Broken Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  She ducks back down below her makeshift desk, set up in the middle of Lang’s underground tunnel. I happen to know for a fact that Felicity has organized for her to have a wired connection so fast it makes photons worry that something might be catching up to them.

  Clyde sits cross-legged at the desk’s base making his way through one of the stacks of books Hannah, Kayla, and I have retrieved from Lang’s study. He has informed me that he’ll be sticking to the Latin texts as Tabitha’s ancient Greek is better than his.

  Felicity stands next to me, surveying the mobile field office we’ve set up. “This is good,” she nods. “This gives us an edge.”

  “I hope so.” This job has taught me that unbridled optimism is usually an invitation for the universe to deliver a swift and savage blow to the balls.

  “You should set up some perimeter security,” Felicity says. “In case Friedrich uncovers details about this place, or about the key.”

  I gaze into the blank darkness of the tunnels. I picture the unsettling image of them gazing back.

  “Do you think he’ll stop?” I say. “Friedrich. If we find this cure the Uhrwerkmänner are looking for?”

  Felicity is quiet for a moment. “I don’t know,” she says after a while. “I mean, that’s what he says he’s doing. Looking for a cure. So if we do it… he should. But… He’s on the sort of journey people have trouble stopping.”

  I glance over at the Uhrwerkmänn Kayla killed. “God, I hope he does stop,” I say, with more feeling than I intended.

  “Looking for a bit of peace and quiet?” Felicity’s smile is further from sympathetic and closer to mocking than I’d like.

  I wrestle with that. Try to find the right words. “Looking for… a stop to pointless struggle,” I say. “And being pulled into other people’s pointless struggles. Why can’t people just be satisfied with what they have?” I reconsider that last bit. “At least, why can’t giant Nazi robots be satisfied?”

  Felicity shrugs. “It’s like a fire fight,” she says. “Stasis is death. Nothing ever stays the way it is.” She pats me on the back. “We don’t fight for stasis, Arthur. We fight for the best change possible. And sometimes that’s still a shitty change. Sometimes we just fight for the least bad outcome.” She wraps an arm around me, squeezes.

  I squeeze her back. It’s a little half-hearted. “Not exactly a motivational speaker, are you?”

  Another shrug. “Fine then,” she says. “Just think about how your paycheck is dependent on you fighting the good fight instead then.”

  THAT EVENING

  Back in the upper underground tunnel, I hold the door open, so Felicity can slip past me onto the stairs leading back down below. Bags of Chinese food weigh my arms down. Felicity holds several steaming cups of coffee.

  “We should tell Volk and Hermann about this place,” I say as we descend.

  “I don’t know.” Felicity’s ahead of me and I can’t see her face, but she sounds dubious. “I think you’re right that they’re on our side, but I also think their network is leaky as hell. Anything we tell them will get to Friedrich sooner or later.”

  Kayla waits at the bottom of the stairs tapping her phone. “I’m wasting feckin’ time here.” She doesn’t bother looking up. “Never be able to fix up a date for tonight at this point.”

  “Aren’t you meant to be on perimeter guard duty?” I ask.

  “Feckin’ doorway,” Kayla says. “Feckin’ perimeter. Feckin’ guarding it.”

  Felicity nods. “I’ve got sweet and sour chicken for you when you’re ready.”

  Kayla grimaces. Hopefully her chicken is heavy on the sweet side.

  We put the bags down on Tabitha’s makeshift desk, which has been drowned in Lang’s papers. Clyde sits in the middle of what might well be a book fort. Even Hannah is reading. I peer over her shoulder. It looks like gibberish.

  “Beowulf,” she says without looking up. “The Old English original version. Had to translate it my first year of uni. Only book in Lang’s stash that I recognized. Learning bollocks all from it. Just like back when I was at uni, actually.”

  Felicity holds out a box toward her. “Chow mein.”

  “You two learned anything?” I look to Clyde and Tabitha. Tabitha is sitting at her desk, Doc Martens propped up on its formica surface. She peers over the edge of the journal she’s reading.

  “Himalayas,” she says.

  My eyes have a momentary meeting with Felicity’s. They confer. We come up lacking. “Maybe a little more information?” I ask.

  “Well,” Clyde cuts in, “these are all Lang’s personal papers. We thought we’d start with them. Educated guess. Well, not formal education. No Joseph Lang Studies offered at Cambridge unfortunately. Not that I’d likely have studied that. Wouldn’t have had the foresight to see their application, like as not. Not many people would, I suspect. Which probably explains their absence from the curriculum come to think of it. Tough to organize an entire undergraduate course when you don’t think anyone’s going to take it. Beating one’s head against the administrative red tape, I’m sure. Not that there’s ever been much literal red tape involved in the bureaucracy I’ve encountered. Maybe it’s something to do with communists. The Reds. They seem keen on bureaucracy. Though the tape… well that could be metaphorical, I suppose…” He stares off into space.

  I give him a moment, check on Tabitha. She’s gone back to reading.

  “The Himalayas?” I prompt him.

  “Oh yes, sorry.” Clyde shrugs twice. “Well, we thought we’d start with Lang’s papers on the grounds that those might contain the most personal information. The Uhrwerkmänner being an idea original to him and all that. And, well—” His hand indicates the walls of paper around him, “—turns out he was quite a loquacious fellow. Which isn’t said to cast aspersions, just an observation. Though some of the things he got loquacious on…” He makes a face. “That lot,” he says indicating the paper wall behind him, “is basically filth.”

  “Racist fuck,” Tabitha comments without looking up.

  “Amen,” Hannah mumbles, her mouth full of noodles.

  “Maybe,” Felicity says, taking advantage of the momentary lull, “we could get back to the word, ‘Himalayas.’”

  “Oh yes,” Clyde nods. “Well the stuff that isn’t filth, a lot of it is journals. There’s really very little technical stuff in them. I mean there’s some fascinating meanderings on the nature of reality, and some very odd math around it. A rather unwieldy combination of philosophy and poetry mixed around it all, but nothing which is really solid practical information.”

  Tabitha jams a thumb at the door to the pocket reality. “Personal, not professional.”

  “Professional?” I still need more.

  “This seems to be where he kept things that were of personal value. A library of the non-functional. This wasn’t a workspace,” Clyde elaborates.

  “And the workspace?” Felicity asks.

  But I have it now. “Is in the Himalayas.”

  “Bingo.” Tabitha turns a page, keeps reading.

  “A valley in the Himalayan foothills in Nepal. We mapped it on Google. Looks like there might be some sort of temple or ruins in the region. It’s a little vague.”

  Now the information is out on the table, it looks a little wonky. “He just jaunted off to the Himalayas to do work?” I ask. “In the thirties?”

  “Well,” Clyde says, “it is where they found the book. So it was likely funded research. First by MI37, and then by the Germans after that. They sent a few expeditions there. Mad for all this occult stuff, they were. I think I heard there was an expedition looking for Atlantis there. Which doesn’t make much sense from what I know of the legend. Seems like you’re traveling in the opposite direction from Atlantis as soon as you start heading up, but I guess it’s not really my area of expertise. Someone must have thought it was a good idea at the time.”

  “You mean,” Hannah sounds a little surprised, “you’re not going to tell
me that the existence of Atlantis was confirmed during the sixties by a cabal of LSD-toting college professors from Denmark?”

  “Oh no, not at all. Atlantis is still a big mystery. Though you’re pretty close to the way the existence of Jotunheim was confirmed, except that those professors were all Swedish.”

  “Shut up.” Hannah flicks a noodle at him.

  Somehow I feel like I should have been part of that conversation, as if my role was somehow usurped.

  “So,” I say, trying to reassert myself in the conversation, “we need to go to the Himalayas. A valley in the Nepalese foothills.”

  “Yes,” Felicity says.

  “What? No!” The objection approaches us at speed from the stairs back up to the London Underground. Kayla arrives, phone pointed accusingly at me. “Are you trying to feck me?” she asks. “Because I am trying to get fecked, and it is a scheduling feckin’ nightmare, and I cannot have you fecks dragging me off to feckin’ Nepal. I’ve got too much shit coming up. No.” The last word is said with the sort of emphasis normally reserved for the cocking of pump-action shotguns.

  “Have you considered,” I attempt, “that getting impregnated isn’t the best way to repair your relationship with Ephie?”

  “Have you considered shutting up before I give you a sword enema?”

  Well… now I have.

  “Have you considered a sperm bank?”

  All eyes fall upon Clyde. He immediately begins shrugging. “Oh gosh. Speaking out of turn. Which assumes turns in conversation. Which would actually make the whole social interaction thing a lot easier to navigate if you ask me. Not that you were. Hence this whole mess and—”

  “Shut up,” Kayla tells him. “Then start up again. Just about the sperm bank thing.”

  “Oh,” Clyde studies his hands. “Just considering, you know, that the whole dating thing is fraught with all sorts of problems of the sort that can’t easily be solved with pointy bits of metal. Also wondering if, perhaps, maybe, well… possibly, I suppose, if maybe the dates were actually a distraction from the business of, well, getting down to business. Just, you know, considering that your goal isn’t actually a loving companion to spend your tender years with, but rather a simple repository of genetic material. Might be a quicker way to get to the aforementioned genetic material, I thought. Cut out the whole middle man, so to speak. Or any sort of man, really. Replace him with more of a turkey baster sort of apparatus.”

  There is more silence. I cannot quite bring myself to look at Kayla. For fear of turning to stone.

  “Felicity always said you were a feckin’ clever bonce,” Kayla says finally. “Guess you do have your moments.”

  In all honesty, I suppose he does too. It’s just this is one of the moments when I wish I could slap him.

  “Aaaaanyway,” Felicity says, revealing that this is also one of the moments when I wish she hadn’t mastered the whole “unreadable expression” thing. Still, not knowing what she’s thinking does leave the door open for us to launch an informal intervention into Kayla’s family planning.

  Instead, though, Felicity goes with, “Tabitha, Clyde, I’m going to need you to assess and pack up any essential texts for our trip to Nepal. The earliest flight won’t be until sometime tomorrow. We’ll all be accompanying you two as a protect—”

  “Not going to fucking Nepal.” Tabitha has her hands on her hips, indignant. “Researcher. You have a new field agent. I stay fucking home. My fucking job description.”

  Felicity wheels on her, with a suddenness that catches me off guard. “Yes, Tabitha,” she says, and there is a whip crack to her words. “You do. You go. This is not a bloody discussion, it is marching orders. There is a very dangerous, very desperate machine out there looking to unleash God-knows-what on the world. And you and Clyde are what stands between him and success. Lang was a scientist, a thaumaturge. Understanding his work is what is going to save us here. All of us.” She sweeps an arm savagely at the ceiling, at London and England above. “So you will understand it. You will do everything within your power to fix it. Because that is what we do. We fix problems other people can’t. We do the things only we can do. You will do the things only you can do. And if you can’t do it with a smile on your face, maybe you can do it with my boot up your arse.”

  There is a very long pause. Tabitha shuffles her feet and glances at Clyde, who shrugs in a way that resembles a tortoise ducking its head. I stare at Felicity, trying to work out where that came from. Felicity’s tolerance for our bullshit is normally far greater than that.

  And then I notice that Felicity isn’t looking at Tabitha. She’s looking at Hannah. Hannah who has her face buried in her box of noodles, and who seems blissfully unaware.

  “Bloody hell.” Tabitha breaks the silence. “Fine then.”

  “Good.” Felicity’s expression is tight. She seems a little embarrassed by her outburst. She takes half a step toward me then stops. She pushes strands of hair back behind her ears. “Let’s get going then.”

  23

  ON THE M25, HEADING TOWARD OXFORD

  “So,” I say, “what was all that about then?”

  Felicity has been fairly quiet since we left the others packing crates of manuscripts down in the underground tunnels. To be fair, she’s been tapping away on her phone trying to guarantee military transport as early as tomorrow. She looks up, her mouth a tight line.

  “What was what?” she asks.

  “I think that’s the closest Tabitha’s come to having her head bitten off since that incident at Didcot power station.”

  For a moment the line of Felicity’s mouth softens. Then it tightens again. “We need to do good on this one, Arthur,” she says. “Better than we have been. We need to do this and look good.”

  Look good. I weigh that. I add it to the look I saw her giving Hannah. The scale tips.

  “OK,” I say. “What’s all this got to do with Hannah?”

  Felicity looks away, stares out at the string of rear car lights strung out before us, glowing red breadcrumbs leading us in circles.

  “You two need to find a way to work together. I need peace between you two.”

  I don’t have to be a former detective to notice that that isn’t an explanation.

  “Why?” I push. “Why can’t we just throw up our hands and say it was a nice idea, but Hannah’s a bad fit and we’ll keep our eye out for someone else?”

  “Because they’ll shut us bloody down if we do.”

  Felicity’s words ricochet off my ears, bounce off the windscreen, and tear great bloody holes in my calm. I feel my foot slip down on the accelerator. The engine revs with my shock.

  “They’ll fucking what?”

  My emotions are slipping gears again. I try to rein them in. The cat’s eyes at the center of the road slip by faster and faster.

  “Shit.” Felicity puts her head in her hands.

  “They’ll shut us down? If she’s a bad fit?”

  Felicity doesn’t look up. “If she gives us a bad assessment,” she says to her lap.

  “She has the power to shut us down?” I’m still trying to grasp it all. It doesn’t make sense. We’ve been doing so well. We’ve saved lives. We’ve made a difference. Why jam a stick in our spokes now and blame us for tripping?

  “She doesn’t know.” The bitterness is rank on Felicity’s tongue. “No one’s meant to bloody know. You’re not meant to know. In the words of the Prime Minister, ‘don’t even tell that one you’re keen on.’” Her laugh is bitter. “And I thought, well screw him. I’ll tell Arthur. But then you’ve been so… preoccupied or… God, I don’t know. But I’m trying to be the good girlfriend and give you space, and let you figure it out. And I thought maybe the added pressure wouldn’t be the best thing. I trust you. But it’s like you’re trying to screw this up, Arthur. Like you’re actively working against me.”

  “The Prime Minister.” I’m still reeling here. Hannah has the power to shut us down. The car ahead of us is coming up fast. I s
hift lanes. The blundering thrum of the tires over the cat’s eyes. I wipe one palm on my trousers, try to get a better grip on the wheel.

  “When he wanted to see me. He told me. He said he was impressed. Said he wanted to give us an opportunity. One of MI6’s best and brightest. She was to come over for a few months, see how it all went. Assuming the experience was a good one we’ll get more like her. We’ll get a bigger budget. We’ll finally be everything I dreamed this department could be.”

  That all sounds like good things. Then the other shoe drops.

  “And if it doesn’t work out?”

  “Then maybe it would be for the best,” she says adopting the haughty received pronunciation tones of our country’s political leader, “if MI37 was rolled into MI6 for more centralized oversight. Avoid some of these close calls.” I think she is close to spitting into the footwell.

  MI37 rolled into MI6. Into Hannah’s mothership. And of course, I’m sure she’d like nothing better. Except MI37 would be as bad a fit with MI6 as Hannah is with us. We’d be the grit in their shoe, and it would only be a matter of time until we were discarded by the wayside.

  “What would happen to you?” I ask. “If…” I can’t quite bring myself to utter the scenario.

  “Oh, I’d be officially in charge for a while at least. But there would be ‘oversight.’ And eventually they would find a reason to shunt me out of the way. And then I would find myself wandering through a maze of side-jobs and increasingly obscure positions until I wind up behind a desk reviewing reports about how many paper clips they’re importing to Iran this month and trying not to kill myself for want of something to do.”

  It’s a good thing we’re having this conversation away from her orchids. I think this would wilt them.

  “Shit.” I don’t have another word for it. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  Felicity finally looks up, looks at me. “You’re not over-confident either.” It’s a statement, not a question.