Identity X (19 page)

It was as she was closing the cupboard
door that she saw the large white pot hiding in a back corner.  She remembered
how there had been a pot just like it many years ago, and how Mr. Johnson, the
man that had sheltered them for that summer had tried to show her how much fun
she could have without having any toys around.  They had mixed the contents
with sugar, thrown in some baking powder and watched as the soft glue that
formed began to resemble peanut butter that she had heard about from her
American cousin but had yet to try.  At the last minute they had thrown in some
old red paint powder from the shed and left it for an hour in little pots to
dry.  Once they added a fuse and a bit of tape he had given her a box and into
it placed the three black cylinders, which to her looked nothing like a toy and
nothing of beauty and therefore remained decidedly uninspiring.  She took
little disappointment as he sealed up the box with more black plastic tape.  He
had made her promise not to open it until he took her somewhere where she could
play with it.  Every night he would pass by her bedroom door, which always
remained open, and in the minutes between recumbency and nocturnal fantasy when
her breathing was sporadic and her nightmares yet to torture her, he would
check that the box remained intact. 

True to his word one day he woke her
early, before first light had broken.  He had already made them a flask of hot
tea, and gave her a rucksack to carry that was almost too big for her eight
year old shoulders.  After they had driven for just over an hour through a
snake box of winding roads, he parked the car at the edge of the forest.  He
tightened the rucksack on her shoulders as much as possible, and they set out
along a small path that wound through moorland where the Heather grew wild and
required their careful footing.  The light was just coming up as they reached
the top of the ridge, which jutted out from the ground triumphantly, rising up
high above the fields of wild plants below, selfishly dominating the
landscape.  They sat and shared sweet tea from the plastic cup as they dangled
their feet over the ledge.  The sun was low in the sky, and above the swollen
fluffy clouds of a damp morning, the golden shimmering tip of the ball of
sunshine could be seen just creeping into the visible sky.  He fastened a small
rope around her waist, and secured it to a big rock boulder behind her.  He
pulled it tight to test it before he allowed her to sit down, and as he wagged
his finger mockingly in front of her face had said
that that son of mine
will never forgive me if anything happens to you
.  It had never made sense
at the time.  She had no idea who Mr. Johnson’s son was, but she had been glad
to be so well looked after, and to at least leave the cottage for a while. 

After they had eaten their breakfast of
jam sandwiches he asked her if they should open the box.  She hadn’t realised
that he had been carrying it in his bag, and initially was annoyed that he had
sneaked it out whilst she was sleeping.  As he handed her the first black
cylinder and struck a match, he told her as soon as he lit it to drop it over
the edge of the cliff.  At first, as she dropped the little black cartridge she
didn’t know what to expect, but as the first swarms of pink smoke filtered up
through the sky, they sat engulfed in the artificial cloud, princess pink
tinged with the orange glow of the sunrise as the light rippled through.  The
silence of the man beside her only enhanced her sense of wonderment, the only
sound the wind as it swept along the ridge, clearing it of the previous days
dust and debris, and depositing a fresh layer for the day ahead.  As she turned
to look at him he was smiling at her, not a Cheshire cat
I’ll get you
type smile, but rather soft and gentle, a hug waiting on his face.  It was at
that point in her life, the most miraculous and beautiful sight that she had
ever witnessed and any lingering annoyance at the apparent theft had been
forgotten.  It was perhaps at that point the best morning of her life. 
No,
not perhaps. 
It truly was.  It was one of a handful of memories of her
grandfather, and one she treasured as preciously as she did the memories that
she created with her own child.

Pulling the other cupboards open she
found some sugar, baking powder, and a cigarette lighter.  The sugar bag was
hosting several lodgers, and a small colony of ants had found their way into
the cupboard, marching regimentally in and regimentally out.  Brushing the
insects aside she took out a large pot and threw in the sugar and the contents
of the white pot, cooking up the memorable sticky brown paste.  She threw in
some baking powder and took the pot away from the cooker.  She picked up the
lighter and stowed it safely in her pocket.  Braving the heavier rain she
ducked back outside, lowering her head forwards to avoid the drops as they
descended from the sky.  The clouds had swung in low, and as she budged open
the door by lunging her shoulder at the latch of the shed and horsing it
upwards, she smelt the same balm of that summer; the damp, the peat, and the
dusty remnants of terracotta pottery.  She had forgotten to bring a torch with
her, and the diminishing light from outside was not intense enough to light the
darkest corners of the small shed.  She checked her wrist watch.  It was a
quarter past three. 
The car should be here by now,
she thought to
herself.

As her eyes adjusted to the light she
brushed pots and empty seed packets aside until she spotted the dusty old box
in the corner on the floor.  It was the same box that she had used all those
years previously, and she hoped desperately that it would still be fit for
purpose.  As she pulled up the box and opened the lid, she saw how it had been
sealed with an old piece of string, the paint itself in several layers of
plastic bag, each a little less worn as she pulled the first degraded layers
away.  Giving it a shake, she could hear the contents skirting around inside,
like sand grains in an hourglass.  Grabbing the black tape that she never
doubted would be in the old toolbox on the floor, she darted back over the
grass, slipping as she did so.  She pushed the front door open, shutting it
frantically behind her.

The sound of the door closing woke Ben. 
“What are you doing?” he asked.  Ben startled her as he spoke whilst she still
had her back turned, and as she gasped the roll of tape that she had stowed in
her teeth in order to free a hand to open the door made a thud as it dropped
and rolled like a fire victim to the floor.  He leant over and picked it up as
it arrived at his feet.

“You scared me!” she exclaimed, as she
held her hand up to her chest.  “Help me with this, quickly.”

“What are you doing?” 

She shed her woollen throw as if she had
walked straight into summer.  As she held up the bag containing the paint,
tipping it into the pot of brown goo, she asked him to bring her all the toilet
rolls that were in the bathroom cupboard.

“Why, what do you….”

“Ben please, just bring them here.” 
Dutifully, he found the bathroom and rooted around for the toilet rolls,
finding four dusty rolls in total, including the one from the holder.  He took
the three spare and then considered if he needed to use the toilet or not. 
This thought came to him entirely coincidentally as he gathered up the paper
rolls, but was born of the realisation that he hadn’t fulfilled any of his
natural bodily functions in almost two days.  His response was apprehensively
negative and so he pulled a long section from the roll, tucked it onto the holder,
and then took the last roll from the wall, adding it to the others in his
arms. 
Just in case. 
He dropped them onto the table in the kitchen,
next to the bag full of weaponry, and she brought over the pot, now transformed
into a red, sticky glue like substance. 

“What is that?”

“It’s our cover Ben.  We don’t have
anybody on our team.  Everybody is against us, even if they don’t know it yet. 
Anything I can think of that might help us get Matthew out, I’ll try.  Here,”
she said as she took the first toilet roll.  “Take off all the paper, we want
the cardboard tubes.” 

After covering the wooden floor in a
fanciful swathe of tissue, he lined up the four cardboard tubes on the table. 
She covered one of their open ends with black insulating tape.  Turning them
closed side down she instructed Ben to fill up the tubes with the red paste. 
By the time he had done so, she had returned with two pens and two pencils, and
stuck them into the sticky pots one by one.  She also threw a box of matches
onto the table, which she had found by the fireplace.

“Cut the heads off these.”

“How many?” he said, as he opened the box
of matches.

“As many as there are.”  His heart sank
as he saw an almost full box.  His disappointment was interrupted only by the
buzz of a telephone, and the break in isolation reminded him of the outside
world and the threat that it posed.  She picked up the telephone, read the
screen and then placed it back down on the counter.

“Car will be here soon.  It’s late, but
at least it gives us time to finish this.”

As they sat waiting for the smoke bombs
to dry out, making match head fuses, it was virtually impossible for Ben to
concentrate on the task that she had set for him.  All he could think about was
Matthew, imprisoned in a building that she referred to as ‘Headquarters’, or
what seemed to him to be more menacing, ‘The Shop’, which sounded like no place
for a six year old boy. 

“What is Matthew doing now, do you
think?  Where is he?”  She looked up from her match head fuse and eyed up her
husband coolly. 

“He’ll be where I left him.”

“Which is where? Where did you take him
when you left me in our home to die?”  From the tone in his voice, and the
emphasis that Ben placed on the word ‘left’, his gratitude for her recent
decisions had worn thin.  His outrage at the events of the past was swirling
around in his stomach, punching around inside of him, fighting to get free. 
She chose to ignore it, knowing she had ignored and endured worse
,
and
simply proceeded to answer the question.   

“It was agreed that he remain at Headquarters
on Thursday, whilst we conducted all the necessary duties for debriefing.  Mark
was so over excited by your research and celebrating, that everything got put
back.  Debriefing was moved to Friday morning.  That’s why I never got to you
in time before you woke up.  He is safe there, until I collect him.”  She
offered up the idea of his safety convincingly enough, but she wasn’t sure who
she was trying to convince.

“And what about me?  You told me that I
was supposed to get on that boat.  Where was I going?”

“Here,” as she raised her head and
motioned to the room before her.  “My father would have brought you here.  I
didn’t expect them to turn on me.”

“I don’t think they expected you to kill
them.”

“Nobody expects to be killed Ben.”  She
looked towards him.  “You of all people should know that.”  They sat in silence
for a few moments, until Ben spoke again.

“What is this place?”

“It’s my grandfather’s home.  My real
grandfather.  I came here as a child.  I didn’t know at the time he was my
grandfather, but we came here when my father had to stay off the grid.”

“Your father was a spy, right?”

“No, and neither am I.  Our job is not to
spy.  It’s to do the things that are necessary, but that a nation cannot be
seen to do publically.  We do the work that the public don’t need or want to
know about, and make the politicians look clean.  They look clean because they
are.  They don’t know anything about us.”

“So what now?  What happens when you turn
up with no team of agents, no van, no prisoner?  Do you think that they’ll let
you just turn up, pick up our son and walk out like nothing has happened?  I
don’t know these people, but that sounds a bit naïve to me.”

“Ben I only need ten minutes.  I have
access to almost everywhere in that building.  When I am almost there I will
call Mark.  I’ll call in a car accident, and say that we have stayed with the
van.  That’s protocol.  You are going to stay at the car, just out of view. 
They are looking for you, but not right outside their own front door.

“I have to go through the main entrance. 
Once I am in, I can go directly to the room where they are holding Matthew.” 
The words cut Ben deeply.  The very thought that Matthew was being held against
his will, against Ben’s will, was enough to shatter his hope and strengthen his
sense of purpose.  “I will have to move fast, but from the main door to being
back to the car I can do it in ten minutes.  I’ll be out before Mark knew I was
there.”

“And you guarantee that this will work?”

“There is no other choice, Ben.  They
have no reason to suspect me until they realise that there was no accident.  By
that time I’ll be back in the car with you and Matthew.”

They both stopped talking and raised
their heads towards the front door as they heard the sound of gravel crunching
underfoot.

“It’s the car,” she said as she rose to
her feet.  Get your stuff together including your gun, get these bags, and get
ready to go.”

She arrived back
at the
doorway with the keys to the car in her hand.  Ben
couldn’t see the face of the person, but thought that it looked like a man as
he walked towards the jetty where they had previously left the boat.

“Are you ready?” she said to Ben, as he
craned his neck to get a better view of the figure walking towards the water. 
“It’s time to leave.”  She picked up the first of the bags from where he had
readied them on the floor by the door as if they were preparing to go on
holiday, and walked towards the boot of the black saloon car.  The delivery man
was still walking to the boat, his grey hood just visible as he ducked
underneath the low lying tree branches, and Ben heard the splutters of an
engine as the boat roared into life.  Hannah was already back at the front door,
and she threw him a look that more than told him to hurry up.  He grabbed his
stolen jacket and stepped out of the door.  She stepped back into the hallway
of the house and placed a small black box onto the coffee table in front of
her.  Lifting up a tiny antenna, she flicked a switch, activating a small red
flickering light.

“What’s that?” he asked, as she stood up
and walked towards the door.

“It’s you, or rather, it’s your phone
signal.”  He stood there wondering if he had attached the gun strap properly,
or if it looked out of place, like fancy dress, or as if he were playing at
being a cowboy.  She paid it no attention, and he assumed it looked alright. 
She grabbed her coat and flicked it around her shoulders as they both heard the
boat chug away from the mooring.  She checked her wrist watch again.  Only a
few minutes until four in the afternoon.  “I want them to track you here.  It
won’t be long until they pick up the signal.  It will be enough time for us to
get there, and it will divert their attention.  If they think you are here,
they sure as hell won’t be looking for you outside their own building.  We will
be there in half an hour, and they will be here not long after that.  That will
provide me enough time to get in and get out with our son.”  For the first time
he saw apprehension in her face, and as she forced out the last of her words he
knew that she felt nervous.  He wanted so much to hate her for what she had
done to them, but the thought of what she had done since to save his life, and
at least to give him a chance, put a barrier between him and his hate.  “Let’s
get moving.  The clock is ticking.”

He opened the door of the car and sat
inside, adjusting the gun on his hip, eager to get out of the easing rain.  He
heard her open the boot, and the once alien sound of the gun barrel as she
loaded her hips with two new handguns rang out from behind the car.  With the
guns concealed by her jacket, she looked just like his wife, and yet seemed like
such a stranger.  She dumped the rucksack onto his lap and handed him the roll
of black tape and the homemade fuses.

“Put tape all around the smoke bombs. 
Put the fuse into this hole,” she explained, as she picked one up and
demonstrated by placing the fuse in the hole from where she had recently
removed the pens.  “Then stuff a bit of this tissue inside and tape up the top,
just leaving a bit of a hole in the middle.  Got it?”  Even if he hadn’t
followed well, the ‘got it’ sounded so irrevocably terminal that he would not
have dared proffer no as a response.  Instead, as he taped the first bomb
together, adding in the fuse as she had shown him, he repeatedly stopped to
hold it up for her inspection.  She nodded a series of positive affirmations,
before he produced the first finished product.

“Good.  Do the others.”

“What are you going to use them for? 
What do you mean, cover?”

“Confusion.  They might help, and we need
all the help we can get.”

As they drove through the forest away
from the cottage they reached the end of the track and picked up the trail of
the first main road.  As the density of the forest lessened, in place of trees
there was real life, pedestrians, other cars, and the general hustle and bustle
of normal everyday existence.  Gradually the roads became larger and he
realised that they were approaching the city.  They passed restaurants and
cafes, and places that he had been before.  As he travelled through the
backdrop of his memories, they seemed to him now like nothing more than a
theatre stage, full of props and imagery designed to create the illusion of
real life.   He regarded the people as they went about their busy lives; crowds
standing waiting at pedestrian crossings, business men working from laptops on
coffee shop tables, street sellers offering their papers and food.  He thought
about how each of them would have an identity card tucked safely inside their
pockets which they would rely on for even the simplest of luxuries.  There
would no doubt be a line at the Central Government Office, people waiting
patiently and orderly as the guards stood close by with their hands resting
menacingly on to the handle of their holstered gun.  There had never been an
incident involving such a guard, no guard had ever pulled his trigger.  Nobody
would have ever dared cause a problem.  Yet now, knowing the power that a gun
can possess, and how that power can surge up your forearm and make you pull the
trigger, even when every other pathway in your brain tells you that to take a
life is wrong, he thought it only a matter of time until something like this
occurred.  As he watched the life carrying on around him, nothing about what he
observed seemed real to him anymore.

“What is it?” she said, as she caught him
staring sentimentally from the window.  “Are you nervous?”

“Everything out there, Hannah.  That’s
what’s wrong.  None of it is real anymore.  I have all these memories, but none
of them mean anything because none of them were ever real.”

“They were real.”

“You married me because you had to.  I
met your father today, so I don’t know whose hand it was that I was shaking on
the wedding day, and who I thanked for such a wonderful wife.  Who was it that
I promised that I would take care of you?”  He didn’t wait for an answer, even
if she was about to offer one.  His question was purely rhetorical.  He knew
the answer; it was nobody.  “Here for example,” as he pointed up to the small
French restaurant that they used to visit, which sat on a corner and that he
considered the best reminder of Paris he had ever seen outside of the city
itself.  “We used to come here.  This is one of the first places we ever came
together, and I loved it there.  Now that memory is lost.  It’s all lost. 
Everything.  My life.  My family.  My memories.  Every piece of research that I
ever did.  All the work that I did to try and make people’s lives better,
disease free.  It’s gone.  Gone in order to be used for weapons.  Everything
was just a big ploy.  A cover up.  I was just a tool in the whole thing.  A
tool for warfare.  I will be the man who created a monster, rather than the man
that saved people from them.”

“That’s not true.  I loved you.  I still
love you.”

“Love me?  You can’t love me.”

“I saved your life,” she pleaded,
half-heartedly, knowing that she was also responsible for almost destroying it.

“That was guilt.  You did it for
Matthew.  If you wanted to save me, you could have done it ages ago.”

“I was coming back for you.”

“You could have taken me from the moment
I got home that night.  You could have told me anytime.  What about last week? 
You could have said,
hey guess what my love
,” he began.  “
Next week
your best friend will try and kill you.  I know all about it because I’m in on
it too.  Fancy doing a runner?
  Never once.  Nothing from you until you
feel guilty and it’s too late.  You have destroyed my life, Matthew’s life, and
the lives of everybody that my research would have saved.”

“I didn’t…”

“You didn’t what?  I can’t believe a word
that you have ever said to me.  All the stories that you told me about your
family.  All the lies.  You told me that your mother wasn’t at our wedding
because she died when you were young.  How could you lie about such a thing
when you knew what drove me to work was the death of my own father?”

“Ben, I…”

“I don’t want to hear it.  Don’t talk to
me.  I have heard enough.”

The rest of the car journey proceeded
under a veil of silence as the black saloon meandered through the streets
towards Headquarters.  She drove as if under the scrutiny of a driving
instructor, her eyes always alert for any sign of hazard, of their being
followed.  More than once she allowed herself a glimpse of Ben as he sat
staring dead ahead at the dashboard, his eyes watery and tear filled.  She knew
that he was right.  She had had endless chances to tell him.  Once she had even
considered it.  They had been arguing one Sunday morning about nothing of any
importance.  She was shouting at him about the mess in the bathroom, the crumbs
on the floor under the chair where he had dropped his toast, and the other end
of the table where he had taken up residency and had permanently stationed a
laptop, text books, and endless piles of his preferred handwritten notes.  She
had complained and complained at him, until finally he rose to his feet, his
cheeks ruddy from anger, his patience finally snapped like an over plucked
string of a violin. 
What do you want from me,
he had screamed as he
slammed down his sweaty palms onto the tabletop.  He accidently knocked over
his juice, and sent it streaming towards the piles of notes.  She had grabbed a
towel to mop it up, which he snatched out of her hands faster than she could
take a grip on it.  She tried to help him, but instead he body blocked her,
forcing her out of the situation.  As she watched him frantically mopping up
the spilt juice, she thought about how it might sound if she tried to tell him
what was happening and why she was really so angry, and expose all of the
secrets stored up in her once perfectly conditioned brain.  She mouthed the
words over in her head, sounding them out internally. 
There is a plan to
kill you.  I want to save you.  Please listen to me.  I want to save you. 
By
the time he had finished mopping up the spillage, he turned to look at her, his
face still drowning in the extent of his frustration which was focussed fully
on her.  He looked at her with such harsh eyes, his breath streaming through
his nostrils in punctuated jets, quivering with anger.  Without any words he
communicated perfectly his desire for her to get out of his way, and he moved
past her silently as she stepped aside, leaving to take an anaesthetising
shower.  It was the last time she wanted to feel his judgment.  His hatred of
her was too much a burden to bear.

Pulling the car into the side of the
road, she pulled on the handbrake and shut down the engine.  She turned the key
and sat back in her seat, the only sound in the car that of the material of her
coat as it crimpled under her shifting weight.  Turning to look at Ben, who was
still staring at the dashboard in front of him, she placed her hands down onto
her knees, when what she really wanted to do was to rest them onto his leg and
try to comfort him.

“Ben, I know it’s hard to believe me.  I
have made so many mistakes when it comes to you.”  He remained motionless, as
if he hadn’t even heard her words.  “But you have to try to believe me.  I had
to let them believe they had succeeded.  I was scared for Matthew and for you. 
If the operation failed, they would have killed you anyway.  If they discovered
that it was because of me, they would have killed me too.  What would he have
done then?  I tried to manage the situation, but I didn’t do it very well.”

“The situation?” he asked, turning to
look first ahead, and then at her.  “Matthew and I were a situation that needed
managing?”  He shook his head in disbelief.  “This just keeps getting better.”

“You’re mixing my words Ben, and you know
it.  I tried to save you.  I did it badly.  I was coming back to the house, but
you woke up faster than expected when I was delayed.”

“Hannah, honestly.  Listen to yourself. 
You left me in our house for over twenty four hours!  They could have come and
got me at anytime.  You had no intention of
saving me.”

“It was part of my plan.  I didn’t leave
that night like you think I did.  You threw up at about half past midnight.  I
gave you a slow release sedative to make sure that you wouldn’t wake up.  The
branch of the agency which organises recovery isn’t based at Headquarters.  I
have a contact there.  He helped me make it look like you had already been
picked up.  Mark assumed that I had done it when he checked the status of your
recovery on the system.”

“So then what?”

“My debriefing should have happened on
Friday morning after being put back from Thursday afternoon.  It would have
meant that the operation had been closed.  Deemed successful.  Ben, Hannah and
Matthew Stone would have been erased from ever existing, and Matthew and I
would have gone on to live a new life, with different identities.”

“Without me.”

“Yes, at first.  But I have a lot of
contacts, Ben.  People to help me.  I was planning to come back and get you on
Thursday afternoon, but when things got changed I had to put it back to Friday
morning.  The same man that delivered the car to us was going to help me.  I
know him through my father.  They are good people.  Honest people.  But when
your identity card was detected in the underground this morning it was as much
a surprise to me as it was to Mark, and it threw the plan into chaos.