by PJ Adams
Istanbul, when he’d saved her ass.
They’d held him for four days. A coarse blanket over his head and face, tied around his neck. His hands taped behind him to the wooden chair where he sat in his own filth for those four days. They’d cut him and shocked him and burned him, they’d waterboarded him, but still he hadn’t betrayed the location of the safehouse where the mad redheaded woman had taken the traitorous Kurdish militant leader for debriefing after she and Mitchell had meticulously groomed and turned him.
Hadn’t told them it was literally only a block from where they had snatched him, and where now Laura and the defector would be in lockdown while the special forces located everyone and executed an extraction plan.
He hadn’t betrayed her at all – it was her own impatience that had. The day she’d been so frustrated at waiting for support that she’d emerged from the safehouse, choosing to make her way to the Embassy to demand action, and instead had been snatched, too.
“We have her,” one of the thugs had told him, and he’d instantly dismissed it as a ruse, until the guy had come back in a short time later with a fistful of that distinctive copper hair, the roots wet and bloody.
They had her, and had clearly started work on her already.
He did a thing he’d learned in training. Slowed his breathing until the oxygen in his blood was so low his vision darkened around the edges and his perception of the room spun and faded. Held his breath, felt that darkness spreading. Used all the techniques he had learned to override the body’s automatic survival response. Allowed that darkness to sweep over him, smother his senses.
He didn’t know what happened next because he was unconscious.
All he knew was perception returning, the pressure of hands on his arms, his body at a strange angle, the hardness of the concrete floor against his knees, his right shoulder and arm, the side of his head.
He breathed deep, straightening and pushing himself from the floor in a single movement, so that his head rammed into one man’s face.
He remembered the strange thud and cracking sensation of the other man’s head hitting a wall, Mitchell’s hands around his throat. Then, running through darkened corridors, the sound of gunshots ringing through the abandoned building. The sense of harnessing his rage, funneling it into the ruthless machine he had become.
He remembered finding Laura taped to a chair in another identical room, her scalp matted with blood, the look of untold horrors written across her battered face.
He killed four men that day and left another comatose. He rescued a fellow agent and ensured a defecting rebel leader was safely handed up the line.
He was a fucking hero.
A broken one.
Yes, he’d saved Laura’s ass that time in Istanbul, but also he’d been damaged, the post- traumatic stress robbing him of the automatic strength she had both depended on and found attractive in him. Strength she had really needed just then, as she dealt with her own traumas in the aftermath of that incident.
He had clung to her, just as she was repelled, each finding their own way to cope.
He saw that now. Had seen it, in truth, since the day he’d found her in bed with the man who meant nothing more to her than a vague nostalgia for the Mitchell she had once loved.
He went through to Sunita’s main bedroom again, and stood at the window. He didn’t understand how his feelings could be thrown into such turmoil, so easily stirred up.
He needed to find some kind of focus again.
“No it wasn’t.”
She was standing close behind him. Picking up an unfinished conversation again: answering his question from before – had their relationship just been a front, a professional convenience?
“It was real,” she went on. “How could you ever doubt that?”
He turned, and looked down into those green eyes, a position – a moment – so familiar it was almost a reflex.
“All those mad days and even madder nights. All the adventures. The passion. How could you ever doubt that, Mitch?”
This was like those pivotal points in the movies, where the protagonist can’t help himself, has to kiss the femme fatale, has to give in to his own weaknesses and complicate everything, perhaps beyond repair.
They were so close he could feel her breath on his face.
“It was over ages ago,” he said. “We both knew on some level or other.”
He turned away, sensed her stepping back, moving toward the doorway.
Would she have done it? Allowed him to kiss her? Responded?
Probably. She liked to prove she was the one in control. And she was flexible like that, led by the moment.
But Mitchell wasn’t. He could be slow, yes. Slow to understand where things had reached. Slow to piece together other people’s reactions.
But he couldn’t spin on a coin like Laura could.
He’d meant it. It was all over between them a long time ago, long before he’d found her with that man.
It had just taken him a while to understand that.
When he turned, she was standing in the doorway, watching him. A strange look on her face. Maybe she had been slow to understand, too, had just now made the same journey.
Or maybe she was, as so often, one step ahead of him.
“You really care for her, don’t you?”
She didn’t need to say any more. He understood. She’d seen. She’d read him.
Sunita.
It wasn’t a stupid fixation in reaction to his shock at what Laura had done. It wasn’t a one-off thing. He hadn’t latched onto Sunita as he rebounded from his relationship with Laura.
You really care for her, don’t you?
He’d fallen, and then, over the past month, had continued to fall.
“That’s good,” said Laura softly. “I like that.” And then she turned and headed down the stairs.
§
They didn’t mention it, as they finished off in the house. They didn’t have to.
Laura had fallen out of love with him a long time ago, and now he was in love with someone else. In love.
They were being very grown up about it. He even thought Laura had meant it when she said it was good and she liked that he had found someone, although it was always hard to tell with her.
They’d both already moved on, it was just that now Mitchell understood where he’d moved on to.
Outside, job done with nothing to show apart from Mitchell’s conviction that Sunita hadn’t expected to be away last night, they paused on the doorstep, taken aback by a spring shower that had moved in while they’d been searching the house.
They looked at each other, Mitchell about to laugh it off when Laura said, “I knew we should have brought a car. You and your fucking walking.” And it was clear she meant it. She’d always had a knack for making him feel responsible, even for things like a change in the weather.
Her expression changed and she reached into her jacket pocket, and Mitchell realized she must have felt the buzz of her phone. She glanced down, said, “Halliday,” and raised it to her ear.
Of course Halliday would call Laura: she was Mitchell’s handler on this job. The point of contact.
He shouldn’t read anything into it. Certainly shouldn’t feel he was being held at arm’s length.
He pulled his coat tighter around himself, and looked away.
When he looked back a couple of minutes later, Laura was off the phone again.
“We definitely have a situation,” she told him. “Sunita should have been at a family thing in London today but hasn’t shown. No one knows why, but they all say it’s not like her.”
“Do the family know we’re involved?”
Laura shook her head. “Halliday says we’ve been able to keep things discreet – a friend asking questions, who then made excuses for her to stop her father reporting her missing.”
Missing.
You really care for her, don’t you?
He hadn’t realized how much until now. Hadn
’t felt that need to rampage through corridors in any damn building in the country until he found her since... Istanbul.
A hand on his arm. “We still don’t know that anything has happened to her, Mitch.”
“What else could it be?”
A pause, Laura looking away, then back at Mitchell.
“What?” he demanded. “What else did Halliday tell you?”
“She’s been taking Bowler’s money, Mitch. One of our analysts has found an account, one kept separate from the rest of her finances and only ever accessed via a VPN. That’s–”
“I know.” A virtual private network. Trying not to leave a digital trail. “It could be nothing. There might be an innocent explanation.” For an asset working on classified research to cover her tracks like this.
Laura’s expression said it all.
“How much?”
“Ten grand a month.”
Not enough to make her rich, but a lot more than she was being paid by the University, and certainly more than the extra ‘allowances’ she’d be receiving from the government for her classified work.
A retainer. The kind of amount that would normally slip under the radar. But...
“She’s not like that. She’s not bothered about the money – if she was, she wouldn’t be working at South Anglia University. She–”
Again, Laura didn’t need words.
“How long for?”
“Six months, at least.”
How blind had he been? How had he allowed himself to fall for someone with such secrets?
He got the irony, the man with so many secrets of his own, but that didn’t make it hurt any less.
18. Sunita
She put on a simple cream salwar kameez, a vivid blue dupatta across her shoulders, and those little flat-soled juttis she’d spotted before. This was the kind of outfit she wore only occasionally, but often that would be on a weekend like this one when she would be going home to Wandsworth. And yes, of course Bowler’s people had known this about her, and included it in the options in her suite.
She didn’t know quite what statement she was trying to make in choosing a more traditional outfit, but whatever it was, she knew her statement was undermined by the fact that Bowler’s people had been one step ahead, and provided the clothes to begin with.
This place... it was as if she’d stepped into another reality. She was in a bubble, isolated from normal life. Concerns about what Alex must think of her, and about what would happen when her protectors learned, as they must, that she had evaded them and broken with protocol. All that... right now it mattered far less than it should.
She could deal with that later, if she had to.
They ate outside. She hadn’t expected that.
Bowler was already out there when she came down from her room, sitting at a table on the wooden decking outside the Galleria. Previously concealed glass barriers had risen to screen the table from the sea breeze, and a roof had similarly extended above. Discreet heaters warmed this area, an isolated bubble within the greater bubble that was the BoTech research center.
He stood, took her hand and stooped to kiss it, then stood back, and for a moment, just a moment, Sunita imagined that the veneer had been peeled away, and the real Bernard Bowler stood before her: a little nervous, unsure of how this evening would go. That hint of a real person who cared was surprisingly moving, and spoke volumes of a man who must constantly have to live behind protective layers in his high profile world.
Already, this was one of the strangest nights of her life.
The first course came. Scallops, samphire, a scattering of sea purslane leaves; a bottle of Chablis with a label that confirmed it came from one of Bowler’s vineyards, although he said nothing. Of course they had picked favorites of hers.
“You can’t do it,” Bowler told her, and then did that thing of his, the long pause that invited her to respond, to ask him to explain.
She stayed quiet, resisting the ploy. Already, their exchanges were practiced, as if they had known each other far longer than they had.
“You can’t stay here. You can’t give up your commitments to Halliday and his people. Why would you ever do that?”
Reversal. Trying to trap her into inevitably thinking the opposite, so that the arguments for accepting his offer would feel like her own.
“You’re right,” she said, instead. “I couldn’t.” She knew she could never match his debating skills, but she would keep up the battle for as long as possible.
He smiled, took a drink of wine.
“Your work should be out there,” he said, changing tack. “Protecting people. How long must it be held back by red tape?”
“It’s not ready.”
“But it will be. It could be ready even sooner if you came here.”
She took another mouthful of the food. The scallops were so tender, they melted on her tongue – barely cooked at all, probably just a marinade and the touch of a blowtorch, she thought. Not that she was trying to dodge the subject, or avoid even thinking about it.
He told her about the history of this place, how the farmhouse had been a ruin only ten years before, lived in for a decade before that by an old lady who then left it to grandchildren who were unable to agree what to do with it and so left it to decay instead. Bowler had persuaded them to sell – Sunita could easily imagine him charming them until they were brainwashed into thinking selling had been their idea in the first place – and created this facility. “For all the other work that I do,” he said, “this is my real dream. Facilitating people far better able than me to pursue knowledge. People who have it in them to maybe change the world. People like you.”
A pattern was emerging: every conversation eventually turning back to the reason she was here. Had they identified this relentless approach as the best way to recruit her, or was it simply Bowler’s personality taking over?
“How can you be comfortable with the kind of people who follow you?” she asked, trying to deflect the conversation away from herself. “You seem like a decent man, beneath all the hype.”
“Should I take that as a compliment?”
“An observation. A theorem I haven’t disproved yet.”
“Ever the scientist.”
Did he smile like this with everyone, or was he particularly enjoying their exchanges? Whichever it was she felt charmed – and shallow for being so easily charmed.
She waited, pursing her lips, and he nodded, acknowledging he had sidestepped her question.
“My message strikes a chord,” he said. “Liberate people from unnecessary ties. Protect our own. Look forward, not back.”
He faltered under her scrutiny.
“Okay,” he said. “No sloganizing. The people who follow me are a cross section of society, of everyone. None of the old Left-Right dogma. If that includes people whose views might occasionally make me uncomfortable, well, I’d still prefer to be inclusive than to turn people away and allow their opposition to fester and cohere elsewhere. My followers, mostly they’re just people like you and me.”
She smiled at that. Debated the futility of pointing out the low representation of minorities among his followers, for all his fine words about inclusion. Instead, she said, “Not people like you, Mr Bowler. It strikes me that you’re something of a one-off.”
“More compliments! I think you’re warming to me.” Then he added, “And you, Dr Chakravarti. I think you might be a one-off, too.”
He held her look. That thing politicians do when they’re engaging with their public. That thing men do when they have a moment, an instant when they realize... there’s something. Something more.
Sunita broke the look. He was manipulating her, and she was making it far too easy. Blurring the lines of the recruitment process, the seduction.
“Why?” she asked. “Why do you want me so badly?” Her words were open to interpretation, and she knew it.
“Nobody’s work is like yours.” The safe route: move the focus back to her work.
“So innovative. So different. My game plan is simple. I maneuver myself into positions where I can identify people like you. People who would make a difference if only they weren’t being stifled. Then I set out to liberate them.”
“I’ve been funded and supported well. I have no complaints.”
“Your loyalty is admirable. You’re a good person.” Using flattery to illustrate her naivety again.
“I’m a researcher. That’s all.”
“You’re developing a radical, and novel, response to new biological threats – whether that’s rapidly evolving pathogens like avian flu, or engineered threats like biological weapons.”
“It’s not a magic pill.”
“No, but it’s a big step forward. You’ve developed an entire suite of strategies for rapid development and deployment of synthetic immune boosters, artificial antibodies that target new pathogens as they emerge. A SWAT team for the body’s defenses. I think that should be available to the people. Do you trust the men in suits to do that?”
“Should I trust a multi-millionaire, self-proclaimed voice of the people more than the representatives of a democratically elected government?”
“A bogged-down bureaucracy, you mean?” he said. “Terror has been normalized. It’s become just something we live with. Today we put up with levels of security unimagined only a few decades ago. But nothing stands still, and it’s our enemies who innovate and adapt the fastest. Today it’s bombers and trucks used as weapons. Tomorrow? The next nine-eleven will be initiated by someone coughing on a subway or in a crowded theater. There have already been attempts, you know, thwarted by the intelligence services and censored before word ever reaches the press. But when one such attempt gets through – and it will – we need to be able to respond, and your research, Dr Chakravarti, offers one of the best approaches to that response. But only if your work is facilitated.”
“By moving to work for a private, for-profit company?”
“Taking your work to the market is the best way to get it to the people,” Bowler told her. “Only by finding profit in adversity can we build robust defenses, a stronger society, and isn’t that what we’re both after? We might have different ideologies, but we’re both working to achieve the same thing, aren’t we?”