Anna knew immediately that this was her fault; that she had done something terrible. ‘I don’t want to.’
The man laughed coldly as Ben was wrenched from her and she was handcuffed and dragged towards the door.
‘Ben!’ Anna screamed. ‘Give him back. You can’t do this. I’m Legal . . . I’m . . .’
‘Legal? Don’t make me laugh. You’re Surplus, that’s what you are,’ the man said, throwing her towards the other man. ‘A dirty little Surplus who thinks she can help the others to escape. Once a Surplus, always a Surplus. But don’t worry. You’re not going to prison. You’re going somewhere much worse.’
‘No. Please,’ Anna begged, but her words were ignored, and all she could hear as she stumbled down the stairs was the sound of Ben’s cries.
Chapter Nineteen
Pincent Pharma seemed bigger on the inside than it did on the outside. It was whiter, brighter, lighter than anywhere Jude had been in his life. Too light, Jude decided, squinting as he followed Derek Samuels past the escalator. He didn’t like the place; preferred the darkness of his bedroom.
Derek Samuels was a thin-faced, wiry man with narrow shoulders and high eyebrows that turned everything he said into a question. He led Jude down a long white corridor, through some double doors and into another, narrower corridor. Eventually, he was shown into a small room with a table in it.
‘Now,’ Derek Samuels said, smiling thinly, ‘would you like to tell me who you are and what you’re doing here?’
Jude looked at him, an expression of boredom on his face. ‘Like I said in my message, I’m offering to fix your security. I thought that’s why you replied.’
Mr Samuels said nothing; he stood up.
‘To fix our security,’ he repeated, icily, then folded his arms and narrowed his eyes. ‘As it happens, I have checked your references,’ he said levelly. ‘I know who you are, know who your father was, know what you’ve been doing for a living. What I want to know, though, is why you are here. And how you managed to hack into our systems. Who put you up to it? And what did they ask you to do?’
His voice was silky, but Jude could hear the threat behind it.
‘No one put me up to it,’ he said with a bored sigh. ‘Hacking into systems is what I do. I managed to hack in because your systems need updating. Because they’re old. Probably the people who developed them are old too. Where’s Mr Pincent, anyway?’
‘Old.’ Mr Samuels moved closer. ‘That’s interesting.’ He moved closer still, so that his face was only inches from Jude’s. ‘You know,’ he said, his voice almost a whisper, ‘what the best thing about Longevity is?’
Jude shook his head, felt his hands going clammy, tried to look anywhere but into Mr Samuels’ eyes.
‘It’s that there aren’t any young people cluttering up the world,’ Mr Samuels continued. ‘Thinking they know it all.’ His face was expressionless, but Jude could hear the anger simmering in his voice, and suddenly found himself suppressing a little smile. Underneath that hard-man exterior, Mr Samuels was unsettled, he realised. Threatened by youth.
‘Thinking?’ Jude said levelly, his confidence returning. ‘Well, in this case, I do know it all. All there is to know about security systems, anyway. Which you know, because otherwise you wouldn’t have invited me in. So do you want me to get to work, or shall I go?’
Mr Samuels’ eyes narrowed. ‘How’s your mother?’ he asked, his eyes glinting slightly.
Jude stared back at him silently.
‘Oh, that’s right,’ Mr Samuels continued. ‘She left, didn’t she? Went to . . . South America, was it? With her new husband? She left you all alone, didn’t she? Probably couldn’t wait to get away from you.’
Jude felt his heart quicken in surprise and anger; it took him a second to regain his composure. ‘Leave my mother out of this.’
‘And what about that Surplus brother of yours?’ Mr Samuels smiled icily. ‘Where does that leave you?’
Jude stared at him stonily. ‘It doesn’t leave me anywhere. It’s no big deal.’
‘No big deal?’ Mr Samuels laughed, then his face contorted into a sneer. ‘A few weeks, and you could have been the Surplus.’
Jude’s face was angry, hot, red and it was all he could do to look straight ahead, to pretend that the very same thought hadn’t dogged him for months. Ever since Peter’s existence became national news. Ever since he escaped; ever since Jude’s father was murdered by his former wife, Mrs Pincent, Peter’s mother.
‘Look, what’s this about?’ Jude said evenly, forcing himself to keep control. ‘If you don’t want me to look at your system, I think I’ll be going now.’
‘Oh, you’re not going,’ Derek Samuels said, blocking his path. ‘You’re not going anywhere. The reason I got you in here today is that we’re holding a rather important press conference. We’ve got a visit from the Authorities. And it is my job to ensure that nothing goes wrong. Absolutely nothing. To which end, I’m keeping you locked up until it’s over, until I know you can’t do any damage.’
‘Locked up?’ Jude looked at him incredulously. ‘You can’t lock me up.’
‘Oh, but I can,’ Samuels said. ‘What you need to understand, Jude, is that I can do anything I like.’
The guard looked around him uncomfortably, before tentatively knocking on the blue door in front of him. He wasn’t used to being in the ReTraining area of Pincent Pharma and felt out of place.
Cautiously, he listened for a response, but there was none. He knocked again, this time louder.
‘Is that the door?’ he heard a voice say. ‘Hello? Is there someone there? Come in, please.’
Emboldened, he pushed the door open. Sure enough, as he’d been told, there were two people in the large white room: Dr Edwards, the one who worked all hours, never seemed to go home, and the boy. The Pincent boy.
‘I’ve . . . well, I’ve got a delivery. For the boy,’ he said, stumbling over his script.
‘The boy?’ Dr Edwards asked. ‘You mean Peter?’
‘That’s right,’ the guard said. ‘For Peter. Peter Pincent.’
‘Do you usually deliver mail?’ Dr Edwards asked curiously. ‘I thought you were security.’
‘I am,’ the guard said, reddening slightly, trying to remember exactly what he’d been told to say. ‘Only this is valuable. It was hand delivered. By a young lady. Wanted to make sure it got to him safely. Peter Pincent, I mean. I just happened to be there.’
‘Then shouldn’t you perhaps be directing this at him?’ Dr Edwards asked, his mouth curving up into a slight smile. The guard nodded curtly.
‘Here,’ he said, thrusting out the envelope in Peter’s direction. Peter looked at it curiously.
‘For me?’ he asked.
The guard nodded. ‘That’s right.’
‘And it’s from who?’
‘Young lady. The Surp— the one what you got out of Grange Hall with,’ the guard said nervously. ‘By the looks of her, at least. Same age as you, I’d have guessed.’
Peter looked shaken. ‘When was she here? Can I still catch her?’
‘I’m afraid I had some important business to attend to primarily.’ The guard’s eyes followed the envelope. ‘She was here, what, forty minutes or so ago. Didn’t want to stop, she said.’
‘Is that all she said?’
The guard shook his head.
‘What, then? What did she say?’ Peter demanded.
‘She said to tell you,’ the guard said slowly, ‘that you was right. That she was sorry. And that she’d see you later.’
‘That I was right? She really said that?’
‘And that she was sorry,’ the guard confirmed. ‘Now, if it’s all right with you, I’d better be getting back to my post.’
‘Of course,’ Peter said, turning the envelope over in his hands. ‘And thank you.’
‘You’re welcome,’ the guard said, his hand caressing the hefty tip sitting in his trouser pocket. ‘Just doing my job.’
Ju
de found himself in a small room, more like a cupboard. The walls were thick, the door solid and there were no windows; only an air vent in the ceiling provided the space with oxygen.
‘You’ll stay here,’ Derek Samuels said. ‘Not that you have a choice. You won’t be going anywhere until I allow you to.’
‘You think you’re so clever,’ Jude muttered under his breath.
‘Borne out by experience,’ Mr Samuels said smugly. He pulled out a walkie-talkie from his pocket. ‘I need a guard. Room 25 on the ground floor.’ Then he looked back at Jude. ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t do anything to upset him.’ And then, shooting Jude one last, triumphant look, he opened the door with his identi-card and left, locking it behind him.
Angrily, Jude leant against the wall and allowed himself to slide down to the ground. Somewhere in the building, the red-haired girl was lying, like a princess in a twisted fairytale, unobtainable. Somewhere else in the building, Peter Pincent was working. Jude, meanwhile, was stuck in a cupboard, trapped and impotent. Angrily he let out a sigh, then stood up again and kicked the wall with his foot. He’d thought he was so smart; had thought he knew it all.
And then he frowned. Maybe he did know it all. Well not all, perhaps, but enough. Derek Samuels hadn’t searched him, after all. He still had his handheld device. He cast his mind back to when he’d been sitting in his bedroom surveying Pincent Pharma through its security system. He’d had the blueprint of the building right in front of him. If he thought hard enough, he could probably remember how he’d got here from reception, then he could work out where he was. His brow furrowing, he found his eyes travelling up towards the air vent. It was small. Difficult to reach. And well sealed.
Jude scanned the room. And then his eyes lit up. In the corner, at the back of a shelf, a paint tin sat, discarded, and a painting tray with a scraping tool sitting in it, both caked in stark, white paint. One out of three problems solved. Listening out for the guard’s footsteps, Jude picked up the scraper and, putting his foot on the shelf, he lifted himself up towards the ceiling.
Chapter Twenty
It took Jude a minute or so to get his bearings, and a couple more for his eyes to adjust to the dark. The only light came from the vents below him, which was barely enough to see by. The space above the ceiling was hot and dusty and full of cables, heating pipes and air-conditioning units; his progress was torturous and uncomfortable. But he scrambled as quickly as he could, stopping every few seconds to listen out for the beep of an identi-card opening the door to his cell. He had gone over his route from reception in his head and if he was correct, he was only a few metres from the Pincent Pharma Energy Centre, which was also on the ground floor, next door to the Security Centre.
Frantically, he crawled; he had only minutes, he knew that, and the seconds were ticking by. He didn’t have long enough to find the girl, didn’t have long enough to do anything, except . . . Except buy himself more time, Jude told himself.
Finally, he arrived at his destination. As he’d expected, above the Energy Centre the ceiling was crammed with devices, with wires, with routers and rerouters. Carefully, he looked around, then alighted upon the mainframe, the hosting computer that ran all of Pincent Pharma’s energy supply. The monitors were below in the room itself where employees and guards sat; Jude could hear them talking. Little did they know that above them, the mainframe routes could be found, that by connecting them to his handheld device, he had access to the only computer that really mattered. Feeling the sweat begin to drip from his forehead, he reached out towards it, took a deep breath and got to work.
The damage would have to be small, impossible to find but devastating in its impact he decided, as he bypassed security and navigated on to the system set-up. He could hear the sound of heavy footsteps in the corridor outside the Energy Centre, and had to wipe beads of sweat from his forehead. Something that would look like a power cut. Something that would shut everything down for at least twenty minutes ideally.
The seconds were ticking by – Jude knew that his absence might be discovered any minute. And then he found it. A connecting code, one of thousands of links embedded in the system. One change would render the system useless and it would take days, maybe even weeks, to find the error. Deftly, he changed one of the letters, keyed in a delay of ten minutes, then frantically, crawled back down towards his cell; twice he thought he had arrived back, only to find that the air vent beneath him was fixed in place. Finally, he found the vent that he’d taken out, swung back through it, and closed it behind him as best he could; as he landed on the ground, it fell open slightly. Quickly, he began to climb back up to fix it in place again, but stopped suddenly when he heard footsteps coming down the corridor. Dropping to the floor, he dusted himself down and looked up guiltily, just as the door swung open and a guard appeared, well-built, head shaven.
As he entered, he eyed Jude suspiciously.
‘What’s going on in here?’
‘Nothing!’ Jude did his best to hide his breathlessness, put all his effort into feigning the outrage and frustration that the guard would be expecting. ‘What can go on? I’m in a cupboard. But if you don’t let me out I’m going to scream blue murder.’
‘Scream?’ The guard grinned and pulled out a chair. ‘You do that. No one’ll hear you. These rooms have been soundproofed especially. You can scream all you like.’
‘I want you to let me go,’ Jude said angrily, trying to stop his eyes from darting involuntarily towards the air vent, which was dangling precariously. ‘It’s against the law to keep me here against my will. I’ve done nothing wrong.’
‘Think the law applies at Pincent Pharma?’ the guard asked. ‘We make the law, is what we do.’
‘I’ll tell the Authorities.’ Jude sat down, kicked his feet; he wanted the guard looking at him, nowhere else.
‘And they’ll pat us on the back for locking you up and keeping you out of mischief.’ The guard yawned and sat down on his chair, then looked over at Jude, his blank eyes appearing to look straight through him. ‘Now, shut up,’ he said quietly, ‘or I’ll make you shut up. Got that?’
Jude nodded silently; he could hear the threat in the guard’s voice, knew that he wouldn’t need much of an excuse to drop the veneer of civility. He held his breath. Any minute now the air vent was going to fall, he knew it. His chest clenched as he waited for the minutes to tick silently by. One minute. Two minutes. Three minutes. And then, suddenly, the lights went out and they were plunged into darkness.
‘What the . . .’ the guard said, pulling out his walkie-talkie. ‘Hello? 245 here. Request information on blackout in Room 25 . . . What? It’s everywhere? . . . No, he’s here with me. Must be something else. How the . . . Right, I’ll check.’ Jude heard him stand up, walk towards the door and pull it. ‘It’s open,’ he said angrily. ‘Bloody nightmare . . . I’ll have to lock it using the override.’ He sighed, then opened the door again and felt around the bottom. ‘Be there in five minutes.’
‘Everything all right?’ Jude asked, doing his best to keep any note of triumph out of his voice.
‘Everything’s fine,’ the guard snapped. ‘Just an electrical fault. Lucky for you this door locks the old-fashioned way too. So whilst I’m required elsewhere, you’ll be nice and safe in here on your own. All right?’
‘You’re leaving me here on my own? But it’s dark,’ Jude said in feigned protest.
The guard laughed, then he opened the door. ‘I’ll be back,’ he said. ‘Don’t have nightmares.’ He left, bolting the door behind him, and Jude heard him trying it several times to make sure it was firmly locked.
He waited until the guard’s footsteps had disappeared down the corridor, then clambered up on the shelves again and reached towards the air vent. He saw it move too late; seconds later it clattered to the ground with a crash. Jude stayed stock-still for a minute, hardly daring to breathe, but no one seemed to have heard. Eventually, his heart beginning to slow, Jude hauled himself back up and started to crawl
back along the ceiling.
Curiously, Peter opened the envelope he’d been given; seconds later he was still staring at its contents, a mixture of elation and dismay that he didn’t entirely understand flooding through him.
‘It’s Anna’s Declaration,’ he gasped. ‘She’s signed it.’
Dr Edwards, who had been discreetly occupying himself with something in the corner ever since the contretemps between Peter and his grandfather that morning, looked up.
‘She has?’
Peter looked over at him blankly, waving the document in his hand. ‘She’s signed,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t understand. She said . . . I didn’t think she . . .’
‘So you’ve got what you wanted?’ Dr Edwards asked. ‘This is cause for celebration, surely?’
‘Yes,’ Peter said uncertainly. ‘I suppose it is.’
‘You don’t sound so sure.’
Peter frowned. ‘I am. I mean, I’m just not sure why she signed.’
‘Perhaps she thought through the alternatives? Didn’t the guard say her message was that you were right?’
Peter nodded vaguely. ‘I have to go and see her,’ he said suddenly. ‘I have to see her now.’
‘Of course,’ Dr Edwards said quickly. ‘Are you going to tell your grandfather?’
Carefully returning Anna’s Declaration to the envelope and putting it in his pocket, Peter pulled off his lab overall and grabbed his coat. ‘You tell him if you want,’ he said, then grimaced when he saw Dr Edwards’ face fall. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’ he said quickly. ‘I just meant, you know, if you see him . . .’
‘I know,’ Dr Edwards said carefully. ‘But you should know I didn’t tell him. Before I mean, about you deciding to sign. It wasn’t me.’
Peter nodded. ‘I know. At least, I guessed. It doesn’t matter anyway. Not any more.’
‘The next delivery is on its way? Marvellous. That’s marvellous, thank you, Eleanor. Pleasure doing business with you.’