The Boy on the Bridge Read online

  John Sealey is giving her anxious looks but he can’t do any more than that with everyone watching. And they are watching. There just aren’t that many topics of conversation left after more than half a year in the field. Khan is a thrilling enigma to the scientists, probably a source of filthy jokes to the soldiers. She can live with that. She has lived with worse things.

  Something else is nagging at her, though, and she’s just about to figure out what it is when the colonel reappears.

  “Rina,” he says. “Dr. Fournier would like to see you.”

  Of course he would.

  “We’re actually pretty busy with this stuff,” Khan says. “Working up the new samples. It’s time-sensitive. Is it possible I could come along in a little while?”

  Carlisle shakes his head. “Now, please,” he says. “This won’t take long, but you need to come with me, Dr. Khan.”

  Dr. Khan. Such formality. But he’s not freezing her out: he’s giving her a warning. Stay on your toes, don’t relax into this. You’ve still got a lot to lose.

  And she doesn’t dispute that.

  6

  The first time she met Colonel Carlisle, Samrina Khan cordially hated him. She is embarrassed about that now, not least because she is aware of the trope in romantic movies where hate at first sight prefigures an eventual romance. She could no more see the colonel as a potential lover than she could see her own father as one—and when she thinks about it, he resembles her dad in many other ways besides. Strict. Insulated from his own emotions. Fiercely honourable.

  But on that first meeting, he reminded her more of Taz, the character from the old Warner cartoons who is a perpetual whirl of objectless fury.

  She was in London. The Centre for Synthetic Biology at Imperial College. She was working on an epidemiological model for the hungry disease that would allow the government to predict its spread with greater than 90 per cent accuracy. And the world was way ahead of her, already falling apart.

  Fortress America was still standing, just about, or at least still broadcasting. Most of the broadcast content consisted of bullish proclamations about the robustness of the newly relocated federal government, operating out of the Sangre de Cristo range in Southern Colorado. Eleven thousand feet up and enjoying the bracing mountain air! But the southern hemisphere had fallen silent and Europe was rolling up from the east to the west like a cheap carpet. The Channel Tunnel had been filled in with seventy thousand tons of cement, which sounded like a lot but turned out to be too little too late.

  The hungries were just there. Everywhere at once. Wherever you tried to draw the line they were already inside it.

  But Khan had always imagined that London would be the last redoubt. When you retreated, you retreated from the bailey to the motte, into the innermost sanctum. So the order to evacuate the city took her by surprise. Apparently the innermost sanctum was Codename Beacon, a fortified camp on the south coast between Dover and Brighton. All remaining government offices were relocating there, effective immediately. Presumably a fortified camp was easier to defend than a city that covered six hundred square miles and had nine major motorways by way of a front door.

  By this time, all the surviving doctors and biologists were government employees, their private contracts annulled or bought up, so “all remaining government offices” included Khan. She was given an assembly point and a time to arrive there with one suitcase and one piece of hand luggage.

  She went right on working. Her model was almost done and there was no guarantee whatsoever that she would be able to get computer time at Codename Middle of Fucking Nowhere. As the desks around her emptied, she just threw herself with more determination into her work. The peace and quiet were even welcome in a way. No distractions. She had already been sleeping on the couch in her office for three weeks, so she didn’t have to venture out into the hazardous and eerily silent streets. She lived on tins of Heinz lentil soup and family-sized packets of crisps.

  Until the colonel came and forced her out at gunpoint.

  Well, “gunpoint” was something of an exaggeration, but he had a gun. He had soldiers. He was in a state of barely contained rage and he told her that if she didn’t come of her own free will she would be handcuffed and taken away under arrest.

  Khan told him to drop dead and kept on entering data.

  Carlisle wasn’t kidding. The cuffs were forthcoming. Two burly soldiers took Khan away from her desk, from her data, and despite her screams of protest they didn’t give her time to record a back-up. The internet had long since gone from being patchy to not being a thing, so her months of work stayed where they were and she was taken south.

  She was honest enough to admit to herself—eventually—that nothing much was lost by this. The research was worthless. The worst-case scenarios had already become realities. She had been clinging to her spreadsheets and models the way a child clings to a security blanket. But being kidnapped for her own good still pissed her off.

  She didn’t register the colonel’s name right away, but she had heard of the Fireman. Everybody had. The man who burned half of Hertfordshire, who rained more napalm down on the home counties than America rained on Vietnam without causing the hungries even to miss a meal. He looked the part. And she had reason enough to hate him, even if he hadn’t just erased a year of her life with a wave of his hand.

  The hate was tempered, though, as they tacked across London. Picking up Khan and two other Imperial College staff had taken the colonel two miles out of his way. He had missed his transport. The four of them had to trek along the Westway to Hammersmith to join another refugee column. They met hungries three times, the third time en masse. The colonel stood his ground alongside his men, aiming low in kneecapping sweeps so the attackers in the forefront of the charge fell and became a barricade against those coming on behind.

  They never found the column they were meant to meet. It had disappeared, hundreds of men and dozens of vehicles just swallowed up and gone. Lost in a city, a world, that had burned up all its history and gone back to being pure jungle. Colonel Carlisle assembled his own column of scavenged and repurposed cars and trucks, and led them south. “Five weeks on the march,” one of the privates said, with a mixture of awe and exasperation. “He doesn’t stop. He just keeps saying we’ll sleep when we’re dead.”

  Which was probably a little over-optimistic, these days.

  They were the last ones to make it out of London. On the evidence of their own nightmare journey to the coast, there was nobody left in there to save.

  Later, Khan learned that Carlisle had made the burn runs in Hertfordshire under protest—a protest that he had taken all the way to the chiefs of staff. They told him to carry out his orders and he did. Then he resigned his commission, although the top brass twisted his arm until he took it up again—and then punished him for his presumption by putting him in charge of the evacuation while they sat in the war room in Codename Beacon moving counters around on situation charts.

  That was where the colonel’s anger came from: the disconnect between the orders he was being given and the situation on the ground. The endless missed opportunities and avoidable screw-ups. The burn runs did nothing but kill innocents and destroy essential roads. London should have been evacuated by air, but the army wouldn’t release the helicopters because they were technically assigned to combat units. Most of the decisions were coming days or weeks too late.

  But Carlisle still followed the orders he was given, the bad ones included. Khan wondered even then what it would take for him to break that habit, given that the end of the world hadn’t been enough to do it.

  She’s wondering the same thing now as she follows him into the engine room. As he punctiliously salutes the worthless man sitting in the room’s only chair. Alan Fournier. A wandering arse cut loose from Beacon’s large intestine. A man whose shortcomings as a scientist and as a human being are balanced by a limitless capacity for …

  The word she is heading towards is obedience, but she doe
sn’t want to concede any point of comparison between Fournier and the colonel. She settles for time-serving, amends it to licking boots. Yes, it’s true that both men do what they’re told. But the colonel has a moral compass. Dr. Fournier just has an eagerness to please.

  The engine room isn’t really a room, any more than the turret is a room. It’s an inspection space, just wide enough for an engineer to work in. It’s so small that the cowling that covers Rosie’s engine is divided into panels, allowing it to be removed in stages. If you took it off in one piece, there would be nowhere to put it and no way of getting it out of the room into the lab beyond.

  But there is space, just about, for Dr. Fournier to have squeezed in a folding table, which he makes believe is a desk. He is sitting behind it now. Khan has to stand. The colonel doesn’t, because Fournier dismisses him with a curt nod of thanks.

  Despite his strict adherence to military discipline, Carlisle rests his hand on Khan’s shoulder for a moment before he leaves: a reminder, in case she needs one, that she has friends outside this room.

  Fournier gives no sign of having noticed. “Close the door, please,” he tells Khan. His thin, ascetic face is solemn, almost architectural with self-conscious dignity. Sweat sticks his hair to his forehead, undercutting the effect. The engine room is uncomfortably hot, but Khan is sure some of the sweat is because he’s been fretting about this conversation ever since he decided to ask her the million-dollar question (Is that a baby in your belly, Dr. Khan, or did you blow your diet?) straight out, yes or no, and she gave the wrong answer.

  For a moment, the strong aversion she feels for the civilian commander gives way to pity. Fournier has so many fears, and what he’s doing now combines most of them. Fear of losing the respect and/or the affection of the crew. Fear of meeting a challenge that will be too strong for him, and will break him. Fear of seeming weak, or cruel, or indecisive. Fear, always, of being judged unfit for the job he has been given. The sad thing is that if he is unfit, it’s the fear that makes him that way. It makes him second-guess himself. He could follow his instincts in almost any direction and be a better leader than he is now.

  Fournier gestures at the hand-held recorder on the table in front of him. “You should know that I’m taping this,” he tells Khan unnecessarily. “Obviously we can’t report in to Beacon just now, but the sound file will go on your record.” It’s quite a grandiose claim when they’re all the way out here in the wilds of Scotland, four hundred miles from the last human enclave in the United Kingdom. There are computers on board, but there are no satellites left in the sky to bounce digital signals from one end of the world to the other. The file will stay on the little hand-held until they get back home, if home is even still there, and then if anyone gives a damn it will be uploaded onto a server somewhere.

  And promptly forgotten, more than likely. Beacon, if it’s still in business, has bigger problems on its plate right now. And they might even solve one or two of them if Fournier would just leave them to get on with their work. Khan tries to shut that line of thought down. She doesn’t want to get angry: anger will make her careless, and she might say something stupid.

  “Dr. Khan,” Fournier says. He seems not to like the sound of it because he tries again. “Rina. Over the past few weeks it’s become impossible to ignore the fact that you’ve been gaining weight. Around your—” he gestures. “Your middle. I didn’t want to pry, but the well-being of this crew is in my hands. So yesterday I asked you if you were pregnant. I’m going to ask you again now, for the record.”

  Khan waits. She’s not going to make this easy for him.

  “Are you pregnant?” Fournier demands at last, when he realises that she is waiting for the actual question to be repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “Which puts you in breach of the mission statement you accepted and signed to when you came aboard.”

  “No,” Khan says. “It doesn’t.”

  “You received the same orders as the rest of us. You accepted, as we all did, that there would be absolutely no fraternisation, absolutely no emotional or physical bonding, between any of the members of this crew. You knew that we were going to be in the field for more than a year. You knew that a pregnancy, if it forced us to return to Beacon early, would be disastrous. Yet you still decided to indulge in unprotected sex.”

  Indulge, Khan thinks. Right. That’s what we did. That frantic fumble was a wild indulgence. And by the way how can you miss the fact that Dr. Akimwe is banging Private Phillips right under your nose every night and most days? No risk of pregnancy there, though, so looking the other way is the better part of valour.

  “And when you realised you were pregnant, as you must have done several months ago, you didn’t tell me.”

  “No,” Khan agrees. “I’m sincerely sorry about that.”

  She sincerely isn’t. She’s sorry that she let her guard down. Sorry that she didn’t think about consequences. But she’s not sorry she kept the secret. Six months ago they would still have been close enough to Beacon to turn around and take her home. She has to be here, however difficult here is. She wants and needs to be a part of this mission. And her presence secured Stephen’s, which she still believes will turn out—at some point, in some way—to be crucial.

  Dr. Fournier doesn’t acknowledge the apology in any case. Khan wonders if he’s working to a script he’s prepared in advance. “This is a disciplinary offence, Rina,” he says, “and I’m going to have to write it up as one. I’m also obliged to ask you to give me the name of the father.”

  Khan says nothing.

  “Dr. Khan, I said you have to tell me who the child’s father is.”

  “No, I don’t.” She takes a deep breath. She is about to lie, and it doesn’t sit well with her. She would prefer to throw the truth in the civilian commander’s teeth and see how he copes with it. But she can’t just consult her own preferences here. Other people are involved. “I was already pregnant when we left Beacon,” she says. “I realised the truth a month later, and you’re right that I should have told you then. I was afraid to. I didn’t want to be responsible for aborting the mission.”

  Fournier stares at her, affronted. “That’s ridiculous,” he protests. “That would mean you’re seven months …” A strained pause completes the sentence.

  “Seven months gone? Yes, Dr. Fournier. Thank you. I’m perfectly capable of counting backwards.” And the calculation isn’t wrong by more than a week. She and John fell into each other’s arms only a few days out from Beacon. It was the relief of getting away from that place. The explosive derepression. They might as well have been drunk.

  Fournier frowns. “It’s hardly conceivable …” he protests, and—conception being precisely the issue—stumbles headlong into another silence.

  “I’m happy to submit to any tests or inquiries you want to order when we get back,” Khan declares. She’s happy enough to say it, anyway. There are no tests that will settle the issue, and she’ll take her chances on an inquiry. The way things are going, Fournier’s lease is unlikely to last any longer than the mission. Beacon doesn’t reward failure.

  The commander knows that, too. But what can he do? Order her shot, theoretically, since the Beacon Muster and the civilian government have joint control of the mission. But short of the nuclear option, he’s got nothing. The colonel was right about that. And shooting her would be such an outrageously stupid move that she doesn’t even feel scared. They’re short-handed already, running out of time and options and ideas. Not a good time to lose one member of the team and traumatise the rest.

  But she has underestimated Dr. Fournier. He has one last shot left in his locker. Four shots, actually, and the locker in question is the medicine locker. The four packages must have been sitting on his knee all this time. He lays them out on the flimsy folding table now as though the two of them have been playing poker all this time and he’s putting down a pat hand.

  Laminaria in a big, bulky box.

  Oxytocin pil
ls.

  Misoprostol suppositories.

  And Digoxin, in a tiny plastic bottle like a nasal spray—with an eight-inch hypodermic syringe taped to it for ease of use.

  Khan stares at the pharmacopoeia, at first in polite surprise and then in queasy wonder.

  “You’re kidding me,” she says without inflection.

  “No,” Fournier says. “I’m not. A late-term abortion in this instance is the only course of action that—”

  “Late term? That’s what you call this?”

  “—the only course of action that will guarantee your safety and allow the mission to proceed in—”

  Khan’s incredulous laugh cuts through the mealy words. She shakes her head. “Shut up,” she says. “My God! Shut up right now.”

  “Rina.” Fournier chides her, seriously affronted. “I’m thinking of you here.”

  That makes her laugh again. “Then think of someone else!” She picks up the ampoule of Digoxin strapped to its little rocket-ship hypodermic, holds it up for him to see. “You think I didn’t consider an abortion?” she asks him. “Seriously? You think that never occurred to me? Seven weeks out, in Luton … right after I found out, I got the methotrexate out of the cabinet and I sat there in my bunk with two little white pills in one hand and a glass of water in the other. I thought it through, Dr. Fournier, and I decided not to go for it. So it’s not likely I’d wait until my baby is almost ready to be born and then stick a needle in its chest to induce a fucking heart attack.”

  It’s a heartfelt speech and she holds to every word of it, but Fournier tries one last blustering end-run. He puts on a consultative face and leans forward across the table, like a hanging judge who wants to discuss drop heights and thicknesses of rope. “Until we can re-establish contact with Beacon, Rina, I’m the sole authority on board Rosie. I’m suggesting that you do this for your own good and for the good of the rest of the crew. A baby will divert resources and distract us from the job we’ve undertaken to do. On my authority as mission commander—”