'He never got on the plane,' she said. 'We stopped him.'
'Why'd you do that?'
Again she looked surprised by this then shrugged.
'I don't know. Seemed a thing to do.'
'Why? God, can you just explain yourself? Please.'
Crosskill let out an exasperated sigh, then they shared a glance and it was apparent she had non-verbally handed over explanation duties.
'Will you two just stop messing around? I brought you the thing, the least you can do is give me some sort of explanation.'
'We've been looking for the last of the guys you call the Jigsaw Man for a number of years,' said Crosskill. 'We follow internet traffic related to the Beatles. Looking for clues, you know the score.'
'You find stuff on the internet about the Beatles? Wow, is there some sort of specialist training for that?'
'The man's a comedian,' said Crosskill. 'And here's me, all this time, thinking you were dull as shit.'
'Agent Crosskill,' said his partner, with an uncommon tone of seniority.
Crosskill made some sort of grudging acceptance of the rebuke and continued with a small dismissive hand gesture.
'We found you through those articles you wrote about the Beatles. One of our people found you. They realised you were living some sort of rogue life, tracked you down, discovered your identity.'
'The night my room got broken into...' I said.
Crosskill made an even more dismissive hand gesture.
'Whatever. We're big picture people, don't know nothing about that kind of shit. The men on the ground discovered there were two of you. Now, I don't know what you were thinking about that, but it's not the first time we've seen it. It happens...'
He caught the eye of his partner, another slight admonishment from her, and again he continued with a movement of his hand.
'So we had you both followed. At some point we decided to bring you both in. You, we were just going to lift off the street. No one knew where you were, who you were. The other guy, we had one of our operatives contact him undercover claiming to be a film producer. You'd written some lousy script a while back. The Jigsaw Man. That was another interesting thing about you. So, that was the plan. Then, just a day or two ahead of the flight, when he was about to get on the plane and we were about to bring you in, you made a move. You came back to your home town. We tracked you, realised what you were doing. Looked like you intended letting the other guy get on the plane, while you went home. Interesting, we thought.'
'Usually these situations, when there's been some sort of replication taking place, there's a fulcrum point,' said his partner, butting in. Crosskill shook his head at the interruption. 'A point in time when everything comes together, or falls apart. We realised that it was the flight. Something was going to happen to that flight. Well, once a flight's taken off, there are only two things that can happen. It can land, or it can crash. This kind of phenomenon, a replication event, is far more likely to occur after a crash. A big crash, something extreme. So it seemed likely to us that there was going to be an accident, and that somehow you'd managed to get yourself off that crashing plane and had gone back in time. Wouldn't be the first time.'
'But I was only on the flight in the first place because you set it up,' I said. 'I would never have gone back in time six months and written those online articles if you hadn't sent me there.'
Crosskill barked out a laugh.
'You thought yourself off a plane crash, right?'
I nodded.
'And that's logical?'
I stared at his partner. There was an awful lot that wasn't logical, and I had long ago realised that I was unlikely to get an explanation. Indeed, that there would be no explanation.
'We decided to stop the guy getting on the plane, see what happened. We brought you in. Cancelled his booking at the last minute. Sent him home to your wife and kid.'
'He's been there all this time?'
I could feel the hand gripping my stomach. It was one thing him living the life I'd already gone through. But not far off five months with Brin and Baggins, storing up memories, going through new experiences, attending Baggins' netball games, seeing her teachers at the parents evening, taking her to the cinema, while I rotted in a cell; it was unconscionable.
'Of course,' he said. 'What'd you think was happening?'
'And what about the plane?'
'It crashed. Everybody died.'
I looked at Crosskill and then back at the woman. She shrugged.
'Sure, there was something weird going on with you, but we had to let it play out.'
'You had to let the plane crash?'
'We didn't know it was going to crash,' said Crosskill, sounding for a moment like he belonged on the Sopranos.
'She just said you thought it was likely the plane would crash.'
'There was no one of significance on the plane,' she said coldly. 'You yourself, if I may remind you, did nothing to stop it taking off the second time.'
I hadn't thought about that in four-and-a-half months. I hadn't wanted to think about that at all.
I leaned forward, rested my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands. For a moment I was back on the plane, people screaming, every fibre of the plane juddering, desperate to break apart.
'And it was you who got me off the plane at the last second?' I asked.
I looked up at her. She shook her head.
'We have no idea how you got off that plane,' said Crosskill. 'Why d'you think we asked you about eight hundred times why you weren't on it? After the plane crashed, we worked that part out. You must have been on it in some other time frame, and then got off it again. You were thrown backwards. We didn't know what was going on.'
'Still don't,' threw in his partner acerbically, and Crosskill nodded.
I looked at them and then sat up, pressed my back against the seat. Pulled myself as far away from them as I could manage in such a confined space.
'What now?' I asked.
They exchanged a glance, one of those where they worked out who was going to be doing the talking, and then looked back at me.
'We exchange you for the other guy.'
'What are you going to do with him?'
'We'll see,' she said. 'Might just have to dispose of him.'
'You can't do that!'
'Why? What d'you want us to do with him? Leave him at home. You think your wife would be happy with two of you there?' She glanced at Crosskill and then back at me. 'Maybe in some situations.'
Crosskill laughed.
'But we can't let that kind of thing be going on. We need to extract him, fit you back in. Seamlessly. We're going to meet one of our operatives down there. He's going to give you the same clothes as the other guy. We're going to draw him out and then send you back into the family home.'
'That's it? I won't know what's been going on there for the past four-and-a-half months?'
'No.'
'What if I've done something stupid? What if something major's happened?'
'We've been watching,' said Crosskill. 'Nothing major.'
I stared at them for a long while, one to the other. I wanted more, but it appeared they were finished.
The car continued on its way down the M4, driving at precisely 70 miles per hour.
42
Jones came back into my head. Hadn't seen her since I left her in Seattle waiting to meet the Starbuck's manager. She'd said she was coming back to the UK the following day, which was the same day as me. Yesterday. At the time I'd hoped she'd by chance be on the same plane, because it wasn't as though there hadn't been a lot of chance. When it came to it though, I was halfway across the Atlantic before I even thought about her.
It had started in the café after I'd first left her at the Hilton, and the change, the distance, had been growing. Seeing her again briefly had only emphasised it. I was moving on, at last, and it had really kicked in after leaving Mr Pike Place Roast, meeting the two agents, and working out where I'd needed to go next.
After that, I'd known I'd be going home. It was time.
Now that I was finally heading there, I was a little nervous about seeing Brin again – and the whole thing about another me being with them the entire time was disconcerting – but despite all that, I couldn't wait. I would get to talk to them and hold them and laugh with them. I'd get to lie next to Brin and press myself against her. Just thinking about it made me realise how much I'd missed it.
We came off the motorway, and slowed down. We began to stop at lights, fitting into early evening traffic.
'What's going to happen to the Jigsaw Man?' I asked. 'I mean, you know, Men. Those three guys.'
Neither of them answered. Indeed, as had frequently happened in the past, they acted as though I hadn't spoken. As before, Agent Crosskill was staring at nothing, Agent No Name was looking at a report.
The car accelerated away from a set of lights and then quickly pulled up again. The driver, who was invisible to us, tapped on the glass behind the female Agent's head. She looked up from her report, as if disturbed from a very deep sleep.
'Right,' she said. 'We're on.'
She opened the door and stepped out onto the pavement. We were not far from my house, at the edge of the small residential area I recognised. I began to get out the car and she held her hand up.
'You stay there for a moment. You'll be getting changed.'
Crosskill started to get out of the other side of the car. I thought he was going to leave without saying goodbye, then he stopped and turned back.
'Hey, Mr Kite,' he said, 'how are you on early '70s classic American porn?'
I looked at him without answering. The question was so out of the blue and unexpected that I didn't know what to say.
'Well, the first biggie was Deep Throat, of course, but after that came The Devil In Miss Jones. A big movie. Genre defining.'
He paused, looking at me, waiting to see if he was going to get any sort of reaction.
He smiled a slightly twisted, cruel smile and then shrugged.
'Just a thought,' he said.
He got out of the car. That was it for Agent Crosskill and me.
The Devil In Miss Jones.
No, thank you, I didn't want to think about that.
The female agent had closed the door on me, then she returned a few moments later and tossed in a change of clothes. Clothes that I recognised from home. The weird thing was that they weren't new, as though they had my actual clothes, but they'd said they'd be getting clothes to match what the other me was wearing.
I changed in the back of the car, stuffing the clothes I removed into the small backpack I'd been carrying, then I stepped out of the car into a warm early spring evening on the edge of Bristol. She was standing talking to another two men when I emerged.
'Ditch the bag,' she said, turning back to me.
'Why?'
'You've just nipped out for something,' she said. 'Why d'you have a bag of clothes?'
I had no answer.
'If there's anything small you want to keep, stick it in your pockets. Otherwise, bag back in the car.'
I stood at the edge of the pavement thinking about it. The credit card was in a side pocket, but there was little point in keeping that. That aside, I had acquired nothing in the previous week or so that I cared to keep. I opened the car door and tossed in the bag.
'What now?'
'Walk with me,' she said.
She crossed the road without looking, as if she instinctively knew that no cars would dare approach while she was in the area. Her two new companions waited for me to follow her, and then they dropped in behind. There was a small park, a couple of people about, through which there was a shortcut to my house. Sometimes I took that path, and sometimes I didn't bother, since it was barely worth it.
'What's your name?' I asked. 'Agent Jones? Are you Jones?'
She glanced behind, slowed a little while holding my gaze, then said, 'Yes, that's correct.'
I slowed slightly. She didn't, so she pulled away again.
'Come on,' said one of the guys coming up behind me, and he indicated a man walking towards us across the path. Recognised him straight away. It was me, shoulders slightly hunched, staring at the ground looking for dog faeces, rather than looking at the trees or the sky. Wearing the same clothes I was wearing now.
There was another fellow in a suit trailing the other me; walking towards them there was Agent Jones, me, and two other guys in suits. Slowly the other me looked up, looked away again, but he was aware now of the peculiarity. Knowing that I'm not one to stare, I knew that I wouldn't immediately look at all these odd-looking people in suits and the bloke in the same clothes.
Eventually however, the other me looked up. He saw me. We were only about forty yards apart by now. He slowed down and then stopped.
Agent Jones approached him, and soon we were all bunched up. Me, myself, the agent and three guys in suits. I stared at myself. I was the only one of the two of us who had any idea what was going on, and even I wasn't that sure. I noticed the other guy looked a little scared.
I'd hoped that in that situation I'd have been much cooler. In reality, of course, I'm rarely cool.
'What?' was all he said, a question he directed at Agent Jones as it was obvious that she was the one in charge.
Maybe if you're a spy, maybe if you spend your time in Mission Impossible type situations, you might expect to come across yourself. You might even look out for it. But this poor sucker was the manager of a Starbucks on the outskirts of Bristol.
'You need to come with us,' said Agent Jones.
'Where?' he asked.
My voice sounded weak. I was disappointed in myself. Show some balls, I wanted to say. Poor sap never had any.
'Doesn't matter,' she said.
The other me turned and that was when he noticed the guy in a suit behind him. He looked around the park, wondering whether or not he should make a scene. It's what I would have done ten months earlier.
Agent Jones turned and gave a quick nod to the two guys who'd followed me up the path. In tandem they eased their suit jackets to the side to reveal the guns padding out their chests.
'You run, we shoot,' she said. 'You cry out, we shoot. You make a scene, we shoot. We're like that Alanis Morissette song You Learn, except we shoot. So don't try anything. We can cover our tracks with no problem whatsoever. We own everybody. Including you. You're coming with us.'
She looked at me and nodded, and I stood to the side. At a nudge from behind, and now looking very shaky, he walked by me, our eyes meeting. I recognised that guy, but I wasn't sure that I recognised myself anymore.
He'd shaved that morning, I'd shaved that morning. The similarities seemed to end there.
'What's happening?' he asked, his voice vulnerable and scared. As he passed her she reached inside his trouser pocket and took out the house keys. We always locked the front door, even when others were home. She stopped beside me, as the three guys in suits led him down the short path to the car.
'We'll see how we get on,' she said, handing me the keys. 'We might be back.'
She held my gaze for a while, and then turned and walked quickly after them.
'Agent Jones?' I said.
She did not turn. Perhaps she hadn't heard her name.
Down the path, across the road they went. I watched them all the way, as they headed for a black transit van. Nearly there, the guy looked over his shoulder at me. Our eyes met. He hesitated and received a nudge from one of the suits. He's going to run, I thought. It's what I would do.
He pushed the guy to his right out of the way and took off down the street. As he came alongside a black Mercedes, which was parked facing him, the front passenger door opened. He ran into it and went sprawling. Agent Crosskill got out of the car and stood over him as the three suits quickly caught up. A brief flurry and it was over.
Two of them hauled him up, led him back to the van, then pushed him inside. None of the others got in there with him. It must have b
een pretty secure, with no way of getting to the driver.
Agent Jones surveyed the scene for a while, wondering perhaps if this brief spectacle had been witnessed by anyone, did not bother looking back in my direction, and got into the car, which immediately drove away. Round a corner and the sound of it was quickly lost.
I stood in near silence for a while. Then I noticed the birds, the familiar sounds, which I hadn't been aware of before. I looked up and around the park. Dusk was falling, but the day was still warm. I'd missed much of it, but it had been one of those delicious, hot early summer days in May that promise so much more than is usually delivered.
I looked at the sky, a near cloudless dark blue. A few aeroplane contrails disappearing south. I looked at the grass and realised that it had been cut earlier in the day, and there was the smell, right there. The smell of freshly mown grass. I closed my eyes and breathed it in.
I was going home. I could forget the past ten-and-a-half months. I could forget the past week.
Smell the grass, feel the warmth.
I could hear knocking and looked down to the road. It was coming from the transit van. Knocking on the back door of the van. The other me had finally woken up and was trying to draw attention to himself. Knock, knock, knock.
Too late.
The van started up and quickly drove off, following the direction of the previous car. They were gone.
I turned and surveyed the park again. Didn't come here much now that Baggins wasn't a toddler anymore. But it reminded me of Baggins and those days of ice cream and Winnie the Pooh and grazed knees. When she was a toddler, she'd fall over, hurt herself, and get back up without so much as a whimper. My brave little girl.
Time to go home.
43
Brin was in the kitchen. Of everything that had happened – from getting off the plane to finding myself in that extraordinary elevator in the middle of Dubai, from going to the Stand Alone and then finding it had been closed for years, from Mr Pike Place Roast to the Jigsaw Man – this was the weirdest. Standing in my own kitchen, about to talk to my wife.
Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! Page 26
