Pick Your Poison

by Lauren Child

  She stopped still there on the sidewalk. She turned the card over and over in her hand as she turned the possibilities over and over in her mind.

  1) Blacker was the mole

  2) Blacker thought she was the mole

  3) Blacker thought she was dangerously unhinged

  4) … something else.

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t going to be good. People were being left off lists. She was being left off lists. Blacker was warning people about her behind her back. The Australian woman was out there somewhere … Her mind was running away with itself now. RULE 8: DON’T LET YOUR IMAGINATION RUN AWAY WITH YOU OR YOU MIGHT WELL LOSE THE PLOT. Maybe this was a good time to visit the Yellow Wind-Dragon dojo.

  She drew her hood down firmly over her head, walked to the Crossways subway and took the College Town line to Cathedral where she changed trains and took the Red Line to Chinatown.

  It would have been easy enough to walk past the building – it showed no sign of what it might be, just plain brick with an unwelcoming metal door set to one side. Spray painted onto the door were the same Chinese characters as on the card.

  She tried the door, not expecting it to give, but it did and in she went. The interior bore no relation to the outside. It was a tranquil space, no harsh lighting, carved wooden pillars, practice mats, sliding opaque screens and much bigger than the Spectrum dojo.

  She was greeted by a man in a white gi who, once she had explained who she was, led her to Jen Yu.

  ‘Ruby Redfort?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Hitch told me you would come.’

  ‘Yeah, well he was right.’

  ‘Who taught you?’

  ‘Li Mu Bai.’

  ‘So you studied White Leopard kung fu?’

  Ruby nodded.

  ‘Very aggressive.’

  Again Ruby nodded.

  ‘Strikes many times and aims to kill.’

  Ruby said nothing.

  ‘So I will teach you something different – a style of kung fu suited to someone of your slight build. It uses momentum, fluidity and speed at its heart.’

  The lesson began and it was all about dragons.

  ‘You can create more power in your strike when the movement originates from the feet,’ said Jen Yu. ‘Use your waist to guide it and let it flow through your body and exit through your fist. I will demonstrate. Stand in a neutral stance.’

  Ruby frowned. ‘You’re going to punch me?’

  ‘Well, yes. How do you expect to improve your kung fu without getting punched?’

  Ruby nodded; she understood. She settled into a ready stance. But she wasn’t ready at all. With amazing power and speed, Jen Yu suddenly moved her hands forwards and up, sending Ruby reeling.

  Ruby picked herself up from the mat, a little winded.

  ‘Back into your stance,’ said Jen Yu.

  Ruby did as she was told – Jen Yu was not a teacher to be argued with.

  ‘Dragon leg work is characterised by a zigzag motion,’ continued the teacher. ‘This mimics the movement of the dragon. This also enables one to use floating and sinking movements – these are very important in generating power and stability, making one’s body calm and relaxed. But they are also important because you will learn to ride the wind. In dragon-style kung fu, this means to follow rather than lead. But in Yellow Wind-Dragon kung fu, this also means to fly.’

  Ruby liked the sound of that.

  ‘Yellow Wind-Dragon uses the momentum of the body to carry oneself high into the air, the feet only touching the ground in order to propel you up. Use this momentum to rotate over the head of your opponent; much of your fighting will be airborne. Like this.’

  Ruby was even less ready this time. Jen Yu jumped into the air and seemed to float there, then turned into a kick that knocked Ruby flat on her back on the mat again. Ruby got up. ‘How do I learn how to do that?’ she said, when her breath was back.

  Jen Yu smiled, and bowed. ‘Simple,’ she said. ‘You practise over and over until you can do it.’

  Ruby arrived home late to find Hitch in the kitchen; he looked like he might have been waiting for her.

  HITCH: ‘So how did your meeting with the boss go?’

  RUBY: ‘Usual thing.’

  HITCH: ‘Did you let her in on your big discovery?’

  RUBY: ‘I didn’t see the point.’

  HITCH: ‘Something bothering you kid?’

  RUBY: ‘Why would there be?’

  HITCH: ‘Well you look like your pet hamster just died, so I’m figuring something’s up.’

  RUBY: ‘Yeah, well, now you mention it, there is actually.’

  HITCH: ‘Are you planning on telling me, or do you want me to guess?’

  RUBY: ‘The briefing tonight – how come I wasn’t on the list?’

  HITCH: ‘You weren’t required to be there, nothing personal.’

  RUBY: ‘It’s not personal that I was the only agent not required?’

  HITCH: ‘Not true, Alonso wasn’t there.’

  RUBY: ‘I happen to know that Alonso is in the hospital having his appendix removed, so that really doesn’t count.’

  HITCH: ‘Look kid, what you need to understand is that there are a whole lot of things you don’t know about. Let’s be honest here, there are a whole lot of things I don’t know about. Let’s take your meeting with LB – I have no idea what that little tête-à-tête was about, but what I figure is, LB has her reasons.’

  Ruby was getting the message loud and clear: focus on your own stuff and stop whining about everyone else’s.

  She noted that Hitch didn’t bring up Blacker. Why not? It would have been the obvious thing to do. Blacker would be the one agent’s name that would have prevented her feeling sore about being left off the list.

  So Hitch knows he was in the building.

  But did Hitch know what Blacker was playing at? Did he know Blacker was making phone calls, warning people not to talk to her, not to trust her? Spreading rumours and poisoning the mind of every agent in Spectrum? And if he did, then was he standing up for her or was he just standing back waiting to see how it all played out?

  She tried to banish the thoughts as she lay on her bed that night, but they kept creeping back, staving off sleep and twisting her mind into a knot of dead ends. Unable to fight it, she lay back on her pillow and let her paranoia lead her to dark places.

  RUBY LEFT THE HOUSE EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, partly because of the previous evening’s uncomfortable conversation with Hitch, and partly because she couldn’t sleep. She’d managed perhaps two hours between 2am and 4am, and seeing how she was awake, she thought she might as well try and earn herself a punctuality point from Mrs Drisco.

  She arrived well before the bell was due to sound. None of her friends were there so she sat down on a bench and took out her comic and decided to read until one of them tapped her on the shoulder. To her surprise it was Vapona Begwell who did the tapping.

  ‘Look Redfort, I don’t like you but I gotta say, I appreciate what you did, you’re no snitch. You coulda blabbed to Levine, but you didn’t.’

  Then, the weirdest thing of all, Vapona Begwell stuck out her arm and shook Ruby’s hand, a firm, almost crushing handshake, the sort that might break a finger or two, but a handshake nonetheless.

  ‘I guess I owe you,’ she said. ‘I don’t like owing people.’ Then she turned on her heel and walked off down the corridor.

  Had the world gone mad? What was going on here? Her fellow agents didn’t trust her but her sworn enemy was shaking her by the hand.

  Ruby didn’t want company that day; she needed to collect her thoughts, understand what was going on here and figure out how she was going to deal with it. She particularly wanted to avoid Clancy, not because this was something she couldn’t talk about with him but because this was something she didn’t want him getting in a stew about – it was one thing him fearing the bad guys might take a pop at his best friend, it was another fearing that the so-called good gu
ys were also on her tail. No, best not tell Clancy.

  For once it was pretty easy to dodge him as he was completely immersed in his behavioural science project, setting up his little camera in the corridor, adjusting the angle, loading the tape, and for this reason his usually highly sensitive antennae was tuned to low. He barely seemed to notice that she was absent at recess, choosing to spend the breaks in the school library. In fact the truth was, none of her friends noticed.

  She was in math class when a message flashed up on the Bradley Baker watch.

  She stared at it, the words vivid, spelled out in green light.

  >> COME IN WHEN YOU CAN. BLACKER.

  She left school five minutes before the bell sounded; she wanted to get out ahead of the others, didn’t want to get caught up in any tricky lies and explanations as she headed to the subway rather than the bus stop.

  She thought about what she was going to say to Blacker and she thought about RULE 51: WHEN YOU DON’T TRUST THE OTHER PLAYERS, ALWAYS PLAY YOUR CARDS CLOSE TO YOUR CHEST.

  She went right on down to the coding room and as she walked through the door she gave Blacker her usual good-natured smirk.

  ‘You wanted to see me?’ she said, like butter wouldn’t melt.

  ‘Hey Ruby, sorry I missed you yesterday,’ said Blacker.

  ‘Yeah, you should be because you lost out on a pretty nice donut.’

  ‘That’s too bad,’ said Blacker.

  ‘Yeah, I nearly came down to your office and left it on your desk.’ She waited for a flicker of unease, but there was none. ‘I was halfway down there and then I decided to eat it myself.’

  ‘You probably did me a favour, Rube, I need to clean up my act as far as my diet goes,’ said Blacker.

  ‘Yeah, maybe you should,’ said Ruby. Boy, this guy, she thought, cool as a cucumber. She was trying to gauge what might be going on behind the eyes, but she could see nothing. He was talking the talk. Smiling the smile.

  ‘Good going on the Taste Twister decode. Froghorn passed it on. You know, he actually looked impressed – a rare sight, wish I’d had a camera.’

  Ruby smiled back. ‘Woulda been a waste of film,’ she said.

  ‘Smart of you to figure out the lid of the bottle gave us the date of the pick up. It’s simple, but it’s the simple things which are so easy to overlook,’ said Blacker. ‘Just a shame we didn’t make it to the Twinford Mirror building in time. I went down there myself, but came back with nothing.’ He sighed heavily and then looked at her. ‘You were sure that was the original bottle top?’

  Was he seeing through her or was he swallowing her deception in one easy bite?

  Ruby shrugged. ‘There wasn’t another one if that’s what you’re asking. I mean the red hat guy could have swapped it I guess, but why? Why leave the bottle if he thought there was a chance it would be found?’ Not a flicker, not a blink. She wasn’t a bad liar either.

  Two can play at this game, she thought.

  ‘That’s that then,’ sighed Blacker. ‘We had the location but we missed the pick-up.’

  Ruby did a good job of pulling her face into an expression which conjured extreme frustration combined with downright disappointment.

  Blacker’s watch beeped: he checked it, sighed again and said, ‘Look, I have to go, but keep me updated on this, OK? You see anything strange, I mean anything, and you contact me.’

  Ruby nodded. She wasn’t going to feel bad about this. He didn’t trust her, so she didn’t trust him. But what she really wanted to know was just how deep this went, how many other agents had been warned off talking to her? She thought for a moment and decided that the best place to start might be the coding office and, more specifically, Froghorn’s desk. Froghorn’s office door would be locked, his files would be password protected, but neither of these two issues were exactly problems.

  Getting into the room was a cinch, the number he had chosen for his door code, I mean please … who picked the Catalan numbers series and actually expected to get away with it? She keyed in 12514.

  Once she was in she began by looking in his desk, and when this search threw up nothing useful she set to work figuring out his file safe code. Again, a no-brainer. The lazy caterer’s sequence? Jeepers. This was sophomore stuff. She turned the dial on the safe: 1 click left, 2 right, 4 left, 7 right, 11 left.

  With a clunk, it opened.

  Rummaging through someone else’s desk at Spectrum was, of course, strictly a no-no, and sneaking information out of the file room no doubt a firing offence, but as she would have told anyone had she been caught: if it was such a big deal then the keeper of those files should have thought up a better password for his file drawer. Or as her T-shirt so aptly put it: you snooze, you loose, sucker.

  Ruby let her fingers walk across the files until they reached R, Rabin, Railey, Reads, Redfort.

  Slowly she pulled her file from its slot and laid it on the table. She didn’t have to do much looking, she opened the cover and her blood froze.

  AS SHE STEPPED OUT OF THE SUBWAY, UTTER DARKNESS SEEMED TO ENVELOP HER. There were no streetlights, no store lights and no house lights to guide her way home. The pitch black was all there was, no buildings, no trees, no road ahead. It would be easy to lose oneself in this nothing land. Someone was trying to destroy her – was it Blacker alone who wanted her gone?

  In her pocket was a photo, taken with a polaroid camera she’d found on Froghorn’s desk.

  But what should she do with it? Who could she show?

  Her problem now was if she couldn’t trust Blacker, then how could she rely on anyone who did? How could she trust anyone who trusted him?

  Blacker was a likeable guy, always steady, always even, never rattled, at least not by people – soda, yes; jelly donuts, always; but when it came to people he was steady as they came.

  She thought about this as she let herself in and made her way upstairs to her room. Could it be that his whole clumsiness thing was an act, a cover, was it just a way of distracting people? The smiling likeable fool, like that TV cop, the one in the raincoat with the uncombed hair … The guy looked a mess, like he had just rolled out of bed or spent the night sleeping in his tin can of a car, but this was a ruse to throw folk off the scent. His brain was razor sharp and when criminals let down their guard, he took them apart. Was that what Blacker was?

  Had he been put there to observe her, lull her into a false sense of security so he could assess her strengths, her weaknesses, and report back? Did he think she was incompetent? Or was it worse than that – she felt a stab of panic – was she the suspect? Did Blacker actually think it could be her – Spectrum’s mole, the double agent? She was beginning to feel like she had been dropped into some seventy-five-cent thriller, where the tables had turned and suddenly the good guys were all pointing their fingers at her; the bad guys too.

  There was a knock at the window and Ruby nearly jumped out of her sneakers.

  ‘Let me in would you,’ came a muffled voice.

  Ruby peered into the dark. ‘Clancy, what are you doing out there?’

  ‘Checking up on you bozo, now let me in, it’s creepy out here, all the power lines are down.’

  She unlatched the window and he climbed through.

  ‘So what happened?’ asked Clancy. ‘One minute you were there, the next you were nowhere.’

  ‘I’ve had a lot on my mind.’

  ‘School, home or Spectrum?’ asked Clancy.

  ‘All three, as it happens, but right now my biggest headache is Blacker.’

  ‘You’re being paranoid Rube.’

  ‘Am I? So why would he get Buzz to tell me he was out of HQ when I happen to know he was there?’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I saw him with my own two eyes. Not only that but he was busy on the phone warning someone not to talk to me, does that sound like a guy who’s on the same side?’

  ‘OK,’ said Clancy, ‘but maybe he had his reasons.’

  ‘I’d like to hear them,’ said Ru
by.

  ‘It’s just I’m not sure Rube, I mean you were wrong about the rain.’

  ‘I might have been wrong about the rain, but how do I even know?’

  ‘Because of what happened to Elliot?’ suggested Clancy.

  ‘Doesn’t prove anything,’ she said. ‘You can argue all you like Clancy, but I got 100% proof.’

  ‘OK, so show me the evidence,’ said Clancy.

  Ruby took out the polaroids and laid them on the table so the message could be read.

  ‘What is this?’ asked Clancy.

  ‘I broke into the file room and this is what I found,’ said Ruby.

  ‘He might come over as Mr Apple-pie-down-the-tie, Clancy, but he sure as darn it speaks with a forked tongue.’

  Clancy was all out of arguments. He just looked at her, looked right into her eyes and said, ‘I didn’t see this coming, and I’m usually good with my hunches.’

  ‘Well, he’s not a secret agent for nothing,’ said Ruby. ‘He’s got one heck of a poker face. The whole time we’ve been working together he’s been keeping his beedy eyes on me and it turns out he doesn’t trust me one iota.’

  ‘So what are you gonna do?’ said Clancy.

  ‘I’m going to have to go it alone,’ said Ruby, ‘nothing else for it.’

  ‘That sounds like a truly bad idea,’ said Clancy.

  ‘Well, it seems I don’t have a whole lotta choice, Clance.’

  ‘What do you mean? You have a whole team of agents down there, under the supermarket – talk to one of them.’

  ‘You don’t get it Clancy. I mean, if Blacker doesn’t trust me, then who does? Not Froghorn, that’s for darned sure. Agent Gill thinks I’m a hot head, Dr Selgood thinks I have a God complex, so I can’t see him exactly backing me up.’

  ‘And Hitch?’ said Clancy.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what Hitch says. Once Blacker makes his case, I’ll be canned.’

  ‘But what evidence does he have? I mean, there isn’t any,’ said Clancy.

  ‘LB’s been trying to find any reason she can to fire me. She never wanted me in Spectrum in the first place.’