De Kliek 6

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Edward Mander is dead.

A text with those words, from an unlisted number pings my phone at the exact same time as I am kneeling beside Mander in a cold, wet Leeds alleyway, watching him take his last breath.

With that last breath, the danger to him is fully realised, and then is completely passed. There is no longer any risk associated with his name being known. 

Edward Mander had worked at the Penzoldt Institute in London until a year ago, when he turned whistleblower. He had been running ever since. His flight came to an abrupt halt on the slimy cobblestones of a wet alleyway a few yards from the River Aire. Many of the secrets he held died with him. The last words he spoke were to me. 

When I emerge from the railway station in Leeds, it is dark and the rain is some of the heaviest I've seen. 

I'm here on the trail of something that started as an anonymous tip that landed in my Signal chat a couple of days ago. The message said simply "Edward Mander - Penzoldt Institute." I had no idea if this was the name of a patient or an employee. I called the Institute, but they don't release the names of people in either category. So then I called Slide and had him get a list of Penzoldt Institute employees. Edward Mander was on that list, but it showed that he had left the institute a year ago. There were address details on file, but they led to a rented flat in Pimlico which Mander had apparently left the day after his job finished. Slide and I looked at the agency records (this was not a great day for fans of data protection), but they had no forwarding address for Mander. Dead end. Except we don't believe in those...

It was a pretty simple job for Slide to identify Mander’s personal email address, and from there to access his emails. We discovered that Mander had been corresponding with a freelance journalist called Cerise Cauthron. Both had been careful about the contents of their messages but, reading between the lines, it seemed likely that Mander was attempting to blow the whistle on some aspect of the Penzoldt Institute. 

I tried to contact Ms Cauthron, but it turned out that she had died, as a result of some kind of seizure, two days before Edward Mander disappeared. The timing suggested something more than coincidence. 

So Slide and I did some more digging and we found out that Edward Mander had done a degree in Ancient History at the University of Leeds. His bank statements showed that he still visited the city several times a year. We figured he had friends there. Even though there was no record of him having gone to Leeds when he abandoned his London flat, I thought it was a decent bet that he was in the city.

And that is how I find myself in a downpour outside Leeds railway station on a chilly October evening. I trudge through the rain to a nearby hotel, check in, and dry off. Searching for one man in a city the size of Leeds might seem to be hopeless, but Mander was a student in the city for three years. Finding out who he was hanging out with then could point to where he was now.

The next morning finds me at the University's archive, scouring magazines, yearbooks and the like for the time when Edward Mander was a student. I don't need to bore you with the details, or the ethical corners that were cut, but it's enough to say that I managed to figure out who Mander's closest friends were during his student days, then filter that group down to the few who still lived in Leeds, and from there I was able to make an educated guess as to who Edward might be staying with.

By mid-afternoon, I am safely situated in a small coffee shop across the street from the house that I think Edward Mander is staying in. My plan is pretty simple; keep sitting here, and keep drinking coffee, until either my heart explodes from a caffeine overdose or Edward Mander shows himself. Fortunately for my heart, Mander beats the caffeine to the punch.

I've been sitting there for maybe an hour when I see the bus pull up across the road. As it clears my view, I see a lone figure walking along the pavement and up the steps to the Victorian terraced house I am watching. Edward is home. 

I ring the doorbell, not sure if he will answer, or what kind of reception I will get. He does answer the door and, when I tell him who I am, the dominant emotion that comes off him is not fear or outrage, it's relief. Sure, there's some of the other stuff too, but relief seems to dominate. I’ve seen this before in people; they are, at least temporarily, relieved that they can stop hiding. 

To be fair, I suspect I might have got a different reaction had I been one of the people that Edward was actually hiding from, but we establish right out front that I am not one of those people. He asks me inside and, as I step through the door, I catch him scoping out the street for other sets of prying eyes. Having been left with nothing to do for an hour in the coffee shop apart from observe my surroundings, I am already pretty sure that no one is watching.

Edward Mander is in his late-thirties. He is slim and kind of pale, like he spends a lot of time indoors. The house I walk into is neat and tidy and suggests that Mander’s host (who I will not be identifying) has been here since they were at university together; the accumulation of books and objects makes the place feel lived in long-term, in a way that a short term let never quite can.

We sit at the kitchen table and Edward makes tea. I need to build some trust, so I'm explicit about how I have found him and the various corners that Slide and I have cut to track him down. He is intrigued as to who sent the original Signal message that put me onto him, but I am unable to enlighten him on that. I sense that, even though Slide and I have been fairly invasive in our search for him, Edward appreciates the honesty and it seems to put him at ease. 

I'm going to present Edward's story as much in his own words as I can, culled from the recording I made there in his kitchen.

I got the job at the Penzoldt Institute a few years ago. It wasn't anything I had ever imagined doing, but my degree was in Ancient History. It was a good degree, one of the best courses in the country, but it's one of those degrees that is impressive because you've got it even though, outside of academia, it doesn't really suggest a career path.

So I drifted around a bit, doing jobs here and there, because I didn't want to teach and I didn't really know what I wanted to do. For a while, I was out in Greece, working for a museum in Athens. I loved that, but Brexit meant that I couldn't stay there any longer. So I came back and settled in London and this job came up at the Penzoldt Institute. A friend of mine had seen it advertised. I didn't know anything about the Institute, it wasn't my field at all. But they were looking for someone to manage their archives and run some stuff on the admin side, and my experience in Athens was relevant to some of that. I applied and interviewed and they offered me the job. It was good money, and I didn't have anything else on the table, so I took it.

The archive at the Institute was quite extensive, because they've been around a while. But there were some gaps because there had apparently been a European operation that shut down in the middle of the Twentieth Century, and a lot of those records were missing. Most of what was there, I didn't understand because psychology isn't my thing. But I came up with a decent classification system for their records, and got it all logged and computerised, which was similar work to what I had been doing for the museum in Greece.

The other thing they needed me to do was to organise the records and admin for a series of trials they were running. Again, the subject matter of the trials was not something I was knowledgeable about, but it all seemed above board. The Institute specialises in the study of fear responses, which might manifest as anything from anxiety to psychosis. They are particularly interested in primal fears, and they regularly run tests and trials. Mostly these involve paying people to come in and take part in a series of experiments; non-invasive stuff, no one is taking pills or medicine or anything. The test subjects are watching and listening to stuff and then filling out questionnaires or taking part in discussion groups. Sometimes there is a neuroscience component, where the subjects are wired up to a machine that can monitor brain activity while they watch or listen to various stimuli. As far as I could tell, none of this stuff was likely to be controversial, or harmful in any way. The test subjects were paid, pretty well, and one of the things I had to do was maintain records of payment and participation. And the subjects were all anonymised, which is standard practice, so that the researchers couldn't show any kind of favour or unduly influence the results.

The work was fairly interesting, and the people who worked in the office with me were all very nice. I hadn't intended to stay very long, but the lack of opportunities to work in Europe, and the diminishing investment in academic and cultural fields in the UK meant that the job market was pretty thin. Nothing came up that was demonstrably better than working at the Penzoldt Institute, so I ended up staying there a while. I suppose I got comfortable.

Looking back, the comfort was the problem. I had a cousin, younger than me, who was struggling to find work and was behind on his rent and really needed some money. He had asked me for a loan, but I wasn't really in a position to help him out. But it did occur to me that what the Institute paid subjects on some of its longer-term studies would make a big difference to him. As I say, the subjects are all anonymous and they are supposed to be picked out of the applicant pool at random. But I was the guy who had set up the systems, so I knew how to navigate them. I told my cousin to make an application, and then I was able to manipulate the system to ensure that he got on one of the better paid trials. It was against the rules, obviously, but I didn't see any harm in it - my cousin was happy to take the trial seriously and to be honest with his answers, to turn up when required etc. He was just another subject, and a good one, I think. He was a bright guy. I figured there was no harm in bending the rules a little to help him out. And there was no reason why anyone would ever find out. I sincerely doubt that I was the first person to do this, other people in the office must have had the same idea in the past, but no one was going to talk about it.

The programme my cousin was on was just a small group of eight people. The timetable had them coming in for what was listed as "audio-visual input sessions" a couple of times a month, and in between those sessions there were one-on-one meetings with supervisors and psychologists where participants would share their experiences and complete questionnaires etc. It all seemed like run-of-the-mill stuff and my cousin was happy because it paid really well but it didn't take up very much time. Within a couple of months, he had paid down his debt and was in the black again, so he should have been happy.

But there was this darkness creeping in to his mood. I noticed it first at a family gathering for my aunt's birthday, a few weeks after the trial started. He just seemed kind of... Diminished. He was quieter than usual and he seemed distracted. I kept catching him staring off into space. He went to the bathroom at one point and I walked past the door and heard him muttering to himself. I took him aside and asked him if he was OK, and he said he was having a hard time sleeping and was feeling a bit ragged. That seemed perfectly plausible, so I left it alone.

Plausible it may have seemed, but Edward said his cousin’s condition seemed to worsen over time. They weren’t close, they didn’t see each other regularly, but over the next few months, Edward said he noticed a significant downturn in his cousin’s apparent well-being.

Then, about five months after his cousin had started on the trial, Edward’s aunt called to let Edward know that her son had passed away. At the inquest, it was revealed that the neighbours had complained several times about loud shouting and screaming coming from the cousin’s flat in the middle of the night. At first, they had assumed he was arguing with someone but, when they had knocked on the door, they had found him to be alone. The theory was posited that the cousin had been talking in his sleep, or suffering from some kind of mania.

The shouting and screaming had continued, despite the intervention on the police on several occasions, and the neighbours had taken the matter up with the landlord; the level of the disturbance prompting requests for Edward’s cousin to be evicted.

On the night that he died, the cousin had again been screaming and shouting, as if in a vicious argument with another party. The neighbours had heard him leave his flat, slamming the door, in the early hours of the morning. Eye-witnesses later reported seeing the young man running along the street, looking repeatedly over his shoulder, as if he was being chased (no pursuer was seen by any witnesses). Whatever terror seemed to be gripping him, it apparently overrode a sense of basic safety; Edward’s cousin ran out into the road and was hit by a grocery delivery truck. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

It seemed pretty obvious to me that my cousin’s problems began when he was enrolled on the Penzoldt trial, so I started doing some digging. My position at the Institute gave me enough access to uncover some quite alarming facts and figures; on these longer trials, like the one my cousin had been enrolled in, the completion rate (that is the percentage of those enrolled who complete the trial) was below fifty percent. That is set against the average of eighty percent on the shorter trials. I tried to get details on the people who had dropped out, I wanted to know if any of them had experienced similar symptoms to my cousin, but I found that the files of all the dropouts had been sealed.

Maybe I was being paranoid, but I didn’t want to share my suspicions with any of my co-workers, and I was hesitant to raise concerns with my superiors.

What Edward did instead was to make contact with an investigative journalist, Cerise Cauthron, whose Substack he subscribed to. Cauthron was based locally and specialised in whistle-blower stories within the medical industry. Edward’s story peaked her interest. With Edward’s help, Cauthron went undercover, enrolling in another long-term trial at the Penzoldt Institute.

I spoke to her after the first session, and she said it had consisted of pretty routine admin; a series of personality questionnaires and some basic psychological tests, as well as a brain scan to establish a “baseline” of neurological function moving forward. Her impression at that time was that the Institute staff were friendly and professional and that the whole thing seemed above board.

A week later, she called me after her second session and she asked me to come to her flat. She had attended the session waring a hidden camera and she wanted me to see the footage she had recorded.

The footage that was recorded by Cerise Cauthron has never resurfaced. According to Edward Mander, it was taken in a small lecture theatre at the Institute. There were a handful of participants present and the focus of attention was a large screen that had been set up at one end of the room. One of the Institute staff (I’m not naming names here for legal reasons), welcomed the group and said that they were going to spend the session watching some footage that was designed to stimulate a particular area of their brain. The participants were instructed to watch the footage in a relaxed state, not to try to impose any kind or interpretation of narrative structure on it, but simply to experience the images as they occurred. The lights were dimmed and then a series of clips was presented on the screen.

Even though he was viewing these images second-hand, via Cauthron's hidden camera, Edward said the clips were extremely disturbing. They were not graphic or violent images in any way, just a series of landscapes, across which the camera moved very slowly. But the landscapes were alien somehow. Edward said that they did not belong to this planet, but neither were they the kind of images one might see on NASA footage, or even in a science fiction movie. Edward described them as “uncanny”; something about the environment they depicted did not make sense, as if he they existed in more than three dimensions.

Watching that footage, it felt like my brain was twisting itself, trying to make sense of what it was seeing. I felt like I was perpetually on the edge of understanding how these rock formations and plants and rivers fitted together, but there was something that wouldn’t quite let them work. The experience was similar to a migraine aura; you know what you’re looking at, but your brain won’t let you focus on it.

In the third session, the group was placed in a pitch black room and made to listen to a range of sounds. Cauthron tried to record them, but she said that her equipment did not pick anything up. She described the sounds as being organic, as if made by some animal, but she said the grunts and growls were more akin to feelings than regular audio, to the extent that she couldn't even be sure she was experiencing the sound aurally. She said it was as if she was feeling these noises deep in the parts of her brain and body that governed fear responses.

Edwards said that after just three sessions, he could tell that the experience was taking a severe toll on Cauthron. She was clearly not sleeping or eating and had developed a series of nervous ticks and tremors. He urged her to quit the trial and seek help, but he said she was exhibiting behaviour that was akin to addiction; she wanted to go back for more, as if increased exposure to whatever was happening at the Institute would somehow fix the problem, as if she was halfway through a cure with adverse side-effects, and if she stopped now, she would be broken forever.

Cauthron did not contact Edward after the fourth session. He paid her a visit and, when she didn't answer the door, he called the emergency services. They broke the door down and found her body in the kitchen. Apparently she had died after having some kind of seizure. There were no signs of foul play and the post-mortem toxicology report was clean.

That was two days before Edward Mander went on the run. The morning after Cerise Cauthron's death, he went to work and downloaded every Institute file he could access to a portable drive. Then he locked up his London flat, gave his notice to his landlord, and ran to Leeds. He had been here ever since. He was in hiding. Except that no one seemed to have come looking for him...

Edward had expected his theft of the Institute's files to have been detected, for his association with Cerise Cauthron to be unearthed. But there was no sign that any of that had happened. Or, if his activities had been detected, there was no indication that anyone associated with the Penzoldt Institute cared. Edward Mander had been in hiding for a year, but no one was looking for him.

He had tried to contact other journalists, to blow the whistle on the Institute, but no one had show any interest in following up on the story. This strikes me as incredibly unlikely. I ask Edward to show me the e-mails he had sent, to verify that he was telling the truth, and he was.

I call Slide and give him Edward's e-mail address. He checks into it and discovers an intercept on all Edward Mander's communication; someone has been scooping up all messages and e-mails relating to the Penzoldt Institute and responding to them in the negative. To all intents and purposes, it looks like the journalists Edward contacted were not interested in his story. In truth, none of them had ever received a message from Edward Mander.

Slide tries to track down the source of the intercept and almost immediately runs into a brick wall. He tells me that the only time he has seen anything like this in the past was with an associate of his who got tangled up with the UK security services. The Penzoldt Institute has cut Edward Mander off from the outside world, and it seemed as if they have done it with the help of MI-5.

I realise at that moment the precarious position I have put Edward in. While he was cut off, he had been safe; someone had decided to silence him without him even realising he had been silenced. And yet now I have sought him out and, in talking to me, he has made himself a threat again. What I don't understand is why anyone would have been OK with Edward keeping hold of all the stolen files. I ask to take a look at them and Edward heads upstairs to retrieve the drive from its hiding place. When he plugs it into his laptop, it becomes clear why no one has tried to retrieve it. The drive is completely corrupted. Every file on there has been rendered to junk.

I can see the shock and fear on Edward's face. He thought he had been sitting on hard evidence of his claims against the Penzoldt Institute all this time, but all he had was a hard drive full of junk data. Had he not checked it? He swears he had, that when he had first moved to Leeds and started contacting journalists, he had mounted the drive and checked its contents. It had all been intact at that point, and the drive had not left its hiding place since then. I connect Slide remotely and he noses around the drive from behind a thick wall of security measures. It doesn't take him long to confirm my suspicions; when Edward had last mounted the drive, it had been detected on his network by whoever was intercepting his communications and a virus had been passed onto it, chewing up the data into meaningless bits. I ask Slide if there is any way to retrieve what had been there, even partially, but he just laughs and disconnects.

Edward is devastated. And he's worried that I must think he's crazy. I assure him that I don't. I've been around enough liars to know when someone is telling the truth, or at least the version of the truth that they sincerely believe. Edward Mander is sincere. I tell him that I will keep digging into the Penzoldt Institute.

I also assure him that I will keep his name out of it because, as I point out, he is free now; a whistle-blower who has never made contact with a journalist, and who holds no material evidence, is no threat to anyone. Edward can now go about his life without fear. He can step out of the shadows.

It takes a while for that last point to sink in. Edward has been hiding, certain that the Institute and their allies are hunting for him. But they haven't been. He's free to have a life again.

Edward insists on walking me back to the station. As we head through the city, I catch him looking around, taking everything in. He hasn't been a shut-in, exactly, but now he's learning to hold his head up, to take in his surroundings. He doesn't have to avoid eye-contact any more. He looks at the city like he's seeing everything for the first time.

But he doesn't look where he's going. The man who bumps into Edward is tall and wiry, wearing a dark parker, the hood up to obscure his face. The bump is brief, but violent, and the man walks on without looking back. Edward calls after him, annoyed at the rudeness, but the man keeps going.

We turn into the alleyway and that's when Edward's legs give way. He drops first to his knees, looking up at me blankly. And then he pitches forward. I roll him onto his side, which is when I see the needle-mark on the side of his neck. By that point, his eyes have already taken on the dull sheen of absence.

I pull my phone from my pocket to call an ambulance, even though I know it's too late. And that's when my phone pings with the text, from an unlisted number: "Edward Mander is dead."

Later, after the paramedics have take Edward away and I have talked to the police (I tell them I was just passing and saw him lying there), I ask Slide to trace the number, but it was listed as unassigned. Slide says this is a common trick of the security services.

On the train back to London, I get another text from the same number:

"The Egyptian is coming."