‘Am I speaking with Mrs Naomi Klaesson?’
‘I’d like to know who you are, please.’
The phone went dead.
Naomi stared at the receiver for some moments, her anger fast curdling into a knot of dread in her stomach. She pressed down on the cradle, then released it, listened for the dial tone and punched out one-four-seven-one. Moments later she heard the automated voice:
‘You were called today at fifteen-eleven hours. We do not have the caller’s number.’
She remembered that John had a caller-ID device in his study and she went through to look at it. A red light was flashing on the top and she pressed a button to bring up the display. On the tiny LCD screen appeared the words:
15.11 INTERNATIONAL
A shiver rippled through her.
It felt as if some terrible ghostly tendril had reached out across the Atlantic and gripped her soul.
Am I speaking with Mrs Naomi Klaesson?
Who the hell are you? What did you want?
Disciples? Disciples of the Third Millennium?
Hurrying back to the hall, she grabbed the car keys, ran out of the front door, pressed the central locking button, ran over to the car and pulled the rear door open.
Luke and Phoebe weren’t there.
For an instant, time stopped. She stared dumbly at the empty child seats. Then, terror-stricken, she looked round, eyes darting everywhere, at the barn with the double garage doors, at the house, at the shrubs swaying crazily. ‘Luke!’ she screamed. ‘Phoebe!’
Rain pelted down on her.
‘LUKE!’ she screamed again, louder, even more panicky. ‘PHOEBE! LUKE! PHOEBE!’
She ran over to the cattle grid and stared down the long expanse of empty driveway. A white plastic bag flapped, trapped in brambles in the hedgerow. No sign of either of them. She turned in despair back towards the house. ‘LUKE! PHOEBE!’
She ran, stumbling, down the side of the house, then all the way around on the wet, boggy grass, screaming out their names.
Then she stood, frozen with fear, soaking wet, by the back door to the kitchen.
They had vanished.
‘Please, God, no, don’t do this to me. Where are they? Please, where are they?’
She ran back into the house. The phone was ringing. She dived into John’s study and grabbed the receiver. ‘Yeshallo?’
It was John.
‘They’ve vanished!’ she shouted at him. ‘I had a call from someone and they’ve vanished. Oh Christ-’
‘Hon? What do you mean? Vanished?’
‘THEY’VE VANISHED, JOHN, THEY’VE FUCKING VANISHED. I LEFT THEM IN THE CAR OUTSIDE THE HOUSE – OH GOD-’
‘Naomi, hon, tell me, what do you mean? What do you mean, they’ve vanished?’
‘THEY’VE DISAPPEARED, YOU STUPID MAN, THAT’S WHAT I MEAN. VANISHED. SOMEONE’S TAKEN THEM.’
‘Someone’s taken them? Are you sure?’
‘I don’t know. They’ve vanished.’
‘When? Where – I mean – where have you looked?’
‘EVERYWHERE!’
‘Have you looked in the house?’
‘THEY WERE OUTSIDE IN THE CAR, FOR GOD’S SAKE!’
‘Check the house. Have you checked the house?’
‘Noooo,’ she sobbed.
‘Naomi, darling, check the house. Have a look around the house. I’ll stay on the line. Just check all the rooms.’
She ran into the drawing room. Then upstairs along the corridor, water running down her face. Their bedroom door was closed. She pushed it open, and stopped in her tracks.
Luke and Phoebe were sitting contentedly on the floor, absorbed in a tower they were building from Lego bricks.
She stared at them with a mixture of relief and total disbelief.
‘I – I’ve – found them,’ she said. ‘They’re OK. I’ve found them.’
‘They OK?’
Backing out of the room she said, quietly, ‘Fine. They’re fine.’
‘Where were they?’
Feeling confused, foolish, she said nothing. Had she brought them in, taken them to her room and forgotten?
No way.
‘Where were they, hon?’
‘In their room,’ she snapped. ‘In their bloody room.’
‘Are they all right?’
‘Luke and Phoebe? Oh yes, John, they’re fine, they’re absolutely fine. They’ve been thrown out of playschool, now they know how to get out of my car all by themselves, and they refuse to say a bloody word to me. If that’s how you define all right, then yes, they are all right. Our designer babies are all right. They’ve obviously been born with all right genes.’
‘I’m cancelling my meeting and coming home, hon. I’ll be there in half an hour.’
‘Go to your meeting. Don’t cancel that. We have enough problems. Go to your meeting.’
‘I can come straight home.’
‘Go to your bloody meeting, John!’ she shouted. ‘Your children don’t need you. They don’t need me. They don’t need anyone.’
65
John sat on a chair in the children’s room, preparing to read to them as he did every night. Over the past few weeks he had read them The Gruffalo, Pooh Bear stories, ‘Cinderella’, ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, and various Mister Men stories.
They just lay silently in their cots, eyes open; he had no idea whether they were listening. And they never gave any reaction when he finished.
After he had kissed them goodnight, he walked heavy-heartedly downstairs and mixed himself a drink in the kitchen. Naomi was on the phone to her mother.
A strange thought suddenly crossed his mind. Were the children punishing them for what they had done? For tampering with their genes? He dismissed that, instantly. Then he took his drink through to his den and sat down in front of his laptop, and watched a dozen new emails appear.
One was from his chess opponent, Gus Santiano, in Brisbane.
Damn. It must have been a week at least since the man’s last move. Guiltily, he opened it.
You bastard! Where the hell did you come up with a move like that from? Have you been taking some tablets this past week? Having coaching? Getting some personal help from Kasparov? I concede, mate. Your turn to open the next game.
John frowned. Had the man been drinking? His last move had been a defensive pawn against an early king’s bishop attack. What on earth was he talking about? Was Gus Santiano playing with another opponent somewhere else and got them confused?
He emailed him back, saying he didn’t understand.
To his surprise, ten minutes later he got a reply, with an attachment.
You must have early Alzheimer’s, John. These are the moves you’ve sent me this week.
John opened the attachment. To his astonishment, there were six emails from him to Santiano, dated daily during the past week, each giving a fresh move, as well as six replies.
Impossible! There was no way he could have done this without remembering, absolutely no way.
He called up the chessboard program, and keyed in the instruction for it to go sequentially through this latest game. The moves Gus Santiano had attributed to him were smart, he could see that clearly. Very smart.
But he hadn’t made them.
He double checked the emails again. All of them had been sent from him, from this computer. But no one else used this computer; and it couldn’t have been Naomi, she didn’t play chess.
Baffled, he pulled an olive out of his drink and chewed on it, thinking. Six moves. Was it a hacker? Possible, except he didn’t leave the computer online either here or at the office.
He did a search through his Sent Items box, and sure enough, found each of the emails. Next, he highlighted one and checked the source. It showed the email was sent from this computer at 2.45 a.m. last Saturday. The next one was sent at 3 a.m. on Sunday. The next at 2.48 a.m. on Monday. The following three at similar times on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, today.
Am I going nuts? Sleepwalking and playing chess?
He swallowed down most of the martini in one gulp. But the usual buzz he got from the drink didn’t happen. In the middle of the night someone was using his computer, playing chess for him. Either it was a hacker or He looked up at the ceiling. Oh, sure, John, your two-and-a-half-year-old son and daughter are creeping downstairs in the middle of the night and playing chess, beating the pants off a semi-finalist in last year’s Queensland open chess championship. Explain that?