Chapter 6
Daniel
When she awoke in rumbling darkness, Daniel’s first thought was that she’d been killed and sent to a bumpy, pitch-black purgatory. Then she listened to a few lines of Money, Money, Money and rethought the theory. God wouldn’t play ABBA in the afterlife, at least one could only hope. She swallowed, blinking and shifting around, feeling incredible pressure on her eyelids and wrists. The seat beneath her was vibrating but it was a different vibration from the plane. She was in a car wearing handcuffs and a thick black blindfold. “Kinky,” she said, her voice croaky from disuse.
“Ma’am, she’s awake.” That was Alan—the little needle-sticking fuck.
“Excellent,” a woman replied. She had the kind of crisp British accent that made you think of barristers in white wigs.
“Margaret Thatcher?” Daniel croaked. “Is that you?”
The woman laughed softly. “Insolent, isn’t she, Alan?”
“She is. Don’t worry, I’ll deal with her, ma’am.”
Someone, Alan presumably, began poking at her side. Daniel tried to wriggle away but her body felt like uncooked bread dough, all loose and floppy. The probing fingers dug deeper into her side.
“Can you not?” she said, wriggling even harder. “I’m a human being not a fucking Tickle-Me Elmo.”
With that Alan shoved his whole hand into her mouth. “Should we give her another dose?”
“No, we need her alive. Dosing her again would kill her.”
So she wasn’t going to be killed. That was promising. Daniel attempted to bite Alan’s fingers and when that failed to get a reaction, licked them. They tasted of chicken fat and smoked paprika.
When did he have time to get wings? Did we hit a drive-through while I was unconscious?
“Ms. Elkin, she’s licking me.” Alan sounded disgusted by that, which, when you considered his job was ridiculous.
“Get your hands out of her mouth, you idiot,” the woman snapped.
Instantly the greasy fingers retracted and Daniel spat on the floor. A tense silence filled, what she assumed from the spatial resonance, was another limo. She was ninety-nine percent sure she’d spat on someone.
“I-I…” Alan stammered. “Ms. Elkin, ma’am, I’m so sorry.”
Make that a hundred percent.
Daniel tilted her face toward Alan’s voice. “Here’s some friendly advice, Alan; clean yourself before you shove your disgusting chickeny fingers into someone’s mouth. There are like, fifteen billion bacteria on human hands.”
There was more silence.
“That’s enough, Ms. Schwartz,” said the cold British woman. Ms. Elkin, Alan had called her. Daniel tried to picture her face and came up with a monitor lizard in a wig. There was something reptilian about her voice, an intense excitement that made Daniel think despite her refusal to drug her again, these might be the last few hours of her life. Just breathe, she told herself. Relax.
She’d always known this day might come. When you joined an eco-terrorist collective and dedicated your life to fucking shit up, you made enemies. Grassroots had always been clear about that.
She and Cynthia had signed up when they were twenty, uni students from bad homes who consciously chose to channel their shit into the righteous business of Saving The World.
Cynth stayed on the straight and narrow; getting her PhD and producing research papers about the impact of climate change, fracking and GMO crops. Daniel, who’d been told all her life she’d cure cancer or invent artificial intelligence that could pass the Turing test directed her skills towards ecological sabotage. She stole, she planned raids, she leaked documents. With the exception of physical violence she’d pretty much done it all and it had undoubtedly led her to this Reservoir Dogs situation. The problem was, she’d stuck so many monkey wrenches into so many different machines it was hard to know who Alan and Ms. Elkin were avenging. Maybe they’d tell her before they cut off her ears or something.
“I represent a company called Middlebend,” Elkin announced in her lizard voice. “Are you familiar with that name, Ms. Schwartz?”
Or maybe they’d just tell her.
“Middlebend, that’s the…” Daniel shivered so hard her whole body shook, her teeth rattling like dice in a Yahtzee game. All of a sudden she was freezing cold, her hands and feet numb, her insides aching. How long had it been since she’d hadn’t taken a pill with breakfast or done a line with her morning coffee? One week? Two?
“Are you ill, Ms. Schwartz?” Elkin asked.
Daniel could feel her minty breath on her cheeks and fought the urge to head-butt her. “I’m coming down off some stuff, yes.”
And I think I’ve got a long, long way to fall.
“Hmm, yes your bloodwork indicated as much. You’d think a smart girl like you would know better.”
“Yeah, well, the roofies didn’t exactly help this situation, Mother Theresa.”
“I get you anything to ease your transition?”
Daniel thought about it. “Two bottles of blue Gatorade, a blanket, an ice pack, Earl Grey tea, the last season of The Mighty Boosh, magnesium, Valium, and some Cookie Time cookies. I want triple chocolate chunk but original’s cool too.”
There was a short pause. “We can make you a cup of tea.”
“Pfft.” Daniel slumped back in her seat and closed her eyes. “Some fucking kidnapping this is turning out to be.”
“You have not been kidnapped.”
“Pfffffffft.”
“Ms. Schwartz, my organization simply needs to ask you some questions. If you answer them sufficiently you’ll be free to go.”
Daniel closed her eyes behind the blindfold. “So it’s gonna be like that, huh?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that if I don’t answer them sufficiently you’re gonna slice off one of my thumbs with an electrical meat saw, aren’t you?”
Elkin laughed. It sounded like someone was tickling a monitor lizard. “Ms. Schwartz if you answer our questions, I can assure you, you will be free to go.”
“Yeah, that’s what they all say.” Daniel attempted to cross her legs, but it proved impossible in her latex dress. She settled them back on the floor. “What do you want to know?”
There was a short pause, as though Elkin wasn’t expecting her to cave so fast. “What were you doing in London?”
“Taking drugs.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, I probably shouldn’t say this but I feel like I can really trust you.” Daniel raised her shackled hands to the side of her mouth. “I was sleeping around.”
Alan muttered something that definitely included the word ‘bitch.’
“I see,” Elkin said icily. “What were you doing for work in London?”
“Nothing. I’m unemployed.” That was technically correct, defending Mother Nature didn’t pay a working wage. At least not one you could lodge on a tax return.
“Oh don’t give us that garbage,” Elkin said. “We both know who you are and who you work for.”
Daniel’s teeth were still chattering and her jaw was starting to ache. “Well fuck me, why don’t you save us some time and tell me who I am?”
Another humorless chuckle. “Well you’re lots of things. An orphan, a New Zealand citizen, you have ADHD—”
“Hey!” Daniel said, jibing at that old accusation. “Unlike Alan’s gonorrhea that was never clinically diagnosed.”
“—perhaps a child prodigy,” Elkin continued a little louder than before. “Perhaps just a girl of above average intelligence with an appetite for anarchy but that doesn’t concern us. We’re interested in your adult accomplishments.”
“You mean figuring out how to smoke weed inside a nectarine?”
“I mean dropping out of a biomedical science degree and turning your considerable talents toward petty theft and corruption.”
Daniel smiled. “There it is. Cool, now tell me who I fucked over. Was it you? Your son? Your dad? Your pet coal mine? Let’s keep the honesty train moving all the way to the station.”
“It’s not what you’ve done to my organization, Ms. Schwartz. It’s what you’re planning to do.”
Daniel’s forehead was chalky with old make-up and she felt it crack as she wrinkled her brow. “I’m not planning shit. I haven’t been involved in Grassroots for over a year.”
“Really?” Elkin’s voice was colder than the advent of nuclear winter. “Because six months ago a source informed us you were working on an assignment regarding fracking’s influence on volcanic activity. Project Rangitoto, I believe it was called.”
Daniel was suddenly grateful for the blindfold. Without it she was pretty sure her eyeballs would have popped right out of her head. She’d been prepared to face the music for anything, anything she’d done, sticking gum in Kelsey Holly’s hair, freeing sixteen rhesus monkeys from a medical lab, anything except the end of the world. She’d buried the end of the world, she and Cynthia and Mikey, and it was supposed to stay buried.
“Ms. Schwartz?” Elkin said. “I’m going to require an answer.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Well you’re obviously lying. We know you were assisting your friend Cynthia Moorcroft before her untimely death.”
“I wouldn’t call it ‘untimely.’ When you drink a liter of bleach you’re not fucking around, are you?”
“I suppose,” Elkin said without a trace of sympathy. “Tell me, what did you and Cynthia uncover that inspired her to take her life in Paris?”
“She was depressed. Her boyfriend was cheating on her,” Daniel said robotically.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Whether you believe me or not doesn’t matter.”
Elkin made a noise like a pepper mill grinding. “You’re lying, tell us what you know or we’ll be forced to take active measures to extract the information.”
Daniel’s stomach panged with fake excitement, a weak endorphin rush from her tired, wrung-out brain. She should have known she couldn’t lay Rangitoto to rest. All Frankenstein’s monster did was follow him around giving him the shits too.
There was a rustle of expensive sounding skirts. “Have we reached an impasse, Ms. Schwartz?”
“I think we have some unexplored options, such as, you could let me go.”
Alan chuckled. “You’re in no position to make threats, love.”
Daniel stuck her tongue out at him.
“That’s quite enough.”
A cold hand descended onto Daniel’s thigh and she fought the urge to shudder. “Ms. Elkin, are you hitting on me?”
Elkin huffed through her nose, a sarcastic little laugh. “No I am not, I want to ask you if you’ve ever been to Santa Monica?”
“No.” She’d spent a year living on a Grassroots base in the California Mountains when she was twenty- two but overall she preferred Europe to the US. Less chance you’d be shot while umming and ahhing over a burger menu.
“That’s where we’re taking you, a house in Santa Monica.” Elkin removed her hand from Daniel’s leg. “You’ll love it there. Didn’t you grow up by the beach?”
“In Auckland, where it’s cloudy three hundred and sixty days a year.”
“Well, this will be much more pleasant then, won’t it?”
“Of course it will,” Alan agreed.
“Shut up,” Daniel and Elkin said simultaneously.
Daniel tapped her bound fingertips to her nose. “Twinsies. So I’m going to Santa Fe?”
“Monica,” Elkin corrected. “Yes, since you’re not ready to be honest with us, you’ll be held in a secure location until you are.”
Daniel pictured herself standing at the bottom of a well as Elkin lowered a basket of feminine hygiene products toward her. It puts the lotion on its skin… “Great, except what are you going to tell my friends and various loved ones?”
Alan, who it seemed impossible to dishearten, laughed. “Like who? The pansy you were going to fuck at that nightclub?”
“I have friends!” Daniel said defensively. Friends like Mikey, and the Grasshoppers she hadn’t seen in months, friends like Cynthia, who were dead, friends like her half-sister, who hated her. All good friends.
Elkin’s cold hand returned to Daniel’s thigh. “We’ve informed your associates, few though there are, that you’re working on a secure project in California and are unable to be contacted.”
“Okay, so what’s your endgame here? I’m never changing my mind. I’m just going to grow really long fingernails and then die.”
“Oh I think you’ll change your mind,” Elkin said in an annoyingly singsong voice.
“Whatever. It doesn’t matter who you cc’ed in your little email. If I don’t make contact for too long Grassroots will come looking for me. And when they do you’ll rue the day you let a man dope me on an airplane like an underperforming racehorse.”
“Ms. Schwartz, haven’t you been listening to me? We have a source, one of your own people in fact. We know you haven’t been in contact with your so-called organization in months.”
“I see.” Daniel’s guts shriveled to the size of an apricot pit. So one of her brothers and sisters had actually sold her out. She bit her tongue to keep from asking who it was and how they could fucking sleep at night.
“We assume you cut ties because of what you uncovered while working with Ms, Moorcroft,” Elkin said. “Would you care to elaborate?”
Daniel extended a leg displaying the tattoo that lay on the inside of her right ankle. The one Jacques thought made her and Cynthia lesbians. “Does this look like I cut ties?”
“Quamdiu enim orbis vertitur,” Elkin read. “I’m not as familiar with Latin as I should be. What does it mean?”
“For as long as the world turns,” Daniel recited. “I don’t care who you got to narc on me, you’re never finding out about Rangitoto and you can tell your source that when I get out of here I’m going to feed them their own hair.”
“Very well.” Elkin sounded bored. “Mr. Walshaw, could you please?”
Alan’s too-hot chickeny-fingers fastened themselves around one of Daniel’s wrists.
“Our source tells us you’re immune to physical pain,” Elkin said.
Daniel said, her blood pressure spiked. “I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to feed them their hair and fingernails.”
“So it’s true then?”
If they were going to do what Daniel thought they were going to do, there was no point denying it. “Yeah, I can’t feel pain. But feel free to have a crack at torturing me anyway, I assume that’s what you’re getting at?”
“It is. Alan?”
Daniel felt a sharp point press under the third fingernail of her left hand. “Just FYI, this isn’t a good idea.”
“That’s for us to decide. Oh and Alan, please remove Ms. Schwartz’s eye mask.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Walshaw said, sounding as though he had a throbbing erection.
Light rushed into Daniel’s sore pupils, intensifying her hangover. “Fuck.”
“Better?”
She blinked at the woman in front of her. Ms. Elkin had the looks Daniel coveted in other women; she was pale, blond and lithe, like an older Charlize Theron. An older Cynthia. There was a lightness to women like this that she, with her big boobs and dark features could never have replicated. She smiled and Daniel instinctively smiled back, at least she did until their eyes met. They were cold, colder than chips of ice, colder than liquid nitrogen. She was staring at Daniel as though she were an old abused dog; worthy of sympathy but repulsive. Alive but less than human. Less than herself. Daniel knew at once this wasn’t a woman capable of female solidarity. She was an apex predator masquerading as a humanoid and she was dangerous. Daniel’s blood thinned as her heart pounded with misplaced excitement. “You’re a lot younger than I thought you’d be.”
“Well thank you,” Elkin said, fingering the delicate silver chain around her neck. “Now one last chance, would you like to talk about Project Rangitoto?”
Daniel stared down the needle settled against the ring finger of her right hand. The things I do for the fucking world… “Nah, I’m good.”
Elkin smiled, her eyes full of calm, almost amused, hunger. “Alan, please begin.”
Slick as a buttered knife, the needle pierced her skin but Daniel didn’t scream. She laughed instead. Laughed and laughed and laughed.