Cast No Shadow (Chapter 2)
Ingrid Hunnigan appeals to Leon's sense of heroism. She has her work cut out for her.
Chapter 2- Departure
Thanks to everyone who reviewed the first chapter!
Quick Note: this fic makes liberal use of flashbacks and these are written in italics to distinguish them from the rest of the story.
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‘Show me,’ I snatch a chair from under the dining table and swing it between my legs.
Hunnigan fans out a dozen grainy photographs and I peer into them, looking for a probable future. I see metal chairs in orderly rows and people milling between them, glass kiosks with the shutters down and a range of dates and times stamped at the corners. The most recent date was from last Thursday, around o-nine hundred.
‘What am I looking at?’ I mumble absently as my mind starts to slot the pieces together. But it’s a rusty process, even after only five months out of the job, so I need Hunnigan’s guiding hand.
‘Harvardville Airport security footage,’ she plucks a pencil from her blouse pocket and points it at a dark silhouette, ‘This man has been spotted in the airport several times in the past few months. He never takes a flight. He doesn’t pick anything or anyone up. He’s just there one minute and gone the next.’
Tall and lean but undoubtedly male, the man could have been in his early twenties or his late fifties for all the detail these snapshots offered. His only distinguishing feature was his dark hair, long and lank, tied into a ponytail in some pictures, loose about his shoulders in others. These images wouldn’t give anywhere near a positive ID in a courtroom.
‘Sure it’s the same guy?’
Hunnigan gives me that look.
‘All right,’ I amend with a flickering grin of apology, ‘You’re sure.’
She folds her arms across her chest and explains that the airport’s security system had been compromised months ago. A hacker, alias ‘Hades’, had been screwing their computer systems and testing everything: the lights, doors, the auto-locks, the metal detectors. Slowly and secretly he’d learned to work the entire security system like a master conductor at the Prague Philharmonic. First-Air, the company that owned the airport, hadn’t reported it to the authorities as soon as they’d spotted the breach, fearing their stock prices would plummet as a result.
Money trumps safety. Greed trumps common sense.
Figures.
‘You think this is Hades dropping by to gloat in full view?’
‘We don’t know,’ she admits with a barely detectable huff, ‘But I’m almost sure Hades isn’t flying solo. He’s got powerful friends. We just don’t know who yet. Or why.’
I lean back and fold my arms behind my head. I need a moment’s distance. Her urgency is putting me on edge and it’s the last place a man like me should find himself, especially after everything that’s happened.
‘You were getting to the part about why I need to be involved,’ I glance at the photographs, a hollow space unravelling inside my chest, ‘I was never in the cyber crimes unit.’
By way of a reply, Hunnigan reaches into her bag. She pulls out her gambit and she does it in a theatrical way, with a flourishing hand gesture. She slides the wafer-thin notebook computer out from nowhere and presents it to me like a magician presents a six year old with a white rabbit.
I see Harvardville airport on her computer’s screen. I watch it move; those black and white pictures from before suddenly in motion. The timestamp in the corner ticks on for about half a minute before I see something... someone. Someone is running away from the windows. They disappear just out of camera shot, ducking into static. Then someone else follows. And another and another. Mass movement. Hysteria. There’s no sound, but I can hear the screaming. I have a talent for filling in the blanks and the dark spaces. I lean closer as if I could peep around the corner and see what had sent them stampeding across the foyer.
‘Holy shit,’ I rasp.
I slap the pause button just as the nose of an airplane smashes through the back row of chairs, splashing dozens of travellers with glass and metal. Bodies bouncing like insects on its windshield. My mind flashes between the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Sweet Mary Mother of God.
The clip ends and my fingers stab at the play-back button. Soon I’m onto my fifth consecutive re-watch of the footage, all without looking up or saying a word. I latch stubbornly onto every second of these two and a half black and white minutes.
‘This happened a few hours ago,’ Hunnigan has circled the table to watch from behind my hunched shoulders, ‘This is... was Flight 409 from Kansas City. Shortly before impact Air Traffic Control got a ten second Mayday and then static.’
‘Have there been anymore crashes?’ I demand gruffly before hitting rewind for a sixth time.
‘No. But every passenger plane in the country has been grounded.’
I mumble my approval and rub my hands over my mouth and nose. This has to be all over the news right now. I suppose this is where not having a TV has come back to bite me in the ass.
An hour ago I’d been counting fish eggs, but now... I can’t reconcile myself. I was splitting down the middle again. Afraid. Exhilarated. Furious. Apathetic. I don’t know how to react anymore.
‘What about-’ I clear my throat and lift my eyes to the inches of space just above Hunnigan’s head, ‘What about the T Virus? Don’t tell me you think it was in the-’
Hunnigan nods once. My face falls, muscles losing structure and tone.
I erupt out of the chair, almost kicking it over.
‘Sonofabitch!’ I yell at the far wall, confident it can survive my outburst and not take it personally. After all, it’s taken the brunt of my anger, my raised voice, my bad dreams and broken bottles on a regular basis since I’d arrived at the cabin.
I swallow what I hope will be a calming breath, but the air has the texture of ash in my lungs. It pools in my veins like tar. I’m a toxic mess. I should be quarantined, not enlisted.
I face Hunnigan, ‘What was it? An accident? Deliberate?’
‘That’s what we want you to find out,’ her voice is so calm that it instantly makes me feel like a dick for losing it at record speed, ‘We’re not sure how the virus got onto the plane or whether there’s another carrier out there somewhere infecting everything they so much as breathe on. We’ve got the CDC, USAMRIID, the armed forces and military police surrounding the building. But if this is what we think it is then we can’t contain it short of complete sterilisation.’
Sterilisation.
My nerve endings shrivel.
‘We have confirmed reports of an outbreak that sounds exactly like the T Virus,’ Hunnigan rounds off her pitch. The look in her eyes is focused like a hot beam through glass, ‘We need your expertise. And we need it now.’
‘Chris Redfield,’ I throw the name out like a wish into the wind.
‘He’s in Botswana.’
‘Barry Burton.’
‘Alaska. Besides, he retired.’
‘And I haven’t?’
‘He has a family.’
And I have no one. Can’t argue there.
What’s worse is that there’s a part of me that wants to do it, that wants to be there today, that wants to lead. I crave the hot, delicious rush that comes after I help save a life. But I don’t want to give into my addiction. Mom’s cocaine habit had ruined her. Grandpa’s cigars had blackened his lungs until they were useless.
This is why I’m in Colorado. I’m trying to force the point through my thick skull. The point that my life before Raccoon City had been different. It’d held promise and even love; a safe, harmless kind of love that couldn’t ruin my life if it’d tried. And one day I could have that again. In theory. But my ghosts have hitched a ride up State with me. They have their hands over my eyes and are clouding my senses.
I inhale danger. It’d erased everything I’d ever loved. And it’d almost destroyed me. Maybe facing death in the womb had given me my first hit of recklessness and defiance, my desire to save and be saved. I’d suckled on adrenaline and been born on a high.
Coming down was the tricky part.
I begin to tread slowly across the floor, the wooden boards singing beneath me. I wrap my fingers around the windowsill and squeeze. White paint comes off in flakes that become embedded into my palms like burrowing ticks.
Snap. Snap. Snap. The clock above the stove has never been louder.
The helicopter is prepped for launch. Outside its blades are whipping up a storm, faster and faster until it’s almost enough to pick up this cabin and whisk me away to the reddest, most blood drenched end of the rainbow. The thick scent of an adventure tickles the edge of my senses and the more I recoil the closer it creeps into the depths of me.
‘Okay,’ I answer without turning around, ‘I’ll provide support over comms. I’ll brief your teams-’
‘Not what we had in mind.’
My throat tightens like a rubber band being stretched and stretched, on and on until all I can do is wheeze: ‘Don’t make me do this Ingrid. I can’t.’
I hear a plastic click and turn to find Hunnigan forcing her laptop closed.
‘Then I’m all out,’ she tears open her briefcase.
‘All outta what?’
She ignores me.
‘What Hunnigan?’
‘Options. Time. Energy. Patience. You name it, the cupboard is bare Leon,’ she clarifies with a level of candidness that I’d never expected to hear from her, ‘Five months you’ve been hiding here and look at yourself. You’re a mess. I throw you a lifeline and you throw it back. Do you have the slightest idea how much credibility I lost vouching for you when you went on that joyride across Asia?’
I scoff, my defences so high they break orbit, ‘Funny. I don’t remember you doing much vouching when I was facing five to seven without parole.’
‘What did you expect? Cookies and a hug? You’d turned your back on the agency.’
‘No! It turned its back on me,’ I let her have it, both barrels smoking, ‘I begged for help and I got nothing. I had to go after those bastards all on my own.’
‘And we still have agents in Shanghai cleaning up after you.’
I’m startled, but I hide it well. I swallow back the shame with nothing but an inward grimace, ‘So, the agency’ll send out a team to do a cover up but you won’t lift a finger to solve a murder?’
It was her turn to go green around the gills. Her eyes grow wide, magnified by her owl-rim glasses, ‘There just wasn’t any real proof. You know that as well as I do. We chase facts, not ghosts.’
This is the bone of contention between us. We can’t agree. I follow my gut while she follows logic; the logic that sometimes there is smoke but no fire.
‘She wasn’t a ghost Hunnigan. She was real,’ my voice shakes as if I’m not even sure of that anymore, ‘She sacrificed everything she had and the best the Director could do was say “well, shit happens. Take the weekend off”. What was I supposed to do?’
‘But they did look Leon,’ she insists, her hair seeming to unravel from its sculpted bun as she becomes desperate, ‘They investigated the whole site for days. You were there. You saw it. And all evidence pointed to an accident. The place was derelict and falling apart. There was a leaking gas main. She fired a shot and the building went up.’
‘That’s a whole load of bullshit,’ laughter gurgles up my throat like acid, ‘Do you honestly think that after everything... every damn thing we’ve been through these past seven years that Ada would have been so fucking stupid?’
The laughter foams at my mouth tasting like a sour milky residue; invisible bubbles slapping my lips as they burst. I think I’m about to be sick.
You see, I haven’t said her name, not out loud, for almost six months. It’s a sledgehammer to the solar plexus. I need to sit down.
My sudden loss of fervour gets past Hunnigan and she begins to pack her things.
‘There’s an ongoing state of emergency. People are dying, Leon. I don’t have time to argue about this ad-nauseum,’ she slings her bag onto her shoulder, ‘I don’t even have time to force you at gunpoint, but so help me God I wish I did. The Leon I know wouldn’t hesitate to help.’
‘Please. The Leon you know dances on the head of a pin. He spins moonbeams into unicorns and he raises the dead. He’s not real.’
But of course I don’t say that to her. Instead my list of boring excuses grows long: ‘I want to help. But you’re asking more from me than I can give. I can’t do this anymore. There has to be someone else.’
She’s heard it all before and wasn’t impressed, not even the first time. Her eyes go dull, fading behind the tint of her glasses, ‘I can’t pretend to understand what it was like to lose her so suddenly. But answer me one thing Agent Kennedy. How does hiding and giving up make any damn difference? I didn’t know Ada well but look at yourself... what part of this honours her? ’
There’s a timid knock at my door and Agent Armani pokes his head into the room. He taps his watch at Hunnigan and she nods her assent. He ducks away, avoiding me completely. When the door closes Hunnigan stares at me, silently pleading and just a touch sentimental. Her question dangles above my head unanswered. And I know what my answer will be even before I realise why I’ve changed my mind.
I cross the room. My hand reaches out towards my grandfather’s tackle box and for the piece of jewellery I’d tucked into its darkest corner. It’s a gold pin decorated with an exquisitely sculpted Art Deco butterfly. It’s studded with gemstones. The design is unnaturally asymmetrical and flawlessly unique: a tiny ruby on its left wing, a sapphire on its right. Its wings are attached to the pin via tiny hinges and they’re so delicate that they flap at the slightest movement.
I could see Ada in my mind’s eye. She was in front of a gilded mirror, deftly tossing her raven hair into a short braid.
‘I’m not sure about this. There’s too much we don’t know about Chen. No one’s gonna think less of us if we ask for a little more time.’
‘You’re being paranoid.’
‘I’m being careful.’
Silent laughter, ‘Then don’t let me panic you.’
‘You callin’ me a coward?’
‘No. Never that. Besides, you should take comfort in being nervous. It means we’re close. Do you think I don’t feel the same way?’
She’d paused for an answer, but I wasn’t falling into that trap again. I’d smiled at her, flashing a glimpse of dimpled tongue. She’d rolled back her shoulders and her mouth had puckered into an airborne kiss.
‘Fine. It’s dangerous. I’m not blind. But it’s intoxicating too, don’t you think?’ she’d continued in a tone that’d be described as wistful if it’d come from anyone but her, ‘I don’t walk away from a fight worth winning. You’re no different. It’s why this has worked.’
By ‘this’ she meant us; our partnership. All seven glorious, bruising, intoxicating months of it.
Then she’d swept me up. Got me excited. She was always too damn good at that.
We had been close. She’d been right about that, but wrong about other things. It hadn’t been nerves shredding my insides, it’d been dread; violent, sickly dread unlike anything I’d experienced before. It’d woken me in the middle of the night; it’d bathed me in an ice-sweat. It’d even been strong enough to drown out my hunger for Ada’s freedom. For our freedom.
‘All the more reason to be careful,’ I’d reclined lazily into the man-sized cleft we’d made in the middle of the mattress.
I’d still been in my boxers. We hadn’t been due at our safe house until the next morning. We’d spent the night in a small hotel on the outskirts of the city with nothing but a bottle of wine and an old TV set that’d played shows in a language neither of us could understand.
I have a hundred regrets and this is one of them: I should’ve had some damn pants on. If I’d swapped out my ‘come to bed’ eyes and taken on a more professional attitude or if the sex we’d just had hadn’t been playing through my mind on an endless loop then she might have taken me more seriously.
‘Funny. When did I become the optimist and you the pessimist?’
‘I guess around the same time you started borrowing my shirts and leaving breakfast crumbs between my sheets.’
I’d studied her reflection. She’d wrinkled her nose but her eyes had fallen half shut; a sure sign of reluctant delight, ‘And if I stop coming over will you take me seriously?’
‘I always take you seriously,’ I’d risen up on my elbows, ‘More than you know. I’m being... trying to be practical. You’re no good to anyone injured.’
‘Aw. I’m touched,’ she’d patted her bosom affectionately, ‘I hadn’t noticed that I meant so much to you.’
‘Then you haven’t been paying enough attention.’
She’d stopped. Her gaze had flashed to the mirror to find mine waiting in its reflection. Her fingers had fallen from her hair and the braid had tumbled open.
Then she’d turned, climbed onto the bed and crawled over the woollen quilt. She’d made a smooth landing on my lap and plucked the butterfly pin from her collar. I’d bought it and had it altered specially for her. I’d presented it to her on Christmas day last year just as our relationship had gotten serious. She’d worn it everyday since then, jokingly calling it her good luck charm.
Ada had pressed the butterfly pin into my palm and closed her fingers around mine, a parcel of flesh and bone locked tight with her lips as the scarlet bow. She’d been so empathic to my needs, to who I was. She’d known when I was scared and how she could comfort me. And with her I’d been the same.
‘Here,’ she’d caressed my jaw bone, tickling my stubble with the fingertips of her free hand, ‘For good luck.’
I’d kissed her back into my arms. I’d caressed her soft body beneath those sheets for the last time. I’d made her mine for too short a moment. Then I’d fixed her some coffee. I’d helped her to dress. With a sleepy grin I’d offered to buy her an early breakfast at the little bohemian cafe around the corner. I’d caught her eyeing the cream cakes in its window during our walk to the hotel, her lips curling inwards around the moist dip of her tongue; a phantom tasting I’d longed to satisfy. With a half-smile she’d declined.
‘Next time Handsome. There’s always a next time.’
Everyday since that night I’ve backed my memories of her into a corner. But they’d branch their way out, twisting down pathways I hadn’t known existed and into depths where I’d never been touched before, not by pleasure or pain.
In that seemingly endless split-second between asleep and awake the rubble of my life would clarify. D’you want me to tell you why I’m afraid? Do you want to know the truth? The truth I’ve never admitted to anyone, not even Hunnigan?
All right.
I didn’t leave the agency because I blamed them for the mission that had gone to hell. Wasn’t their fault. If I could delude myself enough I could blame them for so much; resent them for every rusty spot that’d tarnished my waking hours since Raccoon City. But they hadn’t made me pull the trigger. They hadn’t even given me the gun. You see after the agency had closed the investigation into Ada’s murder I’d been hungry for someone to punish, someone to steal the spotlight that’d been hounding me since that catastrophic night in Cracow. My world had been torn from its orbit on the night she’d died. I’d needed to redress the balance. I’d had to make someone pay.
So I’d gone after the triad sect involved in trading biological weapons that Ada and I had been trying to take down all those months we were together. I’d been so sure that they’d ordered her death. I’d spent three months and all my savings in Shanghai and Beijing trying to prove it.
No one would have recognised the man I became in China. I’d stolen. I’d threatened. I’d blackmailed and lied. I’d sold out informants. I’d bribed men to cover up the crimes of thugs and killers. I’m an accessory to murder. And the truly shameful thing is that I’m able to live with it. By the time I’d returned to the States I was done trying to be a hero because I knew I was a fraud.
I curl my fingers around the butterfly pin and I try so hard to find the man I was a year ago. The man with the qualities that she could bring out in me. The man she’d been proud of instead of a wreck in self-imposed exile. I’ve lived so many days feeling hollow. There are times when even light passes straight through me and, like a ghost, I cast no shadow.
‘I’ll...’ I close my eyes and focus hard on the words as they take shape. I can almost see them. They are sharp and red like rusty blades, ‘I’ll pack my things.’
Hunnigan’s mouth spreads into the kind of smile I only expect to see on a well fed cat, ‘Don’t bother. I’ve taken care of it. You’ll have everything you need. Weapons. Change of clothes. Equipment.’
Bag in hand she shepherds me towards my door.
When she’s close to me she hesitates and her gaze falls to my chin, ‘You can uh... shave when we reach base camp.’
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Thanks for reading. The next chapter is due in a week. In case anyone is wondering, I based Leon's confession towards the end on lines used during Captain Sisko's final log entry at the end of the Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode 'In the Pale Moonlight'.
*Is teh shameless sci fi diva* :3
Chapter 2- Departure
Thanks to everyone who reviewed the first chapter!
Quick Note: this fic makes liberal use of flashbacks and these are written in italics to distinguish them from the rest of the story.
---
‘Show me,’ I snatch a chair from under the dining table and swing it between my legs.
Hunnigan fans out a dozen grainy photographs and I peer into them, looking for a probable future. I see metal chairs in orderly rows and people milling between them, glass kiosks with the shutters down and a range of dates and times stamped at the corners. The most recent date was from last Thursday, around o-nine hundred.
‘What am I looking at?’ I mumble absently as my mind starts to slot the pieces together. But it’s a rusty process, even after only five months out of the job, so I need Hunnigan’s guiding hand.
‘Harvardville Airport security footage,’ she plucks a pencil from her blouse pocket and points it at a dark silhouette, ‘This man has been spotted in the airport several times in the past few months. He never takes a flight. He doesn’t pick anything or anyone up. He’s just there one minute and gone the next.’
Tall and lean but undoubtedly male, the man could have been in his early twenties or his late fifties for all the detail these snapshots offered. His only distinguishing feature was his dark hair, long and lank, tied into a ponytail in some pictures, loose about his shoulders in others. These images wouldn’t give anywhere near a positive ID in a courtroom.
‘Sure it’s the same guy?’
Hunnigan gives me that look.
‘All right,’ I amend with a flickering grin of apology, ‘You’re sure.’
She folds her arms across her chest and explains that the airport’s security system had been compromised months ago. A hacker, alias ‘Hades’, had been screwing their computer systems and testing everything: the lights, doors, the auto-locks, the metal detectors. Slowly and secretly he’d learned to work the entire security system like a master conductor at the Prague Philharmonic. First-Air, the company that owned the airport, hadn’t reported it to the authorities as soon as they’d spotted the breach, fearing their stock prices would plummet as a result.
Money trumps safety. Greed trumps common sense.
Figures.
‘You think this is Hades dropping by to gloat in full view?’
‘We don’t know,’ she admits with a barely detectable huff, ‘But I’m almost sure Hades isn’t flying solo. He’s got powerful friends. We just don’t know who yet. Or why.’
I lean back and fold my arms behind my head. I need a moment’s distance. Her urgency is putting me on edge and it’s the last place a man like me should find himself, especially after everything that’s happened.
‘You were getting to the part about why I need to be involved,’ I glance at the photographs, a hollow space unravelling inside my chest, ‘I was never in the cyber crimes unit.’
By way of a reply, Hunnigan reaches into her bag. She pulls out her gambit and she does it in a theatrical way, with a flourishing hand gesture. She slides the wafer-thin notebook computer out from nowhere and presents it to me like a magician presents a six year old with a white rabbit.
I see Harvardville airport on her computer’s screen. I watch it move; those black and white pictures from before suddenly in motion. The timestamp in the corner ticks on for about half a minute before I see something... someone. Someone is running away from the windows. They disappear just out of camera shot, ducking into static. Then someone else follows. And another and another. Mass movement. Hysteria. There’s no sound, but I can hear the screaming. I have a talent for filling in the blanks and the dark spaces. I lean closer as if I could peep around the corner and see what had sent them stampeding across the foyer.
‘Holy shit,’ I rasp.
I slap the pause button just as the nose of an airplane smashes through the back row of chairs, splashing dozens of travellers with glass and metal. Bodies bouncing like insects on its windshield. My mind flashes between the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Sweet Mary Mother of God.
The clip ends and my fingers stab at the play-back button. Soon I’m onto my fifth consecutive re-watch of the footage, all without looking up or saying a word. I latch stubbornly onto every second of these two and a half black and white minutes.
‘This happened a few hours ago,’ Hunnigan has circled the table to watch from behind my hunched shoulders, ‘This is... was Flight 409 from Kansas City. Shortly before impact Air Traffic Control got a ten second Mayday and then static.’
‘Have there been anymore crashes?’ I demand gruffly before hitting rewind for a sixth time.
‘No. But every passenger plane in the country has been grounded.’
I mumble my approval and rub my hands over my mouth and nose. This has to be all over the news right now. I suppose this is where not having a TV has come back to bite me in the ass.
An hour ago I’d been counting fish eggs, but now... I can’t reconcile myself. I was splitting down the middle again. Afraid. Exhilarated. Furious. Apathetic. I don’t know how to react anymore.
‘What about-’ I clear my throat and lift my eyes to the inches of space just above Hunnigan’s head, ‘What about the T Virus? Don’t tell me you think it was in the-’
Hunnigan nods once. My face falls, muscles losing structure and tone.
I erupt out of the chair, almost kicking it over.
‘Sonofabitch!’ I yell at the far wall, confident it can survive my outburst and not take it personally. After all, it’s taken the brunt of my anger, my raised voice, my bad dreams and broken bottles on a regular basis since I’d arrived at the cabin.
I swallow what I hope will be a calming breath, but the air has the texture of ash in my lungs. It pools in my veins like tar. I’m a toxic mess. I should be quarantined, not enlisted.
I face Hunnigan, ‘What was it? An accident? Deliberate?’
‘That’s what we want you to find out,’ her voice is so calm that it instantly makes me feel like a dick for losing it at record speed, ‘We’re not sure how the virus got onto the plane or whether there’s another carrier out there somewhere infecting everything they so much as breathe on. We’ve got the CDC, USAMRIID, the armed forces and military police surrounding the building. But if this is what we think it is then we can’t contain it short of complete sterilisation.’
Sterilisation.
My nerve endings shrivel.
‘We have confirmed reports of an outbreak that sounds exactly like the T Virus,’ Hunnigan rounds off her pitch. The look in her eyes is focused like a hot beam through glass, ‘We need your expertise. And we need it now.’
‘Chris Redfield,’ I throw the name out like a wish into the wind.
‘He’s in Botswana.’
‘Barry Burton.’
‘Alaska. Besides, he retired.’
‘And I haven’t?’
‘He has a family.’
And I have no one. Can’t argue there.
What’s worse is that there’s a part of me that wants to do it, that wants to be there today, that wants to lead. I crave the hot, delicious rush that comes after I help save a life. But I don’t want to give into my addiction. Mom’s cocaine habit had ruined her. Grandpa’s cigars had blackened his lungs until they were useless.
This is why I’m in Colorado. I’m trying to force the point through my thick skull. The point that my life before Raccoon City had been different. It’d held promise and even love; a safe, harmless kind of love that couldn’t ruin my life if it’d tried. And one day I could have that again. In theory. But my ghosts have hitched a ride up State with me. They have their hands over my eyes and are clouding my senses.
I inhale danger. It’d erased everything I’d ever loved. And it’d almost destroyed me. Maybe facing death in the womb had given me my first hit of recklessness and defiance, my desire to save and be saved. I’d suckled on adrenaline and been born on a high.
Coming down was the tricky part.
I begin to tread slowly across the floor, the wooden boards singing beneath me. I wrap my fingers around the windowsill and squeeze. White paint comes off in flakes that become embedded into my palms like burrowing ticks.
Snap. Snap. Snap. The clock above the stove has never been louder.
The helicopter is prepped for launch. Outside its blades are whipping up a storm, faster and faster until it’s almost enough to pick up this cabin and whisk me away to the reddest, most blood drenched end of the rainbow. The thick scent of an adventure tickles the edge of my senses and the more I recoil the closer it creeps into the depths of me.
‘Okay,’ I answer without turning around, ‘I’ll provide support over comms. I’ll brief your teams-’
‘Not what we had in mind.’
My throat tightens like a rubber band being stretched and stretched, on and on until all I can do is wheeze: ‘Don’t make me do this Ingrid. I can’t.’
I hear a plastic click and turn to find Hunnigan forcing her laptop closed.
‘Then I’m all out,’ she tears open her briefcase.
‘All outta what?’
She ignores me.
‘What Hunnigan?’
‘Options. Time. Energy. Patience. You name it, the cupboard is bare Leon,’ she clarifies with a level of candidness that I’d never expected to hear from her, ‘Five months you’ve been hiding here and look at yourself. You’re a mess. I throw you a lifeline and you throw it back. Do you have the slightest idea how much credibility I lost vouching for you when you went on that joyride across Asia?’
I scoff, my defences so high they break orbit, ‘Funny. I don’t remember you doing much vouching when I was facing five to seven without parole.’
‘What did you expect? Cookies and a hug? You’d turned your back on the agency.’
‘No! It turned its back on me,’ I let her have it, both barrels smoking, ‘I begged for help and I got nothing. I had to go after those bastards all on my own.’
‘And we still have agents in Shanghai cleaning up after you.’
I’m startled, but I hide it well. I swallow back the shame with nothing but an inward grimace, ‘So, the agency’ll send out a team to do a cover up but you won’t lift a finger to solve a murder?’
It was her turn to go green around the gills. Her eyes grow wide, magnified by her owl-rim glasses, ‘There just wasn’t any real proof. You know that as well as I do. We chase facts, not ghosts.’
This is the bone of contention between us. We can’t agree. I follow my gut while she follows logic; the logic that sometimes there is smoke but no fire.
‘She wasn’t a ghost Hunnigan. She was real,’ my voice shakes as if I’m not even sure of that anymore, ‘She sacrificed everything she had and the best the Director could do was say “well, shit happens. Take the weekend off”. What was I supposed to do?’
‘But they did look Leon,’ she insists, her hair seeming to unravel from its sculpted bun as she becomes desperate, ‘They investigated the whole site for days. You were there. You saw it. And all evidence pointed to an accident. The place was derelict and falling apart. There was a leaking gas main. She fired a shot and the building went up.’
‘That’s a whole load of bullshit,’ laughter gurgles up my throat like acid, ‘Do you honestly think that after everything... every damn thing we’ve been through these past seven years that Ada would have been so fucking stupid?’
The laughter foams at my mouth tasting like a sour milky residue; invisible bubbles slapping my lips as they burst. I think I’m about to be sick.
You see, I haven’t said her name, not out loud, for almost six months. It’s a sledgehammer to the solar plexus. I need to sit down.
My sudden loss of fervour gets past Hunnigan and she begins to pack her things.
‘There’s an ongoing state of emergency. People are dying, Leon. I don’t have time to argue about this ad-nauseum,’ she slings her bag onto her shoulder, ‘I don’t even have time to force you at gunpoint, but so help me God I wish I did. The Leon I know wouldn’t hesitate to help.’
‘Please. The Leon you know dances on the head of a pin. He spins moonbeams into unicorns and he raises the dead. He’s not real.’
But of course I don’t say that to her. Instead my list of boring excuses grows long: ‘I want to help. But you’re asking more from me than I can give. I can’t do this anymore. There has to be someone else.’
She’s heard it all before and wasn’t impressed, not even the first time. Her eyes go dull, fading behind the tint of her glasses, ‘I can’t pretend to understand what it was like to lose her so suddenly. But answer me one thing Agent Kennedy. How does hiding and giving up make any damn difference? I didn’t know Ada well but look at yourself... what part of this honours her? ’
There’s a timid knock at my door and Agent Armani pokes his head into the room. He taps his watch at Hunnigan and she nods her assent. He ducks away, avoiding me completely. When the door closes Hunnigan stares at me, silently pleading and just a touch sentimental. Her question dangles above my head unanswered. And I know what my answer will be even before I realise why I’ve changed my mind.
I cross the room. My hand reaches out towards my grandfather’s tackle box and for the piece of jewellery I’d tucked into its darkest corner. It’s a gold pin decorated with an exquisitely sculpted Art Deco butterfly. It’s studded with gemstones. The design is unnaturally asymmetrical and flawlessly unique: a tiny ruby on its left wing, a sapphire on its right. Its wings are attached to the pin via tiny hinges and they’re so delicate that they flap at the slightest movement.
I could see Ada in my mind’s eye. She was in front of a gilded mirror, deftly tossing her raven hair into a short braid.
‘I’m not sure about this. There’s too much we don’t know about Chen. No one’s gonna think less of us if we ask for a little more time.’
‘You’re being paranoid.’
‘I’m being careful.’
Silent laughter, ‘Then don’t let me panic you.’
‘You callin’ me a coward?’
‘No. Never that. Besides, you should take comfort in being nervous. It means we’re close. Do you think I don’t feel the same way?’
She’d paused for an answer, but I wasn’t falling into that trap again. I’d smiled at her, flashing a glimpse of dimpled tongue. She’d rolled back her shoulders and her mouth had puckered into an airborne kiss.
‘Fine. It’s dangerous. I’m not blind. But it’s intoxicating too, don’t you think?’ she’d continued in a tone that’d be described as wistful if it’d come from anyone but her, ‘I don’t walk away from a fight worth winning. You’re no different. It’s why this has worked.’
By ‘this’ she meant us; our partnership. All seven glorious, bruising, intoxicating months of it.
Then she’d swept me up. Got me excited. She was always too damn good at that.
We had been close. She’d been right about that, but wrong about other things. It hadn’t been nerves shredding my insides, it’d been dread; violent, sickly dread unlike anything I’d experienced before. It’d woken me in the middle of the night; it’d bathed me in an ice-sweat. It’d even been strong enough to drown out my hunger for Ada’s freedom. For our freedom.
‘All the more reason to be careful,’ I’d reclined lazily into the man-sized cleft we’d made in the middle of the mattress.
I’d still been in my boxers. We hadn’t been due at our safe house until the next morning. We’d spent the night in a small hotel on the outskirts of the city with nothing but a bottle of wine and an old TV set that’d played shows in a language neither of us could understand.
I have a hundred regrets and this is one of them: I should’ve had some damn pants on. If I’d swapped out my ‘come to bed’ eyes and taken on a more professional attitude or if the sex we’d just had hadn’t been playing through my mind on an endless loop then she might have taken me more seriously.
‘Funny. When did I become the optimist and you the pessimist?’
‘I guess around the same time you started borrowing my shirts and leaving breakfast crumbs between my sheets.’
I’d studied her reflection. She’d wrinkled her nose but her eyes had fallen half shut; a sure sign of reluctant delight, ‘And if I stop coming over will you take me seriously?’
‘I always take you seriously,’ I’d risen up on my elbows, ‘More than you know. I’m being... trying to be practical. You’re no good to anyone injured.’
‘Aw. I’m touched,’ she’d patted her bosom affectionately, ‘I hadn’t noticed that I meant so much to you.’
‘Then you haven’t been paying enough attention.’
She’d stopped. Her gaze had flashed to the mirror to find mine waiting in its reflection. Her fingers had fallen from her hair and the braid had tumbled open.
Then she’d turned, climbed onto the bed and crawled over the woollen quilt. She’d made a smooth landing on my lap and plucked the butterfly pin from her collar. I’d bought it and had it altered specially for her. I’d presented it to her on Christmas day last year just as our relationship had gotten serious. She’d worn it everyday since then, jokingly calling it her good luck charm.
Ada had pressed the butterfly pin into my palm and closed her fingers around mine, a parcel of flesh and bone locked tight with her lips as the scarlet bow. She’d been so empathic to my needs, to who I was. She’d known when I was scared and how she could comfort me. And with her I’d been the same.
‘Here,’ she’d caressed my jaw bone, tickling my stubble with the fingertips of her free hand, ‘For good luck.’
I’d kissed her back into my arms. I’d caressed her soft body beneath those sheets for the last time. I’d made her mine for too short a moment. Then I’d fixed her some coffee. I’d helped her to dress. With a sleepy grin I’d offered to buy her an early breakfast at the little bohemian cafe around the corner. I’d caught her eyeing the cream cakes in its window during our walk to the hotel, her lips curling inwards around the moist dip of her tongue; a phantom tasting I’d longed to satisfy. With a half-smile she’d declined.
‘Next time Handsome. There’s always a next time.’
Everyday since that night I’ve backed my memories of her into a corner. But they’d branch their way out, twisting down pathways I hadn’t known existed and into depths where I’d never been touched before, not by pleasure or pain.
In that seemingly endless split-second between asleep and awake the rubble of my life would clarify. D’you want me to tell you why I’m afraid? Do you want to know the truth? The truth I’ve never admitted to anyone, not even Hunnigan?
All right.
I didn’t leave the agency because I blamed them for the mission that had gone to hell. Wasn’t their fault. If I could delude myself enough I could blame them for so much; resent them for every rusty spot that’d tarnished my waking hours since Raccoon City. But they hadn’t made me pull the trigger. They hadn’t even given me the gun. You see after the agency had closed the investigation into Ada’s murder I’d been hungry for someone to punish, someone to steal the spotlight that’d been hounding me since that catastrophic night in Cracow. My world had been torn from its orbit on the night she’d died. I’d needed to redress the balance. I’d had to make someone pay.
So I’d gone after the triad sect involved in trading biological weapons that Ada and I had been trying to take down all those months we were together. I’d been so sure that they’d ordered her death. I’d spent three months and all my savings in Shanghai and Beijing trying to prove it.
No one would have recognised the man I became in China. I’d stolen. I’d threatened. I’d blackmailed and lied. I’d sold out informants. I’d bribed men to cover up the crimes of thugs and killers. I’m an accessory to murder. And the truly shameful thing is that I’m able to live with it. By the time I’d returned to the States I was done trying to be a hero because I knew I was a fraud.
I curl my fingers around the butterfly pin and I try so hard to find the man I was a year ago. The man with the qualities that she could bring out in me. The man she’d been proud of instead of a wreck in self-imposed exile. I’ve lived so many days feeling hollow. There are times when even light passes straight through me and, like a ghost, I cast no shadow.
‘I’ll...’ I close my eyes and focus hard on the words as they take shape. I can almost see them. They are sharp and red like rusty blades, ‘I’ll pack my things.’
Hunnigan’s mouth spreads into the kind of smile I only expect to see on a well fed cat, ‘Don’t bother. I’ve taken care of it. You’ll have everything you need. Weapons. Change of clothes. Equipment.’
Bag in hand she shepherds me towards my door.
When she’s close to me she hesitates and her gaze falls to my chin, ‘You can uh... shave when we reach base camp.’
---
Thanks for reading. The next chapter is due in a week. In case anyone is wondering, I based Leon's confession towards the end on lines used during Captain Sisko's final log entry at the end of the Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode 'In the Pale Moonlight'.
*Is teh shameless sci fi diva* :3