No Hero (3 page)

A decent woman. A nice businesslike woman, in a nice businesslike suit, in a nice businesslike hospital. And how exactly am I meant to tell her than I saw a monster in a man’s head? An alien?

Stress. It was just stress.

“Nothing.” I shake my head and wish I hadn’t. The world feels loose, wobbly.

“Do you feel up to talking, Detective Wallace?”

I look at her. I imagine a worm, a maggot, an alien in her skull. Another bad idea while on morphine. I close my eyes.

“Not really,” I say.

“Later then,” she says.

I close my eyes, hear her footsteps. The door opens.

“Wait,” I say. Because I’m reviewing the conversation and I realize she told me that the killer escaped. So I still have to get my man. My woman.

“How long until I’m up and about, Doctor?”

She cocks her head on one side. “I have no idea. I’m not your doctor, Detective.” There’s a very thin smile on her face. And then she’s gone, and I think that’s pretty weird right there. But then I sink into sleep and morphine demonstrates that when it comes to weird, it has my visitor rather outclassed.

The quality of visitor I receive definitely picks up the next day. Swann comes in just as my doctor is about to leave. She stops him in the doorway.

“How is he?” she asks, favoring the doctor, a tall Kenyan, with a dazzling smile. He returns it, possibly at even greater wattage.

“You’re disregarding eyewitness testimony,” I point out. Only slightly jealous of the smiling match playing out before me.

“Men’s stab wounds are like the fish they claim to catch,” she tells me. “They keep on getting bigger and bigger.”

“He’s much better,” the doctor says. “Even took a short walk to the bathroom.”

Which is true, but not really a heroic feat of endurance. But in the absence of genocidal terrorists threatening the hospital, chances to prove my fortitude have been a bit thin on the ground.

Once she’s seated by the bed, Swann checks that the doctor is definitely gone. “When I was a kid all my doctors were giant gangly blokes with sunken cheeks and narrow teeth. You get all the luck.” She pauses, tugs at a strand of hair. “Well, aside from the being stabbed thing.”

“Silver lining to every cloud,” I say

“Plus,” she says, “this cloud rains chocolates,” and she holds out a small wrapped present. Which is incredibly nice of her, and genuinely sweet, and really is a silver lining, and I’m about to tell her she shouldn’t have when she tells me she didn’t.

“Boys and girls at the station had a whip round,” she says.

“Very decent of you all,” I say, though my enthusiasm is about as punctured as my lung. But that’s an ungrateful thought, so I attempt a more genuine smile, and ask, “How’s the case going?”

“Well,” a small smile plays around the corners of her mouth, “we do have an eyewitness.”

“Wait... we... you... you mean... we...” I spray words around the room, taking out innocent bystanders with my abrupt enthusiasm. “This is huge! This is enormous! This is like the Godzilla of breaks. It’s the sort of break that destroys large chunks of Tokyo!” I stop, take stock, try and gain perspective. Punctured lung and all that. “Who is it?” I ask, unable to stop one toe from tapping.

“You, Boss.”

My toe ceases its tapping. I take a mental step backwards. “I’m going to blame the painkillers for me being slow on this one,” I say, “but can you run that by me one more time?”

“He stabbed you, Boss. Stuck a sword in you. He must have been close. You must have seen something.”

A sword. I saw a sword. I saw it going into my body. Blood and black. Black vision. White blade.

I blink, rub my eyes. Memories—a nice place to visit but not necessarily somewhere you’d like to live.

“She,” I say, attempting the whole stiff upper lip thing. “Not a he, a she.”

“See!” Swann shifts from her hospital standard-issue chair to the corner of my bed. “We’re making headway already.”

“Yeah.” I smile but I... No. I don’t want to go back there, I find. The girl, the sword. The thing... My moment of madness. I’m not a reliable witness.

“I’m afraid I don’t remember much else,” I say.

“Come on,” she says, “what do we always tell the witnesses?”

“A pack of lies,” I say. Which is true.

“You remember more than you think,” she says.

“Yeah,” I say. But it’s hard to express that that’s what really scares me. I don’t want to remember any more.

“You’re going to bust this thing wide open,” she says and she pats my hand.

It’s an odd moment. Something between affection and condescension. I think I might be blushing. Then she’s blushing. We stare at each other. I think maybe this is what it would be like if one of us suddenly grew an extra head and it started spouting profanities.

“Sorry,” she says.

“Quite all right,” I manage, and then we disengage the offending body parts and then suddenly her phone goes off and equally suddenly there’s an emergency involving blood work and contamination, and missing paperwork, and all sorts, so she doesn’t even get to hang up before she’s waving goodbye, so I’m left alone with some chocolates and the desire to eat them until I feel nauseous.

Five minutes later I’m still thinking about the hand pat far more than is either healthy or reasonable. It’s almost a relief when Ms. “You-suffered-a-punctured-lung” walks in again.

Turns out that’s not her real name.

“Felicity Shaw,” she says and sticks out a hand. Her suit is paler today but no less severe. “You look like you’re feeling a little bit better, Detective.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Fresh air and exercise. Drugs and doctors. All that.”

She doesn’t smile. I think Swann would have smiled at that. Which I hope makes me funny and not Swann a woman with a terrible sense of humor. Could go either way on that one, though.

“I’d like to ask you some questions about what exactly happened the night you were injured,” Shaw says, because Shaw is serious and businesslike.

Which is fine, of course, except I don’t even want to talk about what happened to someone who thinks I’m funny, let alone to someone who thinks I’m juvenile.

“I don’t suppose you have some ID?” I say, which is a dodge that’s been thrown in my face enough times that I feel it’s only fair I should get to use it.

That does elicit a smile from Shaw. Except I wasn’t trying to be funny. Something is off here, and I don’t know which one of us it is.

Shaw reaches into her pocket, pulls out a card. “Felicity Shaw, director of Military Intelligence, Section Thirty-seven.”

“MI37?” I sound incredulous because I am. MI5, yes. MI6, I’m with you. And if logic persists in military intelligence, though I’m not sure it does, you could probably convince me over time about MI1, 2, 3, and 4. But MI37? Really?

“Yes, Detective,” Shaw says. “MI37. We are a reality We certainly don’t advertise our existence the way MI5 and 6 do, but that just means the politics of intimidation are not useful in our arena. It doesn’t mean we’re not real. We are real, Detective Wallace, as real as the consequences you’ll face if you discuss this conversation with anyone else.”

I take the ID card from her. It has her face, though maybe five years younger, from before she tipped over into forty, and she has shorter hair and longer bangs. But it’s her picture, and it’s her name, and her title, and it does look terribly official, but I have to say I wouldn’t know a military intelligence ID badge if one approached me at a party and offered to show me a good time.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I just don’t know...”

Felicity Shaw nods, which is a better reception than I’d anticipated. “Your cynicism stands you well,” she says. She looks away from me, out of the window. “Still, I’m surprised to find you with such a mindset after all you’ve seen.”

It’s the conversational equivalent of slapping me about the face. I sit up straight as a bolt, stare at her, while she continues to study the window. “What are you talking about?” I ask her. But I know exactly what she’s talking about.

And she knows I do. “They’re called the Progeny,” she says. “The creature you saw in the victim’s head. It’s called a Progeny.”

“Shit,” I say, which is about as honest as I can get at that moment. “What do you want to know?”

“Actually, Detective, it’s the other way around. I want to tell you about what I know.”

She’s crazy, of course. That’s the obvious explanation, I realize. She’s escaped from another wing of the hospital. Except her madness is the same color and shade as mine. It has the same details. It’s as if she pulled the madness out of my head and into the world. But that’s not what happened, I know. So that means she’s not crazy, and I’m not, but that the world is.

“What is there to tell?” I ask.

Shaw’s eyes leave the window, look around the rest of the room. “Not here,” she says. “I’ll fetch you a wheelchair.”

I always assumed that if you have a clandestine organization then you’d have a clandestine headquarters. Stands to reason. And—I concede this point—Oxford is, admittedly, short on skull-shaped volcanoes. Shark-infested waters— ditto. But there is some pretty awesome architecture. Dreaming spires and all that. I always thought you could bury something beneath the limestone columns and copper dome of the Radcliffe Camera. Hide something in the depths of the Bodleian Library—down between the winding stacks, through miles of books, with just one ancient tome that acts as a lever to open some hidden passageway. So when Shaw tells me, “It’s about two miles to the office,” I can’t help but be a little disappointed.

There is no romance in the term, “the office.” Then again, Shaw seems more likely to fantasize over spreadsheets than biceps and bodice-ripping. I don’t exactly see her as the type to adore purple prose or books with Fabio on the cover.

There again, neither am I.

She pilots the van through Oxford’s tourist-loving heart, and heads toward the train station. She pulls up outside a shabby building thrown up in the sixties by an architect who clearly was less into dreaming spires and more into concrete squares. Shaw fetches the wheelchair from the boot of the car and I heft myself into it.

“We’re in the basement,” she tells me. Which briefly conjures images of secret passageways and hidden riches, but I’m not that hopeful anymore.

Shaw punches a six-digit code into a pad beside the door, her fingers a staccato blur. I can’t follow the keys she hits. The door buzzes. A second door, another code. No beeps, just the rhythm of her nails on the keys. No clues for me. To take the elevator down requires a key.

“No thumbprint scanner?” I ask. Not my best joke, but I’m trying to make light. Then the elevator doors slide open and, of course, there one is. So I don’t even manage that.

Considering how insecure I’m starting to feel, it’s almost a relief when the elevator doors open onto an utterly mundane corridor, lined with mundane gray office doors. The first word that really springs to mind is industrious, except... the place feels too still for that. I expect to see men in gray suits and sensible ties clutching teetering stacks of folders, running from door to door in acute diagonals across the corridor, but instead when I glimpse through windows in doors I see empty rooms, chairs stacked in corners. The word is less industrious, and more abandoned.

“We’re going to the reading room,” Shaw says, taking a firm hold on my wheelchair and pushing me ahead before I have too much time to stare. “I’ll talk while we walk, give you some background.”

I hesitate, suddenly wondering if this is going to turn out to be a rather involved hidden camera stunt, but then take the plunge and ask anyway. “So,” I say, “the Progeny.”

“The Progeny,” Shaw replies. The wheels of my chair make a light thrumming noise over the linoleum floor. “Are you familiar with the Fermi paradox, Detective?”

A distant bell rings but I can’t place it, and shake my head.

“At its most basic,” Shaw says, “the paradox points out that the absence of alien life in the universe is unusual. The universe is big. Big enough that life should have evolved elsewhere, but not so big that we shouldn’t have found any examples. But we’ve found nothing. There’s nothing there.

“This is a puzzle to scientists, to UFO speculators.” Shaw speaks at a measured, even pace. Still, it sounds a little like a pitch. Maybe I was off with the hidden camera idea. Maybe Jehovah’s Witnesses have just gotten all sorts of creative with their recruitment plans. Shaw continues, “Here at MI37 we have the answers. Both of them.”

“Both?”

“Yes.” Shaw keeps her measured tone. “Two interrelated answers. I am going to tell them to you. For the first one, I need you to think of a radio.”

“I can do that.” I go with my car radio.

“So,” says Shaw, “a radio. FM and AM. Both radio waves, both ways of transmitting sound. But imagine the dial is stuck on AM. The FM stations are still there, but you can’t get to them. In fact, if no one told you about FM you’d have no way of knowing they were there. For all intents and purposes, they wouldn’t exist for you.”

Just like my car radio then.

Still, flippancy aside I think I get the metaphor. “You’re saying people are like that radio.” I’m a little hesitant, but more because I’m worried about getting it right rather than getting it wrong.

“Exactly.” Something in her tone makes me think she’s smiling, is proud. Her footsteps sound a little brighter.

“So, the Progeny,” I say. “They’re FM?”

“Not exactly.” We turn down more corridors, past more doors. This place is a warren. “You see, there are multiple realities, Detective Wallace. There are, to stretch the metaphor slightly, the equivalent of long-wave stations, medium-wave stations, satellite stations. And yet, eventually, the analogy breaks down. In the end we run out of radio stations. The universe, however, doesn’t suffer from similar limitations. There are myriad realities, Detective. And many of them house intelligent life.”

“How many?” Another question that I don’t really want to know the answer to, but asking questions is a habit detectives pick up.

“I honestly don’t know. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Millions perhaps. But for all that it matters, they don’t matter to us. We’re tuned to one reality and can’t get to any others.”