Rebound

by PJ Adams

  She didn’t judge him, though. She took it at face value.

  “Coffee. Maybe.” Then: “Okay, yes, coffee. But you have to accept that we’re not a thing.”

  “Definitely not a thing. Friends.” He’d take that. He’d take any tiny sliver, even though he wanted far more.

  Maybe she was right. He needed time to get his head straight, time to move past what had happened with Laura. But this thing with Sunita... Sometimes stuff happens and the timing might not be perfect but you just have to go for it. Last night. How could he not think that was worth pursuing, whatever the state of his mind?

  She smiled again, and in a moment of insight he realized that this was like that moment last night when he’d chased after her, desperate to reassure himself he hadn’t broken her with his clumsiness: this morning, she was desperately trying to make sure she hadn’t done any damage, too.

  “I tell you one thing, though,” he said, and for an instant she looked alarmed, worried at where he might be heading with this. “I’m going to need to get some clothes from somewhere. I think I ripped a few buttons off that shirt, and I don’t think we stopped to hang anything up to dry...”

  She tipped her head back, shaking her hair out, then fixed him with a look.

  “You do,” she said. “But not now. Not yet, at least.”

  For a moment he was confused, then she placed a hand against his chest, pushing him back down. Leaning over him, her hair cascaded down around his head, and her breasts squashed against his chest.

  He felt himself responding instantly, his hardening manhood dragging up against her hip.

  She kissed him. Swung a leg across, straddled him, and pressed down, softness against his hardness, wet labia nestling around his shaft.

  Started to rock her hips back and forward, working herself against him.

  Friends. That’s what she’d said.

  Just friends.

  Not a thing.

  Not. A. Thing.

  PART TWO

  A THING

  §

  12. Alex, now

  He called her again at the lab. It was nearly six, but if she was snowed under then she might still be there.

  Tasha picked up, said, “Sunita? No, sorry. Haven’t seen her most of the afternoon. Think she might have headed off early today.”

  “That’s not like her.”

  “No. But it’s Friday, you know?”

  He shouldn’t be concerned. He had no reason to be. He and Sunita didn’t have a thing going. She’d made that perfectly clear to him that morning last month when she’d lain beside him in bed, propped up on one elbow, that sad, wistful look on her beautiful face.

  They were friends. They met occasionally for coffee. They chatted on Skype and exchanged text messages and she was trying to get him to open a Facebook account so they could use Messenger, even though he didn’t see any reason to have yet another app to clutter up his phone and his mind. It was all about sharing, apparently, but he was not a natural sharer. And he liked to keep his life simple, and organized.

  This afternoon? She’d just forgotten, that was all. Trying to fit too much in to the end of her week.

  Anyway... they didn’t keep tabs on each other, he didn’t know her movements, her plans.

  Yes, she would more often be in the lab until nine rather than have gone by three, but as Tasha said, it was Friday. Normal people leave early on Fridays, sometimes.

  “How was the tour?” he asked.

  “The tour? Oh, Bowler? He’s a dick, but then that’s no surprise, you know? I don’t think he was comfortable that most of us here aren’t members of the Aryan super-race, but hey.”

  He wanted to dig further, but held back. Now wasn’t the time and, socially-retarded as he sometimes felt, he knew you didn’t just go digging into friends’ activities behind their back without good reason. You waited and spoke to them, like adults did.

  And you certainly didn’t give their friends something to gossip about by appearing too needy.

  He thanked Tasha, hung up, and tried not to dwell too much on the fact that Sunita had said nothing to him about Bowler’s visit. She’d had no reason to; she hadn’t even known Mitchell was involved with any of that until he’d mentioned it on the day of the event.

  He sent her a text message instead, asking if she fancied doing something over the weekend – maybe Sunday, as she’d mentioned a family thing on the Saturday. He didn’t know what to suggest, so left it vague; didn’t know what people did. He thought then of what it had been like with Laura, the kinds of things they had done together when they had time off, but instantly he felt that was wrong, not a benchmark anyone would think appropriate.

  And besides, he and Sunita didn’t have a thing. They were just friends, working out how to do whatever it was that friends did. Nothing more than that.

  §

  “This is going to sound irrational, and I fully expect you to tell me not to bother you, but I’m just a bit worried about someone, and it’s indirectly related to Bernard Bowler’s visit this afternoon.”

  He’d thought long about how to raise it with Professor Halliday, and even after all that consideration, this was the best he’d come up with.

  He’d been surprised Halliday was even still in his office at this time on a Friday to take the call, and he could just imagine the look on the professor’s face at Mitchell’s clumsy concerns at a time when most people would be in weekend mood.

  “Hmm?” The frustration was suppressed but still evident in Halliday’s tone, no doubt a carefully honed skill.

  “When Bowler was distracting us with those cloak and dagger games with his stand-in, he was actually on a private tour of the School of Biological Sciences, talking to people in Virology. Dr Sunita Chakravarti, to be specific. It’s almost certainly nothing, only I was due to see her this afternoon but she didn’t show, and now I can’t get hold of her, and I’m not sure what to do about it.”

  He fully expected Halliday to slap him down, tell him to stop being an idiot. He needed him to do that, needed a bit of sense and proportion knocking into him.

  Instead: “Chakravarti? Bowler was talking to Sunita?”

  Mitchell felt a switch flip over in his mind. It was one of those moments when everything changed, when you expect the cards to fall one way and they fall in entirely the opposite direction instead.

  Halliday knew Sunita – well enough to refer to her by first name. And while he seemed surprised that Bowler should have paid her a visit, he hadn’t simply dismissed it. He had paid attention, was now pausing, either thinking through implications or working out what he could safely say to Mitchell. Either way, the longer that silence drew itself out, the more certain Mitchell became that there was a whole layer to this he had been unaware of.

  “You know Sunita?” He hesitated, unsure how to phrase it. “The network knows her?”

  His training had kicked in: you never refer to the Company over an unsecured line.

  There was nothing he’d said already in this conversation that betrayed anything: it was known within the University’s management that Halliday, as PVC, had asked Mitchell to supervise Bowler’s visit and that Bowler had run rings round them, so it was natural for them to talk. Mention now of ‘the network’ gave nothing away, but they both knew Mitchell was referring to the Company.

  “We follow her work,” said Halliday. “Listen, Alex. I’m here for a while, why not swing by my office on your way home? We can talk some more.”

  §

  “Her research is classified. What she publishes in peer-reviewed journals is enough to satisfy her public profile as a promising young scientist, but no more.”

  Mitchell nodded, again confronting the oddity of talking in these terms with a man he had dismissed for the past two years as a stuffy academic who, if anything, had been left behind by the pace of change in his discipline and the world around him.

  What Halliday said made sense. Mitchell and Sunita had talked about her work, the tech
niques she was developing to synthesize cells that mimicked the behavior of white blood cells – an artificial immune system that could provide targeted protection. She’d once described it as a rapid response team, tailored to respond dynamically to new threats. One day her work might form the first line of defense against the threat of biological warfare – or terrorism.

  “Are you concerned?”

  Mitchell understood the question.

  Mostly, the Company dealt in evidence. Carefully gathered data. Sometimes, though, they had to be less specific than that. Sometimes it came down to an analyst’s awareness of increased levels of chatter on the social networks they were monitoring. Sometimes things just didn’t look right, or someone was behaving differently. These things that were hard to ever put a finger on weren’t so much intuition, as hard- won professional judgments that kicked in when actual evidence was scant.

  Mitchell nodded. “Yes. Concerned, but not alarmed.” Somewhere in the middle of that sliding scale of professional judgment.

  Halliday turned to his keyboard, and tapped away at the keys for a few seconds, then turned back to Mitchell. “She knows about you,” he said. “I told her, when the University started cropping up a little too often in intel chatter last month. Just in case anything kicked off and she needed somewhere to turn.”

  Mitchell stared.

  Sunita knew he was with the Company, but hadn’t said anything? He’d never suspected she played her cards so close to her chest, but then he hadn’t been aware she was under protection, either.

  He should have known not to underestimate her.

  His mind was racing. Reassessing, analyzing. Going back over conversations and kicking himself for not spotting even a hint that she was far better informed than he had realized. No wonder she hadn’t commented on his scars – she already knew he was a man familiar with violence.

  “Was she at risk? Was there a threat?”

  Halliday shook his head. “No more than you’d expect for someone in her position,” he said.

  In her position. Working on cutting edge technology in the world of terror, and counter- terror.

  “Bowler had already approached her,” Mitchell said now. “She told me. Not in as many words – she didn’t name him specifically – but it all makes sense now.”

  Halliday said nothing, the silence inviting Mitchell to go on.

  “We’ve been meeting for coffee. Talking a lot. She’s been a big help over the past few weeks.”

  “That hasn’t been overlooked,” said Halliday.

  That made sense. Surveillance was the flip-side of the kind of protection Sunita must have been under. Her every move would have been monitored.

  “Just friends, not a thing,” said Mitchell, far too defensively. His mantra. “She told me someone from one of the funding bodies had been calling her, thought she was onto something, was keen to meet. That must have been Bowler – he’s involved in that kind of thing. He must have used it to engineer this meeting with her today.”

  He was speculating, constructing his own narrative. His mind racing to work out any connection between Bowler’s persistence and Sunita’s sudden low profile.

  And only now did he hesitate, draw a breath, force himself to acknowledge the one possibility he’d been suppressing until now. That all this was simply his paranoia kicking in, another wave of the PTSD he’d battled ever since Istanbul.

  “Maybe it’s nothing,” he said, dipping his head, looking down at his fingers tangled together in his lap.

  All this... the abrupt call back into service for today, the adrenaline of being on the job again, the wind-down at the end of it all.

  There had been plenty to upset his delicate balance.

  “It’s Friday,” he went on. “She’s probably left work early to meet up with friends or family or something. She’s due in London tomorrow evening, I think. Maybe she went down there early.”

  “Perhaps, yes.”

  “I’m almost certainly over-reacting. I’m rusty.” He hesitated, about to go on and say his head was still fucked and that was hardly the basis for a sound professional assessment of a situation. A possible situation. He met Halliday’s look, and fell silent. The professor didn’t need any of that spelling out.

  “Go home, Alex. Do whatever it is you do to pull yourself together. You hear me? Do that. Leave this with me.”

  §

  Halliday called him into the office the next morning, and that’s when Mitchell began to fully realize just how important Sunita was to the Company.

  And that’s when he realized that his assessment was right.

  This wasn’t just a possible situation.

  It was a situation.

  After seeing Halliday late on the Friday afternoon, Mitchell had gone to the gym and then spent the evening with a Vietnamese takeaway and a movie on Netflix he barely paid attention to. His body ached from the workout, far more intense than usual, but it didn’t distract him enough.

  He couldn’t work out if he was reading his intuitions correctly or if this was some kind of over-reaction. Had he come to rely on Sunita too much, so that when she wasn’t around – without warning him – he panicked? Had he really become that... pathetic?

  But Sunita was a good, conscientious person. She would never simply fail to show when they’d arranged to meet. And even if he was pissing her off by getting too needy, she wouldn’t ignore his messages like this. Apart from anything else, she was too damned polite for that!

  The longer this went on, the more convinced he became that something out of the ordinary was happening.

  There could, of course, still be any number of perfectly normal explanations.

  She might be having problems with her phone.

  She might be traveling – he knew she had a family thing some time this weekend.

  She might even be dealing with some family crisis, a sick parent, a dying grandparent, anything. In an event like that, Friday afternoon coffee with Mitchell would be the last thing on her mind.

  And she might, of course, be feeling smothered by his attentions and have decided now was the time to make a stand.

  He had no right to expect her to respond quickly, after all. They were only friends.

  But no matter how much he tried to rationalize it away, he would never have expected her to not respond at all.

  After giving up on the Netflix movie, he slept. A training thing. Soldiers learn to take sleep where they can get it, be it a solid night’s sleep or a few minutes here and there. None of this tossing and turning, restless lark: you get the opportunity, you sleep.

  He woke early, though. Still dark outside, save for the street lights.

  No messages.

  Nothing until that call from Halliday just after nine.

  The professor wouldn’t give much information over the phone – sensible caution, but frustrating.

  Mitchell grabbed a coat, keys, his wallet and phone, and headed out. The morning was mild, the sky blue with only a drift of white cloud. Not a hint of the snowstorm of earlier in the week.

  He slung the coat over his shoulder without bothering to put it on, and walked, head down, to the bridge, turning off onto the path along the river that would take him to the Riverside Campus and then up through the park to Halliday’s office in Sherborne House.

  The University was like a ghost town today, but then he’d never been into the main buildings on a Saturday before.

  The outer office was empty, no secretary today. Mitchell pushed in through the open door, saw Halliday’s door was open too, and went through.

  Halliday stood at the window, looking out. He turned, and with no preamble said, “Dr Chakravarti left her laboratory shortly after three o’clock yesterday afternoon. She was seen getting into Bernard Bowler’s car around half an hour later. We have been unable to ascertain her movements between that point and now.”

  “And is that a cause for concern?”

  It was a genuine question. He knew Sunita’s work was cl
assified, and he knew Bernard Bowler was a fairly odious individual, but Sunita was a free person, and she had the right to voluntarily get into another adult’s car. Bowler was hardly an international drug-dealer or terrorist, as far as Mitchell knew. He could even entertain the argument that he should feel reassured by Halliday’s information.

  “Bowler is on the Watch List.”

  Scrub that. Mitchell didn’t need to know why Bowler was on the list, but simply knowing that he was a person of interest changed everything. Even if he wasn’t a high-flying drug-dealer or terrorist, he was in the same category in the Company’s eyes.

  A threat to national security.

  That would explain the security response when Bowler had visited the University the day before, regardless of whether there had actually been intel chatter about the visit or not: that kind of operation would be triggered everywhere he went if he was on the list.

  And now he had something to do with Sunita’s... if it wasn’t quite classified as a disappearance as yet, it was certainly an unexplained – and suspicious – absence.

  What had happened?

  It sounded like she had gone with Bowler voluntarily, but had she had any idea what she might be getting into?

  If her work was classified to the extent that the Company had set up a protection operation for her – albeit one that had singularly failed the first time it had been needed – then she would have been briefed about the risks, and about sensible precautions. She would have had channels of communication, and the expectation that she would report any activity outside what was normal.

  So why would she not have thought to at least mention this thing with Bernard Bowler?

  “We want you to go after her.”

  He was rusty. He was fragile and volatile. He had been out of the game for too long.

  But he still understood how it worked.

  He didn’t even have to ask, why him?

  They’d chosen him because he knew Sunita and she knew him, but also they’d chosen him specifically because he was a wild card, from outside the system. He was good enough to do whatever needed doing, but sometimes it went beyond that. They both knew that Company operatives were specifically given the responsibility of making assessments on the spot, and whoever was put on a job like this might end up taking action beyond what was strictly legal, and once that happened, the risk of things going wrong increased.