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  Chapter 4 — In the News

  Conrad Faulkner had been in the news for a long time, for a whole range of reasons, before his secret in the jungle became a cause for worldwide political turmoil. I still remember the first time I saw his face on television, though not because the story particularly interested me then. It was just that the rest of that day had been so hectic, such a turning point, that every second was permanently engraved in my memory. It was the day my life could so easily have changed, and the slimmest of margins sent me on a completely different path, so of course I remembered.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard his name, though when I’d been in college I’d only heard some of the science nerds mention his name. He’d been one of the leading lights in a particular branch of pharmacology. Some of my friends had studied his work, and I guess if you were in the drugs industry you would have heard of him a lot sooner than I did. Some people who never paid attention until recently might be amazed to hear that he had once been well respected, revered almost, or that he was skilled and successful. They shouldn’t be so surprised, everyone always says that there’s a fine line between genius and madness, and that line had been a tightrope Faulkner walked along long before he stumbled over to the wrong side.

  He’d been mentioned in a couple of newspapers a week or two earlier, in connection to his investigation by a variety of medical ethics committees and subsequent firing by a large faceless corporation. It was the kind of story that would only be noted by a wannabe reporter who scoured every column inch of the local and national news hoping to absorb the skills of journalism by sheer quantity of exposure. I’d read the story alongside a hundred others, made a mental note of the way the reporter used the words “scandal” and “inhumane” to try to add a veneer of excitement to what was really a story of transgression against industry regulations. I’d assumed that by the end of the week I’d never hear about him again, unless one of the geeks who idolised him wanted to stay in touch after I left college.

  The moment I got home from classes that day, I found a note on the counter for me. It was addressed to me by name, and was signed by my older brother Paul, even though we were the only people living in our parents’ house now. Before their accident, Mom had always delivered reprimands in written form with a single four-letter name at the head. Paul had continued the tradition, though it had struck me as pointless ever since John had left. If the neighbours wanted to make snide comments about my oldest brother, they used indirect terms like “Some people”, or they said “That’s what makes us different from them”. It was like they thought never mentioning his name would somehow spare them from contact with the scandal that had torn our family apart. Paul’s letters were only ever for my attention now, but still had to be addressed to me by name.

  “Mark — We need to talk tonight. I’ll see you when I get home. Paul.” The note was simple enough, but I didn’t know why he needed to leave it at all. Did he want me to be anticipating this conversation with dread? Maybe he thought that if I was hating it enough, I might be inspired to make better choices with my life. He’d picked the wrong method of persuasion tonight, though, because I knew we needed to talk. There were so many things I needed to say to him, but he’d never be willing to listen. He wanted me to pick a specialisation for my final year at college, which the official letters said I needed to have decided on by the end of the month.

  Seeing the note, I didn’t want to have that conversation again. I went up to my room and started cramming things into a bag. My passport, some clothes, a tiny tent, a letter of introduction courtesy of my friend Samus. As I stormed around the room trying to find everything I’d need, my mind was whirling just as quickly. I’d been planning to do this, but later in the month after I’d had a little more time to research my options. Maybe I would have gone through with it, or maybe I would have had second thoughts. That letter was the tipping point that made my decision for me.

  I wasn’t a dropout, I’d done really well right through school, and in the first year of college. They said I was a genius, with a natural talent for abstract mathematics and something of a gift for the sciences too. I’d followed that path because it came so naturally, and never really considered doing anything else with my life. That’s why it had come as such a shock when I realised I didn’t actually like where I was headed. What’s not to like? Someday soon I’d have some qualifications, a good job, a house of my own where the walls weren’t made of cheap timber and gypsum board. I might be an academic, which was certainly the path to tread if you wanted to bring home a salary both reliable and luxurious. And with all that, there was no way I could fail to find good people to hang around with as well. Friends from work would all be white-collar geniuses, the kind of people I could talk to without effort, and no girl could resist the charm of a loquacious, popular, successful, and wealthy young man with a good career.

  That was all wrong. Well, not wrong so much as not what I wanted. It was about six months before deciding to walk out that I realised I didn’t care about money, prestige, or success. What I cared about was making a difference in the world. Sure, if I became a master of statistics I could do all the equations to tell some big corporation how to synthesise chemicals a few percent more efficiently, and my bosses would be oh so generous after they made an extra billion dollars off my work. But who would it really help? Teaching was no better, because it would just be moulding younger students so that they could find themselves following the same path I was now trapped on. I wanted out.

  I wanted to be a crusading journalist, travelling the world to report on the starving and the oppressed. I would send back stories so poignant that the great and the good couldn’t refuse to send aid to those who needed it. I’d give my readers an impression of a war zone that would be so real they felt like they were there, and they’d force their governments to stop the carnage. And if I was going to do that, my natural ability with languages would be good enough. If I could translate an advanced engineering paper into seven languages for a conference, then I didn’t need any academic qualifications to go out and find the news. I could pick up a language in a few weeks if I set my mind to it, even if I didn’t pick up enough dictionary words to be considered fluent. There weren’t any paper qualifications in the kind of things I could do well, but I was sure by then that it didn’t matter.

  You didn’t need any certificates to be a crusading journalist. The Internet didn’t want proof of your ability before you were allowed to post, all that matters was having the words that would move people and get them to tell their friends. That was one thing I was sure of. So when Paul said he wanted to talk down to me again, my mind was made up and I’d have no second thoughts about heading away to lead my own life. I’d be a success, I knew I would. That’s just how naïve I was, you could even say stupid. But I was still a teenager even if the law called me an adult, and I’d never had to fend for myself. I really thought I could just go join some small news organisation, or even get to some third world disaster area under my own steam and just start reporting. How to get people to read me was something I could think about later, if Samus’s letter didn’t open enough doors.

  It was probably a good job I decided to catch the television news before I headed out, or the headlines at least. I thought there could be a pointer in there to where in the world needed my attention the most. But as I flicked onto a news channel, the first story didn’t have any giant government or corporation bullying the people without power or influence. The screen showed a low-res home video, slightly shaking and somewhat blurred. There was a child running around a small but well-tended suburban garden. The sun shone brightly enough to have dried out patches of the grass as well as turning the girl’s exposed arms and legs an overexposed white on the cheap camera. She was wearing an Easter dress, and had one hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun, also meaning the audience couldn’t get a clear view of the kid’s face. I immediately assumed a child dead or missing, else they’d be able to
get a more professional image to illustrate whatever the story was.

  “…illegal biotechnology research,” the announcer was saying as the sound came on. “Although Glassner-Whyte-Jones Incorporated has not yet released details of Doctor Faulkner’s experiments, supervisor Dr Michael Aldred-Cohen informed Channel 6 News World – in an exclusive interview earlier this week – that all drugs and samples kept at the company’s New Jersey laboratory had been destroyed in a lab fire, permanently ending research along similar unethical lines.”

  The man sitting on a lawn chair, occasionally throwing a beach ball back over to his daughter must be the infamous Dr Faulkner, then. He looked younger than I would have expected for someone with such a weighty reputation. His hair was already greying, but the lines on his face were all creases of sadness rather than the wrinkles of age. His nose was buried in a book, which he perused intently. The camera moved closer, and someone must have spoken because the man looked up and put on a forced smile. I couldn’t hear his words, the news channel hadn’t kept the original audio from the recording, but the redness of his eyes said he’d been crying, and the resigned slump of his shoulders made me think that wasn’t unusual for him.

  I might have flicked over to one of the other news channels, but there was something odd in this report. I’d read the sidebars about Faulkner’s fall from grace in all the newspapers, but they didn’t see it as particularly newsworthy. There had to be some new development, but I didn’t know why they would choose to show him as a family man rather than take footage from some scientific conference or other. This wasn’t the kind of story I could make a difference on, I was sure, but I was intrigued enough to wait for the details.

  “…no further investigation was being undertaken, and a Federal manhunt was only initiated this morning after school officials reported that Lucretia was also missing…”

  That answered my question. A line of text scrolled across the bottom of the screen as the video was replaced by mugshots in which Faulkner looked a lot healthier and more confident. In a few seconds, I could discover that Faulkner had disappeared before a full investigation into his illegal research could be carried out. That was news, but not the kind of thing the public was massively interested in. Then it turned out that his eight year old daughter hadn’t come home from school, and the aunt who was supposed to be looking after her was distraught. A daughter who’d been in and out of hospital throughout the past two years but the diagnosis of her illness was still under question.

  Channel Six had gone to interview doctors in the hope they could have a sensational story about a girl who might die if taken away from her treatment, but what they learned was even more shocking: Lucretia Wellingsley Faulkner had never had the blood tests that the doctors recommended, because her father insisted that he had already sought a consultation from all manner of specialists at other institutions. The hospital was only needed to provide palliative treatment, which they’d been happy to do before finally realising that the specialists named on her charts all led back to Faulkner himself. Nobody knew what was wrong with the girl, and though samples had been taken, the results all seemed to be missing. Every hospital, every clinic, thought that somebody else had the rest of this little girl’s file.

  It had been concerned relatives calling up some of those mysterious doctors that had broken the case in the first place. It had turned out surprisingly difficult to separate the man’s work from his personal projects, and in the course of trying to unravel it all his supervisor had realised just how badly Faulkner’s research project violated all kinds of medical ethics. Her extended family had quickly stepped in to care for her, and more importantly to ensure that her potentially deranged father couldn’t get close to her again. Nobody had expected they’d find that task so difficult.

  The newsreader was careful to hedge her bets. It could be that her father knew more about her condition, and he thought that it was worth the risk of taking her with him while he fled from the authorities. Maybe he knew that she’d be safe even without access to a proper hospital, or maybe he just thought he did. But on the other side of the coin, he might know a lot more than he was letting on. The whole report was worded to plant the suspicion that this respected pharmacologist had been conducting illegal experiments on his own child, and that she had never been sick at all. They couldn’t say it without any kind of evidence, but it was clearly there in the way the rhetorical questions were phrased.

  I turned away and switched the TV off, deciding to search for a story that was better suited to me once I was away from here. It was terrible, what had happened to that girl, and I knew I’d wonder about it along with the rest of the world as the police search closed in. But for now there was nothing else I could do about it.

  As soon as the TV was off, the first thing I heard was a key in the front door. I’d wasted more time than I thought. I grabbed my bag without even doing a last check of its contents, and ran to the back door in an abortive attempt to escape a life of academic boredom.

  Chapter 5 — A Secret Shared

  There were worse things than boredom, I knew. But I made the right choice as a kid, because I could never have lived with myself if I’d taken the easy route only to see the atrocities perpetrated against less advantaged people later in life. By following my heart and following the news, I had a way to help people who had been subjected to things more terrible than I could dream of. Being caught by Paul before I left was the best thing that had ever happened to me, because after finishing college and going through a real journalism course I could walk through so many doors that would have slammed in my face if I’d reached them as an idealistic runaway.

  Trying to help the tortured animals find peace, I was still stumped now. The doors to the Faulkner Laboratory were locked, of course, which was why I’d carefully relieved one of our guards of his keys earlier in the day. There were advantages to having a guard to watch every foreign visitor, especially when the majority of those guards probably had very little real world experience of their role. The administration here was terrified of journalists or foreign ambassadors sneaking off to see things they weren’t supposed to, so they had provided so much extra security that there had been bound to be at least one who was bored of babysitting foreigners and not paying enough attention to me while my assistant Marcos provided a distraction.

  The problem here was that none of the keys secreted around my pockets would fit this lock. The door had what looked like some kind of keypad, to enter a code. The numbers weren’t numbers, but ten unfamiliar squiggles. I thought back to when we’d been introduced to one of the local tribes a few days before; I think these were the symbols they’d used. It didn’t matter, though, it was a 10 digit keypad regardless of what marks were on the keys, and more importantly it was a keypad to which I had no idea of the code.

  I contemplated trying numbers at random, but I knew that even a four digit code had a myriad possibilities. If I took just a second to enter each possibility, I’d still expect to be here more than an hour before I got lucky. I was staring at the keypad, with its unfamiliar transfers on the keys, when I heard someone coming towards me. I didn’t even notice as the footsteps somewhere else in the compound turned into steps around the next corner; the confusion of echoes that had protected me was going to be the thing that got me caught now. I could duck into the alcove opposite, but I could hear every step from around the next corner so clearly. If I moved, they’d clearly know someone was here, and the relative gloom of the corridor wasn’t enough to keep me hidden if anyone was actually looking around.

  As I was frozen in indecision, Dr Corliss appeared. I was still incredibly anxious, but I breathed a mental sigh of relief at least. Corliss had been with us on our expeditions to see the tribes and the animals, and I thought I knew the kind of person he was. Of all the scientists here, he seemed the most out of place. He understood every tiny nuance of the politics between the many tribes in the area, and the slightly different languages spoken by ea
ch, but he didn’t seem to have a clue about politics in the real world or the travesties that Faulkner had been perpetrating in this very building. He was so oblivious to events around him, I guessed, that the UN scientists had allowed him to stay. He knew the lab was under different management now, but he neither knew nor cared why. It was like he’d spent so long in the ivory towers of his own mind that he didn’t understand anything other than the problem he was researching. There was just a chance that he wouldn’t find my presence here suspicious.

  “Hi, Doctor,” I put on a cheerful air, trying to hide all my worries. I just had to take control of the dialogue, and make sure he didn’t think of the questions I didn’t want to answer. It was the kind of tactic I’d used in interviews so many times, though never with quite so much at stake. “I was just on the way to the thing. What are you doing up so late? Some new discovery?”

  “No!” he snapped back, immediately on the defensive, “All biology research has been forbidden! We are strictly keeping the base running, and making sure the… animals stay healthy. I’m visiting…” and he hesitated. Had I just stumbled on a secret project, something he wanted to hide? “Visiting the specimens, to make sure they’re being fed okay. Yeah, all the animals,” he nodded vigorously, finding a viable excuse. It didn’t explain why he was here so late at night, or why he was so jumpy. He was hiding something, and I wanted to know whether the lab was actually continuing their work in secret, or if this was some private errand he was keeping from the others too. But I couldn’t really ask without prompting him to wonder why I was up at this hour. For now, we’d overlook each other’s secrets.