by Madlen Namro
The house he intended to build was to become a safe haven for his son and, who knew, maybe even another woman in his life. He missed Robert greatly as well as the guys and Jo, who’d always been there for him in times of need. He wasn’t sure if they were ever going to see each other again. What he wouldn’t give to at least know where they had been sent to. The need was so burning that he one day entered the city prefecture, sat at a computer terminal and downright hacked into the military database to find out. He managed to locate Levi in the former USA and Alec in Japan. He was of course less than eager to see Alec again. That man had been a constant nuisance, always ready to mess things up. Had it not been for Jo, David would surely have beaten some sense into him on several occasions. Alec was certainly one acquaintance he was glad to be separated from.
Oddly enough, he managed to find no information on Jo, even though he tried every hacking trick he knew of, and he knew a lot. The reason, he would later find out, was fairly simple. Embittered, after arriving at Tenerife, Jo had destroyed all her identification chips and had never registered at the local base. She had managed to sneak her way past border control and onboard a ferryboat which had taken her to a Spanish island called Fuerteventura where she would spend her time among the local fishermen.
As she came closer to the island, she realised how little she knew about it. It was part of the Royal United Nations archipelago, also known as the Canaries, just 100 kilometres off the coast of Africa. It immediately enchanted Jo with its golden sands carried forth by winds from the Sahara. The island was scarcely populated, mainly by fishermen and shepherds, at first glance almost uncontaminated by technology or modernity.
The water supply for the island was via ship transports regularly sailing back and forth to the continent. At first, Jo found accommodation in Betanucria, a small city built on the top of a volcano. She was soon scared off by its overwhelming quietness, so she had instead moved to a fishing village called Corralejo. She was quickly accepted into the small world of local fishermen and the sandy dunes offered a perfect setting for long walks during which she always remembered to do some training – martial arts in the morning and tai chi at sunset. During the day she would sail out onboard one of the fishing boats and in the evenings she helped at the local restaurant, learning the secrets of Guanchan cuisine. The multitude of tastes she experienced there, the diet based on fish, corn, bananas and beans, was beyond any comparison to the nutrition servings she’d eaten onboard the shuttle. She was now beginning to rediscover the sheer joy of eating, the pleasure of finding yet another palette of tastes with every freshly caught fish she was served.
After a while, some of the villagers began to suspect who she was, especially after she’d settled several of the more violent disputes in bars and pubs with military efficiency. Her commando background was also given away by the way she’d secured her house on the outskirts of the village and the amount of technologically advanced equipment she’d managed to drum up, not without difficulty, from the local military base. She also managed to obtain an army car which she used for long trips along the beach, when the sunset painted the sea red and the village was already fast asleep.
A group of Norwegians visiting the island managed to tempt her into two diving expeditions to explore the deep sea ecosystem of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the highest formation of the Atlantic Ocean bed.
She was enchanted by the deep sea, until very recently the least explored environment on the planet. The Ridge, stretching between Iceland and the Azores, had recently been studied by the Norwegian team, who employed robotic probes and who had managed to document over a thousand new life forms so far completely unknown to science. The research material they had managed to gather was enthusiastically welcomed by various scientific circles. With her knowledge of almost every type of vehicle known to man, Jo had helped them greatly in steering their stateof-the-art submarine, equipped with its complex console, especially since the ship’s captain was – as a local saying went – ‘sea-wise incapable’ due to the excessive amounts of guancha-malva – the Spanish wine he had a particular taste for.
When she returned from those expeditions, she was always happier and more enthusiastic than she’d felt in a long time. She would tell the fishermen of strange caverns left by an unknown animal in the slopes of underwater mountains, two thousand metres below the surface. They would then, in turn, talk of other mountains, particularly those located around the volcanic island of Lanzarotte and similar caverns often found there. These were things of legends, particularly since whenever one tried to return to the spot to see the caverns again they seemed to have disappeared, never to be found in the same place twice.
And so the next few evenings would be filled with various stories told by the people of Corralejo who clearly enjoyed Jo’s company. However, whenever she tried to share some stories from space with the Spaniards, they listened reluctantly and always concluded their place was here, on Earth, and they had no intention of moving anywhere else.
And so her memories of the shuttle and her life there were beginning to return to haunt her.
Magdalena managed to upload the whole disk before she’d died, but it seemed some memories were more difficult to recall than others. Every day she managed to regain some more. She certainly did remember Alec now. Not a day would pass without her wondering how she could have been so wrong about the man. She had once truly believed him to be her Mr. Right. Now, all she could feel when thinking of him was maybe not as much hate as simple distaste. She pondered a lot on this whole business with Diana and found solace in remembering her true friends, Levi and David, wondering where they were and what they were doing.
From time to time her face would suddenly brighten with memories of the night she’d spent with Victor. She still couldn’t forgive herself for the way she’d treated him at the end. She feared it might have scared him off. He had not even come to see her off when she was leaving the base.
There was an area in her memory, however, she still could not quite put her finger on, even though the island and its surroundings seemed somehow related to that very part of her past. She often felt a sort of a déjà vu when, for example, she would suddenly recognise a certain street or back alley, but nothing definitive had yet broken through. Even here, on this beautiful island, she still felt displaced and confused. She subconsciously believed it to be a form of punishment for her decision to undergo the memory wipe in the first place. She still felt remorse for getting the commodore involved in all this. He’d always been almost like a father to her.
As she sat there, gazing at the starry sky, pondering on a thousand questions swelling in her head, she did not realise that all those dilemmas were soon to be answered.
* * * *
Only a few more days left. Victor had been studying Alec’s and David’s files for the last few hours and could not find anything to fault as far as their military competence was concerned. They were both outstanding soldiers, highly trained under Levi’s supervision, as well as acknowledged specialists in their chosen fields of science. David was a cyberneticist and Alec an electronics specialist and chemist. Both in their late thirties and graduates of the finest military academies, there was nothing in the files Victor had not known beforehand. Both were highly proficient marksmen
– a skill which may soon come in handy, Victor had to admit once he’d managed to regain his ability for cold calculation. The enemy had quite a few skilled marksmen in their ranks as well.
David had been delegated to the base of Freestation near Old Cairo and fervently took up his new duties aiding the reconstruction of the city. As for Alec, it seemed that he’d been recently posing as an altruist.
Victor took off his glasses and shook his head. A Zen school? An ecological mission? It was hard to believe an egoist like Alec would get involved in helping anyone but himself. His location – Kyoto.
He got up to stretch his legs. He walked to the kitchenette, fixed himself a cup of coffee and took a sip before swa
llowing a pill which was supposed to be a substitute for a full meal. He had not time to go down to the canteen and have some proper food, there was too much to be done. He apprehensively glanced at Kaminsky’s file and forced himself to pick it up. The first page contained a picture of the terrorist. He looked rather… well, dark hair, beard and moustache, with only a few strands of grey here and there and the thick, angrily raised eyebrows overshadowing his dark eyes. He must have been around fifty when the picture was taken, but even though he was well over sixty now he still looked pretty much the same.
He tossed the file aside, unable to force himself to start reading just yet, even though he knew he’d have to eventually. He looked at the cup of coffee in his hand feeling it burn his skin. Levi’s files were also left aside. Victor was quite confident he knew all there was to know about the commodore. His professional career had been, for lack of a better word, brilliant. He was the best student in his year, most respected lecturer at the military academy and most decorated officer in the force. His promotion to commodore was swift and well deserved. Once he was charged with the command of a new shuttle, he renamed it the Luna and needed surprisingly little time to handpick its crew.
By contrast, his personal life was a long chain of disasters. Be it due to character incompatibility or his wife’s unwillingness to move from London to Atlantis, before he knew it he had become involved in divorce proceedings. Levi’s wife left the city and moved out with their daughter to a place Levi could not, or would not find. Engrossed in his efforts to save the world, he failed to save his own family life. He tried not to let it show, but his thoughts drifted to his daughter, Laura more often than he would ever admit, pondering what she looked like, what she did and most importantly where she was. Victor flicked through the remaining pages and glanced at the last paragraph – Charles’ current location, Washington.
As he reached for Jo’s file he was once more briefly surprised how thick it was. As night was slowly settling in, he stretched out on his bed and pulled a blanket over his legs. He reached for his glasses to aid his tired eyes. It was going to be a long read. Curious about what new facts this file could contain about Jo, he started to read.
The first pages listed her family details, origin, and place of birth, nothing he didn’t already know.
Joanna Starska, born in 2108 in Warsaw in the territory of the UN Polish zone. The father, Adam Starski, was a celebrated computer programmer, the mother, Franciszka, a teacher. After she’d contracted a heart disease she was forced to retire. No siblings. In 2127, the family moved to France where Jo enrolled in a military school. As an outstanding student, she was awarded a scholarship at the NASA Military Academy in Washington where she spent the next ten years of her life, always among the best of her peers.
Victor stopped reading for a moment. He recalled the day they first met and involuntarily smiled. He quickly fanned through the next few pages containing her detailed test results, teacher opinions and descriptions of her friends and first dates. He was amazed by how detailed her file was. The best student on her year, awards for achievements in spacecraft pilotage, methodology, psychology and computer programming. Not bad for a young girl from Poland. The image of Jo with wet hair, wrapped only in her towel, came back to haunt him. He couldn’t help smiling as he dove back into the text.
The final exams at the military Academy passed with bravura.
At the dean’s discretion, her test results were cancelled and her application for Atlantis rejected, without a word of explanation. No one expected Jo to give up just like that, so it was hardly surprising when she demanded a retest. What awaited her was the most difficult combination of logical, psychological and practical tasks in the history of the school, at the same time an experiment she could not be aware of.
Victor continued to read with growing interest. Here was finally something he’d not known beforehand.
Several other students, randomly picked from the school’s most distinguished fresh graduates, took the exact same test. Jo came out with the highest score. One of the examination panel members was Charles Levi, the creator of the test who used it to find a captain for his shuttle. Soon afterwards, Jo marched onboard the Luna for the first time. However, the military council had a different plan in stock for her.
Well then, thought Victor, seems Levi was not one hundred percent honest with me, after all.
After a dozen or so months of active service as the shuttle’s pilot, Jo had sufficient experience to volunteer for a more demanding mission.
As Victor continued to read, he realised he was getting more and more engrossed in the documents. The night they’d spent together over a year before had left him hungry for more. He wanted to know her better regardless of how often he would remind himself that the night might have been little more than an accident. He suddenly realised that he had thought about her long before he’d even met her. Levi used to talk about her a lot and the stories had fascinated Victor more than he would care to admit. He could not remember ever thinking of another woman with such intensity, such craving. His feelings, when realised, surprised even himself, but he also remembered that he was first and foremost a tracker. His desires as a man were not a priority. He could not allow a woman to turn his life upside down, to interfere with his deliberate solitude. He resumed reading with a conviction that he’d managed to set himself back on track – no more of this romantic daydreaming.
On an order by the Defence Council, Levi set the Luna on the course to Atlantis, where Jo was about to stand before a committee. Levi was allowed to be present as the only independent observer.
Damn it, thought Victor. Charles never talked about that.
It was stressed by the Council on several occasions that the mission would be top secret, never to be disclosed to anyone.
Victor held up a photograph of Jo smiling brightly, daring sparks in her eyes.
The following day Jo was shipped to Fuerteventura, an island converted into a closely monitored, restricted zone.
Wait a second. Victor sat up. What son of a bitch decided to send her to Tenerife, knowing it was bloody well right next to Fuerteventura!
Only six people were allowed to enter the closed zone. Jo was stationed there as the sixth, her mission to determine which of the other five was the real leader of the terrorists. It was shortly after the military had had a lucky break capturing Kaminsky and several others, all claiming to be the caliph. The only way to determine who the real one was, was to infiltrate the group, gain their trust and watch them closely. In fact, Kaminsky was probably the least suspected of the lot. He was a geneticist, a scientist, completely devoted to his work on new methods of cloning. His research had been rejected by the United Nations who had refused to subsidise it further, thus leading him to join the ranks of the enemy whose eagerness to finance his research had never been weakened by any moral doubts.
The file’s contents were truly repugnant. They’d sent Jo to a closed off island to spend weeks with a psychopath! Victor threw the papers aside angrily and once more looked at the woman’s photo. Is the president aware of this, he asked himself. Or the Defence Council? I must find out.
Victor remembered Kaminsky’s arrest well. There were rumours of his involvement in acts against the United Nations and faint hints of his leading part in certain events. In time, they all proved to be true. The tracker got up to get another cup of coffee. It seemed like the night would never end.
Jo passed lots of psychological tests, each one indicating that she was mentally resilient and capable of concealing her true feelings. She agreed to take the mission which would turn out worse than anyone could have expected.
Victor recalled Levi speaking of some sort of a nervous breakdown she’d undergone, her nightmares and a constant fear she could not shake off. Even Alec, her partner at that time, was unable to help her get over it, not knowing the real cause of her state. She suffered form severe depression, a condition uncommon among commandos.
The living condi
tions in the restricted zone were fairly good, the rooms were comfortable and they were allowed to move around freely as long as they stayed within its limits. Jo had sufficient time to win the men’s trust, but nevertheless her task soon turned into a living nightmare. People started dying of food poisoning and a suicide. At first the deaths seemed completely unrelated, accidental, but after the third one died, Jo accepted the fact that one of the remaining men was a cold blooded killer, methodically murdering the others. A hair raising psychological game began. Through her long discussions with Kaminsky, Jo realised that he was the one they’d been looking for, the terrorist leader and the murderer. But at the same time a genuine genius, demented, yet brilliant. After the fourth man lost his life, it was clear that Kaminsky had decided to leave her for dessert.
Victor burnt his tongue as he drank nearly boiling water by accident.
“Fuck!” he growled angrily. Only now was he beginning to understand her decision to undergo the memory erasure.
Once it was only her and Kaminsky, she had no doubt it was now her time to die. Having analysed the previous murders and the caliph’s ingenuity she guessed that he would attempt to drown her, making it seem like yet another accident. So she prepared herself, mentally and physically. After faking her own death and letting Kaminsky believe that he’d succeeded in killing her (he was later released, the authorities unable to secure his conviction as nothing could be proven), she was secretly sent back to the base where she suffered a severe nervous breakdown.
The island was swept clean and not a trace of the dramatic events was left. Jo found refuge in her work, hoping to get her life back on track through complete devotion to her duties.
Victor stopped reading. He already knew the rest of the story. He was overwhelmed with compassion and he would give anything to be able to be with her right now, to hold her close and comfort her. What a brave woman, he thought.