First Light (31 page)

‘Sir, I’ve no excuse except that I failed.’

The man got out of his black leather chair and walked across the wood-panelled office. He turned his back to K, looking out the window. K wondered where the other boys were. They couldn’t all be out on missions, yet he hadn’t seen any of them since he’d arrived back from Lebanon two days before.

The huge man sighed loudly, bringing K back to the current situation.

‘
I don’t know what to do for the best. You’re fortunate that your record so far this year has been impeccable. You haven’t once aroused anyone’s suspicions – you play the sweet innocent teenager with exceptional accuracy. You have, however, failed your first test and if you think we’ll go easy on you because you’re a child–’ he took a deep breath, filling his lungs and pushing his chest out, ‘then, you would be wrong. You are anything but a child, because we made you anything but. Childhood is a state of mind, lad, and your mind is more adult than most of the men I’ve worked with. Now, I know you might hate me right now, I know you would like to hurt me, but you will bear it. You will take it on the chin like the soldier you are, because what you need to realise is that emotion is no good to you, and it’s definitely no good to me. I won't tolerate it.

‘What if I told you, the man you failed to terminate later detonated a suicide bomb, killing not only his own family, but four others and six US soldiers?’

K didn’t flinch and he didn’t reply, he knew the question was rhetorical and, if he was honest, he didn’t have any feeling about it either way. He guessed that was what they wanted, for him to have no views or emotions about death and murder and to some extent he didn’t. Until that Christmas evening, he’d thought he was a breed above every other person, able to remove himself completely from what he liked to refer to as the “human condition”. His reaction to the target and the mission had surprised him as much as it had surprised his superiors and he’d accept whatever punishment came his way.

‘I’d be lying anyway. It was a test, K – a test you failed. The man was an innocent. However, we chose him to see if you would follow orders so perfectly if your situation were more
complicated
. You didn’t. For this, I’m afraid, you must be trained.’

As the words were spoken, the door to the office opened and three men in suits entered. K stood immediately and faced them, preparing himself for a fight. It didn’t last long – he managed to land a good punch on the jaw of one of the agents before a bag was thrown over his head and he was beaten until he lost consciousness.

When he awoke, he could barely move and his hands were cuffed behind his back. K opened his eyes and waited for them to adjust to the darkness around him, but they never did. The dark was too black, there wasn’t even a patch of light to infiltrate it. He forced his body to move when he realised nothing was broken. K knew they wouldn’t break any of his bones, to ensure he wasn’t beyond repair when they were done with him. After all, that would be a waste of everyone’s time and money. The point was to train him, not kill him. Otherwise, he’d be dead already. The notion didn’t comfort him. They had many other ways of inflicting pain if it helped break any element of his humanity that remained intact.

Self-preservation forced him to his feet and he shuffled around the room, inching backwards and feeling his way along the walls. It was solid stone; a closed box, and from the smell and the thickness of the air, he was sure it was underground.

There was no way out.

K blinked. If he knew what it was to cry, he might have cried then. He’d been a prisoner of sorts for many years, but this was the first time he felt trapped and the first time he had ever been scared. Then the steel door in front of him opened and an artificial white light poured into the room. The bag was thrown back over his head, and the next beating ensued.

And so the days went on.

34 – Recovery

I was awake at six.
I wanted to see him, but I knew he needed to sleep. After almost an hour, which felt more like a hundred, I allowed myself to creep to my father’s old room and peek in. To my surprise, Kal was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the window.

I pushed the door open. ‘Hey, how are you feeling?’

He glanced up, studying my face as if he didn’t recognise me. A horrible suffocating sensation filled my chest. Could he have amnesia? Panic. If he no longer knew me, my life wouldn’t be the same.

‘You’ve been taking care of me,’ he croaked, as though he hated to have been a burden.

My relief was so intense I almost laughed. I bit my lip. I wanted to tell him the joy I felt at seeing him recovering. Instead, I asked if I could get him anything.

He shook his head mutely.

‘Well – please don’t go. I think you need to rest some more, just get back into bed. It’s okay, no one knows you’re here. I mean, your friends do, but no one else and Rachel's on holiday.’

He stared fixedly at the floor for a long while, before finally lifting his legs back onto the bed and closing his eyes. I lingered for a moment and wondered how I would have fared if things had been different – if he’d died. Realising my hands were shaking, I left the room and busied myself with other things.

He slept for the rest of the day, waking only to eat. I sat by his bedside most of the time, reading through course notes my tutors had emailed to me. I washed the last of the brown dye out of my hair, ditching the dresses and wearing my jeans again. It felt like I was finally throwing away a mask I’d been wearing for everyone around me.

The following morning he was wide-awake, but I had to work. It was the last thing I wanted to do. I called in sick and made him breakfast instead. He was sitting on the sofa in front of the open fire when I came downstairs from my shower.

 ‘
It’s spring out there, you know. You wanna sit in the garden?’

‘I like the fire,’ he said absently. Then he turned his head in my direction. ‘Come and sit with me.’

I perched on the arm of a chair by his, pulling my feet up underneath me. The burning heat from the fire was almost too much, but I didn’t move. Silently, we stared at the flames dancing in the grate.

‘I need to ask you something,’ he said. ‘You do understand what the word run means, right?’ His sarcasm was only slight, he was actually annoyed with me.

‘Yes, but was I supposed to just leave you there without even trying to help?’

‘That’s exactly what you were supposed to do!’ He looked at me seriously, his expression evaluating. Then he let out a thoughtful sigh. ‘Not many people would do what you did, Red. Thank you.’

It’s my fault you got hurt. Don’t thank me for that.
‘What I don’t understand, is why I was left there, but you were taken. Are you going to tell me what happened, should we call the police?’

He lowered his eyes. ‘No and no.’

I swallowed. ‘We went to the garage. There was so much blood–’

His head snapped up. ‘The boys took you
there
?’

I didn’t answer, the conversation was going nowhere good.

‘That wasn’t all my blood,’ he said eventually. ‘They moved me from there, worried the boys would find me. Honestly Red, all of this,’ he looked down at himself, ‘is mostly because I was locked up for so long with no food or water. They began to panic, and none of them having what it took to actually kill me, they left me there, hoping I would die. It took me too long to escape and when I got to the woods at the back of your house, I passed out. How long was I gone?’

I twisted the sleeves of my jumper, my eyes burning with the threat of tears. ‘Nearly a week.’

‘
Red, please don’t be upset.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ It seemed completely inadequate, but I could see my moping was only making him more uncomfortable. I tried to think of a way to change the subject. I said the first thing that came to me, ‘So, is Kalen your real name?’

He grinned. ‘That depends.’

‘On?’

‘On what you class as a real name.’

I reached over and playfully prodded his arm. ‘What name were you born with?’

‘I have no idea. I was so young when they took me from the orphanage, I don’t remember.’

‘
Oh.’ That was possibly the saddest thing he’d ever said. I pulled my knees up to my chest, but he shrugged it off as though he’d come to terms with it long ago.

‘The Agency gave me K, and Kalen was the first name I was assigned on my very first job. It can be oddly comforting to see your picture next to a name when you’ve never had one. Anyway that’s what the few people who know me refer to me as, so in that respect I suppose it’s my real name.’

‘
And Smith?’

‘The same,’ he shrugged.

‘And how do you all survive, I know you were stealing from someone that night in London.’

His head dropped. ‘Sometimes D and I get door work in the bigger cities we visit. Nash does some encryption work. He’s real good with computers. But really, jobs aren’t an option for us. It’s not like we steal from little old ladies,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘We don’t take much. Just what we need, when we need it, which believe me, is not a lot. The house we have right now, for example, Nash and I scoped Clanots for a while before we came here, we knew this house was vacant, and we monitor the owner’s movements. He doesn’t know we’re here... so while we don’t pay rent, we don’t rob anyone either.’

‘He doesn’t know you’re living in his house?’

'No, and if he ever planned to pay his holiday house in Clanots Ocean a visit we would know about it.’

I thought about that and decided they were making the best of a bad situation. What did I want from him? That he would go and get a job filing in an office? It was foolish of me to hope for something normal to come out of something so abnormal, but inside me my emotions were tearing at each other. Would he ever be able to live like a regular person, if not, what did that mean for us? Though there was no “us” as such, I didn’t think I could stand not having him in my life. Even just as we were right now.

‘So, you can never have a normal life?’

Something glimmered in his eyes then. Hope. It wasn’t an expression I was used to seeing on him.

‘When my handler told me what was happening, I agreed to disappear; to leave and let the other boys die. He gave me money – a lot of money – to help me get gone. I have it hidden away. One day I hope to get my freedom and that money will be waiting for me. Maybe I can have some semblance of a life. Probably not, but everyone needs a dream, right?’

A dream. I knew the feeling. ‘You changed your mind about leaving the boys, then?’

‘I was never going to leave them, but I was angry and wanted his money. I'd earned it. So I told him what he wanted to hear and then I screwed him over the way he screwed us.’

I tried to imagine what he must have gone through, I came up blank – it was too hard to fathom. ‘You’re very brave,’ I said lamely.

‘Not brave,’ he said. ‘It’s fear that drives us all in the end, Ronnie. We might be scared of something, but there’ll always be something else that frightens us more. We’re scared of taking a human life, but more scared of failure. Scared to get found in a group, but more scared of living our pointless lives alone... scared of loving someone, yet terrified not to.’ He lifted his eyes to mine. All the air had left my lungs. I felt like I was in a vacuum.

‘I didn’t want to die when they terminated the project, but I couldn’t live with myself if, after everything I’d done, I let those who trusted me most die in my place. I was more scared of who that would make me than I was of any form of death they could deliver.’

‘That’s a sad way of looking at things.’ I cleared my throat, finding my breath once more. ‘You're saying every good thing people do has a selfish motive behind it. That would mean no hero is ever really heroic.’

‘I wouldn’t disagree with that.’

‘No,’ I responded adamantly. ‘You sell yourself short, and other people. You should have a little faith in the human race.’

‘Ah, the human race,’ he sighed.

‘Let’s not think about that anyway,’ I ventured, wanting to lighten the intense mood I had inadvertently created. ‘Let’s think about what we can do with that all that money one day!’