The Girl Who Ran (The Project Trilogy). Nikki Owen

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      ‘There was a woman…’ Patricia gulps some air and slides onto the table a worn, old book. ‘She…’ Another swallow. ‘She gave this to me by the book store.’

      It is a copy of 1984 by George Orwell.

      Taking the novel in my hands, I smell its pages. Coffee, mothballs, mint and lavender, each stain and rip and pencilled etching depicting the tracks of the readers who have lived in these words, all of their movements documented and preserved in the multi-coloured cover and spine that now sit in my hand. I leaf the old, yellow courier typeface.

      ‘Who gave this to you?’

      ‘A woman on the platform.’ She pauses. ‘Doc, she said you have to read page 97.’

      ‘Okay.’

      ‘No, Doc. You – she said your name.’ She looks between Chris and I. ‘She knew who you were.’

Chapter 8

      Goldenpass railway line, The Alps, Switzerland.

       Time remaining to Project re-initiation: 25 hours and 25 minutes

      A tsunami of fear hits.

      ‘Where is she?’ I say.

      Patricia scans the platform. ‘There. Doc, that’s her! That’s the woman who gave me the book!’

      We all dart up. The train is beginning to pull away from the platform. We sprint to the door, watched by the father and his sons and by the dough ball woman pressed into her seat.

      ‘There, Doc. Look! Do you know her?’

      I scan where Patricia is pointing, but all I see are books and assorted junk and bric-a-brac. ‘There is no one.’

      She thrusts her hand ninety degrees west. ‘There!’

      The train shudders to a temporary halt and I see her. The woman. She has buttermilk skin, a navy baseball cap with tiny wisps of chestnut hair peeking from underneath, black jeans, blue sneakers, chocolate brown eyes and a face I recognise. A gasp slips from my lips. There is a flash of memory inside my head: of Kurt, the Project intelligence officer whose real name was Daniel, passing as my therapist after prison, of the spiked coffee with the Versed drug that the Project used on me to transport me to their facility.

      The woman who brought the spiked coffee to me.

      ‘She is with the Project,’ I say, remembering. ‘She is the girlfriend of a Project officer that Balthus killed. She… she was at Montserrat Abbey when the Project took me.’

      ‘No shit,’ Chris says, ramming his head to the window. ‘Fuck.’

      I grab 1984 from Patricia and scan page 97. At first, there is nothing obvious of concern, no code jumping out, no immediate message.

      Chris scans the page too. ‘See anything?’

      I search. ‘There are words.’

      ‘Yes, but anything… unusual?’

      A whistle blows and I jump, instantly clicking my tongue at the noise. On the tannoy, the conductor announces that there are cows on the line, which are finally moving and the train’s departure will be in one minute’s time.

      ‘Doc, you’re clicking – you okay?’

      I let out a quick breath, count to ten, try to think straight. ‘There is nothing here,’ I say to Chris. ‘The words seem normal.’

      Chris reads the page then stops. ‘Wait. What’s that there? I’ve read this book, like a hundred times before – that line shouldn’t be there.’

      I re-read. ‘You are correct,’ I say, amazed. ‘There is an extra line.’

      Patricia looks. ‘What?’

      Together, Chris and I examine the page in front of us.

      ‘There’s a code,’ he says after a few seconds, voice low, eyes locked on to the book.

      ‘Where?’

      He goes to take the book but I am clamped to it. ‘Can I… can I have it for a sec? Thanks. It’s difficult to see, but if I angle it…’ He rotates the page ninety degrees.

      I spot it – the code in the letters. The whistle of the guard, the bark of the tannoy must have stopped my brain from working at it before.

      Patricia bends in. ‘What is it?’

      ‘There’s an extra sentence at the bottom of the page,’ Chris says. ‘Exactly the same as the one above it.’

      ‘Not exactly the same.’ I trace the prose, mind firing now. ‘Here. It angles differently and there are three extra letters.’

      Chris narrows his eyes. ‘And two extra numbers.’

      I begin decrypting the code, as does Chris, his mouth murmuring the numbers we see. But I go fast, more rapid than ever. I grab my notebook and tearing it open to the area I need, tracking fast the data that I have recalled in the past, I decipher the hidden code in Orwell’s novel, catching my breath at the rate at which I work. Chris’s lips move along the indecipherable words and numbers, his mind analysing, as Patricia looks on, glancing from time to time to the platform bookstore in the near distance then back to us, before slipping her phone from her pocket, checking it, slotting it back out of sight once more.

      I examine the last section of the page, reading, re-reading, but it’s only when Chris mutters two elements of a code we both deciphered from the files held within the Project facility in Hamburg that the idea forms.

      ‘The code you just relayed,’ I say. ‘It connects.’

      He wipes his mouth, eyes flying over the numbers. One second passes, two, three until he pulls his head up and mutters, ‘Jesus.’

      ‘What?’ Patricia says, glancing between the two of us. ‘What?’

      ‘It’s a warning,’ Chris says.

      ‘Huh? A warning? A warning for what? Doc, what does it say?’

      My eyes stay on the code, decrypting it again to be sure, but still, no matter how much I wish to deny it, the message is the same.

      ‘It says the Project knows where we are.’ I close my eyes. ‘It says they are waiting for us at the next station stop at Interlaken.’

      The train starts to pull away and pick up speed.

      Deep cover Project facility.

       Present day

      ‘This СКАЧАТЬ