'This really won't help sir.'
'Maybe not, but it makes me feel a whole lot better. So who wants to see me?'
'I can't say sir.'
'Liar. You have no fucking idea, do you?
'I really must insist sir. Please come with me or I will need to remove you by force.'
'Yeah, yeah, I know. Jab me with drugs, lock me in a straight jacket and manacle me,' I said, as I slowly stood and looked him in the eyes. 'I've had it all done to me before, so unless you're about to put a bullet in my head, it's just another new day with all the same shit. Now, am I meeting another fucking woman?'
'I can't say sir.'
'I know. You can't say much at all can you? So best you lead me away to someone who can.'
'This way sir,' he said, and kept a careful eye on me as I followed him out through my hatch into the gangway. He looked hesitantly across his shoulder at me as we started walking, with me a step behind him.
'Would you prefer me to lead?'
'Yes sir,' he said, as he let me pass him and he pointed ahead. I don't know why, but today I really couldn't give a fuck.
'Turn left here sir.' I obeyed, but shrugged my shoulders and was very pleased with myself for the pissed off look on Submariner Crater Face's face.
'Here sir,' he said, as he opened a hatch and waited for me to enter. I did and he closed it behind me as my eyes met hers.
'Good morning Mr Garret.'
'I was honestly hoping for a man this time,' I said, but at the same time was seriously thinking that fear can make one do and say the most stupid things. My guts were living a nightmare and had tied themselves into a double constrictor knot, while my brain had decided that the best form of defence I had was to run my mouth.
'I'm sorry to disappoint you. Would you sit down please,' she said, but with her downward intonation on please, it sounded more like an order rather than an invitation. I sat down obediently, trying to put a label on her. She had very short grey hair, with colour matched eyes and skin and was probably about fifty. Dressed in grey overalls, which hid everything else about her, I could only label her as short, grey, and very scary. I waited for her to speak, as I had no idea what I should say. As I waited, and she consulted a file, it felt as if the walls of the small metal cabin we where in were closing in on me. Finally she looked up at me with her dagger like grey eyes.
'I don't have much time Mr Garret, so please don't fuck with me.'
I was tempted to nod in agreement, but decided to cancel that idea and just stare back at her. Anyway, there was no correct answer to that.
'Where is your wife?'
'I don't know.'
'Do you know who she is?'
'Yes, my wife.'
'Mr Garret, listen. I told you not to fuck with me, so cut the bullshit.'
'It's not. I have no idea what's going on here. All I know is that my wife was away when I got dragged out of my own home, and then later I got shown a video of her in bed with some ugly creep and discovered that she smokes.'
'Who showed you the video?'
'Leda.'
'Who's Leda?'
'The woman who was doing your job at the last place I was locked up,' I said, and the woman made a note in her file.
'Tell me about the man.'
'He was fucking my wife, what more can I tell you?'
'Describe him.'
'I don't know. About fifty, bald, well almost. Eh, he had a moustache I think.'
'Anything else? His face?'
'Round. Maybe a bit fat. What's all this about?'
'Just tell me about the man.'
'And if I don't feel like it you're going to tie me up and drug me. You know, it's all getting a bit fucking repetitive and….'
'Don't fuck with me!' she shouted, as she launched to her feet and leant across the small table and pushed her face right in front of mine. 'Keep up this attitude arsehole and we'll have to see how well your balls handle jumper leads,' she hissed, an inch from my nose.
'He had one eye that was a little lazy I think, and looked maybe Arabic or Slavic or something,' I said sheepishly, as I had a bad feeling she didn't make idle threats.
'That's better. We seem to understand each other now,' she said as she sat back down and added more notes.
'And my wife was smoking. I never knew she smoked.'
'Yes, well you never know everything now, do you? Ok, so now tell me about being taken from your home in Switzerland and what's happened since. In detail.'
'It was on Sunday morning,' I started telling her, and then went on as best I could, outlining everything I could remember since then. She made a lot of notes and had me go back over events again and again, and pushing me to describe all the people I had seen in minute detail. For someone who had told me she didn't have much time at the start of my questioning, she must have been using a totally different time system to me, as she was still asking me questions three hours later when she said it was time for a break. She sent me back to my cabin, with Submariner Crater Face making sure I behaved myself. After locking me in my cabin, I saw the lunch tray on my bunk. Perhaps it was the sight of tuna and mayonnaise sandwiches, but something inside me broke, and I started crying, before moving on to uncontrollable sobbing.
I'm not sure if that was the moment I broke, or if it had wanted to happen earlier and I'd put it off for a while using male pride and bluster for cover. The sense of helplessness dripped from every pore of my skin as my sobbing finally ebbed and was beginning to be replaced by childish sniffling. For some reason, up until this morning, I had been captured, drugged, transported to god knows where, tied up, questioned and seduced. But all these things just happened to me and I had no control over them. But the grey woman was different. She gave me reason to worry about what could happen to me, and she didn't make it sound inviting.
I dragged my shirtsleeve across my nose and eyes and wiped away the tears and snot and tried to calm myself. Then I used my other shirtsleeve to get what the first one had missed. My shoulders sagged as my guts, mind and brain sent me their collective appraisal of my situation. Hopeless. Unless I wanted to risk having my balls crushed and electrocuted, or be shot out from a submarine at the bottom of the Mediterranean, the only choice I had was to do exactly what the Grey Lady wanted, and be much nicer to Submariner Crater Face.
After I washed my face I tried to eat a bit of my lunch, but my stomach wasn't all that welcoming of what was on offer. At least when Crater Face returned a little later, he did notice I hadn't eaten that much of my lunch and ask if there was anything wrong with it. I told him it was fine but that I wasn't all that hungry and was ready to come with him. A few minutes later I was sitting back opposite the Grey Lady and she started with a very different topic.
'Tell me about the letter from your mother.'
'I don't know where it is.'
'When was the last time you recall seeing it?'
'Years ago. I'm not sure when exactly but maybe twenty years or so.'
'Think about it a bit more. Exactly when did you last see the letter?'
'It was before we moved to Neuchâtel.'
'And where were you living before that?'
'Briefly in Zurich after Vienna but we also spent around three months in Beirut. It was a temporary posting while we were living in Vienna. We moved around a bit for Helen's work. '
'Your wife?'
'Yes.'
'So do you recall seeing the letter in Zurich or Vienna? Or was it before that?'
'I don't think so. I kept it in a metal trunk along with, well, you know, the bits and pieces you collect through your life. When we lived in London I know it was in the attic and I clearly remember seeing the letter when I was looking for some old papers I needed for a visa and residency application.'
'So when was that?'
'Not long after we got married. I needed the papers to be able to travel with Helen.'
'Right. So what about this trunk? Have you still got it?'
'I'm not sure.
We have a small lock up box in the basement of our building, so it's probably there unless it got lost over the years,' I replied. The Grey Lady didn't look up as she made more notes in her file. When she looked up at me again, she waited a moment and then handed me a writing pad and a pen. I looked at her with a question mark stamped all over my face. She stood up and folded her file closed. I went to stand, but she waved her hand telling me to stay seated.
'I'll be back later. In the meantime I want you to try and remember what was written in the letter from your mother.'
'And write it down?'
'Word for word as best you can.'
'Eh, right.'
She only nodded and then disappeared behind me and closed the hatch. I looked at the writing pad and it was a match for my brain. Totally blank. I was staring at the wall in front of me, lined with rivets and pipes and hadn't really noticed the pen in my hand doodling on the pad, drawing silly circles and squares as I tried to remember the letter. I wrote Mother alongside my artwork and then Letter. Without thinking again, I wrote Helen under that along with London, Vienna, Beirut, Zurich and Neuchâtel. I underlined Vienna. I looked at the words and added, gods and spirits and fantasies. My list was growing with the additions of Greek, Decem Filios, Evenor and Leucippe, Sons of Cleito, The First King, Gaia and Uranus and Atlantis. Then I added Hazel Eyes that could have killed, Leda and Chara. The Grey Lady was my last addition. I tore out the page, folded it and put in my pocket and returned to my assignment of trying to remember what was in my mother's letter. The thought of electrified genitals helped me remember a few words from the beginning of the letter.
I had no idea how long it was, but it was quite some time later when the Grey Lady returned. She sat opposite me and I passed her the writing pad, which contained two and half pages of notes from what I could recall from the contents of the letter. She read it slowly without saying a word, while I sat waiting for my pass or fail mark. As she read, she made more notes in her file, looking up once or twice at me with eyes that said absolutely nothing, yet made the hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention. She tore out the pages I had written and neatly inserted them in her file before standing up.
'That will be all Mr Garret.'
'What? I'm free to go?'
'Back to you cabin, yes.'
'But after that, will I be released somewhere and I can just forget about all this and go home?'
'I'm sorry Mr Garret. That won't be possible.'
I must have looked disappointed, or maybe she felt sorry for me, which was highly unlikely, but she did wait for me to speak.
'Can I ask you one question?'
'Yes.'
'Why am I here?'
'I can't tell you that Mr Garret. I'm sorry these matters are out of my hands. You can return to your cabin now,' she said as she opened the hatch and my escort, Submariner Crater Face stood waiting for me.
In
Escape is a word that simply does not collocate with submarine. Words such as claustrophobic, noisy, fetid, suffocating and drown do however. While no one was telling me anything, I did manage to notice the name badge on Submariner Crater Face's uniform. It simply read Forbes. After a few days Forbes, as I knew him now, did answer one quite important question for me. I asked him how long a submarine could stay underwater. He was quite open in telling me that it was possible to stay submerged for quite a few months on end, but normally three months was the limit as that's when they usually ran out of food. Of course I asked him how long this mission had been at sea, but naturally he wasn't allowed to tell me. He did half smile when I told him that at least I knew my maximum underwater prison term now, and then he offered to exchange his out of date motoring magazines with mine. It was a nice gesture until I discovered that his were even older than mine. But it was the thought that counted.
My smuggled note in my pocket was my only other reading material and although it was only a list of a several disconnected words, it kept me returning to read it and thinking that it contained the reason I was here. Like the puzzle that needs you to go outside the nine dots to be solved, my little enigma needed me to go outside the words for my answer. Luckily I had a lot of time on my hands because the answer certainly wasn't arriving in any particular hurry.
I hadn't kept count of the days so didn't know how long I'd been holed up in my submarine prison when Forbes arrived with relatively good news.
'You're being transferred today.'
'To where?
'I don't know, just make sure you're ready in two hours.'
'But up? I mean off the submarine?'
'I believe so.'
'Oh god I hope so Forbes.'
I had expected winches, ropes and flying foxes but had to settle on a rather disappointing black inflatable with a very loud motor for my transfer from one hollow steel vessel to another, and there was a frighteningly high rope ladder climb involved on the other end of my transfer. However, once aboard and escorted to my new cabin, I noticed that the only real difference between where I had been and where I was now was that the motoring magazines were slightly more recent and there was a small port hole for my viewing, and breathing pleasure. Samuels had replaced Forbes, but thankfully there was no sign of the Grey Lady and her foreboding jumper leads.
It could have been the sea air, or the fact that I was being rather nicely ignored that some clarity came to my head, closely followed by the bleeding obvious. I took out my short word list from my pocket and started putting things neatly into place. Unlike my other places of confinement, this one was equipped with two pencils and a small notepad. I enjoyed these luxury additions and started making some notes. I was often distracted though by the almost fluorescent orange overalls I had to wear that were not to my taste at all.
Being certain that my mother and her letter formed the basis of all my problems; I circled these items and drew a bubble from each one. I wrote spy in the bubble connected to my mother and coded message in the bubble connected to the letter. The contents of the letter, as best I could recall, told the story of Evenor, one of the original inhabitants of Atlantis, who was born from the Earth, and how he took a wife named Leucippe. They only had one child, a daughter, Cleito. Unfortunately, at about her marriageable age, Cleito's parents died. There was no explanation why that I could remember, but Cleito then slept with the god Poseidon and from this produced five sets of twin sons. The eldest son, Atlas, later became the first king of Atlantis, with his nine younger brothers becoming governors under his rule. Perhaps this was the hierarchy that was still being used and that it represented something similar to a board of directors – and to what the lines on my neck represented. Ten brothers who were five sets of twins.
I drew a line down the page and started an organigram with Atlas at the head and his brothers under him, assuming that these were all code names for people within some kind of organisation. I couldn't remember all the brothers' names but wrote in the few I could recall. I then added a note below equating Atlantis with what I had been told was the island of Decem Filios, or Ten Sons. That seemed to pull a few things together in my mind. Under each of the ten sons I noted what I could remember about them. Ampheres and Evaemon were given many men to rule over and a large territory, while Atlas' twin brother Gadeirus was given the responsibility for the extreme regions of the island, which I presumed meant Atlantis. I couldn't remember the name but I knew that one set of twins were told to go with Alastor, the spirit of blood feuds and vengeance and learn from his powers. Another story in the letter referred to the smasher, the destroyer and the shatterer, but I couldn't remember their names or connection.
I left a gap under my organigram and noted what I could remember about the references to Zeus. It said that he was the king of all the gods, and also god of the sky, weather, thunder, lightning, law, order, and fate. It pretty much covered controlling everything I thought. I drew a line from Zeus to just above my organigram and Atlas and wrote, Aim = Power and Control. I sat back and looked at my notes and thinkin
g it was enough to move onto why I was involved.
When the woman with hazel eyes that could have killed set in train the process that ended with me being delivered to Decem Filios and to Leda and Chara, they must have been on the same side, or at least working in cooperation. Although I had been drugged, tied up and dumped on a barren island, I couldn't say that they had been overly threatening or violent. Hazel Eyes only asked me enough questions to make sure I was who she was supposed to abduct, and Leda and Chara seemed set on a path to re-educate me. Perhaps they wanted information about the letter, but they hadn't really asked. Maybe that would have come later. Unless they knew exactly what was in the letter, or perhaps were the part of the content. I knew the underwater performance by Chara was a fake after noticing the exact same wave from her the second time. A little mistake perhaps. One thing was for sure, I wasn't held on the mythical Atlantis. There was good reason to assume that Leda had wanted me to turn against Helen, but why? Was Helen a threat or an enemy in Leda's eyes? Was Helen working against what Leda was working towards? Anyway, they all became Team One in my notes.
When I was taken from the island, it was by a far more threatening Team Two. In another situation it could have been seen that they had rescued or saved me, but killing Chara for no logical reason other than maybe stopping her from suddenly screaming at the sight of black balaclavas and guns was barbaric. Then locking me away in a submarine and threatening me with electrocuted genitals weren't actions that I would associate with being rescued. Then there was the Grey Lady, who unlike Leda, seemed only interested in knowing about the contents of my mother's letter – and urgently, as if something was about to happen that related to the letter.
Then there was my wife. Making the assumption that seeing as I hadn't seen the letter in a very long time, it was possible that Helen had taken it. Now whether she had given it to Team One as I had dubbed them, I didn't know, but it seemed sure that she hadn't given it to Team Two because the Grey Lady wanted to know what the letter contained. So Helen probably wasn't working with them. So was she working with Team One? I had my doubts, as Leda had made a point of ensuring I saw the video of Helen and with it, leading me to believe she was working against Leda and her friends – and me. I couldn't make sense of where Helen fit into all this. I tried to remember if Leda or Chara had mentioned my mother's letter, and I couldn't recall that they had. I had a vague memory that I had mentioned it once myself, but Leda hadn't been interested, so she either knew all about the contents of the letter, or it didn't matter to her at all. But to the Grey Lady, it was all that mattered.
The Sons Of Cleito (The Abductions of Langley Garret Book 1) Page 7