The Killing Files

Wait …

I rest my back for a moment against the cool wash of the wall and listen. My hands squeeze the iron bar as I assess where the danger source is, scanning my memory, determining what I should do next. For some reason, after two, three seconds pass, I find myself slowly coming to a stand. It surprises me, the move, makes my pulse rocket, but still I do it, slipping the cell phone into the band pocket of my shorts, watching as my feet, ghost-like, become taut, engaged, and before I can stop myself, before I can order my body to halt its course, I am holding the iron bar aloft and preparing to stride straight through the kitchen door.

Eliminate the threat.

‘Maria,’ Balthus says, ‘have you left yet?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘I can eliminate the threat.’

‘What? No. Just get the laptop and notebook and run.’

‘Negative. The best course of action is to—’ I see her. There, in the solitary cabinet, a waterfall of blonde hair reflecting in the glass panes in the wood. My chest tightens as panic shoots up. ‘She is here.’

‘What? Christ, Maria. Move!’

I go to run, to dart out of the way, but before I do, before my feet flip fast enough, the window behind me shatters, a clap of thunder in the silence. Shards of glass rain down onto my bare neck, shoulders, arms and legs, scissor splinters tearing apart the warm, suede air of the summer sun.

A bag is thrust over my head, plunging me into a sudden frightening, claustrophobic darkness. I thrash about, frantic to get out, and, as I lift my arms to try to rip the bag off my head, the iron bar slips from my grip and clatters to the tiles.

‘Maria? Maria?!’

The bag becomes tighter and tighter, and Balthus’s voice echoes from the phone, the sound of him reduced to just lost, helpless words drifting alone into the ripped, fractured room.

Chapter 7

Undisclosed confinement location—present day

I wake up once more to find myself still alive.

Woozy, weary, my eyelids flicker as my sight takes in a panoramic view of the room, of the black, the stench. My muscles ache and throb, and in my head is a searing pain that shoots down my neck to the base of my back and stays there, pulsating, a globe of pins pricking my skin and bones. I curl my fingers into fists. The hallucination, the memory of it all floods back, the water, the feeling of drowning all fresh in my mind as if the shore were still at my feet.

‘Patricia?’ I croak. ‘Can you hear me?’

There is a cough. ‘D … Doc?’

‘Patricia?’ Hearing her voice makes me happy for one solitary, exquisite second and I let out a small whoop. ‘What is your status?’

A laugh ripples out, weak, vanilla, but there. ‘I love how—’ she halts, hacks up something from her throat— ‘I love how even in a shithole like this, you’re still so formal.’ She gags then hauls in a shoal of breath. ‘My leg’s killing me.’

‘Your leg is killing you?’ I panic, confused. ‘How can your leg kill you?’

‘No, no it’s not …’ She laughs again, but it does not sound like her, as if were altered somehow, down an octave. ‘Doc, it’s a phrase. Remember those? I taught you about them in prison. My leg’s not actually killing me—it just means it really hurts.’

‘Oh.’

Some time passes, but I don’t know how much. I drift in and out of consciousness, the blackness of the room throwing a blanket over everything, rendering each line of vision I try to establish useless. Slowly, though, after a while, an element of lucidity begins to return. It is small, the tide of it, the clarity that trickles back towards the shore, towards the solid certainty of the land in my mind, but nonetheless it is there and, for the first time since I awoke in this room, there is a grip of strength inside me.

‘Doc, where are we?’

I let out a breath, one controlled exhalation, then think. Location, logistics. How did we get here? If there are drugs in my system, then how were they administered and why? To transport me? But from where? And if so, does that mean Patricia has been drugged too?

For the next few moments, we remain silent. Patricia, lying on the floor at whichever side she is, sings some type of Irish lullaby, a song about the sea, and for ten seconds, I become calm, listen only to her melody, all whipped vanilla cream and light chocolate soufflé. I know it is wrong. I know that for her to be here means danger, being in this room trapped with me, yet still, as she sings, as her voice dances through the air, gliding through the gloom, I feel a slice of gratitude, of selfish thankfulness that my friend is near to me.

‘Hey, Doc,’ Patricia says after a while, after the serene song has faded into the dark air, ‘do you remember when we first met?’

‘Oh. Yes. It was a Tuesday.’

‘Was it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Cool. And do you remember what you said to me?’

The image of the scene flashes in my mind. Patricia, tattoos of the Virgin Mary and a blackbird on her arm, me bending forward to analyse them without saying anything at all to Patricia until she spoke again to me, telling me I was ‘getting a little close.’

‘The first words I spoke to you were about your name,’ I say. ‘“Patricia. It is the female form of Patrick. Patrick means—”’

‘Means nobleman.’ She laughs, joining in the end of my sentence. There is a sigh, small, mewed, and I find myself breathing more easy at the sound. ‘Your face was all bruised, Doc, do you remember?’

‘Yes.’ A flash comes to me, an image of a fist to the face. I swallow.

‘Doc, I’m so sorry I brought it up. Are you … are you okay?’

‘Why do people think I am a freak?’

‘Huh?’

‘Why do they call me weird?’

She wheezes into the air. ‘I don’t know, Doc. People are idiots. They don’t always see that it’s okay just to be who we are. Last time I looked, we were all, by, well, our very human nature, I guess, different to each other. At what point does different turn into weird? Who the hell knows? My answer? It doesn’t. We just are who we are, and the quicker the world accepts that, the better a place it will be.’

I sit and think about what my friend’s words mean and how, when I am confused, she seems to cut through the bewilderment, and the clouds in my head part a little quicker and the cage that surrounds makes me feel just a little less isolated.

After a few moments Patricia coughs. ‘She worked for MI5, right, that Michaela?’

‘Yes. She did.’

‘Jesus, it’s fucked up shit.’ She pauses, the blackness of the room pressing down on us. ‘I’m glad I met you, Doc, even though we’re locked up now in God knows where—I’m glad I met you. Without you, I … I wouldn’t have got out on parole so fast—that Harry lawyer of yours helped me, before he … well, you know.’ She inhales. ‘I still think about my mum, how she was in pain. It was the right thing to do to, you know … to end her life. I’d do the prison sentence all over again if I had to, just so she wouldn’t have to suffer.’

‘Euthanasia. That is what you did.’

‘Yep.’ A sniff. ‘Yep.’

‘I am sorry you are sad,’ I say after a moment. ‘Thanks, Doc. Thanks.’

We sit, the two of us, in silence and thoughts where the blackness of the room covers us almost totally. My muscles ache. I try to roll my shoulders to move the blood in them, but when I do, each bone creaks and my neck at the back goes rigid.

‘Er, Doc, you there?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘I can see something.’

I forget my sore neck and jerk forwards. ‘What?’

‘On your hand, there—some light.’

I look down. She’s right. I can see my hand for the first time, illuminated by a globule of buttered light. Adrenaline shoots through my bloodstream as inch by inch, a rash of light spreads from my hand, to my wrist, shining on the rope tying me down, then it continues up my arm to the well on my inside elbow, until it shows me something that I did not at all register until now.

‘Doc, what is it?’

I blink, check once more, but there is no denying it, because I am a doctor—I have seen thousands of them.

‘Doc! What?’

I start to shake. ‘The drugs are in my cubital vein.’

‘The cubital … Wait, what?’

‘The cubital vein resides in the ante cubital area.’

‘What? Doc, you’ll have to explain in words I can understand, because you—’

The light shines bright. My panic hits a high. ‘There is a needle in my arm!’

Salamancan Mountains, Spain.

34 hours and 20 minutes to confinement

The bag on my head has blacked everything out and all I can see through the pin-prick gaps of fabric are shards of sunlight and shadows of shapes. I try to get a handle on where Dr Andersson is, but the bag is so scratchy on my face that it is becoming distracting, and the urge to yank it off, claw at my face over and over until the heat subsides, is almost overwhelming, but when I reach up one free hand to pull, it is snapped back.

‘Move.’

I gulp in buckets of breath, sucking on the bag as she pushes me forward, my bare feet flopping over the tiles. Then, we stop. For a moment, there is complete quiet. I jerk left and right, disorientated as I try to pinpoint where Dr Andersson is, willing her to utter one more clipped accent of a word, but all I can hear is the sound of my own breath rushing in my ears as if a sea shell were being held to my head. I don’t move. My muscles scream out at me, itching in agony where Dr Andersson pinches my wrists and shoulders. And all the while my cell phone sits hidden in the band of my shorts.

There is a click of a phone, but it is not mine.

‘It’s me,’ Dr Andersson says now, her voice a punnet of plums, a rich slate board of cured meats.

Another voice speaks from what must be her cell. ‘Is it her?’ A male, speaking in pebbled English. Who is he?

‘Yes. It’s her.’ There is a tug on my wrist. ‘Stay still!’ I wince. ‘Her hair’s blonde now, she’s skinnier, but it’s still Martinez.’

‘Good. Good. Well, you know what to do. We have to put an end to the Project. And she’s it.’

My mind races. She’s it. She’s it. Nerves rise in me, immediate, urgent, but the will to survive, to forge something that will get me out of this situation is stronger than even my urge to curl up in a ball, moan and hide.

‘You cannot kill me,’ I say, spitting out fluff and fibres.

She slides a plastic tie around my wrists, pulls it tight then walks away, her boots slapping the tiles. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, and then there is utter silence as she seems to go into another room. Where? The kitchen? I slam my head left and right to determine where Dr Andersson is, stagger back a little and count in my head, the numbers not only soothing me, but allowing me to analyse the time frame and give me a slice of clarity. I reach thirty, listen. Nothing. Just the starlings on the cypress trees in the fields and the light tidal rush of grass in the wind. My body relaxes a little, shoulders softening—and then I remember: my cell.

‘Balthus,’ I whisper.

There is a scratch of static and then one word. ‘Maria?’

His voice is low, quiet, but hearing it, knowing he is there makes the heat of the bag, the confusing disorientation of it all more easy to bear.

‘Maria, are you okay? My God, she’s going to kill you, you have to get out. Can you?’

‘I do not know.’ I blink, try to gauge any shapes from behind the fabric. I sniff the air. ‘Chanel No. 5.’

‘What?’

‘It is Dr Andersson’s scent and I can smell it. The scent was strong before, but now is less so. Judging by the distance now of the perfume, it means she is not in the room, yet she still remains on the property.’

‘Well get to another room then! Move out of there.’

He is right. It is a risk, but if I can get to the bedroom, I can run.

I begin to raise my arms, slow at first, the plastic ties digging in, then fast, projecting the direction in the dark my body will need to crawl when the scent of perfume suddenly becomes so strong it feels as if my head will explode at the sensory assault.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’

She’s here! I go to grab the bag with my tied hands, desperate to run, but Dr Andersson hauls me back, slams my arms down.

‘No!’ I yell.

‘Just stop fighting. God, Maria.’

I kick out, but Dr Andersson’s grip on me is tight and she jerks her elbow into my ribs. My torso folds in like a pack of cards, my eyes watering, lungs burning as I heave the bag so hard into my mouth to claw some oxygen that I begin to suffocate. There is a fierce kick to my shin. It catches me on the bone, ripping a fire up my leg, expelling the fabric momentarily from my mouth allowing air to slip in. I lash out my tied fists, but she knocks my head, pinning me against the wall.

‘How long have you been tracking the NSA?’

‘Let me go.’

She exhales hard and shakes her head. ‘I’m tired,’ she says. ‘I’ve come a long way and my family are at home and I’m missing my daughter’s third birthday for you, for this, so just do—’ she shoves me hard against the wall then loosens her grip ‘—as I say, Maria. Jesus.’

I hear her stride away, and I catch short sprints of breath, listening, a wild animal caught in a trap. There is a rustling of paper, tearing.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Finishing what I was supposed to do when you were in Goldmouth.’

The tearing restarts and I realise: she is at my wall where my news articles and images sit, tearing them off from the plaster, tracking the data I have traced. I toss my head left and right, shout out, but another kick hits my shin, harder this time, felling me, knocking me clean to the floor where a punch reaches my stomach, a balled fist sinking into my abdomen. I yell, curl up as a stab of heat shoots through my whole body and amidst it all the cell phone slips further down and all I can think about is not the pain that roars through me but the cell phone, Balthus, and whether Dr Andersson has seen it.

I have to do something quick. Taking in a fractured breath, I roll what I think is to the left then hit something. What? The wall? A crate? I go rigid, adrenaline mixing into a lethal cocktail inside me.

‘She has everything here—news articles, the lot.’

She’s talking somewhere on her cell again. My eyes blink at lightning rate as I listen out for a clue, for anything. Is Balthus listening, too?

‘There is CCTV all over the place,’ Dr Andersson continues.

‘You’ll have to destroy all evidence,’ the man replies, voice breaking up, ‘erase any trace of her presence. We are at the agreed rendezvous point. Surveillance is pulled back so no ops can be tracked. It’s down to you now.’

A rendezvous point—does that mean her team are near? I try to think it through, but my brain is so overloaded by the bag and the adrenaline that it is almost impossible to be coherent, and if I—

There is a crash. The breaking of items, the pulling of drawers, throwing of books to the tiles—she is tearing apart my villa. I try to think fast and what to do and then I remember: my notebook.

Some time passes. I try to count the seconds, track the minutes, but pain from the kicks comes in waves, swelling then rolling back. After a while, crashing over, I hear her stride into what I think again is the kitchen and I take my chance.

‘Balthus?’

A second, two then: ‘Oh, thank God. What’s happening?’

I tell him fast then blink, try to see.

‘Maria, have you slipped the ties from your wrists?’

‘What? No. I have tried but it is secured with some type of—’ A smash. I wait, swallow, ‘—with some type of hard plastic that I am unfamiliar with.’

‘Hang on. Can you feel it, the plastic?’

I touch the tether with my fingertips. ‘Yes. Why?’

‘How small are the groves on the tether?’

I feel. ‘One millimetre depth.’

‘I think I know which type it is. If it’s just one millimetre, sounds like it’s the new restraints we sometimes used at the prison.’

A flicker of hope begins to burn. ‘Do you know how I can untie it?’

‘Yes … I think so.’

There is another smash from the kitchen. ‘Then tell me. Fast.’

After three, perhaps four minutes, Dr Andersson returns. Her boots sound lighter now on the tiles as if she has changed shoes and when she walks, the drift of her perfume is softer, more weak. She marches up to me and halts. The bag, cemented still to my head, scratches at my face but I try hard to ignore it, bite my lip, keep my back steady and wait.

For a moment, there is no movement. She is crouching in front of me, I think—I can just make out the outline of her body in front of me. But more than that, more than simply her presence, is the heat of her, of another person that catches me off guard and, oddly, the thought strikes me that this, now, is the first time in six months that I have encountered, with such geographical closeness, another human being.

‘Right,’ she says finally, ‘let’s do this, shall we? The day is getting on and so is time.’

The bag is whipped from my head and my skin, slapped by sunlight, stings as, for the first time, my eyes blinking over and over, I get a complete look at Dr Andersson as she looms now in front of me. Her blonde hair is tied up into a ponytail that slides down her back and rests down her spine all the way to her hip bones. Her forehead is high and sharp and peppered with freckles, and on either side of her straight nose sit two rose crescents for cheeks, each propped up by defined, prominent bone structure. I choke, spitting out the fibres of fabric from my mouth and throat.

‘What do you want?’

She offers me a smile, the one I remember from Goldmouth, with white teeth and scarlet, plumped lips. ‘I want to do my job and get home. I understand you’re on the harsh end of this, I really do, but MI5 wants the Project to end, which means I have to deal with you, end you.’ She takes out a gun. ‘I’m really very sorry, Maria. I always rather liked you.’

And then, with one bullet, she shoots me in the leg.

Chapter 8

Undisclosed confinement location—present day

‘Doc, are you sure there’s a needle? Can you see it?’

‘Yes. But the light is fading again.’

The blackness has reclaimed the air, but, now I know the needle is there, I will my arm to move as much as it can, wriggling my fingers in an attempt to feel the point of the metal inserted into my veins. At first, nothing shifts and I feel so thirsty, am so desperately weak and tired that my mind begins to think it has imagined the entire thing.

And then it moves, there, the needle, in the crease of my elbow. Just one pull at my skin and veins.

‘Can you see it now?’ Patricia says.

‘No. I can feel it.’

‘Doc, you know what this means, right?’

I go to speak the words they are drugging me again but instead clam up, an instinct to yell out, to cry as loud and deep as possible welling up inside of me. This was not supposed to happen again. No, no, no, no.

‘Doc, are you still there?’

‘I ran away from them,’ I say after a moment, catching my short, shallow breath. ‘I hid. The Project and MI5 thought I was dead after prison. I thought I had escaped it all.’

‘Oh, Doc. Doc, I’m so sorry.’

For a moment, in the blackness, it feels as if everything has stopped, as if, here, now, all I have is collapsing on me, folding inwards never to push out again. It feels hopeless. I sit there, silent, scared, until, on the murky moisture of the air there is a rush of something.

‘Doc? Doc, you’re groaning. What’s the matter?’

I squint as hard as I can, frantically forcing my eyes to see something, anything in the dank, suffocating space as to my direct side, the rush sounds again, distinct now, a click licking the air as what must be a liquid begins its gentle whoosh. It is only when I hear again that my groggy brain engages in the intricacies of the noises around me and I realise with a stabbing clarity what is actually happening and what it means to me—what it means to us both.

‘What if they are drugging me, so they can transport me to another facility somewhere? If they do that, what will happen to you?’

‘I’ll be okay, Doc.’

‘What if they are intending to kill you? That is what the Project does—it kills those I love.’ My breathing begins to speed up in short, rapid intakes of oxygen as the worry inside me escalates.

‘Doc, Doc I can’t get to you, so look, it’s going to happen either way, so try to breathe through it. There, that’s it …’

I try so hard to focus on her voice, slam my arms against the rope on my wrists, desperate to escape, to run, hide, because what is charging forward now like a pack of hungry wolves makes my heart stop, makes every sweat gland on my skin scream out in fear. A hallucination.

‘Breathe, Doc. Keep breathing. Keep listening to me …’

A body with multiple heads, each one of them spinning 360 degrees, hurtles towards me. I scream. My nails scratch into the wood of the chair, legs kick out, but it does no good, and I know it must be the drug, be the liquid shooting inside my veins, but there is nothing I can do. I am trapped.

The monster is on me now, here in this room. I yell out my friend’s name, hear the distant scream of her voice, but I can’t reach her. The heads in the image sway, thorns in the breeze, and I hear a voice screech and realise it’s mine, because the heads, the faces on them—they are Mama and Ramon. My mother and brother.

‘Patricia, where are you?’ I yell.

‘I’m here, Doc. It’ll be over soon. Keep calm, okay? Keep breathing …’

I try to scramble back, tell myself that none of this is real, but still they come, the heads grotesque, twisted out of shape, all images in a fairground mirror, their mouths and eyes huge, each of them laughing over and over like two sick clowns. ‘Freak! She doesn’t understand,’ they sing. ‘She doesn’t understand, the freak.’ The children run beside them, children I recall from my school days, and they skip and they chant, Weirdo, weirdo, stinky nerdy weirdo. And I ask them what they mean, scream at them to tell me what is happening, but the heads, all of them, family, children, they simply look at me, at each other, and then, just as I think they’re going to disappear, they let out one roar of a laugh and, merging together, morph into a gun as tall as a car and shoot me, point blank, in the head.

My eyes fly open. I choke, claw for air, chest ripping, struggling as I look down at myself, at the black room, shaky, scared at what just happened.

‘Patricia, the drugs …’

‘Sssh. Sssh.’

I stutter, voice cracked and it takes a full minute for my body to settle, for the nightmare of the image of my mama and brother to slowly subside.

‘Doc, I’m here. It’s okay. It’s over. It’s over.’

I hear my friend, cling onto her voice as if I was sinking and she were my life raft in the sea. My brain recalibrates itself, but it is taking time and each movement of my eyes and hands and limbs makes the room sway and soar and whip up a pile of nausea in my stomach.

After a moment, after the heat has subsided, Patricia checks on me then asks me a question.

‘Doc, you know these hallucinations, right?’

‘Y-yes.’

‘Well, why’s it only happened now?’

My head throbs, throat runs red raw. Everything in the room still fades into black. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, if this needle, yeah, this drug is permanently in your vein, why’s it not causing you to trip all the time?’

I begin to think. What she is saying, what she talks about—my brain finally starts to shrug off the drug effects and engage, calculate.

‘Doc, I guess what I mean is,’ she says now, ‘what’s making the drug only come out in doses?’

And in the dark, in the foul mouldy odour, I sit and I think and I try to understand what is happening.