Identity X (8 page)

“What’s
going on?”  Mark still sounded calm.  Alive. 
Thank God.

“Meet
me at the café in the shopping mall.  The one on the corner on the first
floor.”

“Ben,
what’s up?  What’s going on?  Where are you?”

“I
don’t know what the hell is going on, but somebody just tried to kill me.”

“What?”
Mark shrieked.

“Listen,
I have to go.  Meet me there.”  With that Ben hung up, and stashed his
telephone back in his pocket.  He had backed into a disused door way, and
wanted desperately to stay there, concealed and safe in this recess
,
obscured from view.  He thought back to
how secure the hideaway in the stock room had felt only minutes before, and
wished now that he had just stayed there, pretended that everything was OK and
that there was nobody chasing him with a taste for his death.  Every step that
he took from this point on felt like it could be his last.  He picked up his
telephone again and dialled Hannah’s number.  He waited, but the call didn’t
connect.  “Shit!”  He had no choice but to press on. 

Choice
.  He thought about that word
for a moment.  Did he really have no choice?  If he could choose, what would he
do now?  If he hadn’t just lost the last twenty years of a career overnight, if
he hadn’t just nearly been killed, if there wasn’t an order to move into the
unknown world of ‘Phase Two’, what was it that he would choose?  Would he
choose to go home and sit with his wife, pull up the covers on the bed like
when they first met and let the world carry on without them?  How long had that
lasted, until he tired of her company and craved the sterile world of a
laboratory?  Would he choose Saturday afternoons in the park kicking a football? 
How long had it really been until he had sacrificed the first football session
in place of an analysis run that just couldn’t wait until Monday?  How many
times had he prioritised the lab and his research over anything else in his
life?  Mark had been right when he had questioned his happiness.  His times at
home felt like a countdown, a clock initiated when he put his key in the door,
until the next time he could legitimately get out and back to his work life. 
All the time he had been focused on saving the future, he had forgotten what he
had in the present. 

He
pushed himself out of the safety of his recess and took his first steps towards
his next move.  He didn’t know if it was better to stay on the quiet streets,
or head into the safety of the crowd. 
Another choice
.  The old adage
‘safety in numbers’ played out in his head, and he turned left into the main
street and into the bustling crowd where he hoped that he would disappear.  He
thought how simple it was for these other people, going about their everyday
lives without the knowledge of how easily it could all be snatched away.  They
were running backwards and forwards not paying any attention, living without
thought in their carefree fantasies.  To Ben, that’s all they were now.  Normal
life seemed nothing more than a fantasy.

He
walked the streets with his head down, glancing up every so often to see the
direction in which he should walk.  On one such occasion he noticed the
magazine booth.  He passed this place, occasionally and it was one of the few
places that you could still pay with cash, no questions asked.  The newspapers
were tucked into neat rows and secured underneath crisscrossing cords of
elastic, and when the weather was warm the ink would smudge off onto your
fingers at the slightest touch, complacent under the strength of the sun,
easily pushed out of place.  The vendor would turn up early to receive his
delivery each day and fill the shelves with the daily news.  Most people didn’t
bother with newspapers anymore, but there was something about this store that
people clung to.  There was a sense of nostalgia about it, and it reminded Ben
of a childhood time, and therefore of his father.  The owner would open up the
doors to reveal the kiosk in which he would sit, another reminder for Ben of
Paris and the artisans who would open up their stands along the left bank of
the Seine in St. Germain.  He knew that the most traditional of Parisians
turned their noses skyward to avert their gaze as they brushed past the
outskirts of this once intellectual hub, long since bastardised into a tourist
haven which no doubt Hugo and Voltaire would avoid with equal distaste for its
pseudo-authentic overtones.  But Ben didn’t care for the judgment of long
passed greats.  He loved it.  

Every
day the owner would stand a little A-frame notice board outside of his kiosk
and write the main headline and the date on a sheet of cheap white paper. 
Today was no different.  The little board was there.  The headline informed him
that interest rates would be falling in the next week.  Most people had been
watching the interest rates over the course of the last year, and people who
wanted to buy homes were waiting to get the best mortgage deals, and Ben had
been waiting to reap the benefits of the reduction.  But it wasn’t this news
story that grabbed his interest, pricking his attention with the same urgency
as a pin to an inflated balloon.  Interest rates have little to spike your
curiosity when you have spent the last thirty minutes unsuccessfully dodging
bullets.  The details that interested him now were the day and the date.

When
he left Simpson’s bar more than a little worse for wear, he had been more than
certain that he was putting behind him a wet and rainy Wednesday.  He had no
doubt in his mind that when he returned home that night they had watched the
soap opera that Hannah was obsessed with that is only shown on a Monday and a
Wednesday night.  Yet before him the news that was being advertised was for
Friday.  Friday the sixth of April.  What about Thursday?  What happened to
that whole day?

“Hey,
excuse me,” Ben shouted up towards the news vender, temporarily forgetting his
desired anonymity and his wish to keep a low profile.  He looked at Ben as he
picked at his fingernails, each finger poking through half gloves.  He was
scraping out traces of ink which had leeched onto his fingertips.  

“Yeah?”
he mumbled.

“Is
this right?  Are you sure you haven’t made a mistake?”  Ben pointed down at the
board.

“What
mistake?” he said, still only half paying attention.

“The
date!”  Ben could feel his voice becoming raised and frustrated.  He
consciously calmed himself down, pulling up the collar of his stolen jacket a
little.  “The day I mean.  It’s definitely Friday?”

“Well
that’s what these papers say.”  Ben looked down at the rows of newspapers
tucked neatly inside their elasticated strings.  He pulled at one, crimpling up
the corner.  He felt the familiar sensation of the cheap flimsy paper and the
immediate residue of ink on his skin.  He took no satisfaction in it today. 
The smell didn’t drift from the sheets, and he had forgotten all ideas of
tranquil days whiled away in Paris.  He pulled out the paper and as it unfolded
automatically before him he saw that sure enough the date was Friday the sixth
of April.  The vendor was already turning away, realising that Ben had no
intention of buying anything, and the temporary interruption of a potential
customer was forgotten as he focussed again on his fingers.  There was only one
question on Ben’s mind as he turned to walk away.  It had nothing to do with
interest rates or his uncertain future.  Now he couldn’t even be certain of the
present.  His question was simple. 
What the hell had happened to Thursday?

The realization that he had
slept for almost thirty six hours
brought with it a whole new set of problems.  The main one of which was his
family.  Realistically, he could accept that Hannah had left him in bed the
first morning.  She had probably woken up to the smell of fresh vomit, saw the
pile of it on the carpet next to the bed, tiptoed her way through his trail of
drunken destruction on the stairway and left him where he was, privately and
secretly savouring the fact that he would be late for his precious work.  He
could imagine her closing the door and smiling sweetly to herself at the
prospect of his accidental placement of his feet into the expelled stomach
contents as he swung them out of bed.  If she had been feeling particularly
malevolent she may even have enjoyed the idea of him accidentally stepping into
the shards of glass as they continued to lay scattered on the stairs as he
dashed about, and the inevitable cursing as he hopped around like a pogo stick,
unbalanced and precarious.  The first morning was explicable in any way he
chose to look at it.  But later on that day when she had calmed down and
succumbed to the inevitable guilt of her earlier thoughts, and after arriving
home to find an unchanged scene, she would surely have questioned his
whereabouts.  She would have noticed that his keys were on the table,
indicating that he had to be home.  She would have been angry, and worried, and
the plethora of negative emotions would have propelled her forth about the
house in search of him, her anger a mere facade for her natural concern.  But
even if she had by the slightest and unlikeliest of chances arrived home and
not followed this course of action, she would have eventually found her husband
still in bed that night.  Would she not attempt to wake him?  Would she not be
worried that he had slept for almost a day?  Surely there wasn’t a soul that
could find sense in somebody sleeping for twenty four hours solid?  Ben
couldn’t remember waking or stirring.  He couldn’t remember anything from that
period of time.  He could barely remember arriving home, if he thought about
it.  The only explanation for him remaining undisturbed in bed for that length
of time was that Hannah hadn’t been home. 
She hadn’t been home.
 
If
she hadn’t been home, where the hell was she?   Where the hell was Matthew?
 
Suddenly there was more at stake than a lifetime of research.

As he
quickened his pace towards his meeting place with Mark he could feel the
telephone buzzing in his pocket. 
Please be Hannah.  Please be Hannah. 
This
time he looked at the screen.  It was Ami, his colleague from the laboratory
and chosen subject for all manner of inappropriate thoughts.

“Ami?”

“Oh
my God, thank God you’re still alive.” 
She knew
.
  She knew what was
happening to him.
  She knew and she sounded desperate, her voice quivering
at an unnatural frequency.  “I thought they had already got you.  It took me so
long to find you.”

“What?” 
She knew.
  “Ami, what the
hell is going on?”  Ben found the entrance to a side street and slipped into
another doorway to conceal himself as he spoke, holding his free hand up to
cover his mouth as he whispered angrily.  “Who are they?  Who is trying to kill
me?”  He couldn’t believe he was asking Ami about this.  “How the hell do you
know anything about it?”

“I
can’t explain now.  I need you to meet me.  You’re in danger Ben.”

“Ami,
I think they might have taken my wife and son.”  Ben’s mind was working double
time, impulses firing off with the fervidity of new lovers, fumbling and
grappling around for sense that doesn’t exist.  “I don’t have time to meet
you.  Tell me what’s going on.”

“Forget
Hannah.  Meet me at…..”

“Forget
Hannah?  I can’t forget Hannah.  How do I even know I can trust you?  How do
you know all this?”  He was sure he had never told Ami his wife’s name.  He had
made a point of not talking about her with Ami.

“I’ll
explain when I’m with you.  Meet me at the park behind Seventy Fourth Street. 
Stay out of sight.  They’re looking for you.”

“No
way!  Why should I trust you?  Where is everybody from the lab Ami?  Huh?  How
do you know all this?  You know too much.   I can’t trust you.”

“Ben
you can’t trust anybody.  Whatever you do don’t trust anybody.”  After this all
he could hear was the empty hum of a dropped call.  She had hung up.   

For a
moment he stood there in the doorway watching the nearby crowds as they passed
him by on the main street.  He began walking back towards them in a daydream, a
state of mental paralysis, the people knocking him left and right whilst his
telephone hung limply in his hand.   His mind was overloaded by everything that
had happened for which he could offer no logical explanation.  He lived his life
through a series of logical explanations, and when there was doubt he would
retrace his steps and find the fault, the mistake, the unexplained variable,
until the time when fact combined with discovery and elicited the conception of
his understanding.  He felt like his body was being pulled in a million
directions by every random synaptic response charging around in his brain.  Ami
was wrong about one thing.  He still had somebody that he could trust.  He had
known Mark his entire life, and he had stood at his side in the line-up for
football practice, he had stood at his side when they graduated from
university, and he had stood by his side throughout his father’s illness and
death.  If ever there was anyone he could trust, it was him.

Lacking
the advantage of a functional identity and the freedom to use the underground
train system to travel around the city he was confined to moving around on
foot.  He had purposefully selected the shopping mall knowing that it was close
to the centre of the city and hence not too far.  Mentally it felt close, but
the city was crammed full of people, and his progress was stunted as he weaved
his way through the crowds.  Ben couldn’t remember the last time that he was
out in the streets at this time of day.  As he usually arrived for work around
seven thirty in the morning, he was used to seeing the labours of preparation
for the day ahead, the streets relatively sleepy and calm.  He was surprised at
just how many people were roaming the streets in the middle of the day.  Maybe
it was because it was lunchtime, but he could barely cover any ground at an
acceptable speed.  Every step that he took felt like he was pushed back another
two.   He pushed his way sideways to the nearest side street; Fifty Eighth
Street.  He was still at least a fifteen minute walk away from the shopping
centre on the main road, and if he was skirting his way through the side
streets he could add on another ten.  It was time to pick up the pace. 

He
walked with his head down and hands in his pockets, showing no concern for his
fellow travellers.  He held his telephone in his hand and kept it inside his
pocket.  He couldn’t lose it.  This was the only way that Hannah would be able
to call him, should she get a chance.  He was propelled onwards by a developing
sense of responsibility for what had happened.  He had no idea what he had
unwittingly involved himself in, but whoever it was that was after him, they
were serious.  They had tried to kill him, and there was a good chance that
they had taken Hannah and Matthew.  If he hadn’t drunk himself into such a
stupor on Wednesday night maybe it would have been different.  Maybe then he
wouldn’t have slept for a whole day and he could have been around to protect
her. 
Slept for a whole day? 
No, that just didn’t make sense.  Through
the disorientated muddle of his thoughts, even at a stretch of the imagination
he couldn’t see how it was possible for him to have slept for such a long
time.  He had been drunk many times before his celebratory night of inebriation,
and yet had never suffered the same inexplicable after effects.  It just wasn’t
possible.

Could
they have drugged me?

He
trawled through his brain, trying to remember all the people he had come into
contact with that Wednesday.  He had spent the day at the lab, he had drunk the
Champagne from the flimsy plastic cups, but he had bought that himself and he
had opened it himself.  He had watched Phil pour a measure into each of the
other cups before he had got his own share, and he remembered it being less in
his cup than any of the others. 
Then I went straight to the bar. 
It
was only after searching this possibility that he realised how crazy he had
already started to sound. 
Who the hell were ‘they’ anyway?

The
bar? Could somebody have drugged me at the bar?

As he
entered the quiet side streets Ben became acutely aware of every movement and
every person around him.  He called Hannah three times, but the calls didn’t
connect.  The side streets were filled with small cafes and little shops, the
kind that Hannah always liked to nose around in when they had taken trips to
the coastal villages in the early days of their marriage and before the
research had taken over their lives.  He realised that without any conscious
thought he was following Ami’s advice and staying reasonably out of sight.  Her
other instruction,
don’t trust anybody,
had positioned itself
uncomfortably at the forefront of his mind.  She hadn’t even requested that he
extend any trust to her.  She virtually begged him to meet her and then told him
not to trust anybody.  She knew his wife’s name. 
I definitely never told
her about Hannah
.

He
knew this because Mark had been right.  Ami did have feelings for him, and he
knew it.  He could see it in every single thing that she did in the
laboratory.  When he was discussing results with Phil, he would see her staring
through the glass partition watching him.  Watching his lips as they handled
each word.  She would tap her beautiful and elegant hands against the glass of
his office door, hands that seemed to never be inflicted with a scratch or
blemish, and she would float through like a heavenly seraphim with an
inextinguishable light illuminating his dark cave.  She would offer coffee or
to collect his pastrami sandwich from the shop below.  She would ask for help
with procedures that he knew she understood as well as he did.  They would sit
in the area at the top of the stairs together as she listened whilst he spoke
passionately about his dedication to his research, kicking off her shoes to
tuck her feet up underneath her legs to listen when there was nobody else
there.  He had courted her attentions and had given her every reason to believe
that her flirtations were far from foolish.  He had allowed her to massage his
ego.  He had encouraged her advances for his own benefit.  She was a slave to
his needs, a carer who tended to him, offering attention in ways that he had
forgotten that he needed.  By asking for nothing, she gave him everything and
made him feel like a king.  She didn’t argue her point.  She accepted.  She
didn’t demand his time.  She offered.  She would never have purchased
compulsory celebratory champagne, and would have left him with his beer to
enjoy.  He had told Mark that his work came first, and it did, but he knew that
at least on a handful of occasions the results from the day had reached a
conclusion and yet he had still found himself sat in the office with Ami long
after everybody else had returned to their lives at home.  He had never
dismissed her then.  Was it so easy to dismiss her now?

Ben
had decided not to approach the mall from the main entrance.  He knew there was
a side entrance and that it led directly to the lifts where he would be able to
approach the first floor without being seen in the corridors.  Even though
nobody but Mark knew he was coming here he had to be careful.  He slipped in
quietly where the side corridor was virtually empty, the only exception a few
weekday shoppers.  He watched from the shadow of a corner as the red arrow
flashed downwards to indicate the imminent arrival of the lift.  He waited for
the doors to open and made a quick dash inside.  The elderly woman next to him
eyed him suspiciously as he snuck in the lift, and she clung to her shopping
bag a little tighter.  He knew if the doors weren’t already closing she would
have been out of that lift without a second thought, running from the weirdo
man who had frightened her merely by breathing.  He realised from her reaction
that he must be starting to look and act suspiciously, and perhaps appear a
little bedraggled, and he reminded himself of the need to
go unnoticed
and to
blend in
.  He smiled at the old woman, and she smiled back
because she was polite and that’s what a woman of her generation was supposed
to do, but he knew that she was just hoping that he didn’t hit her over the
head with whatever it might be that he was hiding in his jacket and steal her
Friday fillet steak treat.  He pressed the button for the first floor and
waited for the lift to deliver him to his destination.  He allowed her to exit
the lift before him, and then slipped out behind her.  The first floor cafe
that he had alluded to on the telephone was visible from his vantage point just
behind the lift shaft.  He stood with his back to the wall, and concealed
within the green foliage of the abundant planters, he hid his six foot frame
for a third time that day.  He scanned the cafe, and could see Mark sat waiting
at a table outside.  The cafe was surrounded by ornate and oversized planters,
the same as the one he was stooping behind, and that was another reason that he
had considered this to be a good place to meet.  He had correctly anticipated
that it would be quiet on a weekday, and with the greenery blocking the
majority of the view it would give them plenty of space to speak privately. 
Mark was too visible though.  They would have to change seats.  He scanned the
room for anything suspicious, although he knew he had no idea what that might
actually be, and after deciding that everything seemed to be safe he took the
first step out from behind his cover when the telephone that he was still
clutching in his pocket began to buzz.  He snatched it out and with urgent and
fumbling fingers, answered the call.  It was Ami.