Chapter One

My name is Mary, Lottie, Alicia, Jane. I do undercover. But you can call me, Charlie, a name I always wanted to use but have never had the opportunity. Charlie March, welcome.

‘What we have here is a murder mystery,’ the editor said, promising more than he could deliver, ‘I love a good murder mystery,’ I said. I didn’t, particularly, no more than anyone else, but I needed the work. I didn’t know anyone who wasn’t finding the cost of living a struggle.

Within my circle of power friends more than one person theorised that the cost of living was so high because investors were clawing in profits, profiteering even, to invest in paradigm shifting, and highly secretive technology.

He had a soft spot for me. I ‘fluttered my eyelashes’, he point blank refused, wanted another ‘girl’ to do it…I intensified…he capitulated…it was an ancient dance; a pre-acceptance ceremony, a farce by any other name, but a lucrative investment none the less.

I was mad on London. I had lived there for two years, happily sharing a flat with a great bunch in Brixton.

This is where truthful confession meets moral scrutiny. They were a great bunch, a bit serious, but I had been placed there. They were animal activists and I was monitoring them. My second job.

Okay the story about needing the job was a lie, I was lying, what can I say? It goes together with the undercover. I can’t stop or I’d fall out of practice. If you’re not slippery enough the friction will burn you.

My handlers wanted me to visit the site where people who were above Intelligence Agencies had been operating illegal technology with impunity. They both sounded like they were being cagey within cagey, running a low key venture under the peeping keyhole of their immediate bosses…

MI5 handed me over to MI6 in a local park, like in a low budget movie. MI5 called it secondment, MI6 called it a loan. The next day I was on a Flight to the US. 

I was partnered up to facilitate the through trip from New York to San Diego, Hawaii and then an interminable boat ride to Midway Atoll. The partner up was with a travel guide who confessed she was working for the CIA far too many times to maintain professionalism, she was fresh out of college, it was a head rush for her, I understood. 

We parted at the airport in Hawaii, She introduced me to three people who were volunteering for a three month stint on the Atoll with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Then, the boat ride on a small ship.

Normally a long period without any interruptions gave me time to work on shelved projects and stuff that had found its way to the back of the art-cupboard. But rough sea from the outset rendered me useless. Seasick and brain dead.

I bathed in nausea and tried to pick up on the conversation of the three volunteers. If the island was worth visiting regarding a murder perpetrated by illicit technology they were not up for talking about it.

Eventually I squeezed out a question, ‘Have any of you heard about the dead guy on the island?

‘We don’t call it an island…and no,’ it was news to them. 

I told them about the underground labs, but they denied all knowledge of their existence, ‘That’s a myth…it is a nature reserve, no building is allowed.’

‘We’d know if they had.’

‘Precisely.’

’It would desecrate the war dead.’

I began to have my doubts; the thought of arriving to find it was a scam or a prank, those three having a good laugh at my gullibility, brought down the nausea shutters and declared me shut for further business. I slept for the remainder of the way. If I had been near civilisation I would have got myself checked out because it felt like more than just seasickness…

When we clambered down into the small boat to take us to shore, I had still not been contacted by my host. And when we landed and walked on dry solid land that swayed as my sea legs prevailed, I was filled with gotcha vibes. Who’d been in on it. I suspected everyone.

The blue sky was deep and wondrous and alive with albatrosses.

The dynamic between me and the three volunteers had changed, they were castaways. They released me into the wild, barely saying goodbye, they had stations to man.

Guy, who’d dropped us off, waited for ten minutes before leaving, promising to keep in touch.

My potentiality began narrowing into functional survival criteria.

My phone chirped up despite having had no signal for days. I remembered some blurbby instructions I’d read: a private satellite, closed comms, closely monitored, permission contingent.

I got a text of three words, so I went to What Three Words and located the square. I was preparing for it to be the place the cameras had been set up to record my ‘gotcha’ moment. I was busy apologising to myself for the behaviour I must have upset the wrong people enough with to feel like they could do this to me, when a hatch in the ground opened and a man climbed out, ‘I’m a mole and I live in a hole. Welcome… Phillip Patrice St. Clare,’ he said, sounding like he’d been to the same schools and colleges as MI5 and MI6, ‘let’s get you underground before the snoopers come a snooping… Claustrophobe?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. Small spaces didn’t bother me…my concern was weird psychopaths in small spaces.

I tailed the possible psychopath down through a series of levels with passing places and small security desks, through heavy doors and hatches.

‘There is an easier way, there’s a service tunnel but it needs excavating before it can be used. The place was designed for secrecy and built with stealth. We will be excavating in the near future as part of the refurb, but in the meantime we creep about like nocturnal beasts.’

After negotiating a short ladder the room opened up into a much larger, reassuring space. And along a short corridor a door that led to a vast cavern which we crossed with echoes of clip-clopping slaps. And we entered a door leading to the lab complex.

‘It was the discovery of this natural cave that prompted the government to sell the underground area of the atoll to private investors with subterranean requirements. Those box like structures we passed in the cavern, they are the first ever quantum hardware machines; on the eighth day God created Quantum Assisted Semi-Artificial Intelligence. What we imagine they can do is super scary stuff. For now we keep a respectful distance.’

‘Can imagining something be truly scary?’

‘Oh, yes… These machines work closely with our imagination, enhancing it, but having to commandeer our mind to do so…that was the problem they faced, not, getting the system to work, but stopping it from overstepping the mark. It was a good job they had an effective shutdown system. There were plenty of pioneering souls who dismissed the super smart shutdown system or any shutdown system at all.’

The place was like I’d got off the ghost train and couldn’t get out of the station where haunting elements were roaming around getting on with whatever backstage shenanigans ghost train company employees did. Figures kept cropping up as though in a dream that solidified but evaded explanation.

‘Who are those people and what are they doing?’

‘My people, and by my people I mean the owners of this place, and half the rest of the world, want an accurate story of what went on here, but no mention of what is going to go on here.’

I had been told the identity of the corporation which owned the underground of the island was to remain secret but as it owned half the world it was not difficult to guess who they were.

My brief from the editor told me to, ‘swim in the flow of their narrative, report what they wanted me to, make friends, tell tall stories if I have to, while covertly gathering all I could about the boy in the bubble.’

I’d seen a smuggled out image of the boy, as a grown man, obviously not in a bubble, floor plans left to the magazine in a construction worker’s will, and lots of conjecture.

Phill took me to the place we were going to meet later and then to my accommodation. It was bigger and more comfortable than the cabin on the ship, but it retained a nautical feel. I felt a familiarity that took a while to work out: the room featured in the only photo in existence of the boy in the bubble.

I lay back on the hard, comfortable mattress, my weariness catching up, guard slipping and imprudently asked the room a torrent of questions that had built up. There were no answers but I felt better. I fell asleep, called it a nap and freshened up before heading to the meeting with my host.

Phillip Patrice was seething; audibly upset, despite calm body language, like he’d been trained in body lingo, but not in voice control. He played a recording of the questions I’d asked aloud in my room, revealing why I was really there. I earned my ‘gotcha’ moment after all.

‘And,’ he added, ‘we don’t call it an island, because it is not an island, it is an atoll.’

‘Gotcha! …’ I said, blowing lightly upon the gaping wound I had just inflicted upon myself.