Nssm 200 - The Milieu Derivative

  Muffled was about the best word he could think of to describe the voices far into the background, distant and hidden from view, one in particular speaking with especial venom. Try as he may he couldn’t get an image into his mind then realised his eyes had yet to open. He attempted to shift position and felt something cold and hard dig into his wrists, restraining his arms. Forcing his eyes open he peered through the gloom to measure how distant the voices were, unsuccessfully in those first moments of consciousness. Seconds later a number of human shapes came into view, as did the handcuffs tying him to the thin metal pipe.

  “We know who sent him and why he’s here so I don’t see what there is to discuss,” said a woman’s voice.

  “We should at least give him a chance,” said a familiar woman’s voice.

  “What’s the point?” said the first.

  “Find out what he knows,” said the second. “He might be able to tell us something about what they’re planning to do, their next move.”

  “The guy is nothing more than a drone.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” said a man’s voice.

  “I am. We’re just wasting time. I say we kill him and be done with it.”

  There were no prizes for guessing whose voice advocated killing him. He heard the distinct sound of a handgun being checked for ammunition and panic brought a sense of urgency into his mind. His eyes examined the surrounds, some sort of basement. The pipe dropped from a roughly hewn hole in the roof and led to another hole in the concrete floor. There were no joins or breaks anywhere in view. He scanned the room. Whoever did this was smart. Not a single object lay anywhere around him within a three metre radius, offering no visible means of defence. He was at his captor’s complete mercy. A shadow moved to the left, quickly followed by a second and a third. He closed his eyes and allowed his head to fall back into its original position. The distinct smell of weaponry filled the air and the sound of footsteps neared. Matt instinctively held his breath as a figure circled him. Silent and motionless, save for the rise and fall of breathing, his mind galloped. There had to be something he could do.

  The shock was instant, violent, like an unexpected slap across the face with a wet fish, as the ice cold liquid thrashed against his head.

  “Crap,” he spluttered.

  “I knew you were awake,” spat the woman.

  The pair of dark slacked legs stood too far away to wrestle to the ground. Shaking his head to clear the water from his eyes he looked up at the sneering face pointing the handgun to his unprotected head, her eyes aflame with hatred. He wished he’d killed her, the time he had her captive in Berchtesgaden. She approached and pressed the barrel to his temple, cold and hard and threatening.

  “I should have guessed,” he said. “Lalitha Shalini Singh. Your parents obviously weren’t thinking straight when they thought up the name of their daughter. By the translation you’re meant to be elegant and modest.”

  “How the fuck do you know my name?”

  “I know a lot about you, Lily.”

  The sound of talking brought others to the fore, three more to be precise. The two men of matching build bore an uncanny and striking resemblance, armed apiece with heavy eyebrows and steely dark eyes. They could easily have been mistaken as brothers had he not known otherwise. The face of a blonde-haired woman came into focus.

  “I thought I told you not to come after us.”

  “What can I say? I’m addicted to you, Rosa. Either that or the date rape drug you used on me last time.”

  She responded with one of her deep, throaty laughs which he would normally find disarming. The others failed to share in Rosa’s amusement.

  “Let’s just kill him,” said Lily.

  “Wait,” said a voice from behind.

  “But he knows me. How does he know my name?” asked Lily of the hidden voice.

  “I know about all of you,” said Matt, settling his gaze on the angry woman.

  “Lalitha Shalini Singh. Born in 1982 to illegal immigrants from Kashmir you ran away from home at the age of thirteen to avoid an arranged marriage. You’ve hated male authority ever since, which makes it all the more surprising you ended up working in a team with a man as its figurehead, one John Tillman.”

  “Fuck you, Durham.”

  “Is that true, Lily?” asked the tallest of the men, head covered by a mop of the blackest hair Matt had ever seen.

  “Yes it is, Johnno,” said Matt.

  “What did you call me?”

  “Johnno,” he replied. “Your precise name is John Albert Secker though you prefer people not to know your middle name as it doesn’t suit the youthful, athletic image you want to conjure with the fairer sex. Your professional reputation is as a consummate weapons expert, an image cultivated since your arrest at the tender age of eighteen years for the illegal possession of unlicensed firearms.”

  “They framed me. I found them.”

  “Yeah, it’s amazing what you come across in a military arms depot,” said Matt.

  “Nice one Johnno,” said the look-a-like, a shade smaller than Secker he now noticed.

  “Mr Tobias Ian Rowe should have been jailed for hacking crimes against the state had he been old enough. His parents, lifelong Civil Servants, were so mortified they were more than happy for you to be sent to a state-run residential school in North Yorkshire, unaware it was a Government facility for errant children with a gift for all things computers.”

  “You made your point, Matt,” said Rosa.

  “Not really, I left the best two for last.”

  “How does he know all this?” shouted Lily.

  “Tillman’s log,” said another man’s voice, face hidden by the gloom. “For some unknown reason Tillman bequeathed his personal log to him, including our personal files. What I can’t figure out is why.”

  “Makes you wonder doesn’t it?” said Matt. “You may as well come out of the shadows, Will.”

  “That’s it,” shouted Lily, pressing the gun to his head.

  “Hold it,” said Will, emerging into view.

  “We’re wasting time,” said Lily, her finger tightening on the trigger. “If you have a God, Durham, now’s the time to pray,” she sneered.

  The time for boldness had arrived.

  “If you were going to kill me you’d have done it in the car and thrown the body into a trench.”

  “Well that’s where you’re wrong. I’ll kill you now.”

  He heard her cock the trigger.

  “Don’t you ever get tired of repeating yourself?” said Matt.

  “Once you’re dead I won’t have to,” she spat.

  He stared intently, one by one, into the eyes of his captors. None of them seemed remotely interested in trying to stop her. Not even Rosa. He was on his own.

  “It’s pretty obvious, from the half-tucked in flap of my jacket pocket, that you’ve already done a body search and not found what you were looking for. So shooting me isn’t likely to produce Tillman’s log either.”

  It took an age before she reluctantly relaxed the trigger and he noticed her gaze shift to each of the others in turn.

  “What makes you think we’re remotely interested in the damn thing?” she said.

  Hiding the inner sigh of relief coursing through his system he elected to try and reduce the tension.

  “Life would be easier if you took these cuffs off.”

  He eyed their individual faces, impassive and indifferent to his restrained discomfort.

  “There are five of you and only one of me,” he said. “I can’t really see me getting away, can you?”

  Will nodded and Rosa released the restraints.

  “A coffee would be good too.”

  “There’s some upstairs,” said Rosa.

  He followed them to the rear of the large, dank space and was the second last to take the stone steps up to the next floor with Lily bringing up the rear, gun in hand.

  “How long have I been out?” he asked, sipping at the cup of war
m liquid.

  “A while,” said Rosa, placing his gold watch on the table in front of him.

  He glanced at Will, leaning against a kitchen unit next to the ceramic oven top, and then gradually took in the room’s dimensions. White panelled units filled the remaining length of the long grey tiled wall leading to a set of French windows, occupying half the width of the narrow end wall and which opened out onto a vast and recently mown lawn. He could see a mid-sized shed deposited to the back of the green carpet of grass, up against the wooden six foot fence.

  “Not a hedgehog friendly garden,” he said, motioning with his head towards the cedar painted panels.

  “What have hedgehogs got to do with anything,” said Lily.

  “The fence comes right down to the soil, stops them from travelling between gardens in the search for food.”

  “Jesus Christ, a freaking environmental evangelist,” she said, looking up to the high ceiling.

  “They’re on the decline,” he insisted.

  “We’re not people friendly either,” said Rosa. “So get to the point of why you’re looking for us.”

  Matt speared his darkest look at her, causing her piercing blue eyes into a solitary blink before holding their station. She was unnervingly convincing. Toby approached and ran his hands down each side of Matt’s body, using a curious object.

  “What’s that?”

  “Bug detector,” said Toby.”If the blue lights up you’re wired for sound, red tells me it’s visual.”

  “And if I’ve got both?”

  “They both do. Here,” he said, handing it to Matt. “I’ve got plenty more.”

  “What are the numbers for?”

  “Frequency, tells you the wavelength being used.”

  “Enough of this shit. We know why he’s here. He’s come for the virus,” snapped Lily.

  “That was my original intention,” he said. “Things have moved on a little since then.”

  “He wants our help,” said Will.

  “And in return I’ll help you.”

  “Hah!” said Lily. “Now I’ve heard it all. This amateur piece of shit thinks he can help us.”

  “Seems to me like you need a little bit of assistance from this amateur piece of shit,” he said.

  “You’re not short of confidence, Durham. I’ll give you that much,” said Johnno.

  “Okay, you’ve got our attention. So tell us, how exactly you are going to help us?” asked Rosa.

  “By allowing me to return the virus to its original owners,” he said.

  “Yeah, real smart,” hissed Lily. “He wants us to give back our only bargaining chip.”

  “You have nothing to bargain with. They’re not going to pay a ransom demand because they know you daren’t release it, not without an effective antidote.”

  “And they thought if they asked nicely we’d just give it back to them?”

  “Yes, because now they don’t want to release it into the atmosphere either,” he said.

  “What a crock of shit,” said Lily.

  “More than a little tenuous, Matt,” said Will. “Trying to peddle the line that after all the investment they’ve suddenly found God.”

  “God has nothing to do with it. There is no antidote, at least not one that’s effective.”

  “Yeah right,” snapped Lily. “That’s a bluff if ever I heard one.”

  “They thought they’d developed a secure vaccine but it turns out it isn’t. The antidote cures by rendering all recipients permanently infertile, irrespective of gender. Release the virus and people without inoculation die within days whilst the remainder of civilisation peters out through an inability to conceive.”

  The statement had caught their attention, their exchange of furtive glances multiplying by the second.

  “What evidence did they provide?” asked Toby.

  “They asked me to come and talk to you?”

  “What kind of evidence is that,” said Johnno.

  “Didn’t you wonder why they hadn’t sent a regiment of special operatives against you? Fear, that’s why. Fear over likely events should the virus be accidentally released and the subsequent consequences.”

  “So we hang on to it,” said Toby.

  “To what end?”

  “For as long as we’ve got the stuff they can neither move against us nor implement their plan.”

  “So you see either way we win and they lose. Explain that one away,” snapped Lily.

  “Only until they manage to develop an effective antidote,” he said. “It might take weeks it might take years but they’ll do it eventually and when they do you’re all as good as dead. You’ll have no defence whatsoever, no-one will.”

  Their return to contemplation allowed him to reassess the situation. Of the group only one, Lily, gave him real cause for concern. The others were no doubt wary, of his presence and the people he had apparently come to represent, but she was openly hostile. Matt put this down to what he read in the log about her relationship with Tillman and the knowledge Matt had killed him.

  “We get the picture, Matt. Where are you taking us with this?” asked Will.

  “You don’t need the virus to stop them.”

  “What other way is there?” asked Rosa.

  “Tillman’s log gives you another option.”

  “Then give it to us,” said Lily.

  “I can’t show it to any of you right now.”

  “Can’t?” Rosa asked. “Why can’t you?”

  “For the same reason that’s in all your minds,” he said.

  “Which is?”

  “One of you is a traitor.”

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Taking Control