How has it come to this?
Gina doesn’t know – but she looks across the warehouse floorat the three men and decides she can’t take any more of it. She hasto leave. It’s just too much.
‘I’m… I’ll be outside,’ she says, though it’s barely audible.
She turns and walks over to the metal door. Her hand isshaking as she opens it. She steps outside, into the cold night air.
With her back to the closed door, she takes a deep breath andcloses her eyes.
After a moment, she opens them again. It’s a fairly desolatescene out here. In one direction the floodlit yard of this industrialpark leads to a graffiti-covered wall at the back of a housingestate. In the other direction there are more warehouses, and youcan just about see the road up ahead – which is dead quiet at themoment. Five minutes west of here there is a major roundabout,and even at this time of night it would be busy with traffic.
Gina can’t believe she’s feeling lonely for traffic.
She looks up. The sky is clear and the moon is so dazzlinglybright that it’s almost pulsating. She stays huddled in thedoorway, puts her back to the wind and tries to get one of Fitz’scigarettes going, cupping her hand around it and flicking theZippo repeatedly until it takes.
Then, inhaling deeply, she steps away from the door. Theintense glow from the moon tonight, combined with the orangewash of the floodlights, gives the space out here an air of unreality,the eerie and soulless feel of a virtual environment. She wishesthat that’s what this whole thing were – a simulation, a game,something she could tinker with and reprogramme. But sheknows there is no – can be no – digital equivalent, or evenapproximation, of anxiety, of guilt, of fear.
This is real and it’s happening now.
But what if Terry Stack finds out where Mark Griffin is? Willthat mean it’s been worth it? Will that mean she did the rightthing by calling him?
Or is it all too toxic now for such a clean exchange?
As she takes her next drag on the cigarette, Gina hears a weirdsound. It is short and shrill and penetrating. She looks up andremains still for a few seconds, listening.
She really can’t be sure that the sound wasn’t just some form ofdistortion carried here from a distance by the wind.
She closes her eyes.
But neither can she be sure that it didn’t come from nearby,from directly behind her, and that it wasn’t a scream.