment.
‘If your documents are convincing,’ I said. ‘Did you bring a disguise for me?’
She smiled, then looked away. ‘You’re fine as you are.’
•
The FBI’s Houston Field Office hadn’t changed much—a slab of glass surrounded by flags and dry grass, just off the Northwest Freeway. Even the cars in the lot were the same. FBI agents don’t upgrade often. Thistle was probably still requesting her favourite Crown Vic from the motor pool.
Zara dropped me off and sped away towards the police precinct. She wanted to find out why the cops thought I was the Reaper. I was here to see what the feds had figured out about the fighter pilot and stop them working out anything more.
A security guard looked me up and down but said nothing as I entered the lobby. The bureau’s motto was carved into the wall—Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity—over the photos of the last ten presidents, at least five of whom had been investigated by the FBI.
The receptionist had a broad grin and caked-on make-up that made her look like a child’s doll from a horror movie. ‘Mr Blake!’
‘Good memory,’ I said. I’d only ever been a visitor, without a cubicle of my own.
She noted the stitches on my face. ‘Oh dear.’ Then she saw my missing hand. ‘Oh dear!’
‘Shark attack,’ I said. ‘Can you sign me in?’
‘Of course. Gosh.’ She slid a tablet across the counter towards me. ‘So, I hear you’re in the private sector now?’
I tapped in my name and the ClearHorizon phone number. ‘Who told you that?’
She avoided the question. ‘Must be nice. Do you get dental?’
Best guess, Thistle had been asking around, trying to poke holes in my cover. ‘You bet. I need my winning smile.’
A tinkle of laughter. ‘You still got your old pass?’
‘Nope.’
‘Glad to hear it.’ Her nails clacked on the keyboard for a while, and a small printer spat out a sticker. ‘Keep this on you while you’re in the building.’
I smoothed it across the lapel of my polo shirt. ‘Will do.’
She gave me a sympathetic smile. ‘Head on up. Thistle knows you’re coming.’
My heart beat a little faster.
I took the stairs up. The cubicles had been replaced by an open-plan layout, with computer monitors exposed and confidential papers clearly visible on desks. Wall monitors displayed faces from the Most Wanted list. None of this seemed very secure, but to be fair, management didn’t know a cannibal spy was roaming the building.
While I was looking for Thistle, I was sidetracked by the smell of bacon coming from a conference room. The door was ajar, and I could hear voices from inside. I guessed it was a breakfast meeting that had run overtime, all the agents chomping down drive-through while they discussed some case or other. Through the gap in the door I could see a whiteboard with a list of addresses next to a list of dates and times. The addresses spanned four states—Houston and Katy in Texas, Sugartown in Louisiana, Las Cruces in New Mexico and Santa Monica in California. Something about that list unsettled me, but before I could work out what, an agent saw me peering in.
‘Help you?’ she said.
‘Sorry, wrong meeting,’ I replied, and pulled the door shut.
‘Blake.’ Thistle was behind me, arms folded, keeping a safe distance. I wondered if the sight of her would ever stop feeling like a punch to the chest.
‘Oh my God.’ Her eyes widened. ‘What happened to your face?’
‘I’m okay,’ I said.
She stared at me.
I sighed. ‘I fell in a stormwater channel and got swept along.’
‘You fell in?’
‘I was trying to jump over. Didn’t make it.’
‘Why were you—’
‘That’s not what I’m here about. Can we talk in your office?’
Thistle hadn’t told the FBI about my crimes, which made her complicit. The agents around here were a threat to us both.
‘I don’t have an office,’ she said. ‘Come on.’
She led me to the cafeteria, which was close to deserted at this time of day. At the machine, she made me a coffee with sugar and salt, and one for herself with just sugar.
I sat at a formica table. ‘How come you still don’t have an office?’
‘Offices go to superstars.’ Thistle removed her cup from the machine and stirred the liquid. ‘And my two biggest cases both exposed corruption within the FBI. You may recall them.’
I did.
‘Not the sort of cases the new director wants to call attention to.’ She didn’t sound bitter. Just tired. ‘Plus, there was the whole thing with Bucetti.’
Bucetti had been Thistle’s old partner, before he was shot by a domestic abuser. Bucetti tried to sue her, arguing that Thistle could have prevented his injury by opening fire sooner.
I’d lost my old partner in almost the same way. Richmond had been wounded in front of me; shot by a suspect I had goaded on. That was how Thistle had become my partner. She and I seemed to have led parallel lives, from birth onwards. She was the Earth, damaged but beautiful, while I was the Moon, cold and lifeless. We were on the same trajectory around the sun but couldn’t have been more different.
‘Management doesn’t want to give me too much of a profile,’ Thistle was saying. ‘Which means I end up with all the work the superstars never get around to doing. I’m very busy, so …’ she sat down in front of me ‘… you’ve got fifteen minutes.’
Zara had given me straightforward instructions. Find out what Thistle knows, then feed her some misinformation to stop her getting any further.
But I was all done lying to Thistle.
‘The dead man at Space City wasn’t an astronaut,’ I said.
‘No shit. Who was he?’
‘Our working theory is that he was a Chinese fighter pilot on a recon mission. His stealth jet malfunctioned, he bailed out, and then he asphyxiated on the way down. This is classified, by the way.’
Thistle looked intrigued. ‘You got any evidence of this?’
‘We found his plane in the Pacific Ocean. Again, classified.’
‘We being ClearHorizon?’
I said nothing, letting her fill in the blanks.
‘Hmm.’ Thistle drummed her nails on the tabletop. ‘Okay, you said recon mission. What was he trying to get a look at?’
‘Unknown. There are several technologies in development at the JSC. But I’m not sure anything useful would be visible from the air. And just because he bailed out over Space City doesn’t mean that was the target.’
‘Did you recover any photos from inside the plane?’
‘I didn’t. The people who pulled the wreckage out of the ocean may have. I don’t know.’
‘You’re sure this plane exists?’
It hadn’t occurred to me to doubt the authenticity of the video until now. ‘Pretty sure. But no one’s told me what was inside.’
‘Why would anyone tell you? You’re just a consultant from the private sector.’ Thistle watched me closely.
I swallowed. It was one thing to risk getting tried for treason by telling her about the plane. But if I told her who I was working for, and the CIA found out, they might consider her a threat. So I stayed silent.
‘Well.’ Thistle sipped her coffee. ‘It’s a good story. But it doesn’t hold together. If the pilot ejected, where did his ejector seat land? Where was his parachute?’
Zara had covered this. ‘If he wasn’t buckled in properly, the seat and the chute might have landed someplace else. Like the bay.’
‘Someone would have noticed that, surely?’
‘Okay, maybe it landed in the woods around Space City. They’re fenced off. No foot traffic to find the debris.’
‘Let me get this straight.’ Thistle held up one finger. ‘You think the pilot’s jet malfunctioned, in some as-yet-unknown way, so he bailed out.’ She held up a second finger. ‘You also think he didn’t know how to work a seatbelt, so he fell out of his ejector seat halfway down.’ A third finger. ‘And you think his seat and chute happened to land within the fence, but far enough away from the buildings that no one has found them, days later. Have I got that right?’
When she summed it all up like that, it did sound unlikely. But as Garcia had said, on a long enough timescale, the unlikely becomes inevitable.
‘It could have happened,’ I said.
‘It could have, but I’ll bet you a million bucks it didn’t.’ Thistle’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She checked the screen, cursed, and drained the last of her coffee. ‘I gotta go. Let me know if you hear anything else. Nice to see you, Blake.’
I doubted she meant it. Once I’d been a brilliant investigator, and she’d trusted me. Now I was a crank, not worth even ten of the fifteen minutes she’d promised. She probably wanted to sweep away all memory of me, erase the dirty footprints I’d left all over her life—
‘Wait,’ I said.
She paused on her way to the door. ‘Yes?’
‘What about the partial footprint? In the field, near the Martian training area. When I saw it, I thought someone might have found the body before Anders did, then swept the dirt to hide their tracks.’
Thistle folded her arms. ‘Wait. You think someone found the body and then took away the ejector seat and the chute?’
‘No.’ She hadn’t seen the dead man in the flesh. Face up. Legs wide. Heels scuffed. Arms above his head. Like he’d been dragged by the wrists. ‘I think the body landed in the woods and then someone moved it. Someone who knew him, and cared about him—otherwise they would have pulled him by the ankles.’
