Halfhead (23 page)

There has to be a release. There has to be a release
soon
, or she won’t be able to think straight. And if she can’t think straight she’ll start making mistakes. And if she makes mistakes she’ll be caught.

Justification.

She stops pacing and closes her eyes, pleased with herself.

If she doesn’t kill something, she’ll be caught.

She grabs a fresh blade from a pack and slips it into her orange and black jumpsuit. This is the last day she will ever wear this nasty polyester uniform. After tonight she’ll be back to her elegant best. Perhaps, once the swelling goes down, she’ll stroll down Sauchiehall Street and burn a hole in someone’s bank account. That will be nice. A manicure and a facial and a lovely lunch down at the Green. What could be better?

Then afterwards she’ll pay Assistant Section Director William Hunter a visit and congratulate him on his promotion.

Dr Westfield pops some supplies in the bottom of her wheely-bucket and saunters off towards the exit. There are a lot of people in Glasgow Royal Infirmary, many of whom will live to a ripe old age. And one who isn’t going to live to see tomorrow.

As the storeroom door slides closed behind her she wonders who it will be.

‘What’s up with you?’ Jo appeared in the Comlab Six canteen where Will was busy nursing a half litre of imported lager and a foul mood. She stood in front of his table, hands on hips, hair hanging slightly damp round her face. On her it looked good.

‘Nothing.’ Will forced a smile. ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

DS Cameron raised an eyebrow. ‘Bollocks, nothing’s wrong. I’ve interviewed thieves and murderers remember? I know a lie when I hear one.’ She dumped her kitbag on the table and sank down into the seat opposite. ‘Spill the beans.’

‘Honestly, there’s nothing—’

‘William Hunter, if you expect dinner, dancing or anything else this evening you’ll come clean. Understand?’

‘“Anything else”?’ This time the smile was genuine. ‘And just
what
did you have in mind?’

‘Talk.’

After a moment’s silence he nodded and said, ‘I bumped into an old friend when you were getting changed. Told me to keep my nose out of the PsychTech files, told me to stop digging for information on him and his boss. Said if I played nice, “no one would have to get hurt”.’

‘He
threatened
you?’

‘Yup.’

‘But you’re a Network Assistant Director!’

Will just shrugged.

Jo frowned. ‘Why the hell would someone care if you went rooting about in a defunct, debunked, psychology programme that died years ago?’

‘No idea.’ Will stood. ‘I’ve got to go see Doc Morrison at Glasgow Royal Infirmary in forty minutes. Would be a shame if I
accidentally
hacked into the PsychTech files while I was there. Want to tag along?’

‘Just how dangerous is this “old friend” of yours?’

‘That’s what I’m trying to find out.’

Jo hauled on her jacket. ‘What we waiting for then?’

She walks through the wards like a diner examining the menu. There are so many to choose from: some that no one will miss, others that will leave a family in mourning. Some are young, some are old and none of them look as if they’re going to put up much of a struggle. She likes that best of all. This is no time to take any unnecessary risks. A quick, clean kill and then a little bit of post-mortem fun. She’s not due in surgery till half eleven: she can take her time with the remains.

But first she has to get them downstairs.

The dumb-waiters are no good, they’re only designed to transport things
up
from the automated storeroom, not down. Being inside one when it collapses into the wall and starts its rapid descent back to the basement would be…messy. Nothing left to play with. Nothing but mush and a few broken bones. Where’s the fun in that?

She pulls her mop from its bucket and spreads some disinfectant over the floor. It’s a mundane task, but it helps her think. When she has her real life back, whether it’s in the New Republic or Asia Major or even the Colonies, she’s going to have the cleanest home in town.

In the next bed a small child cries. It can’t be much more than four or five years old: too small to be any real sport, though it would just about fit in her bucket if she snapped its arms and legs. But its head would stick out of the top, someone would see…

She drifts through to a more grown-up ward.

There are a few other halfheads working the room. One manoeuvres a floor-polisher back and forth across the scuffed terrazzo; another pushes a disposal buggy from one bed to the next, picking up the patients’ wastepaper baskets and emptying them into the big box on wheels. She stops for a moment to watch him—or her—work. Pick up the bin, tip it into the buggy, put the bin back. A nice un demanding job, just the thing for a surgically edited mass murderer. Or rapist. Or hedge-fund manager. Or whatever
it was the thing in the orange jumpsuit had done to deserve half its face being cut off.

A nice big buggy, just the right size to take a fully grown adult. Perfect.

She crosses to the end bed. The man lying beneath the crumpled white blanket is wearing stripy pyjamas and a VR headset. His hands are above the covers, so whatever fantasies he’s living out can’t be too rude.

Dr Westfield takes a look up and down the ward: no one is watching. So she goes up to the curtain, grabs it and walks it round until the bed is hidden from view. The man doesn’t even look up.

His name is Liam Holdstock and—according to the case notes that flicker across her datapad—he has an infected liver. Better not eat it…And then she remembers she hasn’t got a mouth to eat it with. Not yet anyway.

Seven and a half hours and counting.

She balls her right hand into a fist, then taps Liam on the shoulder.

‘Whatta hell d’you want?’ he grumbles, still buried in his little computer game. ‘Can you no’ see I’m busy. Jesus, hiv youse lot nithin better tae dae wi’ yer time than bug me?’

She taps him again, enjoying herself as the moment stretches out.

‘
What?
Jesus-effin-Christ. Can ye no’—’ He pulls up the side of his headset and peers out. He frowns, slack mouth hanging open. There’s no one there, just some stupid halfhead. ‘Aw, fer fucksake,’ he says at last. For a brief second he glances up at her and his flabby face breaks into a smile. ‘Aye, an’ you can fuck aff as weil, y’bucktoothed wee bast—’

She hits him across the bridge of the nose, breaking it. Blood pours down his face. His hands come up, palms open and facing out. Classic defence posture. But she’s not playing that game today. She grabs the clock from his bedside cabinet and smashes it over his head. He goes limp.

For a minute she just looks at him lying there, not moving, and then she reaches forward and feels for a pulse. And there it is. She hasn’t hit him too hard; he’ll survive the trip downstairs. But not what waits for him there.

Right on cue, the halfhead with the disposal buggy pushes through the curtain, looking for Liam Holdstock’s bin. She takes the buggy and steers the lobotomized slave to the other side of the bed, where she presses her mop handle into its hands, then pushes it back out into the ward.

Liam’s heavier than he looks and getting him into the buggy isn’t easy, but she manages it, forcing him down into the basket. She doesn’t want him making any sound on their little trip down to the storeroom so she pulls a tube of skinglue from her pocket and with quick, economical movements draws a line of surgical adhesive on both his lips, then presses them together. He looks funny like that, as if he’s forgotten to put his teeth in. Just to be safe she runs a spiral of the same glue onto both of his palms and slaps them over his ears. Hear no evil, speak no evil, but he’ll be able to see and feel everything.

Emptying Liam’s waste-paper basket over his head she pushes her way through the curtain. The halfhead is still standing there, frowning at the mop in its hands. She has confused its little brain. It was emptying bins, but now it’s mopping floors. Sooner or later its training will kick in. She doesn’t have to worry about it.

Which is just as well, because she’s got an appointment in the basement with a man who isn’t going to enjoy the next few hours even half as much as she is.

Will and Jo squelched their way through Glasgow Royal Infirm ary’s lobby, en route to the private Network wards, a good half hour early for Will’s follow-up appointment with Doc Morrison.

On the thirteenth floor he led the way through security,
then down the corridor to the doctors’ consulting rooms. Doc Morrison wasn’t in, so Will slipped in behind her desk, powered up her computer, and asked Jo to keep an eye on the door.

‘Right,’ he said, hacking his way into the hospital network. ‘Let’s see what the little gimp was so keen to hide…’ He entered ‘K
EN
P
EITAI
’ and ‘T
OMUKU
K
IKAN
’ into a stealth engine and sent it off to look at every single record on the hospital servers. They weren’t listed in PsychTech—he’d checked before leaving the house this morning—but they were bound to be somewhere, and the hospital’s systems were the only ones Will hadn’t broken into yesterday. Ninety percent of them weren’t accessible from outside the building.

Only the rattle of the air conditioning and the hum of the doctor’s terminal broke the silence.

Jo stood with her back against the wall, arms crossed, face working its way round a frown. ‘Will,’ she said at last, ‘when we were in your house this morning I noticed all these pictures of a woman…’

So that was it.

Not exactly a conversation he’d been looking forward to.

‘It’s…’ He cleared his throat. ‘Her name’s Janet. We were married.’ He closed his eyes; this was even harder than he’d thought. ‘She…she died six years ago.’

‘You still miss her.’

‘I…’ He couldn’t look her in the eye. Sigh. ‘Yes, I still miss her.’ Six years. Six whole fucking years and he still couldn’t let go.

‘I see.’

Silence settled back over the room like a shroud.

Fucking useless blubbery BASTARD!

Liam is spread out on the concrete floor with hardly a mark on him, dead. He barely lasted ten minutes.

Useless fuck.

She stops pacing up and down the storeroom to kick him in the face. Hard.

He bounces: flopping like a great, flaccid rag doll. It didn’t say on his chart that he had a heart condition.

She kicks him again, smearing his nose over his waxy features.

If they don’t put things like that on the chart, how is she supposed to operate?

This time she stamps on his face with her heel, again and again and again—useless—bastarding—fuck—until the whole front of his skull caves in.

There are still seven hours on the clock and she’s got nothing to keep her busy but getting rid of fat Liam’s disgusting corpse. This is so
unfair
. All she wanted was a little distraction to while away the time, was that so much to ask? Was it?

Something to make the fucking bees shut up.

Stamp, stamp, stamp.

She stops when she realizes that all she’s doing is making a bigger mess for herself to clean up. Liam’s head looks like an old cushion, and all the stuffing is leaking out over the storeroom floor. She steps away from the body and breathes deeply, in and out through her nose, not the little vent glued into her throat.

Calm.

This is all just temporary. Just make-work. Killing time till the operation, nothing more.

Calm down. Deep breaths. Deep breaths and calm, cool thoughts.

Useless
bastard
.

Grabbing a drip stand from a nearby rack she beats at his chest until one of the wheels breaks off and the sharp edge punctures his flesh.

Seven hours to go. Just seven hours. She can make it, she can. All she needs to do is clear her mind.

The drip stand rattles and clanks as she drops it to the floor.

Calm, cool thoughts. Calm, cool thoughts.

She snaps yet another shot of medicine into her neck and sinks down against a stack of internal thermometers.

Calm, cool thoughts.

She’ll need to wrap the body in something, then she’ll have to clean the floor. Get rid of the evidence. Something deep inside her likes that. Mopping and scrubbing will be therapeutic, calming. Then she can throw the body back into the disposal buggy and wheel it down to the incinerator.

Calm, cool thoughts.

But inside she
burns
. She wanted a release—deserved one—and Liam didn’t hold up his end of the bargain. She needs to let off steam. She needs it. Even with three shots of medicine in her she can’t sit still.

Bees and broken glass.

Dr Westfield looks from the battered corpse of worthless Liam to the clock on the wall. It’s just after four: nearly seven and a half hours to go. She can’t last that long. She just can’t.

A shudder runs down her spine. The Man In The Dark-Blue Suit has to come back to the hospital at half past four: she read about the appointment in his medical records. She has half an hour to clean stupid Liam away before the man responsible for all this shit arrives in the building.

She was going to save William Hunter for later, for when she’s all fixed up and can taste his fear and his blood, but she needs something now. And William Hunter will do nicely. Escort him back down to her storeroom-operating theatre and give him the worst seven hours of his life.

The Network has its own private floor of Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Different from the rest of the building, its walls are thicker, its floors are reinforced, its ceiling covered with shielding. Troopers stand guard at the main bank of elevators; anyone without a pass is escorted off the thirteenth floor at the point of a Whomper. But she walks right past them as if they weren’t even there.

She wanders slowly around the private reception area, picking up the wastepaper baskets and emptying them into her buggy. Fat, useless Liam is just another layer of ash in the hospital furnace, the storeroom is nice and clean, and she still has ten minutes before The Man In The Dark-Blue Suit arrives for his appointment. Ten minutes to find out where he’ll be going. Ten minutes to get into position. Ten minutes to decide what she’s going to do to him.

So many beautiful options…

Her medicine makes little stars twinkle at the edge of her vision, the world fizzing on chemical ripples. The base of her neck is sore from repeated injections. She’s had far more than the recommended daily dose.

The buggy creaks as she pushes it through the double doors, following the orange line. The place is quiet, but then four
twenty on a Sunday afternoon is hardly peak time. She passes wards, scanners, and operating theatres. The consultation rooms are at the end of a short corridor.

There’s a waiting area in the middle of the room—comfy chairs, pot plants, a coffee machine—and treatment rooms down either side. Each one with a display screen next to it, listing the doctor’s name and upcoming appointments.

There’s no one around to see her checking the screens for William Hunter’s name. She finds it down at the end of the row.

Seven minutes. His appointment is in seven minutes.

Perfect. All she has to do is wait in the little room. She’s not worried about the doctor already being there—doctors die just as easily as everyone else. And when William Hunter turns up she’ll wait till he’s not looking, then use the injector in her pocket to pump him full of sedatives. Heave him into the buggy, just like useless Liam. Only when she gets him down to the storeroom he’ll last a lot, lot longer.

Mmm…

Her hand freezes on the doorknob; there are voices inside the consulting room. She frowns at the display, checking. No one should be in there—it’s reserved for The Man In The Dark-Blue Suit. How dare they! How
dare
they get in the way! And then the voices say something that makes her flinch.

‘Peitai…’

The word makes her skin burst out in pins and needles.

A cold room, keys beneath her fingers and tubes in her arms.

She lurches back from the door, heart thumping in her chest.

Peitai.

Pictures of her children, flickering lights, questions, elec tricity, pain. She staggers into the buggy and it sends one of the pretty pot plants crashing to the ground.

Peitai…

‘What was that?’ Jo jerked upright.

‘I said that Ken Peitai—’

‘Shush!’ she crossed to the door and put her ear against it. ‘There’s someone out there!’

Will nodded. ‘Yeah, it’s a
hospital
. There are thousands of people out there.’ It was a stupid thing to say, but it was out before he could stop himself. Ever since she’d asked about the photos in his living room there had been a layer of glass between them. Something that couldn’t be seen, but kept them apart. He was acting like a tit and he knew it.

Jo scowled at him. ‘You know what I mean. We’re hacking into the hospital records, you think your doctor’s going to be happy about that?’

‘Good point.’ He started hammering commands into the keyboard. ‘You see who it is, I’ll copy the files and shut this thing down.’

Lights: too bright for her to bear, shining straight in her eyes. A short man in green, an older one dressed like a crow. Questions. More questions. She stumbles to the seats in the middle of the waiting area and collapses into one.

Hot noise races through her head; the interrogation chair; stabbing bursts of pain; questions. Peitai and his keeper—the man in the long black cloat with the delicate fingers that make her writhe in pain.

Someone says something, but she ignores it. Her head is burning from the inside out.

A hand touches her shoulder and she explodes out of the chair. No. No more. She won’t answer any more questions!

Something goes ‘crack’ and suddenly all the noise and light and pain vanish.

She’s in the waiting area, standing over the body of a woman. The woman isn’t moving, she’s just lying there on the floor, a Palm Zapper nestling in a shoulder holster, just visible through her open jacket.

Dr Westfield grabs it.

It’s all gone wrong. Unravelling…

She stares at the consulting room door with his name next to it.

This is too dangerous. Too big a risk. She has to get away from here. Now.

She grabs her trolley and makes for the exit. Walk, don’t run. If she runs they’ll know something’s wrong. If she runs they’ll catch her.

Will shut down the doctor’s computer with a satisfied click. There were only a couple of references to Peitai and his boss, Mr Kikan, but it was still a lot more than he’d had this morning. And now the files were all downloaded to his cracker where he could read through them at his leisure.

He put everything back the way he’d found it and stood, waiting for Jo to return. When she didn’t he crossed to the treatment room door and stuck his ear against it: silence.

‘Jo?’

He pulled the door open and saw her body lying sprawled across the floor. A bloody graze on her forehead.

‘Jo!’ Will dropped to one knee and felt for a pulse. She was still alive, but it looked as if she was in for one hell of a lump. ‘Jo, can you hear me? Who was it?’

No reply.

‘Damn!’ He stabbed his throat-mike. ‘Control, this is Hunter: Network treatment rooms, Glasgow Royal. I have an officer down.’

‘Roger that, Security is on its way…Wait a minute, “officer”? Don’t you mean Agent?’

‘No I don’t.’ He dragged his Palm Thrummer out of its holster and snapped the thing on. ‘Get a med team here on the double! You’ll find DS Cameron outside Doc Morrison’s room.’

‘Where will you—’

He killed the link.

There was no sign of which way the bastard had gone.

Left or right? Left. He sprinted back along the corridor, making for the exit and the lifts, barged through the first set of swing doors and almost fell over a halfhead. The damn thing was right in the middle of the passageway, but Will dodged it just in time and kept on running.

He was breathing hard when he battered through the next set of doors and into a ring of heavy weapons.

‘Hud it right there! Hauns far I can see ‘em!’

Will was looking down the business end of a Whomper on full power—telltales blinking away on the assault rifle. He did exactly what he was told.

‘Drop the weapon, pal, or I’m gonnae drop you!’

He let the Palm Thrummer fall to the floor. ‘ADS Hunter. I’ve got a Bluecoat DS in need of medical assistance back there and whoever did it is still running loose! Has anyone passed you?’

‘What?’ The assault rifle drifted away from his face as the spokesman frowned. ‘There’s been naebody down this end.’

‘Then they’re still on this level!’

Will pointed at the trooper with the Whomper and the sergeant’s stripes. ‘You come with me.’ He turned towards two others: ‘I want you and you to do a sweep of the floor, search the bloody bedpans if you have to.’ Then he grabbed the remaining trooper. ‘Get back there and guard the lift, no one in or out. Understand?’

‘Hud oan.’ The Whomper drifted back towards Will’s head. ‘Afore we go runnin’ about like good wee doggies, let’s see some ID.’

She can feel the sweat beading on her forehead. The corridor is full of armed guards, but they’re not interested in her; they’re interested in the man trying to order them about. The man she came here to kill. Their guns point at
his
head, not hers and she wants to keep it that way.

Her heart thumps faster and faster as she wheels the creaking buggy past.

Calm. Stay calm. They don’t even bother to look as she slouches by, even though she knows she must be shaking like a schoolboy in a brothel. And then the doors swing shut behind her and she is in the reception area, praying with every step.

God must love her, because no one says a thing as she walks into the lift.

The doors slide shut and a shudder runs through her body.

She’s going to get away with it.

Will ran back towards the consultation rooms, trailing his armed escort behind him. Jo’s body was still lying where he’d left it and he skidded to a halt. Thank God, she was still breathing.

‘Search the rooms!’

He knelt beside her, stroking her cheek as the sergeant with the Whomper started kicking in doors. Jo’s eyelids fluttered, then she murmured something. He had to lean in close to hear what it was.

‘Well,’ he said, sitting back on his haunches, ‘there’s obviously nothing wrong with your swearing gland.’

Jo grunted, opened her eyes, then closed them again, clutching her bleeding forehead. ‘Bastard…’

‘Are you OK?’

‘No.’ She struggled to sit up. ‘Did you get him?’

‘No sign of anyone. Did you see which way they went?’

She nodded her head, winced, then pointed off towards the main reception, where Will had just come from. ‘Heard the door slam.’

‘What? But there wasn’t anyone…’ He stood, watching the sergeant kicking in another consultation-room door. They’d said no one had passed them, and Will hadn’t seen anyone on the way back.

He clicked his throat-mike. ‘Has anyone tried to leave this floor?’

Jo almost fell over in the rush to pull her earpiece free. ‘Not so loud!’

He shrugged an apology as the voice of the trooper guarding the elevator crackled in his ear.

‘Negative. Just a halfhead with a refuse buggy.’

‘Stop the lift!’

‘What?’

‘Stop the damn lift!’

‘OK, OK! I’m stopping it!’

Jo sagged back against the row of seats, cradling her head in her hands and groaning.

‘Will you be OK?’

‘Go. Catch him.’

Will didn’t need telling twice; he charged back up the corridor and into the reception area. The trooper stood at the lift’s control panel, the open casing exposing neat braids of multicoloured wire and a small terminal.

‘I thought I told you no one in or out!’ Will said, storming across the floor.

‘It was just a halfhead! How could it have been the half-head? It’s got nae brain!’

‘Not the halfhead, you idiot: the buggy. You said it was pushing a refuse buggy.’

‘Aye.’

‘Big enough to hide a man?’

‘Shite.’ The trooper’s face fell.

‘Shite is right. Override the safeties on the lift. We don’t want him cranking the doors open and jumping out.’

‘Yes, sir!’ The private punched something into the elevator’s console. ‘Safeties are killed. He’s going nowhere.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Lift’s stopped between the lobby and the ground floor.’

‘Right.’ Will checked the charge on his Palm Thrummer.
‘Stay here and make sure no one else gets out this way. And this time when I say no one I
mean
no one! Got it?’

‘Yes, sir!’

Idiot.

Will called the sergeant and told him to round up more bodies and meet him in the hospital lobby.

Tears roll down her cheeks when the lift shudders to a halt between floors. She was so close. So very, very close. Twenty seconds longer and she’d have been free.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

She could have sat on her backside, down in the storeroom, and waited for her surgical appointment, but no. She has to have
revenge
! She has to risk everything for a little venal pleasure.

She deserves to be caught.

Deserves it.

But she’d been so close…

Dr Westfield reaches into her jumpsuit pocket and fingers her new Palm Zapper. She won’t make it easy for them. The little pebbled disk is powered up, its dial twisted past ‘H
EAVY
S
TUN
’ all the way to ‘F
ULL
P
OWER
’.

She looks at what’s left of her face, reflected in the lift’s mirrored doors. If they catch her they’ll burn her brain away again. And this time they’ll do it properly. This time there will be no coming back.

The Zapper is warm in her hands.

They won’t take her alive.

They clustered round the lift entrance, all weapons pointed at the doors. A small crowd was beginning to form behind the Network team, but just like the residents of Sherman House, everyone observed the mythical six-foot barrier.

Will clicked his throat-mike, ‘I’m going to give the word and I want you to bring the elevator down nice and slow.’
He checked the cordon of heavy weapons surrounding him. They had enough firepower to take on a small army. ‘Do it.’

With a delicate
ping
, the double doors slid open and the sound of electronic firearms gearing up filled the air like wasps in a blender. There, standing behind a disposal buggy, was a solitary halfhead.

‘Shite.’ The sergeant took a step forward and swept the lift from top to bottom. ‘There’s no one here.’

Will could have sworn the truncated face relaxed as the sergeant spoke…but that was ridiculous.

‘Hold on.’ Will motioned one of the troopers forward, pointing at the disposal buggy. He’d been right: it was easily big enough to take a fully grown man. The trooper nodded and held his Whomper vertically, the butt-end brushing the ceiling tiles inside the lift. The barrel was pointing straight down into the open buggy.

‘Sorry, sir,’ he said at last. ‘Nothin’ in there, but crap.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yup.’ The trooper stabbed the assault rifle down into the basket, sweeping it through the rubbish, letting it clang off the buggy’s walls. When he pulled it out again there were unpleasant things sticking to the barrel.

Will stepped into the lift. It was beginning to get a bit crowded: three Network personnel, a halfhead, and a disposal buggy. He peered inside the open top, but the trooper was right, there was no one hiding in there. This had all been one big waste of time.