Identity X (21 page)

PART THREE

The last ten
minutes of
Mark’s life had been like the polar ends of two
magnets.  When Captain White had walked into his office and told him that Agent
Mulligan and her team had slipped off the grid, he was certain that could only
spell trouble.  Bursting back into his office and taking a look towards the
large screen confirmed the news, and before the Captain could offer up any more
opinion on the matter Mark turned on his heels and proceeded to march towards
the Surveillance Centre.  He slammed open the double doors, immediately casting
a silence over the room where each worker prayed that it would not be
to
them that he would ask a question. 

“Forrester?  Forrester, where are you?” 
A small in stature man stood up from amongst a large collection of monitors in
the amphitheatre shaped room.  He was short and hunched over as a result of his
constant sitting at a desk for fifty years of trusted service in communications. 
He had lived almost his whole life in secrecy, often not leaving headquarters
for weeks on end.  His years on naval warships operating radar had left him
partially agoraphobic and so his recruitment into the secretive world of The
Agency had served him well, and given him enough excuses to stay hidden away
from the world.

“Sir.”  His appearance was deceptively
deferent, but his colleagues knew that under the pathetic exterior there was a
fight not to be courted by the weak.

“Forrester, what has happened to the
signal from Mulligan’s vehicle?  How the hell could you have lost them?”

“Sir, I have run every test that I have,
and all of my equipment is fine.  I have every other system tracked and
identified.  On my last count I have one hundred and six agents all accounted
for as we speak.  Five agents, one of which is your trusted Miss Mulligan, have
simply
disappeared as if their
signals have been, shall we say, deactivated.”  Mark looked to Captain White,
who himself was shuffling uncomfortably on the spot.  “There is no logical
explanation from my point of view as to how I can lose one vehicle and five
individuals who are all travelling together, and not have lost another agent if
it is my system at fault.”

“Agent Mulligan would not turn off the
tracer.  It’s unthinkable.  Find the error.”

“Sir, you don’t seem to understand me. 
It’s unthinka……”

“Find them.  You have everything at your
disposal.  Wherever they are, you find them.  I don’t want to hear about
another member of this agency failing!”  Mark turned in Captain White’s
direction, who felt the eyes from around the room fall upon him.  He prayed
silently for time to stop, for the seconds to stop ticking, so that he could
escape his own discomfort unnoticed and slip away from
their judgement
.

Forrester sat back down in his chair. 
Mark could hear whisperings coming from the workstation, but he didn’t know if
it was from Forrester or another colleague.  Short of watching the red flashing
lights on the screen, he was lost when it came to tracking his agents.  He
relied on everybody to do their job.  If they failed, so did he, and failure
was not an option he wanted to consider. 

“Sir, could you take a look at this
please.”  A small voice called out from behind
a
computer screen.  Mark watched as a
hunched over Forrester straightened himself, and after attempting to pop the
misaligned vertebral connections back into a more acceptable and comfortable
alignment, he walked without even the remotest hint of urgency up the stairs
towards the voice.  Mark watched him with an overwhelming degree of irritation
as he walked towards the workstation, and he would have liked nothing more than
to stand up and give this petulant little man a proper straightening up. 
Once
and for all.

“What is it, Thorne?  What do you have?”
he said as he approached, resting his hands down onto piles of paperwork that
in Mark’s opinion would have been better off being filed appropriately. 

“Well Sir, I thought I’d scan across
different channels and look at a few different frequencies, and I have picked
up a weak signal.  I have tracked it with GPS and triangulated it to a position
on the river, east of the city.  The trace has the same signal as Stone’s
mobile phone.”

“Forrester?”  Mark’s attention had been
grabbed by the strained tendons of its throat, and he almost ran towards them. 
“What have we got?  Have we got him?”  Forrester ignored Mark as he crouched
down to look at the signal with his own eyes, recalculating the position of the
signal for himself.

“Good work Thorne.  Well done.” 
Forrester turned to look at Mark.  “I’d say that we have a strong chance of
having found our target.”

“Captain White, get things moving.  I
want every agent we have got at that location.  Get him here now.”

“Sir I can’t pull everybody.  What if
it’s wrong?”

“White, are you questioning my
authority?  My decisions
? 
A
fter what
happened with Sadler?  He has slipped through everybody.  Wait,” he said as he
stopped to answer the telephone that was buzzing on his belt.  They all stopped
to listen as they heard their leader announcing success, before it seemed to
Captain White that it was even within reach.  He slipped his telephone back
into his pocket before looking back up to Captain White.  “I don’t want to take
any chances.  Anyway, that was Mulligan and her team is accounted for.  They
have had an accident and it screwed up their signals.  Forrester, get that
location downloaded to every GPS we have, and get our agents on it.” 

Mark turned to leave the room, and headed
back to his office.  He saw the first of the
reserve
agents running from their desks in order
to coordinate the strike on the signal and clapped his hands encouragingly, as
if cheering on a child at school sports day, all the while shouting ‘let’s go,
let’s go’.  This was what he had been waiting for.  Since the first day that he
had taken this job, he had been waiting for the day when glory would land at
his feet.  He had thought that it had been yesterday, and his early
celebrations had been cruelly premature.  When he walked in through the main
front doors yesterday he had been so convinced of his own success,
and of
his moulding and sculpting of
the team around him that had ultimately resulted in the glory of Ben’s death
.  He was celebrating the fact
that he now had in his possession
the intelligence to engineer an army, a weapon, a warfare
so advanced that his legacy would continue in any conflict that the world
experienced for generations to come.  He
had been too early.  But now it was
time.  He was
ready for his deification. 

As he walked into his office he slammed
the door behind him, his face overwhelmed by broad but cautious smiles.  They
were the type of inappropriate smiles that make an appearance when you least
want them to, when you hear a sad story but yet somehow still see the funny
side. 
He died how? He was run over by a mobility scooter?  The driver was
drunk?  How terrible,
and then the smile that strips your authenticity. 
You can’t hide it.  You feel the shame but the smile is defiant, and won’t
budge, and then you feel the laughter brewing and just hope the person sat
before you is a good friend.  He needed a whiskey to calm his nerves, or
excitement, and as he walked over to the cupboard where he kept it he loosened
his tie, pulling it away from his neck and throwing it onto his desk.  He could
breathe for the first time all day, now that the prospect of picking Ben up was
real and tangible. 
Just half an hour to wait, no more than that.
  He
would have word that Ben had been picked up, bound in plastic grip ties with
muffles across his ears and blacked out goggles strapped to his face, his
confused and protesting body captured safely in the back of
a
van.  Once they had got him secure, Mark
would order his execution. 

He poured a generous amount of whisky
into the neat little glass and took a large sip.  He pulled out the oversized
desk chair and slumped his weary body down into the cushioned leather seat. 
Leaning back he could feel the padded backrest massaging his knotted up muscles
that surrounded and supported his spine, and formed an appreciative yet
transient respect for how Forrester must feel as he hung his head backwards,
before rolling it left and right to ease the tension in his neck.  Taking a
large glug from the whisky, he set the glass down on his desk and opened the
drawer underneath.  He flicked the small latch and pulled open the drawer to
the left of his knees.  He took out Ben’s,
no wait, my files,
and placed
them down onto the desk next to his whisky. 
 
Inside there were a few
more beige carton files that had nothing written on them with the exception of
the emblem of The Agency; a small black triangle with an old Latin phrase, the
same as the paperweight.  ‘Serviamus Humiliter’.  He had always thought it a
rather inadequate description of the provisions offered by The Agency, and was
not a motto that he lived by.  He did not aim to serve humbly, as the phrase
would suggest, and he had preferred his own motto of ‘achieve and succeed’ to
govern the rules by which he would live.

Blocking out the photograph of him with
Ben, he pulled out the first of these files from the drawer and dropped it on
the desk in front of him.  As he turned the cover, there was a small picture of
Catherine Mulligan.  It had been taken many years previously, and before she
had known Ben.
 The file and photograph were
dogeared and tatty.  It had been taken on her registration day as a fully
trained agent.  There was no hint of a smile on her face, as there had been
when she had graduated university.  There was no parent at her side, proudly
smiling at the awe of their child’s success.  Just Catherine Mulligan, wearing
a black polo neck sweater, her hair tied back without care into a tight
ponytail.  She stood emotionless, as she had been trained to do, her face
disclosing no secret, no fact, and almost no identity, for it was this day that
she had chosen to forego her own.  This image was the culmination of every
choice she had taken to make herself a willing participant in The Agency’s
ability to mould her character, disposition, and her temperament, and she saw
no purpose in clinging to a saccharine notion of a name that was given to her
long before she was the person that stood so coldly before the lens that day. 

He leafed through the extensive file. 
Inside it contained everything that one may wish to know about the life of
Catherine Mulligan.  It detailed how she was born in Ireland, and shortly
afterwards travelled to England once her father’s work changed and his return
was demanded by his home country.  Her early memories were happy, according at
least to the psychological researcher that compiled the earliest of personality
assessments and history recollection.  Her training was extensive, at first in
driving, and then in weaponry.  After her first homeland assignment, she had
made a request to work as an Operations Officer.  She
hadn’t
wanted to work in homeland security, but
rather spread her wings and move around the world, arriving in whichever
destination had been predetermined for her with whichever new name had been
provided.  She wanted to be the agent who worked with local dissidents,
collecting assets in the shape and form of other humans that had chosen to
strive for an alternative world to the one in which they found themselves.  Her
degree in economics and fluency in several foreign languages had made her an
excellent choice, and she was set to go on her first foreign mission only two
weeks after Mark read her file for the first time and changed everything. 

Her file had remained in his desk since
that first reading, sat dustily in a draw as a mirror of her actual life,
covered and compartmentali
s
ed with the exception of the
days that he took it out to view.  He had read this file time and time again,
always looking for a flaw, always reassessing his choice.  When he first read
this file and he
saw
that her mother had died
due to
one of her father’s missions
becoming
compromised
,
he knew she was the right choice. 
Catherine had been present in the house when the back door flew open.  She had
heard the first gunshot and a small scream that she assumed had come from her
mother.  She heard her father’s words stream into her head. 
Catherine, if
ever you are scared, do as I tell you, OK? 
She did exactly as her father
had instructed
. 
S
he
didn’t make
a sound as she crept silently
into the nearest hiding place as he had shown her.  She opened the cupboard
door in the dining room and she sat inside, concentrating hard to control her
breathing.  She heard the footsteps of the intruder pass by the cupboard door. 
She waited in fear, surrounded by the scent of wet paper and urine until
somebody came close enough to the door of the cupboard and knelt down, telling
her to release the lock.  She never questioned why her father had
the internal locks
fitted.  She had been there
for two days, and it was after this point that
they
secluded
themselves
away with her grandfather, where she had
spent the longest summer of her life wondering where her mother had gone, and
why she didn’t want her anymore.