Altered States (28 page)

As Karla returned, I stood up, clumsily knocking my chair over backwards. I stumbled back a couple of paces. Heads darted in my direction but I was looking only at Karla’s face, a mixture of stricken guilt and terror. For a moment our eyes met in a knowing embrace and then I fled. It was time to walk away once more. But this time I knew that what I was leaving behind I could never hope to find again.

The sun beat down casting a short shadow beneath me. It was the kind of stagnant heat that you only find inland. It was like swimming through warm treacle. My feet scuffed the sandy path as I trudged along, my mind burning with anguished thoughts. Everything was falling into place.

A voice called from behind me.

‘If you keep walking, you’ll never know.’

I stopped, my head stooped, a tear rolling down my cheek. I didn’t want this. I heard footsteps rush up behind me and felt a hand on my shoulder.

‘
I
didn’t know,’ Karla said softly but with urgency.

I shrugged off her hand and turned around angrily. ‘What do you mean you didn’t know?’ I shouted. ‘How could you not know?’

Karla spoke with exigency.

‘They didn’t tell me, not till last week, when you were away. However they figured out that you couldn’t read me, they did it without me knowing. They couldn’t risk telling me anything, because if they were wrong you’d know as soon as you met me.’

She took a small step toward me and softened her tone.

‘Listen. I
do
work for Igneous, and BlueJay is my patch. That’s the truth. Somehow they knew that you wouldn’t be able to read me and somehow they got you there. But I don’t know how. They knew that if they were right you’d spot me and be intrigued by me and want to know me.’ She let out a deep breath. ‘They watched us for weeks until they were sure that it was safe to approach me.’

My mind was still too fuzzed to understand whether that made any difference.

‘And
then
you deceived me!’ I snapped with crisp anger.

Karla said nothing for a moment, her face showing guilt and sadness.

‘They offered me something I couldn’t refuse,’ she said softly with a saddening of her eyes.

And as I wondered what sum of money that might have been, what remuneration package it might have included, I wasn’t expecting to hear her next word.

‘You.’

She saw the perplexity woven into my brow. ‘Don’t be so surprised,’ she continued, as simultaneously a tear rolled down her cheek and she gave an amused smile. ‘God, for the most fascinating guy I’ve ever met you’ve got a damned low opinion of yourself.’

I was confused. I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to think. Whatever she said, could I trust her now? I shook my head and threw my arms in the air in frustration.

‘How the hell am I supposed to trust someone who’s in bed with my enemy?’

‘Fucking hell Aaron. You know what these people can be like. I was scared of them. I’m sorry,’ she pleaded. ‘All I wanted was to be with you.’ She grabbed my wrists and held them by my side.

I shook my head in disbelief. I paused, trying to assimilate this new knowledge with all the puzzles of my past.

‘But, they –’

What started as a shout tailed off into nothing, as a chain of fireworks started to go off in my head. I pulled myself from Karla’s grasp. I stumbled to a nearby wall, sat and hung my head in my hands.

The line of hundred-year-old men sitting at the other end of the wall gazed with mere quiet intrigue, nothing more. They’d seen a lot in their time. A slightly insane foreigner was hardly going to interest them if they’d seen wars come and go.

I had to think this one through. My brain was throbbing so hard it felt like it was going to burst out of my skull.

There was more to this. Much more.

I took a moment to focus and decided I needed to play at being on her side; needed to ask more questions. I wouldn’t know whether her answers were the truth, but I’d know what they were and that might be useful enough.

Of course, I could just disappear again. But that would leave Karla in a very dicey situation. Having failed her mission, having blown her cover, she was no longer of any use. That didn’t sound like a good thing to be, with the guys she was dealing with. Big Business could be just as nasty as Big Crime.

But it wasn’t just Karla.

I was starting to get mighty pissed off with there being so many questions and so few answers. Every fact uncovered seemed to bring with it three more mysteries.

The latest one being: how did Igneous know about me? And how come I ended up exactly where they needed me?

I knew exactly where the answer lay: at the bottom of a bottle of beer, or maybe the second bottle ... or the eighth.

Outside the hotel we parted company. Karla headed for the shops; I headed off the Strip for the darkest, quietest bar I could find. I knew I’d hit the jackpot when I found a sign pointing down a flight of steps to a basement entrance. No windows was exactly how many I needed right now.

When I stepped through the door I was somewhat surprised by the ambience on the other side. It wasn’t quite the flea pit I had imagined. It was actually quite pleasant. It was just a no-messing joint. No gimmicks, no themes. Not for the tourists. The locals had to have somewhere to drink without having to remortgage their house for each round.

I got myself a beer and took a booth in the corner. I was already slightly under the influence of lunchtime sangria, but I was thinking clear enough.

Have you ever noticed that you think differently at different times of the day? Have you ever had a really big decision to make and noticed that in the morning you’ll always fall on one side of the fence – the safer, easier, less scary side – and last thing at night you’ll think the opposite? That’s because inside you there is more than just one person. You have multiple personalities that manifest themselves under different circumstances. Mostly, the belief systems of these different yous are reasonably well aligned. They are variations on a theme. If you need to make a decision then it’s best to tap into them all to get a consensus. But if you need to execute a specific task, then you need to enlist the right one for the job. Getting
in the zone
is what they call it.

My specific task right now was puzzle solving. For this I needed clear wits and focused acumen. In short, I needed to be
sober
. With this in mind non-alcoholic beverages were the order of the day.

But I was also really hacked off, so I just got a slice of lime with my beer and hoped that would equate.

I started to locate all the pieces of the puzzle and laid them about at the front of my mind. I knew I didn’t have all the pieces but I hoped I had enough. I had to take this thing back to basics. Look at things logically.

The second was Karla. She claimed that Igneous had manipulated her and orchestrated our meeting; and however many questions this threw up, I felt I had no choice but to believe her. The alternative was to believe that the only person in the world I couldn’t read – the only person who could probe me for information – just happened to work for a company that desperately wanted to develop a system just like Hide. That was too much of a coincidence.

So that left the third alternative, the third entity that knew all about me: my previous employers. And one person in particular who had the necessary resources and bitterness to put me through all this. The man I’d screwed over. The man I’d died to hide from. Zack Bayliss.

To the best of my knowledge to-date I was invisible to Bayliss. Even if he didn’t buy that I was dead, I assumed he had long since lost track of me. It made me feel nauseous just considering that this might not be the case. But as I reluctantly allowed myself to accept this conclusion, one big chunk of the conundrum fell into place.

At this point, if you’re keeping up, you should be wondering how Zack Bayliss, a deputy director of national intelligence, is in any way associated with high fashion? That’s because you don’t know what I know. Not about Bayliss, just about the intelligence service in general. Let me give you some background.

When I was inside, it was well known that the agency set up and ran lots of businesses as fronts, such as garages, shops, cafés and so forth. It was often easier to get these places into the flow of underground knowledge than an individual agent. It was easier to convince the underworld that these businesses were legitimately illegitimate if you see what I mean.

It was also well known that some of these fronts became successful businesses in their own right. They actually turned a decent profit, paid for themselves. This was not surprising considering the power of their backers. There were indeed fairly well accepted rumours that some of these businesses were now large corporations being run by the agency to fund its own operations.

It was all entirely plausible.

And now something seemed undoubtable.

BlueJay, one of the trendiest bar chains in the world, was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US secret services. Why BlueJay and not Igneous itself? Well, I’ll get to that later.

I traced my mind back over the events of recent weeks to figure out how they’d led me here. There were some subtleties I was missing, I knew that, but one thing was abundantly clear. I was part of such an audacious display of human manipulation that I might almost have been impressed – if I weren’t so busy being extremely ticked off.

I realised now that I’d always been a little complacent – conceited even – about the fact that I could not be influenced. I was always confident that if anyone tried to con me face-to-face, I’d know about it. But I underestimated the lengths to which some people might go when a lot of money was involved; or maybe just for kicks.

So ... how was I brought here?

The bits I know are as follows. Someone in New Meadows was arrested for Pearle’s murder to draw me out. Burch was set up for this purpose and of course did not know why. So when I spoke to him I wouldn’t learn anything. A meeting was set up at BlueJay between Burch and some rug dealers – who also knew nothing about what was really going on. Then, once I was there, Karla just had to be sat down in front of me to see if I took the bait; see if their theory was right about her – that I couldn’t read her.

And that was one of the two things that was troubling me most right now. How had they known that Karla was someone who I wouldn’t be able to read? Even if they had a theory about how to
make
someone unreadable, how had they tested it?

The other major hole in my theory was that Bayliss never knew that Gemma, and so Pearle, was connected to me. If he had he would have shown up at our door much sooner – after I’d gone AWOL.

I finished up my beer and headed out onto the street, not knowing where I was going next. I didn’t want to tell Karla who I thought was behind all of this. Just in case. If things got dicey he could easily terminate both of us. Though he’d probably spare me. Like he always had done. Who knows how many times he had found me before; how many times he had tried to manipulate me into helping his cause?

Maybe he didn’t actually want my help per se. Maybe he wanted me to know he was getting close, to see if the Hide system was still about; make me paranoid enough to go dig it out of the internet and move it someplace else.

As I was following this line of internal questioning, my thoughts got rudely interrupted by the annoying tones of a mobile phone erupting. After silently cursing the kind of idiots who enjoy excessively loud phone alerts so much that they don’t even bother to act on them, I decided to answer it. Still wasn’t used to that happening.

I examined the now silent phone. It was a message from our friendly geneticist Dr Venton. He was back in town.

This town.

Fragments

An hour later I was in a departmental common room at New Meadows University.

‘Thanks for coming here,’ I said as I shook the geneticist’s hand.

‘No trouble,’ he said. ‘I am affiliated with the college here, so I need to pay the occasional visit. Besides, I really wanted to speak to you.’

‘That sounds ... intriguing’.

Dr Venton was not one of those eccentric boffin types with limited personal skills and even more limited dress sense. He was one of those kinds of boffins with astute business nous; who sets up spin-off companies, plays tennis at the weekends and is worth an absolute mint.

He wore chinos and a blue shirt open at the collar, and sported a trendy pair of frameless spectacles. He was balding, but knew how to wear it – in such a way to accompany his neatly clipped silver-black beard. In short, he was the kind of old guy I wanted to be when I grew up.