Rebound

by PJ Adams

  Contents

  REBOUND

  Afters: about the author, and hot samples from other books

  Credits and copyright information

  Join the PJ Adams mailing list and get future releases for $0.99.

  REBOUND

  The past... it will always catch up with you in the end.

  PJ Adams

  Prologue, a month earlier

  She couldn’t afford to let things get complicated. Not now, with everything about to kick off. She couldn’t afford the distraction.

  But still, she lingered when she saw him in the park. He cut such a lonely figure, sitting by himself on a bench beneath a cluster of tall, dark evergreen oaks on a slope above the lake.

  In the middle of February.

  Who in their right mind eats lunch outside in the depths of winter?

  She’d come here to get away from a series of dull meetings on the main part of the town- center campus. She hated the University’s internal politics. Too much posturing and point-scoring. Too many people taking far too long to achieve very little.

  She needed to clear her head.

  Maybe that was why he’d come here, too, why he was sitting in the park with his lunch in the middle of February. Just to get away from it all and clear his head.

  “Hey, Alex,” she said, stopping before his bench. For sure, he had the kind of broken good looks that appealed to her, and a spark of something different in his eyes, but Alex Mitchell did not look like the kind of man who was about to change her life forever.

  Sometimes it’s not so much a person as an act, though, a simple choice that leads you down one route rather than any other.

  He glanced up, then, and for a moment she saw a flash of irritation at the interruption of his solitude. Then his face was transformed by a smile and he said, “Dr Chakravarti, hi.”

  “Sunita.”

  “Sunita.”

  What was it that shifted a normal silence into one that was awkward?

  Awareness, she decided, answering her own question. Awareness that there was a pause, that it was lasting too long, that you were starting to over-think it, debating who should break that silence and how.

  She pulled her leather jacket tight against the cold, unsure of the answers to those questions, then deciding to leap in, regardless.

  “You want to get coffee?” she asked. “You look fucking freezing.”

  One simple, impulse decision, and from that point on everything would change.

  PART ONE

  NOT A THING

  §

  1. Alex, Wednesday morning, a month later

  Alex Mitchell leaned back in his office chair, tapping his fingernails on his teeth.

  Professor Halliday. Why would someone like Halliday want to see him? The appointment had just appeared in his online diary. Tomorrow afternoon, in Halliday’s office over in Sherborne House. No explanation, no accompanying notes, just ‘consultation’. Bridget or Maggie must have added it to his schedule.

  Halliday was Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research. That wasn’t Mitchell’s area at all, but as Deputy Head of Systems Administration he often got drawn into all kinds of odd areas of the University.

  It would be some new research scheme that required a spot of financial juggling, no doubt. Something that required supporting systems, a new database requirement – probably with no additional budget, so Halliday would be hoping they could squeeze whatever he needed out of existing infrastructure. Halliday had a reputation for pulling strings and calling in favors, even where they didn’t exist – anything that would get him what he wanted without paying.

  It was bound to be something like that.

  No need to be worried. He hadn’t done anything wrong. Nobody had anything on him.

  And why was he even thinking like that? Halliday was nothing, just an anonymous academic in a provincial university. It was hard for Mitchell to shake the old ways off completely though, the instinctive suspicion of those in power, of any deviation in routine. The paranoia still haunted him.

  He glanced at the middle drawer to his right. He didn’t need to open it.

  He could picture it: the drawer sliding open, the neatly arranged papers and pens and Post-it pads. The SIG Sauer P229. Slim, ergonomic design with the E2 grip. Compact enough to conceal easily, but it still packed enough punch to take someone out at 50 meters if you were a good enough shot. And he was.

  The handgun was part of a previous life.

  One of the few parts Alex Mitchell had carried forward into this life.

  Insurance.

  Peace of mind.

  He visualized the drawer sliding closed, mentally trying to put it all away. Lock up the past. Move on.

  That’s what they’d taught him to do when he came out of the Service.

  He knew his head was in a bad way when he found himself thinking like this, responses that were inappropriate to normal life.

  Voices drifted up from outside, students protesting, chanting their slogans over and over, the words unintelligible. They were still young enough to think they could change the world, not to have come to understand the limits of democracy and protest, the impotence of the ordinary Joe in the street. It was people like Alex who changed the world. People like the former Alex, at least.

  He closed his eyes, and breathed deep. Moved on.

  §

  He reached for his mouse and dismissed the appointment dialogue box from his screen.

  There was always something soothing about the sound of protesting students. The rhythmic rise and fall of voices brought to mind something you’d see on the National Geographic channel, something tribal, something shamanistic.

  He leaned back again and peered out of the window.

  There were about thirty of them out in the square, with a few limp banners and home-made placards. No doubt they’d carefully crop the photos for Facebook to make it look like more.

  SAUSU says NO to Bowler

  NO PLATFORM FOR HATE

  And there was even a Black And White Unite And Fight!!!

  Mitchell smiled. You had to admire the naive energy of youth, even as you patronized and dismissed them.

  He went to the connecting door between his room and Sys Admin’s general office, leaned through and said, “Hey, Maggie. What’s all the noise about?” And then as an afterthought: “And who the fuck’s this Bowler?” In his head he couldn’t shake the thought that it was something to do with cricket.

  He smiled disarmingly. Maggie was prim and fifty-something and disapproved of his language, but he knew she found it hard to resist his charm. The others in this office, Bridget, Sue, and Lola, were younger, and would give as good as they got, but he knew how to charm them, too. He’d overheard them once describing him as their collective bit of rough, and had played on it ever since.

  Now, Maggie frowned, then smiled, then shrugged, and said, “It’s the Students’ Union. The Politics Society invited Bernard Bowler to speak and SAUSU don’t think he should be allowed here.” SAUSU: the South Anglia University Student Union. Pronounced, somewhat creatively, as Swazoo.

  Bowler. The name clicked. Until recently he’d been an anonymous millionaire businessman, one of those names you recognized without ever quite being able to say what he did. In the last year or so he’d had a raised profile, holding populist rallies under the Way Forward banner and somehow managing to be highly political without ever allying himself to a particular party or movement. The kind of man who could simultaneously be charmingly smooth and a vicious thug, and a regular on all the chat shows and reality channels. One of his critics had once famously said Bowler could charm the bollocks off a bulldog, and instead of taking that as the insult intended he used it almost as a slogan.

  Mitchell nodded. He’d hoped it would be a bit mor
e interesting than that.

  He ducked back into his office, remembering he had an eleven o’clock with Patsy Donald in MIS.

  2. Alex, a month earlier

  Lunchtime. Alex Mitchell bought a ciabatta with Parma ham, mozzarella, and basil from the deli and went to eat it in the town park.

  The day was cold and gray, as you might expect for the time of year, and the only people here hurried past with their coats pulled tight, their heads down. Mitchell didn’t mind the cold. He came here for the solitude: even though it was in the center of town you could be alone here. Unless someone cutting between university buildings spotted you and broke the peace, of course.

  Most of the time Mitchell appreciated having people around him. He liked the Sys Admin office, with never fewer than three or four people there, the voices on the phones, the looks passed across the room, the running jokes and the teasing and flirting. Save for a few sociopaths, he liked the University’s departmental administrators, the academics, the management, too. He even liked the students, for god’s sake. He needed people around him.

  Isolation could tear you apart.

  But solitude was different to isolation. Solitude was space for your mind to work. Solitude was freedom from social clutter. Solitude let you drop the mental guards.

  He was shaking.

  The cold. The gray miserable February cold.

  Nothing more than that.

  He pulled his jacket tight. Should have brought his big winter coat.

  He reached for his jacket again, fumbling in an outer pocket for the card Laura had left on the breakfast bar for him this morning. As he took it out, he eased the envelope open with fingers stiff from the cold.

  A big pink heart on the front. Together forever, it said inside the card, followed by a big, scrawled ‘L’. When he got back he would stand it by the photo of Laura on his desk.

  Valentine’s Day. He’d left out a red rose in an old wine bottle for her to breakfast by, their morning as unsynchronized as ever.

  A squirrel ran across the path, paused to look at him, then darted up and into a bin.

  He slipped his phone’s earpieces in. “Call Laura,” he said, and listened to the mobile tone-dialing her number. She’d be at work now, over at the General Hospital. She’d be cross with him for calling her mobile when she was working, but if it bugged her that much why did she never turn it off?

  “Mitch.”

  That was her irritated tone. Cautious, as if she already sensed he was fragile.

  “Lau,” he said. “Happy Valentine’s.”

  “You too,” she said, softening. “You okay?”

  She knew him too well, knew the inflections of his voice.

  “I’m fine,” he said, and he knew she could tell he was teetering. Hands deep in his jacket against the cold, his right hand was folded around the textured polymer grip of his P229.

  Would he ever leave this paranoia behind? Would he ever accept that he had left that world for good? He’d done his time, served his country, and come out the other side.

  “You still okay for tonight?” he added.

  “Of course I’m okay for tonight, you arse,” Laura said. “It’s bloody Valentine’s, isn’t it?”

  He smiled at that. “Yeah, bloody Valentine’s,” he agreed. She sounded so very prim and proper, so English, even when she swore.

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “I am,” he said, and cut the line. He was bloody freezing.

  §

  He hadn’t noticed her approaching. Sunita Chakravarti.

  That in itself was unusual. Even on a good day his nerves were fine-tuned, and his guard never dropped.

  And on a day like this, when for some reason everything seemed to be getting to him and he was reminded of the worst days that should have been long behind him by now, even a damned squirrel could set him on edge.

  He became aware of her, looked up, took a second to over-ride his initial surprise at her presence, and then smiled. Sunita was one of the good ones.

  They exchanged a bit of small talk, and then she made an observation that was undeniable: “You look fucking freezing.”

  They walked down through the park toward the river, speaking of Sunita’s meetings.

  “I never expected this,” she said, glancing sidelong at him as they approached the University’s Riverside Campus. “A life of cutting edge research, I thought. Not days filled with meetings about research scholarships and postgrad career development paths.”

  “You’re doing it wrong,” Mitchell told her, waiting for her to hold his look, make that little pursing of the lips thing that was sometimes accompanied by an arch of the eyebrow that meant she was waiting for him to explain. “You give a shit. You turn up for meetings on time. You pay attention.”

  He’d sat across tables from her at enough meetings to know she was one of the ones who actually took the trouble to read the papers beforehand and follow what was going on during the meeting. He appreciated that, as the kind of meetings Mitchell organized were usually about things most people couldn’t care less about. But universities ran on committees, and anyone who helped ease that was an asset in his working life.

  “You do that,” he concluded, “and you end up getting volunteered for all kinds of things.”

  There was more, too, which he’d forgotten until that moment of the slightly pursed lips.

  Sunita Chakravarti had a way about her. An intensity. Even across a packed meeting table, she could fix you with those dark eyes and you would be transfixed. A flick of the tip of her tongue, moistening her lips, and you hung on whatever she was about to say.

  Maybe a part of it was just him. Something about her that affected him this way. It wasn’t beyond him to be shallow when a beautiful woman was involved.

  But she definitely had an air of someone who got things done.

  A short time later, as they sat in the University’s Coffee House, he was reminded of this as those dark eyes fixed on him, the tip of the tongue flicked.

  He’d missed what she said, so now he shrugged apologetically, gave his usually-disarming smile, and said, “Sorry, what was that? What was it you wanted?” Too blunt, too direct, but too late to retract.

  “What makes you think I want something?”

  “Sorry,” he said, raising his hands, palms outward, in defense. “Automatic response. People don’t usually buy me coffee unless they want something in this place.”

  She shook her head. “I was walking through the park. I saw you. I remembered chatting with you after the last Progression Review meeting last week. And you looked really cold just now.”

  He took another drink of his coffee, allowing himself to relax a little. He’d been in such a paranoid mood all day, and he knew it wasn’t healthy. He shouldn’t be so suspicious.

  That could have been the end of it. Nothing to feel bad about. Just a chat with a colleague, a sharing of gossip about mutual acquaintances and a bit of university politics. Only a few moments to trigger guilt: a look here or there, an acknowledgment that at least part of his response to Dr Chakravarti was because she was so easy on the eye, and you can hardly help those responses, after all – it’s what you do about them that matters.

  But then... Just a moment, an innocent moment when the light slanted in through the big windows, making her skin appear to briefly glow. A glint of the diamond stud in her nose as she dabbed at a bit of froth on her lower lip with the little finger of her left hand.

  What was it about that moment that stripped away all the layers of pretense, of decent, very English and proper politeness?

  Whatever it was, as their eyes met and they both opened their mouths to speak, then remained silent, Mitchell knew this had become more than just a casual coffee with a colleague.

  He broke the look first.

  He didn’t need this.

  He didn’t need complications, and he didn’t need to be put in a place where he was examining his own life.

  He didn’t need t
o have his head suddenly spinning like this, the sudden comprehension that this innocent coffee encounter was, in fact, a dance, a courtship dance like on one of those David Attenborough shows, brightly colored birds strutting around each other in ever-decreasing circles.

  “I’m in a relationship,” he said.

  You had to be really sure of a situation to say something like that out loud. If he’d misjudged the moment it would sound so crass, so arrogant, the underlying assumption that something was there when it was not.

  That she didn’t contradict him confirmed his certainty.

  This time it was Sunita who broke the renewed look. She turned her eyes to the side, licked her lips, dipped her head slightly to take a sip from her coffee, and Mitchell tried not to notice how this emphasized the elegant lines where her neck joined her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t intend...”

  “It’s fine. Another planet, another life.”

  “But not in this one. It’s okay: you’re safe with me.”

  He shrugged, cracked that winning smile.

  It was just a moment, that was all.

  Just a bit of chat.

  Nothing more.

  §

  “–beyond Liaoning and Jilin provinces in north-eastern China. United Nations medical teams policing the quarantine zones along the border with North Korea are optimistic. Spokesperson Hu Jiang told a press conference this–”

  Alex Mitchell fumbled with the alarm, hit the snooze button, and the radio fell silent again. He rolled over into the space where Laura had been. The sheets were still warm, and the memory-foam mattress still bore her imprint, her scent.

  Sounds came from downstairs, a rush of water in the pipes, a chink of crockery, a cupboard door closing.

  §

  The front door thudded shut. A pause, and then the radio started again, a story about police raids on human traffickers, something to do with the case a few weeks ago where seventeen Syrians had been found dead in the back of a truck at Portsmouth docks.