The Girl in the Mirror

by Philip J. Gould

  From the passenger seat, having belted himself in, Brayden was holding his mobile phone having dialled his partner. The ring tone continued for an elongated period before going to voicemail. Brayden sighed. It wasn’t unusual for the older man to ignore his calls, probably still vexed at Brayden’s recent promotion. He flung the handset down into the recess within the van’s door. He’d only wanted to tell Mitch to end Harriet’s interrogation and to clear out now the compound had been compromised. Stupid old fool!

  The driver climbed in beside him. “You all right?”

  “Yeah…” he sighed. “Let’s go. We’ve got what we came for.”

  “What about the girl?”

  Brayden shrugged. “I’ll leave her to Dominic. Win or lose, it doesn’t matter, we’ve got the next best thing back there,” Brayden indicated behind him with a backward jerk of his head. “We’ll get Daddy to make us one of our own.”

  The driver started the DHL van’s engine and drove forward out of the industrial estate just as the warehouse behind fell silent and the halogen light above the entrance door went out. Brayden didn’t care to notice. It was no longer of any interest.

  Taking a series of roads that would lead to the A11, the Black Hawk helicopter followed low in the sky above, its spotlight lighting the DHL van like a West End or Broadway stage performer.

  Extractions of VIPs and figures of National Interest were something the Americans were notorious for. They’d also earned a reputation for botching them. But not this time. The plan had been simple. Draw George and Sophie Jennings out into the open, separate them and grab the asset. Dominic, following his old Kaplan Ratcliff programming, assumed that it was Sophie who was being sought, and as such had set about a number of schemes designed in her capture (all doomed to fail, Brayden mused). All they accomplished was to force George into an act of desperation, thereafter playing nicely into Brayden’s hands. Once Harriet was in their possession, George’s rescue attempt was a foregone conclusion. The timing of it made more assured by Dominic’s hostage exchange ploy – Brayden knew George would not have waited, wishing to play out his own advantage. Old training on George’s part was hard to forget.

  The truth of the matter, it was always George they’d wanted. The Deputy Director of the CIA had been quite specific.

  Sophie was expendable – she was too domesticated, too… girlie. Her hormones would get the better of her; her invisibility and her arsenal of tricks just made her a ticking time bomb. Brayden had suggested taking her out of the equation, a proposal that his superiors had rebuked. Alive, they said, George would be more willing and malleable; dead, who’s to say what he might be capable of. He certainly wouldn’t be cooperative in any way, shape or form.

  An hour later Brayden would be escorting George up a flight of mobile airplane steps into a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, and hitching a ride on the empty cargo plane; the destination:

  Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, USA.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Sophie

  “Ladies…”

  The silhouette walked into view to reveal a man who was familiar to Harriet. More than familiar. Not only did she recognise him beneath the subdued torchlight, its beacon bouncing off the wall closest to her to illuminate the room, she recognised his voice. He was the security agent employed at Kaplan Ratcliff, her family’s pursuer for more than two years, the man she’d last seen at the roadside by his wrecked Mercedes the day before. He had allied himself with the two Americans who’d been keeping her hostage for over twenty-four hours; the maniac who’d driven her off Seabrook Road and nearly killed her and Charlie.

  With her back to him, feeling the man’s eyes boring invisible holes into her, Sophie slowly raised her arms up in surrender, the torch beam rising to the ceiling. Dominic had come prepared and looked at them through thermal goggles, the pistol aimed carefully at the young woman’s back.

  “I guess you and your father weren’t keen on a trade for mother dear. Shame. I like a happy ending.” Dominic levelled the pistol, aiming past Sophie’s torso and pressed the trigger:

  BANG!

  In the silence the gun’s discharge was thunderous. The pistol fired its deadly load and hit Harriet square in the chest, knocking her backwards, the glow stick falling to the floor and rolling under the table. She collapsed against the far wall and dropped to the floor in a heap, moaning and crying, raising a bloodied hand as an ineffective shield.

  “Nooooooo,” screamed Sophie. Before her mother had hit the floor, Sophie was whirling round and flicking the lid off the syringe, the second of two items she’d pulled from her backpack. Concealed within her right hand and with barely a second flashing by from the muzzle explosion of Dominic’s gun, Sophie had advanced on the man just standing ahead of the room’s entrance, aiming the torch into his face, hoping to disorientate him. Almost in slow motion, Dominic brought the pistol round to train on the girl angling for him. Before he was able to fix on his target and depress the trigger, Sophie had propelled him back against the wall by the door with her full weight, dropping the torch to land hard, its beam flickering on and off as though suffering from a loose connection, her left hand thrusting his gun arm up, forcing the weapon to aim harmlessly away, though he still held it tightly in his grip. Before he was able to regain composure or fight further, Sophie brought what Dominic thought was a fisted hand down against his nape. He flinched at the sudden bee-sting of pain that lanced his neck, Sophie depressing the plunger at the same time the needle pierced his skin, injecting the Profonol originally destined for her, into the man’s circulatory system, consciousness deserting him without expectation and little warning.

  As Dominic quickly blacked out, Sophie released her grip on the man’s gun arm and stepped back. The gun clattered to the floor, beating Dominic’s descent. He collapsed to the tiles with a heavy thud a moment after.

  Before running to where her mother was, Sophie retrieved the torch (still flickering) and slapped it hard with the heel of her hand. The flickering stopped. She aimed the torch’s beam towards her mother and examined her wound. Still lying on the floor, an inky-dark stain was spreading fast across the front of her blouse. The bullet had penetrated just below Harriet’s right clavicle, shredding a hole through the loose fitting garment. On close inspection, Sophie could see that there was no exit wound – the bullet was still inside her mother’s body. What she didn’t know was it was travelling slowly towards her heart. She applied pressure, momentarily stemming the flow of blood that dribbled from the wound.

  “Here, wear these. It’ll help you see me.” Sophie slipped the special glasses from her backpack and placed them on the bridge of her mother’s nose.

  “I need to get you out of here.” Sophie helped her mother to her feet. The older woman screamed from the pain tearing at her chest and the lesser pain in her left leg.

  “Ahhh, no…. no, I… I… I can’t!” she wailed.

  “I’m not leaving you here. We’ll find dad and we’ll be all right.”

  Reluctantly, Harriet pulled herself up and shuffled forward, Sophie shouldering her weight, an arm draped around her neck. On passing the table, Sophie awkwardly replaced the backpack onto her other shoulder and half-carried her mother out of the room, the torch held in her only free hand, Harriet’s glow stick forgotten, its soft incandescence suffused beneath the table. Though invisible in Sophie’s hand, the torch magically lit the way. Neither of them cared to look at Dominic lying on the floor just to the left of the door. It took all of Sophie’s resolve not to put a bullet in the man who’d been dogging her family for over two years and who’d earlier coerced her into committing a crime. An image of the diamond sprung to mind. It was still stowed in her backpack. She dismissed the thought, it served no purpose.

  Sophie led her mother out of the cell in which she’d been held captive for more than a day and took her back in the direc
tion that she had arrived. Though the door at the end of the corridor had been locked, refusing her father entrance and thus barring his progress, the cutting of the power had disarmed the electronic locking mechanism causing it to fail. It now opened effortlessly with a gentle shove.

  Before exiting the corridor, Sophie peered through the glass panel towards the hallway beyond. As she’d expected her father was no longer there. She guessed he had gone in search of another way in.

  Sophie opened the door and stepped through, dragging her mother in with her. Despite her genetically increased strength, carrying her mother around for too long was going to prove exhausting. On the other side of the door, she could see the first security barrier at the end of the corridor, the door she knew was unlocked earlier from the three bullets blasted at the keypad lock. Before it, the torch highlighted something small and black laying on the tiled corridor floor a short way from the exit point. It almost glowed on the polished marble effect flooring.

  Sophie trudged slowly towards the object, her mother increasingly weighing her down. With less than four feet from the discarded item, Sophie could see that the object was a mobile phone. She recognised it as her father’s.

  “What’s wrong?” Harriet, in too much pain to notice, or care, hadn’t spotted the electronic device lying abandoned on the floor ahead. She had gauged something was amiss by the way Sophie had slowed to a standstill.

  “Wait here a second.” Sophie propped her mother up against the wall and crouched down to retrieve the mobile handset. She aimed the torch upon the mobile, checking it over; alarm immediately filled her head.

  Harriet looked at her daughter anxiously, unable to read Sophie’s look of dread or understand what was causing the holdup.

  “It’s dad’s…” she stood up, pocketing the communication device. “He left it for us.”

  “Something’s wrong,” Harriet murmured, answering her earlier question.

  Sophie ignored her. “Come, let’s get out of here.” Once again, the girl helped her mother forward, half-carrying and half-dragging her the short distance to the last internal door.

  As George had done previously, she took little or no care as she passed through the final barrier; only unlike George there was no armed muscle on the other side waiting in ambush. Now in the final corridor that led to the outside world, Sophie could make out the din of helicopter rotors and vehicle engines revving from outside the building. There were a few shouts but nothing discernible. Once again leaving her mother propped up against a wall, she ran to the door and pushed it open a crack, peering out into the darkness beyond. The lack of the halogen light rendered the car park almost in unearthly blackness.

  “What’s happening?!” Harriet shouted from behind, barely heard over the harsh noises that lambasted Sophie’s eardrums.

  It took Sophie just a moment to take in the commotion that played ahead of her; the DHL van disappearing out of the car park; the Black Hawk helicopter hovering low; the group of men surrounded by what looked like half a dozen armed soldiers; the convoy of black vans parked up a short distance away.

  “WHAT IS IT SOPHIE?!” Harriet had laboured from where Sophie had left her and was now behind her daughter, a note of agitation in her voice. She demanded a response to her question.

  The girl allowed the door to gently close, blocking out the tableau outside. She turned to face her mother, her look grave. “It’s not safe here. We’re surrounded. And they’ve got dad.”

  “Can’t you go after them? Aren’t you programmed to do that?”

  “I’m not a machine, mum,” she said, half-laughing in a derisive fashion. The DHL van was by now gone and soon followed by the helicopter. The turmoil on Sophie’s face was palpable. On her own she could have made after the DHL van unseen and released her father with a variable degree of success. Anchored down by her injured mother, who wasn’t blessed – if you could call it that – with invisibility, she had no hope. Plus there were the children to think about, hiding within the relative safety of her father’s car, parked down an isolated, dark, rarely used dirt track half a mile away.

  The klaxon of the security alarms began ringing again and the fluorescent at the end of the hall behind them flickered on as power in the warehouse was restored. A bang and echo of a door resounded from somewhere behind them.

  Someone (Dominic?) was coming. But that wasn’t possible, was it?

  “I think this is the proverbial ‘rock and a hard place’,” Sophie said, opening the door a crack. Not much had changed since before, though Sophie could still hear the chopper beating in the near distance. She switched off the torch and tucked it back into the backpack.

  “I think we are going to have to make a run for it.” Without further hesitation, she flung the door open, “Come, now!” she exclaimed, dragging her mother out to the left of the building, hoping to find cover beyond the luminance of the now-blazing security light and the lamppost − both seeming much brighter than before. Harriet winced with every footfall, but persevered. Through sheer will and adrenaline, she managed to quicken her pace. As luck would have it, even without Sophie’s transparent ability, Harriet got out of the warehouse unseen, the armed men too preoccupied with their captives to notice; they were now ordering them to their feet and leading them away towards their black convoy.

  At the front of the warehouse Mitch Youngs had appeared, his face flustered. In one hand he held a revolver whilst the other nursed the swelling from where Sophie had clobbered him to the side of his head, adding to the injuries his skull had already sustained.

  “Did you see the woman?” Mitch shouted across to the troupe of armed men shepherding Kaplan’s Bravo Team towards one of the white vans still parked from their earlier failed stakeout. Tom Kaplan’s lifeless body had been carried to it moments earlier. One of the armed men shook his head. Mitch swore and then kicked the warehouse door.

  Sophie laid a hand on her mother’s arm. “Come, let’s go. There are three kids desperate to see you,” she whispered.

  “What about George?”

  What to do about George? It sounded like the opening line to a musical number from a stage show by Stephen Sondheim. Sophie wanted to go after him but that wouldn’t have been what he would have wanted. It would jeopardise everything and put his family at immense risk. Besides, Harriet was hurt, and hurt real bad.

  She tried a reassuring smile. “We’ll go get the kids first, get you to a hospital and then track him like we tracked you.” Sophie knew George wore a GPS tracker. It hung from his gold chain like a pendant, attached for Sophie’s benefit; reassurance for when he was late home after splitting his time with his first family. Harriet’s ankle bracelet had been instrumental in finding her, so the fact that George had been taken did not overly concern her.

  Harriet smiled back. “I agree with all but one thing. No hospital. Uh-uh,” she shook her head firmly. “Look where taking Charlie to the hospital yesterday got us...”

  Sophie didn’t argue. Silently they skirted around parked vehicles and edged to the furthest side of the warehouse. Hidden, they trudged the full length of the building until they eventually came to the hole that George had cut in the wire fence.

  Unobserved, still half-carrying Harriet, Sophie retraced the steps taken for the half mile return journey to the car, the torch retrieved from her backpack lighting the precarious way. Owing to Harriet’s injury, the trip back took twice as long, it wasn’t until twenty minutes after leaving the warehouse mother and daughter finally found themselves sitting in the front of the Peugeot.

  “We’ll get you to a hospital,” asserted Sophie, ignoring her mother’s earlier protest, masking her annoyance at not being able to give immediate chase to her father’s abductors.

  In the rear seats Meredith, Stanley and Charlie were huddled together like a family of rodents, fast asleep, one or two snores filling the nig
ht air. They looked too peaceful considering all that they’d been through.

  Harriet glanced at her children and shook her head. “No. I told you, no hospital. Patch me up, I’ll be fine. Let’s go and get your father.”

  Sophie knew that her mother had lost a lot of blood. The right thing to do would be to get her to a hospital, anything else was just sheer folly.

  Instead of arguing she heard herself say: “This is madness...”

  “What are you waiting for?” Harriet hissed.

  Sophie hurried out of the car heading for the boot where she had earlier seen her father’s first aid kit.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Ryan

  It was close to midnight when Emily had made her excuses to leave. Ryan had suggested she take a room in the hotel but she feared that staying here would complicate things further. Ryan was very much alive, much to her relief. During the hour or so that had passed since speaking to George, the former Assistant Intelligence Officer had made it clear that he intended to help protect Sophie where possible, even though he had no affinity towards the man he directly held responsible for the death of his daughter.

  He’d asked Emily outright if he could rely on her to help him. She hadn’t hesitated when she had said with sincere confidence, yes.

  “You see, Emily. Sophie meant a lot to Clara, more than you’d believe; more than I wanted to know. Days before she died in the explosion she called me and made me promise that I would keep an eye on Sophie. The fact that this infant was different to any other child did not come into it. She said she would tell me why one day… but then the so called ‘accident’ happened.” Ryan had gone quiet then, his thoughts drifting off. Emily didn’t press him and that conversation came to an abrupt, unfinished conclusion.