The Unlucky Man (7 page)

That had been his first day at Control after his transfer, a direct result of coming top of his unit for tactical testing. He had been proud that day, had looked on his new home with something like satisfaction. But you couldn’t leave, as he had quickly learned. Apart from on manoeuvres, Quinn had not set foot outside of the underground fortress labyrinth since that day. At times it felt like a prison. Of course, he thought darkly, that was exactly what it was for some.

That was the other reason that he would not be hurrying back. This was the most freedom that Quinn had seen since his transfer. Paranoia and secrecy were the order of the day at Control and it felt good to taste fresh air once more. In a literal sense too, he thought with a wry smile. The recycled air under all that concrete tasted old and stale as dust.

Not that Quinn would ever voice any of these thoughts. Too many others had disappeared down those narrow stairs that led to the deepest levels for him to ever risk doing so. The walls were thick stone but even so sometimes you heard things, especially in the close dark of the night.

He wondered despondently what would happen to him if he came back empty handed. Doubtless he’d have to report to the giant and that would be bad enough. Would he get dragged down into that office as well? Would he be forced to stand in front of that big wood and leather desk and explain his failure like an errant school child? God, he hoped not.

As he watched, one of his squad opened an unlocked door and, just for a moment, Quinn’s spirits were lifted. But as the glare of the torch beam revealed nothing more than an empty shed and the rotting remains of an old bicycle under some moth-eaten wormy blankets, they plummeted to earth once more. Undeterred, his man shut the door and moved on.

Quinn tried not to think about some of the darker, more outlandish tales he’d heard, stories about those found plotting against Control or speaking to the outside world. Still, his mind returned to them none the less. People removed in the dead of night and never seen again, vanished down the winding stair. That much Quinn knew to be true, dissenters came and went although to what fate he was unsure. But he had heard whispers of what went on in the lowest levels, of experiments carried out and tests endured. He dismissed them, in the main, and was careful never to repeat any of them as the walls all had ears. Still, people did disappear, and the midnight trains rumbled in and out along their abandoned lines.

He found himself wondering who the second man they hunted might be, the unknown stranger who had helped the driver back to his apartment. Whoever he was, Quinn thought, in doing so he had signed his own death warrant. If we ever find them that is, he mentally added ruefully.

The thoughts troubled him, but he did his best to push them to the back of his mind, something he found himself doing more and more frequently of late with troubling questions. Best not to think about it, he warned himself, orders are orders and there for obeying. Better to let others worry about the morality of them.

Water trickled from a broken gutter, tracing an icy trail down his back. If he could just find them, he told himself, then it wouldn’t matter what was true and what wasn’t, at least for another day. Taking a deep breath of the alley’s cold, damp air, Quinn looked once more at the ticking digits of his wrist watch. He could put it off no longer.

"Hendriks," he said into his close range radio, "Patch me into Control."

He sighed. Thoughts of failure and what it might mean on his return had robbed him of any sense of freedom the night might have offered. The reality of the situation came back to him. This was still his first command and he had still lost his quarry. And it was time to make his report.

"Here," Corg whispered, coming to a stop in front of a set of large burnt orange monochrome doors indistinguishable, to my eyes at least, from any of the others in the row. He fumbled for another key then spent a few moments battling with the lock as the rain beat down, plastering my hair across my skull. My scrubs hung wetly against me, saturated and clinging as water like ice slid under my collar.

Then, with a click, the lock gave and we bundled in out of the night.

Quinn stood with a thumb pressed to his ear-piece, making report over the fizz and crackle of the line. Something was interfering with the signal, he thought, as he made his despondent update back to Control.

"Two men down," he said again. "Request immediate cleanup. Targets temporarily lost." He listened to a voice through the static for a moment, the suppressed blue light of his ear-piece lending his skin an unearthly, ghoulish tint.

"Affirmative," he said stiffly, at length. "We’ll find them."

The burbling static cut off abruptly as the line went dead.

It was dark in the storage shed, the air heavy with a musky damp perfume.

Gradually, as my eyes acclimatized to the gloom, grey silhouettes began to flow into abstract focus. Vague box-like shapes were stacked against the walls, their contents a mystery although I’d guess they housed, at times at least, the evidence of Corg’s bootlegging.

Under the overriding airless odor I gradually came to detect another more camphoraceous element; a machine smell, like oil or grease perhaps, and something else as well. Wax?

It was coming from the main resident of the room, hidden beneath a large irregular shaped tarpaulin that dominated the centre of the garage.

"I think I know what’s under there," I whispered flatly.

In the half darkness I couldn’t really see him, but I’m pretty sure Corg was grinning as, with a magician like flourish, he swept back the oilcloth to reveal the old hearse concealed beneath.

Tah-dah, I thought.

"Get the door," Corg muttered.

"Time to go?"

"Hell yeah," Corg replied, popping open the driver’s door, face illuminated like a pointed devil’s in the sudden amber glow.

"We’re bustin’ outta here!"

Quinn was back on the radio.

"Positive ID on the second target," the voice reported through a growing sea of electronic crackle. Quinn listened intently to the report, unease growing in tune with the hiss and pop.

"Hesker?" he repeated at last.

"Affirmative," came the disembodied metallic reply.

"Jon Hesker is dead," Quinn said. "It was a part of the briefing, shot and killed on Central Station yesterday morning. That’s why we’re here, now. Cleaning up. Confirm?"

This whole business, he thought, was starting to turn sour. The mission was heading south and he didn’t want to be the one left holding the compass trying to turn it back around. He waited, listening to the white noise on the line for a long time. Long enough, in fact that he started to wonder if the connection had flat lined.

When at last the voice came back on in his ear, there was a note of confusion to it. "That has been confirmed. But, well, we also have evidence that Jon Hesker walked out of Lucia General Hospital earlier today. We’re looking into it."

"Evidence?"

"Look," the voice said candidly, "This comes direct from downstairs. Direct from Control, so no questions. Just get it finished."

Quinn considered this for a moment, watching his team move from door to door in a vain attempt to trace their missing targets, shining torch beams down the entrances to alleys and checking locked doors with mounting frustration.

"What do we do about him?"

There was a pause and some muffled words spoken on the other end of the line between his contact and another unknown factor. Quinn wondered who it could be, someone who knew more about what was going on than he did for certain. Rift's scarred face floated unnervingly before his mind's eye as the voice came back clearly.

"Find him. Find both of them. Bring them in. Get it done." Once again the line clicked into jarring, empty silence.

And, at the same moment, Quinn’s close range radio squawked into life.

"Sir!" came the distorted voice of one of his squad – even his close range equipment was losing clarity – the message sounding horse in his ear. "We’ve found an open depot."

"Where?" Quinn started to run.

The engine purred into life. All around the oddly familiar - the smell of the interior, the soft glow of a dashboard I’d seen thousands of times, the small sounds you take for granted on a daily basis – warred with the outlandish nature of unfurling events. It was an unsettling, detached moment that pinpricked down my spine.

Then Corg fired down the pedal and, roaring like a banshee, the hearse leaped from cover. For a second dark silhouetted figures were picked out, blinded in the twin beam of the headlights, and then we were powering past them, tires spinning on the drowned road.

Quinn was almost at the open depot when the hulking mass of the hearse screamed to life from the gaping black pit of the garage and into the grey night. In one fluid movement, he dropped into a shooter’s stance on the wet road, ripping his pistol from its holster, and managed to squeeze off a handful of rounds.

But the action was hurried, the rain thick, the mist rising from the road a cloying, shape bending menace and his shots all went wide of their mark.

For a moment the street was filled with the receding roar of the engine and the burning coals of its lights and then these things faded to nothing and it stood empty once more.

***

To begin with we drove with an urgency and speed that was almost the same as purpose, choosing our route at random, twisting and turning through a maze of side streets and alleys until we were truly lost and hoped that any pursuit must surely be likewise entangled in our spider web of indecision.

 Warehouses had quickly given way to dilapidated brown bricks, tenement housing rich with graffiti and broken down, discarded hopes as we tried to lose ourselves in the shapeless domestic warren of forlorn city streets.

The sky was lightening with a rosy tint when at last Corg killed the engine and we steamed, cooling and ticking, unwanted in the lee of a battered and boarded over school-house. A big, sprayed on Q stood out resplendent in neon green and white paint over its sealed and boarded over front doors.

It was still raining.

I’d caught Corg glancing at me as he drove, concern or apprehension or something like it reflected in his eyes.

"You know," I said at last, breaking a heavy silence that had grown up between us as the circuitous miles wound past, "I’ve never seen inside your warehouse before." Corg raised an acid eyebrow.

"Really?" he said, "That’s funny, I’ve never seen you put three bullets through someone’s face before."

The engine pinged as it cooled.

"A day of firsts then I guess," I said glibly.

He gave me a sharp look. "Where did you learn to shoot like that?"

I understood his concern. At first a mixture of the alien nature of events and pure adrenaline had kept us running as normal. That and a copious amount of vodka in Corg’s case, but I supposed it was unavoidable that uncertainties would arise, floating out of a sea of confusion and fear like the crashing waves after a narcotic high. Immediate danger passed, reality was seeping assiduously back in with blanket inevitability.

"I don’t know," I confessed. "At the time, it didn’t even occur to me I might miss." It was the truth and yet saying it aloud cast a shadow of worry against the back of my mind. There was no way I would have been able to do the things I had done tonight two days ago. I had come in from the dark apparently emancipated from doubt, from hesitation, but at what cost?

That was what was bothering Corg, I think. Doubt was normal, fear was human and at present I felt neither. I was aware that my emotional responses were in no way in line with what they ought to be. In truth I felt detached from events, an island of stillness as chaos seas churned about me.

But then I thought of the patch of clean, fresh skin on my chest where a bullet should have blown apart my heart and rattled across ribs and the dark, hungry well that had grown from it. If the world had stopped making sense, why shouldn’t my responses follow suit? It was a train of thought I wasn’t going to pursue much further.

To change the subject, as much for my own benefit as Corg’s, I brought up another that had been nagging away at me as I’d watched the rain slough down the window and the buildings loom up large and barren before fading away once more.

"This is our old hearse right? The one we used before Danvers auctioned it off?"

"Yeah, that’s right," he said frostily.

"And Danvers sold it to you?"

I could see Corg relax slightly, despite himself, as he thought about his prized and familiar chariot. He’d always treated it like he owned it anyway and created merry hell at the prospect of its sale, something I now realised, with a certain respect, was probably an act of commendable play acting from Corg.

"No," he said, the ghost of a smile hovering at the corner’s of his mouth, "He sold it to Harry Katch."

"Who’s Harry Katch?" I asked, before catching the smug look on his face. "You’re Harry Katch?"

He nodded. "Harry Katch owns this car and the apartment behind mine and the garage."