Peter James - Perfect People

He went back down to the kitchen, ignoring the beeping alarm, which he figured would barely be audible outside the house. It took him only moments to spot the electric jug kettle. Perfect. He unscrewed the switch mechanism, disabled the cut-out, and screwed the switch mechanism back into place. Then he emptied the water out of the kettle, switched it on, pulled a couple of dry tea towels off a rack, bundled them around the base of it, stepped back and waited.

After a couple of minutes he could smell hot plastic. Another minute and he could see wisps of smoke. Then the jug kettle was on fire.

Standing well back, by the closed door, he took out the cylinder of liquid propane from his pocket, and twisted the valve. A jet of gas shot across the room towards the kettle, and almost instantly, a sheet of flame shot upwards towards the ceiling.

Then he opened the door and stepped back into the night. Within moments, the rush of air had turned the room into a fireball.

Safely back behind the shrubbery at the end of the garden, he removed the gas mask, and stood and watched as the flames spread. Soon his nostrils picked up the scents of burning wood and paint. His ears picked up the crackling of the flames. And then an even sweeter sound. Two infants crying.

He climbed a fence, and took the route to safety that God had shown him two nights ago, across the fields to the parking lot behind a small general store, where his little rental car sat in the shadows.

From: Kalle Almtorp, Swedish Embassy, Washington.

To: John Klaesson. bklaesson@morleypark. org

Subject: Disciples

John,

I think you should be aware that the Disciples may have surfaced again.

An Iowa couple, Drs Laurence and Patty Morrison and their twins, Nathan and Amy, aged thirty months, were found dead in their burned-out ranch house two days ago. They too had been to the Dettore Clinic. The fire damage was pretty bad, and it is too early for the police to know the cause of the fire – but I just thought you ought to know.

Three deaths of three couples with twins, all of whom had been to the Dettore Clinic, is not enough to prove anything, but I would advise you to continue to be vigilant.

Of course I will keep you informed. To date there has been no progress in identifying any of these so-called Disciples of the Third Millennium, nor anyone behind them. They remain a mystery and an enigma.

I hope this email finds you and Naomi and your family well and thriving. I will be moving from Washington at the end of this year to a new posting in Malaysia, but I will endeavour to maintain vigilance for you.

Halsningar!

Kalle

Reggie Chetwynde-Cunningham looked like the kind of boffin a casting agency might have suggested to a film director in search of an archetypal eccentric English professor. From behind his tiny desk in his cramped office in the Linguistics Centre, housed in Building B4 at Morley Park, he squinted at John through his monocle like some hawkish bird of prey

In his early sixties, the linguist had a weather-beaten face, intricately shot with broken veins, and mad hair. He was dressed in a shabby green tweed suit with leather elbow patches and sported a flamboyant paisley bow tie over a check Viyella shirt.

On the walls of his cluttered office were a couple of maps of ancient Britain, a picture of him shaking hands with Prince Philip, and a framed legend proclaiming: A LANGUAGE IS A

DIALECT WITH AN ARMY AND A NAVY – DR JOHNSON.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Gosh, right, hmmnnn.’ His cherrywood desk was littered with biscuit crumbs, and more avalanched down now as he reached out, offering the pack of digestives to John, then took one himself and dunked it in his coffee. ‘Quite fascinating!’

One of the things John particularly liked about Morley Park was that, unlike at the universities where he had worked before where the average age was around twenty, making him horribly aware of his advancing years, the average age here was closer to fifty. It was a good feeling to be among the younger members of staff, even if only by a narrow margin. He chewed a mouthful of biscuit.

Reggie Chetwynde-Cunningham had been knighted some years earlier for services to national security. In his previous post he had worked at the Government Communications Headquarters, developing computer programs that could pick out the voices of known terrorists from among millions of landline and cellphone calls monitored daily. Now he headed a department on the Morley Park campus developing systems for controlling machines through either thought or speech.

‘Play the original again!’

A complex hi-fi system behind the linguist kicked into life, and moments later the crystal-clear voices of Luke and Phoebe filled the room.

First Phoebe. ‘Obm dekcarh cidnaaev hot nawoy fedied oevauoy.’

Luke responded, ‘Eka foe eipnod hyderlseh deegsomud.’

Then Phoebe’s voice again. ‘Olaaeo evayeh gibra snahele.’

‘Stop!’ Chetwynde-Cunningham barked. Then, looking at John and beaming, he said, ‘This is pretty impressive, you know.’

‘What language is it? Have you identified it?’

The linguist shook his head. ‘I had a play with it yesterday, actually, got a few of my younger colleagues to listen to it. One, a woman with small children herself. Everyone agreed there are patterns distinctive of language, but no one could put a name to it. Just to be sure, we ran it in on a computer program that can identify every known language in the world – all six thousand, two hundred and seven of them,’ he added with a touch of pride in his voice. ‘But there was no match, and of course there wasn’t going to be!’

‘Why not?’ John sipped some coffee and politely waved away the biscuit pack that the linguist again pushed towards him.

‘Well, you do hear of children born with the ability to speak other languages – people talk about it as evidence of past lives, that sort of stuff,’ he said with a rather dismissive tone. ‘But I’ve never heard a small child speak a foreign language convincingly. Sometimes, as with you and your wife, when the child comes from parents of mixed races, they will pick up smatterings of each of the parents’ languages.’

‘Is there some Swedish in this? My wife and I want-’

The linguist interrupted him with a vehement shake of his head. ‘Not Swedish. There’s no Swedish there.’ He helped himself to another biscuit and suspended it over his coffee cup. ‘Of course, you do get the phenomenon with twins, more usually with identical twins, where they create their own language as a means of excluding their parents – and the outside world in general. This seems to be what’s happening in your case.’

‘Their own language?’

Chetwynde-Cunningham nodded.

‘Can you make any sense of what they’re saying?’ John asked.

‘Oh yes, once you know the key, it’s a doddle – same with any code.’

‘ Code? ’

The linguist turned to his computer. ‘Print original on screen!’ he commanded.

Moments later the words appeared.

Obm dekcarh cidaaev hot nawoy fedied oevauoy.

Eka foe eipnod hyderlseh deegsomud.

Olaaeo evayeh gibra snahele.

John peered at them closely, trying to see if he could spot what the linguist evidently had already. But after a couple of minutes he was forced to concede defeat. ‘I can’t spot the key.’

‘No, well, I’m not surprised. Take a look at the first line.’

John stared at it.

Obm dekcarh cidnaaev hot nawoy fedied oevauoy.

Then the linguist gave another command. ‘Reverse and sort into English!’

Moments later a second line appeared:

You ave o deide f yo wan to hve a andich r cke, Dmbo.