Hindsight

by AA Bell

  ‘Forewarned is forearmed,’ she said, quoting Matron Sanchez. ‘Now you can do something about it — if you’re genuine.’

  He walked closer but Lockman blocked his path. ‘If you’re right, lady … you’re dangerous.’

  ‘Too dangerous,’ Greggie said from the loading bay, causing an applause of hands clapping against weapons in every direction. ‘Toys down, soldier boys, or your precious Miss X will die for real this time.’

  PART SEVEN

  Double Crossed

  No crime can ever be defended on rational grounds

  Titus Livius

  NINETEEN

  ‘Stay calm,’ Lockman whispered, ‘and drop when I tell you.’

  Calm wasn’t the problem. Mira felt braver than she ever had, even as Greggie’s lumbering, sweaty men rounded up Lockman’s team and herded everyone into the convenience store with their hands on their heads like a line of children.

  ‘You reported the location secure!’ Lockman fumed at Patterson as they passed through the warehouse. ‘What happened?’

  Mira could already guess the answer. Having explored every aisle and room of the shop while witnessing the robbery and other crimes, she’d noticed ghosts coming and going from a basement.

  ‘Must have been inside already,’ Pobody replied. ‘We saw no sign, Lieutenant, I swear. No cars or movement anywhere.’

  ‘Down there,’ Mira said as they passed the basement door. Guilt made her feel sick to think that she could have found the danger sooner, if she hadn’t been so focused on much earlier dates for other reasons. ‘My fault, sorry. I didn’t need to explore down there. I didn’t —’

  A hand grabbed her arm and Lockman tried to intervene — until someone wrenched her away from him.

  ‘I’ve got a talking knife, bitch …’ She felt the blunt side of the blade on her neck as Greggie spun her backwards against him. ‘It says you’ve blabbed enough.’ He turned the sharp side to her skin.

  ‘Stop!’ Lockman shouted. He struggled as if it was taking more than one person to hold him. ‘You can’t hurt her, idiot! It’s all or nothing! Dissect any part of her — scratch anything — and you’ll cut the whole circuitry!’

  ‘Ha! She’s warm,’ Greggie replied. ‘So she’s no robot. She’ll cooperate or lose the only guy she’s ever cared about … hey, there’s no need to look so cut up about it, pal. I don’t mean you.’ He turned Mira roughly again until she faced him and caught a lung full of his musk deodorant. ‘Benny’s in a bad way,’ he whispered, as she struggled. ‘He didn’t answer any of our questions, so now you need to answer for him, or he won’t see another sunrise. Got it?’

  She nodded and stopped struggling.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said, taking the liberty of exploring down her body a little more. ‘I can see we’re going to get on just fine, you and me.’

  Mira shuddered and tried to push away, but he needed only one arm to hold her, his strength exceeding hers as his mouth found her throat and suckled until it hurt.

  ‘Leave her alone!’ Lockman shouted, triggering a fight that swiftly spread to include many. Mira heard bodies pounded and bones breaking — until someone fired a machine gun very close to her, shattering the ceiling as well as Mira’s hearing temporarily. She cringed under the snowfall of ceiling plaster, fearing the sounds that she now had trouble hearing were the groans of Lockman on the ground near her feet.

  ‘Lieutenant?’ she called. ‘Are you okay?’ She heard him groan and tried to reach for him, but her captor only tightened his grip.

  ‘Don’t hurt him!’ she pleaded. ‘I’ll go with you!’

  ‘You heard the lady. Get your trash off my floor, and up those stairs — the lot of you. You just volunteered to help with the final stocktake.’

  ‘In the roof?’ asked Moser.

  ‘Storage attic. You went up looking for clues, and locked yourselves in by accident.’

  ‘Hey, Greggie,’ called a gruff man a short distance from Mira. ‘This blond guy’s a woman. Not bad lookin’ under the hat. You want her too?’

  ‘If I liked pecs and flat chests I’d play with boys. Pitch the bitch upstairs and call the truck to get back here for us.’

  ‘He needs a doctor!’ Mira heard Lockman groan again as they manhandled him to the stairs.

  ‘Relax, sweet cheeks.’ Her captor licked the side of her face. ‘He only ate the blunt end of a gun for now — and it’s not a doctor he’ll need. It’s a fireman.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Don’t …’ Lockman croaked, barely audible. ‘Don’t argue with them.’

  ‘Do something!’ Mira shouted to the others.

  ‘Can’t or we’ll sneeze bullets,’ Patterson said nearby. ‘Just do as you’re told for now. We’ll come get you.’

  Their captors laughed.

  ‘You’re all brain dead!’ Mira screamed, clenching her fists. ‘Fight or we’ll all be dead soon!’

  ‘Shut it!’ Greggie shoved her roughly into the arms of a bigger man who slapped one hand over her face until she needed to fight just to breathe. She grappled with his fingers, stealing small gasps at a time.

  ‘We have a search warrant for these premises,’ Symes said, almost calmly. ‘Time and date already recorded at the station and courthouse. You can’t just make us disappear without the search starting right here.’

  ‘Oh, I’m counting on that, Detective. Upstairs now, please, everyone. Makes no difference to me if you’re Swiss cheese first. You’ll be Swiss cheese on toast,’ he laughed.

  ‘You can’t shoot us,’ Symes argued. ‘Forensics will –-’

  A short burst of machine gun fire argued differently. Mira heard Symes scream and she panicked, hearing the worried shouts from the others, but there was nothing she could do or say. She couldn’t break free, and even if she could, she was still outnumbered.

  ‘Thanks,’ Symes gasped from the ground. ‘Now my autopsy will link you to murder.’

  Greggie laughed again. ‘You’re hilarious. It’s just a leg wound, and maybe you didn’t pay attention to the blind bitch? We still have a cop who can testify and play with evidence. It’ll look as if your soldier friends went berserk at the first smell of smoke. Electrical fires are so common in old buildings, and it’s so easy to trip on loose wires up there. So watch your step, gentlemen. I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourselves any more on your way to your funerals.’

  Mira heard plastic bottles sloshing all around her, and even with a fist of sweaty fingers clamped over her nose and mouth, she could smell kerosene. Glass bottles shattered nearby and as she clawed at the fat fingers, she caught the smell of floor cleaners and other chemicals.

  ‘It won’t take long,’ promised their killer as the stairs creaked for the final time. ‘Flames spread like wildfire once the sparks start falling. I can leave your weapons down here, and in the ash, it’ll look as if you still had them.’

  Mira heard a door slam and shouts from beyond, then a match struck flames to her right.

  Desperate, she sunk her teeth into a filthy finger and broke free briefly.

  ‘Lieutenant!’ she screamed, but if he heard or answered, she didn’t hear him as her captors wrenched her away.

  Matron Sanchez entered Freddie’s dungeon with a tear-stained fax in her hand.

  Fredarick sensed her behind him and paused briefly at his Braille keyboard, but he couldn’t bring himself to look upon her face at that moment. Instead, he listened to the final whisper of her voice as it broke the soft end of the sound barrier.

  Mira is dead.

  He pulled out the last page that he’d typed, and keeping his back to her, waved it over his shoulder for her to collect.

  You can hear me! she shouted as the final echoes of each word rippled over the horizon of time into silent history. I’ve got a fax here from General Garland saying she’s dead. Ben’s not answering his phones, and I pinged the GPS in Mira’s cane to find she’s at an airbase! But every time I call, they refuse to let me see her body! And why did the army
really latch its hooks into Mira again anyway? Fredarick, you must let me read it all now, please? I have to know what you’ve heard to be going on out there!

  He shook his head, guarding his growing pile of transcripts with one arm and waving the single page at her until she approached and discovered that he wasn’t ignoring her. He’d already prepared his reply in code in accordance with their page-a-day agreement — as much as he could allow her to see for the moment.

  She took the page and knelt beside him to read it:

  Matron Sanchez entered Fredarick’s dungeon with a tear-stained fax in her hand …

  Mira is dead.

  Solemnly, he offered his reply to her in Braille, since she’d already seen his warning once before on a noticeboard and failed to understand it.

  The lie is true.

  One message, three meanings — one for each of those he’d intended to see it.

  For Mira, that Ben had lied about his mother. For Ben, that Lieutenant Lockman would give him no competition for her affections. And for his beloved matron, that the general would attempt to deceive her. But the false fax should be treated as a prediction, just as he’d always foretold. Mira would die if not brought home to Serenity, and care must be taken to ensure the danger didn’t follow her home.

  Sanchez looked up from the page, and turned Fredarick’s chin until his eyes rolled reluctantly to meet her.

  Are you saying the fax is a lie? she asked with her hands. That she’s still alive?

  For now, he replied, turning away again. But it’s too late to save her.

  Then why warn me?

  It’s your fate that concerns me. Hanging his head in despair briefly, he dropped to his knees, then looked up and pleaded with his eyes as well as his hands. Her shadow stretches like elastic back here, and she knows it. When the snap comes, you must not respond to it!

  Nursing his ribs, Lockman hurried to the low side of the roof cavity.

  In the darkness, he could hear the others attempting to pull up panels of the ceiling to climb down through the store, but having renovated the hayloft of his barn at home into a spare room for a farm manager, he suspected he might know a faster way out.

  Reassured by the shape of storage cupboards that filled the lowest angles of the attic, he slid open one of the doors to find his suspicion correct; the roofing iron wasn’t lined with ceiling panels or insulation sheets inside the cupboard. It presented him with only one layer of roofing iron to break through, and as old as the building was, he could already see pinpricks of street lighting outside through the rusted holes of loose and missing roofing screws.

  Lying on his back, he kicked at the nearest sheet of iron and shouted to the others — too late! He could feel the heat rising and smell chemical fumes flooding into the attic through a broken ceiling panel.

  ‘This way,’ he shouted. ‘Or you’re all fired!’

  Moser and Patterson came first, helping him to punch through, and as the biggest and strongest of the group, hung themselves over the gutter to form a human ladder for the others to scramble down onto the lid of a large industrial rubbish bin, sending Lockman down third. Then opening it to find it half-filled with discarded cardboard and packing boxes, Lockman signalled it was safe for them to let go — and not a moment too soon. Flames licked from the gutters and windows, and as the last of them fell into the makeshift mattress of boxes, Lockman heard a series of crashes inside the building as the ceiling and roof fell into the blazing inferno.

  No sign of Greggie or his men, aside from the fresh marks of tyres that led to the cliff. Lockman left the others to investigate. He already knew that their vehicles were at the bottom. The camo-green army van and detectives’ sedan with its grill-mounted police lights would need a crane to disentangle them, while his Hilux looked like any civilian’s and was still parked inconspicuously across the street.

  Still nursing his ribs, Lockman jogged to his cab and reached for the mike to his mobile comm-set. ‘Alpha Lima to Mamma Bear,’ he said, calling in. ‘Request immediate air-evac, and sat-obs for all activity, past thirty mins at these co-ords, over.’

  ‘Roger that, Alpha Lima,’ came the reply from General Garland’s airborne command centre. ‘Evac team is en route: ETA seven minutes. Civilian firefighters have been notified: ETA fourteen minutes. Mamma Bear sends her compliments on a successful handover and requests you remind the two suits of their confidentiality agreements prior to disengaging from the area of operation. Over.’

  Injured and aching, Lockman stared at the comms-unit, wondering if he’d heard right. With an ETA of only seven minutes for the evac team, it was clear that Mamma Bear had been watching, as planned, but he had no idea what was meant by ‘successful handover’ and couldn’t ask for details with two civilian detectives standing within earshot. ‘Repeat prior instruction? Over.’

  Patterson snatched the hand-held mike and pressed the side-button. ‘Alpha Lima out. Echo Papa here. Stage one complete. Echo Papa out.’

  ‘Hey! What …?’ Lockman said, catching the mike as Patterson tossed it back to him. ‘What do you mean, stage one?’

  ‘Not your concern,’ Patterson replied. ‘You’re relieved.’ He withdrew a sealed envelope from his shirt pocket and handed it to Lockman to read the bad news for himself. ‘I outrank you again, Lance Corporal. I’m assuming command of this unit.’

  Patterson walked back to the others, leaving Lockman to slump against his Hilux. He read the orders twice more to be sure. In the distance, he could hear the chopper and fire units coming fast, but for him, time had stopped. Garland had kicked him in the balls, and not just by repealing his field commission. He’d expected that much. Having achieved the rank of lieutenant under another name in another life, he knew he still had a lot to do before he could earn back that rank. It was the way she’d done it, keeping him in the dark while fully briefing the rest of his team. It was a Pacific Rim job, all over again.

  Only this time, he had the home ground advantage. He could do something.

  He saw an army Blackhawk touch down in the carpark of a security-lit kindergarten down the road. Flames made landing any closer to the Greppia store dangerous, and the others were already down there, preparing to load while two medics jogged uphill with their kit to attend to him. Passing them halfway, he shrugged them off and grabbed Staff Sergeant Patterson by the arm.

  ‘You’re on leave,’ Patterson shouted over the whine of the rotors. ‘There’s nothing more you can do here, son!’

  ‘I need to know what Mamma Bear meant by the handover?’

  Patterson patted him on the shoulder. ‘What do you think? You can’t catch the big fish without running out your bait.’

  As Patterson turned away, Lockman caught sight of a slim-line headset protruding from his pocket and realised he’d been in contact with Mamma Bear on a separate frequency all along.

  Lockman hooked a fist at him, but his injuries slowed him. Patterson deflected and caught him into a bear-hug, noticeably gentler with Lockman’s ribs than he could have been.

  ‘I’m letting this go,’ he said quietly enough that only Lockman could hear him. ‘You did good here, kid, no matter what anyone says, and you went through a lot with that whole Kitching-torture ordeal a while back, so don’t make me boot you off to a stockade. Enjoy what’s left of your holiday and don’t forget those two extra days.’ Then he shouted for the medics and handed him over, not letting go until they had a firm grip on him and orders to hold him for at least half an hour — while Lockman pocketed the slim-line headset from Patterson’s vest, hoping he’d be long gone before he noticed it missing.

  ‘Police chopper’s on its way,’ Pobody reported. ‘The medics can hitch a ride back when they’re done with the sherlocks — unless he needs a lift to hospital too?’

  Lockman shook his head, knowing his ribs were only about as sore as they had been a fortnight beforehand when Colonel Kitching had tried to talk him into confessing to the murder of his previous sergeant. Time was the only cur
e for his hairline fracture and bruising, and he needed more of that to recuperate, which was why he’d opted for a quiet fishing holiday in the first place.

  Still, as he watched them all climb into the cargo hold of the Blackhawk, he couldn’t help but feel betrayed and up against a slippery slope that was near to mountainous. Only Davit Uno spared him a pained look of sympathy, but their silence and obedience as they boarded, made them all complicit. His blood boiled to think how Mira Chambers must feel by now.

  ‘Where to?’ he heard Patterson shout as he boarded with the others.

  ‘To Straddie,’ replied the loadmaster. ‘Buckle-up, people. There’s a storm blowing in.’

  TWENTY

  Mira woke to the sensation of falling — her worst nightmare.

  She thrashed about, and remembered falling out of her favourite poet tree as a child and breaking bones as if they were eggshells. She screamed, knowing Chloe’s body had fallen too — driven over a cliff — but it took barely a second more before Mira landed on her back on what felt like a mattress with lumps of pillows and dishevelled bedcovers.

  Through the purple haze of yesterday, the bed sat metres away in the corner of a luxurious triangular-shaped room, leaving her cringing in mid-air beside a curious round window, which had a seal and lever-shaped latch, like a cookie jar. A porthole? Still regaining her senses, she couldn’t tell if the room was really warped into the shape of a blunt triangle, or only appeared that way. The wall curved near the head of the bed, where the low ceiling left barely enough head room to stand up, and outside the round window all she could see was a blank wall stained with rust. A neighbouring ship?

  ‘Comfortable?’ asked Greggie’s bodiless voice beside the bed.