‘Just tell me where it is.’
But the doctor had already given it away. His eyes had flicked towards the left.
‘Thank you,’ Sampson said.
He pushed the doctor to the ground and knelt on his chest. He squeezed Twigger’s nose between forefinger and thumb and clamped a hand over his mouth. The doctor’s eyes were wide, pleading. The monkeys gazed down from their cage. Eventually, Dr Twigger stopped trying to struggle. Sampson had hoped he might feel something at the moment of the doctor’s death – not sympathy or sadness, necessarily, words he’d looked up in the dictionary and tried to understand – but something.
As always, he felt nothing.
Aware that he’d wasted precious seconds getting the combination out of the doctor – next time, he’d just go for the testicles; that always worked quickly – he opened the freezer and removed the vials containing the AG-769 virus and stored them in a padded wallet which he kept in his inside pocket. Back in the car he would transfer them to a portable freezer. He picked up the computer hard drive and realised he’d almost forgotten something. He took the animal rights leaflet with the picture of the cat out of his back pocket and left it lying on the dead doctor’s chest.
In the office, he opened the safe and removed the backup disks that contained the crucial data.
He exited the building and walked through the darkness towards his car.
As he got in, one of his two mobile phones rang. It was his second phone. Only one person had this number. Was Gaunt checking up on him to make sure he’d done what he’d said he would? The arsehole. He’d never let him down before.
‘I’m done,’ he snapped as he answered the call.
The voice on the other end was calm. ‘Excellent. I knew you would. But that’s not what I’m calling about.’
‘No?’
‘No. I’ve got another urgent job for you. We’ve just had a tip-off about an old . . . patient who’s just returned to the UK.’
‘Right.’
‘Her name’s Kate Maddox.’
Cold panic flooded Kate’s insides as she entered the hotel room. This couldn’t be real.
‘Jack? Jack!’ She cried out his name. Where was he? She started to repeat his name in her mind over and over as she stood in the centre of the room, turning in a slow circle, her hand on her brow. In a kind of trance, she opened the bathroom door, looked inside. Stupidly – or, at least, she would think it was stupid when she looked back later – she checked the closet and behind the sofa, as if he might be hiding there, waiting to spring out and yell, ‘Boo!’ She felt suspended in time, waiting for reality to kick back in, for this strange, slow-motion sickness to pass.
A second later, she sprang back to life.
She flung the door open and pelted down the corridor towards the lift, her coat billowing behind her. She thumped the button, jabbed it, jabbed it again, stamped her foot and muttered, ‘Come on, come on, fucking come on,’ as she waited for the red numbers above the lift door to change. The numbers descended – 9, 8, 7 – with sadistic, agonising slowness. She was about to give up and take the stairs when the lift arrived. The doors pinged open and revealed a middle-aged woman in a fur coat. The woman didn’t appear to be in much of a hurry.
Kate reached into the lift, took the woman by the elbow and pulled her firmly but gently into the hallway, stepping past her and pressing the close button, the woman’s mouth frozen in a circle of surprise as the doors slid shut.
If she thought jumping and down would have made the lift descend faster, Kate would have done it. Scenarios from dark films and newspaper headlines played out in her imagination. Jack, in the hands of a paedophile. Jack, floating face down in the freezing Thames. But these images passed quickly. Terrifying as they were, these things were not her number one fear. She hadn’t woken every night for the last week dreading strangers. Her fear wore a familiar face; utterly familiar. The face which had been on the pillow beside her most mornings for the past decade, since she had promised to love, honour and obey him forever, in a little church in a Boston chapel.
People broke promises all the time. The thought passed fleetingly through a deep seam in her brain, and was gone again, pressed out by the panic of Jack’s disappearance.
Could Vernon really have found them so quickly? Could he really have figured out what she was planning and come looking for her? She didn’t have time to consider the answer. The lift doors sprang open and she dashed out – straight into a Japanese businessman who was waiting with his luggage by the lift. Arms windmilling, he toppled backwards and Kate stumbled, losing a shoe, but she was soon on her feet and running towards the desk. The receptionists stared at her. Everyone in the lobby stared at her. She didn’t give a damn.
She slapped her palms on the desk. ‘Call the police.’
‘Madam, what’s the matter?’ The chief receptionist, with hair tied back in an efficient ponytail, spoke softly.
‘My son. Have you seen my son?’
‘What does he look like?’ The receptionist seemed like she was used to dealing with hysterical guests and spoke to Kate as if she were reporting a dry-cleaning disaster. Kate wanted to reach across the desk and shake her. Her maternal instincts had taken complete control. Nobody, nothing else mattered.
The receptionist said, ‘Can you describe . . .?’
Kate didn’t allow her to finish. ‘He was with one of your babysitters in the hotel room and now he’s gone. They’ve gone.’ Her voice trembled on the last word as she tried to stop herself from crying. She needed to be strong. And these idiots didn’t get it. Another wave of panic crashed through her, nearly knocking her off her feet.
The receptionists exchanged worried looks. One of them said, ‘I’ll get the manager.’
The main receptionist said, ‘What’s your room number, madam?’
Kate shook her head. ‘502. My son has been kidnapped. For god’s sake – just call the police!’ She raised her voice with her last sentence, her words wobbling on the last few words.
The receptionist touched her forearm. ‘Madam, how old is your son? What does he look like? We might have seen him.’
She took a deep breath, tried to calm herself. ‘He’s six. He’s got light brown hair and he was wearing a . . .’ She paused. What had he been wearing? She pictured him sitting on the bed watching TV, already in his pyjamas. She’d made him get ready for bed after his bath because she hadn’t liked the idea of the babysitter undressing him. And now, right now, what was the babysitter doing to him? Betraying him. Betraying both of them. How much had Vernon paid her to do it? Kate fumed inwardly. Where was he?
‘He’s wearing orange Finding Nemo pyjamas, with a big clown fish on the front, you know, from the movie . . .’
The receptionist nodded over Kate’s shoulder. ‘Like that boy over there?’
Kate swung round.
A small figure in orange pyjamas with an open denim jacket over the top of them was tumbling gleefully out of the lift, still clutching Billy the robot. He turned immediately back and pressed the button on the elevator’s side panel as if to summon it, although it was already standing there open, with the babysitter waiting indulgently inside. He was laughing at something the babysitter was saying.
‘Jack!’
Kate ran across the lobby. The moment she reached him she scooped him up and hugged him so tight he shouted, ‘Ow!’
‘Oh thank God . . .’ She turned to the babysitter. ‘What