Identity X (6 page)

He
pushed the door that sat to the side of the sandwich shop and that functioned
as the entrance to the laboratory, expecting it to glide open as usual.  He was
surprised to be met by resistance.  He pushed the door a little harder, and put
his weight behind it.  Still nothing.  He dug around in his pockets and found
the set of keys that had both his home and office keys attached.  He fingered
through the keys, finding the correct one and slid it into the lock.  It was
unusual for the door to be locked at this time, and on any other day it would
have given him reasonable cause for anger that he couldn’t get into his own
laboratory with the ease he wanted, but he figured on a day when he was
arriving four hours late, boss or not, any direction of his anger at those
already at work would be unlikely to be well received.  The door was heavy, and
with today’s headache it felt doubly difficult, but he shoved the door open
with the weight of his body behind it.  Leaving his irritation at the foot of
the stairs, he took the steps one at a time, his head still pounding as he
placed his feet, his eyes still heavy and sleepy.  He needed water, and
coffee.  Not necessarily in that order.  Maybe Ami would offer to make it for
him. 
Maybe Ami?  MaybeAmi.  Maybeami.  Good nickname,
he thought.

At
the top of the stairs there was a small clearing that functioned as a staff
room.  There was a small fridge and a kettle, and a selection of chairs where
people could sit to enjoy a caffeine enriched break when it simply couldn’t
wait any longer.  As he neared this clearing he paused, suspended in the void
somewhere between expectation and reality.  He stopped to take a longer look,
thinking that his hungover mind was trying to play a trick on him, like the satisfying
delusion of a mirage in a desert of nothing but emptiness and dehydration. 
Only this mirage was the exact opposite.  In place of the chairs he saw nothing
but floor space.  In the corner where normally stood a fridge was a bare wall
with a lighter imprint of clean ice blue paint where the fridge had once stood
and protected it from the grime of everyday life.  Gone was the life that had
been here for the past four years and instead in its place was a vacuum of empty
space.  He walked up the last few steps, his eyes wide and fixed in disbelief. 
He stood transfixed for a moment unable to comprehend the change in environment. 
He stood there in the absence of a single lucid or explanatory thought, until
eventually the only ideas to come to him arose from a darker and inconceivable
place.  At first it was very small, an almost indistinguishable thought, a
silent
what if
, that was dismissible with the same ease at which it
sprang into his mind.  But with each passing second that he stood taking in the
sight of the vacuous space before him the thought grew, changing and developing
into something more terrifying than he could dare let himself imagine.  He
hesitated as he cleared the last couple of steps for fear of what he might see,
but yet unable to avoid the lure, he turned right to face the sliding door to
the lab.  Eyeing up the red button to his left that would permit him entry, he
gingerly pressed his finger against it.  The door slid back as the pneumatics
released a shot of air, and before him the extent of what he saw was almost
impossible to register, so great was the horror of what lay before him.  Where
there should be workbenches, there was dust.  Where he expected to see laminar
flow cabinets and hear the hum of the fluorescent lights there was empty
space.  There were no reagent filled cupboards, no laboratory stools, and where
he expected to see Ami, Alan, or Phil, there was simply nobody.  He walked
towards the back of the office, where the walls separated his office from the
rest of the room and pushed open the door willing his eyes to see a desk, and
cabinets, and wall to wall research files stacked haphazardly on top of each
other in an order that only he could understand.  He wanted to see not only the
last four years of work that he had accumulated since he got the job with
Bionics, but everything that he had dragged here on day one, too precious to leave
behind.  Instead he saw nothing but another empty room.  No files.  No desk. 
No picture of his father.  Nothing.  He rubbed his hands across his face, his
fingers probing at his heavy eyes like an udder, hoping to milk out the truth,
to make himself see that this was all just a horrible dream.  He backed out of
the room, his body turning in circles looking desperately for something solid
to cling to.  After a moment of bewilderment, numbly backing out of his office,
his body made contact with the nearest wall, and as his legs buckled beneath
him he slid down onto the floor dropping the keys beside him.

When
Ben was ten years old he got his first bike.  It was June the second, nineteen
eighty five.  His birthday.  He had woken up to the sound of his parents
singing the happy birthday song as they danced along the crazy psychedelic
swirls of the carpet of his bedroom, a remnant from the previous decade, and
they whisked him downstairs for a special pancake breakfast with extra sugar. 
It was a Wednesday, and he had been allowed an indulgent day of truancy from
school.  He received a new Pac Man handheld arcade game, and he played with it
for two hours solid, riding the sugar induced high until the shop installed
batteries gave up and his father complained that the shop owner had ripped them
off.  The disappointment was short lived as his father distracted him by
wrapping a blindfold around his eyes, and led him outside.  Without the benefit
of sight, he held his parents hands as they guided him out towards the front
garden.  He could smell the overpowering bouquet of summer flowers filling the
air and the overtone of Honeysuckle that grew in an arch over the front door
and that when it was warm always made him feel nauseous.  He placed his feet
carefully, treading with caution as he felt the movement of loose tarmac
pebbles under his feet.  As they peeled back the blindfold he saw standing
before him the most wonderful red Spitfire bicycle, with ribbons dangling from
its curved handlebars.  There were no words exchanged in that moment, and
anything that his parents said to mark the occasion was lost in the haze of
excitement.  Ben walked towards the bicycle and sat down on the saddle,
wrapping his hands around the hard rubber handles, getting a feel for them.  They
were perfect.  He had learnt how to ride on his cousin’s bike, and he knew that
he would know how.  With only the briefest of wobbles he was through the gate
and making headway towards the centre of the village, peddling harder and
faster than his parent’s words of caution could carry on the wind behind him. 
At that point in his life, he had never been happier.  That night, when he had
finally returned home after covering more than ten miles of pavement and the
odd field crossing, with bruises on his behind and red chaffed palms, he had
sat in the bath with his father at his side listening as he told him what a
wonderful day he had had, and how not one of his fellow classmates had a
bicycle as wonderful as this.  It was only after Ben had begun to smell the
same odour as when his mother cleaned the toilets that his eyes began to
sting.  His screams brought his mother running into the bathroom to find his
skin reddened and hair lightened from the bleach that his father had carelessly
used to wash his hair.  It was Ben’s first memory of his father’s demise.  It
was the first step in Ben’s journey to the empty floor where he sat today,
where only last night he had celebrated NEMREC’s success and how it would
change the course of medicine, and prevent the besmirching of any other child’s
happy memories.

He
reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out the contents: the
seemingly useless identity card, a few coins that would just about make up
enough to buy one of those pastrami sandwiches, and his telephone.  He flicked
open the screen and scrolled through the menu to find Hannah’s name.  He hit
the button with the green telephone symbol and waited, staring absently into
the space before him.  No answer.  He dropped the telephone carelessly onto the
floor, and threw his head backwards against the wall.

“I
can’t believe it,” he whispered to himself airily.  He racked his brain, trying
to recall every face that had passed through the lab in the last few months.  
He knew who was responsible for this, but he couldn’t understand their idiocy. 
“Another day!  Another day and I would have called you!”  He had two weeks of
funding left, and had planned at the end of today to report to Bionics and tell
them that it had worked.  Instead, they hadn’t waited and had simply closed him
down. 
Had they bought out the staff?  Did they lose confidence in me?  The
whole thing has been shut down and relocated without me? 
Thoughts of them
relocating the lab overnight were virtually impossible to comprehend, and too
painful. 
Had one of his team been some sort of an informant?  They knew we
had done it?  They cut the funding the......wait, Saad.  He wanted this work. 
Could he have stolen it?  Overnight?

“In
less than twelve hours?” he finally said out loud.  Endless possibilities raced
through his mind, and yet nothing quite seemed possible. 
How could it just
disappear overnight? 
Suddenly, he was jerked back into reality by the
sound of his telephone buzzing against the floor in a tune far too cheerful for
his mood. 
Hannah!

“Hello,
Hannah?”  She would have ideas.

“No,
it’s me.  What’s up?”

“What?” 
He took the telephone away from his ear and glanced at the screen.  “Oh Mark,
it’s you.  Listen mate, I’ve got a problem.”

“What’s
going on?”  Ben explained in detail about how somebody had broken into the
laboratory and stolen the equipment and the results.  He explained how
everything was gone.  How a lifetime of research and personal aspirations had
disappeared overnight.  “I don’t believe it, Ben.  Listen, I’m coming over. 
Just stay there.  Don’t go anywhere, OK.  I’ll be there soon.”  With that, Mark
hung up. 
Mark would understand
.  He was a scientist too, and whilst he
was now stuck in some managerial job pushing papers and numbers all day long,
he would appreciate the importance of what he had told him. 
Yes, he would
know what to do.

Even
with the shock of what had happened over the last ten minutes he still couldn’t
shake the gnawing pain of hunger and the headache that had plagued him since he
woke up in the state that he had this morning.  He had to eat something.  He
was beginning to feel queasy from the emptiness of his stomach, and he could
feel it turning and pulling at his insides.  He caught sight of the coins that
sat on the floor at the side of him.  Totalling them up they seemed to amount
to about six pounds, and that would be enough to get him one of his beloved
pastrami sandwiches.  Mark wouldn’t be here for another fifteen minutes.  He grabbed
the keys and fiddled up the coins.  He left the telephone and the identity card
where they were and headed down the stairs.  The sunlight was streaming in
through the windows as he approached the door, and he thought how unusual it
seemed that there were no buses passing by to cast the door in shadow.  He
pushed the handle of the door down and after releasing the heavy door
sufficiently, he started to move his body into the open space.  At first, the
high pitched ping confused him, as did the small cloud of dust that swirled to
the side of his face.  He couldn’t quite make out what had just happened.  It
took only a second to glance down, his eyes following the responsible object
subconsciously, before he had even intended to look.  As he saw the
deformed slug of a spent
bullet hit the ground and
clatter
away from him, the second
one
hit the door.  It flew past his head at
a proximity that seemed like only millimetres away.  It too hit the door
leaving behind the same trail of dust and pain in his ears, and before he could
even consider looking down in order to confirm that it was indeed another
bullet, his instincts had taken over and he was back behind the door.   Wedging
his weight behind the open door he forced it shut, and as he did so the money
that he had been clutching in his hand scattered onto the ground around him. 
Ben stood stupefied and still, and watched as the third bullet hit the pane of
glass.  He jumped back in fright, falling and hitting his back against the
tread of the first step.  His first thought was that he was thankful not to be
dead.  The second was considerably more confusing. 
Why had the glass not
broken?
  He stood up, and as he did he saw two more bullets hit the glass
at the level of his eyes.  Both left nothing but a small cloud of dust and a
crater in the glass as they ricocheted back off the door, landing on the
pavement.

“Bullet
proof?” he asked rhetorically as he stroked his fingers against the pane of
glass.  Not a single palpable mark was present on the inside.  “Why the fuck is
that bullet proof?”  The confusion of his survival had for a few seconds
shielded him from the realisation that somebody had just made an attempt on his
life.  When the next bullet hit the glass panel it woke him from his daydream. 
He could hear screams coming from outside, as the crowd fluttered around like
the feathers of a terrified bird, and he knew that there was no way out through
these doors.  He back heeled his way up the stairs, climbing frantically on all
fours and dragging himself to the top.  Stopping briefly to catch his breath,
he scrambled to his feet and raced into the empty laboratory. 

“What
the fuck is going on?” he screamed through panicked and desperate breaths, the
room spinning around him.  His mind switched to survival mode, and his eyes
scanned the room for another exit.  The only way out that didn’t involve going
down the stairs was out through the windows.  He could hear somebody at the
door downstairs.  There was no time for consideration.  Downstairs or waiting
here was certain to bring only one thing and he didn’t want to think about
that.  His only choice was the window.