Rebound

by PJ Adams

  And if it came to that, Mitchell himself was expendable. He had a history of mental instability, the kind of noble, broken ex-warrior who might make rash decisions or simply snap. If he broke the law in pursuit of his investigations and things became messy, he was under no illusions that the Company would protect him.

  But also... they would give him a minder. Someone who would try to keep him in line and stop things from ever getting that messy.

  All this in a split-second assessment: he knew how they worked; he understood why he’d been chosen and what Halliday was presenting to him. And he knew he had about as much choice as he had the last time the Company came to him and asked him to do a job.

  “You’re not alone,” said Halliday now, only a heartbeat after he’d said they wanted Mitchell to go after Sunita. “We will have your back. You’ll have a handler.”

  He expected Conner, or perhaps someone from the old days, like Lazenby. Someone who knew him, someone he had worked with at least once. The Company liked its agents to be familiar with each other’s ways.

  He hadn’t expected...

  The other door to Halliday’s office opened, and she stepped through. A slight body that concealed her natural, wiry strength. The narrow, pointed face framed by short, chestnut hair. Altogether more clothes and less dick in her than the last time he’d seen her.

  Laura.

  13. Sunita

  Alex must never know how hard it had been for her, and she would do all she could not to tell him.

  It had been so difficult to be the adult. Lying there that morning as he still slept, studying the face of the man who had so transformed himself in her perception in such a short space of time. From familiar, if distant colleague, to man of mystery, revealed as one of Halliday’s secret agents. From the wounded, broken warrior she’d rescued from a freezing and lonely lunch in the park that day to fleeting lover. Surprise lover, too, for she’d never anticipated they would end up like this.

  Sunita wasn’t that kind of person.

  Just as she would never cheat with someone, she would never leap into their bed while it was still warm from somebody else.

  There were so many levels of wrong in that. Not so much morally wrong – he’d split with Laura in no uncertain terms, after all – but wrong on practical and psychological levels. There were so many reasons why something like that could never work.

  He needed to get over his traumas, and learn how to live his own life again, before he could ever throw himself into something new. He needed to get his head straight, let his emotions settle.

  And so, she had lain there that morning almost a month ago, propped up on one elbow, watching him until he woke, and then told him she was not going to be his rebound.

  She had done the adult thing, stepped back, and it had been one of the toughest things she had ever done.

  But not before... one more time. One more tender, sweet time when they made love, such an intimate thing for they both knew that after this they really would step back, end it almost the moment it had begun.

  Just friends.

  Not a thing, at all.

  §

  She tried to understand it, what had happened between them. Tried to rationalize it away.

  They’d spent the evening exchanging truths about relationships, the world.

  They’d drunk too much.

  But that was neither explanation nor excuse. She’d had heavy conversations and a few too many drinks with guys before now – she was the kind of person people confided in.

  She’d never done anything like this before, though.

  Never fallen into bed with a guy on the first night – it wasn’t even a first date!

  She’d never had a one-night stand, because she had no interest in that kind of thing. She needed to be sure of someone before she would commit either her heart or her body.

  She couldn’t work it out.

  She didn’t understand what it was that Alex Mitchell had and no man before had.

  §

  They’d talked instead, in the weeks that followed.

  She wasn’t used to having a friend like this, a man who would go for coffee with her because he enjoyed her company; a guy who asked her opinions because he liked hearing what she had to say.

  People always had agendas – they wanted to advance their careers, they wanted to get her into bed, whatever – and yet Alex... he seemed to accept the friendship thing, albeit reluctantly. She knew he wanted more, of course, but he genuinely seemed to have put that aside for now. He liked being with her.

  She felt guilty, of course. That was inevitable.

  She had kept secrets from him, after all.

  She knew who he was. What he was.

  Halliday had told her Alex was an ex-officer from a specialist branch of the security services who might be called back into service to protect her at any time. But how do you raise something like that in normal conversation? Oh, and by the way...

  She’d thought she would say something that day in the park – that’s why she’d gone after him – but no. And when you haven’t done so at the earliest opportunity, some subjects become even more difficult to raise on subsequent occasions.

  It gave her insight into him, yes. She knew he’d been through a lot. The scars on his body confirmed that much.

  But also it built barriers. Not just the secret knowledge, but also that imbalance where she had some insight into his personality that they could not share.

  And there was Bowler.

  They’d talked all the way around Bernard Bowler without her ever mentioning the man’s name. She couldn’t, because she should already have told Halliday about Bowler’s interest, and she knew Alex would be duty-bound to report it, too, if she mentioned it, and then difficult questions would be raised.

  She’d limited herself to telling him there was someone from one of the funding bodies who wanted to discuss her work, which was true, but only a limited version of the truth.

  That had led to the moment of perhaps their closest sharing of the things that were secret between them.

  They’d been in the Senior Common Room chatting about something – the wildlife around campus, the weather, something totally inconsequential. A pause, then she said, “My funding stalker called again this morning.” That was their joke name for him, the guy who was being so persistent in his interest in her work. Bernard Bowler.

  “So why not talk to him? He’s interested, he’s read your papers, he thinks you’re onto something. Why not meet and see what his line is? If he’s familiar with the field he might actually have some insight, or interesting connections, at least. I’ll sit in, if you like, in case he really is just trying to get into your pants.”

  They laughed, and she looked down at the table.

  Sometimes when he looked at her like that she had to force herself to remember. To be the adult. That spark in his eye.

  “Maybe there’s a reason I’m fending him off,” she said. “I suspect he’s not such a good man. I don’t think his motives can be good.”

  “Then maybe in that case you should listen to your intuition,” Alex said. “You’re a good person, Sunita. You see the good in other people, too. You put the rest of us to shame when you do that because it makes us see how judgmental and petty we all tend to be in comparison. If even you don’t think he’s a good person, then tell him where to get off. Or at least, stop answering his calls!”

  He really thought of her in those terms. He didn’t know the secrets she kept from him. She was about to say something to correct him when he put a hand out and covered hers, silencing her with the sudden intimacy.

  “There’s all kinds of people,” he said. “People like you are the rare ones, good people who try always to do good things. And then there’s the rest of us. Good people who sometimes do bad things. Bad people who are capable of occasional good. And bad people who do really bad things. I know you work on some cutting edge stuff – you don’t want that to ever fall into the hands of t
hat last group of people, believe me.” He spoke with the authority of someone who’d had dealings with all those groups.

  She nodded, let the silence grow. Then asked, “Which are you, Alex?” She knew the question was a trap, because she knew what he was, and he wasn’t aware of her knowledge.

  He turned away, looking suddenly vulnerable, and she felt immediately guilty.

  “I genuinely don’t know,” he said. “Maybe somewhere in the middle, between good people who’ve done bad things, and bad people who’ve done good. I don’t know which side of the line I am. The bad things always hurt you, though, so maybe that’s some kind of indication of which side I fall. Or maybe I’m just clutching at straws.”

  She didn’t press. She understood that the scale of good and bad for someone like Alex had different orders of magnitude to that of someone who had led a more normal life.

  His hand still lay on hers, the grip tighter now, almost too tight. She covered it with her free hand and squeezed.

  §

  It was strange, getting to know Alex in this way, sleeping together first and then finding their way in a new friendship.

  They had the intimacy from the start. How could it not be natural to hug, to kiss on the cheek, to reach across and put a calming hand on the other’s hand or arm, when you’ve already seen each other naked? When you’ve swallowed him so deep you nearly choked? When you’ve gazed into his eyes and watched them open a fraction wider, just as you feel him push harder, and hold himself deep inside you as orgasm sweeps across his senses? When you’ve seen the scars, and heard him cry out in his sleep.

  Well, okay. Perhaps. She understood, on an intellectual level, how that could just as easily breed awkwardness and distance, but not with her and Alex.

  Getting to know the man, on the other hand, was not so natural a process... A man with so many complications and barriers. He was a puzzle to be unpicked.

  She’d asked Tasha one time, “How do you get to know someone who just doesn’t live life like everyone else? No Facebook profile. Nothing.” Because she’d done that, tried to mine social media, to find even the merest ripples he might have made. It’s what you do, and Tasha’s reaction confirmed that.

  “What? He has nothing online? I’d run a mile, babe. He’s hiding something.”

  She could hardly say that, yes, Alex Mitchell was hiding something. A man who left no ripples, no traces.

  And so, instead, she’d had to do it old school. Talking, exchanging stories, teasing out truths and reactions.

  Allowing herself to get drawn ever deeper.

  §

  Why hadn’t she told Halliday about Bowler’s approach?

  Partly because it was one of those things that hadn’t even become a thing until later, when Bowler persisted and she realized she should have reported it at the outset.

  She wasn’t used to all this. Wasn’t used to the way your mind worked when you were dealing with people like Bowler and Halliday.

  And by that stage, Bowler had managed to intrigue her. Wary as she was of a man like him, what he offered was interesting. Until this point, she hadn’t fully understood how oppressive it was to operate under the levels of secrecy she did.

  And she hadn’t understood how attractive she might find the possibility of a way out, even if it only allowed her to daydream a little.

  She wasn’t stupid. She was perfectly capable of making connections, and she knew Bowler’s very public visit to the University only a few weeks after he’d started calling her, and after Halliday had alerted her to a higher state of security, could be no coincidence.

  When she found herself able to step back and see how she had been drawn steadily deeper into all this intrigue, with each step making its own sense even as it drew her in, she realized she had been played. This whole thing had been a clever seduction.

  From the outset, even as she had tried to fend him off, it had been inevitable she would meet with Bowler and he would make his pitch.

  She simply wasn’t equipped to stop a force of nature like Bernard Bowler.

  14. Sunita

  “You’re a persistent man, Mr Bowler.”

  She sat across her desk from him. So strange seeing him in that seat, where so many colleagues and postgrad students had sat. PhD supervisions and brainstorming sessions and dull matters of university administration.

  He looked like he did on TV. A little older, perhaps, shadows under the eyes that TV makeup would normally conceal. He sat with fingers steepled before him, almost like a monk in contemplation, and those piercing blue eyes fixed her in her place.

  “I follow my interests,” he said, and for a moment Sunita wasn’t sure where he was heading. “I’ve been following your work. I’d like to know more. I can be a very useful ally.”

  “I wasn’t aware that I needed allies.” She’d met people like Bowler before. Every sentence was a potential trap, a chess move where several steps down the line you might find yourself backed into the most unexpected corner.

  “What are you doing this evening?” he asked, throwing her again. “Tomorrow?”

  She glanced around the open plan office. Everyone was being very conscientious about ignoring her visitor, even as they were being just as conscientious about actually being at their desks on a Friday lunchtime when usually the place would be far emptier than this.

  She chose not to answer. She had never been a game player and she had no wish to get drawn in.

  “Look, Mr Bowler, I don’t mean to be rude, but can we finally get to the point? You clearly have something you wish to raise with me, and you’ve already taken up a fair bit of both my and your time to reach this point. Shall we cut to the chase?”

  He smiled. He was enjoying this. Enjoying her.

  She’d expected him to have a powerful personality. She’d expected him to be persuasive. She knew his reputation. But she hadn’t anticipated her own response, the strong need to impress, the almost pathetic gratefulness when he acknowledged her, when she made him smile. There was an entire psychology to this kind of encounter that she wasn’t familiar with.

  She reminded herself who he was. The kinds of people he associated himself with.

  “I believe we’ll work well together, Dr Chakravarti.”

  That arrogant assumption in his tone and words – normally it would irritate her beyond measure, but he knew he could get away with it, and he took it for granted.

  “You assume we’ll work together,” she said.

  “Okay. To the chase.”

  For a man getting to the point, he paused for a long time. All part of playing the fish – Sunita knew that. He wanted her to ask him to go on, or at least show some sign of wanting him to explain. Instead, she glanced out of the window at the river.

  “I want to liberate your work,” Bowler told her. “What you’re doing is too important to be shut away behind closed doors, where a few anonymous men in suits get to decide on its implementation. I want to convince you to move to my laboratories, let my lawyers extricate you from the binds of secrecy. If you stay here your work will take years to develop into an effective response to the weapons of biological warfare, and it will only ever be deployed in ways that tie in with the strategies of those men in suits. If you accept the opportunities I present, your work will be fast-tracked to the market where it will become available to all. You will be saving lives, Dr Chakravarti, just as you have always sought to do.”

  She saw exactly what he was doing. The use of words like ‘liberate’ and ‘opportunity’, set against repeated reference to the ‘men in suits’ who controlled and constrained her work.

  He was saying all the right things to press her buttons.

  “The market, you say. You want to sell what I do. You want to commodify protection.” He wanted to exploit her work for profit, and the only way to do that would be to control the market and limit access – value in scarcity. “My work has the potential not only to offer a first line of defense against bio- warfare, but from natural
ly mutating pathogens, too, the kind of avian flu outbreak we’re seeing in Asia right now, or new strains of Ebola – my synthetic leukocytes will be able to fast-track the body’s own defenses. Why would I ever turn that over to profit?”

  “We could debate politics and the economy all day, I see.” He was still smiling, enjoying the exchange. “And I’m sure we will, in days to come. But what I propose is a far faster way to democratize your knowledge than if it remains the purvey of those men in suits you’ve signed yourself over to. I can free you from all that.”

  She knew he’d had her researched and analyzed. He wanted to recruit her, so he would have developed a strategy that would appeal to her sensitivities. But it was uncanny how intimately Bowler and his team seemed to have read her, their understanding of her own increasing frustration with trying to work within the correct channels of government control. A frustration she hadn’t even articulated to herself yet, let alone to anyone else.

  If he said ‘men in suits’ one more time she’d probably sign over her soul right there and then.

  “You’re not my kind of people,” she said. It was so out of her comfort zone to state things to someone’s face this bluntly, particularly to someone who was so charming and polite. But...

  “You’re a popular man,” she told him. “You have a lot of support – from racists and bigots, to be blunt. The kind of people who are happy to align themselves with the extreme Right because they instinctively don’t like people like me.”

  He didn’t seem fazed in the slightest by her directness. But then, she knew, he must face this kind of confrontation all the time.

  “That’s not me,” he said. “I don’t choose my followers, and I can’t be held to blame for the people who make up part of my movement’s following. We’re not part of the old Left-Right schism, which is why we have such broad appeal. We have supporters from the old Right, yes, but just as many from the Trade Union and protest movements. I’m neither a racist nor a xenophobe. If I was, then I wouldn’t be so keen to work with, as you put it, people like you. I’m a protectionist, yes – my country before all others. And you’re as much a part of that as I am, the nation I love.”