Ned Beauman - Glow

‘What?’

He doesn’t want to say any more. If he’s wrong, it will make her suspicious. A real Nostrand executive wouldn’t be so impressionable that this training facility would make him hallucinate. But he has to know.

‘I expect it was just a trick of the light. . but is it possible that I saw an animal?’ He clears his throat. ‘A fox?’

Belasco nods. ‘You’ve got sharp eyes, Mr Rose. When the US military was setting up its first simulated Iraqi villages, the soldiers told them it wouldn’t be realistic without the animals. Donkeys, goats, dogs. . They even got camels, I heard. We try to match that standard. So, yes, we have, uh, we have foxes, and we’re in the process of sourcing some pigeons.’

Raf has spent only about twenty minutes with Belasco, so it’s not as if he knows her very well, but there was something about how she stumbled over her words just now that made him wonder if she was telling a lie of her own. ‘Now, if I may, I’m going to show you an example of a core scenario installation that we have up and running at the moment.’

This turns out to be one of the flats on the second floor of the council block on the left. As they follow the open walkway down to number 14, a smell reaches Raf that is surely too vigorous in its tang to have been pumped out of an artificial scent machine. He looks at Belasco, and she’s wrinkling her nose, but also staring rigidly ahead, almost as if it’s a bodily odour that she’s too embarrassed to acknowledge. She unlocks the front door of the flat, and once inside Raf realises that somewhere in the swirl of the stench is that toothy peat musk he remembers from the fox on the night bus the weekend before last — but there’s also tamarind and bleach and dung and a lot more, which makes it almost the only stimulus he’s encountered since he set foot in this depot that has the same sensory complexity as real things have out there in the unbounded world.

‘Our associate here is playing the role of a high-value target,’ Belasco says, leading him through to the kitchen. A slender Burmese guy stands at the sink soaping his hands, and it feels strange to walk in like this without even nodding hello, but Raf isn’t sure whether it’s like a theatre and the actors have to pretend you’re not there. This ‘core scenario installation’ has been arranged to look like a makeshift laboratory: cluttering the counters are flasks, beakers, burettes, and funnels — many of them clamped upside down to steel ring stands and interconnected by loops of tubing, like the renal system of an android — as well as plastic tubs, latex gloves, rubber stoppers, paper towels, cotton wool, coffee filters, a couple of electric hotplates, and all sorts of other props. On the table is a laptop; on top of the fridge is the exact same brand of cheap radio that Raf has in his own kitchen, tuned to a station that in the circumstances seems pretty likely to be Myth FM; and on the windowsill is a sort of DIY incense burner made from two empty cans of Rubicon guava juice that have been glued end to end with extra holes drilled in the lids and half the sides cut off. It seems as if the set of a ‘core scenario installation’ is dressed with an especially close attention to detail — if you’re trying to evoke a believable world it’s natural that you spend more time on the sections that people are going to pay attention to — but that still doesn’t quite explain Belasco’s weird reaction to the odour.

‘This apartment has even more cameras per hundred square feet than the rest of the facility,’ she says, ‘but they’re all concealed, for realism. We can analyse every tactical simulation with incredible specificity. The action couldn’t be clearer if it was in chess notation.’

Now the Burmese guy is filling an electric kettle from the tap. The linoleum tiles on the floor have a hexagon pattern.

‘So what’s he supposed to be making here?’ says Raf. ‘Explosives?’ If this is how Lacebark have chosen to array their simulated high-value target, then presumably at least one of their real high-value targets is believed to be hiding out in a real laboratory somewhere.

‘For the purposes of the tactical exercises, all that matters is that there may be volatile chemicals in the apartment.’

Raf rehearses his next question in his head a few times before he voices it. ‘I’m curious to know how much evidence you have that a tactical exercise in a controlled environment like this can translate to concrete results out on the street.’

‘Do you mean from our own experience? I don’t have direct access to a lot of that information. But based on what I’ve heard from Lacebark personnel in London, it’s hard to overestimate how helpful this facility has been to prepare for their recent operations.’

How far can he push this? ‘Those operations. .’

‘Obviously I’m not at liberty. .’

‘Right. Sure.’

‘Is there anything else you’d like to see?’

Raf shakes his head. ‘This is already a lot to take in,’ he says, truthfully.

As they leave the kitchen, Raf turns back for one last look, and by accident he makes eye contact with the Burmese guy, who is standing there watching them go while the kettle boils. For an uncomfortable second they have both broken character, although if any coded signal passed between them, Raf wouldn’t be able to say what it was. He follows Belasco back down the stairs and out into the ‘street’. Rain is still trickling from the trees.

‘How long are you staying in London?’ she says.

Raf begins to relax. The tour has reached its epilogue of rote small talk. Now all he has to do is get to the exit. ‘Just until tomorrow morning.’

‘And then more travel?’

Raf remembers that town she mentioned earlier. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Straight back to Fehedou.’

Belasco frowns. ‘But I understood that Nostrand pulled out of Fehedou right after the truck bomb.’

A puff of liquid nitrogen in Raf’s guts. How bad was that slip? He can’t tell. But now Belasco is looking straight at him, and he knows that just because he’s got this far without fucking up, it won’t necessarily keep her from leaving him with a security guard while she calls Nostrand to check his credentials. He thinks of the order of service sheet in his pocket. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘We did.’ If he tries to explain away the mistake he’ll just make another one. But Belasco has a fontanelle of her own, and Raf’s best option is to put his thumb on it. ‘By the way, Denise, the core scenario installation you showed me: I was wondering about the smell. Is that all artificial too?’

His guess is that if he’d asked any other question, Fehedou would still have been on Belasco’s mind. But instead she looks as if now she just wants this conversation to conclude as fast as possible.

‘Sure,’ she says. ‘All artificial. We use the latest Biopac Scent Delivery System, with sixteen cartridge slots. I guess it might have been a little, uh, a little too thick in the air today!’

She smiles, and Raf smiles warmly back. Inside his polished black shoes all ten of his toes are clenched so hard they feel as if they might snap off.

4.15 p.m.

It’s about glow. It’s got to be about glow. This is what Raf says to himself as he unclips Rose’s leash after a trip to the Iranian corner shop for booze and dog food. Back at Lacebark’s doll’s house, when Belasco showed him the fake laboratory, the reason he asked about bombs in particular was that news footage from the War on Terror was looping in his head, satellite maps riddled with ‘black sites’ like tumours on a CT scan. But Belasco didn’t confirm that and he shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions. Instead, he needs to get to his computer and do some homework to batten his new hunch. He’s trying not to think too hard about the risk he took today, because now that the adrenaline’s turned to vinegar and he’s safely back in his flat, there’s some chance he might start whimpering to himself. And it’s funny that for comfort he’s turned instinctively to a bottle of whisky and a faithful hound, which makes him feel like some sort of red-faced country squire. But no one has invented a pill yet that does the job so well.