overdose.”
“And?” Lynne asks.
“This many brains gone within minutes of each other? Looks to me like we’re under attack.”
There’s a long pause as Lynne’s blue eyes track across the room. “Jack, Sunil, Rachel, Jason—stay here. Everybody else goes home, but keep your phones on and be ready to go anywhere at very short notice. Thank you.”
When the room empties Lynne points to some seats and pours herself coffee from the flask near the whiteboard. Nobody says a word. Eventually Lynne sits down and says, “Okay. We need to be clear about this. Jack—you’re senior director on this movie. How much have we got?”
Jack is in his mid-thirties. He has unfashionably long hair and a patrician English private-school accent, despite the fact that he went to a crummy comprehensive in Bolton. “If we include some marginal takes,” he says, “I’d say we’ve got about eighty percent of it. Just a guess. We’ll have to do a slash edit.”
Lynne turns to Rachel, who is the second ranking director. “Rachel, do you agree with that?”
Rachel nods.
“So,” Lynne asks, “my first question is, can we finish it? We’ve got vast information from the actors on the computers. Haven’t we, Sunil?”
Sunil hates this. He avoids eye contact with the others. “Yes, we have,” he says quietly.
Lynne walks over and stands in his eyeline. “You don’t sound very sure,” she says. “Why can’t we finish the movie using the personalities we have?”
“We probably can,” Sunil says.
“How big or small is ‘probably’?”
Sunil puts his forefinger and thumb into a sign for small.
Lynne steps away and takes a breath. “I’m very stupid,” she says. “We spend two billion Euros to get the most advanced movie-making system ever devised. We collect Oscars the way people get loyalty points in supermarkets. We hire some beautiful people with zero acting talent, hijack their brains, and then I forget that they’re human. They can die. We didn’t protect them. We’re gobshite.”
The blue eyes are unexpectedly wet. Jack’s smartphone buzzes and he swipes the screen with his finger. “Two more,” he says. “They’re taking out everybody.”
Lynne spins around and kicks a chair across the room. “Well fuck them!” she shouts. “This is fucking war! Jack and Rachel, see if we can rescue the movie. Sunil, get the whole of your technical team on it.”
Sunil has his head in his hands, gazing at the grey carpet. “Fine,” he says. “But we may have another problem.”
Lynne picks up the broken chair, sets it down very carefully, and says, “This is absolutely the time I need to know everything. What is it I don’t know?”
A white Learjet 85 is lined up on the apron at the west end of the runway next to the white terminator markers, trembling in the wash of a Whizz Air 737 bound for Prague winding its engines up to take-off thrust. The 737 rolls away down the runway, its wingtip lights flashing brightly; it rotates and lifts off.
The cabin lights are dim in the Learjet, but we can still see Lynne and her PA Jason sipping coffee. There’s busy radio chatter from the control tower, and then the Learjet begins to move, turning into the long reach of black tarmac, accelerates, lifts into the air, and flies southwards across Germany and the Alps, down the Italian coast past Venice and Brindisi towards Corfu.
Lynne is sleeping as the plane descends from thirty-seven thousand feet to five thousand and follows the track down the Adriatic towards the islands that mark the northwesterly points of Greece. To their left the flight crew can see the rocky coast of Albania. Jason wakes Lynne with coffee and fruit juice. Orange dawn light is flaring over the mountains to the east.
Danny Edwards, the head of security, doesn’t sleep much. He’s sitting in his seat just behind the pilots, patched into the studio’s hi-tech and probably illegal network of satellite systems. He’s drinking herbal tea, which he hates, and the nicotine patch on his arm itches. He has his headset on and he’s calling in the return of a few favours, plus a liberal sprinkling of Euros. Sunil is sitting beside him, monitoring the exotic equipment in the hold.
The Learjet pilots have a few words with the tower at Ioannis Kapodistrias airport, lower their landing gear, extend the flaps, and descend to fifteen hundred feet. It’s a bumpy ride as the wind that brought the heroes of the Odyssey home to Greece takes them down the west coast of Corfu. The dark green mountains of the island are to the left. The Ionian Sea, plunging to a depth of sixteen thousand feet, is to the right. They fly past the villages of Agios Stefanos, where Angel died, then Arillas, Agios Giorgios, and Paleokastritsa, where Amber died. The beaches are all in shadow. The gods are asleep, even Korkyra, the beautiful nymph whom Poseidon abducted and married, and who gives her name to the island: Kerkyra.
They turn left and make their approach over the hills to the runway, which is a spit reaching out into the sea. They pass over a white-painted church on a small island. They touch down and savage the dawn peace with reverse thrust.
Spiros has seen a great deal of sudden death in his career as a policeman, but he still hates postmortems. He hates the bitter charring smell of bone-saws. He hates the calm evisceration, the digital scales, the organs, the dissection of somebody who laughed and loved into a scrap heap of components. He’s sweating.
The mortuary in the new blue-and-white-painted hospital in Kontokali, just north of the town centre, is state of the art. Amber’s mangled body lies naked on one stainless-steel slab and Angel’s perfect dark-haired beauty lies on the next, although she’s not so good-looking with her scalp peeled back. Spiros is pleased to be behind glass in the observation area and not up close and intimate with the body fluids. He’s even more pleased when his mobile phone rings and the head of the prefecture orders him to halt the postmortem. His pleasure doesn’t last long.
The pathology-trained surgeon speaks clearly into her microphone. “This is highly unusual,” she says. She has just trepanned Angel’s skull, exposing the membrane of the brain surface. “The dura mater is bright blue.”
Spiros barges his way through the door into the room. “Stamata!” he says. Stop. “Refrigerate the bodies and wait for instructions. And don’t ask. Politics!”
FAST FORWARD thirty minutes, and Spiros, Selina Mariatos, the acting pathologist, Lynne and her team, and a senior police officer are sitting in a meeting area drinking cold lemon-tea from a vending machine. Spiros swills his down, crushes the can, and throws it very accurately into a recycling bin. “So?” he demands. “We’re conducting an investigation. We are not open to interference.”
“That’s the last thing we want to do, Mr. Koukoulades,” Lynne says. “We think we can help. In fact we know we can help. The thing is, this is time-critical. We have a few hours at most.”
“Make your case quickly, then. As the investigating officer, I will decide whether you are helping or… something else.”
Lynne stands up and walks to the window. “What I’m going to tell you,” she says, “is highly confidential.”
Spiros laughs, and says, “I have two dead film-stars. Everything I do is going to be reported across the world. If you have something to tell me, then tell me. But you don’t decide what is confidential. Is that clear?”
He doesn’t flinch when Lynne turns and opens her eyes wide and looks into his—blue on brown. He’s used to tough women. He married one. “You have two dead film-stars. We have five. This is no accident, officer. This is conspiracy and murder. We need your help, and believe me, you need ours.”
Danny’s looking at his smartphone. “It’s six actors now,” he says. “Can we get moving?”
FAST FORWARD twenty minutes and Sunil and Selina are having a nerd-fest in the dissection area as the equipment from the Learjet is wheeled in. They are thirty years old, almost exactly the same olive-skinned colour, and both good-looking in reasonably dim light. They are both isolated from the human race around them by their considerable knowledge. Selina throws a plastic coverall to him. He puts it on, and then says, “You’ll have to be kind to me. I’m not used to bodies.” She pokes him in the chest and says, “You’ve got one.”
“I may be sick.”
“D’you think I care about sick? If you’re sick I’ll scrape it up and tell you what you had for lunch three days
