Spitting Image (14 page)

“Are you sure?”

“That it was his real name? No. But that’s what he told me.”

“He told you you’d been with an impostor? And you believed him?”

“Yes. Yes! Jesus, don’t dunk me! Look, it’s crazy, I know. I didn’t believe it at first. But, look. I mean, I have mysterious powers myself. I’ve seen other people with them. It made sense.”

They plunged me in again.

I don’t know how long it went on. They kept asking me the same questions, and I stuck to my story.

I’m not a particularly brave man. Not above lying or cheating or running away. But I stuck to my story. The informant’s name was Nolan. He looked like McLaglen. When I was skeptical of the story of shape changers, he changed to look like Benedict Arnold. They probably hadn’t met Arnold, but I had, and it was easy to describe Arnold when thinking of a turncoat, so I wasn’t likely to forget or change details. I insisted that Nolan had told me where they were holding Sarah, because I wanted to keep Bob out of this and off the radar.

I used nice, simple, memorable lies and clung to them like grim death. Any time I thought of telling the truth to stop the pain, I told myself that changing my story would just make things worse. I thought about giving up and dying a few times, but if I had, then I wouldn’t be able to see Brad’s expression change when I finally got out of this, tracked him down and shot him in both kneecaps.

That helped.

EVENTUALLY THEY GOT BORED with hearing the same answer, or their arms got tired from lifting the chair by the legs and dunking me, or maybe they got sick of reviving me. I found myself back in the first room, still tied to the chair, wet, shivering and lightheaded, dragging shaky breaths into my poor ravaged lungs and letting the pieces of memory fall together.

I know I lost consciousness at least once and they had to bring me around with an oxygen mask. My chest hurt, but that may have been from straining against the belt, or it may have been pain in my starved lungs. I doubt they actually had to do CPR on me, but it’s possible.

The thought of payback kept me going, gave me a reason to keep hoping for freedom, but I knew it wasn’t much of a hope. I told myself that next time I was untied, I would fight my way out, but I felt too weak to fight the average nursing home patient, let alone a pair of thugs.

Nothing wrong with a reassuring little fiction to keep you going, though. One of humanity’s oldest coping mechanisms. It’s hard for a man who’s been around as long and seen as much as I to pray in the trenches, so I just had to get more creative with my lies.

I scanned the room again looking for anything that might help me escape. There still weren’t any carelessly overlooked submachine guns or large false mustaches or forgotten secret doors. Even if there were, I wasn’t getting out of my bonds without help or a box cutter. Brad hadn’t accidentally slipped one of those into my pocket either.

I figured my best bet was to go limp, act defeated and hope they let down their guard next time they came to feed me. Then I’d have to rely on the element of surprise and a plastic straw to fight my out with.

That and Thor’s grace to strengthen my arm.

There. Cynicism back where it belonged. I was feeling better.

I heard a gunshot. Then a slamming door, running, shouting, and more shots.

After the first barrage faded away, I heard footsteps pound past the door, then another burst of

gunfire. Then it got very, very quiet.

Eventually, I heard a key in the lock. I readied myself, took a deep breath and waited.

The door swung open and Bob came in, preceded by the barrel of a shotgun. He scanned the room– which took a good half second– before he spoke.

“You alright?”

“Great,” I replied. “Had ‘em right where I wanted ‘em.”

He came into the room and walked over to my chair. John took up a position guarding the door. Bob set the shotgun down and pulled out a knife, sliding it under the zip ties around my wrists.

“Looks like we got you just in time,” he said, looking me over.

“Any minute now, I was going to make my move,” I said. “Just lulling them into false sense of security. Trying to look helpless.”

“It’s working,” he replied. “You think you can handle a gun?”

“Yeah,” I said, rubbing the circulation back into my wrists, feeling my hands come back to life, protesting.

“Here.” He handed me a compact 9 mm automatic. I dropped the magazine checked that it was full, checked the chamber and found it loaded. I slipped the magazine back in, found the safety.

“It’s on,” said Bob. “Ambidextrous thumb safety.”

“Thanks.” When I was sure the weapon was loaded, and my throbbing hands able to fire it, I asked him: “How do you like your eggs?”

A staged rescue would be easy for my enemies. They could look like my friends, pretend to whisk me to safety and probably get me to spill info before I discovered the trick. Giving me a gun would help allay my suspicion. Giving me a loaded one was a calculated risk. I still wanted to hear him answer a question.

“With all the salmonella cooked out of them. Now let’s go.”

Had to be Bob. Anybody who was just guessing would say over easy.

He led me out into the hallway. John was there, and my old friend Brad, his hands bound, a gag in his mouth. Blood dribbled from his nostrils and a split lip.

“This time, we’re taking the prisoner with us,” said John. “Even if he was lousy in bed.”

“You’re calling the shots,” I replied. I’m not one to look a gift rescue in the mouth.

I followed them through a series of hallways, up a flight of steps and through a large kitchen to a back door. Bob opened it, looked left and right and waved us out. We found ourselves in an alleyway between two buildings. An ambulance pulled up and we all piled into the back.

“Sean!” Nique said from her position in the passenger seat. “Are you alright?”

“I’ll live,” I replied.

“Just get us out of here,” said Bob. “Everybody’s OK.”

“An ambulance?” I asked.

“Hard for them to chase us, we can go around traffic without getting pulled over, and if anybody got shot on this mission, we could treat ‘em. Well,
they
could treat ‘em.” He jerked a thumb toward Pete and Nique in the front.

He and John wrestled Brad down onto the stretcher and tightened the belts across him. John reached into the linen compartment and found a pillowcase. “Here you go, handsome,” he said, putting it over the prisoner’s head.

“So how–” I began.

Bob shook his head. “Wait until we get where we’re going. Then we’ll discuss what happened and see what our new friend can tell us.”

I had a hundred questions I wanted to ask, but I waited. Bob was right, anything they told me they’d be telling our prisoner, and the more he knew, the better able he’d be to withstand questioning, since it would be harder to catch him in a lie if he knew what we knew. And if he did get free, the more he knew, the more of a liability he’d be. Right at that moment, the idea of shooting him and dumping him off a dock with a cinder block chained to his ankles had a certain appeal, but it would be nice if that wasn’t the only option.

I moved forward and leaned through the passageway, squatting between Pete and Nique in the front seats. “Thanks, guys.”

“No problem, man,” said Pete.

“Are you alright?” asked Nique.

“I’ll be fine. You guys working?”

“Nah,” said Pete, “just borrowed the truck.”

“Going out on a limb with that.”

“It’s after nine on a weekend. No adult supervision at FlatLine. This beast is a spare. I showed up in uniform and took it. Anybody asked, I was bringing it to the mechanics so they can have it there bright and early on Monday.”

“Nobody asked?”

“All out saving lives,” he replied. “I doubt anybody will notice it’s gone. I’ll bring it back later. It’s not like the base is Fort Knox.”

“Good point.”

“You sure you’re alright?” Nique persisted.

“I’m a little dinged up. Maybe a broken nose. Nothing I can’t recover from.”

“What do you do to get people so pissed at you, man?” asked Pete. “I mean, they can’t all be supervisors from ambulance companies you worked for in the past, can they?”

“That would explain a lot,” I admitted.

The ambulance pulled into the empty parking lot of a factory then around behind the building. Bob and John grabbed the prisoner and hauled him out, then tossed him in the back of a waiting van. I followed.

“Thanks, guys,” I said to Pete and Nique. “I’ll call you soon and let you know what’s up. Right now, you’re better off not knowing where we’re going.”

“Take care of yourself,” said Nique.

“Watch your back,” said Pete.

“I will. You guys be careful yourselves,” I said. “Don’t trust anybody. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can. Be suspicious. Ask me something to prove I’m me.”

They drove off. After a few minutes so did we. Maybe it was paranoia, but what they didn’t know, like our direction of travel, they couldn’t give away.

AFTER AN HOUR or so, Bob pulled the van into the driveway of what looked to be a vacant business. He drove around the side, out of sight of the road, and opened a garage door, then pulled the van inside.

“Place used to be a body shop,” he told me. “It closed a few years back. The landlord won’t lower the rates enough to attract a new tenant, so it’s just sitting, waiting for the local economy to bounce back.”

“How’d you find it?”

“Guy I knew from way back. Works for the state tax department. He lets me know about vacant places, in case I need to hole up or hide something. He owes me one from a long time ago in a land far, far away.”

“It’s good to have friends,” I said. “Speaking of which, thanks for coming for me.”

“You came back for me last winter,” he said.

I had. But I had also kinda gotten him involved in the first place, so I figured I still owed him.

John dragged our prisoner into a glass-windowed office, the kind of area that keeps the noise of the shop from bothering the guy doing paperwork, but lets him watch the work being done, and zip-tied him to a chair. After we closed the door, we could still keep an eye on him, but unless we shouted, he probably couldn’t hear us.

“So how’d you find me?” I asked.

“Sarah,” Bob replied. “She said when she called you, something wasn’t right, so she did some tech savvy thing and traced your phone to the address we found you at.”

“Good thing she’s smart.”

“Yeah,” he grunted. “I don’t like it, but she’s on her way here. Says we need somebody to be the brains of this operation.”

I thought about it. I didn’t like the idea of her in danger either, but it’s not like she hadn’t been a target already, and she was right, smart, younger and more technically literate, she brought skills to the table that we lacked.

“After Sarah found you, she did some more online investigating to see who owned the building, and some of the names matched those contacts from that phone you took off the other bad guys, so we planned a rescue. Called your medic buddies because, like we said, best getaway vehicle ever, and useful if anybody got hurt.”

It was a good idea. Unfortunately, it seemed that I’d landed just about everybody who mattered to me in the shit.

After centuries of trying to look after myself and avoid getting too close so I wouldn’t have to worry about this kind of thing, I seemed to be making up for lost time.

“When we found the place,” Bob went on, “we breached the door and started looking for you. The first guy we met decided to shoot it out, but that went badly for him. Then this guy came around a corner, I hit him with the butt of my shotgun, took his gun and politely asked him to bring us to where you were being held.”

“At least you asked politely.”

“I was very polite. I even politely offered to shoot him in the face with a twelve gauge if he’d rather not tell me what I wanted to know,” said Bob. “It’s all about choices.”

“Maybe he’ll keep making smart ones,” I said.

“We can hope,” he replied.

The door opened and Sarah walked in with a bag of sandwiches and a tray of coffees.

I felt a catch in my breathing when I saw her, the same desperate urge to take her in my arms. The fact that I couldn’t was like a knife in my chest. The fact that the look in her eyes behind the strained smile told me she wanted me to but couldn’t let me was a twist of the knife.

“Hey, you,” she said.

“Hey yourself.”

“Are you alright?” she asked, putting the food down on the table. She wavered for a moment, as though she were torn between a desire to rush to me and hold me and a decision to keep her distance. Or maybe that was me projecting. Except for the distance thing.

“Thanks to you and the gang,” I replied.

“Are you hurt?”

“Not bad. Just ragged from trying to answer their questions without answering them.”

“Did they torture you?”

“Not according to Dick Cheney,” I replied.

“Oh my God. Sean. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. Without your help, I’d still be there.”

“OK,” Bob interrupted, opening the bag and handing me a sandwich and a coffee. “We’re all happy we’re alive, we’re all sorry it happened, now let’s hear the story and see what we can do to finish this.”

I took a bite of sandwich and a long sip of coffee, then I told my story. As I got to the part where I’d tried to escape as they took me out of the car, something occurred to me.

“John, when you disarmed the woman back at the house in Rowley when we went looking for info, you didn’t have any trouble tossing her on the couch and pulling her gun away. What do you think she weighed?”

“What does that have to do with–” Sarah began.

“One-ten, one-twenty,” answered John.

“When I tried to break away after they kidnapped me, I tried a leg sweep on the woman who drugged me. She looked about the same, just over a hundred pounds, not very muscular. But my kick bounced off her legs and then she hit me like a sledgehammer.”

“Maybe you’re just a weedy paleface,” he suggested.

“You don’t think a woman could beat you?” asked Sarah.

“If she fought like Jackie Chan, then I’d have believed it. But she fought like Muhammad Ali.”

“Which means?”

“Mass is mass,” I said. “We know they can change their appearance. But they don’t get heavier or lighter. They don’t add mass, they just rearrange it. I think this was a two hundred pound guy squashed into the shape of a small woman. So she was a very dense, heavy, woman-shaped creature. If it had gone the other way, if a hundred pound woman changed shape to a big bruiser, she’d look big, but she’d be a balloon.”

“Fascinating. But what’s that tell us?”

“The woman John disarmed was the one who tried to get my DNA the old fashioned way,” I said. “That seemed like a safe and reasonable thing to try, given the skills they have. But this woman, who showed up as Pete, and who drugged me, couldn’t have been the same one, and couldn’t have planned the same thing, since she wasn’t really a woman.”

“But if he, or she, or whatever, changed–”

“Growing ovaries is a lot more difficult that just shifting your body to look taller or fatter or whatever,” I said. “I mean, that makes sense, and from what Caruthers said...”

“Do we trust him?” asked Bob.

“No,” I replied. “But some of what he told me is true. He knew they were holding Sarah, he knew about the plan to go after my genes.”

“But why would he tell you? What’s his angle?”

“That I don’t know.”

“It’s a family feud,” said Sarah.

“What?”

“Or, rather, a struggle between factions.” She looked at me. “He told you about the other faction’s plan, told you where to find me, but not out of the goodness of his heart. He’s trying to screw their plan for his own reasons. And after you went to that house in Rowley and talked to that woman, let them know you knew, somebody who wasn’t her, but you’d think was, kidnapped and tortured you.”

I thought for a moment. It did all seem strange, but it looked like two sides fighting with me in the middle.

“I don’t know” she continued. “Maybe Caruthers and his faction wanted your genes too. Maybe they were going to torture you until you agreed to give them a sample in a cup. Maybe he wanted to sell it or use it for somebody other than the relative who...slept with you. Maybe he wanted to make you so angry you’d go after her and her side once he let you go.”

“Yeah,” I thought, scratching my chin. “That makes sense. We need more info.”

“Maybe our guest can tell us something,” suggested John.

“We didn’t drag him along to play cards,” Bob said.

“So now you’re going to torture him?” asked Sarah.

“No,” I said before anyone else could speak. “We’re not. We’ll talk to him. See what his angle is, see what he can tell us, check that against what we know. We’re not torturing anybody.”

“So what if he lies? Or just plays dumb?” asked Bob.

“We have a list of names from the phones and the gun and the building. We let him know we know some things, so he’ll be wary about lying. And he’s probably sure we will torture him. It would be payback, and it’s how they operate, so he probably fears it. I’m fine using that. We let him know he can pick the easy way or the hard way. But I’m not going to beat it out of him.”

“We been shooting at each other for a while now,” said John. “And we can kidnap a guy. And it’s OK to scare him, but not hurt him a little?”

“I’m not going to be a part of torture,” I repeated.

“You already were a part of it.”

“Oddly enough, that didn’t really change my mind,” I said.

“So we can lie to him. What’s the cutoff, noogies?”

“Indian burns, but only in a ticking bomb scenario,” offered Bob.

“That’s racist,” John pointed out.

“Sorry. First Nation Burns.”

“Better.”

“I don’t believe in torture,” I said.

“That’s like Joan of Arc not believing in fire,” said John. “Your life, and your friends’ lives are at stake. You’re going to start drawing lines now?”

“The difference between the good guys and the bad guys is where you draw your lines,” I said. “You take that away and you’re just playing hyper violent Shirt and Skins.”

Bob shrugged. “You’re the boss. Anyway, it’s your funeral. They don’t know where I live.”

That effectively ended the argument. I was unmoved. I didn’t believe in torture. I didn’t think it worked. After all, I managed to lie my way through it. And the things we do, regardless of why we do them, change us. Once you carve out an exception, a reason good enough to torture someone, you give up a piece of your humanity.

You can say the same for almost any type of violence, but once you start expanding definitions you get into a rhetorical quagmire where up is down and we have to destroy a city to save it. I prefer to draw a few clear lines. The world might really be mostly shades of grey, but some grey is dark enough to call black.

“We talk to him,” I said. “We see what he’ll tell us. If there is a dispute between factions, maybe we can play both sides against the middle.”

“Worth a shot,” said Bob. He heaved himself out of his chair. “I’m gonna go introduce myself. Don’t worry. I won’t touch him. I’ll just be big and scary.”

“Play to your strength,” I said.

“I’ll tag along,” said John. “Do my stoic, noble savage thing.”

They walked away, leaving Sarah and me alone at the table.

After an awkward silence, she leaned forward. “Are you alright? I mean, really?”

I shrugged. “I’m good. No lasting damage.”

“They tortured you?”

“They kept asking questions and ducking my head under water until they got some answers,” I replied. “I lied.”

“My God.”

I didn’t want her to worry. She’d been through enough, most of it because of me. “It was bad, but I’ve been through worse.”

“Who thinks of these things?”

“One thing humans are good at is coming up with innovative ways to be horrible to one another.”

“I’m still having a hard time with that,” she said.

“Bob said you found where I was,” I said, trying to turn the conversation off the path it was on. Because I’ve been down that path before, and it’s dark and twisting and I’ve yet to see anyone find a good way back from it.

She nodded. “When I called, and I asked your least favorite band, I knew it wasn’t you. Nickelback was too easy, and God knows, I never expect an easy answer from you. So I set up a fake meeting to buy time and tracked you down.”

“How?”

She sighed. “A few months ago I put a locator app on your phone,” she said. “Not because I was at all worried about you cheating on me with a bunch of slutty young EMTs. I did it because you should have one, but I know you’re a Luddite. And you have a dangerous past, and you do a dangerous job. And I worry about you. It was probably wrong to do it, without asking at least, but I do worry. Are you upset?”

“Considering it saved my life, I think it was the sweetest invasion of privacy I’ve ever seen.” I wasn’t upset. I probably should have been, but I just didn’t care. I was safe. For now. With a chance to fight back, and she had saved me.

I guess some lines you draw, and some you don’t.

“So,” she went on, “after I found where you were, I ran the address through a record search for the deed, and checked the name against the list of names you got from that woman’s phone when you raided the house in Rowley. Plus the name you got from your friends at the police. About the registration for the gun.

“I cross checked everything. Multiple names connected to the same numbers, addresses, bank accounts. It’s all on the net if you know how to find it. I can connect aliases to individuals. And phone records can help us tell who is working together.”

“How?”

“Well, people don’t call themselves, so calls between numbers indicate separate individuals. People who don’t like one another don’t talk for a long time. Just quick calls when they need to talk. Friends stay on the line for a long time. Single numbers that are connected to multiple names probably mean an alias. Somebody who carries one phone but goes by several names. Lets the calls go to voice mail, then figures out who they wanted and calls back. Or uses text so the voice isn’t a giveaway.”