by AA Bell
‘I know what that number is! So what was her story?’
Lockman shifted his feet uncomfortably. ‘That’s as far as I know. I wasn’t authorised to receive any updates after reassignment to R & D.’
‘You can be, if she says so,’ Garland said. ‘Otherwise I’ll have to ask you to leave the room before I fill in that blank.’
Mira shook her head. The more she spoke to Garland, the more cemented their relationship seemed. Much better to keep it on a level with lowly Lockman, since she felt more like a freak with a circus trick anyway, than a walking, talking national secret. She chewed on her lip, trying to decide on the simplest way to explain about her eyes and why so many criminals thought they could benefit from her, but then she remembered his conversation with Ben by the campfire and knew Lockman was on the brink of believing his initial gut instinct anyway. ‘He can stay.’
‘As you wish,’ Garland said. ‘What happened was this: Mrs Chiron texted seven words, as instructed by her attackers. She returned the phone to the nurse — a friend of hers, Willow Springs, with whom she’d worked in pediatrics for at least six …’
‘Skip to the message!’
Garland gulped loudly, and like Lockman, her shoes shifted uncomfortably. ‘To quote precisely: He wants your eyes, dead or alive.’
Mira gulped too. ‘He? … As in Gregan or Greggie?’
‘Unclear. We only know that Nurse Springs was barely out of the room when she received a reply from emergency services, who also summoned police, who then assembled a team of detectives, who subsequently contacted Defence for information about the weapons described aboard their yacht, and that’s when I caught wind of the situation — just as Gregan or his son intended, I dare say. Or else there was no reason to display their naughtiest toys above deck: Kalashnikov variants and an assortment of sniper rifles that most likely came from Kitching’s little side business. The delays and distractions caused by investigating Mrs Chiron’s story also afforded them time to plan their trade-off with Ben and Sei — as a trap — whether father and son are working together or not.’
With a shiver, Mira realised that a medical ward was now the most dangerous place she could be. ‘You don’t plan to give them my eyes, surely?’
Garland laughed. ‘We have to give them something. They have your friend — and Tarin Sei, who happens to be my favourite bodyguard. Getting Ben back is our primary concern for your sake, obviously, but Tarin’s been through enough this year with the loss of her sister. I want her back in one piece too.’
PART SIX
Trust or Bust
A mouse never entrusts her life to only one hole
Plautus
SIXTEEN
Left alone to rest for an hour longer while Garland and the docs took the time they needed for their secret arrangements, Mira’s head throbbed like an earthquake — partly from her head wound and eye strain, but mostly from worry. She didn’t need to be told what they were up to — making the arrangements needed to remove her eyes and optical nerves from her allegedly dead body.
Her greatest worry was Ben — not just the problem of finding him, and what may be happening to him. He’d lied to her about her guardianship status; that much she could forgive. She would have agreed to anything to escape her old life of institutionalisation. No, what really bothered her was that he’d used hand signals to hold secret conversations with Sanchez, even after promising faithfully that he’d never do that again. She tried to imagine excuses for him, but could think of none. At Serenity, he’d always been so reliable, so trustworthy and so unflinchingly honest, and now all that seemed little more than a mask outside in the real world. She was beginning to glimpse the real him. Still, she owed him her life and nothing else mattered for now, she decided. She had to find him, no matter how many Greppias stood in her way.
Yet how to achieve it on her own?
Alone. The spectre of the digital clock taunted her, counting seconds as well as minutes and hours.
Outside in the hall, she heard Lockman arguing in hushed tones with a male passerby, who creaked and rattled like a metal cleaner’s trolley.
‘Give me a break,’ the cleaner complained. ‘It’s fifteen hundred.’
‘Bad luck,’ Lockman replied, and sent him on his way for the third time.
Fifteen hundred, she thought, and realised he meant 3pm, while the ghostly clock ticked past one in the morning.
Twenty minutes later, she heard the same trolley — one wheel jammed and sliding. Again, the cleaner goaded Lockman outside her door and again the lieutenant sent him politely on his way. Yet he returned again in twelve minutes, then in again six, as if time itself had personified to taunt her. Every silent flick on the clock from one digit to the next was time that could have been spent out there looking for Ben — and for baby Josie, who’d die of exposure if she couldn’t be found before the chill of night set in.
Lockman’s voice came to her from the hall, discussing the time again. ‘No, the room won’t be free then either, mate.’
‘Hey, mate,’ argued the cleaner, ‘my job could mean life or death to a patient too!’ Then she heard a thud against the wall and a groan.
‘My mistake,’ croaked the strained voice of the cleaner.
‘You bet,’ Lockman whispered. ‘A real contractor would have taken the hint the first time.’
Mira heard other voices in the hall; another security team who took the cleaner away for questioning, along with his rattling trolley. She shivered, as if splashed by a bucket of ice water. It shouldn’t have surprised her to hear Lockman take care of another threat so efficiently, but it did. He’d sounded so calm and restrained, and then turned on the man so fast it frightened her. She wondered just how savage he could be. Clearly, he wore those masks away from her and, much like Ben, he’d been hiding all but his most polite façade from her the whole time she’d known him. She wondered how fast he could change. Curiosity got the better of her. Sliding silently from the bed, she hoped to catch him unmasked between changes.
She crossed the floor in bare feet and flung open the door, but if he startled, he made no sound of it.
‘Is there a problem, ma’am?’
She laughed and leaned against the doorframe. ‘Do you want the long list, or the summary?’
‘Lady’s choice, but I’ll have to ask you to change rooms first. Just a precautionary measure.’
She heard another movement in the hall — little more than a soft boot shifting weight from one foot to another — and realised he wasn’t alone at his post any more in the hallway.
‘Lead on,’ she replied, feeling the weight of an anonymous set of eyes on her. She couldn’t tell if the second guard was male or female — male perhaps from the weight and length of their stride. They fell into step behind her.
Lockman led her down one flight using a fire exit, then to the opposite end and side of the building. Two doors from the end, he let her into a room that appeared even more sparse of furniture than the last one. Only one bed this time, and a window with a second-floor view across a busy section of the airfield, where squads of soldiers assembled around a large military cargo plane.
Ushering her inside with a gentle hand against her back, Lockman gave orders for his companion to hold post outside while he followed her in and closed the door behind him.
‘This is safer?’ she asked, pointing to the window.
‘Strategically, yes. The other end of the building is line-of-sight to a civilian road. Good sport for a sniper if they could verify your location, but here the only people who can see you are all in uniform. If you ask me, they should have put you down here in the first place.’
‘And if you ask me, General Garland has reasons for everything.’
‘You think she’d leave you vulnerable after so much trouble securing your safety?’
‘I’m no more than a prize of war to her, and who wins a prize without flaunting it to their competitors? What better way to draw them out of the shadows?’
Mira sighed, hoping she’d never have to test that strategy.
‘You said there was a problem, ma’am?’
She nodded and wandered across the cold floor to the window, unsure of where she should begin. Trust was still the issue uppermost in her mind, even though it seemed foolish not to trust him to do his job, at least. She couldn’t help worrying about how she could judge trustworthiness at all any more, if she’d missed the mark so poorly with Ben. Time seemed to be the only measure for it. Chewing on her lip, she also wondered about the flip side of her own argument — about what Lockman might think of her, even though she needed to guard herself so tightly around him.
Leaning her forehead against the window pane, she noticed the increasing bustle of life outside while inside, the glass reflected nothing more than yesterday’s emptiness.
‘Lieutenant, honestly, please,’ she said, wringing her fingers, ‘what do you make of me?’
‘It’s not my place to say, ma’am. I’m just security.’
‘Actually, I’m hoping that’s not true.’ She could hear a certain hesitancy about him that seemed to increase, the more time she spent with him.
‘Ma’am?’
‘I can’t trust my own judgment on people any more, so I can’t take the next step with you on my team without a better idea of who you are — or at least, who you’ll be reliably for me, for as long as you have to work with me.’
‘Ability should command its own respect, you said. If you don’t trust me yet, you never will, I guess.’
‘That’s not what I meant. I trusted you enough to insist that you should be my lieutenant.’
‘That was you?’
She nodded, still staring out the window. ‘You’ve always behaved so respectfully to me. Ever since that first day we met, when you were assigned to guard the two doctors. Too long ago now, but you’ve always spoken to me in a way that’s oddly reassuring, almost nostalgic.’ To some extent, he reminded her a lot of the ghostly warden on Likiba Isle, who’d always been polite to prisoners a hundred years ago, despite all the violence that went on when his back was turned.
‘Is this the “ma’am thing” again?’ Lockman asked, ‘… because there’s not much I can do about that. Not just an army habit. My grandmother was an English professor and she’d tan my hide from the grave if I behaved any differently with a lady.’
Mira blushed and shook her head. ‘No, it’s not that exactly, but I suppose if we must work together for a while longer, you should start calling me Mira.’
‘Mirage suits you better — if you don’t mind me saying.’
She stiffened, preferring to keep things coldly professional between them.
‘Adam,’ he said unprompted, ‘… if that’s something you’re more comfortable with as a civilian?’
She opened her mouth to try it, but she’d already grown accustomed to thinking of him as Lockman. ‘We’ll see. Look, what I really meant was, so far you’ve only been showing me one side of you — respectful, reliable, and polite — to the point of driving me crazy, actually. While upstairs in the hall …’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean for you to hear that.’
‘You misunderstand. That cleaner sounded like any other cleaner to me. I didn’t hear any hint of deception in his voice, or in anything else. He sounded legit to me.’
‘If that’s the case, he’ll be released as soon as it’s verified. You can relax, ma’am. They won’t use any of the interrogation techniques that Colonel Kitching employed.’
Mira shook her head again. ‘I’m not talking about any of that. I’m talking about you — not the one who’s in here now with me. The one I heard outside my door upstairs and the one who rescued me from the two MPs. I’m not sure if you’re really that intimidating or if it’s mainly just posturing. But since you’re hiding that rougher side of yourself from me, I can’t trust my own perceptions either, if you know what I mean.’
‘Trust or bust, hey? I can respect that. So try taking me day by day, hour by hour, and then what does that give you?’
‘Oh, sure. You can control yourself, obviously — pretend you’re tame — but you also strike me as a man among men. I’m guessing the real you must be somewhere in between. Whenever you’re not guarding yourself around me or holding your own among them, I have to wonder which end of the scale you normally lean?’
He chuckled. ‘I guess that depends on the day and the crap that happens. Same as anybody.’
‘Like today for instance?’
‘Like today? Sure.’ The bed creaked as it bumped the wall, suggesting he’d leaned against it. ‘Nothing better than a campfire breakfast to start the day,’ he said, ‘and a promotion always beats a kick in the pants. But like you, I could have done without the ambush. I should have seen that coming sooner, so I guess today you’ve had a glimpse of about the best and worst of me.’
‘You’d have to blame me for the worst of it, surely? Exposing you to trouble, slowing you down? Risking your life?’
‘Nah, those bastards were bastards long before you and I came on the scene.’
‘What if Garland assigned you to work even closer to me — babysit and drive me around, put your life at risk again. Would you take offence?’
‘I always take offence at people shooting at me, but if I get a choice between assignments with a pretty face or a couple of grumpy research scientists, it’s a no brainer. In your case, though, I’m all yours, ma’am. No question.’
Mira blushed, although she knew his flattery had to be empty. She could feel his eyes on her but decided she could work closer with him now — at least long enough to get Ben back home safely. ‘It’s not just a matter of working together,’ she explained. ‘I need to know I can rely on you — to consult with you and discuss certain things, you know, like a friend or sounding board. Nothing too personal, obviously. Observations mostly, to make sure I don’t miss anything.’ However, to discuss any of that, she also realised that he’d need to understand the secret which Garland had so far agreed to keep from him. That gave her only two options for breaking the news to him. Having Garland explain it would make it more easily believable for him, since it would be coming from his own commanding officer, but Mira much preferred to do it herself than to rely on the general for anything.
‘I have something to tell you,’ she said, wringing her hands together. ‘I’m not sure how to go about it.’ Then she noticed that the ghostly version of the window appeared to be misty with early morning fog even though the current time was well into the afternoon and the glass, when she touched it, was dry. Outside she could still see floodlights and a military cargo plane loading a long line of ghostly crates and equipment.
‘Would you mind coming here please, Lieutenant, and tell me what you see out there?’
He strode across and stopped near enough to her shoulder that she could sense the warmth from his arm close to hers. Static electricity charged the air between them, literally, as if his body and hers were magnetic opposites, and she felt all the fine hair down her arm reaching out for him.
‘Not much,’ he said. ‘Aside from a squad of airmen conducting fire drills, the air field is clear.’
‘Not to me it isn’t. Would you like to know what I see?’
‘Sure, if you want to tell me; I’ve been puzzled by those glasses for a long time.’ He leaned nearer to her, and she sensed the hairs on his arm reaching out for her too.
‘It’s not the shades,’ she said, easing away a little ‘although they do make it easier.’ She leaned closer to the ghostly glass again and exhaled deeply to fog up the window for him. Then she traced her finger around the shape of the ghostly plane to demonstrate its position and size in perfect perspective. Quite distinctive in shape, she thought, since both en
ds of the plump bird were open for loading via hatches that folded up at the nose and down at the tail.
‘Hey, that’s a pretty good likeness of a C-5 Galaxy.’
‘I wouldn’t know. I’m just glad it’s got wings so I can tell it’s not a submarine.’ She traced over the plane’s identity codes on the nose and tailfins.
‘You must have a pretty good memory, if you can recall that kind of detail with eyesight that comes and goes.’
‘It’s not from memory. I’m tracing it as I see it.’ She finished the plane and used the smallest tip of her finger to shape out a camo-patterned bulldozer that was parked ready to drive up the ramp under the tailfin, along with a cherry picker and another heavy flat-backed truck with some kind of weird metal arm attached.
Lockman leaned even nearer, until his warm breath huffed across her fingertips. She flinched, then realised she must have run to the edge of her own fog on the window.
‘There’s a weird truck beside the plane,’ she said. ‘Do you need me to trace that too?’
‘Sorry, ma’am, but there’s nothing like that out there.’
‘Not now, but … Is that clock right?’ She pointed above the door.
‘A minute slow by me.’
‘Then this was all out there at twenty-one past two this morning. Seven soldiers were loading many crates of supplies and a couple of shipping containers. Want me to tell you what order they loaded the crates and machinery?’
A long silence followed, arousing her frustration. ‘You don’t believe me?’
‘With all the fuss going on around you, I’m inclined to believe anything. Even ESP. But if you need to have it verified, I have a friend on the loading crew I could ask for you.’