by PJ Adams
He had it in his manner, in the way he conducted himself before a jostling crowd of mixed protesters and admirers. He had it in the look he gave Mitchell and Penny as they joined him outside, the look that somehow managed to combine apology with a couldn’t-give-a-shit playfulness.
He had it in the eyes. A piercing blue look that was just a little too intense when it locked onto you, something fervent in that look, almost evangelical.
“Alex Mitchell? Penny Rayner?” He shook their hands, smiled, and Mitchell felt totally disarmed by the man’s easy manner.
The guy had an earpiece in, too, and Mitchell realized he must have had his stand-in miked up, and any important information relayed to him. That would explain how he knew who they were. Did he conduct his whole life like this? Information streamed into his ear, every encounter carefully orchestrated, the world around him manipulated into exactly the right shape. It was a different world for someone like Bernard Bowler. So many layers of control.
Mitchell smiled. “I see you’ve found your way around.”
Bowler had a hand on the arm of the woman who’d been close to spitting in his face moments earlier. Whatever he’d said had won her over, and Mitchell assumed she was one of the plants.
That alone was an expensive game, because each of these plants could only ever be used once. Each one would need a full back story that would withstand digging from the press to avoid any claims of fakery. Bowler clearly didn’t do anything by halves.
Bowler put his arm around Mitchell’s shoulders, and immediately Mitchell felt exposed – everyone staring, all the cameras, the attention. He wasn’t used to being brought into the center of things like this, to being so public. He needed to remind himself that he was just a normal citizen now – despite getting dragged into today’s performance. He didn’t have a cover to preserve, a fake identity that might be blown by appearing on the front page of a local newspaper.
Still, he resented being so smoothly drawn into the circus. An arm across the shoulder, a winning smile, and you felt as if you’d just won some kind of prize.
Being manipulated didn’t work for him.
He stepped back, straightened his jacket, let Bowler do his crowd-pleasing thing.
Bowler knew exactly what he was doing. If he hadn’t pulled his stunt with the double Conner would never have allowed him to be out in the open like this, exposed to just about anything.
Mitchell scanned the crowd. About a hundred people, mostly anti. One or two cranks with staring eyes and snarling shouts. Mostly students, mostly the kind who thought chaining themselves to radiators might somehow change the world. No obvious threats or vulnerabilities, other than the blasé exposure of the man.
The security guys in the crowd weren’t hard to miss, which probably meant he’d missed one or two, as well. Mitchell knew he was rusty, and clearly off his game. After all, he’d just taken the wrong damned Bowler on a tour of the Riverside Campus.
When it came to his scheduled time to talk to the Politics Society, Bowler spoke eloquently, and had his audience hooked from the start, painting his vision of a free, all-embracing society where the old ideals of Left and Right were left behind, with all the populist appeal of Trump, Trudeau, Macron. He could say almost anything and have an audience eating out of his hand, and seeing him in person Mitchell started to understand the man’s recent rise.
He tried to shut it out. Concentrated on the audience, even the obvious security people, looking for any hint of abnormal behavior.
He soon found himself in that zone again, almost a game-player’s approach of assessing moves and possibilities. Reading the situation for risk, cover, evacuation routes.
In his mind the schedule ticked down, the time left for Bowler’s talk, the twenty minutes allocated to Q&A, and then the route through the building to that parking bay beneath the VC’s offices where Bowler’s car would be waiting. This time, he tried to factor in other unknowns, like the possibility that Bowler would instead opt to take the public exit, mix with his people again, seek one last photo opportunity before departing.
§
Nothing happened.
No threat materialized.
None of the spittle-mouthed cranks turned out to be more than harmless individuals with a passion. None of the ordinary men and women in the audience were anything but admirers or protesters. No one was watching Bowler through a sniper scope from the lecture hall’s projection room, or lurking around a dark corner with a garrote.
Bowler did his thing, over-running by ten minutes because he was so in demand, exactly as you might expect from any celebrity who orchestrated his own public shows of popularity so skillfully, and then he left, just like that.
Mitchell stood there with Penny Rayner, watching the silver car pull away, taken a little aback at the abruptness of Bowler’s departure, his readiness to dismiss them as no longer of use to him.
They turned to each other, she shrugged, and said, “Well...” She had a knack for expressing far more than a single word should ever be able to convey. Bowler had done what he wanted, the University had bent over backward to accommodate him and then it was simply over. Her one word said it all.
“Thanks, Alex,” she said, as they turned back toward the building. “Sometimes we just have to do these things.”
Just then Doug Conner, or whatever his real name was, emerged from the building. He raised a hand in greeting, and said to Penny, “Job done. I’ll send you a summary report just in case you need any paperwork, and if you ever need our services again...?” They shook hands, and then he turned to Mitchell and said, “Alex. Thank you again. You walking my way?”
He was now.
“So what was all that about?” asked Mitchell when they were out of earshot of Penny Rayner. “The subterfuge. Bowler’s fun and games with his stand-in.”
Conner shrugged, clearly not a man to be drawn on anything, let alone speculation. “What did he say about it?” he asked, evasively.
“Nothing. He didn’t seem interested in the likes of me, the hired help. The other guy said Bowler just likes to do everything his own way, that he doesn’t play by the rules and allow other people to organize his life for him. Struck me as a power thing, a way of him making a point of taking control of the situation. The man has an ego the size of a planet.”
“That fits.” It sounded like Conner was agreeing, but his words were as noncommittal as ever.
“Would you have let him get into the crowd like that if he hadn’t pulled his stunt?”
Conner didn’t say anything, which was answer enough, and maybe that was the explanation: Bowler had simply pulled his trick to shake off the over-heavy hand of the security services. At some point it would probably become part of his narrative: carefully leaked stories of how he avoided being over- protected so he could mix with his people.
“Did he know there was a risk today? Something more than normal? If he did, going out into the crowd was almost setting himself up.”
“He was briefed, yes. He didn’t necessarily listen.”
They’d reached the main car park now, and Conner stopped, turning to face Mitchell. “Look, thanks again for your cooperation on this,” he said. “It has been noted.”
“Was it worth it? Did we actually achieve anything today?”
“You can ask that about almost anything we do. Most of the time the measure of success is that nothing happens and we’re never sure if it was ever going to. You don’t get a neat report card and a customer review at the end of each job in our game. You know that, Alex.”
Conner shrugged, went on: “Nothing happened today. Job done. Our efforts might have forestalled something, or there may never have been anything.”
“The intel?”
“We get false positives all the time. When it comes to intel chatter it’s mostly a statistical game. Probabilities. You did well, Alex. We slipped up today but you adapted quickly to the situation on the ground.”
Mitchell nodded. He’d felt rusty toda
y, and he knew he’d had a few lapses when he hadn’t been at the peak of his game, but it was good to have some kind of acknowledgment that he’d done okay.
“Am I done with this?” he asked, as Conner made a move to turn and walk away. “Am I free now?”
Conner’s expression was unreadable. Amused? Knowing? Dismissive?
“You always were, Alex,” he said, finally. “You didn’t have to do this. You wanted to. And don’t ever try to convince yourself otherwise.”
He watched him go. The Company man, walking out of Alex Mitchell’s life until the day another Company man would walk back in again.
You never leave the Company.
Never.
§
He found a table by the windows in the Coffee House at 3.15, and sat cradling a large Americano, watching the world go by outside. The campus was back to being as quiet as usual on a Friday afternoon, just the occasional student or staff member drifting past on the open concrete area outside the window.
When Sunita was late, he thought nothing of it. She’d said she had a conference call this afternoon, and he knew she was working against various deadlines and targets. He still didn’t know her well enough to have an idea of whether this was a particularly busy time for her, or if she simply stretched herself this far all the time.
She was incredibly passionate about what she did, though. That, combined with her belief that she would do some good in this shabby, broken world, was truly inspiring to a man who’d spent his adult life dealing with people who worked only to make it a worse, more broken place.
Funny to think he was past all that – save for days like today, when his past briefly caught up with him.
He needed to find something, he realized. Something to fill the hole in his life. At least when he was with the Company he had been fighting for a better world.
But now...?
He was an ordinary man, leading an ordinary life, and while he could try to argue that working in a university was contributing to the greater good, well... some people need more.
Even today... One of those days when, as Conner had said, their only measure of success was that nothing had happened... Well, at least they had that measure of success. The bad guys hadn’t done harm.
Thinking like this came as a shock to him, the closest he’d come to acknowledging that at least a part of him missed it all.
He wondered what Sunita would think if she knew her own drive and spirit had inspired him to reach this point.
Sunita.
She was fifteen minutes late now.
No messages. He considered calling, but held off. He still had a lot to learn about all this. Friends. All the unwritten rules and assumptions that were part of socializing. Funny that it had taken him two years out of the Service to finally work out that his years in the Company had turned him into a social cripple who now had to start relearning the things everyone else took for granted.
Was that a Company thing, or a PTSD thing? Probably a bit of both, and maybe an indication, at last, that he was starting to find the measure for what was normal for civilian life.
But... rules. Sunita was one of the most laid back people he knew, but there were a couple of things he knew that bugged her. One was people being late for things without calling ahead – it’s so easy to at least let people know if something has come up. And the other was people who didn’t show up at all when they’d arranged to meet people, or do something.
She would never simply fail to show.
Or at least, that’s what he thought. But maybe that’s just one of those things you say in passing in conversation – you don’t like late people and no-shows. He knew people weren’t consistent, after all.
She was probably still on her conference call, or working hard to get some critical stage of an experiment complete by the end of the week, or any number of perfectly valid reasons why Alex Mitchell was sitting here with half a cup of cold coffee and looking out over the deserted campus.
He went back to his office to tidy up a few loose ends. He decided not to chase her, because one of the rules of socializing he’d learned early on – probably from Laura – was that you should be petty and sulk when you’ve been stood up.
He met Terry Regan as he was leaving at five-thirty. He almost suggested drinks, but then remembered that Terry was going full-on with Tasha Haynes these days – they really were going for the whole adolescent passion thing.
“Hey, Terry.”
Regan nodded, as taciturn as ever.
They were about to move on, each in their own direction, when Regan paused and said, “You were involved with that Bowler crap today, weren’t you?”
Mitchell paused, waiting for Regan to go on. It was hardly a surprise Terry knew he was involved. Word gets round fast in a place like this.
“So what was he doing in Virology before his talk, then?”
“That was just a general tour of the Riverside Campus, but we didn’t take in Virology,” said Mitchell. Virology and Clinical Epidemiology was Sunita’s research group in Biological Sciences. “And do you know what? He sent a stunt-double to do the dull bits and trick us all. That whole tour was a waste of time.”
“No, no,” said Regan. “Not that.”
He’d clearly heard about Bowler’s ruse – was news of Mitchell having the wool pulled over his eyes the latest campus hot gossip?
“What do you mean?”
“Tasha told me. Bowler was there in Virology, before he did the main thing. A private tour of the labs behind closed doors, just Sunita Chakravarti and him. Didn’t you know about it?”
“Oh... oh that.”
Bowler and Sunita? What was all that about? And why hadn’t she said anything when they Skyped this morning, or before?
It must have been sprung on her, a last-minute thing, something arranged by Phil Gracewell, the head of the School. She’d tell Mitchell all about it next week, he was sure – unless she stood him up again.
He turned away, his mind racing, trying to stop those paranoid voices from starting up their chatter in the back of his mind again for the first time since this morning.
11. Alex, a month earlier
What was he thinking?
How blind could he be, not to see that with every step he was suckering himself in, deeper and deeper?
Talking with Sunita in the bar, allowing her subtle mix of lighthearted digs and sharp insights to break through his defenses.
Staying far too late, when it had long become clear that Terry Regan and Tasha Haynes were only interested in getting into each other’s pants, and with the two of them otherwise occupied that left just him and Sunita.
And then that mad, stop-start passage through the rain and sleet, the unexpected craziness of it all neatly sidestepping any normal barriers.
With hindsight it was obvious, the inevitability of that trajectory, the consequences of him not once choosing to step aside.
He could make all the excuses in the world. The drink. His fragile emotional state. The profound shock he was still dealing with, after what he had found at home – shock even for a man who had experienced so much in his life that was utterly shocking.
So many excuses and yet...
He’d known exactly what he was doing.
Standing forced together in that crowded pub doorway, as they sheltered from the intensifying storm. Bodies pressing, Sunita having to lean in even closer to make her words heard. His intense awareness of the points where their bodies touched, thigh to thigh, torso, chest... The drag of his wet suit and shirt, and her stiff leather jacket, against each other – not quite bodily contact, but still contact, connection.
Reaching a hand up to her cheek. Kissing her.
He’d known. He was in control of himself. He had plenty of opportunity to hold back, to not kiss her, not touch her cheek.
There was no unstoppable momentum hurling them together yet.
Just...
That moment.
When he’d looked d
own into her eyes, when suddenly, just for a moment, nothing else in the world mattered.
That was the point of no return, the instant when all those opportunities to avoid a moment like this were lost to him, the point when that unstoppable momentum did rush in and take over.
The instant when he could do nothing but dip his head a little – all it took, they were standing so close – and press his lips to hers.
She tasted of wine and something vaguely salty, and her mouth was so many different kinds of soft and firm where it met his lips and tongue.
He pulled her closer to him, the shape of her body obscured by the jacket she wore, the leather stiff in the cold, and slick with rain, the zippers and buttons and seams creating hard edges and protrusions.
She kissed him back, opening her mouth to him, twisting and turning her head to take him deeper, and all he knew was the kiss, the sensations of Sunita, of having her like this. Nothing else.
The world, and everything else in it, had faded away for those few, precious seconds.
She pulled away, arching her spine in his embrace so her face drew back from his. That twist of her body was like some cruel kind of tease, pressing her belly and pelvis against him even as her face drew back, making him gasp at the sudden pressure and then, so unfair, at the release as she stepped clear.
His senses were reeling, his brain struggling to catch up.
He became aware again of the swell of voices, of the almost kaleidoscope effect of the street lighting on the rain descending around Sunita as she staggered away into the street, making the whole scene look almost hallucinogenic.
He shouldn’t have done it. He knew that. He should never have allowed this to happen.
She turned away from him, hunching her shoulders as she pulled her jacket tight around herself.
She started to walk.
He didn’t know if he was supposed to follow or not, and then he made himself stop thinking stupid thoughts like that. Of course she didn’t want him to follow. Of course she hadn’t invited this.
She was upset. Confused, probably. No doubt angry with him for behaving this way, for making her feel bad about what had happened just now after she’d spent the evening providing him with a shoulder to cry on.