Читать книгу The Girl Who Ran (The Project Trilogy) - Nikki Owen - Страница 13

Goldenpass railway line, The Alps, Switzerland.

Time remaining to Project re-initiation: 25 hours and 31 minutes

As the train slows to the scheduled halt at Brunig-Hasliberg Station, Patricia unfolds herself from her seat and announces she’s getting off.

Instantly, I panic. ‘Where are you going?’

She smiles, her back stooping over where her head skims the metal rod of the caged luggage rack above.

‘I’ve read about this place,’ she says. ‘It has a little bookstall and everything. The train’ll be here for ten minutes or so, so I fancy a little wander round, stretch my legs.’

‘Is that wise?’ Chris says.

‘It’s only for a bit. I’ll be careful. I just need to get some air.’

She yawns and stretches her arms. I peer out. A small station with sloping roofs sugar-coated in snow rolls in front of us and lurches to a stop. It is constructed of brick, metal and wood, and under the low-hanging eaves of the worn tiles are housed creaking oak shelves crammed with dog-eared second-hand paperback books of fiction and fact, a metal honesty box slotted at the end where the shelves fall away and the tall wide station doors yawn open to the ticket office beyond. It is quiet. To the left of the make shift bookshop sits a jumble of bric-a-brac for sale and, feeling the need for stability, I count it all: three old radios, a peeling wooden horse, a stack of board games, twenty-seven ornaments and fifty-two picture frames – items passed on, no longer needed. I count five people waiting on benches by the far right side, heads hanging over smartphones stuck to frozen white fingers.

‘Do you have to go?’ I say.

‘Oh, Doc,’ Patricia says, ‘I just want to have a nosey around. I’ve never really been anywhere like this or, well, anywhere really. It looks really pretty.’

‘You have been to places,’ I say, thinking this through logically. ‘You have been to Ireland, to England and to prison.’

She bites her lip. ‘It’s not the same, Doc.’

‘Not the same as what?’

She throws a glance to Chris then turns back to me. ‘I’ll be just five minutes, okay?’

‘Five minutes?’

‘Yep.’

I click the timer on my watch. She pauses, then breaks into a soft smile.

Patricia alights the stationary train. A late stab of sunshine rushes through the window, casting a buttercup glow on the tables and metal grey marled walkways of the carriage. I try to quell my worry for the safety of my friend by counting once more the passengers near to our allocated seats. I watch again the two young boys sitting with their father, scan the doughball woman opposite spilling from the edges of her chair. The boys have now shed their duffle coats and are squabbling over who is to have the last biscuit of what seems to be a discarded packet.

‘Can’t you just share, poppets?’ the woman says.

The boys cease momentarily their squabbling and blink at her with four deep brown eyes.

The father leans in, scoops up the boys, his gaze on dough woman. ‘It’s okay,’ he mutters. ‘They’re okay. Thank you, though.’

I watch them for two seconds longer, curious at the odd lump in my throat, then switching my attention to my belongings, I lay out the old photograph of Isabella and me. Taking out a pen, I turn to a new blank page in my notebook and, starting from the top and working my way to the bottom, I scratch down the series of events, where, from hacking and investigating, we have discovered key information on the Project.

Chris leans over. ‘What you doing?’

‘This is a timeline of all the points where we have uncovered Project files.’

‘Right. Why are you doing it?’

‘I am trying to define a pattern to pinpoint if the virus that attached to your laptop from Weisshorn is coincidental or deliberate.’

Chris goes quiet. He slopes back in his seat, glances to Patricia on the platform. She is flicking through books. I watch her. She slots a novel back to the shelf then, pausing to glance left and right, she takes out her phone.

‘Look, I’m sorry,’ Chris says.

I blink once more at Patricia then turn to him. ‘Why are you saying sorry?’

‘Because if it’s deliberate, the virus, then that means there’s a high chance they’ve been in my laptop before.’ He shakes his head. ‘I’ve got protection and all, defences and everything, but these guys’ —he blows out a breath— ‘they’re in another league. It means, without realising it, I could’ve led MI5 and the Project to the abbey in Montserrat – to you. And then they turned up and the Project took you away.’

I watch him as he frowns. Sometimes I wonder if neurotypical people must be as exhausted with all the unfounded assumptions that they make as much as I am exhausted with trying to understand the inferences of their unfound assumptions in the first place. Maybe, when we scratch at the surface, we’re not so different after all.

‘If I was not taken away that day,’ I say, ‘I would not have been in the Project facility in Hamburg and we would not have been able to hack into their system and discover the files that revealed how many people like me they have tested on. It means we would not have been in a position to contact the Home Secretary and potentially put an end to the entire Project via what will be an in-depth, governmental investigation.’

He drops his head for a second. ‘Thank you. You’re…’ He stops, though it’s not clear why. When he speaks again, his voice is low and a bit wobbly. ‘I’ll do all I can to help you find your mom, okay? I… I still miss my mom every day and it’s been years since she died.’

I feel a strange need to reach out and touch him, hug him, even, but instead, not knowing what the right action is at all, I have a go at arranging my lips into what I think is a sympathetic smile, then, picking up my pen, I channel my feelings into facts.

We work together on the Project file timeline. The carriage is quiet. Every three seconds or so, one of the small boys whoops at some card game they are playing, and when the father looks at them, I notice crinkles by his eyes. When he ruffles their hair with a gentle hand, the pang that stabs me inside comes on so unexpectedly that I have to stop writing and try hard to prevent my thoughts from wandering to Balthus and Papa.

‘Do you remember in my house in Montserrat where we found that kind of countdown thing?’ Chris says after we’ve been working for a few minutes. ‘You know, the one with your age on it, counting it down?’

My pen hovers in the air as I look over to him and trip off the exact date, location and time of the occasion he is referring to.

He turns his tablet to me. ‘Well, d’you remember the timer thing? This?’

I study the screen. Dates, numbers, the tick of a clock. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That is the same one as before.’

‘I know, right? I kept a link of it on file along with all that Black September terrorist stuff from 1973 that kick-started the whole Project in the first place. I thought, while we’re looking for connections while the train’s in the station, I’d go through all the stuff we’ve found since being at my place. But, the thing is, this clock definitely seems to be linked to something else other than what we found, only, I don’t know what.’

I look again at the screen and try to fit what I see to anything from the Project facility in Hamburg, but the only aspect that piques my curiosity is my allocated subject number that sits in the yellow square next to the countdown file. I point to it. ‘It states my subject number here.’

Chris nods. ‘375.’

The fir trees outside ripple. I watch the leaves bend from one branch to another until they merge into a single sea of pale mint green. A thought begins to form.

I turn. ‘Click on there,’ I instruct Chris, unsure why, but cogs turning.

‘You’ve got an idea?’

Following my finger where it brushes the screen, Chris takes the cursor and hovers it over what appears to be a tiny grey square that sits in the corner by the age countdown flash at the very bottom of the laptop. He clicks on it once, twice, but nothing appears. The carriage sways a little as people alight and ascend, bustling in with them the smell of toffee popcorn and burnt sugar. Alarmed at the scents, I cover my nose with my hand and watch as the boys with their father pull at his coat and beg him for food.

‘You alright?’ Chris says.

I nod. Only my eyes peek out. ‘My brother, Ramon, fed popcorn to me in the cellar at Mama’s house in Madrid where he had me imprisoned.’

‘Ah.’

Once the smell fades, nothing is still appearing on the grey square on the screen. I check my watch. Patricia has been away three minutes and one second now. I peer to the window. She is tapping her phone as, two paces from her, a woman wearing a plain navy baseball cap, blue sneakers and tight black jeans steps out from inside the bric-a-brac shop and halts. Why, I think to myself, is Patricia using her phone? It is for emergencies only. I drop my hand and press my face to the window to get a better view when Chris calls out my name.

‘Maria, you have to see this.’

I turn to see, on the tablet screen, numbers. Hundreds and hundreds of numbers.

Chris scans them all. ‘They just sprang through when I clicked the grey box again. Why’s there a line through every single one?’

‘They are subject numbers,’ I say, immediately, almost to myself as in my brain I am photographing each one and cross referencing it with the pre-sorted data in my head until I am 100 per cent certain. ‘Yes. I can confirm they are all subject numbers.’

‘How do you know?’

My eyes speed over each line again, but there is no mistake in the match. ‘They are the same numbers as on the file we found in Hamburg. Then, 2,005 out of 2,113 were marked deceased.’

‘So why are they crossed out? They weren’t crossed out before.’ His eyes narrow. ‘It’s as if someone’s put a line through them all. I mean, you don’t do that on a computer file, so why have they done it? It’s like they want to make a point. Like the numbers, the people have ceased existing or something.’

‘As if they are all dead,’ I say.

‘Shit.’ He blows out some air. ‘That Black Eyes guy, the one that came up on the screen, d’you remember? On my computer in Montserrat? Do you think he’s behind this again? D’you think this thing is programmed, maybe, to match remotely, like, real life events? You know, people dying and stuff? The Hamburg files said they were their subject numbers, right? So, are the rest now dying, too?’

I am about to answer when Patricia returns. My eyes track her every move as she rushes towards us clutching two worn books with cracked spines and tea-stained pages, catching, as she passes, the eye of the woman with the dough ball chin and stomach.

‘Doc,’ she says, breathless, slipping her cell in to her pocket and plaiting her legs and arms into the seat, ‘you have to see this!’

She shrugs off her coat, confetti flakes of snow floating from the sleeves and vanishing into the carpeted floor below.

Chris looks over. ‘What is it?’

‘There was a woman…’ Patricia gulps some air and slides onto the table a worn, old book. ‘She…’ Another swallow. ‘She gave this to me by the book store.’

It is a copy of 1984 by George Orwell.

Taking the novel in my hands, I smell its pages. Coffee, mothballs, mint and lavender, each stain and rip and pencilled etching depicting the tracks of the readers who have lived in these words, all of their movements documented and preserved in the multi-coloured cover and spine that now sit in my hand. I leaf the old, yellow courier typeface.

‘Who gave this to you?’

‘A woman on the platform.’ She pauses. ‘Doc, she said you have to read page 97.’

‘Okay.’

‘No, Doc. You – she said your name.’ She looks between Chris and I. ‘She knew who you were.’