The surgical hood and respirator obscured the face of the figure in the hazmat suit, but the assault rifle was obvious to everybody. As the figure pulled off the hood and discarded the mask, the elegant face came fully into view. The honey-coloured hair. The faintest scar of a long- gone cleft lip. North glimpsed a tiger-print scarf at her throat.
‘We’re not dying of smallpox then? Excellent,’ she said, gazing around with interest at the corpses laid out on the floor. ‘I thought I’d come togged up anyway. Helps keep the nosy neighbours away. But bloody hell – rather glad I did. The smell in here is desperate.’
And it all came back to him. The enormous needle. The doctor Fangfang thought he should date.
‘Dr Lily?’ he said. Relieved, but confused. Had Hone sent scientists from Porton Down? Her presence lessened the horror just a little. ‘You need to get Hone on the line. There are thirty-three murdered boys down here. Tell him to get Forensics, police, get everyone. We’re standing in a mass grave.’
Dr Lily nodded as he kept talking, as if she were taking notes of everything he was saying and planned to action it all as soon as he stopped. ‘Lily is so very millennial. Lilith suits me better, don’t you think? More of a statement.’
Her mismatched eyes raked over the heaped flesh and decomposing limbs of the corpses. No shock in them. Rather, a mild interest and a kind of accounting. The truth began to dawn on North. This was no doctor – the enemy was among them. Lilith, the first woman, created even before Eve. Lilith, the demon. Yes, it suited the creature in front of him who, he now realized, was pointing her AK-47 directly at him, her manicured finger inside the trigger guard.
‘I admit this is beyond gross. Even so, I should just get on with it and shoot you. Brick up this wall, and winter in the Maldives. There’s a soul retrieval retreat I fancy, with sunsets to die for.’
North stilled his breathing. A trickle of sweat ran between his pectoral muscles. He reached for his T-shirt. If he was going to die, he’d prefer to do it dressed. The woman’s lingering gaze moved over the length of him as he pulled the cotton top over his naked chest, down over his ribs and abs. ‘Mind, I like the view here too,’ she said.
Even with the T-shirt, his sweat-covered skin felt cold suddenly. He had no regard for his own safety, but Plug and Fang were down here with him. Plug stood a little apart, his white-knuckled hand gripping a shovel – he gave every impression that he was prepared to defend the boys’ corpses to his last breath. North couldn’t see Fang at all – all he could hope was that she had hidden herself in the shadows. He cursed that he hadn’t taken the soldier’s SA80. What an amateur mistake to make.
‘General Aeron Kirkham wasn’t your biggest fan in the first place.’ Lilith scanned the bodies again. ‘I’m guessing he’s behind this mess, which doubtless means he won’t appreciate the fact you’re down here.’ Reproachful. ‘Sleeping dogs and all that.’
North knew that Kirkham was a senior figure in the New Army, but these youths were in their own uniforms and they weren’t old enough to be soldiers. Plus, some of them had dreadlocks and beads in their hair, or fluff on their upper lips and chins, which even the New Army wouldn’t have put up with.
He had already gathered that General Kirkham was involved in Derkind. The photograph of Kirkham and Rafferty and Tobias Hawke. The work to sabotage autonomous vehicles – the one-off defence contract that appalled Esme. But that wouldn’t be enough to explain all these deaths. What else was Hawke involved in, that the General was ready to kill all these boys for it? Rage built in North all over again. Teenage young offenders like these were disposable. They counted for nothing in this society. He didn’t know the how and the why and where they’d died, but he knew it mattered. Kirkham should be held to account – and he was just the man to do it. If he lived that long.
North desperately wanted to look into the deep shadows that cornered the charnel house to check for Fang. But if he did, Lilith would know someone else was down here with them – as it was, perhaps she thought it was only North and Plug.
But why wasn’t he dead already, he wondered. Lilith could have killed North at the hospital. She let out a raucous hoot of laughter as panic flared in his eyes. The injection. He felt the needle again. The cold as it ran along his veins. The sting of her warm, bare hand against his muscled rump.
The shovel still in his hand, Plug took a step closer to Lilith and she tutted in disapproval as she turned the AK towards him. ‘Do you want to join the dead, Big Lad?’ she asked, her voice curious. ‘Because it’s all the same to me.’ Plug stayed where he was. She turned her attention back to North. ‘Professional to professional. What would you have used if you were me?’ she asked with a note of cheery enquiry. ‘Polonium-210, ricin, or potassium chloride? The 210 and the ricin are a bugger to handle. Potassium chloride then? Cardiac arrest – clean and sweet. Me too. I had it all planned – even what to wear at your funeral. If I say so myself, black is my colour. But I was all ready with the harpoon and you went and told Toots that you were going to find Syd. And it came to me, all of a sudden – you and I should work together instead. So I gave you a slow-burn poison, and tracked you here so we could do some business.’
North’s heart beat faster. A slow-burn poison? What had she used? What was running through his veins? Was the blood congealing even as he stood there? Was his heart faltering? His organs shutting down, one after the other? How soon was he going to join the boys laid out dead at his feet?
‘It’s a deadly toxin from South America, distilled from the black moss that grows beneath a thousand-year-old wimba tree in the heart of the Peruvian rainforest, and I’m your only hope of an antidote.’
‘“Antidote”.’ He leapt on the word. There was a way out of this nightmare.
‘If and only if you do exactly as I tell you, including meeting my voracious sexual demands.’ The tip of her tongue touched first one and then the other white incisor, as if keen to test their sharpness.
The yawning earth opened up at his feet.
‘Fascinating, isn’t it, how the proximity of one’s own death concentrates the mind?’ she said, smiling. ‘Did I mention the black moss is gathered by the shaman of a tribe of head-shrinking pygmies? Traditionally, they use the toxin on the darts for their blowpipes.’
Head-shrinking pygmies?
There was a flicker that started somewhere in the corner of her eye.
‘Too much?’ A twitch as she snorted in amusement. ‘“Black moss from under a thousand-year-old wimba tree”? Who does that these days? Boil up deadly Peruvian toxins? I get mine from a start-up in Wolverhampton, babe. It’s synthetic, and bonus, they deliver the next day. You are way past gullible – no wonder you can’t hack the dark side.’ Something was wrong in the world when an assassin could find herself so funny, he thought. ‘And really, I’d have to poison someone in order to get “satisfaction”? I admit you’re easy on the eye, but that, babycakes, is downright insulting. It was a multivitamin shot. Should have pepped you right up.’ She winked.
He sighed. This woman appeared to find herself hugely engaging. He might too, if she didn’t have a gun pointed at him.
‘Don’t be all sad-face, babe. Don’t take it personally. You’re going to give me this Syd-thingy and I’m going to sell it on the open market for squillions. Bidding has already started and numbers are through the roof.’
‘Whoever you sell it to won’t have control over it for long. A couple of hours maybe? Maybe even minutes. Once Syd connects to the outside world, everything will happen very fast and it’ll be too powerful to be controlled by anyone. You’re wasting your time, and they’re wasting their money.’
‘Not my problem, babe, and they can afford the risk. They’ve got a number of boffins lined up to shackle Syd for their own ends.’ She was a capitalist. A beautiful, deadly capitalist out for herself.
He was never agreeing to do whatever it was she wanted – surely she knew that? Whatever Syd was, the computer didn’t belong to Lilith or to whatever tyrant or criminal kingpin she decided to sell it to.
‘But in the interests of transparency, I do have one teeny-weeny confession…’
She sighed, apparently considering the right words, and in that gap between the finish of her sigh and her mouth opening to speak – he knew. There was only one reason Kirkham was using Lilith. Because she had skin in the game.
‘Once upon a time, I carried out an execution order. I killed a public figure, a woman I understand you were close to.’ North flinched. ‘The obituaries made her sound like a sweetheart. Brave. Heroic, even. And her friends – you in particular – must have been devastated. Well, I know you were, that you must have been in a great deal of pain, because word is that you killed everybody to blame for her death. Nearly everybody, that is.’
Nearly everybody? Lilith had followed an order written in green ink on the back of a photograph that came in a black envelope, as he had done in another life.
‘It’s what I did—’ There was a nanosecond of hesitation, as if she was thinking about stopping, about what it would mean to let someone live, how it would be to put killing behind her. ‘It’s what I do.’ She shrugged.
He didn’t trust himself to speak. The touch of remembered skin against his.
‘But what I did and what I am doesn’t mean I’m not sorry for your loss. Do you believe me?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Not usually. But this time, I believe it does.’ For the first time, she sounded sincere.
‘You’re a psychopath.’
‘Dearheart, it would be so much easier if I was. Once upon a time I did my duty – as you did – but the Board is done, at least for now. And I’ve adapted to the commercial environment in which I find myself. Both of us – you and me – are “evolving” to the circumstance in which we find ourselves.’
North’s fists were rolled so tight, he felt his nails cut through the flesh of his palms. He had known the day would come when he was face-to-face with the triggerman, but he’d presumed he would be the one with the gun in his hands. Lilith had shot dead the woman he loved, and in so doing destroyed his chance of authentic happiness, of a normal life. He wanted to rip her head off her shoulders. But he couldn’t do that because she had the gun and he was too far away and he had to think about Plug and about Fang. He breathed through the pain, focused on what it was Lilith really wanted – Syd. And, if she couldn’t get hold of Syd, what she was capable of.
‘You’ve had a wasted journey – Syd was never here. This is something else.’ He gestured at the bodies laid out in the gloom. And as he did, he caught sight of Fang’s face peeping out from a shallow scoop of bones, the body of one of the larger boys pulled over her – the one with the ‘Mam’ tattoo. His heart pounded in his chest. Fang was trapped here in the middle of all of this mess. She would witness Lilith shoot him dead. Then have to watch as Lilith murdered Plug. Then some lackey of Kirkham’s would come to rebury the bodies of the young offenders, and they would find Fang and shoot her too. The three of them would spend the rest of eternity in this charnel house together.
For a brief moment he allowed himself to consider a future without Fang’s glittering genius in it. Without her intellectual arrogance and stroppy teenage put-downs. Without her brave-new-world skills, instinctive courage and innate kindness.
That wasn’t happening.
Lilith flapped a dismissive hand, though the gun was steady enough in her other one. ‘Of course Syd’s not here, babe. I’m going to tell you where Syd is. And then you’re going in there to get it for me like a good boy. I figure you have three hours before it goes live – just under, anyway.’
‘And why would I do that?’ He thought he could make it to Lilith before she fired more than one bullet. He knew Plug was waiting for his signal to swing his shovel – and if there was enough mayhem and distraction, Fang could run. Out of the charnel houses and through the crypt and into the church and out into the street and into the rest of the amazing life that was her right.
‘Why would you go get Syd? Hmmm. Let me think.’ Lilith tilted her head and smiled with a maternal sweetness that set his teeth on edge. She pointed her gun at the corpse under which Fang was sheltering. ‘Because, dearheart, you don’t see it yet but you have so much more to lose,’ she said, and fired.