Tim Stevens - Delivering Caliban

In the past week there’d been frantic activity on the island, boxes being carted away by the Jeepload and extensive makeshift construction work as wood and steel was hammered down as reinforcement. Nina had watched and listened, bewildered, the feeling growing in her that none of the adults actually believed what they were doing was going to work. Sure enough, three days later her father had bundled her out of bed in the middle of the night and she’d found herself on a dream journey that involved a car and a roaring, shaking plane, before she’d woken shivering and terrified in her grandmother’s bed.

Her father came to her after two days, with the news that their home was lost, and so was her mother.

*

And now, almost a decade and a half later, she was on a night bus from Charlottesville, VA to Washington D.C., fleeing men in suits who were at the same time authority figures and the murderers of her friends, in search of the only person who could help her. Her father, whose whereabouts she didn’t, if she was honest, have a clue about; who had been out of her life for more than half of it; and whom she had learned to hate.

Charlottesville, Virginia

Monday 20 May, 9.05 pm

Over the years Pope had mastered the art of stillness; of waiting absolutely silently and ignoring the clamour of hunger and other more pressing bodily requirements.

After four hours in the girl’s flat he decided to use the lavatory.

Immediately afterwards his ears strained for tell-tale signs that somebody was already in the flat and had reacted. But there were none. Satisfied again that he was alone, he went back to wait on the living room sofa in the dark.

He flexed the muscles in his arms and calves and thighs minutely to keep the blood flowing. The distorted Dali clock on the wall said it was nine p.m. He’d arrived in Charlottesville on the Amtrak train at four, and had found the flat within half an hour. Entry had posed no problem. He hadn’t expected her to be at home on a Monday afternoon, and he was right. On arrival he did a quick prowl around the flat, familiarising himself with the layout and trying to determine if anyone else lived there.

Nina Ramirez seemed to live alone. There was no tract of any male presence, no man’s clothes in the wardrobe or shaving kit in the bathroom. Nor were there any signs that she shared with a woman friend. The bedroom was a single one.

The decorations were few: framed photographs of a woman in her thirties with a child of ten or so, whom Pope knew were Ramirez and her mother; considerably more of an older woman who resembled both of the other two. The grandmother. Ramirez had lived with her from childhood and through college, Pope knew.

Of her father there were no pictures.

Most of what passed for ornamentation in the flat was related to music. There were coffee-table tomes on the great violinists, on the history of the instrument itself. Two framed prints on the walls were facsimiles of yellowing musical scores: Paganini, Khachaturian. A wall-mounted unit revealed an array of CDs and DVDs, almost all of classical recordings.

At nine twenty he saw the first flicker of blue and red lights across the wall opposite the main bay window.

Quickly he moved at a crouch to the window and peered out. Police black-and-whites were pulling up, four of them.

Without stopping to consider what this meant he strode across the room. The tiny bathroom was at the rear of the flat. He stood on the toilet lid and pushed open the window as far as it would go. An alley behind the flat stretched away for ten yards and then bent to the left.

Pope dragged himself through the window, snagging his belt buckle for one moment before tearing free. The apartment was on the second floor — an American would say the first — and the drop was an easy one.

After putting two blocks between himself and the flat he doubled back by another route until he had a vantage point of the front of the complex. There was no doorman, just a simple keycode entry system. Four uniformed cops milled about on the pavement at the front. It meant four had gone inside, probably, and they were expecting her to make a run for it.

He took a few seconds to absorb this new information and try to process it. Nothing came up. There was no way anyone could have known he was heading here. Purkiss himself couldn’t possibly have worked out the connection yet, not without supernatural powers of some kind.

When the lights came on at the second-floor windows he knew it was Ramirez’s flat they’d come to visit.

He debated waiting but decided nothing would come of it. At most he’d see a group of police officers emerge in a few minutes’ time with nothing to show for their search. Pope turned away and began walking, pondering his next move.

He knew a lot about the girl, but nothing about her friends in the city. He did know she hadn’t gone away: there were signs of recent habitation in the flat, such as dishes unwashed on the kitchen surface. So presumably she was in the city somewhere. Where precisely, he had no way of knowing.

Pope had the grandmother’s old address but that was unlikely to be of much use; he knew the house had been sold since her death. He knew also that the girl was a musician and therefore presumably had musical friends and acquaintances, but again finding them was going to be difficult.

He’d never been to Charlottesville before but had learned a little of the basic layout, and headed towards Main Street and the Mall. It was a picturesque city, he noted distantly, with a lively atmosphere even on a Monday evening.

As often happened, he ran a segment of the diary through his head to occupy his thoughts while the rest of his mind worked on the problem of what to do next.

18th October

Signs are that the hurricane is going to hit us in a week or so. Z is getting nervous — once more, he handles his tension well, but he can’t conceal it completely. He’s started “precautionary measures”, as he calls them. It’s not quite an evacuation, yet, but the beginnings of one. Little of the equipment has been moved, and the storm shutters are being hammered into place with admirable speed. But nobody here really believes the operation is going to be able to continue after the storm hits, even if the Box isn’t completely destroyed. For one thing, relief ships and aircraft are going to be prowling the area and the likelihood of discovery will be enormous.

Still the subjects — prisoners, let’s call them that and have done with it — continue to come in, sometimes in a trickle, at other times en masse. It’s almost as though Z is desperate having come this far to process as many as he can before everything ends. I don’t know quite what’s driving him. The results so far have been clear. Caliban is a failure. Or, at least, the result has been a negative one, which is not quite the same thing. But given what’s gone into the project, with regard to manpower and secrecy, an outcome like this is nothing less than disappointing.

The core people, Jablonsky and Taylor and Grosvenor and of course Z himself, are still here. Around thirty per cent of the support personnel remain, including the three medics. I haven’t learned their names. They’re guilty, of course, but they’re small fry and can be mopped up afterwards. The other four names are the important ones.

20 thOctober

Another evening talking with Z. If he’s been tainted by Taylor’s suspicions of me, he’s hiding it well. Alone with me he makes less of an effort to disguise the tension he’s experiencing. He doesn’t talk about the approaching storm much, though. Instead he speaks of Caliban as if it’s still a going concern, a project that’s far from over let alone dead in the water.