Yesterday's Hero (18 page)

He’s pushed me back against one wall of the street. I look down at his finger. Up at him.

“I was being chased by a bronze lion, you fuck,” I say to him. Small, petty man that he is. And I bet he’d love to see me torn limb from limb. “And I had a pistol, and itty bitty little bullets that did fuck all.”

“And Clyde?” Coleman doesn’t give me an inch. “What was he going to do?”

“Clyde knows magic! I was buying him time!”

I look around. Clyde stands at the end of the street, arm wreathed in bandages, not meeting my gaze. Tabitha is next to him, matching bandages on her left leg. She does look at me. It’s not the friendliest look she’s ever given.

Devon, at least, has a smile for me, but Kayla, standing behind her, looks like I shit in her porridge.

“And once that was bought?” Coleman stares at me disdainfully. “You thought you’d done your part.”

“Oh, yeah,” I throw up my hands and sway back a step, “I just figured I’d lie down for bit, have a nap.” I look down at the blood on my arms. “You have any idea where all these bruises came from?”

“It’s good to know, Wallace,” Coleman says, “when push comes to shove, whose life you’re really concerned with saving.” There’s a sneer on his face. “Good to see your true colors.”

“Oh go screw yourself, you bloody idiot.”

It is, I realize after about a second’s retrospection, high as I am, not the smartest thing to say. Because no matter how low my opinion is of Coleman, other people with far more power than me have a high one. Or a higher one than they have of me. So Coleman has more power than me. And Coleman is going purple.

“You’re on probation, Wallace,” he says. “Officially. Thirty days to shape up. To contribute. Or you’re out.”

I stare at him. This has to be a joke.

“Felicity?” I say. I look at her. She is standing off to the side, looking concerned, and completely bloody failing to express it. “Felicity!”

Coleman shoves me. Hard. I stagger backwards, only held upright by the wall I collide with. “Fucking her won’t save you now, toy-boy,” Coleman hisses.

I take a swing at him.

Screw it. Screw consequences.

He bats my fist away. It’s a pathetic attempt on my part. I can barely feel my elbow, let alone my fingers.

“He’s on drugs.” Felicity finds her tongue, finally steps in. Too little, too bloody late.

I feel very sober now. “There were Russians,” I say. The pain is starting to leak back in. “Back here. In a van.” Neither Coleman nor Felicity are really looking at me as I say it.

“They were talking about this as a distraction.” Screw this. I’ll do my damn debrief, then I’m out of here. “They were saying this wasn’t important, that something was going on at Big Ben.”

Coleman starts to walk away.

“Nothing’s going on at Big Ben,” Felicity says. “Nothing’s happened there.”

“It’s what they said.” I shrug. I don’t know what she wants to hear. I’m not asking for forgiveness. “They beat the living shit out of me for hearing it.”

“We’ll look into it, Arthur.” She’s still not meeting my eye. I don’t know whether to believe her.

“He teleported, Felicity,” I say. “I know Clyde and everyone says it’s not possible, but I saw it. He wasn’t there when I went for him. When I tried to fight him. He got hit by lightning or something, coming from the van, and then
he was somewhere else. Space magic. Time magic. Impossible magic. He was doing it.”

“We’ll look into it, Arthur.” The same flat tone. And she doesn’t believe me. And I don’t believe her.

“It’s the truth.” I can’t make it any plainer. I can’t make it any more convincing. This is what I have to give them.

“OK, Arthur.” She nods. A small woman in a small suit. Hardly Felicity Shaw at all.

God, I’m on drugs, and I’m in pain, and someone should be taking bloody care of me. And instead I’m trying to explain how I did exactly the right bloody thing in the rain. To my girlfriend.

Three days. Three days since I helped save the world. Three days since I snuck into Felicity’s bed. And now she’s watching as I’m put on fucking probation. And I’m sure she has reasons, but right now none of them feel good enough.

I push off from the wall, start walking away. Away from Trafalgar Square. Away from Coleman and Felicity and the whole MI37 crew.

“Where are you going, Arthur?” Felicity asks me.

“I don’t know,” I say. Away. Trying to find the space to put my head back together.

“Come back to the hotel, Arthur. You need to rest.”

“I need…” I hear my voice rising. All my anger and frustration starting to boil up and over. I take a breath. “I need a little while,” I say.

“Don’t drink on it,” calls the cleanup man. “Lot of drugs in your system right now.”

Not enough. Not enough by half.

I
don’t know London. It’s just streets. Just strips of gray stretching off into a rain haze. I walk them. Get lost in them. And it’s good to concentrate purely on taking this left. This right. To feel the litany of directions overwhelm memory, obliterate thought, obliterate what just happened. I just concentrate on getting lost. In this city. In my head.

I push my hands through rain-slick hair, then shove them into my pockets. There’s a piece of paper in one. Another distraction. I pull it out. A phone number. Eleven digits all lined up.

Aiko’s number.

Aiko. The Weekender. And from there it’s just a short step to work. To the absurdity of the last scene. It’s all the fault of that poisonous shit Coleman. Why else would they think I abandoned them? They found me lying down beaten up. It wasn’t like I’d chosen to remain out of action.

And, yes, looking back on it, I can see how it might have looked like cowardice, fleeing the field. How I might have kept on going too long after Clyde removed the danger. But I was running for my life. If I went too far then… I mean, surely that’s bloody understandable.

And seeing that situation wrong isn’t the only mistake they’re making. This isn’t just about a bomb. This isn’t just about the surrender of the West to the USSR. Something else is happening. And they’re not seeing it. I just wish I knew what it was, had enough vision to make it undeniable for them.

I look down at Aiko’s number again. And would she dismiss my theories so completely? Or would she listen?

I shake my head. I need to remember that I’m on a lot of drugs right now. I need to remember that calling this number would be a stupid idea. A really, really stupid idea.

Thirty minutes later

The Lamb and Flag is warm and steamy, full of thawing tourists and locals already five pints into their supper. I remember the cleanup man’s advice and just order a coke and a bag of salt and vinegar crisps.

Aiko looks at me across the table. “Jesus,” she says. “Tell me you got the number of the truck at least.”

She’s wearing jeans and layered T-shirts. She pulls her hair out of a ponytail and peers at the bruises distorting my face. “I’m starting to think you hang with the wrong crowd, Agent Arthur,” she says. “An unsavory bunch.”

I laugh. It sounds worryingly bitter. “I’m starting to think you’re right,” I say. I don’t know how much I’m joking.

Still, what about the crowd I’m with now? I could lose my job over this. Felicity told me not to do this.

Felicity is smart and sensible.

Felicity also just watched as I got put on probation.

Felicity also slept with Coleman.

I look at Aiko across the table. She’s looking right at me, open eyes, clear face. A little bit of concern. A little bit of a smile. Some secret joke I’m not sharing. I need to work out what I’m doing, how big a mistake this is. And how do I broach this delicately?

“Clyde says you’re a conspiracy theory nut.”

Probably not like that.

But she smiles as she rolls her eyes. “You know,” she says, “they’re only theories if you don’t have evidence.”

I laugh. Because she’s making fun of me, and she’s doing it pitch perfect.

But she doesn’t laugh with me. She doesn’t even crack a smile.

“You’re serious?” I say.

“What do you mean by a conspiracy theory?” she says.

“Well…” I shake my head. It still feels loose with all the drugs. I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. “The moon landings,” I say.

“First one’s totally fake. You can smell the epochal fear coming off Kennedy through the tapes. They were showing TV images of that come hell or high water. But they got the third Apollo mission up there, for sure.”

“Nine-eleven?” I ask.

“Perpetrated by the US government. Because of oil money. Obviously.”

Oh Jesus, she’s serious. She’s totally serious. “The assassination of JFK?” I try.

“You think I’m going to say the CIA did it, don’t you?” She’s smiling. I’m not though.

“It was actually organized by the Gnomes of Zurich,” she says.

She can’t have just said that. She can’t. Not to my face.

“The who?” I ask.

“Cabal of financiers living in Switzerland. They control about ninety percent of global wealth. JFK was a destabilizing factor for them. See they were heavily invested in Nixon. So they worked with him and the CIA to take JFK out. Actually, it’s funny, but it was actually the elder George Bush who was the trigger man. He denies it now, but he was secretly working for the CIA at the time. Which, I mean, totally set him up for the legacy presidency.” She squints off into the distance beyond my shoulder. “The US is really messed up with shit like that.”

She’s serious. She’s totally dead serious. “You really believe all this don’t you?” I say. I put my head down on the table. And Clyde was right. Felicity was right. They’re all right. Even Coleman. I’m such a fucking imbecile.

“Belief implies faith,” Aiko says. She’s taking my skepticism pretty well. On the other hand this is probably not the first time she’s gotten this reaction. “Faith implies a lack of evidence.”

“Evidence?” I say, not quite managing to look up. “Don’t you think if there was evidence to support all this then we’d know?”

“Arthur.” Her tone brings my head up. She looks at me as if I’m a child. “There’s about a thousand documentaries on the internet demonstrating how nine-eleven was an inside job. It’s out there. It’s just people don’t listen. They don’t look. They take the accepted cultural view.”

“I don’t…” I shake my head. I have no idea what she’s talking about. I don’t know why I’m talking to her.

“Do you believe in gravity, Arthur?” she asks me.

“What? Yes. Of course.” I’m not sure if it’s the non sequiturs or the drugs, but this is getting hard to follow.

“Why?”

I blink at her. “Why?” I repeat. I’m not sure I understand the question.

“Because it’s the best explanation for events, right?” she continues, careless of my confusion. “Things fall down. A force attracts objects with mass. It makes sense. Doesn’t it?”

And yes, of all the things we’ve covered so far, that is the one that does make sense. So I nod.

“Have you ever read Newton’s paper on gravity? Have you ever read any papers on it at all?”

I think about it. Mr. Carper teaching me physics. Me sitting by the window and fantasizing about Sandra Watkins in the row in front of me. Not many primary sources involved in any of that as far as I can recall. I shake my head.

“Then you’re a believer in gravity, Agent Arthur.” Aiko fixes me with a dead-on stare. The sort Kurt Russell gives the bad guy just before he pulls the gun and blows the man’s stone-cold heart out his back. “You’ve accepted a common cultural belief. You don’t
know
, no matter how deeply you believe you do. You’ve taken gravity on faith.”

I feel like I should have issues with that argument but I’m having trouble finding them through the fuzzy edges of my thinking.

“I’m not criticizing you, by the way.” Aiko lets her face soften as she watches me try to puzzle through her logic. “I’m with you. I’m not hunting down the original paper. I’ll accept the popular theory. Maybe if I was into quantum physics or some such then I’d be motivated, but I’m not. But when one of these big cultural beliefs looks like it’s really having a serious effect on my life, on my ability to live the way I want to, then I’m motivated to go and find out the truth. I’ll do the research, look at the evidence, be open-minded. And I’ve seen proof. And I don’t believe in anything. But I know a whole number of things that don’t agree with those common cultural beliefs.”

It’s a good speech. It’s delivered with conviction. It’s delivered calmly. She’s a rational girl who happens to subscribe to a bunch of theories people have labeled as irrational. And considering what I’ve seen maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to judge.

“Shall I tell you why I think you’re here, Agent Arthur?” says Aiko.

She’s taking charge, I notice. The way Felicity does.

I bat that thought away. It seems errant and ill-advised. Instead I just nod again.

“I think you’re here, Agent Arthur,” Aiko says, leaning in and pilfering a handful of my crisps, “because you’ve got proof that a cultural belief is wrong, and you’re bumping heads with people who don’t want to hear it.”

She snarfs the fistful of crisps and leans back, a satisfied expression on her face.

I on the other hand just look generally perplexed.

Aiko rolls her eyes. “Time magic,” she says. “Conspiracy theories. I’m making a comparison. Creating common ground.”

“Oh!” The penny drops.

“Are you really high right now?” She seems genuinely interested.

“Just a little,” I say. “I think. Mostly painkillers.”

She smiles. “You’re kind of fun when you’re high, Agent Arthur.”

“You can just call me Arthur, you know.”

“I know.” She’s still smiling. I’m being toyed with. The mouse while she’s the cat. And, as I understand it, the mouse rarely comes out of these things well. Time to change the subject. Get back to why I’m here.

“Time magic,” I say.

“Of course.” Aiko smiles. She still resembles a Cheshire cat.

“So,” I say, “and as a caveat I really shouldn’t be telling you this.”