She wiped her eyes, closed the curtains and made her way into the kitchen to pour herself a rum and coke. As she took a handful of ice from the freezer, a message alert appeared on her phone.
FAO: FLICK KENNEDY
Private and Confidential
Dear Miss Kennedy, following your successful completion of our puzzle, we are offering you a unique opportunity to start your life afresh. Please find attached to this email an address, date and time, along with non-disclosure agreements and brief notes of what will be expected of you. You will be financially compensated for your time.
‘Start your life afresh,’ she repeated as she scanned through the attached contents. It looked too elaborate to be a scam. She pressed the accept button and hoped whatever lay ahead of her was better than what had preceded it.
Chapter 7
CHARLIE, PORTSMOUTH
There was very little left of Charlie’s fingernails for him to bite by the time the coach driver steered the vehicle into an empty bay at London’s Waterloo station.
Charlie used the last of his transdermal patches to combat his fluctuating anxiety levels and tapped at a copper-coloured wristband. His doctor had suggested that wearable therapy, with its electrical, vibrational, temperature- and scent-based stimulants, would also assist with his unease. But today it was having little effect.
He questioned whether he was about to become the victim of an elaborate hoax. But there was something too tempting to ignore about the offer to start his life again. The invitation to London first appeared by email minutes after he had deciphered the puzzle. He’d been informed that his speed and accuracy had taken him through to the next round of a competition, the winners of which would be offered the opportunity to enter a programme to restart their lives. Naturally, he was sceptical. But the allure of the unattainable was too tempting not to explore.
As his fellow commuters removed luggage from overhead storage areas, however, Charlie remained stationary, once again weighing up the pros and cons of whether he was doing the right thing.
Way into the early hours of last night, he had trawled the internet searching for clues as to the advert’s origin and what previous participants had to say about their experiences. But it had seemingly flown under most of the conspiracy theory community’s radars. Some users had spotted the puzzle but failed to solve it. Regulars on scientific forums suggested it could only be solved by people whose brains were in a particular stage of evolution or wired in an alternative way to the majority. Charlie wondered if that included his synaesthesia. Others claimed it was simply clickbait. But clickbait rarely lured you out of the virtual world and into the real one.
He was the last to disembark the coach as he threw his bag over his shoulder and stretched his legs. He considered taking a taxi to the address he’d been emailed, but chose to walk when he struggled to find a non-autonomous one. He slipped in his earbuds and left it to a map projected into the left lens of his glasses to direct him.
His mind wandered and he found himself asking his OS to play the latest news headlines about the Hacking Collective, a popular subject within his online communities this week. As Charlie crossed Westminster bridge, he mulled over what might happen if the United Kingdom was next to be held to ransom. He had still been a child when the post-Brexit riots divided the country but all these years later, divisions between leavers and remainers lingered. He could foresee history repeating itself and opinions being split as to whether we should pay up or stand our ground.
What the Collective was doing around the world was inexcusable, he reasoned, but his obsession with conspiracy theories had taught him that governments brought the threat of public exposure upon themselves. If they were more transparent there’d be no need to keep so many secrets.
His irises flicked towards the map – he was only minutes from his destination, a side street running adjacent to the Embankment. His anxiety levels were on the rise.
What if I’m not being duped, what if this offer is genuine?he asked himself.What if they really are giving me the opportunity to start my life from scratch?Perhaps he might make a better job of it second time around.
What would I be turning my back on if I accepted? I have very little family, even Mum and Dad split up and moved away to be with their DNA Matches. Who would miss me?
A Match was never far from his mind and he removed his phone from his pocket and asked his OS to log on to his Match Your DNA account. Charlie had registered his details five years earlier but his counterpart had yet to do the same. At this point, he no longer cared if they were decades older than him, located on the other side of the world or ifshewas in fact ahe. He was desperate to know what it felt like to be wanted. ‘No messages,’ the website’s inbox read. The hollowness inside him was to remain but it helped to make his mind up for him. Whatever was going to happen today, he had little to lose.
‘You have reached your destination.’ An automated voice spoke through his earbuds. Adjacent to the Embankment’s dual carriageway was a narrow side street accessed only by concrete steps and a passageway under a building. There, he found himself in an oblong courtyard surrounded by six-storey offices.
Charlie glanced at them all, searching for a building number. There were none above any doors, no keypads, handles, locks or intercoms and each window was tinted so it couldn’t be peered into. He paced around the courtyard, double-checking the address in the email and scanning the buildings again to see if he’d missed an obvious entrance. Again, he drew a blank.
I’m an idiot, he sighed.I knew this was too good to be true. It’s a con.
But for what purpose? Why had they gone to so much effort to get him there? They’d paid for his travel andcompensated his bank account handsomely for his loss of earnings.
Charlie turned and headed back towards the staircase when a set of double doors to his right opened inwards. He paused, waiting for someone to either exit or greet him but no one came. He’d viewed enough thrillers to know that he should keep on walking in the opposite direction of a pitch black lobby. But a sudden confidence stirred inside him. Instead, he tapped a button on the arm of his glasses to zoom in ahead: whatever lay inside was too dark to focus on, with the exception of a pattern on the wall. It was barely visible but Charlie recognised it immediately. It was the solution to the puzzle that had brought him there.
He clutched the patch on his arm, subconsciously rubbing it. ‘You feel too much,’ an acquaintance had once advised him. He’d wanted to protest but she was right. Perhaps it was good to feel nervous about what was inside that building.
The lure of a second chance became too great for Charlie to walk away from.
Chapter 8
SINÉAD, BRISTOL
He will grind you down to nothing.
Joanna’s words followed Sinéad like her own footprints in the snow. She wasn’t a person Sinéad knew well, in fact they had only met on a handful of occasions over the years. But she had got the measure of Sinéad and Daniel’s relationship. And she recognised something inside Sinéad that she was too reluctant to see for herself. For each day she spent with Daniel, another tiny piece of her former self was eroding.
