Exit Alpha (21 page)

Then, intestines resectioned, brain bruised and swollen, a mess of post-operative hazards, he was wheeled to the ICU. He was attached to nasogastric tubes, a drip, an oxygen sensor, ventilator. He had an ileostomy, abdominal drain, urinary catheter . . .

After days of sedation and checks for exudations and odour — bullets suck in bacteria and debris — he went back into the theatre for a delayed primary closure.

Eventually, two blurs, who were presumably people, persuaded him to hold up two fingers, follow a pencil with his eyes and say words. The words slurred and his left hand didn’t quite work.

The bigger blur said, ‘Obeys commands, opens eyes spontaneously, converses, has reasonable motor function. Now if we get him through biochemical and vascular changes, avoid peritonitis, epilepsy, myonecrosis, we’re crash hot.’

He dragged at a tube that seemed part of him but the smaller blur plucked his hand away.

The bigger blur resumed the record of disaster. ‘You’re looking good, Mr Cain. You have a drain but the colon wasn’t damaged so we’ve avoided a colostomy. You got a temporary stoma — be wearing a bag for a while. When the gut heals, we’ll close it and you can shit the usual way.’ He turned to the smaller blur. ‘When’s his next CT?’

‘Tomorrow,’ the sister said. ‘And Dr Mead wants an MRI.’

The next weeks were discomfort and pain. He was restless, coughed a lot. When he was a little less out of it, an EXIT staff surgeon came and, finally, he got hard details.

‘You’ve taken four hits. The cook found you, drove you to a doctor. We sent a chopper and handled it from there.’

‘How did they . . . ?’ He was slurring.

‘Mortar. Gas canisters lobbed through the roof of the house. The gas was just to disable because they wanted the family alive. They plugged you and Stromlo.’

‘Stromlo’s . . . ?’

‘Dead. You got one in the gut, one to the head. With all the blood from your head, they wouldn’t believe you’d survive.’

‘And my gut?’

‘You’ve lost small intestine basically. Could have been worse than the head. When a bullet connects with body tissue it develops a yaw.’ The man knew wound ballistics like all Beta medicos. ‘You get a stress wave, millisecond pulsations . . .’

‘I had the vest on.’ He couldn’t get his tongue around the words.

‘There’s still cavitation on impact. It stopped two rounds but weakened enough to let through a third although it absorbed most of its energy. Did no more damage than a low-velocity pistol bullet. But a rough way to lose an appendix. The vest probably saved you a kidney and a pulped liver on the round that got through.’ He replaced the clipboard on the foot of the bed.

‘The duplicates?’

‘In Russia.’

So it had worked. His mind was starting to drift but he mumbled the question that was haunting him. ‘Were we meant to be taken out?’

The doctor shrugged. ‘I’m not up with the politics. But Rhonda insisted we did everything to save you.’

He frowned under the bandage that was probably holding his head together. ‘How will I be after this?’

‘We’re not so worried about your guts now. Your head’s the iffy bit. We’ll know more in a few days.’ He waffled about secondary insults, BP fluctuations, torn bridging veins, blood absorption. ‘Considering what you’ve been through, you’re in great shape.’

‘Don’t snow me. Just tell me.’

The man nodded, strolled to the window, whistled tunelessly, turned around. ‘Okay. You won’t be the same. At best, you may have to walk with a stick.’

The shock of the statement went in. He knew a chapter of his life had closed.

* * *

After a month, the EXIT surgeon cleared him for the flight to Tasmania. He was shuttled to Beta by chopper and wheeled to a one-bed ward. He hoped Pat would come but they told him she was away having treatment.

Eventually Rhonda arrived, looking grave, her hair a mess. The ash and burn holes in the front of her dress told him how stressed she was. She put a hand on his brow.

His bleary look. ‘So were we expendable?’

‘We told you to get out, you mad idiots.’

‘Like hell you did. We got nothing.’

Shock on her face. ‘No signal?’

‘Nothing. We checked the night before. They’d even found the perimeter system.’

‘But the transmission was acknowledged.’

‘Not by us.’

She went almost crimson with anger. The reaction couldn’t have been faked.

‘So it’s still going on?’

She pressed his hand. ‘I’m sorry, Ray.’

‘I’ve been doing some thinking.’ His voice still slurred like a drunk’s. ‘Rehana wasn’t writing “Z”. She was halfway through an “M”. Murchison fixed the job in Chartres. And I reckon Vanqua’s running him.’

She pressed his hand again, tears of rage in her eyes. ‘Just . . . get well.’

I
t took him a year to recover.

The walking frame went early, the ileostomy after two months. But he needed the stick three months more and the slurring was still there.

After eight months he was well enough to direct again but did it mostly from a chair — stop-frame animation, paintbox stuff. He wore the SIG each day, trusting nobody now.

The change was more than physical. He dwelt on his life a good deal — on the training that justified killing as a job. Now that he’d experienced directly through his body what bullets did, viewing death at one remove became hard to distinguish from brutality.

As for the second aspect they’d formed in him, the inner search — the respect for all religions, the capacity to commune with popes — it made him think a lot about Stromlo, that other unfortunate taught to pray and kill. Would the ordeal of EXIT turn him into Stromlo’s clone — tear him apart inside until even death became more terror than release?

He was physically damaged, ageing, less resilient to stress. During his flight to reality, his personal items had moved.

He bought a shack in a country town two hours drive south of Sydney, intending to repair it at weekends. But he pottered around the place unable to get on with things. He didn’t even drive there but drowsed in the train, mind in neutral, a hypnagogic jerk.

One Sunday near the end of summer he made a simple meal and ate it watching the evening news. He’d heard nothing from base for months. The item was a slap in the face:

‘. . . allegations,’ the TV anchor declared with stock concern, ‘that a covert organisation has kidnapped the controversial guru and replaced him with a surgically altered lookalike. A spokesman for “The Square” claims to have a tape showing one of Gustave Raul’s closest associates teaching the substitute to impersonate him.’

Cain froze, fork in air.

A clip of the man followed and they supered his name: Peter Bell. He was described as a US Navy SEAL, dishonourably discharged. It was the man who’d followed him three years ago — on the night he slept with Jojo. Intelligent face, intense eyes — the man Karen Hunt had assured him she could trust.

An interview with Bell followed. He passionately declared that the cult would do anything to get Raul back. He mentioned the traitors who’d engineered the switch — two men and a woman — and implied that he’d cross-examined the men.

Was one Murchison? Had the bastard been caught in his own trap? Being grilled by the fanatical ex-SEAL wouldn’t have been fun. How much had Murchison given them? With prompting it could have been a lot.

The interviewer then asked Bell if he’d interrogated the woman.

Bell said that she’d eluded them but they were keen to locate her.

And they punched up a still of Hunt.

Cain swore at the beautiful face.

The worm had poked its head from the apple.

EXIT was outed.

T
he city-state seemed undisturbed. Bernini’s colonnade still stood. The image of the saint’s right foot was still being kissed by reverent lips. The decorative guards still patrolled with their halberds and the fountains, grottoes and hedges still resembled a landscape gardener’s nightmare. There was the usual bustle at the Porta Sant’Anna but the helipad was bare and the ghost, in the second library of the English College, had not lately appeared. Like all deep changes, this one left the surface untouched.

The meeting took place in none of the 10,000 rooms yet appropriately close to the secret archives. Cardinal Sarrum avoided the library’s black desks, uncomfortable chairs, solemnly ticking clock and walked through to the patio.

In the small garden, His Eminence, Cardinal Llosa, stood gazing at the flagging. He was a gaunt, chinless Peruvian with trifocals and spatulate hands who rarely looked at anyone directly. ‘So it has come.’

‘Yes. The Secretariat is manoeuvring to put pressure on four of the governments. We’re only secure if both our guests at EXIT are disposed of.’

‘It’s not enough.’ Llosa’s mouth drew down. ‘The exposure could compromise everything. My people want the whole thing closed.’

Sarrum felt the weight of the domain that bound them. ‘The governments would never agree. Though perhaps we could persuade them to mothball the replacement side.’

Llosa, still staring at the ground, spoke as if in pain. ‘Mothballing still leaves evidence. It has to be obliterated.’

Was he wearing, Sarrum wondered, a cilice, or a spiked chain around his thigh? Had he observed strict silence for an extended period after breakfast? Did he apply a whip to his shrivelled buttocks once a week? Did he cherish maxim 175: “It’s beautiful to be a victim”? He glanced at the man, detesting him and his friends in Opus Dei, self-flagellating fascists all. But this was no occasion for prejudice. His enormously influential counterpart was today an emissary only, representing a further eight curial monsignors. And the purge wasn’t in question. Only the
modus operandi
.

‘That’s your final position?’

‘Yes.’

Sarrum nodded. ‘I’ll convey it.’ He walked back out of the garden, out of the light, into the gloom of a bureaucracy now pledged to assassinate a pope.

V
anqua entered the secure booth, the innermost concrete box, punched his card and waited for the checks. One by one, the ten green lights came on. Only then did he use his day key and pick-up.

Checks at the other end still ran. The security of bouncing off satellites was considerable, but had to be much augmented for such a sensitive real-time contact.

This time it was Washington — Senator Barnaby F. Pickett — a glad-hander with the mind of a snake. ‘Vanqua? You got the 411 on what’s goin’ down?’

‘Your original transmission is confirmed.’

‘Questions?’

‘Are the UK and France in?’

‘No. It’s still a three-tick rumble. You know what that means if you screw up?’

He avoided the test question.

‘So what’s the schedule?’ Pickett prodded.

‘A lot of people need to be recalled. We can’t ship them all at once. But we’ll get started.’

‘Not a pretty assignment.’

‘It’s a routine Department S job. We’ll begin with the support staff here at Beta.’

‘You’re a together dude. So how will you handle Rhonda?’

‘Relieve her of command.’

‘And if she gets wise to the rest . . .’

‘She’ll be contained.’

‘Better be. Lose it and we’re toast. So you now assume full authority for EXIT?’

‘Confirmed.’

‘Keep me posted on all developments. I want a list of everyone in the pipeline.’

‘You’ll be informed.’

‘With the grace of God and a fast infield . . . Everyone they got. You with it?’

‘Understood.’ The new EXIT head replaced the handset and leaned against the wall.

He’d been appointed in ’86. This had taken seven years to engineer. He’d felt triumph at first. Now a terrible joy mixed with pain. At last, he could complete this, avenge the one family member he’d known. Though not identical twins they were one in spirit, heart. They’d never known their parents, only ever had each other. ‘She’s ours, Etta,’ he breathed. ‘The last twist.’

T
he northeast coast of the island was chilly in the late afternoon and the converted stable had no damp-course. Despite the heater, Pat felt cold. The cancer had taken all her strength. But her last job was her finest. There’d been time to do it precisely. Years.

When the duplicate had gone, she looked at Rhonda, her friend. A typical Aquarian, she thought — loving humanity but detesting individuals. Still, what she’d just witnessed had gone deep.

‘Amazing. Strangest thing I’ve struck.’ The big woman’s face, though emotionless, had glistening streaks on both cheeks. The outer indifference that protected her feelings had cracked.