People in Season (20 page)

Ava, primly sat on a stool across the table from Agent Myers, chastises herself for forgetting the cup of coffee. Still, she says, ‘Déjà vu.’

Agent Myers, prepping the software, does not turn from his screen.

‘Excuse me?’

Two clicks and a rattle of typing. Ava waits for him to look up, using quiet to wrest his attention. The social agent, however, is not to be drawn, so she’s forced to continue without a hold.

‘Oh, just, it doesn’t seem so long ago Agent Mullen was sitting on the other side of the desk. He only got a closet out of Joanne. You’ve got yourself the whole conference room.’

The friendly comment is read by Agent Myers as a respectful warning. Furrowing his brow, he concentrates on his work, clicking about the screen in front of him, making it clear that he can pick and choose the remarks he responds to and that he’s the one in control. Ava accepts this with all the joy of someone sat waiting in a dentist’s office, only it’s worse, because there aren’t any magazines to flick through as she anticipates the examination. To provoke a reaction, she sighs audibly. The agent looks up at her, taking his time to select what he wants to say.

‘This is not like your interview with Agent Mullen. It’s going to be a bit more invasive than that.’

‘So I’ve heard,’ says Ava. ‘One step away from shock therapy?’

‘Not quite,’ he replies, his face shifting into a grin that says, ‘Just you wait and see.’

The laptop is thin and sleek like most others and has a hand sized pad set beside it, linked wirelessly, for all appearances. Beside these two objects is a cardboard box containing smaller plastic packages. The setup holds no interest for Ava. Instead she allows herself a pass over the social agent’s body, admiring the cut of him, the relaxed but confident way he holds himself, a man accustomed to being in this position of power. Francis, she remembers, always sat in his suit like it was a turtle shell. His pudgy head would poke out of the collar on a pencil-thin neck, the tie loosening throughout the day of its own accord. What a silly man he was, she goes sentimental, he couldn’t even get his tie to do what he wanted. This social agent though has had his clothes tailored. Each piece of dress has been selected and refined to his own taste, knowing exactly his strong and weak points. She wonders how different things might have been if he had been the man investigating their newsroom in the first place. His tapping on the keyboard seems aimless to her. Resigned to the wait, one moment she absently checks for her phone and, remembering that she left it on her desk, the next she folds her arms on her lap and lets her eyes glaze over. Only when her mind has floated out the door does Agent Myers talk again, the hand sized pad in front of her humming now.

‘I think we’re all set.’ Reaching into the box, he removes a plastic wrapper to hand her. ‘Open one of these. They’re sterilised and disposable, we can throw it away when we’re done.’

Ava does as she’s told and finds a dense putty substance small enough to be held in her fist. ‘I’m not much of a sculptor.’

Agent Myers doesn’t respond to the banter. Keeping a wall between them, he explains, ‘It’s for your mouth.’

Ava laughs but stops at his blank expression, though she keeps a distraught smile on her face. ‘My mouth?’

At this the social agent launches into a short explanation of the scan. ‘We’re observing reactions in the brain. UPD have certain impairments in the orbitofrontal and ventrolateral cortex. I’ll be measuring the responses to certain imagery as well as observing theta wave activity. I’m going to get you to place your hand on the pad and put that in your mouth to bite down on. Together they’ll send information to the laptop which will create a detailed map of the brain and its reactions to the pictures that will be displayed on the screen to your right. Not long ago we used to measure reactions based on more disturbing shots. Holocaust photos, gruesome deaths, explicit pornography, that kind of thing. I’d seen so many stupid horror films when I was a kid I don’t know what effect they thought it could have had on me, but anyway, it’s much more refined these days. You shouldn’t be distressed at all. All you have to do is sit and look. It should only take a minute.’

Ava guffaws and squeezes the putty in her hand.

‘Where does the electric shock come in?’

‘The synthetic clay you’re holding will release a slight electrical charge. Unless you have a lot of fillings you’ll barely notice it.’

‘I’m sure,’ she says, doubting him as her tongue runs around her mouth.

‘Shall we begin?’ Agent Myers gestures to the putty. ‘Place it carefully and bite down.’

Reluctant, she follows his instructions. Her lips only just touch as she closes her mouth, after which she feels a slight tingling sensation that numbs her tongue.

‘Beautiful,’ the social agent looks at his screen. ‘Bite down a little harder, please.’

Ava clenches her jaw, annoyed at being put in this position. A round of electric shock treatment would have been preferable. Sitting here, being made a fool of, is more than she can take. Though Agent Myers has soundproofed the room and set the window to frosted, she feels like all her subordinates in the office know what position she’s been put in. It doesn’t help that they’ll be going through the same thing. It’s more humiliating for her because of her rank. This isn’t something somebody with the term editor in their title should have to go through, even if it is preceded by the word assistant. She’s sure she can hear them outside, finding excuses to walk by and steal looks at the door. The only thing stopping them standing with their ears up to it is an embarrassed sense of voyeurism. What’s worse for her though, than the feeling of being humbled in front of these people in her moment of vulnerability, is now that she’s been immobilised, so to speak, unable to comment in a coherent manner, Agent Myers has become chatty. Her face is charged with heat as he talks and she doesn’t know if it’s from her anger or the putty. Either way, the social agent ignores it as he launches into a monologue.

‘It’s ridiculous, I know. Funny how people react to it. I remember one guy I had, oh, years back, when we were only processing civil servants. He was sketchy as soon as he sat down. People get nervous, you know, untouched or not, nobody likes to be picked apart. God knows I didn’t. Social agents get tested too. It’d be crazy if we didn’t, wouldn’t it? The guy who did me was a right nervous plonker, dropped the box of putty all over the place. Had to help him clean it up. Anyway, this civil servant I was processing, a social welfare operator, he hiccuped when I was about to start the process–’ Agent Myers cuts himself off and clicks an alert on the laptop, the story brought to an abrupt halt as some feedback on the screen grabs his attention. Ava is only relieved that she doesn’t have to listen to the rest of it until he speaks up again, chuckling. ‘You don’t need to bite down that hard. What was I saying? The guy hiccuped. Made a real show of it too. Swallowed a chunk of the synthetic clay and got it stuck in his throat. Actually choked on it, almost got himself killed. And once he coughed it up he was panting for a good ten minutes, had people bringing him cups of water, patting his face down with hankies. You should have seen him, hamming it up big time, going for the Oscar he was. And to top it off, what does he do? Starts pretending it set off some fictional heart problem. Sure we have medical histories on file. The man was fit as a fiddle. All of this nonsense to get out of the scan.’ Agent Myers shakes his head in a pantomime reaction to the story. ‘I don’t stand for that. I didn’t stand for it. We gave him a half hour to recover. Had some paramedics give him a clean bill of health. That’s why we’ve got an ambulance here today actually. Types like that trying to waste time. Well, we went ahead with the scan anyway,’ the social agent winks at her, making a show of the fact he’s about to make a bad joke, ‘so don’t even try it.’

Ava waits for him to say if the guy turned out to be untouched or not, but she doesn’t get an answer, and rolls her eyes, irritated at not being able to ask. Agent Myers reads her expression as a request to speed up the process.

‘Yeah, you’re right, let’s get this started. Place your hand on the pad please.’

She does so.

‘You’ll feel a slight humming.’

In a puzzled moment, Ava doesn’t feel anything of the sort and wonders where the sensation is supposed to be coming from. She’s about to ask, but before she can grunt the question, she feels it in her teeth, the faint buzz, like she’s biting down on a radio that’s tuned to static. It starts in her mouth and moves through her skull, loud in her inner ear. Agent Myers appears to up a dial on the screen. She can feel it throughout her body, not an unpleasant sensation, but nothing she’d want to last long.

‘Look at the screen on the right please. A slide show of images will appear. Give it your full attention. If you look away from it we’ll have to start again.’

Ava nods and does as she’s told. As she turns to it she concentrates on the blank screen to wait for an image to appear. A zigzagging line intersecting a circle. It displays for five seconds or so until it switches to another geometric shape, a hexagon. She can feel Agent Myers’ probing curiosity, and is more relaxed when he looks away from her to his laptop. The hexagon changes to a circle and as the humming from the putty becomes slightly more intense, her breathing becomes that much harder. What follows over the course of the rest of the scan feels like a long index finger uncurling in her head, worming about and prodding at her brain tissue. When the hexagon changes, a spinning triangle takes its place, the very same image Francis had shown her that day in his office. At the sight of it, some reflex in her warns that her mind is being read and she wonders how detailed the scan actually is, if it can read the words that are playing, the images, the memories of everything that has happened. The things she has done. Her heart is racing and her body almost shaking from a charge of adrenaline, but before she can worry about it too much, everything comes into sharp focus. It’s as if the light of day has changed, everything now bathed in a clear white. She isn’t worried about anything at all. Then, the shape is gone – just another form that was placed in front of her and will never be seen again. The slideshow finishes out. A cube and lastly a trio of rectangles overlapping each other disappear. She feels the finger in her head curl in on itself until it vanishes altogether. The screen goes black and as the humming in her body slowly fades away, the only thing she’s thinking is how strange it is that a simple triangle could actually mean something to her, if only for a fleeting second.

‘And that, is that,’ Agent Myers confirms and, handing her a tissue for the putty, tells her she can spit it out. ‘There’s a bin at your feet.’

Ava wraps the substance tightly so it can’t escape and disposes of it as casually as she can. Coughing as she sits up on the stool, she inspects Agent Myers’ face for any hints on how she might have done.

‘Well,’ she says.

‘Well,’ he repeats, hidden behind an expressionless mask.

Ava can see through it. She is, after all, somewhat of an expert on masks. What she sees underneath the man’s neutral stance is that she’s being weighed like a slab of steak. Crossing her leg, she breaths, confident that he’ll find whatever it is he wants to see. Enjoying the tease, she meets the man’s gaze and asks in her own suggestive way, ‘Do I get a report in the post or are you going tell me all about it now?’

As the door opens, all the apprehensive eyes that have been awaiting her return are on Ava. They want their suspicions to be confirmed and she hates them for it. The jealous ingrates want Ava O’Dwyer knocked from her pedestal. Every one of them were assuming the same result from her scan. In the style of Barry Danger, she stands dramatically quiet, casts her sights over them and meets their expectations with a scowl.

‘Don’t you people have work to be doing?’

She glares at the baffled detective.

Arriving like an old friend, Agent Myers stands at her side. The collection of heads turn as one, a ripple of switches all set by the same fuse, to the social agent who tested her. He jumps at their attention, as though he’s only just remembered that they’re waiting for him.

‘Don’t worry,’ he reassures the room. ‘She’s clear.’

Nobody lets go of their breath. They’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. Slowly, they begin to glance at each other, checking to see if anybody believes what they’re being told and reluctant to voice their own disbelief until somebody else does it first. All they find in each other though, are carefully guarded expressions that reveal little to hide their initial confusion. They’re stuck there, paralysed, waiting for something more to be said. If a single voice among them speaks up in shock, now, before the day goes any further, it could make all the difference. Instead, it’s Agent Myers who moves things forward.

‘Any volunteers for the next slot or will we start going alphabetically?’

A murmur of two conclusions trickle into one another: If Ava is safe, I must be too. And counter to this, If Ava is safe, god only knows what that means for me. Never have their suspicions of the woman been more certain than now when they’ve been revealed to be absolutely groundless. Some try to make themselves invisible by returning to their work while others remain, waiting to see what will happen next. Dylan’s head is pumping with blood, his sight sharpened to a pin.

‘I’ll go,’ Joanne says. ‘It’s not too bad is it sweetie?’

‘No, it’s not,’ Ava assures her. ‘It was interesting actually. You’ll be fine.’

She places a supportive hand on her editor as they cross paths, and Dylan who watches the exchange, sees Ava disappear into Joanne’s office. As he waits for the woman’s results to come back from Agent Myers, Dylan quietly calls for Barry, but finds he has to hiss the name three times before the journalist realises someone is asking for him.

‘Got the whole force in one place,’ Barry says of the collective Garda and firemen scattered about. ‘If I was UPD I’d blow up the whole building. Wouldn’t be a cop left in Dublin.’

Dylan ignores the comment and steps closer to address Barry. He is quite aware that people have clocked his revived interest and are adjusting their attention to hear the exchange.

‘What was that you said about the fire alarm?’

‘I was just having a laugh,’ Barry says, not sure if he’s being accused of something.

‘About what?’ Dylan asks. ‘Something happened recently?’

Barry’s journalist instinct comes to the fore as he hears a suspicious note in detective’s questioning. ‘Yeah. A week ago somebody set off the fire alarm. Caused a bit of a disruption for the whole building. Why? You know something about it that I don’t?’

‘Agent Mullen was here when it happened,’ Dylan mumbles to himself.

Barry nods, not knowing where this is going.

‘You said Ava did it.’

At this, Barry pulls the reigns in on where he’s being led, chuckling like he’s trying to halt a horse. Then, guardedly, he says, ‘I don’t know about that. It’s just a joke. You shouldn’t take everything I say so seriously. Nobody else does.’

Jaw clenched, Dylan begs the man to give him more than that.

‘Alright,’ Barry relents, dropping the character he’s made of himself. ‘Maybe she did. She was my number one suspect anyway. The alarm that was pulled was on the bottom floor. Nobody in our office did it. We were all up here. She was running late, apparently. When we got outside she was already there, having a smoke and buzzing for a chat.’

‘That’s all? No proof?’

‘Oh yeah. Security dusted the place for fingerprints. Had a few detectives in here to work it out,’ Barry’s personality quickly snaps back to its base mode. ‘Come on mate, there’s enough going on here without worrying who pulled a bloody fire alarm. It was forgotten by lunch.’

‘Bollocks,’ Dylan grunts.

‘Does it make a difference?’ Barry raises his arms up and lets them flop to his side. Falling into the chair at his desk, he spins away from Dylan. ‘I don’t know much about your case, but they’re not going to put someone on trial for pulling a fire alarm. The world isn’t that bad a place, well unless,’ he looks at the door of the testing room, ‘unless Ava’d come out of there in handcuffs. Anyway, that would have just been icing on the cake, wouldn’t it?’

Icing on the cake? It was one of the only solid leads he’s gotten in this damned investigation and it’s dangling in front of him in the closing hours of the race to finish it all.

‘Barry,’ Dylan says, trying to lick his lips but finding that his mouth has gone dry.

He wants to tell him he knows who killed the social agent. Barry looks at him quizzically, and realises from the determination on the detective’s face that he knows indeed that the murderer was Ava. But neither of them say it. With no evidence and no other lead to follow, all the man can do is stare it into Barry, and confirm from the mirrored expression that in their midst is a human being who killed another human being. Dylan rests on the desk behind him, sure there’s a solution to all of this somewhere but too exhausted to find it. Between all these good people are pieces to a puzzle that can be solved, but they won’t help him do it. The fact is this it’s easier for them not to. After all, no matter what happens, Agent Mullen won’t be any less dead.

‘Detective Wong,’ a voice calls apologetically.

Dylan ignores it, an idea is solidifying.

‘Detective Wong,’ the voice goes again.

Barry Danger, who has noticed the detective is zoned out, nudges Dylan and nods to the man who’s been calling. Dylan follows his gaze to the Garda and in turn follows the Garda’s sight over to Agent Myers. The social agent is standing at the door of the conference room, his face contorted in a demonstration of concern, skin gone grey as ash. The first thought that occurs to Dylan is that there’s been another murder.

Dylan walks over. ‘What’s up?’

‘Are you kidding me?’

‘What?’

‘Well why do you think you’re here?’

Dylan, stubborn, waits for the situation to be explained.

‘To make arrests,’ the social agent says, mirthful.

‘I know that,’ snaps Dylan.

‘So it’s time to do your job.’

He is about to ask exactly what that means when it dawns on him and three words escape his mouth.

‘Oh god no.’

He couldn’t have stopped himself from saying them if he’d tried.

‘Joanne has tested positive. She’s in the higher range. Upper UPD.’

The weight of the entire office is on his back as Agent Myers confirms the bad news. He looks into the room where Joanne is sat, e-smoke dropped to the ground and resting at her feet. Her hands are gently linked in her lap, legs pressed together, head locked straight ahead and in another world. The woman is aware of everything about her, though she’s incapable of thinking or saying anything about it. In a word: catatonic.

‘Is she okay?’ Dylan quietly steps into the conference room and closes the door behind him. ‘Joanne?’

‘I think she’s just in shock,’ Agent Myers says. Correcting the note of sympathy in his voice, he goes on dryly, ‘When a UPD is caught they can become very difficult. If dramatic protests don’t work it’s not unusual for them to fling accusations until they give up, and well, sit like this one, just holding out for the next chance to cast some doubt.’

‘She was difficult?’

‘This one seems to have skipped a stage I suppose,’ Agent Myers wears his half smile, repulsed by the thing that’s taking up a seat. ‘What a UPD does isn’t entirely predictable. Anyway, It’s the end of the road.’

Dylan, who has stood over many dead bodies in his career, is overwhelmed by compassion for this living woman. Like a deer that has struggled in the wild all its life, she has finally found herself in a rusty trap, and too exhausted, she’s laid down, white eyed as she waits for the end.

‘Joanne,’ Dylan kneels at her side. ‘We’re going to be taking you out of the office now. We’re going to have to handcuff you. It’s just the procedure...’ Dylan apologises, wanting to reassure her but not knowing how or even why.

Contempt makes the social agent appear drowsy. ‘Just get her out of here, there’s a lot more people left to scan.’

‘Can I get you to stand up, Joanne? Joanne?’

Joanne’s head jerks in a nod of agreement, and she rises, steadying herself on table. Dylan crouches to pick up her e-smoke but they bump heads as she reaches for it at the same time, her hand snatching and pocketing it before he can get to it. As they go, he tells her to put her hands behind her back and puts her in plastic cuffs – loose, just for show, like he said. Standing at the door, Agent Myers in front of them, Dylan and Joanne both take deep breaths as if a rush of water is going to burst through when it’s opened and they’ll be pulled along with a current they can’t fight. Instead what meets them is a wall of stunned faces. Seeing the monster, they can’t believe it’s real. Still, they leave a wide circle of space around the officers and Joanne – so this is what a UPD looks like. A girl puts her hand over her o-shaped mouth and another makes a small whimpering noise. Good god, is heard. Barry’s face is set in stone. Ava is at the front of the bunch, tearing up.

‘Oh no, Joanne,’ she chokes out a sob that stops her from saying anything else.

One of the Garda leans over to Dylan, ‘You going to say anything?’

‘There’s nothing to say,’ he responds coolly. ‘Let’s just get her out of here.’

After a beat, they move. A puppet in Dylan’s hands, Joanne is led from the door of the conference room to the glass doors of the office she built, an honour guard of aghast faces accompanying her expulsion. As she reaches the exit, it occurs to her for the first time that this doesn’t just mean losing her job, her business, her life as she knows it. It’s a lot worse than any of that.

‘I didn’t do anything,’ she twists in Dylan’s arms to shout at her staff. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong! Not to Agent Mullen, good lord!’ her shout is squeezed into a piercing scream. ‘Don’t just stand there! You have to help me! This is all wrong!’

‘She’s right. This is all wrong,’ Ava suddenly speaks up and begins to step forward until she’s held back by one of the Gards. ‘Joanne we’ll get this sorted out.’

‘Alright let’s go.’ Dylan presses down on Joanne’s arm to hint that she should move forward but finds it has no effect.

‘I didn’t do anything,’ she screams again.

Agent Myers, gloating, says, ‘What’d I tell you?’

‘I don’t understand, it was just a triangle. What was I supposed to feel about it?!’

Dylan moves her more forcefully now, counting the steps to the elevator, hoping he can get her there without having to restrain her more vigorously, but she’s wriggling to pull
out of his grip.

‘Ava you have to help me!’

Stunned tears run from Ava’s eyes, leaving black slug trails on her cheeks. ‘I will!’ she says, then quickly changes the statement to include all of the employees. ‘We will Joanne!’

Barry Danger is speechless as he witnesses Ava’s determined resolve.

‘We’ll have you home by the end of the day, Joanne.’ A voice joins Ava’s and some words of support chime in from the others. ‘We’ll get you out of this!’

Joanne doesn’t hear them though. ‘I didn’t do anything,’ she insists again. ‘Why are you taking me away?!’

Feeling the situation getting out of hand, Dylan directs her as best he can but finds he has to shove, hating himself when he does so. As they leave through the door, a group of the emergency workers cram into the elevator with them. Joanne, stood in the middle, her hands tied behind her back, sinks down to the ground, surrounded by cops, a detective, a bureaucrat and four firemen, before being led to a waiting police car. From the car park she looks up to the office windows where she sees the line watch as her head gets pushed into the back seat.

Now, as the cops, the firemen, Dylan and Agent Myers return to the newsroom, Ava has gathered her strength to rally the crowd.

‘We won’t let this go. Anybody who thinks Joanne did anything wrong, even if she is untouched, should... they should leave now,’ she stutters out. ‘She’s not a murderer and every line that comes out of this office has to reflect that. I don’t know what’s going to be happening with the running of this organisation in the meantime, but until a replacement is found I’m going to make sure of it.’

‘Alright, alright,’ Dylan says, ‘that’s enough excitement for now. She hasn’t been accused of anything yet. She’s just going in for questioning.’

‘Ha!’ someone says.

‘Why did she have to be handcuffed?’