by A P Bateman
Stone looked further down the beach. The tide was rising, but there was still plenty of sand to walk on. The beach disappeared in the distance and Stone realised it was curving around to the left, around the peninsular. At the far end the sand was off colour. All the way down to the sea. He made his way cautiously down the other side of the headland. He faced the rock and took short steps. Kept his weight pressed into the rock. His genitalia got in the way of the steep rock face and he had to be careful placing his bare feet on the jagged rocks that jutted out. It was an awkward climb. When he got to within eight-feet of the sand he jumped and rolled and got back to his feet. The manoeuvre stabbed at his side, his ribs. The sand stuck to the graze on his hip. He looked at the wounds, still he was at a loss. He simply could not recall being in an accident. His head thumped beyond imagination. It pounded like a drum. He thought he could almost hear the thudding outside of his own head. As if it followed him, rather than came from within him and would be audible to a bystander, should there have been one. The walk took longer than he expected, but he realised that he was walking incredibly slow. He turned around and looked at his footprints. They curved greatly. He was not walking in a straight line. As he neared the discolouration he could see that it was wet. It was not a stream, but as he turned towards the jungle he noticed it inverted as a triangle, becoming narrower the further he headed away from the sea. At the earthen floor of the jungle, the water was visible. Twenty-metres into the jungle it was as if a garden tap had not been switched off properly. Another twenty-metres and it trickled, flowed even. Stone cupped his hand and made a dam. The water was brown. He rubbed it on his forehead and the back of his neck, resisting the temptation to drink. The jungle sloped upwards and he walked right through the water for another twenty- metres. Tiny scorpions scuttled either side of his feet, their red backs and black tails keeping his concentration focused greatly. He did not want to step on one inadvertently. At a point where the jungle steepened more immediately, Stone saw the water dripping from a ledge. He placed his hands underneath and the water dripped, pooled and washed the mud clean. He rubbed it on his face once more, then cupped his hands and waited. He slurped the water and it stung his lips, tongue and throat. After a few attempts, the water stung less and tasted delicious. He drank for what seemed like an hour or more. His vision seemed to noticeably improve, his head thudded less and he started to remember more about himself, but not how he had arrived. Not how he was naked and alone. After fifty or more leaky handfuls of water had reached his mouth, ran down his chin and quenched his thirst to the glorious point that he craved it no more, he kicked the earth and debris aside and sat down in the darkening jungle. He had remembered something significant, but when was this memory? And had it brought him here?
4
The bar is quiet. Sports heroes from thirties, forties and fifties America are captured for posterity and sealed in monochrome prints. They are not originals. This is a themed bar and the prints are on the walls of similar bars in Minnesota, Ohio, Illinois and New Jersey. Probably all fifty states for all Stone knew. Maybe not the southwestern states though. There was no Tex-Mex. The menu is Italian-American. Big subs, pasta loaded with cheese, steaks and chicken quarters, burgers as big as a softball – you can double up on the meat pate and triple on cheese for another four dollars. The pizzas are New York style and take up most of the table. But not Stone’s table. He has a bowl of nuts and a cold bottle of beer in front of him. The waitresses are friendly, but they work for tips. No sense in docking your own pay by showing your true feelings.
He keeps looking over at the door as it opens. It’s late summer and the evening air is cooler in the city. The air-conditioning is switched off and the door lets a distinguishable draft through each time it opens. The room is warm so it’s not unpleasant. Couples and groups of people come in sporadically and each time the door opens they are greeted by the restaurant manager and shown to a booth. Stone watches and waits. He is used to waiting in his profession. He has lost count of the days and nights he has waited. Ready for something to happen, a scenario to react to and put the countless hours of training, the countless of rounds down the range to the test. Only then to stand to, hand over the watch and go off duty frustrated, unfulfilled, but at the same time, thankful his charge made it through his watch.
A woman walked in alone. She cast her eyes over the booths and discounted the twos and threes, the larger groups who were clinking glasses and handing each other menus. She’s not joining in to make a foursome or add to the party numbers. She’s meeting someone, but that person has either not yet arrived, or like Stone, she is unsure what they will look like.
The woman bypasses the restaurant manager, who is now busy directing waiting staff and has failed to notice her arrival. She approaches Stone’s booth. “Hi,” she says. Her accent is southern belle. Stone can’t place it, but would go with South Carolina if he was encouraged to place a bet. There’s a real unfamiliar twang to it though. “I’m Kathy, you must be Rob.”
Stone is thrown at first. He has worked and socialised with countless colours and creeds, but he had drawn a mental image of his contact, and because of their mutual friend and the professional and social circles she moved in, he had not been expecting an Asian woman. For a moment he is ashamed to have expressed surprise, but he quickly moves on. You can’t get it right all the time. It may account for the confused accent, a mix of Asia and the south. He squeezes his frame out of the booth and towers over her. He offers his hand and she takes it. She goes in for a double air kiss and Stone misses, catching her lips. “Sorry,” he apologises awkwardly.
“Isobel said you were forward, and that I should watch you,” she smiled. “Let’s wait until the second date.”
Stone waited for her to take a seat and he slid back in behind the table. A waitress appeared and asked if they’d like drinks. Kathy went for a cream soda, which surprised Stone, and he tipped his bottle a little to indicate he’d like another beer. Kathy slipped off her jacket and fastened her handbag. Stone watched, the blush subsiding from his cheeks at the thought of his air kissing faux pas. He can’t put an age to her. Her skin is smooth and unblemished, there are no lines or wrinkles and her hair is as black as coal. Wet coal, glossy and rich. He is quite sure she is one of the most attractive women he has ever seen. The blouse is stretching over small, but perfectly formed breasts and her waist is no thicker than his powerful thigh. He is aware that he is staring.
“Haven’t had a cream soda since I was a kid,” he said. “If this were a date, you’d would be the cheapest I’ve had in years.”
“Thanks, just what every girl wants to hear,” she said, somewhere between sarcastic and sardonic, but nowhere near sincere.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean…” he paused. “Well, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than Cosmopolitans, that’s for sure.”
“I think we had better cut to the chase, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps.”
The drinks arrived and Stone clinked the rim of the soda with the neck of the frosted bottle. “Cheers,” he said. “Sure you don’t want an ice cream floater in that?”
“My dad used to bring me here. Well, to one of its sister restaurants down in Louisiana. I used to have a cream soda and he’d have one too. We’d have vanilla floaters in those, but I didn’t think I’d carry it off tonight,” she said. “He’s dead and I felt nostalgic, that’s all.”
Stone hung his head, then looked at her. “Shit. I’m sorry. How about we start again? I won’t kiss you on the lips again either.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Shame,” she smiled. “I think Isobel still has a thing for you.”
“Old news,” he replied shortly. “Geography. We couldn’t make it work. We gave it our best shot.”
“She said you guard the President. That he’s the one good politician we’ve had in decades and that you don’t want to leave him to the wolves of Washington DC.”
“Something like that.”
“So how would you have time to help me?”
“Depends how long it takes,” he said. “There’s some appearances he’s making soon. I requested I be re-assigned for a week or so. Nothing came up, so I’ve got gardening leave, so to speak.”
“If you’ve got time on your hands, you could make more of a go of it with Isobel.”
“Takes two to tango, not three.”
“She’s had a couple of dinner dates, that’s all.”
“Shall we get to what I can do for you?”
“Sure,” Kathy said, a little taken aback.
“Well?”
“Look, sorry if I touched a nerve,” she paused but Stone said nothing. He sipped a beer and stared at her impatiently. “Okay then. Are you familiar with the dark web?”
“Yes.”
“You are? Well, okay, that kind of speeds things up a little. So what do you know?”
“I know it’s part of the deep web, that mainstream search engines don’t uncover enough layers to search it effectively. Much of it is encrypted and requires specialist software.”
“In a nutshell, yes. The internet is like an onion and Google, Bing and the like take off the first layer. That’s where the information is for most people to go about their day. They bank, book vacations, use social media, upload to YouTube, surf for porn - the straightforward stuff that is – and do just about everything they need to do. It’s about five percent of what makes up the internet.”
Stone nodded. “Child pornography, illegal gambling, black market, illegal financial trading lies in the layers underneath. The deep web and the dark web.”
“And you’ve had experience with that?”
“An investigation I headed. The CIA contacted assets, exchanged and stole information in there somewhere. They operated an entire black-ops assassination program from the dark web. They shut down the operation after a congressman heard whispers of it, but a rogue CIA officer kept it going for his own ends. Along with this, I also uncovered a pharmaceutical company with plans to release a virus and sell the anti-virus for a colossal amount. Another case was for the sale of human organ harvesting.”
“And you know how to use the dark web?”
“No.”
She looked disappointed. “So how did you navigate it?”
“I didn’t. I used a couple of specialist programmers. I struggle using my smartphone.”
“I used a specialist programmer too,” she said. “He was working for me, for my paper.”
“What paper do you work for?”
“The Washington Post. I’m the senior reporter on the social affairs desk. The internet is changing society and in ways we are not ready for. Society, that is.”
“So what has your programmer come up with?”
“Well that’s it. He was absolutely banging off the walls. He said that the paper would have to quadruple his fee, that he had the story of the century. That there was a bestselling book in it for me, that the Washington Post could publish it and that he wanted half the royalties for that as well.”
“Greedy guy,” Stone said, then drained his beer. “So what was it?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” Kathy shrugged. “He went missing.”
Stone looked at her. Her beauty hadn’t diminished any since he’d grown accustomed to her presence. He thought of her lips and how warm they had felt against his own, chilled from his cold beer. “Have you called the police?”
“I haven’t. I wanted you to find him.”
“If he’s missing, the police need to be on it.”
“Isobel said if anyone can find him, it’s you. She also said the Secret Service have the means to find him…” she paused. “Even if he doesn’t want to be found.”
“The guy’s trying to cash in big time. Why would he not want to be found?”
Kathy finished her cream soda. She made a noise with the straw as she negotiated the ice chips at the bottom of the glass. She let the straw drop from between her glossy lips and looked up at him. “Because I think he found out something else. He was keen to cash in and confident that the story would be big. And then I think he got scared. But I don’t just think he found something that merely scared him,” she paused, looked at Stone intensely with the darkest brown eyes he’d ever seen. “I think after a little more digging he found something that absolutely terrified him.”
5
He had been badly dehydrated before and on more than one occasion. He recognised the signs. He was not sure where or when, but he recalled kneeling on hard-baked sand, a man in combat fatigues handing him a canteen and ordering him to sip slowly. He hadn’t. He had gulped it down and had vomited the precious liquid. Another time a nurse had given him a white liquid in a thick beaker. He recalled it being sweet, but salty. Just short of so salty as to suffer reflux. The liquid had been warm and the nurse had said it was to prevent shock to his system. Stone knew he had been close to succumbing to dehydration here, wherever here was. But he had a water source now. He had a base. He stepped away from the stream and urinated. The sight was surprising, dark like Guinness. His system was flushing through toxins and impurities which had built up. He knew that his second drink would do him more good. After drinking his fill once more, he got up and walked down the tiny stream and met the sand and light once more. He felt invigorated. He was hungry, but he could ride that out. He knew he could function for many days without food – as long as he had water.
Stone looked both ways down the beach and made a note of the natural markers of the two headlands. He did not want to lose his water supply. However, the fringe of clean sand offered no visible food source and the jungle was dense and rank and he knew he should strike out across an obstruction-free beach and find a more suitable place to make a shelter or forage for food. Some flat rock might afford him some shellfish or seaweed and the coastline looked remote enough from risk of pollution that eating it raw would not bring him any harm. As long as he didn’t eat vast quantities too quickly.
The sand felt warmer underfoot. He looked at the sun and assumed from its position that it was mid-day. He had earlier thought it had been afternoon, but the heat was increasing. He had no geographical insight, other than it was hot and the jungle denoted he was between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Perhaps even equatorial. These were facts he knew. Facts imprinted from his past life. He just hoped he was right.
Stone cast his mind back to the bar and the woman in front of him. He knew her as Kathy. He knew the mutual friend Isobel. He could picture her dark hair, scraped back in a tight ponytail, a smile upon her face. He could not recall how they had met, but he knew they had been close. The thought of her comforted him, but the conversation clearly made him aware that whatever they had was now firmly in the past. He neither felt pleased nor sad. How could he mourn the loss of something he could barely remember?
The second headland was no more than a rocky groin that Stone could walk up, apart from the last ten feet which required hands, but no more than to steady himself and provide extra lift. At the top of the climb he was afforded a stunning view of a horseshoe bay with shallow reef and deep-water lagoons. There was a gentle shore break and part of the bay was exposed reef. He knew he would find food here, but it was impractical unless he either found another fresh water supply or a container to carry water in. He would simply burn off the positive effects of drinking to reach his food supply, and vice versa.
Although he had never, to his knowledge, visited the tropics before, he was aware of the ever increasing problem of plastic deposited in the sea. He was sure he’d seen a feature on television that tropical paradise was littered with bottles and containers and all manner of things which might help him. It was just a matter of time.
The climb down was as rudimentary as his ascent and he was on the sand and walking towards the exposed reef in a matter of minutes. There were tight shoals of tiny fish herded by baby sharks. A single shark would break rank and swim at high speed through the shoal. They took turns
, each snapping a fish and returning to the edge of the shoal. Stone watched a shark come within a few feet from the beach. He saw another further up the beach. He contemplated diving on one. Would it be as simple as that? Would he get bit? Tiny details mattered, and the tiniest mistake could cost him dear. A bite would get infected. A fever would make him delirious. There was no help, no second chance. He decided that if the sharks did this, then they would do it again. Besides, shark skin was as tough as tanned leather and he had no way of cutting the flesh yet. He would need to find a sliver of rock or a fragment of scallop shell before he could think about the task of cutting a shark into sashimi. He walked to the reef and tentatively negotiated the sharp rock underfoot where small scallops and rock oysters lay exposed to the sun as the rising tide slowly covered the reef and returned them to feed and breed and do whatever else bivalve molluscs do.
He picked the white and brown shellfish and used the edges of the shells to pry them open. He smelt them, then when he discovered they merely smelled of the sea he prised out the flesh and ate them one by one. He wasn’t a fan of raw shellfish, never saw the appeal of chilled oysters, but he remembered wasabi, soy sauce and pickled ginger making them a whole lot more palatable somewhere. Without the niceties of condiments, he would have to make do. After sliding a few down, he realised they simply tasted salty and were no different than eating undercooked poached egg.
The flash of movement out of the corner of his eye made him flinch. He didn’t know why, but he thought a dark coloured bird was about to fly into him. He ducked down and looked up in time to see the object spin over and over, scything through the air over his head and out to sea. The object was black, and looked to Stone like a cross between a sickle, a machete and a fire poker. It crashed down into the shoal of fish and in an instant the sharks and fish were gone. Stone looked back in the direction it had travelled. He frowned, unsure if he was going mad, or if madness had already found its way into his mind.
