Dead Of Night
Shelton was at his desk when the report came in from the field team. Alex had escaped. They had missed him by a short margin, an hour at most. It was further evidence to Shelton that Alex was something special and not just because of his other abilities. Even so, his admiration for the boy was tempered by his anger at failing to get him back. He had listened to the report with an outward calm that belied his inner feelings, his fingers playing with the Mont Blanc pen in his hand, twirling the slim, elegant instrument in his dust dry palm. The pen now lay, snapped in two at the foot of a chair across the office, ink leaking out of its cracked body.
He had hoped that capturing Alex would be easy. The boy was not a Technician, although he would have become one eventually, there was no way he should have been able to elude capture for an hour, let alone twenty four. Shelton sighed, it was a moot point, Alex should not have been able to get off the island in the first place. He was fit, healthy, strong. He could fire a gun, was in fact a damn fine shot, but he had no experience in field operations, was naive of all things to do with the nature of The Clinic’s business. Or had been, he corrected himself, but even learning of that did not a Technician make, so how was he able to avoid skilled, trained operatives the way he had. Being allowed to escape at the bus terminal was bad enough, but anyone can be lucky once in their life. What was more impressive, and most annoying was his anticipation of the field team at the woman’s house. They hadn’t missed him by much, just enough.
How much of his ability had been inherited from his father remained to be seen. Peter had been a fine Technician, one of the best. If any of his skills had rubbed off on the boy… But then, when it had been time to get rid of Peter, he had not seen it coming. He hadn’t been the man he was, his precious wife had softened him too much. It had been another reason to add to the real one for getting rid of her once Alex was born. He hadn’t expected Peter to go off the deep end the way he had, although it had been fortuitous. It allowed Shelton to proceed with Alex without hindrance. By the time the elder Rappaport recovered enough to be of use to Shelton, he had run out of any need for him. He had become a nuisance.
In the end it had been easy. The job a set up and Rappaport had fallen obliviously into the trap. The irony was he had used Alex to lure him to his death. The boy was five years old and liked to play games, as any child his age should. He loved the card games, telling Shelton whether it was a circle or a wave or a cross he was holding without having to look at it. And he loved to draw. Pictures of houses or trees, in fact whatever it was that he saw in other people’s heads, people Shelton had brought in especially for such games. Long before the boy’s fifth birthday, Shelton had seen the need for the serum he had developed to counter his charge’s precocious talent.
The models made from Alex’s descriptions were extraordinary in their detail, down even to chippings of stone, cracks in plaster, the smoothness of steps that had seen the passage of many feet. Details that could mean the difference between success or failure of a mission, differences that could be life or death.
The model of the estate where Peter Rappaport met his death was exquisite in its accuracy. The only thing Alex could not possibly know was that the supposed target was dead before his father even left the island. The bomb shredded Peter Rappaport’s body while destroying the beautiful, Mediterranean style villa in spectacular fashion. The entire left wing of the two storey house evaporated, glass, slate and brick arcing hundreds of feet through the estate, peppering palm fronds, skinning bark from trees. The twisted metal of the golf cart that had been parked outside gouged a deep trench in the perfect lawns cart wheeling through the air before coming to rest against the broken spine of a young sapling.
The torn limbs of Peter’s broken body were stripped of their flesh, the skin boiling away in the intense heat of the blast. What was left was unrecognisable as human according to reports later.
Alex cried when Shelton told him his daddy was dead, but children are strong, resilient and over time, Alex began to stop thinking about his father, to stop asking questions about him. Shelton adopted him. There was no need, the outside world was unaware of his existence, but Shelton wanted to. After all, he considered himself to be the child’s real father. He made him what he was and that gave him certain rights. He owned Alex. Alex belonged to him. And now, Alex was trying to deny his ancestry, and it could not be allowed. He had plans for Alex, plans that reached beyond being just another Technician and if he couldn’t get him back… He could feel anger bubbling inside him again, the seething, roiling waters of his rage threatened to eclipse him in a tidal wave of fury. Alex had to come back, there was no other option, regardless of what he had told Elwes, it was meaningless, he had to have Alex back.
Three o’clock in the morning. It was the worst time of any day. The body’s natural defence mechanism, sleep, was designed to carry a person through the hollow, soulless depths of night, to shepherd a person through the dark waters of dreams and nightmares, avoiding the tidal ebbs and flows of worries and fears, to sail past the sucking whirlpools of anxiety that can haunt even the deepest sleeper.
To be awake at that Godless hour is to know a despair that sinks cold teeth into the bones of reality, to feel the creeping, insidious dread caused only by the black pits of the night and what they may hold. It is the best time of night to strike.
It should have been when the field team had taken Alex. Ricci and Borkan stood in the gardens of Madeleine’s property, silent, unmoving, each lost in the same thoughts, knowing that a real chance had escaped. Alex would be more aware, more alert than before. He had been on the run for twenty-seven hours now. Had he slept in that time? If so, it could not have been for long. His nerves would be ragged, his energy low, adrenaline and fear would sap his energy the way headlights left on on a parked car would drain a battery. At three o’clock this morning, there should have been barely enough juice left to start his engine. The field team should have waited.
They traced the paths made by the six men before them. In the house, they searched, looking for clues, finding nothing but Alex’s clothes, still slightly damp in the tumble dryer.
A check had been made on the owner of the house. Nothing. Madeleine Whyte was an ordinary woman who lived an ordinary life. The only thing in her past that separated her from the ordinary was a dead husband who had his own business, a business that once completed a contract for a government department, a hidden, secret department. There had been nothing to substantiate a belief that Douglas Whyte even knew of the existence of that department, despite having worked for them, hidden as it was beneath an elaborate construction of cover identities. Even his death at the controls of his private aircraft was nothing more than an unfortunate accident.
With his death, the business died, sold off by the estate’s executors for the best price, leaving the widowed Mrs. Whyte with a comfortable existence. And there her history ended. Until now.
“Why?” Ricci spoke.
“Why what?”
“Why help him?”
Borkan shrugged.
“Would you have? Think about it. A total stranger appears out of nowhere, forces his way into your car. What would you do?”
“Maybe he threatened her,” Borkan surmised.
“Not according to the guys on his tail.”
“Who were outside the car and not close enough to hear what he might have said, if they had been, we wouldn’t be here now.”
“It still doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe it doesn’t have to.”
Ricci fixed him with a glance.
“Maybe Alex can do things we don’t know about, have you thought about that?” Borkan dropped the laundry to the floor, heading for the garden and the neighbouring house.
“What, made her do it, against her will? Fucked with her brain?”
“It’s possible,” they passed through the trees. “She may not know what she’s doing.” Chew on that for a while, Borkan thought. It might even be true. He doubted it, but who knew, Shelton? He doubted that to. He wanted him alive and would not have withheld that sort of information from them. But who really knew what Alex was capable of?
The bodies had been removed. The one inside the house had staggered out under his own power, head throbbing painfully, breathing through his mouth, holding his slack jaw tenderly, bones clicking and scrapping agonisingly with every step. His nose, mashed to a bloody pulp by the barrel of the shotgun, was clogged with dried blood and swollen to twice normal size. A car was waiting for him.
The second Tech had not been so lucky. Borkan studied the pool of blood soaking into the gravel. He was going to lose the leg, everyone knew it except the man himself, who was, luckily, still unconscious.
Black paint had left an ugly smear along the rough hewn stone of the pillar, the stone itself smoothed by the passage of the car. The BMW would be found soon, but neither Ricci nor Borkan expected to find Alex with the car. Borkan’s admiration for Alex was growing by the second. He was adding to an ever growing list of accomplishments and each one would make him that much more capable. Would allow him to trust a little more in his own abilities, gain confidence. They would find him, he was in no doubt about that. But it was not going to be as easy as they first believed.
Holly’s sleep was disturbed by dreams. She tossed and turned, legs tangling in the sheets, waking, dozing, waking again. Finally she sat up. The red eyes of the clock stared at her from the corner of the room. Three o’clock. She would get no more sleep this night. She reached for the cigarettes on the night table, fingers closing around the packet and the lighter resting on top of it. She drew a cigarette and put it between her lips, the glow of the small flame stole away the darkness as she thumbed the lighter. She stared at the orange glow for a long moment, eyes mesmerised by its straight, unwavering brightness. Her mouth tasted sour, the filter between her dry lips was powdery. The stale taste of too many cigarettes coated her tongue and licked at the back of her throat. She looked at the ashtray beside the bed, its contents overflowing, she didn’t need another cigarette and she didn’t want one. It had been a gut reaction, waking in darkness, head spinning with unremembered dreams, fragments of images darting back and forth, poking out of the clouded, billowing fog of her tired brain, Alex, her stepfather, Shelton.
The lighter was hot in her hand, distracting her thoughts. She gazed once more at the tangerine flame and lifted her thumb. The flame snuffed out, leaving an after image on her retinas. She put the cigarette back in the packet and threw them across the room, the box clattered against the wall, bounced off a chair and came to rest on the carpet.
The red-eyed demon in the corner blinked away another minute, stripping another sixty seconds from the night. A feeling of nausea struck her, a quick tightening of cramp clenched her stomach and then let go, returning after a few moments. Her stomach churned turbidly and she knew she was going to be sick. She kicked back the sheets and swung her legs over the side of the bed, standing groggily to her feet. She felt her gorge rise in her throat and ran for the bathroom. She retched over the bowl, the acid taste of vomit burning her throat, scouring away the acrid staleness of the cigarettes, leaving in its place a much more unpleasant taste.
Her stomach empty, she knelt on the floor, placed her forehead on the cold tiles, letting their coolness ease the heat of her brow. Bent double in the darkness, the taste of vomit on her lips, she began to cry.