Identity X (15 page)

“Hannah, I haven’t done anything.  I
haven’t done anything wrong.  I’m Matthew’s father. Have you forgotten that?” 
His protestations were seizure like, his whole body moving incoherently,
preventing Smith from removing the shackles.  She reached her hand in her
pocket and delicately stroked the soft leather of the wallet as if it were
their
actual
faces on the photograph
inside.  “What will you tell him?”

“What I have to. The fact that you are
Matthew’s father is the only reason I am risking my own life now. You have to
go with
this man
.”  Ben could feel the lump of
hurt forming in the back of his throat, and he tried to swallow it down so that
he could continue to plead for a chance to see his son again.  A chance to save
his old life.

“
But
I love you Hannah.”  A solitary tear
broke free from his eye and trickled over his cheek before falling to the
ground as he reached forward towards her, striking her arms with his still
shackled hands which Agent Smith had failed to remove.  His movement caught the
attention of the agents, each taking an assertive step forward, the pack moving
in to strike, before she called off the hunt with a single shake of her head. 
Smith stepped away and stood to the side.  “I love Matthew.  Don’t take
everything away from me.”  She knew when he referred to everything that he
didn’t just mean the two of them.  He was also referring to his work, his other
baby which never ceased to require attention and time.  It was the child that
never grew up, and he was the parent that never tired of feeding and nappy
changes and all the things you enjoy only the first and last time you do them
as a parent.  “The people I could have saved.  I could have saved Matthew.”

“You don’t need to save him, Ben.” She
looked at his reddened face, his eyes puffy as the leaves of the towering Ash
trees danced about above him. “He doesn’t have Huntington’s
disease
like your father did.”

“But we had him tested, he carries the
gene faults just like I do.  He had enough glutamine repeats in his genes to
cause the disease.  That means he will get ill Hannah.  I don’t have enough,
I’m just a carrier.  But he does.  I’ll be able to cure him.  Give me a chance
to do that.”  He pleaded with her, bringing his hands up towards her face in an
attempt to lay his skin on hers, hoping that his desperation would transfer
between them and make her see sense.

She shook her head ashamedly apologetic,
and averted her gaze, pulling herself away.  “He doesn’t carry enough repeats
in his genes.  He’s clear.  There is little chance he will get ill.”  Ben
looked at Hannah as if he may have met her once and vaguely recognised her. 
“You were lied to so that you would work harder.”

Ben felt a simultaneous sense of relief
and anger as he heard that Matthew was healthy, a fact that up until now had
seemed like an impossible and provocative dream.  In a single moment he had won
back his son, and lost him all over again.  How she could allow their son to be
used like that was beyond his ability for comprehension, but the relief was so
great that the single tear that had already fallen was followed by a silent
torrent as he brought his hands up to his face to shield himself from view.

She placed her hand on his shoulder. “Get
on the boat, Ben.” Her words were soft and warm, and it reminded him of the
thousands of times that she had whispered three enchanting words in his ears
which had always seemed to exhilarate the darkest of days. 
Get on the boat,
Ben. 
They were words of safety that meant him no harm.  They were words to
guide and protect rather than bargain with his life, which had in reality already
been taken.  But she was offering him something back.  He didn’t know exactly
what, but she was offering him a second chance.   She had risked everything to
offer him safety.  He knew there was no other choice.  In some bizarre and
cruel twist of fate, by stepping on that boat, he was offering Matthew a future
with his mother.  She, at least, would return safely.  She took out the wallet
and placed it against his chest and he took it in his hand.  For a moment their
skin connected and he felt her warm soft
fingers
against his own.  He glanced at the
photograph inside and gulped down another lump in his throat.  He nodded his
head solemnly as he wiped the tears away and allowed himself to be guided by
her hand, still resting on his shoulder.

As she turned to walk with Ben to the
boat she heard an almost inaudible sound that her trained ear was attuned to
detect as naturally as her breath gliding in and out without a single conscious
thought.  She swung round, pulling her gun from its holster and aiming it upwards
to meet her fellow agent and mirror his stance, his gun ready and arm
outstretched
,
pointing at Ben.

“Smith, what are you doing?  Lower your
weapon!”  She spoke with the urgency of somebody who had no time to stop and
think, her words bursting out from her subconscious, her gun pulled
automatically by a brain in automatic mode.  She pointed it at Smith.

“Ma’am, I can’t let you go through with
this.”  Smith spoke on the behalf of his henchmen. “If he gets away and the
part this team played in it is discovered, it’s our lives that are over.  I
can’t let you risk that, Ma’am.  I can’t let you risk our lives.”

“Nobody will find out if everybody keeps
their mouths shut.  How could they find out?”

“We have to turn him in.  None of us will
say a word about your part in this.  But we can’t let him get away.”

“Smith you don’t understand.  We can’t
kill him.  We can’t…” Smith didn’t let her finish.

“We respect you Ma’am, we do.  We have
given you every chance to rein this in.  To do the right thing.  Now we have to
take over.  But your part in this will stay with us.”

“Smith,” she said with definite and
purposeful words, “you will not kill this man.”  Ben was looking frantically
between Smith and Hannah, realising that suddenly he had more than one option. 
Hannah couldn’t let them kill him.  She had pulled her gun on her own team in
his defence.  All of the things she had told him, she couldn’t carry them out. 
She wouldn’t let them be carried out
.  The bearded boatman was now
taking tentative steps around Ben’s other side and as he took a step in front
of Ben, the gun strapped to his back came provocatively into view.  Ben
remembered the power that he had felt in the underground station and wished
that it had been a weapon rather than a wallet that Hannah had placed in his
hand moments ago.

“I will Ma’am.”

Her eyes darted between Smith and the
other men, analysing each of them and waiting for their next move.  She
silently pulled her finger back on the trigger, squeezing it a little, and
braced her arms.

“Ben, get on the boat.”  Smith’s eyes
were on him, boring a hole into his forehead as if the bullet were already
released and penetrating his body in slow motion.  Hannah repeated her words
again, never taking her eyes from the gunman.

“Get on the boat Ben.”

“Don’t move Mr. Stone.”  Smith didn’t
care about putting a bullet into Ben’s chest, but he genuinely hoped to avoid
putting one into his boss’s.  “Stay where you are.”

“Hannah,” Ben cried. “What should I do?”

“Get on the boat!” she shouted.

“Stay where you are Stone.”

Hannah’s eyes were fixed on
Smith’s
trigger finger.  She watched
as
he
strengthened the position of
his finger
on the
trigger and
braced it for a shot.  He was well trained and there was very little chance of
failure from this distance.  He was quick too, but not as quick as Hannah.  As
she saw him begin to position his finger, without a second thought she unloaded
a single shot into the centre of his forehead, sending a fountain of blood and
bone spraying into the air.  She didn’t hear Ben scream behind her as she
trained her sights on the next agent, and as smooth and seamless as the passage
of light she delivered the same fatal blow into the side of Agent Roberts’
head. The third agent had enough time to get his hand on his gun, but not enough
to remove it from the holster before the boatman unloaded a double round into
his face, hitting him in the right eye and levelling him to the ground to meet
his team. Without a moment passed she turned and pointed her gun directly at
the forth agent.  She was joined by the boatman, putting a line of weaponry
between
the agent
and Ben.

“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.  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, and as he landed at her feet with a
thud, she turned to see Ben staggering to the floor, his arms raised up in a
protective arc around his body.  It had been an instinctive reaction, and under
any other circumstances his fear would have
led
to embarrassment in front of his wife. 
As he gradually stood upright
,
his eyes fixed on Agent
Smith, 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.”  She spoke coolly and calmly, which to his mind
after killing four people, whether they would have killed you or not seemed
more than a little out of the ordinary and in need of explanation.  Earlier on
today as Ben had felt for the first time the force of a gun under his own
control, he had never imagined he would see that power unleashed by his own wife
in quite such a spectacular show, as mesmerising as fireworks in the distant
night sky.  Not only had he shot a man, he had watched his wife deliver a round
of bullets and take out a team of agents without as much as a laboured breath. 
The way she handled the firearm had been effortless, and she had fired it
without flinching, without any thought for the death it would reap.  It was the
final kill that had surprised him to the point of speechlessness, the big
finale, Sydney Harbour at New Year.  The Agent had spoken to her as a friend,
and had offered her time to get away.  He had realised that there was no chance
to control the situation, and instead had conceded his defeat to save his life,
but she took it anyway.  He knew she had done it for him. 
I should be
grateful, right?
 
What did he call her?  Catherine?

“You shot them,” he said as she leant
down and pulled the keys from the top of Agent Smith’s bloody torso.  He
watched her and the boatman as they pulled the first of the bodies along the
ground towards the black van which he now noticed for the first time and
assumed it was the vehicle in which he had arrived.  “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, eyes
wide and mouth gaping open wide like a cavern as she stooped over to drag the
heavy lump of dead flesh.

“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, and walked towards him.  Confusion raced through him as he
remembered the allure of her porcelain skin, smooth and gleaming like Mother of
Pearl, and the simultaneous sense of fear of the woman that he no longer
recognised as his
partner
.  “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
streams of blood and debris in tracks across the gravelly car park as they did
so.  Too far away to hear their conversation, Ben stood watching as the duo
pulled the last body, it’s head bobbling about over the bumps on the ground,
each time spilling a little more of its contents.  They stood and spoke to each
other before looking back towards him, shock
-
sprouted roots fixing him to the spot as
strong as a thousand year old Oak.  He remembered previous
occasions
when he had sat on the edge
of a lake, or the shore of the ocean and felt the peace and tranquillity of the
hypnoti
s
ing combination of sound and
smell that rose from the gentle movement of water.  If ever there were stresses
in his life he would take himself away from the manmade world and consume
himself in nature for a few hours with nothing but the sound of the wind and
its effects around him.  The place he stood offered the most beautiful view;
the tide of the water as it crept back and forth, a gentle haze hanging low
against the surface.  Abutting the water’s edge was a protective line of trees,
dense in greenery and with the occasional promise of flowers which sat grouped
in bunches of buds waiting to burst open.  But the trembling quiver of the blue
tits tune and the flutter of leaves dancing about the trees above him offered
none of the usual peace or therapeutic antidote to the tribulations of life.  
It was a similar place to which he escaped when he had first learnt of
Matthew’s proven genetic affliction.  Once a place like this offered him a
moment of solitude and a chance to think clearly, but yet now stood there by
the water’s edge he found no peace or comfort.  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, although the love and familiarity
of her face as she offered a gentle smile relaxed him a little, putting a stop
to all of his thoughts of running.  She stopped a few feet before him, hanging
her head.  She looked like a child whose delinquency had been exposed.