by PJ Adams
Mitchell lay in Laura’s space, remembering the previous evening. Dinner at Gianni’s, drinks at the Ha Ha, and then home. Kissing on the doorstep, fumbling with keys and staggering inside. Kissing again, but the moment had... not so much gone as faded, dissipated. Laura was tired from a long shift, and they’d both had a little too much to drink.
His thoughts drifted, then, to earlier the previous day, the encounter in the park with Sunita Chakravarti, and his mental image of Laura became suddenly confused, became Sunita, became something poised between the two women. A strangely erotic amalgam, a third, mystery woman...
Mitchell could be a smartass, a cad, a flirt. He would never deny that he liked being the alpha male in an otherwise female office, that he loved the attentions of the easily shocked Maggie, and the younger ones like Bridget and Lola. Loved the teasing subtext of it.
But that was all. He was no bastard. Not in that way, at least. He wasn’t a cheat, a betrayer of trust.
And that was exactly what he’d told Sunita over coffee, when he’d gently deflected her attentions. So why did he feel guilty? Why did his mind play these games, blurring the boundaries?
He went for a shower, leaving the radio to tell the empty room about the latest breakdown in trade negotiations in Strasbourg.
§
So why, if it had just been a bit of chat – nothing more – with a colleague at work, did that moment still haunt him a day later?
Why was it Sunita’s face in his thoughts as he had lain there in bed that morning?
Why did that brief intensity disturb him so?
Why the guilt?
He didn’t need to have his balance rocked like this, and he certainly didn’t need the guilt.
He didn’t even deserve it!
Nothing had happened.
He’d experienced a moment of temptation, nothing more.
It wasn’t even temptation, as such, more a brief awareness of possibilities which he’d immediately squashed. There was nothing in that encounter he couldn’t repeat to Laura.
So as he walked through the park to work this morning, his coat pulled tight against the rain and wind, he tried to push these thoughts from his mind. He knew what was happening. That familiar self- destructive impulse, something in his head that liked to taunt him, threaten to pull him down again. An inability to accept that things might finally be pretty damned good in his life.
Central to everything was Laura. The two of them had been through so much together.
He needed to stop this. Stop his mind playing these games, taunting him with things that threatened all that was good.
3. Alex, Thursday, a month later
The Registry offices were in an old redbrick just off the High Street, a ten-minute walk from Alex Mitchell’s new apartment.
This morning there was a uniformed policeman on the door, and a plain-clothes man nearby, talking into a mobile. Instantly Mitchell slipped into cautious mode. Watchful. He slipped his hands into his coat pocket, not breaking stride.
This kind of security wasn’t normal.
Passing the plain-clothes officer with the cellphone, Mitchell raised an eyebrow, but the man looked straight through him. Opening the door, he heard angry voices.
The lobby was crowded for this early. A dozen students sat in the waiting area with their banners and placards. All very orderly, as if they were waiting their turn at the inquiries desk.
The voices came from a nearby office, its door open. Mitchell peered in.
Three more students were in here. He smiled. Relaxed. A lad with long hair and a patchy hipster beard had handcuffed himself to a radiator, while two others sat cross-legged on the floor, refusing to move. The protesters were silent: it was Terry Regan and Flo Cooper who were doing the shouting.
“Anything I can do?” Mitchell asked, innocently.
Flo looked at him, her eyes narrowed. She was a tall black woman in a sharp suit, known around campus for the huge hoops she wore in her ears and her long-standing affair with the Head of Library Services. The CCTV recordings were still doing the rounds, apparently.
“You could get that fascist Bernard Bowler to take his self-publicity to some other university, if you have that kind of influence, Al. Would you do that for me?”
“I would if I could,” said Mitchell. Flo was his boss, the head of Systems Administration, the person who was directly responsible for and, more to the point, actually understood the student records system.
He headed up the stairs, glad he didn’t have anything to do with the visiting politician, and all the fuss he was causing.
It was cold in his office, and when he checked his emails he saw that this was because the heating had been turned off while someone removed a radiator from a downstairs office. Why not just cut the lad’s handcuffs with bolt-cutters?
Outside, the snow had started again, heavy flakes being driven horizontally by the wind. The weather this March was all over the place – the daffodils and even a few tulips had been in full bloom in the park this morning and now this. He’d disbelieved the morning forecast when it said there was another big winter storm coming in but it looked as if they were right.
§
Mitchell ate a sandwich at his desk as the blizzard worked up a fury outside his window.
He had a set of files open before him, spread out symmetrically across his computer’s desktop. He was efficient, his approach to life still reflecting his early military training. He kept detailed records: of people, of meetings, of projects. This had proved very useful in his eighteen months at the University: he stayed on the ball, always had facts to hand, was rarely caught out. He never liked to be in a position where someone else knew more about a situation than he did.
Professor Stewart Halliday, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research). One of five PVCs, one step down from the Vice- Chancellor herself. That was no big deal, really. Mitchell met and worked with senior management all the time.
So why did he have a mental twitch about this afternoon’s meeting? Not exactly alarm bells, but just... something.
Halliday was a professor in East European Politics, not exactly a thriving area of academic work these days, unless you had an interest in decline and emigration. He’d been to Eton, had a BA from the London School of Economics, and a PhD from Oxford, according to his online profile.
Mitchell had been at meetings with Halliday on fourteen occasions, but usually these were things like Academic Standards Committee, where they’d had little direct contact. He’d probably spoken to the professor on a similar number of less formal occasions – leaving parties and the like.
There was nothing in Mitchell’s notes to indicate that he should either like or dislike the man, but...
He sat back, tapping his teeth with a fingernail.
Even though they had met on several occasions, Halliday was still an empty space to Mitchell, a cipher, a template waiting to be fleshed out. Maybe that was it: never trust a man who casts no shadow.
He dismissed the files. He was prepared with all the information available, which was not very much. Halliday was just a boring ladder-climber, nothing more than that.
§
Mitchell hung his coat on the stand in the PVC’s secretary’s dark-paneled office. “Sorry about that,” he said, indicating the snow on his coat, clumps of the white stuff already falling to the floor and forming small pools of water around the stand. Halliday’s secretary smiled, as if she could really give a toss.
As he stepped away, another man entered and strode directly toward Halliday’s office. The two of them made as if to pass each other, both stepped the same way, and brushed shoulder-to-shoulder past each other.
“Sorry, sorry,” said the man.
“No, it was me. Sorry.”
Mitchell sat, the leather of the chair squeaking as it took his weight.
Halliday’s secretary was thirtyish and carrying just a few more pounds than she’d want to. She looked prim and business-like, with her straw-blonde, pinned back hair, her chunky
-framed glasses and her minimalist jaw- mike and ear-piece. She caught his eye and he looked away.
Just then, she tipped her head to one side and spoke into the jaw-mike. She turned to Mitchell and said, “You can go through now, Mr Mitchell.”
He nodded, stood, went to the door.
He tapped on it with a knuckle and then opened the door, went through, stopped.
Halliday sat behind his desk, smiling. Another man sat in one of two seats pulled up to the other side of the desk. His buzz-cut and stiff posture screamed military or worse at Mitchell, but still he couldn’t quite work out what this could be about.
Then he saw another man standing with his back to the window, the one who had bumped into Mitchell by the coat-stand in the outer office.
A SIG Sauer lay on Halliday’s desk, its magazine removed, emptied, by its side.
Mitchell reached for his jacket pocket, noting the suppressed twitch on the part of the man at the window. The pocket was empty. That was his P229 on the desk, lifted from him by the first man.
Halliday nodded. “Come in, Mitchell,” he said. “Sit down.” He indicated a tray with cups, biscuits, a teapot. “Cup of tea?” he asked. “Would you like a Garibaldi?”
4. Sunita, a month earlier
It hadn’t been innocent at all. A chance encounter in the park.
It hadn’t been a spur of the moment thing to pause before him, tell him he looked fucking freezing and should they go for a coffee?
Far from it.
She’d seen him heading away from the university buildings and followed; lost him briefly, then spotted him on that bench. She’d loitered for far too long in the cold while he ate his sandwich and she considered her options, whether to confront him or turn back now before she did something foolish.
Alex Mitchell. The guy with the craggy, slightly broken good looks. The one who managed to combine ultra- efficiency with an air of fragility, or vulnerability even. There had always been something about him that marked him as different. She knew nothing of his past, but it was obvious he hadn’t spent his entire adult life working his way up the university management hierarchy. There was history there. Darkness.
But still...
When Stewart Halliday had taken her aside yesterday and said, “We have someone. A sleeper. You should be aware, in case you find you need extra protection.” Well, when he’d said that, and she’d asked who, and he’d told her, she couldn’t work out if Mitchell was so obvious she should have guessed straight away, or not obvious at all.
Alex Mitchell?
And then, the rest of Halliday’s words sank in. “You think I might need protection? Why now?”
The professor had the air of a genial old schoolmaster, and now he just raised his bushy eyebrows and said, “You think you don’t? It’s a dangerous world out there.”
“But what’s changed?”
He shrugged and rocked his head from side to side. “Oh, just intel chatter,” he said. “Nothing specific.”
She couldn’t help herself when she saw Mitchell heading out from the admin buildings to the park the following day, and when she found him a short time later, all alone in the freezing cold.
She knew it was a mistake to approach him, but she wasn’t used to all this cloak and dagger stuff. She wasn’t trained in this, other than a few briefings and crash courses in self-preservation, the main message of which always boiled down to ‘Don’t do anything stupid’.
Was it stupid to be curious about him? To suddenly find herself struggling with how to think of him, now she knew this apparently ordinary man fell into an entirely different category?
Maybe that’s what did it, the shift in perception, the sudden need to reassess someone she’d taken for granted. Maybe that’s what led to those two moments of... of what? Madness? Temptation? It was a feeling she didn’t have words for.
So she’d done it. Approached him and stood there before him in the cold, trying to read his reaction – the snap of irritation, and then the sudden relaxation, the way he took control of his responses. That mix of efficiency and the sense of being somehow broken. Now she couldn’t help but see an air of the wounded warrior about him.
That was the first moment of madness, the impulse to suggest coffee when she knew she should walk away, should never even have approached him in the first place.
The second moment came as they sat facing each other, the sudden shaft of sunlight coming in through the Coffee House windows as the clouds briefly parted. A moment of misunderstanding that somehow cut through the bullshit.
He misread her, in that instant. As that shard of sun broke through she glanced at him, as if somehow she might be able to read him more clearly now.
Should she say something? Tell him she knew there was more to him than just Alex Mitchell, Deputy Head of Systems Administration? That she was concerned because Halliday had barely had anything to do with her until the day before, when he’d given her the heads up that they had a man on the ground.
Was she expected to acknowledge this? Did Alex know she knew? Did...?
She wasn’t prepared for this. None of those briefings at Thames House had told her how to handle a situation that could be critical or might simply be a bit of confusion caused by Halliday’s clumsiness.
So now she hesitated, and Alex caught her looking and misread the look. “I’m in a relationship,” he said, and it took her a moment longer than it should have to work out he thought she was interested in him in a sexual, or perhaps romantic, way.
She didn’t know whether to be flattered, charmed, or mildly offended.
She decided to let it go, said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend...”
“It’s fine. Another planet, another life.”
He really had thought she was interested. More, that she was a sure thing, that all that stood between them falling into each other’s arms was his noble resistance. Such arrogance!
She tried not to make her amusement obvious, instead steering the conversation back to the safe territory of university politics and gossip.
And afterward, only then did she really have the chance to take a deep breath and reassess her encounter with Alex Mitchell.
Sitting back in her chair, she watched him threading his way through the tables, heading off to a meeting he seemed quite a lot less than thrilled about, something to do with some new reports they had to set up for HEFCE.
The strange thing was, that simply by saying what he had and the subsequent dismissal and change of subject, he’d made it into something that it was not. If he’d skirted around it in the English way, they could have carried on without ever considering the subject, but by saying it out loud – I’m in a relationship – he had created the tension of an unasked question where there had been none.
Through the tall windows, she watched a stream of students drifting by; the campus always sprang to life in the ten minutes before the hour when everyone was between classes, as lecture halls, laboratories, and seminar rooms emptied and then refilled. Beyond, a waist-high concrete wall blocked her view of the river.
She tried instead to think about why she had approached him in the first place, her new knowledge that there was far more to him than met the eye. Did he know she’d been informed about him? Why hadn’t he said anything?
She decided he was either very good at concealing his knowledge, or he didn’t know she had been told about his alternative role here. But then... either could be true. He was something in the security service, so of course he played his cards close to his chest.
She’d joked earlier about how her visions of a life of cutting edge research had never featured all the admin and meetings she attended, but equally those dreams had never featured security service agents living double lives right under her nose, and the sense she’d stepped into some kind of spy movie – all because her work had implications for national security.
She hated that nowadays she found herself looking differently at everyone around her. She was not naturally such
a suspicious person.
She was a scientist. A microbiologist.
She studied the immune system, virology, and epidemiology. Her work was progressing well. The interim report she’d recently submitted to one of her funding bodies had been full of positive things about advances in using synthesized leukocytes to target pathogens, and specifically the kind of pathogens that might be used as biological warfare agents. She was good at what she did and the things she did might change the world for the better. Her work would one day save lives.
How had such lofty ideals brought her to this point? Scared and suspicious of those around her, and no longer able to read, or trust, people’s responses.
She thought again of Alex, of his assumption that she was trying to seduce him, of that strange mix of feeling both flattered and offended at those assumptions.
Another planet, another life.
Indeed.
She finished her coffee and stood, a rare clear afternoon in the lab ahead of her.
And as she walked back through the Riverside Campus she tried hard not to keep glancing over her shoulder.
§
The School of Biological Sciences occupied a squat concrete building on the east side of the Riverside Campus, tucked into a kink in the river. Part of the flat roof held a block of glasshouses, lit up on the short winter days by intensive mercury grow lights.
It wasn’t unusual to see security guards at the doors of the building. Some of the work here involved animal experimentation, which always brought the risk of action from anti-vivisectionists.
So the two heavies on the main door were nothing to be alarmed about.
Really they weren’t.
She had to stop thinking like that.
This was normal, and nothing to do with the ‘intel chatter’ Halliday had referred to the day before.
There was nothing suspicious about the way one of the guards looked her up and down before he finally met her eye, nodded, and held the door for her.
If there had been a flash of recognition in his look it was because he’d been briefed on the School’s staff, had probably memorized their ID photos.