Kitabı oku: «The Killing Files», sayfa 3
Chapter 5
Undisclosed confinement location—present day
I don’t know how much time has passed. I blacked out, only coming to now as somewhere in the room a noise clicks high in the air, one, two, three, four.
My body instinctively bends forward, brain attempts to gauge the level of danger and then I remember: Patricia.
I call her name, yell into the abyss of black. There is a click, another trip of light mixed with darkness and then, finally, a voice, singular, pure.
‘Doc? Doc? Are you there?’
She’s okay! ‘Patricia?’
‘Doc!’
‘What is your status? Are you injured?’
‘No. No, I don’t think so, but … my leg—it hurts. Help me, Doc.’
I open my mouth to ask her specific diagnostics, but the air is so black and hot, so suddenly suffocating that it feels as if a palm is being pressed into my nose and mouth, an acrid taste of metal poisoning my lips. I struggle hard against it. I have to know where we are, and yet nothing here seems to make sense, but I do it. My conditioning, my training, despite my horror at it, kicks in and I begin to function on cognitive thought.
‘Doc! Doc, where are we?’
Click. The sound, there again on the surface of the room—it makes me halt.
‘Doc—what was that?’
Tap, tap, tap. My heart rate rockets. ‘Patricia, stay still.’
I listen. It’s like the beak of a robin on a window pane.
‘Who is there?’ I ask to the thick stench of the room. Click, tap. Click, tap. My breathing becomes fast, shallow. ‘Who is there?’
But no answer comes back. I slap away the fear and strain my neck, try to catch sight of something, anything, but just as my eyes clear, just as they begin to see through the haze, the click sounds again and something happens inside me.
A heat, a surge of liquid in my veins burns its way through me, scalding one second then freezing the next, and an ice-blade of pain stabs me. I cry out.
‘Doc! Doc, what is it?’
My mouth opens to yell, but I am mute, a primal fear taking over, a tsunami of fight or flight, the words, ‘You are in danger! You are in danger!’ screaming over and over in my head, and I must be moaning, groaning, because I can hear Patricia shouting at me to stay awake.
My eyelids vibrate, brain attempts to calibrate a connection, find an answer to what is happening to me, but the codes, numbers, solutions that instinctively inhabit my head are all jumbled up, as if I have been shaken like some unwanted toy then discarded on the ground and kicked under a bed to gather dust and wither.
‘Patricia,’ I gasp, my chest ready to explode. ‘Escape. I need you to escape.’
‘I don’t … My leg aches, Doc, but I think I can …’ A grunt, a scrape. ‘My hand—it’s free.’
‘Does that mean …’ The searing pain is so hot in my chest now, it burns and I have to force myself to concentrate once more on my eyes. ‘Does that mean, if your hand is free you can be mobile?’ And then I spot something: a lick of light. There! In the corner …
‘Doc, it won’t … I don’t know. Oh, God. My leg feels numb.’
The single sliver of light disappears and I try to reach out, grab where it was but nothing moves. A hazy, grey film is slowly bleeding over my lenses.
‘Something is happening to me …’ I swallow. ‘Drugged,’ I slur. ‘I must be drugged.’
‘Are we …’ Patricia’s words waver. ‘Does that mean we’re at the Project? At their facility?’ There is a shake in her voice, a tremble.
And then I hear it: water. A trickle of water, a rush of liquid. I shake as a terrifying thought tears into me: we are drowning. We are not actually in a room or a cell or in a locked-away facility, but we are drowning, almost dead already and this haze, this grey film, this distant cry of Patricia’s Irish voice that I can only just detect is the last twisted haemorrhage of my lie of a life. The Project have found me, are to kill me and now this is it, here: death.
‘Can you feel any water around you?’
‘What? I … Wait.’ A scream, a gurgled cry. ‘Doc, I’m hurt!’
Panic swells. ‘Drag yourself free. Quick!’
‘I don’t want to die!’
‘Stay awake!’
‘I … I can’t breathe.’
I struggle to cough, try anything—a lick of my lips, a last gulp of oxygen—anything to dismantle the rolling tide as, to my side, Patricia groans.
‘Pull your arms up!’ I shout. ‘See if there is anything you can grip on to.’
‘There’s nothing! Only a … Oh, Jesus, help! It hurts! Doc, help, please …’
Her voice stops, abrupt, a TV being switched off. ‘Patricia?’
Nothing.
‘Patricia! Patricia, shout to me that you are …’
I stop breathing.
My hands form two fists, knuckles white, chest bursting, ribs ready to crack, as my mind prepares, because this is it. The final seconds of me, of my life. Dr Maria Martinez.
Gone.
Salamancan Mountains, Spain.
34 hours and 32 minutes to confinement
I shut down the alarm and haul in a breath.
‘What’s going on, Maria?’
‘Wait.’ My eyes remain locked on the computer screen, but my vest has become sweaty and it itches my skin. I scratch my stomach, up down, unable to stop as the nerves seep out.
‘Maria, for God’s sake, what’s happening?’
‘The red icon is flashing.’
My skin flushes, feels as if it’s burning, nerve endings so sensitive to the change in the fabric. It is too much to bear. I rip off my vest, throw it to the floor. The relief is almost overwhelming.
‘Anyone on the cameras?’ Balthus says now.
I flip open the surveillance programme then pause. The reality of what could happen slams me in the face and I recount Abel’s binomial theorem to focus my mind.
No matter how many times I scan the CCTV film, it comes back blank, eight square, grey, live pictures of the fields and walls around the villa. No trespassers, no intelligence officers, just everything as it was before I stepped inside the house.
‘The cameras are displaying no signs of intruders.’
My body leans back as my mind attempts to get a handle on what is happening, already planning ahead on what I may need to do. As I think, a whip of wind lashes at a funnel of cypress trees outside, sending a swarm of starlings scurrying into the sky, and it is so sudden, so fast and loud that I jump, slapping my hand to my chest.
‘Maria, is everything all right? Talk to me.’
The starlings rush away, their swarm temporarily blackening the sky.
‘Birds,’ I say.
‘What?
The last remaining starling flies into a candy floss cloud. ‘I was frightened by a murmuration of birds.’
‘A mumur-what …?’
I stare at the now empty branches outside, wiping the sweat from my face. The air is static. For a moment, I swear a shadow glides over the sand-coloured earth, its hazy contours rippling over the deep green cypress tree giants that guard the perimeter of the villa, but when I blink and rub my eyes it is instead the tall, scorched grass reeds I see, their long, stretched shadows swaying innocently in the morning air, but each movement of the reeds vibrates in my eardrums. I take the heels of my palms, bang them to the sides of my head to try and dislodge the sound.
‘Maria?’
One more hit and the reed rush will be gone …
‘Maria? Maria, answer me.’
Bang. Done. ‘What?’
‘Did you install the tripwire system I told you about?’
‘Yes.’
‘And it’s not flagging anything up?’
‘Negative.’
‘Then what could have triggered the surveillance? Could there have been a system error?’
I consider this but am unconvinced. The CCTV shows no trespass entry, so why the alarm? My mind scans through every tiny detail, yet still concludes that all is as before—the fields are empty for several kilometres, the long gravel drive is free of foreign vehicles and the only car is an old black truck I use on the rare occasions I need to drive into the village in the fading evening sunlight for supplies. So why did the alarm sound? A colony of nerves collects in the depths of my stomach and my thumb taps my forefinger.
‘Maria, do you think you are in danger?’
My eyes flicker to the window then return to the red icon that still flashes on the laptop. ‘I cannot say with certainty until I run a complete check. But …’
Another shadow creeps across the cypresses again, this time more distinct, more clear.
More human.
A bolt of electricity shoots down my spine. ‘Someone is here.’
‘What?’
I grab my notebook, hide it behind a stack of books and run to the window, adrenaline immediately spiking as I slam my back against the wall and count to three.
‘Maria, have you seen someone?’ Balthus calls out, but I ignore him because if I shout now, if I utter one single word, whoever is out there will know my location.
Another shadow passes by. I track it. Breath heavy, heart rate way beyond acceptable, I count my steps as I drop to the ground, crawling to the opposite side of the window then standing again, acutely aware that I am unarmed, and yet instinctively knowing what to do. It scares me, always has. It scares me that if someone came in now, I am trained to not even need a gun to kill them.
Slowly, I inch my head up to the window ledge, one millimetre, two, three, until I reach the edge where the citrus scent from the groves beyond drifts in. If someone is standing by the outside of the wall, then, if I move one centimetre further, they will detect my presence. My cortisol peaks. Taking one bare foot forward, I raise my hands and step to the left, manoeuvring my body so it slips almost invisibly to the side, my brain instructing me, from some hidden training tactics manual, what to do. Prepare, wait, engage. For some reason, the phrase flicks into my mind. Prepare, wait, engage, and I realise, with revulsion, that I am recalling something the Project must have trained me on.
But, despite my disgust, I do it. I track the area, I pause, listen to every minute sound, to each tweet, rustle, bleat, creak, creating a full itinerary, a complete map of the exact scene before me until I am ready. Ready to engage.
I exhale, long, deep into my diaphragm as the sunlight dances across my eyelids, cheeks, onto my forehead, my neck, onto my bare sweat-drenched shoulders as, gradually, one millimetre after the other, I peer over the edge to the glazed window.
There is a face staring right back at me.
Chapter 6
Salamanca, Spain.
34 hours and 28 minutes to confinement
Dr Andersson stares straight back at me.
I yell out her name, alerting Balthus, still on the cell, as Dr Andersson ducks out of sight, running towards the far entrance where the kitchen yawns wide open, exposed to the fields and beyond.
‘Maria,’ Balthus whispers, ‘where is she?’
Panic. Sheer panic and chaos rise now as I look to the cell phone. I need it, cannot have any noise give away my location. Checking left and right, I count to three then, fast, drop down and crawl on all fours, scurrying forward, snatch the cell then scamper back, slamming my body into a corner, hidden by a tower of books and by the lost, cracked crates that scatter the room.
I catch my breath, try to think.
‘Maria? Talk to me.’
I gulp down saliva. ‘She is here,’ I whisper. ‘Dr Andersson.’
‘Oh shit. Oh shit. She’s with MI5 and MI5 want the Project gone. That can mean only one thing, right?’
‘She is here to kill me.’ The words hang in the air, a foul stench jarring against the fresh, fragrant green grass burst from the fields beyond. For a moment, I freeze, not wanting to acknowledge that my peaceful retreat, my quiet hideaway has been shattered.
‘MI5 want all connections to the Project to disappear,’ Balthus says. ‘Kurt—Daniel—he said that to you, right? That’s why he wanted you to stay with him. The Project did not want to disappear, they broke away and wanted you with them; MI5 wanted you gone. Maria, you’re right. Oh Jesus. She’ll kill you—she’s a trained officer.’
I scan the kitchen door—nothing. Yet. ‘I am trained also.’
‘Yes, but she, well, she’s not like you. She won’t hesitate to do what she’s been told.’
I open my mouth to respond to Balthus when I stop. The image of Raven floats to my mind. They will make you kill me. I have no recollection of what I actually did to her, no tangible evidence of whether I ever hurt the woman or not—no real idea of who I am, of what I am, in truth, capable of.
I glance to the window. It is open. Another bird sits there now on the wooden ledge, head jerking right and left. I can see its feathers soft and shining even from here, a brown and black sheen shimmering in the morning sun.
‘There is no sign of her,’ I say, turning to the phone. ‘She may have a map of the dwelling.’
‘How did they find you?’
‘What?’
‘MI5,’ Balthus whispers. ‘How the hell did they find you? You’ve been off radar.’
I think for a moment, uncomfortable. Have I made a mistake in my encrypted file tracking? In my proxy ISP emails? ‘It is possible they may have infiltrated some files if they have the right technical people to carry out the hack.’ My eyes glance to the laptop open on the crate. ‘I need to hide my notebook.’
‘What? Maria, get out of there!’
A clatter of crates rings from outside, followed by a shatter of glass. Every single part of me drops still.
‘What was that?’ Balthus whispers.
My eyes dart to the side, unable to answer Balthus as I focus, every part of me on fire, desperately pressing back the guttural fear that surges upwards. I need to move now, get to the laptop then leave, but if I go to the right, I’ll have to open the door to the bedroom where my bag is stored, yet if I turn to the left and head past the kitchen where Dr Andersson may be, then I have no chance of grabbing the laptop and notebook.
My instinct is to go into meltdown, to curl up into a ball and slam shut my eyes and plead for this all to go away, so hard is it for me to cope. Yet even as my brain shouts at me to run, gradually, like a rainbow appearing on a stormy day, something happens—a change, a simmering, butter-coloured difference: I become calm. A coolness crackles over me as, in my head, an instinctive knowledge takes control, and over and over in my mind one phrase shoots across the shadows of my thoughts: prepare, wait, engage.
Up ahead, the kitchen door, before closed, is now swinging open.
My hairs stand on end. ‘She’s here.’
‘What? Get … you …she …’ The phone crackles, Balthus’s voice dipping in and out of audio.
I grip the cell tight, telling myself that if I do so, maybe, somehow, I won’t be on my own.
Every muscle in me becomes rigid, ready, suddenly not caring about the illegal means in which I was trained by the Project, because, right now, I want to know it all, want desperately to remember every tiny detail of what I was taught, because it could save me. My eyes land on the lone toothbrush on the shelf by the wall.
The phone flickers again.
‘Maria? Maria, are you okay? Are you there?’
Balthus. The sound of his voice, the familiar curve of it floods me, for some reason, with relief.
‘I am here.’ I keep my volume low—there are sounds creaking from the kitchen.
Prepare.
I do a rapid assessment. I am wearing my running gear. I am fast, fit, but even when I calculate the time and trajectory at which I can sprint, I know that if Dr Andersson has a gun and surveillance of her own, I will never escape unless I can get to the bedroom.
‘Can you get out?’ Balthus says.
‘The bedroom door opens onto the shed where the truck is parked—it is my only safe route out.’
‘Good! Can you get to the door?’
I look to the kitchen, calculate the angles and trajectory. ‘I cannot determine if I can be seen.’
‘Well, is there another way?’
I think fast when my eyes, scanning the area for Dr Andersson’s face, see something, something long, thick, rusty—solid.
An iron bar by the cabinet, one I use for the fire pit outside, now sits discarded, tossed to one side after I got distracted from obsessing over tracking every tiny detail about the NSA scandal.
The kitchen door suddenly sways, a waltz, one, two, three, one, two, three, dancing in and out of the room. Is she here? I look to the iron bar then back to the door, and even though it screeches when it swings, too loud for my ears, for my senses, I slap the aggravation it causes aside because it offers me something, that unbearable noise: it offers me cover.
I drop like a stone. Flat to the floor, I scurry along the tiles so fast, so quick that by the time the second creak sounds, my fingers are handcuffed to the iron bar and, on the third creak, I am hauling it up and crawling back to where the window sits.
The cell phone crinkles and Balthus’s voice trickles in. ‘Where are you?’
‘Home.’
‘No, I mean … Oh, it doesn’t matter. Have you got the laptop and book?’
‘No.’
‘But you can get them?’
‘Yes.’ I glance to where they still sit. Right now, it is all a matter of timing.
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?’
