by Nikki Owen
‘Doc! Doc!’ the familiar Irish lilt of a voice shouts out.
I manage to stand and step forward, as what emerges in front of me, limb by limb, bone by bone, is a beaten, bruised and tied-up body.
When I find my voice, only one word comes out. ‘Patricia.’
Chapter 2
Madrid Barajas Airport, Spain.
Time remaining to Project re-initiation: 32 hours
Even the earbuds I wear can’t cancel out the chaos and noise. People march back and forth, left and right, criss crossing the glaring bright gloss of the polished airport walkways. Babies scream and toddlers yell, coffee cups clink and trolley wheels screech, tannoy systems above my head bark the next flight departure as, in the near distance, wine glasses tinkle at a champagne bar, and a group of people laugh at a joke I will never understand.
I stand and blink and watch it all as the airport scene crashes into my senses, body and mind temporarily paralysed by everything. The noise, the smells. Tinny music from open shops. Coffee, beer, oil, sickly sugar, stale cigarette smoke, burger fat, perfume, leather, sweat, the faint soak of breeze block urine. The slurp of a straw. The bite of a sandwich. Every single scent, I smell. Every tiny pinprick of noise, I hear. It all smashes into my brain, colliding into my white and grey matter until I don’t know which way to look.
‘Doc?’
I slip out an earbud and look to my friend.
‘They’re not going to spot us,’ Patricia says, her voice low, calm. ‘We’ve got through security and I know airports are a nightmare for you, but look at us.’ She points to herself. ‘We’re in business suits and wigs. Jesus’— she smiles,— ‘I’ve never looked so smart. So it’ll be alright. Okay?’
I nod and tap my finger.
Another smile. ‘Good. You’re doing great. I’m right with you.’
She looks down at herself now and I watch her angled arms, her swan neck and her shaven head disguised by a long, mouse-brown wig that settles on suited shoulders. A cream, silk blouse slipped under a black jacket sits against smart tailored trousers and neat, flat ballet pumps on the end of flamingo stalks for legs. My friend. My first true friend.
‘It is too loud here,’ I say.
She takes my palm and presses her five fingertips into mine as she has always done. ‘I know, Doc. I know it’s too much information flying into your head from the airport, but I’m here.’ A group of passengers shuffle nearby and Patricia forms a little bubble of space around us so no one brushes against me. I catch her familiar scent of talcum powder, fresh linen, bubble baths. It makes me breathe a little slower.
Chris wanders over. He fiddles with his suit and his newly dyed bottle-blonde hair, and shakes his bright red Converses. ‘The security guards are hanging around a bit back there. We need to get moving towards boarding.’
Patricia eyes his feet. ‘You couldn’t have worn a pair of smart shoes, could you? We’re supposed to be pretending to be professional business people.’
He fidgets, pulling at his yellow tie, at the sleeves of his smart navy suit, shoulders twitching. ‘I feel like an idiot.’
‘You look like one.’
Chris glares at Patricia. He scratches where a white shirt clings to a flat surfer stomach and pulls at his trouser band muttering, ‘It’s too fucking tight.’
I observe my friends without any understanding of what their exchange means, the glances between them, the words. Funny or serious? Heartfelt or fickle? Ahead, a large bang slices the air as a café tray clatters to the floor, cups and plates and cutlery smashing into cold cream tiles, the sound of it hammering my head. I wince. It’s exhausting. I need stability, something factually familiar for my mind to cling onto, a lifeboat of facts.
I turn to Chris. ‘The term “idiot” means a person of low intelligence. You hacked into a CIA website, that takes intelligence to achieve. Therefore, the term idiot in describing you is wrong. On this occasion.’
Chris pulls his tongue out at Patricia. ‘See.’ Then he turns to me. ‘Thanks, Google.’
‘I have informed you before – that is not my name.’
He smiles, big and wide. ‘I know.’ Then he starts humming a song I have come to recognise from a singer he seems to greatly admire called Taylor Swift.
‘That is the melody entitled…’ I listen… “Shake it Off.”
He grins. ‘In one.’
Patricia rolls her eyes. ‘We have to go. Doc?’
‘Yes?’
‘Stay by me.’
We find a semi-quiet patch in a coffee shop and sit. Immediately anxiety hits. The slurp of peoples’ lips and tongues as they sip their drinks. The clink of cups. The steam from the milk machine and the mechanical grind of coffee beans. Teeth biting down into crunchy lettuce. Someone’s lace undone, the thread hanging loose, dragging along the floor. It all collides inside me. I try to focus, count, look to Patricia who mouths to me, ‘How can I help?’ except I don’t know the answer, only know that here and now I need to keep any potential meltdown under control so no attention is drawn to me or to us. Three hours ago we were in Ines’s apartment and I killed her with an iron nail to the neck, and watched Ramon and Balthus die. The last thing we need is a scene.
‘Doc, deep breaths.’
I nod, watching Chris closely as he walks to the counter, orders our drinks, but immediately, this tips me into a panic.
‘I want a black coffee,’ I say. ‘What is he ordering for me? It can only be black.’
‘It’s okay,’ Patricia says. ‘He asked me and I said black coffee. I told him for you.’ She smiles. Soft cheeks, lines opening wide at her eyes. ‘Okay?’
I nod, but inside I am panicking.
Chris is talking to the barista now, easy, light, making random conversation about the bustle of the airport. To give myself something to focus on, I examine his movements, his facial expressions. How easy it seems to come to him, how simple such dialogue appears for him. I try pressing some of it into my memory, the way in which he acts, remember it so I can perhaps use it, mimic it, cover me up. It’s hard to find a place in the world when you don’t know who you’re expected to be.
Done with that yet still anxious, I turn my focus to checking and rechecking the time of our flight to Zurich where Chris has secured us a safe house through his hacking contacts until we can get further away and out of sight. Finally, Chris returns and it’s only then I can be assured that the right drink has been bought. I sip slowly. The liquid is hot, scalding my palate and tongue, but I like it, as if it polishes the tips of my mind so they are ready to be used. Now and then the multiple sights, sounds, smells of the airport hit me, make my body go rigid, but breathing and counting help, and so I do that, run through numbers in my mind, murmur the digits with the tips of my fingers pressed one after the other into my thumb, all the while glancing to my friends, grateful that they are here.
‘Okay, so, I checked my email,’ Chris says, emptying two full sachets of sugar into a latte, ‘and my buddy in Zurich is all set for us to rock up there. All secure. Also, from what I can tell, it looks as if the Alexander woman has read the message we sent her.’
Patricia looks up. ‘What? The Home Secretary?’
‘Yep, Balthus’s wife, Harriet Alexander herself.’ He draws out a computer tablet and taps the screen. ‘About twenty-seven minutes ago. No, wait…twenty-eight minutes ago she read the whole file that reveals the Project Callidus bombshell, from way back in 1973 up to right now.’ He starts listing things off with his fingers. ‘The thousands of Basque blood-type people they’ve been testing on, the cancer drugs for Ines, the Project taking Maria and drugging her, Maria being Balthus’s kid, all of it, all of the stuff we hacked into in Hamburg.’ He grins at us and I wonder if his face has ever, in his life, been fixed into a frown; I resist the temptation to stick my finger into the dimple on his chin.
‘Well,’ Patricia says, ‘hopefully that’ll be it. That’ll be enough for the government to kick-start an investigation into the whole Pro
ject bollocks and it’ll finally all be over. No more running.’
‘Can your software connect to her server system?’ I ask.
‘Ah, you’re thinking of hacking into her emails, tracking who she contacts about the subject of our little message. Yep, thought of that. There’s something blocking me at the moment, don’t know what it is yet, but I’m on it.’
We finish our coffee. Chris taps on his computer the whole time and, ten minutes to go until our flight is boarding, he excuses himself to attend the lavatory. I use the spare time to carry out a reassuring check of the contents of my rucksack. One by one, I place them on the table in a neat line: three pay-as-you-go cell phones, two fake passports, money in several denominations, one wash bag, two packets of energy tablets and the other essential items I require to be on the run and hide, all itemised on a list in my head. But it is the last three things that I unpack, that now amid the din and the cappuccino milk steam and the idle chatter around tea-stained tables, that give me the most sense of calm and reassurance: my notebook and two old photographs.
I rest my hand on the worn notebook cover, flick a finger over the dog-eared pages, pages that have housed my thoughts and calculations and mathematical probabilities for years, each spare section crammed with drawings and codes scribbled feverishly after awaking from dreams and nightmares that would jolt some distant, drug induced memory.
Patricia leans in, looks at a page filled with algorithms and coding. ‘I may as well be seeing spots as to understand what on earth all that means.’ She inhales. ‘It’s been hard for you, hasn’t it, Doc? Everything that’s happened.’
I touch the page with my fingertips, let them skim the curve of the equations before me, the lines, the sketches of pencilled memories forgotten and only sometimes remembered. ‘Ines killed Balthus,’ I say, sticking to the facts, unable to express the sorrow I truly feel inside.
‘Yes, Doc, she did.’ Her voice is a soft pillow, a floating feather.
I blink, turn my attention to the two photographs from my bag.
‘Is that your dad with you when you were young? He has the same dark hair and eyes as your brother.’
‘Yes. Except they were never my biological father or brother.’
‘No,’ Patricia says. ‘No, I know. Balthus was your biological father, and that’s hard – you watched him die when you’d only just found out who he really was.’
I swallow. My eyes are a little blurred. ‘Yes.’
Patricia touches the second photograph, this one more sepia-toned and worn. ‘You were a cute baby.’
I take the second image between my fingers and stare. In it stands a woman, my biological mother, long hair falling in wisps around her face, two grainy, willowed hands on the ends of ribbon-thin arms cradling me – her new swaddled baby. I map the skirt that skims the ground where ten toes on bare feet rest on a bed of gravel surrounding a sprawling, stone hospital-come-nunnery with a crucifix on the door. I blink at the photograph and battle with a feeling inside me, strange and unwelcome. Anger and sadness, a tumbleweed of sorrow that, try as I might, will not go, but instead rolls along the barren land of my heart and mind, leaving behind trails in the sand that vanish with one whip of the wind. Isabella Bidarte – my real mother. I try the phrase out in my head, wear it like a new pair of shoes, walk it up and down the corridors of my mind, but it feels odd, stiff, as if using it for too long would create a blister filled with pus that would burst and seep and hurt.
I turn the photograph in my hands. On the back is scribbled an address and the geolocation coordinates of a hospital – Weisshorn Psychiatric Hospital, the place Isabella was last kept in Geneva, and next to it the date of her death, all etched out by my Papa and hidden from Ines before he died.
Patricia stares at it. ‘He knew she was kept there, didn’t he, your dad? He’d found out about what Ines was doing – getting the cancer drugs to keep her alive in exchange for you.’
Too sad to speak, I trace the address and date with my fingertips as, to the right of the café, a television repeats a news feed detailing the killings at Mama’s apartment.
‘A triple homicide was reported in Madrid, in what is being cited as a cartel crime. Spanish lawyer and member of parliament Ines Villanueva; her lawyer son, Ramon Martinez; and a British prison chief, Balthus Ochoa, have all been implicated in what sources are saying is a decade-long fraud ring stretching into millions of dollars and which includes trafficking in illegal medical drugs. The bodies of the three were found at Villanueva’s central Madrid house this afternoon. Villanueva, who was a likely pick to become the next leader of the right wing, and prime minister …’
Tilting her head so I can see her eye-creased smile, Patricia nods to the television. ‘Same story they’re telling like before, same bullshit.’
‘It is all lies. The deaths did not happen in that way.’
She sighs as the television screen flashes across the faces of Ines, Balthus and Ramon.
We finish our coffees. I carry out a final check of my belongings, secure the photographs in an inside pocket near my notebook and, acknowledging the presence of my passport one more time, in my head I begin to carry out a run-through of the airport journey when Chris runs up to the table, breathless.
‘Jesus,’ Patricia says, ‘what’s with you?’
He swallows, pointing behind him. ‘People…’ He gulps air, slaps two palms to the table and hauls in some oxygen. ‘C-coming…’
‘What d’you mean?’ Patricia says, frowning. ‘You’re not making any sense and we’ve got to—’
‘Shush!’
Patricia opens her mouth on the verge of speaking when Chris raises a hand and finally spits out the words he wants to say.
‘The Project – they’ve found us!’
Chapter 3
Madrid Barajas Airport, Spain.
Time remaining to Project re-initiation: 31 hours and 30 minutes
I turn, stand, focus. ‘Tell me.’
He swallows. ‘So, I was just walking back and looking in the duty-free bit, and they have the mirrors and stuff there and I’m sure there were two guys watching me.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ Patricia says.
‘What? No. I was followed.’ He looks straight to me. ‘I’m telling you – they were different, these guys.’
‘How?’
‘Just, well, I guess they were, like, rigid, you know. Kind of robotic and—’
‘Christ,’ Patricia says, ‘this is the last thing we need, you freaking out on us like this.’
‘I’m not freaking out.’
‘You are, and you’re going to upset—’
‘No!’ His voice is raised. I flinch. The people at the next table stop eating mid-sandwich bite and narrow their eyes.
Chris lowers his head. ‘No. Please,’ he whispers, ‘you have to listen to me. I know they have to be different because I recognise them, from when I was locked up for hacking, okay. One of the two guys who investigated me via the UK, well they were MI5. The other one, I’m not sure…’
‘You have to be sure,’ I say. ‘Now.’ My eyes scan ahead, quick fire.
‘I’m sorry. I recognise both of them, just can’t place the second one.’
‘One of them is definitely MI5?’
‘Yes.’
The cogs in my head, as if tripped by a switch, begin to turn at such a rate, for a second I feel dizzy.
‘Shit,’ Patricia says. ‘Doc, MI5 wanted you dead. If they’re here, this is not good.’
‘Oh fuck.’ Chris rubs his head. ‘Oh fuck, oh fuck.’
As my friends swear repeatedly, I scan the crowds.
‘Maria,’ Chris says now, ‘I’m sorry. I sent that email. MI5 must have tracked it.’
‘Why would you be sorry?’ I ask. ‘This is not your fault.’
‘It is,’ Patricia snaps.
I look between the two of them. ‘We cannot determine with any mathematical certainty why these men are here. We can only assume.’ I pause, my m
ind firing at such a rate now, the probabilities and conclusions whip out. ‘We can only assume a level of danger which requires some amount of action on our part.’
Patricia blows out a breath. ‘Shit a brick.’
Chris nods. ‘Too right.’
I scan the busy foyer, the noise so loud, my body wincing at the near physical hurt it causes me. Heads, hats, citrus perfume, detergent, the smell of ice cream and pancakes, a series of buckles and trailing laces.
‘I can see them,’ Chris says.
‘Where?’
He gestures to an area by a burger bar thirty metres away. ‘Right… there.’
I follow his line and spot two men, black jackets, casual clothing, no suitcases, no definable baggage, just coffee bean eyes and steady strides.
‘Doc,’ Patricia says, ‘is it them? Could MI5 be back working with the Project now, you know, running it or something?’
‘I do not know,’ I say, sight missile-locked on the two figures. Flickering fluorescent lights, the clatter of suitcase wheels, the hum of a fan somewhere in a nearby store, the oppressive stench of chip fat. It all collides in my head, making it harder to think straight, but even between the chaos, a cold calm descends and a phrase, one drummed into me by the Project, despite my resistance, enters my head as easy as walking through an open door. Prepare, wait, engage.
I turn to Chris. ‘You are certain it is them?’
He gulps. ‘Yes.’
‘Then we have to go.’
He rubs his face. ‘Oh man, oh man, oh man.’
Bags secured, Patricia moves backwards, her feet stumbling a little, Chris following as the three of us slip behind a large silver pillar that houses neat billboards for expensive Parisian perfumes.
‘Doc, what do we do now?’
I glance to the area ahead and watch the two men. They walk five steps then stop and, as they do, my brain carries out a full and rapid assessment of the immediate threat. Each man is approximately one hundred and sixty-six centimetres tall, the right man blonde, the left brown, no distinguishable facial features, no definable scars, and by quick track of their frames, each appears to be built to endure long distance runs over twenty kilometres, yet still bulked enough to carry the weight of a full army training kit on their backs.
