by Joe Craig
Jimmy took in a sharp breath. Roosevelt Island. That’s where he was being led.
“You go there and you’ll die,” whispered Dr Higgins, reading Jimmy’s face. Jimmy stared across the room, not focusing on anything.
“Maybe that’s the only way this will end,” he croaked, his voice suddenly not working properly. Dr Higgins said something in response, but Jimmy blocked it out. In his head the word SILVERCUP flashed over and over, like the signs over those noodle bars in Chinatown. He saw the ruin. He saw the towers that he now knew were the funnels of Big Allis Power Station. The images danced behind his eyes, scorching the inside of his head.
“It will never end,” Jimmy said under his breath. “We’ll always be on the run. Every day – always in danger. Even in hiding with the CIA, we’d live the rest of our lives in fear. In pain. They could torture me with this for the rest of my life.” He put his head in his hands and rattled his skull.
“Jimmy…” Dr Higgins tried to interrupt, but there were too many thoughts shouting for attention in Jimmy’s ears.
“My friends,” he muttered, “my family. I have to put this right. It’s all my fault.” As soon as he heard the words, he flinched. “No, wait.” He pulled himself upright and turned to Dr Higgins. He stared at him. “It’s not all my fault, is it?”
“Jimmy,” the doctor began, a sudden grief oozing from his eyes. “If I’d known…”
“That’s no excuse,” Jimmy interrupted. “You should have known.”
“You’re cruel.”
“But I’m right.” Jimmy’s face was clenched in quiet anger.
“Yes,” Dr Higgins admitted. He hung his head, exposing the back of his neck, where his skin was sallow – almost grey. “They say that time avenges,” he whispered, “but sometimes it needs a helping hand.” He paused, staring into the table. “You should kill me. I deserve it.”
“Who’d be sorry?” Jimmy snapped.
“The women.” Dr Higgins raised his head slightly and peeked at Jimmy out of the corner of his eye with a glimmer of delight. It made Jimmy feel physically sick. How could he joke like this when there were lives at stake?
With renewed energy, Dr Higgins knocked his head back and downed the last drop of his apple juice.
“Ahh,” he sighed. “Nothing better with oysters than a cool apple juice.”
Jimmy was so furious he was ready to slam the man’s head on to the table. He could feel his rage feeding his muscles. But then Dr Higgins wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and Jimmy froze. He replayed the action in his imagination and studied the man’s face.
“Who’s my-my—” Jimmy couldn’t get the muscles in his throat to let the words out. “Who’s my father?”
Dread beat in Jimmy’s chest. Dr Higgins stared at him, taken aback by the question. It was a few seconds before he spoke. They were the longest seconds of Jimmy’s life.
“I see,” the doctor said, incredibly quietly. His eyes widened. “I didn’t think this time would come.”
“Is it… Is it…” Jimmy stammered.
“It’s not Ian Coates,” Dr Higgins said quickly. “I presume you know that and that’s why you’re asking.”
Jimmy nodded. He could feel his bottom lip trembling and he hated himself for it.
“Your biological father is dead,” the old man announced.
“Don’t lie to me!” Jimmy shouted and he snatched the doctor’s collar.
“It’s the truth, Jimmy. It is.”
The power drained out of Jimmy’s arm.
“What about my mother,” he murmured. “Is she…” He stopped. He could feel that heat rising in his chest. If he said any more he knew he would cry and he didn’t want to give Dr Higgins that power.
“She is your mother,” said the doctor quickly. “Yes, yes, don’t worry. Of course she’s your mother.”
Jimmy slumped forward on the table. He didn’t dare imagine what might have happened to her. He could only hope that when he made it back to Chinatown, she would be there waiting for him.
“So who is he?” he demanded, lifting his head from the table and trying to piece back together his tough outer layer. “Who is my father?”
Dr Higgins said nothing. Instead, he picked up Jimmy’s pen and pulled another napkin from the rusty dispenser. He wrote something down, shielding it from Jimmy’s eyes. Then he folded it over and pushed it across the table. But his fingers didn’t release it.
“Your father is dead, Jimmy,” he said again, more slowly. “I’ve written his name on this napkin. It’s up to you whether you look.”
Jimmy had no patience for this; he reached out for it. The doctor pulled it away.
“Wait,” Higgins insisted. “There will be a danger in reading this name, Jimmy.” He took a deep breath. Jimmy stared at him, uncertain whether to listen or to grab the napkin and run. “You’ve overcome your programming so many times,” the doctor continued, “and in such difficult circumstances, that you’ve shown me something I never thought could be true.”
“What’s that?” Jimmy’s voice came out meek and small.
“It’s that you have the potential to be your own man. You’re not like Mitchell. From what I’ve seen and heard, he’s succumbing to his programming more and more every day. You, though – you’ve torn up the rule book, Jimmy. But it’s going to get harder for you from now on. Your programming has already developed so far, so quickly, and it will keep growing inside you, taking over. If you’re going to keep it at bay, the only way to do it is to fight every day to control your own destiny.”
His stare scorched Jimmy’s eyes.
“Take responsibility for your actions,” Dr Higgins urged. His whisper seemed to cancel out any other noise in the place. “Seize control. If you do, you’ve shown that you might have a chance to escape the destiny that I programmed into your genes.”
He paused and looked down at the napkin. The tips of his fingers had turned white, pressing harder and harder, nailing the identity of Jimmy’s father in its place.
“Will you be able to do that, Jimmy,” the doctor asked, “if you know the name of your genetic father? If you’re always looking over your shoulder, checking yourself to see whether you’re turning into him? If you’re chasing your father’s shadow?”
Very slowly, he lifted his fingers off the napkin. It sat there, folded in two. The lettering showed through as a red blur, ever so faintly – too faint to be legible. It looked like a bloodstained bandage. Jimmy couldn’t take his eyes off it.
“Take some time,” Dr Higgins told him, a sadness in his face. “Think about it. But take responsibility for your actions. Only read this if you need another man’s identity to define who you are.”
Jimmy picked up the napkin in the tips of his fingers and turned it around. The material was coarse and cold to the touch. Jimmy couldn’t believe he was holding this in his hands and not reading the name inside. But he was still weighing up what Dr Higgins had told him. He could be his own man. And if he managed that, the identity of his father wouldn’t matter. I shouldn’t need to know, he thought to himself. So why do I feel like I do?
His hand trembling slightly, he slipped the napkin into the back pocket of his jeans. He could feel it, suddenly hot, burning through his pocket. Then he grabbed the pen from Dr Higgins and scribbled something quickly in his notebook.
“Dr Higgins,” he said in a business-like tone. “Do one favour for me.”
“So we’re doing each other favours now, are we?”
“Take this back to Chinatown,” Jimmy ordered. “Give it to Felix. It’s very important.”
Jimmy stood up suddenly and handed Dr Higgins his notebook, dropping his pen on the table. He was about to dash away, but checked back and stuffed his hand into the dish of ketchup sachets.
“What are you doing?” asked Dr Higgins.
Jimmy grabbed a fistful of the small plastic packets of ketchup and ran.
“Where are you going?” the doctor cried out after him.
<
br /> Jimmy’s response echoed through the underground caverns long after he was out of sight:
“I’m taking responsibility for my actions.”
* * *
Dr Higgins tapped his bandaged hand on Jimmy’s notebook, listening to the boy’s steps fade. He was deep in thought.
“Wait,” he whispered, to nobody in particular. The waitress tutted and shook her head. To her, the grey man with his cloth cap was just another senile old coot.
“If they’re using phone masts,” Dr Higgins went on under his breath, “it would work in England, but here they’d need access to the US networks and…”
Suddenly, horror attacked his face. He jumped up, more lively than he had been for half a century.
“Jimmy, wait!” Dr Higgins’ words echoed around the room. It was too late. Jimmy was already gone. He never heard the old man’s final warning:
“It’s them!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT– TERMINAL MEETING
Jimmy raced across the spectacular main hall of Grand Central Station. His trainers squeaked on the oversized tiles. He wished he had time to stop and admire the place with its high, rounded ceiling and the orange glow of the walls, but inside him was a new urgency. The images pounded in his head. Hatred of them drove him on. He was desperate to get rid of them and now he knew exactly how to do it – let them take over. If Miss Bennett wanted to lead him into an NJ7 trap on Roosevelt Island, then that’s where he’d go.
There were people scurrying across the floor – busy, even though it was still the early hours of the morning. Jimmy wove a path between them. At the information desk in the centre of the hall he hardly even slowed down, but reached out and plucked a city centre map from the rack. He glanced at the four-faced golden clock as he passed, but it had stopped. How would he know when NJ7 were expecting him, he wondered. All he could do was give himself over to his instincts.
He burst into the street. It was eerily quiet. The dampness in the air soaked into the map as he unfolded it. To Jimmy it felt like it was coating his very bones as well. He quickly found Roosevelt Island – a sliver of land wedged between Manhattan and Queens. The shape of it looked like a large submarine about to submerge into the East River.
Straight away, Jimmy worked out how to get to the tramway that would take him over the water on to the island. But there was somewhere else he needed to go first. Instead of heading north to the tramway, he dashed west, along 42nd Street. The wind gusted in his face. He leaned into it, running with his body at an extreme angle to the ground. The map flapped behind him like the tail of a comet. He let it go. He didn’t need it. He knew now that the Manhattan grid would be scored in his visual memory – it was far simpler than the schematics of a museum.
His feet sprang off the pavement, throwing him forwards. The rhythm was frenetic but regular. Every few strides he felt a fog creeping over his brain. It was doubt in himself. It urged him to stop. Look in your back pocket. Read the name. Jimmy tightened his shoulders and increased his pace. He had to keep moving. It was the only way to stop himself crumbling.
In barely a minute he reached Times Square. Any other boy in the world would have slowed down and craned his neck to gawp at the spectacle. Jimmy ignored it. Times Square could wait. He charged into the station and down the steps. There was still money in his jeans. He bought a ticket from the machine, then clattered through the turnstiles and into the maze of tunnels.
For some reason, it was busier below ground than in the street, as if New York disappeared beneath the earth after dark. A drunk bellowed out a song. His voice filled the tunnels, surrounding Jimmy until the rattle of a train drowned it out.
Jimmy kept running, though he wasn’t trying to catch a train.
KNICKERBOCKER – the word called out to Jimmy. Looking at those time-weathered letters, he felt for an instant that stab in the back where he’d been shot by the CIA’s laser-blanks, and that terror when he’d believed it would kill him. He brushed it all aside and leapt up to tweak the grimy white box that unlocked the door.
There was no mystery this time when he barged through into the lobby of the abandoned hotel.
“Colonel Keays!” he shouted into the expanse of darkness. He gathered a deep breath to settle his panting. “Colonel Keays, it’s me, Jimmy Coates. I need your help.”
At first the only response was his own words echoing back to him. Then, “What is it?”
Jimmy looked up to where the voice had come from. In a fuzzy blue haze, he made out Colonel Keays peering down at him from the balcony.
“I need to borrow some equipment,” Jimmy declared.
The Colonel marched down towards him. He was wearing a night-vision headset that made him look like an alien.
“Whatever you need, Jimmy,” he said when he was close. “I can trust you with any of our kit. We’re on the same side now, remember?”
Jimmy hesitated a moment, then brushed off his anxiety.
“It’s not for me,” he announced. “But if I tell you what to do, can you do it?”
Colonel Keays pulled a pen and a black leather notebook from the inside pocket of his uniform.
“Make a shopping list,” he instructed, handing them to Jimmy. “We’ll deliver.”
In minutes, Jimmy was back on the street. Even when his breathing grated in his lungs he didn’t stop running. The city was still now. Jimmy felt like he was moving through a ghost town. Indistinct noises floated down from a few windows high above him, and he could hear the whirr of the street sweepers never far away. But nobody was around. New York was only a network of shadows and pools of neon light diffracted by the drizzle.
Eventually, Jimmy rounded the corner of 60th Street on to Second Avenue to see the giant concrete construction that dominated the block. It held the terminal for the tramway over to Roosevelt Island. Above Jimmy’s head the building spat out half a dozen super-thick cables – although it had been named a ‘tramway’ by New Yorkers, it was actually what Jimmy would have called a cable car.
That moment, the fat red cabin swung down along the cables to dock in the terminal. On its side, in big white letters, was ‘Roosevelt Island’. Jimmy peered up at it. Through the reflections in its windows, Jimmy made out the silhouette of a single passenger. Who would possibly be travelling across into Manhattan at this time?
Jimmy dashed up the concrete steps, listening to the doors of the cabin sliding open on their ancient runners. A lone set of footsteps emerged. Jimmy reached the top of the stairs. When he saw who it was that had just stepped off the cable car, he thought his heart would stop.
Paduk spun round. His expression reflected the shock in Jimmy. Clearly, NJ7 hadn’t expected Jimmy to arrive so soon. Maybe he wasn’t meant to work out the clues in the images for a few more hours, allowing them to send him closer and closer to insanity the longer the day drew on. But here he was. And seeing the sculpted bulk of Paduk in the same place confirmed it for him – nothing was waiting for him on the island but a battalion of NJ7 agents. Yet Jimmy knew he had to get to them. He had to end this lethal cat-and-mouse chase or it would carry on forever.
Paduk reached under his suit jacket. Jimmy didn’t wait to see what would emerge. He dived to the floor and rolled forwards. A bullet blasted into the concrete behind where he had been standing. Paduk adjusted his aim, but Jimmy launched himself off the ground. In mid-air, he kicked out with both feet. His first kick connected with Paduk’s gun, which jumped out of his fist and clattered to the floor. Jimmy’s other leg followed, aiming straight for Paduk’s head, but the agent was quick. He raised his arm to block the blow and parried Jimmy over his shoulder.
Jimmy twisted in the air to land on his back, while Paduk lunged forwards to pick up his gun. Jimmy swept his foot across Paduk’s ankles to bring the man down. Then Jimmy dived into the cable car. Without hesitating, he slammed his palm down on the control panel twice. One red button started the doors sliding back together. The second jolted the whole cabin into life. It creaked and wobbled, then
shifted awkwardly out of its dock.
Just in time, Paduk thrust out his foot. He jammed it between the doors and the cabin dragged him along the floor of the terminal. As he moved, he took aim at Jimmy through the cabin windows. Jimmy dropped to the floor and kicked Paduk’s foot away. At last, the doors shut and the tram was out of the dock. It lurched through the air, swinging for a few seconds, then settled. Jimmy was alone in the cabin. NJ7 must have somehow made sure that the usual staff weren’t manning their posts that morning.
He looked back at the dock expecting to see Paduk shrinking into the distance. But nobody was there. That instant, something blasted a hole in the floor of the cabin. A hand burst through and grabbed Jimmy’s ankle. Paduk was hanging off the underside of the cable car.
Felix kicked his father gently in the belly.
“Get up,” he insisted. “Come on!”
Neil Muzbeke groaned and rolled over.
“Come on!” Felix urged, louder. “Get up! Jimmy’s not back.”
His father’s eyes shot open. “Not back?” he asked. “What do you mean, ‘not back’? Where did he go?”
“I shouldn’t have let him go,” Felix replied. “But he said he’d be OK. He went with Dr Higgins.”
“Dr Higgins?” Neil pushed himself to his feet and rubbed his hands over his face. He was suddenly wide awake. “Helen back yet?” Felix shook his head. “This isn’t good.”
Then they both heard a noise from downstairs – a click. They stared at each other. Felix had never felt his blood pumping so hard through his veins. He waited to hear either Jimmy or Jimmy’s mother coming up the stairs. Nothing.
He ran out of the room and down to the front door. Waiting for him on the mat was Jimmy’s notebook. He grabbed it and yanked the door open. The wind wrapped around him and squeezed out all warmth. He stepped out and peered up and down the street. It was deserted.
