The Second Cure Read online

‘No, I’d rung her.’ She paused, realising that failing to explain why would make things worse. ‘I wanted to know about Shadrack. He got bail when she’d been sure he wouldn’t.’

  He concentrated on spooning more raita onto his plate. ‘Well, that’s okay, then, right? He’s out on bail – maybe it means he’s got a shot at getting off.’

  ‘I thought it meant that maybe she was trying to tell me there was something she couldn’t talk about on the phone. In case it was bugged. She also said something weird about not believing all the news you hear …’

  He raised a cynical eyebrow, then pointed to the curry. ‘So, what do you think? Not enough chili? I don’t think there’s enough.’

  She felt a wash of rage that he was so dismissive. The charges against Shadrack could put him away for decades, but he was more focussed his bloody curry. She ignored the tightness in her chest and said nothing more.

  Over the next two days, the various rumours began online. Shadrack had killed himself and his body had been found washed up on a beach on Hinchinbrook Island. He’d been taken by submarine from Cairns Harbour and had been spotted in South America. He’d been rearrested and was even now being tortured by the CSSA. Charlie had her vocomm alert her to each trend, while she pretended to Richard to be merrily unconcerned.

  Finally, the Effenberg government broke its silence. She and Juliette were working side by side in the lab when the alert came through. ‘Shadrack,’ said Charlie, and subvocced the command to have the video illuminate on the smartwall in front of them.

  Brigid appeared, talking to camera. Her image had Juliette’s full attention.

  ‘Shadrack Zinn, prominent neuroscientist and social commentator, is, according to official reports, missing, presumed dead.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Charlie gasped. Juliette grabbed her hand, as Brigid continued.

  ‘On Friday, Dr Zinn was formally charged with counts of blasphemy and sedition, but after being granted bail he drove to an undisclosed beach where he abandoned the van he’d been driving. The signal from his ankle monitor ceased, apparently after Dr Zinn threw himself off a cliff. Government sources say that given the height of the cliff and the rocks below, it is extremely unlikely he could have survived.’

  ‘Charlie, I am so sorry …’

  Charlie shook her head, refusing to believe it. Brigid paused, frowned, and gazed into the camera.

  ‘In the interests of full disclosure, I need to explain my involvement here. I left the courthouse with Shadrack Zinn and a friend of his who’d come to pick him up. I don’t know the friend’s name. It was my hope to interview Shadrack about his arrest and bail, but he told me nothing of significance. Shortly after, he told his friend he wanted to be alone and asked if he could borrow the van. The friend agreed, he and I got out near the Kuranda nature reserve, and we went our separate ways. I got a bus back into town. I haven’t seen him since and have no way of contacting him. I will, of course, give a full statement of my actions to the authorities and cooperate fully with their investigation.’

  ‘Oh, Brigid,’ murmured Juliette.

  ‘This isn’t right,’ said Charlie, staring at Brigid.

  ‘On a personal level,’ said Brigid, ‘I want to say that I wasn’t close to Shadrack Zinn, but I did know him. The world has lost a talented scientist. I’ll return with any further developments. Thanks, and goodbye.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ asked Juliette. ‘I know you cared about him.’

  ‘She’s lying.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Brigid’s lying. He’s not dead.’

  Charlie told her about the boeuf bourguignon and the comment about not trusting the news. ‘She was telling me that something was happening, something she couldn’t disclose. She was telling me about this. He’s not dead.’

  ‘I have to talk with her.’

  ‘You can’t, Juliette. Don’t put more pressure on her. She’s playing a complicated game here.’

  ‘Do you think she knows where he’s gone? Merde, I hope she’s okay.’

  ‘Yep. Brigid and Shadrack.’

  Charlie had summoned the Auto2 to pick her up from the railway station. It was spring, but they were deep in a heatwave that would once have done January proud, and she was carrying some fruit she’d picked up from the farmers’ market. The walk would have been intolerable, and the worry that was oppressing her would have made it even worse. Two days had passed since Brigid’s broadcast and there had been no more news. She and Juliette worked on automatic, unable to concentrate, unable to shrug off their constant questions about what was happening to Shadrack and Brigid.

  As she approached the front door, it didn’t open. Charlie frowned. Grandfather was meant to recognise her presence and open it automatically for her. She put down her shopping bag and put her palm onto the sensor. No response. With a sigh, she delved into her handbag for her back-up keys.

  As she entered, the house lights didn’t turn on. The whole system must have been offline. She turned on her mobile’s torch. Where was Richard? He was meant to be home tonight. And where was Goblin? She crept along the corridor and saw a slice of light beneath the kitchen door.

  She heard laughter. Male laughter.

  She opened the door and there, sitting on a stool, in mid-anecdote, was Shadrack. Richard, leaning on the table with a beer in hand, was laughing like a drain. In the mix of emotions that swamped her, one prevailed: pure relief. Shadrack was safe.

  ‘You’re here!’ she cried. His eyes caught hers. Their gaze was brief, but it said so much.

  ‘Seems that way,’ he said, his lopsided smile looking more endearing than ever. If she’d given herself time to think, she wouldn’t have rushed over and wrapped her arms around him, not in front of Richard, but her mind couldn’t catch up with her emotions.

  ‘But how? How did you get here?’

  Shadrack recounted the story of his escape with the help of the underground, of how Brigid had witnessed his disappearance, and his sea journey down to the Australian coast.

  ‘That’s what Brigid was trying to tell us,’ Richard explained to her. ‘She knew what was happening but couldn’t say. She was probably worried about surveillance.’

  Charlie looked at him with incredulity. Wasn’t that exactly what she’d said to him, exactly what he’d dismissed?

  Shadrack was continuing his tale. ‘I hope you don’t mind my turning up here. Sorry about the house computer.’

  ‘We figured it would be safer, in case he’s being tracked. We’ve turned off Grandfather.’ Richard’s ‘we’ wasn’t lost on Charlie. Suddenly he was great mates with Shadrack.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked. ‘You’ve lost everything, haven’t you? Your lab, your house?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ Shadrack confirmed. ‘I’ve got access to emergency money I’d stashed in an account here. It’ll help me get back on my feet. The underground will get me accommodation. But I’ll be living under the radar for the foreseeable. Don’t want to make trouble for the Australians. They might hand me over if Effenberg makes enough noise.’

  ‘I told him we were more than happy for him to stay here,’ said Richard, mysteriously affable. ‘That’s cool with you, right?’ But it wasn’t really a question.

  ‘But I don’t want to put you two in harm’s way,’ said Shadrack.

  All Charlie wanted to do was hug Shadrack and tell him to stay here forever. She limited herself to a simple, ‘Of course you must stay. There’s no question about it.’

  ‘Anything we can do, mate.’ Richard clapped a hand on Shadrack’s shoulder as he went to the fridge and started pulling out ingredients for dinner.

  That’s when it hit Charlie. This was the sort of heroism Richard could embrace: second-hand. No real risk, but plenty of reflected glory. Shadrack used to be an irritant to him, a former rival, a faint threat. Now, though, he was a hero of the resistance, and he was Richard’s best mate.

  ‘You okay with plenty of chili, Shadrack?’ Richard asked. She groaned inwar
dly. He wasn’t completely beyond competition. Masculine ego as measured by the Scoville scale.

  ‘I’m off to have a bath,’ she told them.

  Southwest of Cairns, Republic of Capricornia

  Leaving her vocomm at home was an exercise in vulnerability. It had been years since Brigid had navigated by a paper map and her skills were rusty. But, worse, she missed the comfort of knowing that if anything went wrong, help was a subvocc away. She didn’t have a natty, shiny little bag like the ones Shadrack and Turing used to stop vocomms’ signals, so she’d put hers on her bedside table and hoped that if anyone were spying on her, they’d assume that she was having a day in bed. At least she hoped they did. She hoped that they weren’t surveilling her more closely. After the Shadrack business, she couldn’t make assumptions.

  Her map had shown her that the lat/long she’d been given translated into a clearing of a hectare or so in what revealed itself to be a densely treed area near Davies Creek. It was located beyond what used to be Barron Gorge National Park – when national parks still existed in this part of the world – and was accessible only by a single dirt road, which ended at what must have once been private land. The road clung to the sides of hills, winding through the terrain, a drop to one side and craggy rocks looming above her on the other. The way ahead flattened, and Brigid drove her little Swift into what was once a clearing but was now overgrown with grasses. She saw the crumbling remains of a stone cottage, a century old, at least, its chimney the only part of the structure unbeaten by the years. It was home to a tussock of grass that emerged from its top, and probably much else. The roof was long gone, two of the four outside walls were collapsed, and the interior was gutted. But it must be the rendezvous point. There was nothing else there and the place gave Brigid the creeps. Whoever had set this up had put effort in finding Capricornia’s most forbidding and lonely spot. Thanks, Deep Throat.

  She arrived half an hour early to get a sense of what to expect. Putting the car back into first gear, she retraced her path along the narrow road, looking for a place to leave it so she could return on foot. Having the car parked in the open made it too obvious should drones be overhead. She could only hope she hadn’t been followed, but what choice did she have? She had to make this meeting. A fire-trail stretched a hundred metres back into the bush and she punished her car’s suspension by easing into a hollow beneath a mat of a prickly vine. A branch scratched her arm as she extricated herself from the driver’s seat and she swore in pain. Her own voice startled her as it punctuated the complete silence around her. Not even insects were calling in the sharp heat of the day. She checked her backpack for notepad and pen, water and sunscreen, put on her hat, and set off along the stony track.

  Back on the dirt road, she realised that should another vehicle – Deep Throat’s vehicle – approach from behind, she’d be immediately visible, and she revisited the wisdom of her plan. If necessary, she could dart sideways into the bushes, she supposed, but saw that the plants there were the same as the one that had caused the raised red stripes on her forearm. She checked her old-school watch. Ten minutes until the appointed time. She increased her pace.

  Once in the clearing, Brigid felt naked to any hidden eyes, human or electronic. A chill of apprehension engulfed her. She broke into a run, her need to get under cover becoming urgent. She reached the chimney and leant into the crook where it connected with the cool stone wall. She tried to remember how to breathe.

  A twig snapped behind her, beyond the wall, and her stomach clenched. He’d got there before her? How? Had he been watching her the whole time? Or was it someone else? Brigid shoved her fear away, stood up straight and walked around the side of the ruined cottage.

  ‘Brigid. Hi.’

  She recognised him immediately. Seth Effenberg, Jack and Marion’s son. The Minister for Health and Foreign Affairs in the Government of the Republic of Capricornia. Wearing a T-shirt. He had the physicality of his father, but more hulking and brooding, and the eyes of his mother. That steely gaze. What had she got herself into?

  ‘Are you alone?’ she asked.

  ‘Yep, take a look.’ He held his arms out in a placating gesture of peace.

  She looked among the remains of the building, walked around it. If anyone else were there, they could be no closer than the bush beyond the clearing.

  She looked back at him and demanded, suspicion clipping her voice, ‘Any recording devices? Transmitters?’

  He glowered, showing nothing of the easy charisma of his early years. ‘I could ask the same of you. So, we could do this with our clothes off so we’re sure neither of us is bugged, or we could just trust each other. What’s it going to be, Brigid?’

  He was angry with her, she thought. And then, no. Not anger. Fear. If he was, as his note had suggested, about to blow the whistle, he had a hell of a lot more to lose than she did.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘So what’s this about, Seth? Or would you prefer “Minister”?’

  He shot her a resentful look, then slid down onto the ground, his back against the inner wall of the shack. Still wary, Brigid remained standing, but dropped her backpack to her feet.

  ‘So,’ he began, and stopped. A long pause, then he shook his head with a self-deprecating shrug. He was avoiding her gaze. ‘I’ve rehearsed this so many times, but now …’

  His tough-guy persona had crumbled and Brigid got a glimpse of the boy at the stage door of the Song of Light. She moved to the wall next to him and sat. She looked out at the view before them. Beyond the grassy clearing the bushy hills gave way to distant dark-green mountains. It was beautiful country. This was the moment. This was what she’d been waiting for. The truth.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said gently.

  ‘You know the vaccine? Well, it stopped working for me. Or it never worked and I’ve only recently got exposed. I don’t know.’ He fell silent again.

  ‘You have symptoms?’ she prompted.

  ‘Oh, yeah. I have symptoms. Synaesthesia like you wouldn’t believe. Not just sounds and colours, but everything. Taste, smell, touch, the lot. That’s not the big one, though.’

  She said nothing, leaving the quietness there for him to fill.

  ‘It started with me losing God. I mean, really losing him. It was like one day he was there, the next he was no more real to me than … unicorns.’

  Brigid nodded. ‘Yeah, I know about that. It’s … pretty overwhelming.’ To say the least. The guilt was still raw.

  He looked at her. ‘You too?’

  ‘No, no, not me. My mother. A long time ago.’ She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t ask, ‘Does it make you want to top yourself, too?’

  ‘But that was just the beginning,’ Seth continued. ‘I started seeing everything differently. I started … I started looking at what we were doing, my family, my father, the government, the church …’

  He was looking at her as though he expected this to be a revelation to her, so she just nodded. The brooding hulk had gone.

  ‘And the thing is, there’s no need for the fear. I know that now. I’m unclean, and now I know that there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m … I’m free, Brigid.’

  And naïve as fuck, she thought. ‘Does anyone else know about this?’

  ‘No. I don’t know who to trust. You’re the only person I’ve talked to.’

  He wasn’t aware of Turing’s underground then. She wondered how many were like him, pretending not to be infected so they could fit in. People assuming that they were alone and terrified to speak because of that. Others quietly vanishing across the borders. Should she tell him about the underground? Should she connect him with them? Having a member of the Effenberg family as one of their members, a senior government minister no less, would be invaluable to them. But as quickly as the idea formed, she dismissed it. For all that Seth seemed to be sincere and unworldly, he was still an Effenberg. This might yet be a ploy designed to manipulate her, to get access to the resistance. She needed to be on her guard.

  �
�There are things I know, Brigid. Things that need to be exposed.’

  Now they were getting to the nub of it, she thought, her excitement rising. ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Bad things. Really bad things. Things that if everyone knew … Well, it’d bring down the government. It’d bring down my father. But I’m not telling you, not till I know you’re in. Not till I know you’ll help get it out there.’

  Brigid looked at him, assessing, weighing up how to play this. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I know you’re taking a risk talking to me. I’m taking a risk talking to you, right? We have to trust each other. But how are you going to get out? Because you’re going to have to, right?’

  ‘I have an idea about that,’ he answered. ‘Do we have a deal?’

  Since Darwin’s initial formulation of evolutionary theory, cooperation within and between species has presented a challenge to the idea of natural selection favouring individuals which maximise their own fitness through ‘selfish’ behaviour. An explanation of intraspecific cooperation and altruism emerged with Hamilton’s proposal of kin selection, whereby it is in the interest of an individual to foster the wellbeing of close kin, as they share a high proportion of genes with that individual.

  This rationale for cooperation does not pertain to interspecific mutualism, however, since the genetic relatedness of different species that interact to benefit each other can only be comparatively small.

  Although Darwin was well aware of interspecific mutuality and expounded upon examples such as the dispersal of seeds by the mistletoe bird, his essential focus was upon explaining evolutionary change by the effects of conflict and competition. ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, Thomas Huxley, emphasised the idea of the Hobbesian war occurring among both humans and other animals, as did the staunchly laissez-faire liberal Herbert Spencer, who coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’.

  The Russian Peter Kropotkin recoiled at the idea of competition and conflict being the essence of evolution as proposed by Darwin and Huxley. Possibly influenced by his political ideology of anarchist communism and his own natural history experiences in eastern Siberia, he argued that cooperation and altruism are fundamental to both human nature and species in general. While Kropotkin himself made little reference to interspecific mutualism, his ideas profoundly influenced subsequent zoologists researching this field, who found the perceived social implications of Darwinism repugnant. It is perhaps not coincidental that the originator of the principle of symbiogenesis, Boris Mikhaylovich Kozo-Polyansky, was a countryman of Kropotkin and educated in Soviet Russia.