The Smallest Of Things

by Ian Whates

  Not that he could have cared less at that particular moment.

  Only the most valuable and dangerous things were kept in here, so the space was never especially crowded. Knowing where he’d left it, Chris found what he was after by touch in a matter of seconds, grabbing hold of it and withdrawing his prize, his forearm reappearing in rapid stages to reveal his fist clenched around a matt-grey lozenge that fitted neatly into the palm of one hand.

  After re-entering the key code and making sure the space had closed, Chris sat and stared at the lozenge, which now rested on the desk in front of him. Did he really have the courage to do this?

  He had no choice, not if he was going to get Claire back.

  At that moment his mobile rang. Claire’s number. He didn’t answer. So, she was up.

  That provided him with all the prompting he needed. In one swift movement, before hesitation or doubt could interfere, he reached forward, seized the lozenge, plugged in the flash drive, and let the content download. He then unplugged the drive and tossed it on to the desk, pocketing the lozenge.

  All done, but still he hesitated. Yesterday’s shenanigans had cost him two of his most potent charms, and he was tempted to nip upstairs and replenish the contents of his coat pockets. In the end he refrained and actually took a few items out. The lozenge made most everything else redundant in any case, and he didn’t want to risk losing precious resources during the confrontation that now seemed inevitable.

  Satisfied, he headed back into London; a so-familiar place that had suddenly acquired all the characteristics of a lion’s den.

  Claire phoned again while Chris was on the train and this time he answered, apologising for missing her previous call and reassuring her with platitudes, promising to be back within the hour; which he was.

  “Sorry,” he said in the face of her anxiety and questions. “Had to meet someone—nothing to do with your situation; it was something I’d arranged before you got in touch and I couldn’t cancel. Probably should have said something but I didn’t want to wake you.”

  He had no idea whether she believed him or not, and didn’t give her the time to ponder. It turned out she hadn’t gone down for breakfast yet, preferring to wait for his return. Ringer or not, she had to be famished, so Chris bustled them both along to the restaurant. Thankfully, they were still serving. The toast he’d grabbed at home had barely blunted his appetite after the previous day’s fast. Besides, breakfast was paid for in the exorbitant room price so they might as well claim their monies’ worth—his monies’ worth. It turned out to be far from the worst hotel breakfast he’d suffered: buffet style, with eggs cooked to order—fried, scrambled, or omelette—while the croissants were fresh if a little over-sweet, the sausages herb-laden and enjoyable, and the mushrooms actually tasted of something.

  On the way back into town, Chris had been mulling over the best way to do this: play along with the ruse and see what developed, or bring matters to a head straight away. Since his only priority at this juncture was to see Claire safely returned, there seemed little point in delaying. It was time to bite the bullet.

  As they finished eating, he smiled at his breakfast companion and said casually, “At the risk of sounding clichéd, take me to your leader.”

  She stared across the empty plates and coffee pot. “What?”

  “You’ve been rumbled,” he said, picking up and draining his cup. “I know what’s going on—the switch at the flat yesterday: you for the Claire I know. Now, we can do this one of two ways. Either you can sit there and continue to play the innocent, when we both know you’re anything but, or we can cut the crap and discuss what’s really going on here, which will save us all from wasting any more time.

  “Presumably you want something from me; otherwise why go to all this trouble? Whatever it is, I have no intention of taking you anywhere apart from this hotel or revealing anything about me you don’t already know. So why don’t you just call your friends and suggest we sit down in a civilised fashion to sort this out once and for all?”

  He watched indecision play across her features and for a moment thought she was going to try and bluff her way out, but—whether by her own volition or compelled by instructions he wasn’t privy to—she chose the wiser course. “No need to call anyone,” she said. “They’re listening to every word we say. They’ll meet us outside.”

  She went to stand. He couldn’t resist saying, “Were they listening last night?”

  She shot him a withering glare but didn’t reply. Chris got to his feet and accompanied her in silence out of the breakfast room and through the lobby.

  “What gave me away?” she asked as they stepped into the street.

  Chris refused to answer. He didn’t hate this Claire; she was too much like the woman he knew for that, but he didn’t reckon he owed her any explanations either.

  The best bit was when she tried to stake a claim for the moral high ground, saying, “So, you fucked me last night because…?”

  His turn to stare. “Seriously? You’re trying to make me feel guilty about my motivations?”

  They waited in silence after that.

  Not for long, though. As anticipated, their escort arrived within a couple of minutes. Somehow Chris had expected a car—a black limo with tinted windows, a door thrust open by a mysterious stranger. Maybe he’d been watching too many movies.

  In the event they arrived on foot; two of them. Their physique and focused determination made them easy enough to spot, though little else did. No solid black eyes, no hats, and no brown coats, which confirmed something Chris had begun to suspect: the coats and hats and probably even the eyes were props, stage-craft intended to enhance the drama and, maybe, to distract him from what else might be going on, such as a switch of Claires or the proximity of other agents not so conspicuously dressed. The human mind tends to search first for what it expects to see, and once that’s been found, it won’t necessarily look any further.

  “So, no more pretending, then,” Chris said. “I finally get to see the real face of the Faramund.”

  Judging by her expression, this was the second time he’d surprised her that morning. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be the last.

  What surprised him was the attitude of the two goons. Up until this point he’d assumed that faux-Claire was little more than a pawn: a cog in the Faramund machine, involved in matters purely because she happened to be Claire’s doppelganger. Yet the two brown coats—which was how Chris continued to think of them, despite the garments’ absence—deferred to her at once, leaving little doubt who was in charge here.

  After a brief exchange in a language that he failed to interpret—for all that some phrases sounded tantalisingly familiar—the two men fell into step behind them and they headed off. Claire linked her right arm with his left and led the way. Down a side street and into an alley; a course that brought them around to the back of the hotel. Blank service doors, blank ventilation grilles, and equally blank walls with very few overlooking windows.

  It was here, in this secluded bubble within a bustling city, that they stopped, and one of the men-formerly-known-as-brown-coats passed Claire something: a snub-nosed gun of a type Chris recognised all too well.

  He tensed, immediately regretting his lack of control as he saw Claire smile at his reaction.

  “Relax,” she said. “If I’d wanted to kill you I could have done so in the night while you slept.”

  “So what do you want?”

  “Patience, Chris dear…You’ll just have to trust me.” There was nothing warm in the smile she now favoured him with. She levelled the gun.

  Despite her assurances, Chris felt a surge of fear as she pulled the trigger. Logic told him there was no need to worry. After all, if they’d wanted him dead, why the elaborate ruse? Then again, what if they’d decided to cut their losses now that their plan had been exposed?

  What followed was far from pleasant, but on the positive side, he didn’t die.

  He did, however, feel the transiti
on in a way he’d never experienced a crossing before. It twisted through him. Not pain exactly, more a sense of wrongness, of fundamental change—and not in a good way. It reminded him of being at a concert where the bass is turned up too high. You’re standing in front of the stage and you feel the thunder roll out; a vibration that surges from the speakers, through your feet, up your legs and thighs until it hits the diaphragm and your solar plexus, where it sets about strumming your innards like a discordant banjo. This was like that, but worse.

  Arrival came as a blessed relief, the discomfort ending abruptly as if a switch had been thrown.

  They were all there—faux-Claire, the two coatless brown coats, and Chris—but he was the only one who seemed to be affected. Was that down to differing physiology or merely because the others were used to transitions like this? Poor bastards, if so.

  He only had brief seconds in which to take in the surroundings, but that was enough time to note a dramatic change. Gone were the irregular shapes of haphazard design, gone the reds and browns of urban brickwork. In their place were clean angles and greyness, and it was brighter here than in the alley they’d left behind, though that wasn’t a particularly good thing; there was something antiseptic and pristine about the place, though they were outside and in a backstreet. If asked to sum up his fleeting impression in one word, Chris would have opted for “sterile.”

  His attention reverted to faux-Claire. She raised the gun, pointing it at him again. And, without pause or explanation, shot him. Again.

  Chris came round slumped in a chair, dimly aware of someone holding his shoulder, a gentle pressure that withdrew as consciousness reasserted itself. The chair wasn’t uncomfortable, though the surroundings were—far too bright. His eyes gradually adjusted, to report a room as clinically neutral as the street had been. A brown coat walked from behind him to stand by the door, though given the navy blue one-piece suit the man wore it was probably time to come up with a different epithet.

  He was in an oblong box of a room, walls and ceiling off-white, no window, single door, and the thin slit of air conditioning or some form of ventilation system close to the ceiling; an oblong table—grey-topped, of course—directly in front of him, with two chairs on the opposite side: one occupied, one not. The identity of the occupant came as little surprise.

  “Welcome back,” faux-Claire said. Chris half-expected her to have adopted similar blue garb to the guard, but she still wore the same clothing he’d last seen her in.

  The door opened before he could think of a caustic response, to admit another blue-clad man and a woman. The man took station by the doorway, so that he and his twin stood to either side of it like ornamental pillars, while the woman strode forward to claim the vacant seat.

  Older than Claire, or anyone else present, her hair was pulled back severely into a tight bun, and her black suit made no concession to any uniform.

  A matriarchal society? Okay, this was a pretty small sample on which to base a conclusion—two people in authority, both female; an unspecified number of functionaries, all male—but it was enough to at least formulate a hypothesis. The only truly matriarchal London Chris had encountered before this had seemed prosperous and well balanced from his cursory experience, even benevolent. He wasn’t so confident about this one, assuming it qualified.

  “Chris, isn’t it?” She had a thin mouth, the top lip almost entirely absent; a random observation, but in her case this only enhanced the impression that he was not in the presence of a compassionate individual. The voice was level, her English clipped with a suggestion of accent that sounded Scandinavian rather than Germanic. “Welcome to the headquarters of the Faramund. My name is Magda Freund.” Freund—‘friend’ in German. How was that for irony? “I am the group’s operations director. At some point, incidentally, I’d be curious to know how you were able to identify us.”

  She paused, giving him the opportunity to comment, which he declined.

  “As you wish. I must apologise for the manner of our introduction…”

  He couldn’t let that glib brushing aside of recent events pass unchallenged. “What? The violence, deception, kidnapping, manipulation, and murder, you mean?”

  Her thin smile again. “Indeed. To most of those things, but you of all people should appreciate that unpalatable actions are sometimes necessary in order to fulfil a commission.”

  “Is that what I am, then, a commission?”

  Smile. “I must also apologise for divesting you of your coat. It seemed prudent, having seen how inventive you can be with the contents of those pockets.” Chris hadn’t even realised it was gone until then—too many other things to concentrate on. She continued speaking. “I congratulate you on being so elusive. You must live outside London itself—the suburbs, I presume, or the Home Counties. Given enough time, we would doubtless have tracked down precisely where, but you know how impatient clients can be. We did manage to identify one or two of your associates, though.”

  His gaze flicked to faux-Claire, who hadn’t spoken since the other woman entered.

  “Imagine our delight,” Freund continued, “on discovering that we already had a double for one of your friends within our own ranks.”

  “And Bartosz?”

  “The Eastern European?” She waved a dismissive hand. “Already released. No, we didn’t kill him; there was no need and we’re not barbarians. As you experienced for yourself, our hand units have many uses, depending on their setting.”

  Hand units? They were bloody guns, no matter how many functions they might have.

  “Now that he’s served his purpose, we’ve returned the European to your version of London, unharmed.”

  “Aren’t you afraid he might talk?”

  “What, one more madman claiming to have been abducted by aliens? Why should that concern us?”

  Fair point. Freund’s comments gave him hope for Claire, though he was no closer to discovering what had become of her. It was time to move things forward. “Okay, you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to get me here, and here I am.” He spread his hands. “So now what?”

  “Oh, it’s not so much you we’ve been after, at least not initially. That’s changed, to a certain extent—we’ve been suitably impressed with the way you conducted yourself in response to our operation—but our primary interest has always been in something else, an object we know to be in your possession.”

  Chris had to be careful of his reactions here. Who could tell what means they were using to monitor this conversation, what form of sophisticated systems were focused on him at that very moment, assessing every physiological indicator to gauge the things he avoided saying as well as those he did?

  “We’ve been tasked with recovering the Tenaga Sapphire,” she continued.

  Of course, what else could it have been? Somebody in Victoria II’s government must have employed the Faramund to get the stone back, presumably somebody who was present when he’d presented the stone to Her Majesty, which narrowed the field considerably.

  The Tenaga Sapphire…At a smidgeon under two hundred carats, it was a substantial gem by anyone’s standards, and had been the cause of at least two wars, one revolution, and more than a dozen attempted robberies, the last of which proved successful. It wasn’t just the stone’s size and quality that made this chunk of blue corundum so valuable. As if that weren’t enough in itself, the Tenaga Sapphire had a unique crystalline structure, almost certainly facilitated by some highly unusual inclusions. Whatever the cause, the stone appeared to defy one of physics’ most fundamental laws: the conservation of energy.

  The Tenaga Sapphire magnified whatever energy was passed through it, by approximately the power of four. With no apparent payoff, it represented power for nothing. Impossible, yes, but it worked; and the mechanism had defied every attempt at either explanation or duplication.

  Chris had been brought in when the sapphire was stolen. He was commissioned to recover it, in what proved to be the most difficult and hairiest retrieval he’d e
ver undertaken, one that nearly ended in disaster. When he finally returned the stone to its rightful custodian, Her Enlightened Grace Victoria II lived up to her title by recognising the Tenaga’s potential for mischief. She refused to accept it, fearing that her realm would never know peace while the seductive sapphire remained to tantalise the ambitious and the greedy.

  “This stone has brought our realm nothing but trouble,” she had said. “Rightly is it known as the Blue Death.”

  She then decreed that the jewel should remain officially stolen for the time being, and asked if Chris knew of anywhere such a priceless item could be safely stowed against later recovery. It just so happened that he did. Her trust in him was very touching; the obligatory curse that accompanied that trust, designed to keep him on the straight and narrow, less so, if fully understandable given the stone’s value.

  As he sat there now, a guest of the Faramund, Chris did his damnedest not to think of the hidden space, his private little wrinkle in reality.

  “Ah,” the Director said, not quite gloating. “I see you recognise the reference.”

  Was it merely her gut feeling telling her that, or had a voice whispered the information into her ear, based on telemetry that caused his own body to betray him?

  “We know that you received the sapphire as commission, from a government that no longer relishes the responsibility of owning such a divisive treasure.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” he said quickly, “but you’re wrong.” The one thing Chris had going for him was that he’d never considered the sapphire to be his property. “I know of the Tenaga Sapphire, certainly, but I don’t own it.”

  “You know where it is, though.”

  “Maybe.” A concession that seemed impossible to avoid. “I might be able to point you in the right direction…”