Rebound

by PJ Adams

  Sunita didn’t regard herself as a slow thinker by any means, but she struggled to keep pace with Bernard Bowler. As he spoke, he sounded so utterly reasonable. Then, as she started to catch up, she realized she’d just found persuasive the arguments of a man who was telling her he was comfortable with the support of the kind of people who threw bricks through her parents’ windows, their hatred legitimized by the likes of Bowler.

  “You’re not going to show me your work, are you?” He hadn’t stopped smiling since he’d got here.

  She shook her head, smiling in return, despite the frustration she felt in dealing with him. He was a man who sent very confusing signals.

  “Official secrets. You’ve read the summary report. The rest is confidential.”

  He nodded, had clearly anticipated that she would be unable, or unwilling, to share anything with him beyond the documents he had seen.

  “Come with me this afternoon,” he said. “One of my companies has a research facility on the coast. See what we have to offer. Just allow yourself a few moments to indulge the daydream of what it would be like to work in such an environment.”

  That reference to daydreams. It was as if he had read her thoughts from earlier, that there could be no harm in at least allowing herself to dream of freedom.

  She had nothing in her diary until tomorrow afternoon, so she didn’t even pretend she had other commitments. If Bowler’s people had researched her as well as they clearly had, then they would certainly have checked her schedule to make sure she was free.

  “Indulge yourself for once, Dr Chakravarti. Allow yourself to entertain a few possibilities. A thought experiment in what may be. Go on. Who is it to be? Me, or the men in suits?”

  He’d played his trump card, the men in suits, one more time.

  And just as she was always going to end up agreeing to this meeting, she knew now that she had always been going to agree to one more step. Bernard Bowler was too good at all this for it to be any other way.

  15. Alex

  At least Laura had the decency – or judgment – to look vaguely embarrassed.

  Mitchell met her look, nodded like a true professional, then turned back to Halliday. “What do we know?” he asked. “Is Dr Chakravarti in danger? Is she a threat to national security?” He had to at least entertain the possibility she had been turned by some hostile group or power. “Where is she?”

  Halliday went to the seat behind his desk, and indicated that Mitchell and Laura should sit, too.

  “Dr Chakravarti is an asset who should have been under our protection but who has slipped beneath the radar, and was last seen in the company of a man on our Watch List,” the professor told them. “We do not yet know how or why, or what the implications may be. Bernard Bowler is something of an unknown quantity, his rise rapid and therefore questionable. On the face of it he is a successful businessman, but his move into politics and the way various groups have mobilized behind him ticks lots of boxes.”

  Warning flags – set too many of them off and you earn yourself closer scrutiny, suspicion that you might be the front for something sinister.

  Mitchell knew how it worked. Halliday was implying that Bowler’s recent rise to prominence might have been secretly backed by the Russians or the Chinese or some other group.

  To be honest, Mitchell couldn’t work out which was worse. Was a man like Bernard Bowler more of a risk to national stability if he was the genuine article, or if he was a front for a foreign power? At least with the old superpowers you knew what you were contending with.

  Either way, Bowler had drawn attention to himself. Enough to get added to the Watch List. And now that he’d made secret contact with a security asset – how strange, still, to think of Sunita in those terms! – a lot of wheels were being set in motion. Mitchell and Laura would only be a part of this operation, he knew.

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “We have a team doing the background work,” said Halliday. “Analyzing intel, searching Dr Chakravarti’s phone records, email, social media, search histories, and so on. They’re liaising with the team that’s been monitoring Bowler. We’re trying to track Sunita’s phone, but no luck so far – no trace from either her network provider or the sniffer app in her mobile since she got into that car with Bernard Bowler yesterday afternoon.”

  “And our role?” Mitchell asked. He glanced at Laura. She’d been studiously avoiding his looks, and staying uncharacteristically quiet. He couldn’t help but wonder at her role in this. Were they deliberately trying to provoke him?

  “On the ground. You both know Dr Chakravarti–”

  Mitchell didn’t respond, didn’t look at Laura again to try to read her inscrutable expression, didn’t show any surprise, didn’t exclaim What the fuck...?

  “–so you will brainstorm the possible scenarios behind her disappearance. A search of her workplace and home would be in order – use your knowledge of her to see if you spot anything that has been missed.”

  So they’d already searched Sunita’s office and house and found nothing.

  You both know Dr Chakravarti...

  §

  “You were monitoring Sunita, weren’t you? Using connections between the hospital and her team. You were her link person.”

  “At least I wasn’t fucking her.”

  They were outside Sherborne House, had managed to last barely two minutes since leaving Halliday’s office before... this.

  He fought down the responses jostling in his head. If she wanted a fight he wasn’t going to give her one now.

  They walked in silence, up to the High Street and then left, toward King Street. This was the route Mitchell and Sunita had taken that night a month before, ducking into doorways to shelter from the winter storm. Pressed together by the crowd in the King’s Head doorway, faces so close the kiss had seemed inevitable. Unstoppable.

  Had he or Laura actually said out loud they would start with Sunita’s flat, or just both automatically assumed? He didn’t like to think about how, even when they were at each other’s throats, he and Laura slotted in together so smoothly, a team.

  It made sense. Sunita’s office was a shared space, and she wasn’t the kind of person to leave secrets on Post-it notes under her mouse mat. If there were any secrets to be uncovered at work, they would be on her computer or in the University’s cloud storage, and Halliday had already said there were people working on that.

  Mitchell’s role was to be subjective, to spot the connections and gaps, the items missing or out of place, any hint of anything out of character.

  The best place to do this, in the absence of Sunita herself, was her home.

  §

  Laura had a key.

  Why should that twist the knife in his gut more than anything else so far?

  All the unspoken back-story that must lie behind that simple fact. The possibility that Sunita might actually have known Laura more than superficially, that they might have become friends if Laura was her Company link person. The possibility of evenings together over a bottle of wine or two, the girl talk, the laughter, the knowledge of each other’s lives.

  Had they talked about Mitchell? Had Laura shared her frustrations with him as a lover, as a partner?

  How much did Sunita know about him? Know about him and choose not to share...

  Would it be better if Laura’s key was an illicitly taken duplicate? That on occasions in the past she might have done just as they were doing now, but alone, letting herself in, standing and breathing the air that Sunita had breathed, going through her things. That she had watched her and followed her. Listened to her phone conversations. Their phone conversations.

  The house had the atmosphere of somewhere that had lain untouched for weeks rather than merely a day or so, but Mitchell knew that was in his head. Through the kitchen doorway he could see a cup, a plate, cutlery, unwashed; by the door, yesterday’s mail.

  Mitchell hadn’t been here since leaving that morning a month ago in his still dam
p suit trousers and an over-sized sweatshirt Sunita had found for him, but the place had clearly been lived in up until the day before.

  They checked the house on autopilot, guns drawn. When they’d cleared each room on the ground floor, they moved to the stairs, Laura automatically dropping back a pace to let him take point. Upstairs was clear too, the house proving to be just as deserted as it had felt when they entered.

  They went back down, looked around.

  It felt so wrong being here with Laura now.

  She seemed to sense some of this, and again managed to show at least a sliver of sensitivity. “You take upstairs,” she said. “I’ll look around down here.”

  Let him have the bedroom.

  He shook his head. “That’s not how we work.”

  She understood, of course. They were a team. Two very different people who saw things from contrasting perspectives, often spotting things the other might have missed. Searching together, while Mitchell had insight into Sunita, Laura could easily see things he was blind to because he was too close.

  They had always worked well together, and nobody could get inside Mitchell’s head like Laura.

  Was that why she was here? Their record as partners? The Company’s assessment that they were still a top team?

  Or was it, as he had initially suspected, to goad him? To take him closer to that edge.

  The Company never operated along simple lines. They would have several scenarios mapped out. Among these would be a clean, professional extraction, separating Sunita from Bowler and then gently debriefing her to assess where her loyalties lay and, hopefully, bring her back into the fold. Laura’s knowledge of Sunita might contribute to this, as might Mitchell’s.

  But there would certainly be other scenarios, too, and the possibility of Mitchell going rogue and being provoked into confronting Bowler if he’d done anything to Sunita was right up there. It was certainly a scenario Mitchell himself had outlined in his head. More than once.

  So what buttons had Laura been primed to push? What exposed nerves would she tweak if they decided to unleash him on Bowler?

  He knew it could be a dangerous, paranoid game, following these lines of thought, but also he understood that a degree of informed paranoia could be a life-saver sometimes. The fact that he was thinking through the scenarios might put him at least one step ahead of whatever happened.

  Which probably meant he wasn’t a step ahead, but at least he might be level.

  Also, it meant his head was in a much better place than he’d feared. He had that buzz again, the adrenaline honing his senses, speeding his thoughts.

  He’d spent two years broken, and struggling to rebuild himself – the strength he found now might just be an indication he had completed that journey.

  Now, he met Laura’s look across the room and nodded briefly, determined to remain cool, calm, professional.

  “Anything?”

  Laura had been going through a big leather shoulder bag that had been by the door. Now she stood flicking through a hard-covered notebook. She glanced up, shook her head. “The preliminary sweep went through this notebook already,” she said. “And a pen-drive from the bag. Copies taken of everything, and now back in a lab for analysis.” Standard procedure: they didn’t want to piss Sunita off by having taken her things if this whole thing turned out to be a false alarm. “I just thought I might spot something...”

  That last observation: to Mitchell it was pretty much an admission that Laura knew Sunita pretty well, and might notice something that others had missed.

  “So you never left the Company?” he asked.

  “That’s a bit of a fucking stupid question, don’t you think? Did you really leave, Mitch?”

  Swearing had always sounded funny from Laura, as if she was trying to sound coarse and yet only managed to emphasize her refinement when she did.

  He was avoiding the question, leaving it long enough until he passed the point where an answer seemed necessary.

  If it ever had.

  You never leave the Company.

  §

  “You?”

  Minutes had passed, but he knew she was continuing the stilted exchange, asking if he’d found anything.

  He shook his head. “Normal life,” he said, indicating the kitchen, the things by the sink. “Breakfast stuff from yesterday.” A used espresso cup by the machine, crumbs from a slice of toast. What he assumed, from this and his one previous visit, were her typical breakfast. “Mail from yesterday and today. Everything indicates she hasn’t been here since leaving for work yesterday morning.”

  Without saying anything more, they both headed for the stairs.

  “Bed made,” said Laura, as they paused in the bedroom doorway. “No sign of packing. Anything missing?”

  Mitchell didn’t question her assumption that he might notice that kind of detail. If anything, it made him feel better that Laura seemed to assume he would know, that she didn’t understand that the thing between him and Sunita had been no more than one night and a series of chats at work. Maybe she hadn’t known Sunita so well, after all; hadn’t been watching, following.

  He shook his head. He moved over to the bathroom doorway. He had no idea which toiletries or other items Sunita might hate to be without if she was away somewhere. Maybe she kept a wash bag ready for travel, an overnight bag with a few things in – if she did, then there would be no gaps on the bathroom shelves to indicate she had been prepared to stay away last night.

  He remembered that morning last month, the damp clothes and borrowed sweatshirt. Sometimes events take you by surprise, and you don’t have time to pack.

  “You okay?”

  He didn’t answer. Didn’t need empathy and understanding. Didn’t need any more reminders of just how well Laura knew him, and could read him.

  “Who was he?”

  Not now. Why did his mind do this? Stir things up at just the wrong moment. Blurt it out. Who was the man he’d caught her with? They should be concentrating on Sunita’s absence, not–

  “Nobody.” She knew exactly what he was asking. That reading between the lines thing they’d always had between them; the way one could switch subject out of the blue and the other would follow seamlessly.

  “Is that supposed to make it better, or worse?”

  He didn’t know the answer to his own question. Ask anyone, and they’d probably say that cheating was one thing, but falling in love with another person was a whole other level. But was that really true when you were confronted with it? Was it worse that she might be in love with another man, or that she was just fucking someone she could dismiss as ‘nobody’, meaningless, just a casual screw because why would you not, when your relationship with Mitchell was so very much dead in the water?

  16. Sunita

  She’d agreed to meet Bernard Bowler again later that afternoon, after he was done with giving his talk to the students’ Politics Society.

  She didn’t know why she had acquiesced so easily, but then that’s the kind of man he was. A man with a talent for teasing out commitments and promises without you even noticing he was doing so.

  When she’d seen him earlier in the day, she’d understood straight away that their exchange was like a chess game, and he was trying to corner her. She’d thought she was handling it well, sidestepping the traps, avoiding anything that would commit her.

  And yet... somehow, all that ducking and diving had drawn her into the promise that, yes, she would meet him after his talk, go with him to BoTech’s research facility on the coast, give up what remained of her afternoon and evening to this strange seduction.

  She would never do it. Never agree to drop out of her work for the greater good in the public sector to go and work for Bowler.

  And now she realized, she knew Bowler well enough to understand that this knowledge was somehow the greatest risk of all, because if anyone could take that belief and twist and reshape it until the only sensible outcome was for her to join with him, then that man
was Bernard Bowler.

  §

  The car pulled up in the delivery bay on the east side of the Riverside Campus. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but the C-Max made sense: a family car with plenty of room for Bowler, a driver and a security guy; anonymous enough to blend in, but also to support his man of the people branding – a bullet-proof limo would have sent a very different message.

  A bearded security guy from the front passenger seat stepped out to hold the door for her, and she climbed into the back with Bowler.

  Within a minute or two they were on the ring road, heading east, and only then did Sunita make herself pause and wonder exactly what she’d got herself into.

  This went against every briefing she’d ever had, every bit of advice she’d received from her handlers. The unusual approach from Bowler, the attempt to recruit her, the change in her plans, the failure to take any kind of advice or even let anyone know what she was doing.

  At the very least, she should have passed on word that she was visiting BoTech.

  But... Was it bad that at least a part of her was enjoying this? That it felt good? Shaking off the chains for a few hours. Entertaining that daydream of intellectual freedom. Not being under the thumb of, as Bowler had repeatedly drummed home, those men in suits.

  Being able to breathe again.

  Bowler was watching her. Waiting. No need to rush into conversation now he had a captive audience.

  How many moves was he ahead of her in this game he was playing?

  She reached into her bag for her phone so she could check the time. 3.20. She was due to meet Alex for coffee in ten minutes, a last-minute arrangement they’d made today that had completely slipped her mind in the rush.

  She pointed at her phone, shrugged apologetically, and said, “Do you mind? I’d forgotten I had plans, coffee with a friend that I need to cancel.”