Changeling

by David Wood

  Shah turned to the attendant. “Give us some space.”

  The young man gave a perturbed frown but moved away. Shah looked back at Jade. “Why are you here?”

  “The truth? I need your help.”

  Shah tried to conceal his surprise. “Help? Why would I help you?”

  She folded her arms. “Why wouldn’t you? Do you even know why you’ve been trying to kill me?”

  Her directness was disconcerting. “I…ah—”

  “That’s what I thought. Someone handed you a BS story about how I was trying to destroy Islam, and you swallowed it whole. Did you even stop and think, just for a second?”

  A red flush bloomed on Shah’s cheeks, not anger, but embarrassment. Jade had cut to the heart of it. He had let Gabrielle push him into a course of action that was so far beyond anything he had ever contemplated. He did not even recognize what he had become, what Gabrielle had turned him into.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. No one was supposed to get hurt.” The response sounded so pathetic that he couldn’t help but be defensive. “But you kept pushing. You brought this down on yourself.”

  “Do you even hear what you’re saying? You have a hit list on your website. A hit list! What did you think was going to happen?” Before he could reply, she shook her head. “Look, I’m not here to fight this out. The truth is, you’ve been played. Roche wasn’t killed by one of your followers. You were set up.”

  The statement left Shah stunned and speechless.

  “My intern, Rafi…They killed him and then made it look like he killed Roche. Not only to distract everyone from what they were really doing, but to get leverage over you. Manipulate you into doing their dirty work for them. And you bought it. You chased me across half of Europe, and never even stopped to ask why.” Jade stared at him, narrowing her gaze to laser-like intensity. “You know I’m right, don’t you?”

  Shah ground his teeth together. “Who? Who is doing this?”

  Jade offered a tight smile. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  Shah listened without comment as Jade related everything she knew or thought she knew about the conspiracy that had claimed Roche’s life and given Shah’s jihad the nudge it needed to become an actual terror campaign. She had expected incredulity, but Shah regarded her with a journalist’s inscrutability even as she fumbled for the right words to express something that was still hard for her to grasp. It was only when she started talking about Professor’s replacement that his demeanor changed.

  His eyebrows came together in a frown. “How can you be sure it’s not really him?”

  It was a valid question, and something Jade had not considered, but what struck her most about it was Shah’s tone. Some part of him had already recognized that she was telling him the truth.

  “I…” She hesitated. Despite the fact that she had come to him for help, Shah was still the man who had effectively put a bounty on her. She needed his trust, but that did not mean she was ready to share intimate details of her life with him. “I just knew. There was something off about his behavior…I can’t really explain it. I just knew that it wasn’t the same man.”

  “Could your friend have been brainwashed? Reprogrammed somehow?”

  She shook her head. “It isn’t him.”

  He let out a long sigh. “I think that…my partner…might be working with your Changelings. Maybe she’s even…even one of them.”

  Jade could not help but notice his halting manner and the way he said the word “partner,” but she said nothing, silently prompting him to continue.

  “Now that you’ve told me, it’s like the scales have fallen from my eyes. She kept pushing me to do more, to be more of an activist. I guess now I know why.”

  “Is she here?”

  He shook his head. “I sent her away already. I knew she was working with someone else, but she wouldn’t tell me who.”

  Jade sensed that a chance to move things forward had arrived. “Well, we know who, sort of, but I don’t think we know why.”

  Shah blinked at her. “It seems pretty clear to me. They’re trying to set the stage for a new religious crusade. Islam versus the rest of the world. Everyone loves a good war, and Muslims are such an easy target. Ratchet up the fear factor and give people an enemy, and they’ll trip over each other in the rush to give up their civil liberties. Meanwhile, the military industrial complex cashes in, the Israelis get more political capital to support their apartheid regime in Palestine, and the one percent takes another slice off the pathetic crumbs the rest of us are squabbling over.”

  Jade cleared her throat to end the rant. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, but if that’s all this is about, then they’re going to way too much trouble. I think there’s something else going on here. It all comes back to Roche.”

  “Two birds with one stone. His conspiracy theories got too close to the truth.”

  “Right, but what truth? He been talking about his Changeling conspiracy for years. Why did they wait until…” She trailed off, searching her memories for the answer to her own question. “His new book.”

  Shah stiffened a little. “The one where he claims that the Prophet never existed?”

  Jade put her hands on her hips. “Really? You can’t see past that? He barely even mentioned that. Besides, the Phantom Time hypothesis wasn’t even Roche’s idea. No, it’s something to do with the vault.”

  “At the Hypogeum.”

  She looked back at him. “I forgot you were there. Did you…see anything strange?”

  “Like what?”

  “I guess not. The Hypogeum isn’t the vault. The Vault is…” She stopped herself. No sense in showing all her cards. “It’s somewhere else. The Hypogeum showed me where, sort of like a primitive magical Google Maps.”

  Shah accepted this without question. “You think these…Changelings want to get to the vault first?”

  Jade felt a little like she had finished the border on a 1,500 piece jigsaw puzzle. Good so far, but there was still a great big hole in the middle. “If the Changelings wanted the vault for themselves, it would have been smarter to let me find it for them.” She shook her head. “I think they already know where it is. They just don’t want us finding it. They knew I would keep looking, so they arranged for you to come after me.”

  “After Scotland…” Shah started. “That wasn’t me. I mean, I put you on the Enemies list, but those men were acting on their own. After that, Gab…my partner kept insisting that we take you alive, so we could get you to reveal how much you knew.”

  “Maybe she was also trying to protect Kellogg. I think he’s one too, too. He’s been keeping tabs on me since London. Probably waiting to see how far I would take this. Maybe the left hand didn’t know what the right was doing. Once your partner figured out that Kellogg was tagging along with me, she had to do something to keep your people from killing him.”

  “My people?”

  “You know what I mean. She couldn’t just come out and tell you though. And she couldn’t very well just call it all off. Not when she had worked so hard to make you the fall guy.” Shah’s expression darkened and Jade sensed that she might be losing him. “Hey, the good news is, you didn’t actually hurt anyone. Other than a little property damage, you haven’t done anything wrong.”

  Shah blinked at her. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  “It should.” She allowed that to sink in for a moment. “So, will you help me?”

  “What exactly is it that you want me to do?”

  “Help me get Professor back. And help me stop them.”

  Shah frowned. “Stop them? If even half the stuff you’ve just told me is true, then these Changelings are everywhere. They’ve already won.”

  Jade shook her head defiantly. “If that were true, they wouldn’t be trying to stop me from finding the vault. We can beat them.”

  “If we find the vault?”

  “I already know where it is.” She did not add that, that there was
a very good chance that it would be impossible to get into the vault, at least for a few more decades. Or centuries. “That’s the easy part. Getting Professor back is the real challenge.”

  “About that,” Shah began. “What do you…”

  “I have a lead on where they might he keeping him. I managed to get a look at the location history on his phone. He spent the better part of two days in a place called Rosebery.”

  “Doesn’t ring any bells. Where is it?”

  “Australia. I think so anyway. My guess is that they captured him in Sydney and took him there. The impostor took his stuff after watching him for a while. I’m sure he’s still there. It would be too risky to move him.” She said the last part quickly, hoping Shah would take her word for it. “We go there. We find him. We rescue him.”

  “Simple as that,” Shah retorted, sarcastically.

  “You managed to track me down. You’ve got international resources. And an army at your disposal.”

  Shah did not challenge this. “Why should I help you?”

  “Well, for starters, it would be your way of saying: ‘I’m sorry I tried to kill you.’ Then there’s a little thing called payback. I thought you might be interested in that.”

  “I’ll help you. I think this is a long shot, but I will do what I can. However, if we somehow get through this alive, I want you to take me with you to this Vault.”

  “Done.”

  “I’m not finished. If we find anything in that Vault that might be…let’s say confusing regarding the life of the Prophet or the origins of Islam, I want you to promise me that we’ll destroy it.”

  Jade stared at him, incredulous. “Whatever happened to journalistic integrity?”

  “You don’t yell fire in a crowded room, even if the curtains are smoking. There are a billion and a half Muslims in the world. It’s a very crowded room.”

  Jade blew out her breath. Agreeing to Shah’s request was easy enough under the current circumstances. Her interest in the vault had nothing to do with proving or disproving the origins of the Islamic belief system.

  But what if the proof is there? Do I just ignore it? Go along with the lie?

  If it meant saving Professor, absolutely.

  “Deal.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Unknown Location

  The noise roused Professor from his drug-induced slumber. He opened his eyes but resisted the urge to rise and investigate. His brain was still mired in the soporific chemical, and he had no doubt that his body would be even more sluggish. He lay still for several minutes, listening to increasingly strident noise which his addled brain finally recognized as the howl of jet engines some distance away.

  They’re moving the plane, he thought.

  His last clear memory was of the masked guards closing in on him. He had raised his hands to indicate that he would offer no resistance, but they had knocked him out anyway. Judging by his physical condition, that had been only a short time ago, perhaps just a few hours, but evidently something had happened in that brief period of time to prompt his captors to alter the status quo.

  He lay motionless, breathing deeply to oxygenate his blood and hopefully purge some of the drug from his system, while he mulled over the significance of this development.

  Why are they moving the plane? Has this location been compromised? Or is this some new phase of the plan?

  Carrera—or the woman impersonating her—had not confirmed his speculations about the camp or the motive for capturing the plane, but her response made him think he hit pretty close to the mark.

  He had been captured by Changelings. Not aliens or supernatural creatures out of mythology, but ordinary humans with an extraordinary talent for impersonating real people. They were method actors, immersing themselves in their roles, not merely imitating their targets, but becoming them to such an extent that even close friends and family members would not notice the substitution.

  The town he’d spied from the hillside was a prison where the passengers would live out their days, unaware of the fact that they were being used to train Changeling infiltrators. It was a rehearsal stage, where the Changeling pretenders could hone their abilities, learn real world skills and practice the art of deception and manipulation.

  The noise of the jet engines continued building to a climax but was suddenly punctuated by a much more immediate sound, his door bursting open. He rolled his head sideways in the direction of the disturbance and saw a pair of barely visible silhouettes framed in the doorway.

  “It wasn’t locked,” he mumbled, wondering why his captors had felt the need to make such a dynamic entrance.

  One of the figures stepped forward and then the room was filled with light. Professor winced, squeezing his eyes shut against the brightness, but in the afterimage, he saw a face that he had despaired of ever seeing again.

  Jade?

  “It’s him!”

  It’s her. But how…?

  He felt her arms enfolding him, smelled her hair, oddly counterpointed by sulfur tang of recently burnt gunpowder, heard her voice, trembling with emotion as she whispered in his ear. “Oh, God, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

  “Jade? How?”

  Another voice, low and insistent sounded from behind her. “We gotta go! This place is about to get hot.”

  “I’ll explain everything,” Jade said, speaking quickly. “But we have to get to that plane. Can you walk?”

  Walk? “I don’t know. How did you find me?”

  She insinuated an arm under his shoulder and eased him to a sitting position. “I think they drugged him,” she said, looking back to the other commando. “Have we got any antidote?”

  His eyes were getting used to the harsh light, which he now saw came from the small tactical flashlights mounted to the rails of the H&K MP5S pistols that Jade and her companion carried. The gunpowder residue he had smelled issued from the sound suppressor fitted to the machine pistol. They were both dressed in woodland camouflage fatigues—faces painted to match—with black watch caps covering their hair and tactical vests brimming with spare magazines and grenades. The man reached into a pouch and took out an atropine auto-injector device—standard US military issue to counteract the effects of nerve agents. The atropine would probably counter the effects of the drug in his bloodstream too, but the side-effects would be a lot worse.

  American military. The guy’s an operator. The thought was a far more powerful stimulant.

  “No,” Professor mumbled, gripping Jade’s arm. “I’ll be okay. Just help me up.”

  She gave his arm a reassuring squeeze and then turned him on the bed until his feet touched the floor. He was back in his cabin, right where his captors had left him.

  He stiffened, pulling free of her grip. “How did you find me?”

  “We don’t have time for this,” the other man said, but Jade held up a hand.

  “We’ll make time. I told you what these people can do. He deserves an explanation.” She knelt in front of him and stared up into his eyes. “They sent someone to impersonate you, but I wasn’t fooled for a second.”

  He laughed. Of course she wasn’t. He had spent two days behaving erratically, spinning falsehoods about his life so that his captors wouldn’t know which buttons to push to get him to cooperate. Later, when he’d realized the true reason for their scrutiny, he had taken every opportunity to sell the notion of a fictional romance with Jade. He had purposely fed them bad data, with predictable results. Garbage in, garbage out. Jade had seen right through the pretense.

  “I realized they must have taken you hostage,” she continued, “so I called some of your old SEAL buddies.”

  He raised his head and scrutinized the camouflaged face. The man didn’t look familiar, but that didn’t mean anything. Almost everyone he had served with was either retired or had been promoted out of the Teams, but those people still had the connections to launch a rescue operation.

  “But how did you know where I was? I don’t even know
where I am.”

  “The impostor. He was…” She raised a knowing eyebrow. “Very cooperative.”

  Something about that explanation nagged at him. One cabin out of dozens, he thought. A needle in a haystack, but they found me.

  “We have to go,” the commando insisted again. “That bird is taking off in five minutes, with or without us.”

  Jade glanced at him for a moment then returned her gaze to Professor. “You heard the man. I’ll tell you the rest on the plane.”

  The plane… “The passengers. We have to get them, too.”

  “That’s being taken care of. We’ll get as many as we can.”

  “You don’t understand. Some of them are… Might be…” The word caught in his throat. Changelings.

  Jade nodded in understanding. “We’ll keep them quarantined until we can sort out who’s who.”

  But how will you know for sure? He thought it, but didn’t say it out loud. How would he know for sure? His head was still addled from the drugs. His instincts were screaming for him to slow things down but the urgency of the situation was pushing him to make a snap decision.

  He struggled to stand, leaning heavily on Jade, but as soon as he was up, he turned to her, pulled her close and kissed her, unleashing months of pent-up longing, all of the passion and desire that he had never dared reveal to her.

  He felt her body instantly go taut, defensive, and for a moment, he thought he had made a grave misjudgment, but then she was returning the kiss with equal fervor.

  It lasted less than two seconds before she pulled away. “Okay, lover boy. I’m happy to see you too, but we’ll have to save the rest of it for when we get back home.”

  He nodded but did not let go. “You know I love you, right?”

  She grinned. “Pete, please. We’ve got an audience.”

  “Yes, we do.” He dropped one of his hands to her machine pistol, which dangled from the sling over her shoulder. In the same motion, he spun her around, grabbed a handful of her collar, and leveled the gun over her shoulder. “Drop it or she dies!”