Changeling

by David Wood

  “You are a remarkable man, Professor Chapman,” Carrera said, without a trace of sarcasm. “Mimicking your intellect may be the most challenging part of replacing you.”

  She smiled and Professor was shocked to see that she no longer looked like the First Officer of Flight 815. It was as if voicing his revelation had triggered a sympathetic physical reaction in her, stripping away the veil of illusion. She still bore a passing resemblance to Carrera, but there were discernible differences. She reached up with her left hand and peeled back her right eyelid. A finger sweep removed an opaque contact lens, revealing her natural, jet black iris.

  “I’m afraid you’ve already missed your replacement. He left twelve hours ago to rejoin your girlfriend, Jade Ihara.” She removed the lens from the other eye, and flicked it away like a nuisance insect. “You see, we knew who you really were before you came looking for Flight 815.”

  Professor snapped his fingers. “Rafi. You doubled him, used him to kill Roche so that it would look like Muslim extremists. You had the real Rafi in that car. The double triggered that explosion to cover his tracks and make it look like Rafi killed himself.”

  “An opportune scapegoat. The replacement was a hasty affair, but then it was never meant to stand up to close scrutiny.”

  He narrowed his gaze at her. “So who are you really working for? The Russians? Chinese? No, this is something else.” He snapped his fingers. “Some kind of international crime syndicate, right? That’s why you wanted to pin this on Muslims. You get rid of that nuisance Roche, and stir up a little profitable international unrest in the bargain. Win-win.”

  “Unfortunately, you and Dr. Ihara refused to just let it alone.”

  It was the second time Carrera had mentioned Jade by name. A chill ran down Professor’s spine. “Jade isn’t going to find anything. Roche was barking up the wrong tree. You know it as well as I do. Leave her alone. She’s no threat to you.”

  Carrera smiled again, but there was no humor in her cold black eyes. She waved to someone in the woods. Professor’s doppleganger might not have been lurking there, but several figures wearing mesh head coverings and gray fatigues emerged and began closing in around him.

  “You are intelligent,” she said, “but believe me when I say that you have no idea what’s really going on.”

  TWENTY

  Malta

  Jade’s first impulse was to deny. It was a crazy idea. There weren’t any Changelings except in Roche’s delusional brain…and he’s dead now, isn’t he... so Professor couldn’t possibly be one. That this perfectly rational argument, which she so desperately wanted to believe, was an even less convincing possibility, went way beyond unsettling. It terrified her.

  If that’s not really Professor, then where is he? Is he… No, I won’t even think that.

  But her refusal to frame the thought did not keep her dread at bay. This impostor was wearing Professor’s clothes, his watch, even his ridiculous fedora.

  He’s a hostage. That’s what happened. He figured out what they were up to, but they caught him, and sent this guy in his place.

  They who? The Changelings? She glanced over at the startlingly familiar visage. Who else?

  “Find anything down there?” she asked. Her voice caught in her throat, so the words came out like a coughing fit.

  “You okay, babe?”

  “Yeah,” she croaked. She didn’t need any more proof than that. Professor—the real Professor—would never, ever call her ‘babe.’ “You know how I get around dust.”

  He threw her a sidelong glance as if trying to decide if she was testing him, then returned his attention to the road in front of them. “It was a dead-end. Looks like you’ve been busy though.”

  Jade barely heard him. She could barely hear herself think, a condition that had nothing to do with the jet engine loud blast of sound she’d experienced in the Oracle Room.

  Changelings are real. The Vault is real. Professor is…not here.

  What the hell am I supposed to do?

  Kellogg, perhaps sensing the awkward silence, jumped in. “Good thing you showed up when you did. Those Arabs nearly had our guts for garters.”

  “Not Arabs,” Professor—

  Not Professor!

  —corrected. “At least not all of them. The guy leading them is Atash Shah, co-founder of the Crescent Defense League. He’s actually Iranian.” His eyes found Jade again. “That’s the group Rafi was working with.”

  She blinked at him, fighting the urge to ask how he had known to go to the Hypogeum. She had pulled her SIM card in Syracuse, before Paolo ever mentioned Malta, and had not tried to contact him since. As if sensing her anxiety over this discrepancy, Not-Professor added, “That’s how I found you actually. I followed him and he went right to you.”

  “Makes sense,” she murmured. Except it did not explain how Shah had tracked her in the first place. Paolo? No, that couldn’t be right.

  Kellogg?

  She bit her lip to keep from letting out a gasp of dismay. Kellogg was working with Shah… or he was a Changeling, too. Were the two factions working together?

  She pressed her fingertips to the bridge of her nose, as if to squeeze the paranoia out of her brain. There was a conspiracy at work, but if she let her imagination run wild, she would be virtually paralyzed, unable to defend herself or stop them.

  “From what I can gather,” Not-Professor went on, “he thinks that Roche put you on the trail of some historical evidence to prove that the Prophet Muhammad was fictional.”

  Kellogg leaned through the space between the car seats and gave her a playful slug in the arm. “What did I tell you? Mr. Roche was right about Phantom Time.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I’d go that far,” the impostor said. Then after a pause, he added, “Unless you found something you haven’t told me about. Did you?”

  Kellogg drew back suddenly as if realizing he had spoken out of turn. “I’ll…aah, let Jade tell you. I’m not actually quite sure what to make of it.”

  The Changelings are using Shah as a stalking horse. That has to be it. They sicced him on Roche…

  Suddenly she understood where it had begun. Rafi, the real Rafi, had been replaced by a Changeling, in order to pin the blame for Roche’s murder on the Crescent Defense League, and by extension, the Islamic religion. No doubt, a similar fate had been planned for her.

  But Kellogg has been helping me. Do the Changelings want me to find the vault for them? Or am I wrong about him?

  “Me either,” Jade said. “I’ll tell you when we get wherever it is we’re going. Where are we going?”

  “That’s up to you, babe.”

  “Ummm, how ‘bout we find a hotel, yeah?”

  Not-Professor threw her a lascivious grin. “Exactly what I was thinking.”

  She managed a half-hearted nod. “Yeah. I need a shower. And a drink.”

  Kellogg piped up again. “Should we be worried about those Arabs…or Iranians or whatever?”

  “I doubt we’ll see them again. This is a small island, and they’ve got nowhere to hide. The shooting will bring out the police.”

  The police, Jade thought. Maybe it was time to finally take Kellogg’s suggestion seriously and seek help from law enforcement. And tell them what, exactly? That there are Changelings running around?

  Okay, not the police. But who else could she ask for help? “Good,” she said finally, doing her level best to sound confident and calm. “It’s settled then. Let’s find a hotel and worry about all this in the morning.”

  “Got a preference? Or should we just see what comes up on Google?”

  An idea started to take shape in Jade’s head. “Give me your phone for a sec. We got rid of ours, remember?”

  Not-Professor did not challenge the request or question the conspicuously guilty-sounding elaboration, but simply handed his phone—Professor’s phone, Jade thought—over to her.

  Her fingers were jittery on the touch-screen controls as she scrolled through the i
cons and finally tapped the Settings button. Her heart was hammering in her chest. Did he suspect what she was doing?

  Privacy…Location Services…System Services….

  There it was. An inconspicuous item in the menu marked “Frequently Visited Locations.” She tapped it and a list of locations appeared—every city he had visited on the journey through Malta, a stop in Rome. Sydney. Some place called Rosebery TAS. Sydney, again.

  Rosebery. Where on earth is that, and why the hell did he go there?

  She exited out and hastily typed the words “hotels Paola Malta” into the search bar. There were no lodging results, but one of the hits for “Things to Do in Malta” gave her another idea. She clicked on it, read the short paragraph, then went back to the search and refined it to “hotels close to Paola Malta.”

  She glanced over and caught Not-Professor staring back. He smiled, and she tried to smile back. Crap. I’m taking too long. He knows.

  No. He doesn’t. Stay cool.

  “Looks like we’ll have to go to Valletta,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Great thing about islands. They’re small. I guess I don’t have to tell you that.”

  “Right. How does the Hotel Phoenicia Malta sound?”

  “It sounds expensive,” the imposter said with a grin. “Who’s picking up the tab?”

  Jade tried again to smile but it felt more like a grimace. She glanced back at Kellogg who made a show of rolling his eyes. “I’m not a bottomless pit of money, you know.”

  “Yeah, but that next book is going to be a best-seller.”

  “You’re not wrong about that.”

  Not-Professor chuckled. “Tell me where to turn.”

  Jade relayed the driving directions—the hotel was only a few minutes away—while she surreptitiously studied the road map. Getting away from Professor and Kellogg would be relatively easy, provided she had not already aroused their suspicions, but getting away from Malta might be a lot trickier, especially since anyone she encountered might be working with the Changelings.

  For the first time since the nightmare began, she understood how Roche had become so paranoid. There was only one person she could trust. Just as Roche had turned to her for assistance, she would have to go to her sworn enemy.

  She spent the rest of the drive in silence, speaking only when it was necessary to convey the directions to the hotel. The Phoenicia-Malta was a sprawling palatial resort—a blend of Old World colonial and 1930’s art deco, with just a hint of Moorish influence—situated just outside the City Gate of old Valletta, with a spectacular view of the harbor. Jade felt a slight pang knowing that she would not have the opportunity to indulge in the available creature comforts. She did not know where, much less if, she would sleep tonight, but it would not be here.

  In the elegant hotel lobby, Jade stood by patiently while Not-Professor booked their rooms. She kept her reaction completely neutral when he asked for a double room for them to share, but her mental gears were spinning. From the moment he’d appeared, this impostor had acted as if a romantic involvement between them was well-established—the kiss, the pet names, and now the assumption that they would be sharing a bed. Where had the Changeling gotten such a ludicrous idea?

  Is it ludicrous? Doesn’t part of you wish that it was true?

  She shook her head to banish the idle thoughts. It didn’t matter that the Changelings had tapped into that particular fantasy; they had gotten reality completely wrong, which meant maybe they weren’t omniscient after all.

  Or maybe Not-Professor had a different reason for wanting to share a room with her. What better way to keep an eye on her.

  Go! Now! You won’t get a better chance.

  “Hey, hon,” she said, trying to sound light and airy, and hearing instead a faint quaver. “I’m gonna find the ladies room.”

  “I’m almost done here. We’ll be in the room in five minutes.”

  She pressed her thighs together and danced from foot to foot. “When you gotta go…”

  He nodded and turned back to the reception desk. Jade made a show of searching for the restroom as she wandered through the lobby and then angled toward the hotel lounge, where presumably there would not only be restroom facilities, but also an exit from the building. As she was about to pass out of view of the lobby however, she hesitated.

  What if I’m wrong? She glanced back at them—Kellogg, fidgeting a few steps behind…Professor? Not-Professor?—and wondered again if her imagination had run away from her. Maybe the infrasound had messed with her mind. Maybe this was some kind of neurotransmitter-overload-induced delusion?

  As much as she wanted to, Jade couldn’t make herself believe it.

  If I’m wrong, he’ll forgive me.

  She found a door that opened onto the pool deck, where she broke into a jog, darting past rows of chaise lounges and scantily clad tourists, toward the low wrought iron fence that separated the pool from the landscaped garden beyond. She vaulted the fence and kept going, heading toward the noise of traffic.

  Her destination was less than three miles away, walking distance, but she needed to get there before her protracted absence was noticed. She figured she had only a few minutes—five, tops—before Not-Professor got suspicious. Time enough for a taxi to get her across Valletta and back to Paola. When she told the driver where she wanted to go, he looked askance at her, but then shrugged and started the meter.

  She saw her destination from several blocks away, a tall illuminated spire—like a king’s scepter—jutting up out of the surrounding cityscape. Beside it, and only slightly less obtrusive, was an enormous dome. The surrounding area, several acres, was undeveloped, a rare thing in one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, and formed a wooded buffer zone for the campus of buildings surrounding the tower. The occupants of the religious compound evidently valued their privacy.

  She handed the driver a stack of Euro notes, then leaned in close. “Listen, there’s this guy. My ex-boyfriend. He doesn’t agree with…” She nodded at the building. “Some of the decisions I’ve made. It’s probably nothing to worry about, but I’d appreciate if you could forget you ever saw me.”

  “I don’t think I could ever forget you, miss,” the man said with a wink. “But fear not. Chivalry is not dead in Malta. Good luck.”

  Jade breathed a sigh of relief as the cab drove away, but her sense of satisfaction at having made it this far was dulled by the realization that her next task was going to be far more challenging. Not to mention dangerous. She took a deep breath to muster her courage, and then marched up to the arched gate. She stood there for a few moments until a young man wearing what she assumed to be clerical garments came out to investigate.

  His bearded visage was pinched, as if he was mildly constipated, though it was more likely that his discomfort arose from having to deal with this after-hours visitor. “Are you lost, ma’am?”

  He spoke with a British accent, which sounded strange coming from someone dressed as he was, standing where he was.

  “Is this the Mariam al-Batool Mosque?”

  “It is.”

  “Then I’m exactly where I want to be.”

  “I don’t think—”

  She interrupted before he could finish the brush-off. “I don’t need you to think. I need you to go get Atash Shah. I know he’s in there somewhere. He’ll want to talk to me. Tell him it’s Jade Ihara.”

  Jade did not actually know for a certainty that Shah would retreat to Malta’s only mosque, but she figured the odds were good that, following the deadly encounter at the Hypogeum, he would seek the protection of fellow Muslims. Even if he wasn’t actually there, she figured someone inside would know where he was hiding out.

  She was not wrong however.

  The young man’s constipated frown deepened, but he reluctantly opened the gate and allowed her to step inside. “It is not appropriate for you to be here without your husband,” he said.

  The scolding was half-hearted, as if he realized that he
r business with Shah was more important than this violation of protocol. “I say this for your own protection,” he added. “As well as to safeguard others from temptation.”

  She bit back a scathing rejoinder, and simply said. “Thanks for your concern. I’m sorry, I don’t have a…scarf or anything to cover my head.”

  “I will see that you are provided with one. Please wait here and do not speak to anyone.”

  “Where else would I go?”

  Shah’s first impulse was to run to the gate, gun in hand, and take revenge for the blood that had been spilled.

  Two of the men that had accompanied him into the Hypogeum were dead. Another had been seriously wounded, and without adequate medical attention, would probably not survive the night. Whether he could get that at the Islamic Cultural Centre’s clinic facilities was anyone’s guess, but Shah dared not take the man to a hospital.

  But killing Jade on the front steps of the mosque was not an option, and once his initial rage cooled a bit, his curiosity got the better of him. He could not decide if she was bold or arrogant or something else. Desperate, perhaps? Was she here to plead for her life?

  Doubtful, but he was curious despite himself. He set aside his anger, along with his weapon, and headed out to meet her at the entrance. Although her hijab, provided for her by the gate attendant, framed her face and completely covered her hair, it was the first time Shah had been able to get a good look at her. He stopped and met her stare.

  She did not appear to be desperate.

  “I thought you’d look…” She paused, searching for the right word. “More radical.”

  “That’s a hell of an icebreaker.”

  She shrugged. “I meant it as a compliment.”