Identity X (16 page)

“I’m sorry Ben.  I’m so sorry.”  He stood
motionless, wondering how he could possibly find the words to answer.  He
wasn’t sure that words with the correct intensity or level of appropriateness
existed in any language he had ever heard.  Not even the greatest of poets had
ever managed to mould words to express such depth of feeling.  He didn’t even
know what her apology leaned towards: the lies, the capture, the drugging, the
shooting, or the loss of his life and child? 
Take your pick,
he thought
to himself.

“Hannah...”

She raised a hand to stop him.  She
wanted to speak.  In her mind she had everything ready that she wanted to say
and to tell him, yet it was all compartmentalised and secured, her secrets so
well concealed it was virtually impossible to find the key to unlock them.  She
barely knew herself what the truth was anymore.

“Ben, I don’t even know where to begin,
or how to explain everything to you.  What I told you at the safe house.  Most
of it was true.  But I also kept things from you.  I had to.”

“You kept things from me?  Just today? 
You mean like the fact you kill people.  That you work for people who want me
dead.  The fact that Matthew is OK.”  There was more than a hint of sarcasm in
his voice, and he looked away shamefully at the extent of his duping.  How easy
it had been to pull the wool over his eyes.  How easy it had been to lie to him
for all these years.  He suddenly felt very stupid as he stood there with his
limbs shackled and
splattered
in blood, and he wanted to
spit at her, just to make her feel some of the shame that raged through him. 
Instead, he bit his lip and locked his fingers together.

“I kept things from you because I wanted
to save you.  I wanted to avoid this.”

“Avoid it?”  He was momentarily
distracted by the boatman who had by now finished shoving the last of the dead
bodies into the van.  He slammed the doors shut as Ben trailed his eyes back
along the blood soaked tracks before resting them back upon Hannah who was now
stood so close to him that he could feel her breath on his cheeks, see
her
hairs fluttering in the breeze.  “You
have been part of this whole thing.  Since before we met you were part of
this.  You’ve been planning to kill me for years.”

“No I haven’t.  The beginning is true.  I
work for them, and you began as an assignment.  But I fell in love with you
Ben.  You’re the most amazing man I ever met.”  She began to cry and he felt
the urge to hold her and comfort her, but as soon as he moved his arms towards
her the image of her holding up the gun and firing at the agents pulled him
back.  She wiped her tears and smudged the blood splatters across her face, and
he wondered if that was what he still looked like, or if he had indeed cleaned
his face sufficiently.  “For years now I knew that I wouldn’t go through with
the operation.  I was willing your work to take years and years, but you’re so
brilliant you achieved where everybody had failed.”  As she continued to wipe
the blood spots from her cheeks it reminded him of foxhunters, celebrating
their first kill by blooding their cheeks.  He doubted it was her first.  It
made him want to hate her, and yet he couldn’t find an acceptable way to do
so.  He thought perhaps he was as guilty as she was, as the image of a dead
agent sprawled across a train platform came to his mind.

“I was trying to save people’s lives,
Hannah.”  It was all he could do to stop himself from crying, as he gulped down
the painful lump that obstructed the back of his throat and that stopped him
from breathing comfortably.  “You were trying to destroy mine.  You tried to
kill me.”

“No I didn’t.”

“You drugged me!  You told me so.”  Every
anger laced word struck him like a hammer to the thumb, a blunt and painful
force.  She was thankful that he remained shackled. 
Easier to control.

“But not to kill you.  It was Mark that
drugged you at the bar.  I lied to you in the safe house because I knew that
they were watching us, and listening.  Mark drugged you.  I gave you champagne
that I spiked with something that would make you throw up, and something to make
you sleep.  My plan was to pick you up at our house after the effects wore
off.  I thought I had more time.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“You can believe me or not.  It’s the
truth.  I never wanted to kill you.  You’re Matthew’s father.  How could I have
ever looked him in the eye?  I would never have turned you in, and I would kill
them all over again if it meant getting you on that boat.   It was my only
chance to save you.”

“But you didn’t.  I don’t exist anymore,
Hannah.  I’m dead already.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I just
killed my whole team.  That pretty much means that I am dead too.  Hannah Stone
doesn’t exist anymore either.”  She walked away towards the shore where she
began to remove her clothes.  She washed away the blood by splashing the cold
water on her face and it made Ben feel cold just thinking about it, but yet
urged him to do the same.  Still stood in the same spot, the boatman walked
towards Ben, slowing his pace and stopping just long enough to deliver his
verdict.

“She loves you Ben.”  The boatman stood
regarding the stunned face in front of him fondly, as if he were a friend.  He
rested his hand onto Ben’s shoulder, cupping it affectionately.  “She is
telling you the truth, and she has just caused herself a whole world of problems
to save your life.” 

“What am I supposed to believe?”  Ben
found himself confiding in the cordially faced stranger, searching for help
from an unknown source.  Perhaps that was the only thing that he could really
trust after the events of the past two days.

“Believe what you feel.  She could have
killed you already.  More than once from what I understand.  She didn’t, and
she just floored four men in order to protect you.  You know I am right.”

“I don’t even know who you are.  Why the
hell should I believe you?”

“I’m her father, Ben.”  His father in law
who was for all intents of purposes a total stranger, and not the man whom Ben
remembered at his wedding, offered him a warm smile, in which Ben found an
unexpected level of comfort.  He patted Ben’s shoulder before he walked off in
Hannah’s direction.  As Ben turned around he noticed that there was a window in
the boat house in which his reflection was visible.  It revealed several spots
of blood across his cheeks and forehead and he spat on his fingers, imagined
that the spots were his wife’s face, and proceeded to rub frantically and
angrily at Ami’s blood.

After a period
of immobility
and
I just pissed myself
disbelief, he looked back at the shore towards father
and daughter as the boatman held out fresh clothes for her to wear.  She
dressed into a fresh clean polo neck sweater and readjusted her hair which had
been disturbed in the process.  After loading her handgun with a fresh magazine
she stowed it back into its holster which sat just on the back of her hip.  She
loaded two bags into the boat with the help of her father and then walked back
towards Ben who had sat himself down on the rear steps of the boathouse.

“Can I sit with you?”  She pointed to the
empty space on the step next to him as he looked up, yet continued to fiddle
with the loose rocks that were resting at his feet.  He shrugged his shoulders
in a display of indifference, and she sat down, curling her knees up
protectively in front of her chest. 
T
o
Ben it seemed to function only to put another barrier between them.  Whilst he
flat out refused to look at her, as obstinate as a teenager, he could feel that
she was watching his profile.  She waited patiently and eventually held out a
key, a key for the shackles, and it was this token that she needed to soften
him up.  He held out his hands and feet, and she removed his restraints.  He
rubbed his wrists, angrily at first, a protest at the injustice of it all,
until eventually his muscles relaxed, his face smoother with a
thanks for
removing them
smile, his eyes reflecting her own.

“My name is Catherine Mulligan.  I was
born in Cork, Ireland, and moved here when I was three years old for my father
to work.  He was an agent like me, but I grew up believing that he was an
engineer building bridges all over the world.  I was sixteen years old when I
discovered the truth, and it broke my heart.  I wrote a school assignment on
paper which I had taken from his desk and he went crazy, telling me that I couldn’t
use the paper that he kept in his draws.  He made me rewrite it there and then,
and afterwards he put the original in water and I watched it disappear into
nothing.  That’s when I first realised there were things in our life that I
didn’t understand, and that didn’t make sense.

“They sat me down afterwards, and my
father explained what he really did for a living.  At first I was angry that he
had lied to me my whole life.  Especially after what happened to my mother. 
But gradually, I decided I wanted to be like him.”  Ben continued to wriggle
his hands and feet about in a circular fashion, reigniting the flow of blood to
his fingers and toes.

“So what?  You enrolled in a school for
assassins?”

“I joined a training programme, yes.  You
sign yourself over straight up.  No going back.  Only one way out.  You were my
second assignment.  I was twenty three, young, and naive.  I thought that I
could do it.  I thought I could live with you and pretend to love you.  But
that was before I knew you.  It was before I actually loved you.”  Her eyes
darted away, unable to look upon his face for fear of seeing evidence of her
own betrayal.  Instead she twiddled with the button of her trousers, something
she accepted as a pathetically comforting distraction.  His anger rolled in and
out like the ocean tides, but right now, at low tide, he really hoped that once
again her eyes would find their resting place with his.

“And then what?”

“I knew it was over, as far as the
initial plan went.  I couldn’t kill you.  Then we had Matthew.  I kept the
pregnancy from them for the first five months.  I only told them when I thought
that they wouldn’t make me
abort
the baby.  That’s why I never
wanted us to tell anybody until we had to.”

“I believed you when you told me that it
was hard for you because you lost your mother so young, and that it was an
adjustment.  I tried to support you and all the time you were lying.”  He
closed his eyes for a moment turning his head away, thinking of all the times
that he had wanted to celebrate the imminent arrival of his child, and how he
had worried so much for his expectant wife and her emotional state as she had
wrestled with the memories of the loss of a parent.  He thought of his father,
and it reminded him of his research.  When he opened his eyes she was looking
at him again, and he felt the waves of hatred roll towards the shore, hating
her more in that moment than he had ever before as he thought about the many
lies she had spun him. 
High tide. 
He felt like such a fool.

“I know.  But they were so mad at me.  I
told them that I got pregnant on purpose, because you wanted to leave me.”

“I never wanted to leave you.”

“I know, but it was a way to make them
accept it, because secretly I was so happy.”  She reached out for his hands but
she realised as soon as her skin touched his that she couldn’t feel the same
familiar spark that was always there before.  Even in the bad times when they
drove each other nuts and when she wished he would just disappear for a while
she still felt it.  Now he felt like a stranger, that first date awkwardness
when nobody knows if touching is allowed.  There was no response, no minute
muscle twitch or movement towards the stimuli of her skin, and she pulled away,
terrified to feel the nothingness between them.  She took some breaths, and
counted in her head.  She got to five and then carried on.  “After that, I
formed links with people.  People that could help me.  People I found who
thought the same way that I did.”

“Which is what?”

“That sometimes their way,” she paused as
if only to add time for confirmation, “isn’t necessarily the right way.”  They
looked at each other, searching each other’s faces for a sign; Ben for truth,
Hannah for forgiveness. 

“Hannah, where is our son?” 

“He’s at
H
eadquarters.  I was really hoping that
you would have got on that boat.”  She smiled, half heartedly.  “You kind of
messed up the plan.”

“I would have got on the boat.  It was
your own men that messed up your plan.”  She nodded in solemn agreement.  He
was surprised to feel sympathetic towards her as he began to believe in her
explanation.  “Fortunately for me, it seems that I married a woman who is
pretty sharp with a gun.  My father in law seems quite trigger happy too,” he
joked as he nudged her shoulder with his own.  “Thanks for saving my life.”

“Not yet I didn’t.”  She looked at him,
her face stone cold serious, with a determination that he had never seen before
as she reached up to place her hand against his cheek.  He didn’t stop her. 
“But I will.”

As they walked towards the boat that was
moored on the opposite side of the boathouse, Hannah’s father handed her a set
of keys, and pressed her hand shut.  They stared at each other, telepathic
words exchanged with nothing more than a look.  She nodded and tucked them into
her trouser pocket before she turned back to Ben.  Ben felt like a stranger,
somebody who didn’t belong, as if he had been eavesdropping and now had to
promise never to tell their secrets.

“Ben, it might be a bit late for this,
but this is my father.”  Ben automatically held out his hand, and the boatman
took it with wholehearted warmth that gave Ben a sense of reassurance.   His
handshake was firm and laconic.

“Ben, she’s a good girl.  She did what
she had to.  Now it’s your turn to do the same.  She has risked her own life
and that of Matthew in order to get you out.  Trust her.  She won’t fail you.”

“Yes, sir,” Ben said, feeling eighteen
years old again as if he were being introduced to the father of a girlfriend.  
“Aren’t you supposed to tell me to look after her?” 

“Son, you’ve seen her handle this piece,”
he said as he tapped the gun that sat on her hip.  “She can take care of
herself alright.  Just back her up.”  The boatman reached down and produced
another identical gun, placing it into Ben’s palm.  “I heard you’re not too bad
a shot yourself.”  Ben wondered in how many situations the first time you meet
the father of your wife an exchange regarding the positive nature of how you
had killed a man earlier on in the day would be deemed acceptable.  Positive
even.  The boatman reached a strap around Ben’s waist, and helped him adjust
the firearm into the newly positioned holster.  “Best just to sit it here,” he
said as he shuffled it into the same rear facing position that mirrored
Hannah’s.  “It’ll be more comfortable if you have to run.”

Ben stepped onto the boat, a small white
vessel no longer than a few meters in length and with rounded sides that made
it look like an inflatable dinghy.  In the middle of the boat stood a small
pillar which housed the throttle and steering wheel, and an array of gauges
that he had no idea how to read or handle.  He waited as Hannah held her father
in her embrace, before she too stepped onto the boat, rocking its balance as
she did so.  Ben should have realised that it would be the last time that she
would ever see him, but the thought didn’t even cross his mind.

“Ben, take those bags from there,” she
said, and she pointed to the two rucksacks that she had thrown in a few moments
before.  He picked up the first, which was light.  The flap was open slightly,
and inside he could see pieces of fruit abutted up against a flask of something
he desperately hoped was hot and caffeine rich.  The second bag was heavy, and
as he moved it the contents inside fell around, ringing out the sound of metal
on top of metal.  He looked up at Hannah, as she stepped into the boat, and she
registered his surprise as he lifted the heavy bag.  “Careful with that one. 
Place them both in the compartment over there.  We don’t want them wet.”  He lifted
the lid of the box that she pointed to and did as he was told, all the while
considering the inappropriateness of his desire to take out something to eat. 
Placing the lid back onto the box, he sat himself down and waited for her
instruction. 

He was surprised by her expert control of
the boat, manoeuvring it out onto the still water, which until disturbed bore a
resemblance to the finest silk imprinted with the reflection of trees from
above.  She threw a small black box overboard, but he didn’t ask what it was. 
He wondered how it was that he had made such a mistake when it came to his
impression of his wife. How could it have transpired that their relationship
was so complex?  How could she have fooled him for as many years as she did? 
In the recent years he had come to regard her difficult, even whiney at times,
desperately on occasion seeking his attention and approval.  This woman that
stood before him with the boat steering wheel in one hand and the throttle in
the other was anything but needy.  In fact, it was only because of her, her
courage and her quick fingered willingness when it came to a trigger of a gun
that he was still alive. She didn’t once look back to her father, who was
already walking away from the water’s edge and back to the black van which held
four dead bodies.  Ben didn’t know what he was planning to do with them. 
Bury
them?  Burn them?
  Whatever it was, it had been arranged.  On the spur of
the moment when it had come to killing four people Hannah had thought nothing
of it, and four dead bodies in the back of a van appeared to prove nothing more
than an unfortunate inconvenience.  He had no idea which side Hannah was really
on, or her father.  But for now he had to assume that whatever side it was,
they were on it together.