6

Holst regained consciousness face down on a cool, hard surface. His limbs were numb. He was blindfolded, bound hand and foot, and a cloth gag pulled so hard against the corners of his mouth that his cheeks felt as if they might tear apart. Despite this excruciating pain he felt heavy and drugged and too lacking in energy to do anything other than draw each breath through his congested nostrils. At first the only sound he could hear was that of the blood coursing through his ears to the jumpy rhythm of his heart. Then he became aware of a vibration, the low hum of engines and the stifled, pathetic sobs of a woman somewhere close by.

There was no prospect of moving or of making an intelligible sound. He was helpless. Trapped. It occurred to him that he might indeed be dead. Images that had not visited his mind since Sunday-school classes began to revolve as if on a carousel behind his eyes. Angels, demons, a shadowy figure of Christ and a serpent’s head as large as a man’s with black-green eyes. He fought the urge to vomit, fearing that he would choke. Then a sudden sensation like the ground giving way beneath him distracted his attention. The motion repeated itself and he realized that he was on board an aircraft and that pressure was building against his eardrums. They were descending towards the ground.

He was alive.

Time passed – how much, he wasn’t sure – and the sobbing continued. He wanted to kick out and stop it. Then came the whir of electric motors and the familiar sound of landing gear lowering and locking into position. He summoned an image of his wife, Laura, and their son and daughter aged ten and eight. For precious moments they seemed to smile at him before fading and distorting and joining the procession of grotesques thrown up from the most fearful depths of his mind. He heard himself groan like a man on his death bed and felt overcome with self-pity. What had he done to deserve this? Why him? All he had done was work like a slave to push back the frontiers of knowledge.

The aircraft touched down, bounced once, then came quickly to a halt. Even in his trussed-up condition Holst was aware that it was a small plane, a light jet of some sort. A door opened. Two sets of heavy footsteps approached and stopped close to his head. Thick hands grabbed him under the shoulders and hoisted him to his feet. The restraints were removed from his ankles. Behind him, he heard the woman whimper in alarm.

‘Allons-y.’ Let’s go.

Holst’s legs felt like planks of wood attached to his body. His captor half carried, half dragged him several feet, then hauled him down a flight of steps into hot, humid, cloying air that pulsed with the sound of cicadas.

Several voices shouted at each other in French. The words sounded like orders. Military instructions. Holst felt trickles of sweat run down his back and forehead. The heat was intense, like nothing he had experienced before. They walked across a stretch of tarmac towards the sound of another engine, loud and crude compared with the plane he had just left.

‘Escalier. Quatre.’ Four stairs.

They went up, Holst going first, gingerly seeking each tread with the toe of his shoe before committing his weight. They entered a confined space that smelled of fuel oil and hot vinyl. He was placed in a seat. Seconds later he heard the woman being brought in after him. Now she was weeping and moaning and he heard Drecker’s voice shouting at her in English to shut up. She didn’t. There was a sharp slap, a wounded cry of pain, then finally her whimpering stopped. Several more people followed them in, a door slammed, there was a roar of engines and the accelerating thud-thud-thud overhead told him that they were in a helicopter. He felt the machine lift from the ground, rock from side to side, tilt slightly, then move forward with a jerk.

The flight was hot, noisy and to the best of Holst’s estimation took less than half an hour. He guessed they were in the tropics. Somewhere in Africa perhaps? Probably one of the former French colonies: Ivory Coast or Senegal. But why here? Susan Drecker was an American who worked, at least as far as he knew, for a wealthy entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley. A man whose identity she had kept secret and who wanted to acquire the results of his precious research for commercial purposes. Coupled with the right nanotechnologies, Holst’s discoveries about the reward centres of the brain had the power to manipulate human behaviour in ways that hitherto had been inconceivable.

Could it be that Drecker had been lying all along? That she was nothing to do with business but a government agent who had become aware of the horrendous danger his work posed if its fruits were to fall into the wrong hands? The feeling of nausea returned. His life’s work for nothing. He was going to be interrogated, asked to spill every last detail and terrorized into spending what remained of his career in undoing what he had done. He had heard dark and crazy rumours of such things happening before, of scientists who had created technologies so radical and threatening to the established order that they were strangled at birth.

His fear and anguish gave way to raging anger. Fuck these people. Fuck them to hell.

The engines changed pitch. The helicopter tilted, tipping him forward against his seat belt, then came in to land.