Morte Point by Rob Parker

Author:Rob Parker [Parker, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Media
Published: 2018-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

12.

It only took about an hour’s persuasion. I outlined the situation very carefully to Amina, and painted her role in obvious shades, going heavy on the part concerning all that is at stake. She understood, and with a grim frown, agreed. I think that, since she is the person who positively identified the chemical, she feels — unjustly — responsible for it. Her commitment has looked sound and solid since, but we are only an hour in.

I can’t shake the fact that Amina herself is on the payroll of the very government I suspect of betraying the public. I believe she can be trusted, but...

Who really knows?

So, under my gaze, she transferred the contents of the earring to a clear vial from one of the lab cupboards, and placed it in what looked like a kitchen Tupperware container, filled with foam and closed with a clip lid. She cut a nest out of the centre of the foam inside which the vial now sits snugly. I took a quick wash in the centre’s toilets, we grabbed our things, and she put the lab back the way she thought it should be. We took her car, a red Mitsubishi pickup truck with muddied flanks, and we are heading east. Amina is driving. I sit next to her, in the passenger seat, my bag in the footwell between my feet, while a saline drip hangs from the grab handle above the passenger window, a tube connecting it to the back of my hand. It’s cleaning me up, rehydrating me.

The radio burbles along, a sleepy late-night DJ guiding us between heartbreakers. Intermittently, the music is interrupted by traffic updates, which I find funny — I haven’t seen another car since we set off. But alas, there is no time for enjoying life’s ironies.

‘I’m sorry about this, Amina,’ I say reluctantly. ‘But we are going to have to ditch this car soon.’

‘My car? Why?’ she says. I notice that her accent is more prominent when she gets flustered or angry.

‘When I say ditch, I don’t mean ruin and abandon. I just mean leave somewhere, and we will carry on by other means. You can come back for it later.’

‘If everything goes to plan, you mean,’ she says. A touch of her fire is back, and I’m relieved to see it. I was beginning to worry she might not hack the task I’ve set us.

‘Something like that,’ I reply.

I watch her carefully, for anything that might give away a hint of duplicity. I haven’t seen her touch a phone of any kind, so she doesn’t seem interested in keeping anybody updated of our movements — or at least, not via such conventional means.

She seems pensive and distant, and has done since she looked into the microscope back at her lab; it’s as if the sight stripped away her sense of fun and innocence. It seemed all to be a big game to her before that, a bit of a diversion. Then it all got very, crushingly, dangerously real, and she knows she is right in the middle of it now.

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