Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [106]
Breen unlocked her cuffs and they went out through the glass doors into the hot October night. The girl began to cough as soon as they hit the street air. Her eyes were streaming by the time she reached the squad car. Breen locked her in the back, handing her a mask to wear until the car air conditioning took hold. By the time she got it on the girl was coughing so hard that Mancuso’s chest was aching in sympathy.
She must be from out of town.
* * *
20
The helicopter was late.
Stephanie didn’t mind. It gave her more time to observe Mulwray’s increasingly interesting behaviour.
The two of them were still working together, although Mulwray had twice asked to be transferred. Both times O’Hara had routed the requests back to Stephanie and Stephanie had torn them up. She was enjoying herself. Things had reached the point now where Mulwray wouldn’t even look her in the eye.
The longer the flight was delayed the more nervous Mulwray became. Eventually he went to sit in the control shack with the pilots. Stephanie remained outside on the rooftop, watching big clouds moving over the city. She was wearing a breathing mask today to protect her face against the hot sooty winds blowing in from the west.
Finally the Biostock technicians brought the teenage boy up. Two of them came out on to the roof, wearing the standard white overalls with the Butler Institute logos on the hack. They wheeled the stretcher across the roof surface towards the painted circle where the helicopter sat. The boy’s head was lolling, a small plastic tube taped to his cheek so it remained fixed in his nose. His arms were lashed down on top of the blanket in case he regained consciousness.
Stephanie read the boy’s name off the ID tags that were hanging outside the blanket. Vincent Wheaton. The technicians on the fifty‐first floor had found the tags around his neck when he was being processed.
Vincent was the reason the flight had been delayed. He had been picked up on a routine sweep of the junkies in Central Park and would normally have gone straight into Biostock. He looked cleaner and healthier than the average derelict or street dweller, but the park sweeps were unpredictable and by rights the boy should have been spare parts by now.
But there was a new memo from O’Hara which altered the Biostock protocol. It was apparently based on an article in a British newspaper and it specified a new range of blood tests to be carried out on all incoming stock. Vincent’s blood had rung bells on all the tests, so the clinical sacrifice was postponed, the boy was flagged as something special and his unconscious body was scheduled on the next flight out to the Catskills.
Mulwray came out of the flight shack now and watched as the technicians put Vincent in the back of the helicopter. They strapped him down on a portable life‐support unit with heavy sedatives being fed into his bloodstream in a glucose solution.
‘If they’re pressed for space I can fly out later,’ said Mulwray. ‘I’ve got a lot of deskwork to catch up on.’
Stephanie said nothing.
‘So long as it’s okay with you,’ said Mulwray.
Stephanie smiled.
When they reached the construction site after the flight, Stephanie made Mulwray wait while she pulled on some rubber boots in the site office. There had been some drainage problems at the site, with runoff from the mountainside above flooding the tunnel. As soon as Stephanie had the boots on she set off for the tunnel mouth, not giving Mulwray time to change. She was fascinated to see what he would do. He came trotting after her, still wearing his expensive, gleaming street shoes. By the time they were inside the tunnel they had been reduced to muddy ruin.
Men and women in white coats were trudging back from lunch in the company canteen on the surface, picking their way among puddles in the rutted mud of the tunnel floor. The excavation work was complete now but