Identity X (13 page)

Hannah placed her hands on her hips and
looked towards the ceiling of the small prison cell as she searched within the
flat grey concrete for a way to explain the facts about a reality that she had
hoped she would never have to face up to.

“No I am not a secretary, Ben. I work for
the same branch of the government as Ami.”

“You mean the OS, something,” and he
trailed off unable to remember the name that Ami had told him.

“You mean OSWED.  Office of Scientific
Weaponry Development.”  He nodded in agreement.  “I am your wife, but that is
also part of my job.”

“What do you mean, part of your job?” 
His offence was tangible, and its burden sat heavily on both of their
shoulders.

“My assignment was to marry you.  My job
was to shadow your life and know everything about you and do everything I had
to do in order to ensure you were never away from The Agency’s control.  You
worked for them too, you just didn’t realise it.”  She looked down at him,
realising that he wasn’t able to comprehend what she was saying, too great was
the confusion that surrounded her words. “You were targeted Ben. They believed
that you were the only scientist that would make the theory work. They hijacked
your life. The day you met me that was just the beginning.”

“You’re telling me that everything since
I met you has been a lie?”

“Not a lie.  Engineered.”  Gripped in a
masochistic moment of silence, he recalled his memories for the last seven
years of his life.  He thought about their earliest days when they would while
away time with no other company but their own, restaurants and bars, holidays
and lazy days, all racing before his eyes like a movie playing on
rewind
.
 
They felt real, and he thought of moments
they had shared together when it was just them, and wondered if it was possible
that everything about their lives was as fake as it was supposed to be.

“All of the times that you said you loved
me. All of the times that I held you in my arms. They meant nothing to you?”
His words seemed frail, and came out heaped with shame and hurt at the depth of
her deception.  “Nothing at all?”

Aware of the camera behind her, and of
the eyes and ears that would surely be privy to their discussion, she was
careful not to leave her personal feelings exposed to her colleagues and her
team. “It was my job to make you feel that we had a real life. It was how it
had to be.”  She didn’t want to confirm his beliefs, but she couldn’t find it in
her heart to lie to him anymore either.

“Every time we made love?”  He was angry
at her as she dragged their shared history through the mire and discredited all
of his memories.
 
It was hurtful and unfair.  He
couldn’t believe her.  It couldn’t be true.
 “When we made our son?”

Hannah looked away desperate for any
detail in the otherwise monotonous grey of the wall to focus on, unable to look
her husband in the eye.  She wanted to tell him that she was sorry, that she
didn’t want for it to be this way, and that’s why she is here, to help him, but
nothing that she thought of seemed good enough or suitably poignant to express
the profundity of her regret.

“You have to focus on what is actually
happening, Ben.  We do not have the luxury of time.”  Her refusal to discuss
his pain felt as raw as the bullet wound to his arm.  He wanted to rip the
dressing off just to spite her, just in case she had been the one to dress his
wound.  He knew that they had had issues, and that their relationship had been
under strain, but he could barely believe that there was nothing left between
them, or indeed that perhaps there had never really been anything there at
all. 
She couldn’t be that good at lying, could she? 
 The love he felt
for her was real, but with every passing moment of her refusal to acknowledge
his hurt, shards of anger crept between every feeling he had ever felt.  

“Ami said that you tried to kill me.  Is
that true?”

“Her real name was Amena
.  Yes,
I
drugged
you.”  She turned and looked at him
straight in the eye, hoping that her words would seem truthful and would help
make him see the gravity of his own situation.  The pain of her last statement
gripped him completely, and she watched as his muscles tightened from his jaw
through to his fingertips.  She hoped that her own pain was hidden, and that it
would fail to break through her thin veil of strength. 

“You drugged me with the champagne.”

“Yes.”

“And Mark?  What has he got to do with
it?”

“He is my boss.  He was Ami’s boss too. 
He
gave the orders.  He wants you dead,
like you are supposed to be, and he will not stop until you are.”  Two hours
ago this would have seemed a ridiculous joke, but he had no doubts anymore that
she was telling the truth.

“Then why am I still alive?”  She stood
silently for a moment, as if contemplating her answer.  There was so much that
she could say, and that she wished to say, and yet the complexity of the
situation prevented the revelation of truth.  For a split second her lips
parted and Ben expected her to answer.  Her initial strength and authority had
been weakened by his repeated questioning, and he could sense it.  But suddenly
her jaw locked shut, her lips closed and her shoulders backed up like the
hooves of a stubborn mule.

“Enough with the questions.  I told you
already there is no time for this.  You have a choice Ben, but only one.  As
far as the world is concerned, you are already dead.  Your bank accounts are
closed, your identity card is void.  There is no trace of the life that you
lived anymore, you are now what we call
Identity X. 
Don’t think that
you are the first.  You are just the first to survive.  It’s over, Ben.”  He
sat motionless, his mind thinking back to the grey
X
that flashed up at the underground
station when he used his identity card this morning.  “I am your only chance,
and I’m giving you only one option.  I will say that you were shot.  The men on
my team, they will back me up.  We will say that you were lost in the river.”

“And where will I go?”

“Initially to a safe house, and then in a
couple of weeks I will move you.”

“To where?”

“That’s not important because you don’t
have a choice.  The only other option for you is to be turned in.”

“Your job was to kill me.  Why would you
help me?”  She walked towards the door, aware of the contradictory nature of
her story.  She held what looked like her identity card in her hand, and he
noticed that it looked identical to the card that he had pulled from the pocket
of the shooter.  She swiped the card against the wall, where until now he had
not noticed a small card reader like those in the underground station.  The
door buzzed and opened just a crack.

“Don’t play me, Ben.  One hour.  Your
choice.”

“But Hannah,” he pleaded as she half
walked through the door, turning just before her body disappeared into the
shadows of a world that he had already lost.

“My name isn’t Hannah.”  She turned and
pulled the door shut behind her.  He sat listening to the sound of her
footsteps as they diminished into silence, until the woman that he had loved so
completely and that always, without even realising, found a way to make him
regret every foolish notion that he had ever entertained for Ami, had been
truly lost to him forever.

Her final words
to Ben
as she
left him behind in the cell were playing over and over in her mind, like the
stylus of the tone arm stuck in a groove of an old long play record , the same
words
on repeat
. 
My name is not Hannah.
 As
she had listened to Ben regale his exuberant story on that miserable Wednesday
night she had felt enlivened by every bit of his enthusiasm, snapped up his
over elaborate hand gestures, and drank in the smell of his cologne, that somehow
managed to stay sweet from morning until night.  He explained his success amid
a state of inebriation, and she had hoped that he wouldn't hear the telephone
ringing at their sides, that they could just ignore it.  As she answered and
heard the simple instructions,
Phase One had been activated
, she knew
that she didn't have much time.  She had cracked open the bottle of champagne
and poured him a glass.  She hadn’t been expecting it that night, but she was
ready, and from the very moment that he had held her face in his hands and told
her that he had done it she knew that telephone call was coming.

She was certain that he hadn't seen the
white powder as she tipped it into the flute, and she swirled it around with
the smallest of her fingers, blending it into the bubbles.  It was a time for
celebration and pride in her wonderfully capable husband, and yet his exultant
mood was matched only by her own desperation for absolution for her part in
this artifice.  When she finally served the glass of champagne to Ben she had
expected it to be her last moment of doubt, and once he had collapsed into a
heap of clothed skin on the bed, she collected her things.  She had scooped up
Matthew, hoping that he would remain asleep, which he did, as she crept down
the stairs.  As she passed the last step, she heard Ben wretch from his bed,
and she took heart that she could leave knowing that at least already he had
been sick. She had promised herself that she would deal with her sense of
guilt, and that there would be a way for him to understand.  She couldn't
accept any other option, and the thought of failure was both a terrifying and
encouraging reminder, which made her skin crimple with goose pimples and
flooded the taste of vinegar into her mouth.  When she left the house that
night and reported to her base and her waiting team, she set Matthew down to
sleep in a makeshift bed formed from several layers of blankets on the cold
floor until she would take him to headquarters the following morning.  Unable
to sleep, she sat up drinking coffee throughout the night, watching the steady
rise and fall of Matthews’s chest as he dreamt about the adventure that she had
described to him, his legs twitching as he imagined the lies and mistruths she
had fed him.   She should have slept but she couldn’t, such was her
anticipation of the next twenty four hours.

When she had initially been given the
assignment Mark had made it seem so easy. He was the new Head of Operations and
he was keen to make his position strong, rendering his tenure untouchable.  He
had known about Ben’s research all along and had easily predicted its value. 
It had been his first proposal to the board, and they had accepted the idea
willingly, such vultures that they were.  Mark was smart, but his weakness in character
left him susceptible to corruption, and as history would demonstrate, without
loyalty.  His first task was to
prepare for
Ben's
future
employment, and the
acquisition of Bionics had materialized with such simplicity that the expected
tribulations on the road to success had never appeared, and this early victory
had left quite an impression.  Acquiring the right company, with the intention
to control Ben’s career had been easy, but the real challenge, he had decided,
was to control his whole life.  Selecting a woman for him to fall in love with
had been hard, even with a lifetime of acquaintance, and the first two attempts
had proven fruitless.  They had equally demonstrated its necessity in the
reactive emotional disturbance that had ensued when both relationships failed. 
Ben did not cope well with loss, each time reliving the death of his father and
the painful betrayal of the disease in the years before he died, over and over,
opening up the old wounds with surgical precision.   For weeks Ben had debated
the relevance of his research and will to continue, and the more Mark had heard
about the possibility of Ben taking time out, it had only served to reignite
his determination to find him a partner with which he could balance his life
and control the minutiae of his
protocol
. 
If Ben had chosen to quit, forsaking his dreams and ambitions, how would Mark
ever find the opportunity to recruit him into Bionics. 
It would really
complicate things.
  This he had said would be the decisive factor. 
‘Hannah’ was the third attempt. From their first meeting it was obvious that
Mark’s new recruit was perfect for the role.  Ben was smitten.

She arrived at the end of the cell
corridor and immediately looked to her team for an update.

“Smith, where is he?”  A champagne haired
man who had the appearance of Scandinavian descent, looked up from his desk,
his white face contrasting with his dark uniform in the dimmed light emanating
from his computer screen.

“He went back to headquarters after he
found nothing at Twenty Second Street."

“Good. What about the bodies?”

“Everything is clean, Ma’am.” From this
she
understood
that Ami and her companion
were no longer lying in a pool of bodily exudates, and that the misfortunate
shooting of Agent Adamson had been dealt with;
body collected, full station
service resumed
.  She had been surprised to detect a faint rumbling of
pride as she had approached Ben, hovering over the lifeless body of an agent
with a gun in his hand, and she had wished she had got there moments earlier to
witness it for herself. 
Served him right,
she thought, and reminded
herself that she had never trusted Adamson anyway.
He deserved it. 
Phase
One had been an all round disaster as far as the agency was concerned, and a
resounding success in her eyes, even though it had never been her plan for it
to get that far.  Ben was proving himself to be quite capable, and she wondered
if subconsciously any of her influence had somehow been contagious.  She liked
to think so, but she doubted it. Her only regret was that he woke up too damn
soon, and she told herself that she should have waited longer, especially after
she heard and smelt the vomit before she had even left the house.  She should
have waited and given him the laced champagne later.  It was an unfamiliar
feeling, and not one that she found easy to admit to, but she had panicked a
little after taking that call and had rushed to administer an antidote that
would regurgitate any drug that Mark must have already given him.  She had
expected a day or so in between the success of NEMREC and the activation of
Phase One, but there had been no more than hours.  He should have been lying
'dead' in his bed until the cleanup operation went in on the Friday, and this
would have given her plenty of time.  When she took the call from Mark to say
that ‘Phase Two’ had been activated, she knew something had gone wrong.  The
thought of him being chased across the city, hunted down like a stray dog, had
caused an unwelcome surge in emotion, and she had had to step inside the
toilets to shield her tears from the rest of her team.  She looked at her face
in the mirror and reminded herself that every time she had told him that she
loved him, it had been the truth.  She reminded herself of the tears that had
ran down their faces as they pressed up against each other after their son had
been born, and that it had never been a façade.  With the recitation of
an internal monologue, she encouraged herself that it was this moment and her
subsequent actions for which she would be judged.  She splashed her face with
cold water, and after removing the annoying smudges of mascara that had crept
into the delicate crow’s feet of her eyes, she left the toilets knowing it was
time to find her strength and fight.

Selling
the idea to her team
had
been
a risk. 
Going against the will of the department was a danger to them all, which she
knew could result in the loss of all of their lives.  If her plan failed she
could try to take the blame, but it would not just be her that paid the price. 
Each of them carried a gun and the knowledge to use it.  They too would have to
explain why their weapons had remained in their holsters, loaded and ready and
yet left impotently at their sides.  They had backed her, though, through
loyalty or stupidity she wasn’t sure, but together they had agreed to find him
and provide him with an escape route. 

She
sat down in front of the monitors and viewed the map of the city before her. 
There were five red lights blinking in the region of Twenty Second Street, and
several others spread across the city as she zoomed out to get a full view. 
Their presence, one dot for each agent in the field told her that they were
still looking for him.

“Did
you transfer his phone signal?”  She looked to another of her agents working at
a computer in front of her.

“We
have hooked it up to skip to different numbers.  His signal will hijack
different lines as people make calls.  They won’t be able to track it.  Not
yet.  But they will, if given enough time, and they will know where the hack
came from.  We don’t have long.”

“How
long?”

“It
skips to a new line every fifteen minutes.  That should throw them off for a
couple of hours.  But I need to shut it down before then.  They will see that
it’s not real activity.”

She
sat back in her chair and sipped on a cup of sweet coffee whilst watching the
stationary red lights as they blinked at her on the screen, every one of them
baying for Ben’s blood.  “I have given him an hour.  It’s enough time.”

She
looked at the agents around her, each working against their given mission
purely at her request, and she wondered how it was that four people with their
own lives would accept their new instructions so readily.  Each of them had
their commands from Mark.  He was the voice of authority, and they took their
orders directly from him.  Even asking them to do something else was a risk. 
They could have turned her in immediately, not giving her any chance for
explanation.  They had no reason to help her.   They had worked for many years
together, each day in this building with little to do during the easy times
than to sit and wait.  Occasionally the lassitude of the vacuous days would
snatch at them with the tenacity of a whip, and suddenly one would rise to his
feet and go out for takeaway food.  Another would sit and play his guitar, or
strike a tennis ball repeatedly against the wall in a rhythmical pattern that
seemed to everybody else to prolong the minutes of boredom.  They had got to
know each other well, and she knew things about their lives.  Smith also had a
son, about the same age as Matthew.  She had in one of her absent moments
contemplated that they may organize a play date, before
she remembered
the implausibility of
blurring her work life with her home life.  Perhaps it was loyalty that made
them agree to their new instruction.  They were trained to be loyal and
unquestioning, and to surrender all other aims than that of the company, and to
them at least that’s what Hannah represented.  Her other thought was that it
was just simple narrow mindedness; an inbuilt willingness to follow an order
from their director.  She always dictated their actions when on an assignment
and when Mark remained at a distance. 
Why should today be so different?
 
 But today was the first time
that she had exercised her own will.  Today was the first time that she had
really taken a decision.  It was the riskiest day so far.

Her
thoughts were broken by the sound of the telephone ringing across the other
side of the desk.  She stood up, and reaching across she grabbed the receiver. 
There was only one person that called on this line.

“Sir?” 
She listened as Mark began to speak.

“I
need an explanation for what happened earlier at the station on Sixtieth.”  She
felt her pulse quicken, progressing from a walk to a trot, and she tried to
radiate a calm conviction as she spoke.  She fiddled with the bottom button on
her shirt, as she always did when she wanted to focus but yet simultaneously
wanted to flee.

“Sir,
we picked up a signal from his phone and we followed him to the station.  We
got ahead of him….”  Mark didn’t let her finish.

“Where
did you get this signal?  Why were you not at your base?  You had played your
part in the operation.  You were told to stand down.”

“Yes
I know Sir.  But we picked up a weak signal and knew we were close.  Closer
than anybody else could have been.  You were on your way to Twenty Second. 
There was no time to inform you.  I knew Phase Two was already active.”

“You
should have called it in regardless.  I have two dead agents now and still no
Ben.  I take it you know about Ami.”

“Yes,
Sir.”
  She knew
alright.

“I
haven’t established exactly who she was working for yet, but it’s lucky for her
she was shot in action.  It makes the cessation of her service sound a little
more glorious than being exposed as an informant.”