Джеймс Блатч - The Final Flight

“It looks like Millie was stealing it.”

“What? Rob! That’s ridiculous.”

“Of course it’s ridiculous and of course he wasn’t, but it looks like he was.”

“So, what was he doing?”

Rob exhaled, screwed up his eyes and covered his face with his hand. She got up and moved in close, wrapping an arm around him.

“I let him down. I should have been listening. I’ve been the worst friend and now he’s dead.”

“I don’t understand, Rob. What should you have been listening to? What did he say?”

Rob took a few moments to recover himself. He wiped away his tears. “I can’t tell you, I’m sorry. I can’t involve you.”

“But the box, Rob. It’s in our house. You’ve already involved me.”

“The less you know, the better. Please.”

Behind Rob, something caught Mary’s eye: a figure crossing the lawn. It was Jock MacLeish from next door.

Rob looked at her. “Say nothing about the box.”

She went to the front door; MacLeish looked anxious.

“The police are at Georgina’s. They’re searching the house.”

“Goodness me, what are they looking for?”

Jock gave her a quizzical look. “No idea, but I thought you should know. Georgina might need some support. Rob’s car’s outside the house. Is he over there?”

Rob emerged and stood behind her.

“Hello, Jock. No, I left it there earlier.”

“Oh, right,” Jock said. He looked at Rob. “Are you OK, friend?”

Rob nodded. “Yes, thank you, Jock. Just a bit of delayed reaction, I think. Look, we’ll go over now.”

MacLeish loitered for a moment, looking uncertain, as if he was going to say something before moving off. Mary closed the door and turned to her husband.

“Jesus, Rob, what exactly is in that bloody box?”

His eyes turned to the cupboard.

“It was an impulse. I need time to think.” He turned back to her. “Can you go to Georgina’s? But you don’t know anything, OK?”

“Rob, it’s true. I don’t know anything.”

ONCE MARY HAD LEFT, Rob skulked around for a while, until he was sure the coast was clear.

He retrieved the box and brought it into the kitchen.

After pulling down the window blind and switching on the single bulb lamp that hung from the ceiling, he spread the contents out on the table.

He recognised the data sheets; the mainframe computer produced them at DF Blackton. Lists of height readings from the laser. He had seen them earlier in the trial.

Each sheet was labelled GUIDING LIGHT DATA FEED EXTRACTION.

It was shocking to see the project name in black letters anywhere but inside the four walls of TFU.

As he leafed through the data, he could see hand-drawn rings around some of the figures.

At the bottom of the pile was a single sheet of data, separated from the rest and used as some sort of scratch pad. Millie’s handwritten notes filled it and spilled onto the back.

He scanned the black ink scrawl. Numbers, percentages, and a few equations.

None of it meant anything to him.

Beneath the data sheets were two tapes.

Under those were two tasking sheets for the project.

He lifted them up, revealing the most incriminating document of them all: a schematic. It was a single sheet, straight from the blueprints, showing the flow of electrical signals and data.

This is what terrified Kilton, and rightly so. It revealed the project, what it was, and more or less how it worked.

“Jesus Christ.”

He put the schematic back at the bottom of the pile and turned to the sheet of Millie’s handwriting.

Millie’s ponderous voice floated into his mind, as his calculations shifted from disconnected numbers to an equation, and at the end, on the reverse side of the data sheet, what looked like a conclusion.

The phone rang.

He hurried into the hallway and snatched it off the cradle.

“Hello?”

“May. Mark Kilton. We have carried out an initial search at Milford’s house.”

“Yes, it was noticed.”

“Well, we can’t hide this. I just need you to know that the investigation is ongoing. I need you all to be careful with how much contact you have with Georgina.”

“I’m sorry, sir?”

“May, we don’t know how much she was involved. It’s more important than ever that you do not share any information with her. We have no idea where it might end up.”

“You don’t seriously believe she and Millie were doing anything sinister? Surely there’s a more logical explanation.”

“At the moment, May, we have no alternative but to treat this as a most serious breach of project security.”

“What about Mary? Can she still talk to her?”

“It’s best to keep your distance. Things could get tricky and I don’t want them to get tricky for you.”

Kilton hung up.

Rob’s feet felt heavy as he wandered back into the kitchen.

He shuffled the notes back into the box.

As he pushed the handwritten paper deep into the middle of the pile of papers, the black ink letters and numbers disappeared into the fold.

There was something pleading and urgent in the scrawls.

Kilton wanted him to stay away.

But Millie’s notes said something else.

DESPITE THE STUFFY heat inside her tent, Susie pulled the entrance flaps together and sat cross-legged, out of sight from the dwindling group of protestors.

She pulled out a small notebook and annotated her observations, using a shorthand that couldn’t easily be deciphered.

It had been an extremely interesting day.

Firstly, an encounter with the survivor, Robert May. She’d recognised his car from the information Roger had provided. He looked younger than his twenty-nine years, but was pale and drawn. Not surprising.

She noted the time of the sighting and added ‘nothing out of the ordinary’ following her cursory scan of the vehicle.

But the second sighting was altogether more strange.

The same man, an hour later, running, then walking fast, with a box in his arms, for all the world looking like a thief escaping from the scene of a crime.

She couldn’t break off from the march around the perimeter fence without arousing suspicion, so she noted the exact location of the back garden from where she believed he’d emerged.

Later, on her own, she walked past the end of Lancaster Close and noted the address.

She folded the notebook, slipped it into her shorts pocket and headed into the village.

Roger was waiting for her call.

“My dear, we have some interesting news for you.”

“I have some for you, too.”

“Well, let me go first. Your initial contact, the now deceased Christopher David Milford, is posthumously under investigation.”

“By who and for what?”

“That’s the thing. The RAF Test Flying Unit is covered by a new branch of the military police, rather vaguely called the West Porton Security Police. It seems to have been created along with TFU and reports directly to the Ministry of Supply. So, we can get hold of the odd bulletin, but not much else. Now, what about the survivor?”

“Robert May. I’ve seen him, twice. On his way to the airfield this morning. And this afternoon he left the rear of a nearby house with a box under his arms. The address…” She pulled the notepad from her pocket. “8 Lancaster Way.”

“That’s Milford’s house,” Roger said.

“Bloody hell.”

“All rather peculiar. But you are not to contact him.”

“Why not?”

“They’re jumpy about this upstairs. Too many eyes, including Number Ten’s, on the project.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“Operate in the shadows, of course. If you feel you need to approach him, you’ll need authorisation from above. And you’ll need very good cause if the director’s to agree.”