Identity X

by Michelle Muckley

  “He’s getting on that boat.” The agent looked at her as she spoke, knowing that he had no chance to arm himself, and no way out of the situation that allowed him to secure his prisoner.

  “You’re making a mistake, Catherine,” the final agent said. Instead of reaching for his gun, he took a step forwards towards her. He raised his hands in half-surrender. “If you leave on that boat, I will have to turn you in. I’ll give you some time, but I have to do it.”

  “I know you would have to.” Only a second passed after she had finished speaking before she unloaded a final round into his forehead, dropping the last of the agents. She felt the spray of blood on her skin from the close range hit. The body landed at her feet with a thud, and she turned to see Ben staggering to the ground, his arms raised up in a protective arc around his body. He watched as a pool of bright red blood, the purity of which was tainted only by lumps of flesh, formed underneath his head.

  “It’s time to move, Ben. Get yourself on the boat and wait for us.”

  “You shot them,” he said as she leaned down and pulled the keys from the top of Agent Smith’s bloody torso. It was the final kill that had surprised Ben. The agent had spoken to her as a friend, had offered her time to get away. He had known that there was no chance to control the situation, and instead had conceded his defeat to save his life, but she took it anyway. Ben knew she had done it for him.

  He watched his wife and the boatman as they pulled the first of the bodies along the ground towards the black van. “You shot them all,” he repeated in disbelief staring at the heaped up bodies which had fallen onto each other like a pile of old coats.

  She looked up at his stunned face as she grabbed a second body. “They would have killed you, Ben. As soon as I knew they weren’t with me, it meant they were against me. That changes a lot of things.” She horsed the first of the bodies into the back of the van and pushed it in like a butcher would manhandle a carcass of a pig ready for sale. “I had to kill them,” she justified, sensing his distrust. He stood back and surveyed as the man and woman team worked to drag the remaining three bodies across the ground, leaving tracks of blood and debris in their path.

  Ben watched as the duo spoke before looking back towards him. Then she walked over to him, wiping her hands on a rag that she had recovered from the back of the van, transferring red streaks as she moved it across her blood stained hands. He felt his muscles tighten as she approached. He thought about running, but where would he go? She stopped a few feet before him, hanging her head. She looked like a child whose delinquency had been exposed.

  “I’m sorry, Ben. I’m so very sorry.” He stood motionless, wondering how he could possibly find the words to answer. He wasn’t sure that the words he needed even existed. Not even the greatest of poets had ever managed to mould words to express such depth of feeling. He didn’t even know what her apology leaned towards: the lies, the capture, the drugging, the shooting, or the loss of his life and child?

  Take your pick, Ben, he thought to himself.

  “Hannah...” he said again, before realising his mistake. “Or should I say Catherine?”

  She raised a hand to stop him. She wanted to speak. In her mind she had everything ready that she wanted to say and to tell him. But everything was so well compartmentalised and secured, her secrets so deeply hidden, it was virtually impossible to find the key to unlock them. She barely knew herself what the truth was anymore.

  “Ben, I don’t even know where to begin, or how to explain everything to you. What I told you back at my old base, most of it was true. But I also kept things from you. I had to.”

  “You kept things from me? Just today? You mean like the fact you kill people. That you work for people who want me dead. The fact that Matthew isn’t ill.” There was more than a hint of sarcasm in his voice, and he looked away, ashamed of just how he had been duped. How easy it had been to pull the wool over his eyes. How easy it had been to lie to him for all these years. He suddenly felt very stupid as he stood there with his limbs shackled and splattered in blood. He wanted to spit at her, just to make her feel some of the shame that raged through him. Instead, he bit his lip and locked his fingers together.

  “I kept things from you because I wanted to save you. I wanted to avoid this.”

  “Avoid it?” He was momentarily distracted by the boatman who had by now finished shoving the last of the dead bodies into the van. She used the distraction to get closer to him. By the time he looked back was standing so close that he could feel her breath on his cheeks, see her hairs fluttering in the breeze. “You have been part of this whole thing. Since before we met you were part of this. You’ve been planning to kill me for years.”

  “No, I haven’t. The beginning is true. I work for them, and you began as an assignment. But I fell in love with you, Ben. You’re the most amazing man I have ever met.” She began to cry and he felt the urge to hold her and comfort her. But as soon as he moved his arms closer the image of her holding up the gun and firing at the agents pulled him back. She wiped her tears and smudged the blood splatters across her face. “For years now I knew that I wouldn’t go through with the operation. I was willing your work to take years and years, but you’re so brilliant you achieved where everybody had failed.”

  “I was trying to save people’s lives, Hannah.” It was all he could do to stop himself from crying, as he gulped down the painful lump that obstructed the back of his throat. “You were trying to destroy mine. You tried to kill me.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You drugged me! You admitted it, remember?”

  “But not to kill you. It was Mark that drugged you at the bar. I lied to you back at my old base because I knew that they were watching us, and listening. Mark drugged you. I gave you champagne that I spiked with something that would make you throw up, and something to make you sleep. My plan was to pick you up at our house after the effects wore off. I thought I had more time.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “You can believe me or not. It’s the truth. I never wanted to kill you. You’re Matthew’s father. How could I have ever looked him in the eye? I would never have turned you in, and I would kill them all over again if it meant getting you on that boat. It was my only chance to save you.”

  “But you didn’t save me. I don’t exist anymore, Hannah. I’m dead already.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I just killed my whole team. That pretty much means that I am dead too. Hannah Stone doesn’t exist anymore either.” She walked away towards the shore where she began to remove her clothes. She washed away the blood by splashing the cold water on her face. Then the boatman walked towards Ben, stopping just long enough to deliver his verdict.

  “She loves you, Ben.” He rested his hand onto Ben’s shoulder, cupping it affectionately. “She is telling you the truth, and she has just caused herself a whole world of problems to save your life.”

  “What am I supposed to believe?” Ben found himself confiding in the cordially faced stranger, searching for help from an unknown source. Perhaps that was the only thing that he could really trust after the events of the past two days.

  “Believe what you feel. She could have killed you already. More than once from what I understand. She didn’t, and she just floored four men in order to protect you. You know I am right.”

  “I don’t even know who you are. Why the hell should I believe you?”

  “I’m her father, Ben.” His father-in-law, a total stranger, offered him a warm smile, in which Ben found an unexpected level of comfort. He patted Ben’s shoulder before he walked off in Hannah’s direction. That’s when Ben caught a glimpse of his reflection in a window of the boat house. It revealed several spots of blood across his cheeks and forehead. He spat on his fingers, imagined that the spots were his wife’s face, and proceeded to rub frantically and angrily at Ami’s blood.

  THIRTEEN

  After a period of immobility and disbelief, he looked back at the
shore towards father and daughter as the boatman held out fresh clothes for her to wear. She dressed into a fresh clean polo neck sweater and readjusted her hair which had been disturbed in the process. After loading her handgun with a fresh magazine she stowed it back into its holster on the back of her hip. She loaded two bags into the boat and then walked back towards Ben. He was sitting on the rear steps of the boathouse.

  “Can I sit with you?” She pointed to the empty space on the step next. He continued to fiddle with the loose rocks that were resting at his feet. He shrugged his shoulders in a display of indifference, and she sat down, curling her knees up in front of her chest. To Ben it seemed to function only to put another barrier between them. Whilst he flat out refused to look at her, as obstinate as a teenager, he could feel that she was watching him. She held out a key for the shackles, and it was the token she needed to soften him up. He held out his hands and feet and she removed his restraints. He rubbed his wrists, angrily at first, a protest at the injustice of it all. But he couldn’t hide his gratitude for their removal, and eventually he cracked a light smile.

  “My name is Catherine Mulligan,” she began. “I was born in Cork, Ireland, and moved here when I was three years old for my father to work. He was an agent like me, but I grew up believing that he was an engineer, building bridges all over the world. I was sixteen years old when I discovered the truth, and it broke my heart. I wrote a school assignment on paper which I had taken from his desk and he went crazy, telling me that I couldn’t use the paper that he kept in his drawers. He made me rewrite it there and then, and afterwards he put the original in water and I watched the letters disappear. That’s when I first realised there were things in our life that I didn’t understand, and that didn’t make sense.

  “He sat me down afterwards, explained what he really did for a living. At first I was angry that he had lied to me. But then I decided I wanted to be like him.” Ben continued to wriggle his hands and feet about in a circular fashion, reigniting the flow of blood to his fingers and toes.

  “So what? You enrolled in a school for assassins?”

  “I joined a training programme, yes. You sign yourself over. No going back. Only one way out. You were my second assignment. I was twenty three, young, and naive. I thought that I could do it. I thought I could live with you and pretend to love you. But that was before I knew you. It was before I actually loved you.” Her eyes darted away. She twiddled with the button of her trousers, something she accepted as a pathetically comforting distraction.

  “And then what?” he asked in a calm moment.

  “I knew it was over, as far as the initial plan went. I couldn’t kill you. Then we had Matthew. I kept the pregnancy from them for the first five months. I only told them when I thought that they wouldn’t make me abort the baby. That’s why I never wanted us to tell anybody about the pregnancy.”

  “I believed you when you told me that it was hard for you because your mother died when you were young. I tried to support you and all the time you were lying.” He closed his eyes for a moment turning his head away, thinking of all the times that he had wanted to celebrate the imminent arrival of his child, and how he had worried so much for his expectant wife and her emotional state as she had wrestled with the memories of the loss of a parent. He thought of his father, and it reminded him of his research. When he opened his eyes she was looking at him again, and he felt the waves of hatred roll in, hating her more in that moment than he had ever before as he thought about the many lies she had spun him. He felt like such a fool.

  “I know you supported me. But it’s not all lies. My mother really did die when I was young. It was hard for me. I was scared for our baby. In the end I told the Agency that I got pregnant on purpose because you wanted to leave me.”

  “I never wanted to leave you.”

  “I know, but it was a way to make them accept it, because secretly I was so happy we were going to have Matthew.” She reached out for his hands but she realised as soon as her skin touched his that she couldn’t feel the same familiar spark that was always there before. Even in the bad times when they drove each other nuts and when she wished he would just disappear for a while, she still felt it. Now he felt like a stranger, that first date awkwardness when nobody knows if touching is allowed. There was no response, no minute muscle twitch or movement towards the stimuli of her skin. She pulled away, terrified to feel the nothingness between them. She took some breaths and counted in her head. She got to five and then carried on. “After that, I formed links with people. People that could help me. People I found who thought the same way that I did.”

  “Which is what?”

  “That sometimes their way,” she paused as if only to add time for confirmation, “isn’t necessarily the right way.” They looked at each other, searching each other’s faces for a sign; Ben for truth, Hannah for forgiveness.

  “Hannah, where is our son?”

  “He’s at Headquarters. I was really hoping that you would have got on that boat.” She smiled, half heartedly. “You kind of messed up the plan.”

  “I would have got on the boat. It was your own men that messed up your plan.” She nodded in solemn agreement. He was surprised to feel sympathetic towards her as he began to believe in her explanation. “Fortunately for me, it seems that I married a woman who is pretty sharp with a gun. My father-in-law seems pretty handy, too,” he joked as he nudged her shoulder with his own. “Thanks for saving my life.”

  “I didn’t save it yet. You’re still here. You’re still dead, remember?” She looked at him, her face stone cold serious, with a determination that he had never seen before as she reached up to place her hand against his cheek. He didn’t stop her. “But I will.”

  As they walked towards the boat that was moored on the opposite side of the boathouse, Hannah’s father handed her a set of keys, and pressed her hand shut. They stared at each other, telepathic words exchanged with nothing more than a look. She nodded and tucked them into her trouser pocket before she turned back to Ben. Ben felt like a stranger, somebody who didn’t belong, as if he had been eavesdropping and now had to promise never to tell their secrets.

  “Ben, it might be a bit late for this, but this is my father.” Ben automatically held out his hand, and the boatman took it with wholehearted warmth that gave Ben a sense of reassurance. His handshake was firm and laconic.

  “Ben, she’s a good girl. She did what she had to. Now it’s your turn to do the same. She has risked her own life and that of Matthew in order to get you out. Trust her. She won’t fail you.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ben said, feeling eighteen years old again. “Aren’t you supposed to tell me to look after her?”

  “Son, you’ve seen her handle this piece,” he said as he tapped the gun that sat on her hip. “She can take care of herself alright. Just back her up by doing as she says.” The boatman reached down and produced another identical gun, placing it into Ben’s palm. “I heard you’re not too bad a shot yourself.” Ben wondered in how many situations the first time you meet the father of your wife an exchange regarding the positive nature of how you had killed a man earlier on in the day would be deemed acceptable. Positive even. The boatman reached a strap around Ben’s waist, and helped him adjust the firearm into the newly positioned holster. “Best just to sit it here,” he said as he shuffled it into the same rear facing position that mirrored Hannah’s. “It’ll be more comfortable if you have to run.”

  Ben stepped onto the boat, a small white vessel no longer than a few meters in length and with rounded sides that made it look like an inflatable dinghy. In the middle of the boat stood a small pillar which housed the throttle and steering wheel, and an array of gauges that he had no idea how to read or handle. He waited as Hannah held her father in her embrace, before she too stepped onto the boat, rocking its balance as she did so. Ben should have realised that it would be the last time that she would ever see him, but the thought didn’t even cross his mind.

  “Ben, tak
e those bags from there,” she said, and she pointed to the two rucksacks that she had thrown in a few moments before. He picked up the first, which was light. The flap was open slightly, and inside he could see pieces of fruit abutted up against a flask of something he desperately hoped was hot and caffeine rich. The second bag was heavy, and as he moved it the contents inside fell around, ringing out the sound of metal on top of metal. “Careful with that one. Place them both in the compartment over there. We don’t want them wet.” He lifted the lid of the box that she pointed to and did as he was told. Placing the lid back onto the box, he sat down and waited for her next instruction.

  He was surprised by her expert control of the boat, manoeuvring it out onto the still water, which until disturbed bore a resemblance to the finest silk imprinted with the reflection of trees from above. She pulled a small black box from her pocket and threw it overboard. He didn’t ask what it was.

  He wondered how it was that he had made such a mistake when it came to his impression of his wife. How could it have transpired that their relationship was so complex? How could she have fooled him for as many years as she did? In the recent years he had come to regard her difficult, even whiney at times, desperately on occasion seeking his attention and approval. This woman that stood before him with the boat steering wheel in one hand and the throttle in the other was anything but needy. In fact, it was only because of her, her courage and her quick fingered willingness when it came to a trigger of a gun that he was still alive. She didn’t once look back to her father, who was already walking away from the water’s edge and back to the black van which held four dead bodies. Ben didn’t know what he was planning to do with them. Bury them? Burn them? Whatever it was, it had been arranged. On the spur of the moment when it had come to killing four people Hannah had thought nothing of it, and four dead bodies in the back of a van appeared to prove nothing more than an inconvenience. He had no idea which side Hannah was really on, or her father. But for now he had to assume that whatever side it was, they were on it together.