Identity X

by Michelle Muckley

  “We’re being watched, so don’t try anything. Okay?” He nodded in agreement as he got up onto his feet. He regarded his wife with fresh eyes. Physically she looked the same, with her blond hair fixed in a twist behind her head. Her imposingly beautiful face somehow always appeared as if it was shrouded in silk, the only imperfections the palest blue eyes, the same colour as the oceans of Bali. There was a part of him that wanted to hold her and be held by her in the familiarity of an embrace. Yet there was something tangibly different about her today, and he felt the sharp corners of an edge that he had never detected before. There was something colder and focussed about her approach as she stood in front of him with her arms folded across her breasts.

  “Hannah, what is going on? What the hell is happening to me?” She motioned for him to sit down on the raised block of concrete lining the back wall, and he did so without question, never once taking his eyes off her. She stood in front of him, arms folded, pacing back and forth.

  “Ben, there are things going on that you have no idea about.” The sure as death hilarity of that statement made him want to grab her by the strained tendons in her neck, scream down her ear, and ask her if she thought he was stupid. He found the idea blended very well with his previous violent thoughts. How quickly a person can change, he thought, given the right stimuli. He sat patiently instead, staring at her and waiting for her to speak. “What do you remember last?”

  “We were at the underground station on Sixtieth.”

  “No, no”, she waved her arms in dismissal which for some reason settled him more than when she stood with them crossed. “Before today. You came home on Wednesday night. We drank some champagne. What next? Before that?”

  He scoured his mind for the minutiae of detail, the smallest recollection that may help him to understand. “I remember going to bed, you dragged me up the stairs. We were celebrating.”

  “You remember NEMREC?”

  “Yes, NEMREC.” He was quite surprised that she had remembered the name of the formula. She couldn’t usually. “After that I woke up today with no identity, Mark is trying to kill me, Ami is dead, and you,” he paused as he looked away from his wife, unable to hold her gaze. Had he looked at her, he would have seen a hint of guilt on her face. “I don’t even know what to say to you, because I have no idea what you are doing here, or what you want with me.”

  “What did Ami tell you?”

  “She told me that nothing is real. That you are not real. That you are not really my wife.” As soon as he said it, he wondered how she knew he had met Ami. Panic rose inside of him, bubbling up as if his blood had reached boiling point. Could it be that she knew Ami? More importantly, could she know that he had feelings for her? He decided it was best not to say anything in the interests of not incriminating himself further. Simultaneously he found himself clinging to the hope that she was not responsible for Ami’s death and the brutal acts that he had witnessed earlier.

  “I am your wife.”

  “But you don’t work as a secretary like I thought you did. I don’t know the truth about you, do I?”

  Hannah placed her hands on her hips and looked towards the ceiling of the small prison cell as she searched within the flat grey concrete for a way to explain the facts about a reality that she had hoped she would never have to face up to.

  “No, I am not a secretary, Ben. I work for the same branch of the government as Ami.”

  “You mean the OS, something,” and he trailed off unable to remember the name that Ami had told him.

  “You mean OSWED. Office of Scientific Weaponry Development.” He nodded in agreement. “Yes, that is where I work. I am your wife, but that is also part of my job.”

  “What do you mean, part of your job?” His offence was tangible, and its burden sat heavily on both of their shoulders.

  “My assignment was to marry you. My job was to shadow your life and know everything about you and do everything I had to do in order to ensure you were never far away from The Agency’s control. You worked for them too, you just didn’t realise it.” She knew what she was saying stung him. He couldn’t look at her.

  “That’s what Ami told me,” he whispered.

  “You were targeted, Ben. They believed that you were the only scientist that would make the theory work. They hijacked your life. The day you met me, that was just the beginning.”

  “You’re telling me that everything since I met you has been a lie?”

  “Not a lie. Engineered.” Gripped in a masochistic moment of silence, he recalled his memories for the last seven years of his life. He thought about their earliest days when they would while away time with no other company but their own, restaurants and bars, holidays and lazy days, all racing before his eyes like a movie playing on rewind. They felt real, and he thought of moments they had shared together when it was just them, and wondered if it was possible that everything about their lives was as fake as it was supposed to be.

  “All of the times that you said you loved me. All of the times that I held you in my arms. They meant nothing to you?” His words seemed frail, and came out heaped with shame and hurt at the depth of her deception. “Nothing at all?”

  Aware of the camera behind her, and of the eyes and ears that would surely be privy to their discussion, she was careful not to leave her personal feelings exposed. “It was my job to make you feel that we had a real life. It was how it had to be.” She didn’t want to confirm his beliefs, but she couldn’t find it in her heart to lie to him anymore either.

  “Every time we made love?” He was angry at her as she dragged their shared history through the mire and discredited his memories. It was hurtful and unfair. He couldn’t believe her. It couldn’t be true. “When we made our son?”

  Hannah looked away desperate for any detail in the otherwise monotonous grey of the wall to focus on, unable to look her husband in the eye. She wanted to tell him that she was sorry, that she didn’t want for it to be this way, and that’s why she was there, to help him. But nothing that she thought of seemed good enough or suitably poignant to express the profundity of her regret.

  “You have to focus on what is actually happening, Ben. We do not have the luxury of time.” Her refusal to discuss his pain felt as raw as the bullet wound to his arm. He wanted to rip the dressing off just to spite her, just in case she had been the one to dress his wound. He knew that they had their issues, and that their relationship had been under strain. But he could barely believe that there was nothing left between them, or indeed that perhaps there had never really been anything there at all.

  She couldn’t be that good at lying, could she?

  The love he felt for her was real, but with every passing moment of her refusal to acknowledge his hurt, shards of anger crept between every feeling he had ever felt.

  “Ami said that you tried to kill me. Is that true?”

  “Her real name was Amena. Yes, I drugged you.” She turned and looked at him straight in the eye, hoping that her words would seem truthful and would help make him see the gravity of his situation. She watched as his muscles tightened from his jaw through to his fingertips. She hoped that her own pain was hidden, and that it would fail to break through her thin veil of strength.

  “You drugged me with the champagne.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Mark? What has he got to do with it?”

  “He is my boss. He was Ami’s boss too. He gave the orders. He wants you dead, like you are supposed to be, and he will not stop until you are.” Two hours ago this would have seemed a ridiculous joke, but he had no doubts anymore that she was telling the truth.

  “Then why am I still alive?” She stood silently for a moment, as if contemplating her answer. There was so much that she could say, and that she wished to say, and yet the complexity of the situation prevented the revelation of truth. For a split second her lips parted and Ben expected her to answer. Her initial strength and authority had been weakened by his repeated questioning, and he could sens
e it. But suddenly her jaw locked shut, her lips closed and her shoulders backed up like the hooves of a stubborn mule.

  “Enough with the questions. I told you already there is no time for this. You have a choice Ben, but only one. As far as the world is concerned, you are already dead. Your bank accounts are closed, your identity card is void. There is no trace of the life that you lived anymore, you are now what we call Identity X. Don’t think that you are the first. You are just the first to survive. It’s over, Ben.” He sat motionless, his mind thinking back to the grey X that flashed up at the underground station when he used his identity card that morning. “I am your only chance, and I’m giving you only one option. I will say that you were shot. The men on my team, they will back me up. We will say that you were lost in the river.”

  “And where will I go?”

  “Initially to a safe house, and then in a couple of weeks I will move you.”

  “To where?”

  “That’s not important because you don’t have a choice. The only other option for you is to be turned in.”

  “Your job was to kill me. Why would you help me?” She walked towards the door, aware of the contradictory nature of her story. She held what looked like her identity card in her hand, and he noticed that it looked identical to the card that he had pulled from the pocket of the shooter. She swiped the card against the wall, where until now he had not noticed a small card reader like those in the underground station. The door buzzed and opened just a crack.

  “Don’t play me, Ben. One hour. Your choice.”

  “Hannah,” he pleaded as she half walked through the door, turning just before her body disappeared into the shadows of a world that he had already lost.

  “My name isn’t Hannah.” She turned and pulled the door shut behind her. He sat listening to the sound of her footsteps as they diminished into silence. He felt an overwhelming sense of regret for every stupid notion he had ever entertained for Ami. Because now, the woman that he truly loved, had been lost to him forever.

  ELEVEN

  Her final words to Ben as she left him behind in the cell were playing over and over in her mind, like the stylus of the tone arm stuck in a groove of an old long play record.

  My name is not Hannah.

  As she had listened to Ben regale his exuberant story on that miserable Wednesday night she had felt enlivened by every bit of his enthusiasm. She drank in his enthusiasm over the smell of his cologne, that somehow managed to stay sweet from morning until night. She had hoped that he wouldn't hear the telephone ringing at their sides as he explained their success. As she answered and heard the simple instructions, Phase One is activate, she knew that she didn't have much time. She cracked open the bottle of champagne and poured him a glass. She hadn’t been expecting it that night, but she was ready. She knew the moment he told her that he had done it that the telephone call was coming.

  She was certain that he hadn't seen the white powder as she tipped it into the flute, and she swirled it around with the smallest of her fingers, blending it into the bubbles. It was a time for celebration and pride in her wonderfully capable husband, and yet his exultant mood was matched only by her own desperation. Desperation that it would go to plan. She had scooped up Matthew as soon as Ben was asleep. As she passed the last step, she heard Ben wretch, and she took heart knowing that he had at least already been sick. She promised herself that she would deal with her guilt, that there would be a way for him to understand. He had to, because there was no other way.

  She left the house that night and reported to her base and her waiting team. She set Matthew down to sleep in a makeshift bed formed from several layers of blankets on the cold floor. Unable to sleep, she sat up drinking coffee throughout the night, watching the steady rise and fall of Matthews’s chest as he dreamt about the adventure that she had described to him, his legs twitching as he imagined the lies and mistruths he had believed. She should have slept but she couldn’t, such was her anticipation of the next twenty four hours.

  When she was given the assignment, Mark had made it seem so easy. He was the new Head of Operations of OSWED, and he was keen to make his position strong. He knew about Ben’s research and knew its value. Following his progress had been Mark’s first proposal to the board, and they had accepted the idea, such vultures that they were. Mark was smart, but his weakness in character left him susceptible to corruption, and as history would demonstrate, without loyalty.

  His first task was to prepare for Ben's future employment. The acquisition of Bionics materialised with such simplicity, and his early victory left quite an impression on the board. Acquiring the right company in order to employ and control Ben had been easy, but the real challenge, Mark had decided, was to control Ben’s whole life. To select a woman for him to fall in love with. The first two attempts had proven fruitless. They had equally demonstrated its necessity in the reactive emotional disturbance that had ensued when both relationships failed. Ben did not cope well with loss, each time reliving the death of his father and the painful betrayal of the disease in the years before he died. For weeks after Ben debated the relevance of his research and will to continue. The more Mark had heard about the possibility of Ben taking time out, it had only served to reignite his determination to find him a partner with which he could balance his life. If Ben had chosen to quit, forsaking his dreams and ambitions, how would Mark ever find the opportunity to recruit him into Bionics. It would really complicate things. This he had said would be the decisive factor. Hannah was the third attempt. From their first meeting it was obvious that Mark’s new recruit was perfect for the role. Ben was smitten.

  She arrived at the end of the cell corridor and looked to her team for an update.

  “Smith, where is he?” A champagne haired man who had the appearance of Scandinavian descent, looked up from his desk. His face was cast in shadow from the dimmed light of his computer screen.

  “He went back to headquarters after he found nothing at Twenty Second Street."

  “Good. What about the bodies?” She wanted to know what had happened to Amena’s body, and that of Agent Adamson, the shooter who had been following Ben.

  “Everything is clean, Ma’am.”

  She had been surprised to feel a faint rumbling of pride as she had approached Ben hovering over the lifeless body of an agent with a gun at his side. In fact, she wished she had got there moments earlier to witness it for herself. Phase One had been an all round disaster as far as the Agency was concerned, and a resounding success in her eyes, even though it had never been her plan for it to get that far. Ben was proving himself to be quite capable, and she wondered if subconsciously any of her influence had somehow been contagious. She liked to think so, but she doubted it. Her only regret was that he woke up too damn soon, and she told herself that she should have waited longer, especially after she heard him vomit before she had even left the house. She should have waited and given him the laced champagne later.

  It was an unfamiliar feeling, and not one that she found easy to admit to, but she had panicked a little after taking that call and had rushed to administer an antidote that would regurgitate any drug that Mark must have already given him. She had expected a day or so between the success of NEMREC and the activation of Phase One, but there had been little more than hours. He should have been lying 'dead' in his bed until the cleanup operation went in on the Friday, and this would have given her plenty of time to get him out. But when she took the call from Mark to say that ‘Phase Two’ had been activated, she knew something had gone wrong.

  Selling the idea of trying to save Ben to her team had been a risk. Going against the will of the Agency was a danger to them all, which she knew could result in the loss of all of their lives. If her plan failed she could try to take the blame, but they would all pay a price. Each of them carried a gun and the knowledge to use it. They too would have had to explain why their weapons had remained in their holsters. They had backed her, though, through loyalty or stupidity she
wasn’t sure, but together they had agreed to find him and provide him with an escape route.

  She sat down in front of the monitors and viewed the map of the city before her. There were five red lights blinking in the region of Twenty Second Street, and several others spread across the city as she zoomed out to get a full view. Their presence, one dot for each agent in the field told her that they were still looking for him.

  “Did you transfer his phone signal?” She looked to another of her agents working at a computer in front of her.

  “We have hooked it up to skip to different numbers. His signal will hijack different lines as people make calls. They won’t be able to track it. Not yet. But they will, if given enough time, and they will know where the hack came from. We don’t have long.”

  “How long?”

  “It skips to a new line every fifteen minutes. That should throw them off for a couple of hours. But I need to shut it down before then. They will see that it’s not real activity.”

  She sat back in her chair and sipped on a cup of sweet coffee whilst watching the stationary red lights as they blinked at her on the screen, every one of them baying for Ben’s blood. “I have given him an hour. It’s enough time.”

  She looked at the agents around her, each working against their given mission at her request. She wondered how it was that four people with their own lives would accept their new instructions so readily. Perhaps it was loyalty that made them agree to their new instruction. They were trained to be loyal and unquestioning, and to surrender all other aims than that of the company, and to them at least that’s what she represented. She always dictated their actions when on an assignment and when Mark remained at a distance.

  Why should today be so different?

  But today was the first time that she had exercised her own will. Today was the first time that she had really taken a decision. It was the riskiest day so far.