Nikki Owen - The Killing Files

‘Someone is on my property.’

Undisclosed confinement location—present day

I don’t know how much time has passed. I blacked out, only coming to now as somewhere in the room a noise clicks high in the air, one, two, three, four.

My body instinctively bends forward, brain attempts to gauge the level of danger and then I remember: Patricia.

I call her name, yell into the abyss of black. There is a click, another trip of light mixed with darkness and then, finally, a voice, singular, pure.

‘Doc? Doc? Are you there?’

She’s okay! ‘Patricia?’

‘Doc!’

‘What is your status? Are you injured?’

‘No. No, I don’t think so, but … my leg—it hurts. Help me, Doc.’

I open my mouth to ask her specific diagnostics, but the air is so black and hot, so suddenly suffocating that it feels as if a palm is being pressed into my nose and mouth, an acrid taste of metal poisoning my lips. I struggle hard against it. I have to know where we are, and yet nothing here seems to make sense, but I do it. My conditioning, my training, despite my horror at it, kicks in and I begin to function on cognitive thought.

‘Doc! Doc, where are we?’

Click. The sound, there again on the surface of the room—it makes me halt.

‘Doc—what was that?’

Tap, tap, tap. My heart rate rockets. ‘Patricia, stay still.’

I listen. It’s like the beak of a robin on a window pane.

‘Who is there?’ I ask to the thick stench of the room. Click, tap. Click, tap. My breathing becomes fast, shallow. ‘Who is there?’

But no answer comes back. I slap away the fear and strain my neck, try to catch sight of something, anything, but just as my eyes clear, just as they begin to see through the haze, the click sounds again and something happens inside me.

A heat, a surge of liquid in my veins burns its way through me, scalding one second then freezing the next, and an ice-blade of pain stabs me. I cry out.

‘Doc! Doc, what is it?’

My mouth opens to yell, but I am mute, a primal fear taking over, a tsunami of fight or flight, the words, ‘You are in danger! You are in danger!’ screaming over and over in my head, and I must be moaning, groaning, because I can hear Patricia shouting at me to stay awake.

My eyelids vibrate, brain attempts to calibrate a connection, find an answer to what is happening to me, but the codes, numbers, solutions that instinctively inhabit my head are all jumbled up, as if I have been shaken like some unwanted toy then discarded on the ground and kicked under a bed to gather dust and wither.

‘Patricia,’ I gasp, my chest ready to explode. ‘Escape. I need you to escape.’

‘I don’t … My leg aches, Doc, but I think I can …’ A grunt, a scrape. ‘My hand—it’s free.’

‘Does that mean …’ The searing pain is so hot in my chest now, it burns and I have to force myself to concentrate once more on my eyes. ‘Does that mean, if your hand is free you can be mobile?’ And then I spot something: a lick of light. There! In the corner …

‘Doc, it won’t … I don’t know. Oh, God. My leg feels numb.’

The single sliver of light disappears and I try to reach out, grab where it was but nothing moves. A hazy, grey film is slowly bleeding over my lenses.

‘Something is happening to me …’ I swallow. ‘Drugged,’ I slur. ‘I must be drugged.’

‘Are we …’ Patricia’s words waver. ‘Does that mean we’re at the Project? At their facility?’ There is a shake in her voice, a tremble.

And then I hear it: water. A trickle of water, a rush of liquid. I shake as a terrifying thought tears into me: we are drowning. We are not actually in a room or a cell or in a locked-away facility, but we are drowning, almost dead already and this haze, this grey film, this distant cry of Patricia’s Irish voice that I can only just detect is the last twisted haemorrhage of my lie of a life. The Project have found me, are to kill me and now this is it, here: death.

‘Can you feel any water around you?’

‘What? I … Wait.’ A scream, a gurgled cry. ‘Doc, I’m hurt!’

Panic swells. ‘Drag yourself free. Quick!’

‘I don’t want to die!’

‘Stay awake!’

‘I … I can’t breathe.’

I struggle to cough, try anything—a lick of my lips, a last gulp of oxygen—anything to dismantle the rolling tide as, to my side, Patricia groans.

‘Pull your arms up!’ I shout. ‘See if there is anything you can grip on to.’

‘There’s nothing! Only a … Oh, Jesus, help! It hurts! Doc, help, please …’

Her voice stops, abrupt, a TV being switched off. ‘Patricia?’

Nothing.

‘Patricia! Patricia, shout to me that you are …’

I stop breathing.

My hands form two fists, knuckles white, chest bursting, ribs ready to crack, as my mind prepares, because this is it. The final seconds of me, of my life. Dr Maria Martinez.

Gone.

Salamancan Mountains, Spain .

34 hours and 32 minutes to confinement

I shut down the alarm and haul in a breath.

‘What’s going on, Maria?’

‘Wait.’ My eyes remain locked on the computer screen, but my vest has become sweaty and it itches my skin. I scratch my stomach, up down, unable to stop as the nerves seep out.

‘Maria, for God’s sake, what’s happening?’

‘The red icon is flashing.’

My skin flushes, feels as if it’s burning, nerve endings so sensitive to the change in the fabric. It is too much to bear. I rip off my vest, throw it to the floor. The relief is almost overwhelming.

‘Anyone on the cameras?’ Balthus says now.

I flip open the surveillance programme then pause. The reality of what could happen slams me in the face and I recount Abel’s binomial theorem to focus my mind.

No matter how many times I scan the CCTV film, it comes back blank, eight square, grey, live pictures of the fields and walls around the villa. No trespassers, no intelligence officers, just everything as it was before I stepped inside the house.

‘The cameras are displaying no signs of intruders.’

My body leans back as my mind attempts to get a handle on what is happening, already planning ahead on what I may need to do. As I think, a whip of wind lashes at a funnel of cypress trees outside, sending a swarm of starlings scurrying into the sky, and it is so sudden, so fast and loud that I jump, slapping my hand to my chest.

‘Maria, is everything all right? Talk to me.’

The starlings rush away, their swarm temporarily blackening the sky.

‘Birds,’ I say.

‘What?

The last remaining starling flies into a candy floss cloud. ‘I was frightened by a murmuration of birds.’

‘A mumur-what …?’

I stare at the now empty branches outside, wiping the sweat from my face. The air is static. For a moment, I swear a shadow glides over the sand-coloured earth, its hazy contours rippling over the deep green cypress tree giants that guard the perimeter of the villa, but when I blink and rub my eyes it is instead the tall, scorched grass reeds I see, their long, stretched shadows swaying innocently in the morning air, but each movement of the reeds vibrates in my eardrums. I take the heels of my palms, bang them to the sides of my head to try and dislodge the sound.

‘Maria?’

One more hit and the reed rush will be gone …

‘Maria? Maria, answer me.’

Bang. Done. ‘What?’

‘Did you install the tripwire system I told you about?’

‘Yes.’

‘And it’s not flagging anything up?’

‘Negative.’

‘Then what could have triggered the surveillance? Could there have been a system error?’