Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [39]
‘You can call me Benny,’ said the woman.
‘Anything I’m going to call you is likely to be a lot less pleasant.’
‘Take it easy, Creed.’
The IDEA officer took off his sunglasses, maybe in an attempt to be a human being. He massaged the bridge of his nose and looked wearily at Creed. ‘You see, Benny is assisting us on this assignment. She’s a special operative on secondment to IDEA and the NYPD. She’s one of us.’
‘Oh great,’ said Creed. ‘Was there anyone here who wasn’t an undercover cop?’
‘Hopefully the guys you killed,’ said the IDEA man.
* * *
In the hallway outside the apartment the paramedic had given up on the younger Mayan and was concentrating her attention on what was left of what’s‐his‐name. The kid they’d pushed off the edge of the world. The one whose name no one could remember.
The paramedic had connected the kid’s withered body to the life‐support stretcher and she was crouching on the narrow carpeted floor, studying the computer readout with disbelief on her face.
‘No hope?’ asked Creed.
‘He’s long gone,’ said the paramedic. ‘And according to this he died of an acute downward spiral in his body temperature. That’s what it says. “Catastrophic, rapid and irreversible loss of core temperature.” That’s a lot of help to me.’
Creed looked down at the body. It reminded him of photographs of lost Arctic expeditions, corpses dug out of ice.
‘The computer is suggesting either hypothermia or extreme shock as cause of death.’ The paramedic looked at him as if he might enlighten her.
Creed just shrugged. ‘I guess we froze him out so effectively he froze to death.’
Creed turned to see that the woman, Benny Summerfield, had come out into the hallway. She looked at the kid’s shrunken body. ‘We applied a social shock to him and it killed him. People need people,’ she said, with a bitter smile.
‘But people don’t die when they’re alone,’ said Creed. Now that he was coming down from the drug everything was taking on a nightmarish quality. All the frantic explanations he’d contrived to defend himself were crumbling. Now it seemed that warlock was far too powerful and far too dangerous to yield to any easy explanation. ‘People go and spend years in the wilderness and they don’t die like this.’
‘Different contexts,’ said Benny. ‘Different expectations. In the wilderness we’re out of the social web. But as soon as we’re back among other human beings we instantly plug into subliminal communication and depend on it. We want confirmation from others that we exist.’
‘Like getting a radar echo,’ said Creed.
‘Exactly,’ said Benny.
The paramedic was giving them a look of distaste as they stood over the dead body of the kid, calmly conducting a technical discussion. She has a point, thought Creed, but he was too tired to care.
‘Besides, even in the wilderness we often get feedback,’ said Benny. ‘From animals, the way they react to us.’
‘Animals?’ Creed watched as the paramedic switched off the life‐support computer.
‘Sure, there’s a vast amount of subliminal communication between humans and animals. A dog always knows if you’re scared of it.’
Creed watched the paramedic go. She was wheeling what’s‐his‐name’s stretcher away down the corridor to the elevators. It looked as if IDEA had managed to get them working. They always carried a lot of clout.
‘When a human being walks through a forest he is creating a profound reaction in every bird, rabbit or squirrel that senses his presence.’ Benny looked at Creed as if it was important that he understood. ‘We make ripples in our environment. We may not be aware of it, but in the past we would have been keenly alert to these things. Not so long ago. When we were animals ourselves.’
‘How the hell do you know so much?’
The IDEA guy with the dreadlocks came out and joined them in the corridor. ‘I told you, Miss Summerfield is a special agent. She’s an example of the intelligence of our personnel. That’s why they call us IDEA. Because we’re all so smart.’ He smiled at them.
‘If you were smart,’ said Creed, ‘you