Jon Evans - Swarm

My hands hung half-senseless behind me. I tried to work my fingers and wrists, remembering vaguely that tensing and releasing muscles had been part of Houdini’s arsenal of bondage-busting tricks. The whole airplane vibrated as its engines started up. Their noise was like a city screaming. The plane shuddered into motion, halted briefly, then rocketed forward as its engines howled with the strain. We climbed so rapidly that my stomach lurched.

Locked in the trunk of a car includes the line ‘Well, you could say I became chronologically fucked up.’ Gord Downie knew whereof he sang. I lost all track of time during that flight. My brain worried at the subject of what would happen to me like a dog gnawing on a bone, and I couldn’t pull it free. Images of the worst kinds of torture, rape, degradation and mutilation churned ceaselessly in my mind’s eye. I couldn’t believe that they actually seemed plausible. I wondered at what point I might decide to try to kill myself, bite my own tongue off and choke myself with the severed stump like in Million Dollar Baby . My limbs felt as weak as water. The air was warm but I shivered uncontrollably, panting like a dog. My muscles were so uncontrollably tense that my legs began to cramp. The malarial miasma of utter terror feels like a bad flu, only worse.

It could have been hours or days before something shifted inside me, some indistinct proprioceptive signal of deceleration and descent. Soon after the airplane wobbled as it became earthborne. We slowed so rapidly that I slewed forward and nearly off the chair.

They carried me out like a sack of rice. In the frenzy of activity my blindfold loosened a little, so I could see a sliver of the world with my left eye. I tried not to reveal this tiny victory with my body language, didn’t dare scan my surroundings, but as I was hoisted into a waiting van I caught a glimpse of a sign, written in Spanish. I understood only a single word: Mexico.

That was so unexpected it kicked my brain into speculative gear again. Sheer coincidence? Or had I been wrong about Colombia?

The van drove for a long time. I couldn’t make out our surroundings through its curtained windows except that we were in a city. Men sat beside and in front of me, chatting excitedly in Spanish, until someone ordered them to shut up.

We halted long enough for a gate to grind open, cruised into a kind of courtyard filled with vehicles, and stopped. I could barely feel my hands at all. They dragged me out of the van, laughed when I barked my head painfully against its roof. I was taken into a building, up stairs, along corridors, through what felt like an endless labyrinth. Strong hands untied my wrists and shoved me forward. I staggered and nearly fell.

With my numbed fingers it took me several attempts to pull off the blindfold and reveal a room full of whiteboards and server racks. Laptops sat on a few haphazardly arranged metal desks, accompanied by Aeron chairs. Bits of disassembled hardware lay clumped on the floor. Despite the white-noise hum of several air conditioners the air was warm with the heat from the dozens of blade servers. It felt like the nerve centre of a software startup with big aspirations. Most importantly, it did not seem like the kind of room in which people were tortured to death.

The man who had escorted me in was short but hugely muscled. His ropy arms were covered by demonic tattoos, and his shirt said MONSTER 666. The room’s other occupant sat behind a desk crowded untidily with papers. He looked Slavic, not Hispanic; tall and gangly, with lanky hair so blond and skin so pale that he was almost albino. He smiled with uneven teeth, and gestured at a chair. It took me a second to understand his meaning. I walked over and sat down.

“So you’re James Kowalski,” he said thoughtfully, examining me carefully, like I was a meal he might want to send back to the kitchen.

I nodded. Language seemed almost beyond me. I tried to control my trembling limbs. As feeling returned to my hands, they felt doused in flaming sulphuric acid.

“I’m Dmitri.” He stressed the name as if I should recognize it.

“Nice to meet you,” I muttered automatically, and ridiculously.

He chuckled. “I doubt that.”

I didn’t say anything. I was terrified that anything might condemn me.

“We are very disappointed in you, James.” His accent was Russian, but his English was so fluid that he had to have spent years in America. “Were you trying to cover your tracks? Or play both sides? Either way, it was a very stupid thing to do.”

He looked at me as if waiting for a response, but I couldn’t even make sense of his questions, much less find an answer.

“So many smart people are so very stupid outside their area of expertise. You know this, but you never imagined that you too might be one of them. And now that you know, it is too late.” Dmitri shook his head sadly, as if he had just intoned my epitaph. “Did you really believe nobody would ever find the money? The gnomes of Zurich and the Caymans, even they are not immune to pressure. We knew who you were all along. Soon after you first contacted us. Before you even received the first payment. You must have known that if the Americans found out, they would think you were ours all along. What were you going to tell them? You won seven million dollars playing bingo? You found it under your couch cushions?”

I stared at him with utter incomprehension.

“You should have spent it while you could, James. Your new salary will be little more than, let us say, a living wage.” He smiled thinly. “Think of me as a younger and more calorie-conscious version of Don Corleone. Now you have no choice but to become what they will have thought you were all along.”

He looked at me expectantly.

”I’m sorry,” I said, my voice barely louder than a whisper, beginning to wonder if he was confusing me with some other James Kowalski. “I don’t understand.”

He sighed. “Please. I am not fishing for confirmation. I know . Unless you expect us to believe that someone else was content to see all that money flow into a numbered bank accounts over which you personally have full and sole control.”

My head spun. “This is insane,” I croaked, as much to myself as to him.

“Really? It seems ordinary to me. Engineers everywhere make such transitions. From external consultant to internal employee. Yes, we were hoping for Dr. Sophie Warren, but Mr. James Kowalski is an acceptable consolation prize. You should be flattered.”

“Flattered,” I echoed, grasping at surreal straws. “By what exactly?”

“I would think our offer self-evident. You provide us technical assistance, and in exchange, we allow you to live. Think of it as a belated support contract for all that lovely technology you sold us.”

I stared bemused at Dmitri’s gap-toothed smile, my fear for my life half-erased by complete bewilderment. He wasn’t making any sense at all. I had not sold anyone any technology. I had never received any payments. I had no secret Swiss or Cayman Islands bank account -

– or did I?

There was one possible way that Dmitri’s words might make a horrible kind of sense. Like a jigsaw puzzle that when assembled revealed a sanity-eating image straight out of H.P. Lovecraft.

To the best of my knowledge I had never opened an account at any Cayman Islands bank; but I had once signed a sheaf of papers to co-register a business there. Sophie had said our accountant had set it up for tax purposes, to receive payments from Convoy. Our lab was a complicated mix of university research and private enterprise, and the paperwork was always a nightmare. I had long ago given up on reading all our contracts in favour of just signing whatever she gave me. One of those signatures could easily have opened a bank account without my knowing it.