There aren’t any.’
Sampson put the hard drive down on the bench and walked towards Twigger, who took a step back towards the cages. The monkeys leapt forward in their cages, hissing.
‘Where are the backups?’ he repeated.
‘There aren’t any . . .’
Sampson grabbed the doctor and turned him round, clutching the back of his neck. With his free hand he opened the door of the closest cage and pushed the doctor’s head inside. Dr Twigger knew not to cry out. Sampson felt him tremble.
The monkey sat on the floor of the cage, eyeing the doctor’s scalp and baring its sharp teeth.
Sampson said, ‘So they can do a lot of damage?’
The doctor spoke in a whisper. ‘Yes. Please.’
‘I can’t hear you.’
‘Please.’
He pushed Twigger’s head in further, glad of the leather gloves. The other monkeys were clinging to the bars of their cages, watching, waiting. If monkeys could make plans, dream of revenge, then surely they’d dreamt of getting revenge on this man who caged them and made them sick.
‘Where are the backups?’ he repeated.
Twigger’s voice had risen an octave. ‘In the safe.’
‘Where’s the safe?’
‘In . . .’ Without warning, the monkey jumped across the cage, screaming. Twigger screamed too, but at the last moment Sampson pulled him clear and slammed the door in the monkey’s face. It struck the bars and landed on the floor of the cage, screeching.
‘The location of the safe and the combination,’ Sampson said in his usual quiet monotone.
Twigger had pissed himself; Sampson could smell it. Twigger looked nervously over his shoulder at the monkey, who was now prowling around his cage, shaking his head.
Sampson was beginning to lose his patience. He took hold of the doctor again and moved to push him back towards the cage.
Twigger yelled, ‘No. The safe is next door. Combination 6471.’
‘Thank you. And the AG-769 virus?’
‘What?’
‘AG-769. Where is it stored?’
The doctor was clearly confused. ‘Why do you want that?’
‘Just tell me where it is.’
But the doctor had already given it away. His eyes had flicked towards the left.
‘Thank you,’ Sampson said.
He pushed the doctor to the ground and knelt on his chest. He squeezed Twigger’s nose between forefinger and thumb and clamped a hand over his mouth. The doctor’s eyes were wide, pleading. The monkeys gazed down from their cage. Eventually, Dr Twigger stopped trying to struggle. Sampson had hoped he might feel something at the moment of the doctor’s death – not sympathy or sadness, necessarily, words he’d looked up in the dictionary and tried to understand – but something.
As always, he felt nothing.
Aware that he’d wasted precious seconds getting the combination out of the doctor – next time, he’d just go for the testicles; that always worked quickly – he opened the freezer and removed the vials containing the AG-769 virus and stored them in a padded wallet which he kept in his inside pocket. Back in the car he would transfer them to a portable freezer. He picked up the computer hard drive and realised he’d almost forgotten something. He took the animal rights leaflet with the picture of the cat out of his back pocket and left it lying on the dead doctor’s chest.
In the office, he opened the safe and removed the backup disks that contained the crucial data.
He exited the building and walked through the darkness towards his car.
As he got in, one of his two mobile phones rang. It was his second phone. Only one person had this number. Was Gaunt checking up on him to make sure he’d done what he’d said he would? The arsehole. He’d never let him down before.
‘I’m done,’ he snapped as he answered the call.
The voice on the other end was calm. ‘Excellent. I knew you would. But that’s not what I’m calling about.’
‘No?’
‘No. I’ve got another urgent job for you. We’ve just had a tip-off about an old . . . patient who’s just returned to the UK.’
‘Right.’
‘Her name’s Kate Maddox.’
Cold panic flooded Kate’s insides as she entered the hotel room. This couldn’t be real.
‘Jack? Jack!’ She cried out his name. Where was he? She started to repeat his name in her mind over and over as she stood in the centre of the room, turning in a slow circle, her hand on her brow. In a kind of trance, she opened the bathroom door, looked inside. Stupidly – or, at least, she would think it was stupid when she looked back later – she checked the closet and behind the sofa, as if he might be hiding there, waiting to spring out and yell, ‘Boo!’ She felt suspended in time, waiting for reality to kick back in, for this strange, slow-motion sickness to pass.
A second later, she sprang back to life.
She flung the door open and pelted down the corridor towards the lift, her coat billowing behind her. She thumped the button, jabbed it, jabbed it again, stamped her foot and muttered, ‘Come on, come on, fucking come on,’ as she waited for the red numbers above the lift door to change. The numbers descended – 9, 8, 7 – with sadistic, agonising slowness. She was about to give up and take the stairs when the lift arrived. The doors pinged open and revealed a middle-aged woman in a fur coat. The woman didn’t appear to be in much of a hurry.
Kate reached into the lift, took the woman by the elbow and pulled her firmly but gently into the hallway, stepping past her and pressing the close button, the woman’s mouth frozen in a circle of surprise as the doors slid shut.
If she thought jumping and down would have made the lift descend faster, Kate would have done it. Scenarios from dark films and newspaper headlines played out in her imagination. Jack, in the hands of a paedophile. Jack, floating face down in the freezing Thames. But these images passed quickly. Terrifying as they were, these things were not her number one fear. She hadn’t woken every night for the last week dreading strangers. Her fear wore a familiar face; utterly familiar. The face which had been on the pillow beside her most mornings for the past decade, since she had promised to love, honour and obey him forever, in a little church in a Boston chapel.
People broke promises all the time. The thought passed fleetingly through a deep seam in her brain, and was gone again, pressed out by the panic of Jack’s disappearance.
Could Vernon really have found them so
