Abyss (Songs of Megiddo) (19 page)

“If you were set up...”

“Yeah...but that’s part of being a good agent. I should have felt it. And that was what I was thinking: that I should’ve fucking felt it; how fucking
wrong
that shit was, right from the get-go. So I’m shaking. I’m trying to stay tough; as insane as it is, my training’s screaming at me to stay cold...to stay focussed, and see if I can salvage the mission. But I just can’t stop fucking
shaking
. And I know this kid can see it: he’s broken me, and he knows it. One soldier’s looking down at another...and there’s just...no respect there. He points the gun at me, and he tells me to pray. Just that one word in English: ‘pray’.” Smoke sighed. Yvonne shifted her hand over Smoke’s.

“
Are you okay?”

“Not really,” Smoke chuckled a sad little chuckle. “But it happened like it happened, right? It’s not like I can go back and
change things.”

“Yeah.”

“So...I squeeze my eyes shut, and...nothing. I didn’t even have anything to pray to. I’m not even religious. But, see...I knew what the kid wanted, and I knew I didn’t want to die, so I did it. I screwed my eyes shut as tightly as I fucking could, and hoped like hell that I’d get to open them again. When I do, I’m alone. Well...Felix is there, but he doesn’t feel like talking right now.” She chuckled a bleak, nihilistic little chuckle: “His blood’s just...fucking
covering
me...and I can picture him saying, with that smug fucking smirk of his: ‘you’re a mess, woman. Get regulation! On the double!’. And he would’ve laughed, that sick motherfucker. He would’ve laughed so fucking hard. You ever know anyone like that?”

“
Everyone’s known someone like that in our line of work...” Yvonne observed. Smoke nodded in agreement.

“
Somehow, though...I just know. I know. I fucking...
know
.” Yvonne realised Smoke was shaking; that it got worse. “Now...Dragon? They don’t pick up a lot of tails. And it’s not because they’re ‘that good’. They are, but that’s not it. It’s because they’re...‘persuasive’. If someone’s following them, they work out what message needs to be sent to convince whoever the fuck it is that’s doing the following to stop. And then they make good and sure that whoever the message is for...gets...the fucking...message. So I kinda knew what I was gonna find in the warehouse. I knew...in a general sort of way. But there are some things you can’t ever really know. And there are some things that Human Beings just weren’t built to fucking see, y’know? Or to un-see, for that matter. I shouldn’t have even gone in, for fucks sake...”

“You don’t have to tell me.” Yvonne assured her. “I can guess.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I suppose you can. I saw your intake with Sudo, after all.”

“That bad?” Smoke and Yvonne’s eyes met.

“That...fucking...bad.” Smoke inhaled raggedly. “And the team I was with...they were my friends, y’know? Fuck, they were
family
.” Yvonne nodded.

“I know.
”

“So, if you were wondering? That’s also what Sudo showed
me
.” Smoke shook her head briskly, composing herself. “The inside of that
fucking
warehouse. Just like the inside of the Mosque she showed
you
...near the end of the second Damascus Incident.” Yvonne frowned, trying not to remember.

“So you left the CIA?”

“Well, depending on the kind of work you do for them, leaving the CIA isn’t always just...something you can up and do. But I would have, after that...even if they had someone – a younger ‘me’, I guess – put a bullet in my head for it. Honestly, I would’ve fucking welcomed it...then, and for a fuck of a long time after. So yeah...I would’ve walked away, but I never got the chance.”

“Never got the chance?”
Yvonne echoed.

“Yeah. They burned me.” Smoke shrugged, as if it was inconsequential next to what she’d just described. And, to her
– Yvonne assumed – it very probably was. “Not that they really have to ‘burn’ you when you’re not meant to exist in the first place. They just...delete an entry in a database, and they shred a fucking folder, and that’s about the fucking size of it. Weird to think about it: your life boiling down to such a minimal amount of paperwork. So...that was when The Organisation first made contact with me.”

“Wright?” Smoke shook her head.

“No...it was one of the Aventine people. This scary little Indonesian guy. We got along really well, actually. ‘Pengembara’, I think he called himself. Means ‘wanderer’ in English.”

“An alias?” Smoke nodded.

“Wright’s not so good in Asia. Doesn’t blend. He really...
really
likes to be able to just...meld into the scenery. Can’t do that many places in Asia as a tall white guy with control issues, a big-ass personal space bubble, and no useful, non-European language skills.”

“Wow. I think that’s the first thing I’ve heard you say about Wright without
– ”

“
– He’s also a massive, pretentious,
asshole
.” Smoke smirked. “Which isn’t great for blending in
anywhere
, if I’m completely fucking honest...”

“There it is.” Yvonne squeezed Smoke’s hand.

§§§

Smoke parked the convertible in the street
; carefully feeding a handful of small change into the parking meter.

“You ready for this?” She asked, holding Yvonne’s door open and then closing it after her.

“As ready as I’ll ever be.” Yvonne shrugged, not feeling remotely enthusiastic about returning to Palatine Hill.

“Ma’am? Uh
...operative Smoke?” The two women turned. Behind them was – Yvonne was almost certain – one of Smoke’s ‘jarheads’ from the compound.

“Liam.” Yvonne stifled a laugh at Smoke’s icy, detached tone. She’d almost forgotten how it sounded.

“I’m sorry for...I know this is...” He shifted nervously. Smoke rolled her eyes.

“Yes. Against policy. But you’re
here, now...so what is it?”

“Mister Wright has a couple of us on a
...detail.” Liam admitted.

“
Does he, now?” Smoke glowered. Yvonne felt a shiver up her spine. Everything about Smoke’s body language had shifted the second ‘Liam’ said the word ‘detail’. Yvonne made the assumption that Wright had just severely undermined her authority.

“We’ve been instructed to
...destroy some records.”

“
What...records?” It
also
occurred to Yvonne that if Liam didn’t start providing more substantive answers – and soon – Smoke might just murder him; right there on the steps leading up to the Manus Incorporated building.

“Surveillance, ma’am. On one of the journalists.” Smoke’s eyes narrowed. She took a m
oment to think before responding.

“That should’ve been
finalised by now. We finished vetting them all weeks ago. Necessary precautions were taken. Contingencies were put in place. What the hell is he – ”

“
– This one was classified as inactive, weeks ago.” Smoke raised an eyebrow.

“And he’s no longer
inactive?” She asked. Liam cleared his throat, nervously, clearly wanting to make a correction, but nervous about what the result might be:

“
Sh-she, ma’am: She’s no longer inactive.”

XIII
– Tsk Fkn Tsk

~ Kayla ~

30/11/2023

I had a thick terrycloth robe draped around my otherwise bare form. My cheeks and ears were pleasantly warm, and my breathing and heartbeat were still a little elevated. I smiled contentedly over at my husband: asleep in a comfortable armchair, a thick, rumpled duvet pulled up and around him. He was, it appeared, in some sort of honeymoon sex coma.

Guys. No staying power. One time and they’re down for the count.

“
Znnnarkhn...” He snored. I chuckled, shaking my head.

“I love you, Naithe.” I whispered, sincerely. “I really,
really love you.” And I did. To be completely honest, it scared me. More than a little. More than a lot. Most of my life had been spent taking people apart...twitch by tic and truth by lie, until the bare, oily machinery of them was out in the open and I no longer saw them as people I could be close to. That was never the point, but it was – all too often – the outcome. The point was – simply; truthfully – that as a substitute for the ability to trust, I’d opted for insurance. And insurance required appraisal.

Less euphemistically, it was
, again, all about self-preservation. And in the name of self-preservation, deciding that I might want to be close to someone had meant pulling on every loose thread, and trying to force open every locked door – both figuratively and literally – until I found what I was looking for. To let someone in, I needed to know that there was something twisted to the point of defective – broken, irreparably – in that person. Something that was aberrant in a way that couldn’t simply be put down to the idiosyncrasies of the individual. Without that, I had no insurance against how people would react when –
if
– they happened to encounter any of the broken, defective parts of me. At least – if I knew that they were as damaged as I was – I didn’t have to blame myself...not exclusively, anyway...for failed relationships and broken connections.

From an outsiders’ perspective, I knew, it looked like I was working to keep people at a distance.
Pathologically. And maybe that was the net result of my behaviour. But the root of it was, I liked to think, more sympathetic than that.

Unfortunately, as much sense as it made to me
...it didn’t really allow much room for actual intimacy. Mostly because it was all about having enough dirt on people that it was easy to dismiss them as fuck-ups if they hurt me. Ironically, it typically went in the other direction: They never had a chance to hurt me before I drove them away.

With Naithe, it had started out the same way as it always did. But in the handful of years I’d known him, all I’d found was a lot of things that I
liked, a couple of innocuous little habits that I didn’t, and one or two mild irritants that I found endearing anywhere between twenty-three and twenty-six days of a given month. When I was in a mood, he never took it personally. When I tried to provoke or bait him, he just took it with a smile. I played the part that I’d always had – because I couldn’t not; it was me – and he loved me anyway. Just like I loved him.

As much as it scared me sometimes, I knew
– on some level, at least – that the fear was really just a series of echoes moving forward through time from my troubled past, and rebounding off the demarcation between the present and an uncertain future that I’d been conditioned to mistrust. I remember thinking that I had to start learning to trust things. If not people...then at least some sort of outline for a shared, stable future with Naithe, and an understanding that fresh disaster wasn’t forever lurking in the shadows...just waiting for me to stop expecting it.

Naithe grunted, muttered something to
himself, and twisted around in the armchair. I fought the urge to go and curl up with him...knowing that I’d be bored in five minutes and wouldn’t be able to extricate myself without waking him. Unlike me, he actually liked sleeping. Humming quietly, I folded my legs up under myself...settling into the couch and dragging my laptop up and into my lap; flipping open the display.

Somewhere between comfortably numb and blissfully energised, the way I saw it was that I had two choices about how to structure my evening. Either I could quickly check my emails and then turn on the TV and watch something, or I could check the news and ma
ybe do a little research. I have to admit, I was tempted to put on something a little – or a lot – raunchy. With my husband fast asleep a couple of metres away from me on the first night of our honeymoon, the idea of watching some cheap, tawdry cable smut was exactly the kind of idea that I’d have typically really liked the sound of. Even though it wasn’t true, imagining that I was somehow sexually abandoned by my brand new spouse in a hotel room far from home
really
did it for me. If the hotel had been a star-and-a-half less classy, I probably wouldn’t have been able to resist jumping myself.

I shook my head for no reason in particular, grinding my bottom lip gently between my teeth. Skimming through my inbox, I not
iced something from Darren; my Editor. There was nothing in the subject line, and just a crisp, no-nonsense couple of lines in the body of the email: ‘Kayla. NOTSPAM.’

Now isn’t that
just
the kind of thing a spam email would say?

“Have you seen this???” The question seemed to refer to the hyperlinked URL at the bo
ttom of the email. The message continued: “ifnt!: hrry the FKUP and familiarise. VET ALL DRFTS STARTE PROR TO PUB. WILL WNT FREH STRYS ASAP. GT ON IT. PLZ DONOT FK ARND ON THS.” I rolled my eyes.

Melodra
matic
and
borderline illiterate? Tsk tsk, Darren. Tsk fkn tsk.

When it came to vetting work for publication, Darren was the most detail
-oriented Editor I’d ever worked for, and a dogmatic micromanager. For some bizarre reason, the obsessive perfectionism and attention to detail went utterly to shit the second he clicked on any button marked either ‘compose’ or ‘reply’. I clicked the link.

The colour in the URL bar slowed to a halt for a second or two to process my login. I saw that it was the APIAD site
– the Associated Press ‘International Affiliate Directory’ – where the shared resources for the majority of authorised foreign journalists were aggregated and stored. Before the contents of the new window had even completely loaded, my interest was piqued. It was a simple directory archive: a graphical representation of the contents of a single folder in a larger directory. The folders it contained sat, named for the various Disappearances and arranged in ascending alphabetical order. This was definitely new. I liked it.

Curious,
I scrolled down...down...down...until I reached P-o. Portokolos. Comma. Ambrose. Ambrose Portokolos.

There you are, Ambrose. Let’s see what we have, here
...

The folder opened onto a blank screen, and I was prompted for my password. Impatiently, I tapped it in.

There were almost a hundred separate files. Skimming the list, I realised that nearly a third of them were actually mine. These were, almost exclusively, bits and pieces of work I’d done on Ambrose for the paper in Colorado. There were some other stories that were a bit more general, comparing the various cases from Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. I was mildly surprised to see that a summary I did for the Sydney Morning Herald – possibly the most unimaginative piece of work I’d ever produced – was there too...as was a tiny little profile on Ambrose I threw together for the Time Magazine special issue on the Disappearances, which was only about fifty words in all.

Aside from
my work, there were a decent number of documents I already had on my hard drive: biographical information, lists of other work that had been done on Ambrose, specifically...and the various ‘red herring’ leads I’d pursued, one by one...all of which had amounted to...well...I think the phrase ‘sweet fuck-all’ encapsulates it pretty succinctly.

Beyond that, almost all of the new information seemed to be pretty repetitious. Just
...rearrangements of what I’d already seen, mostly. As I sifted through it, I found myself getting more and more irritated with Darren for making such a fuss. But then I saw it. This innocuous little .txt file that I’d initially dismissed because the filename was just a series of seemingly random numbers. Opening the file, I realised it was empty.

For the billionth time since taking the job in Pueblo, I got this slightly sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was like I was trying to solve a riddle in
Latin. One that I’d confidently claimed I’d be able to solve – convincing myself and others – before managing to work out if that was even possible.

And that
– right there – was the real issue that I was having with the story. I got the distinct impression that it was all futile because, while bits of what I was working through looked familiar...I lacked some kind of fundamental fluency. I felt like I was missing the feel of the problem – the soul of it – even when I did manage to translate enough of it to cobble together answers to my questions. Beyond that, the answers never led to anything but more seemingly unanswerable questions. If the riddles were in
Latin
, then whatever the answers were may as well have been written in
Sanskrit
for all the likelihood there was of me working them out. And
this
was, I tried to tell myself, just another bullshit facet of the overall problem; too foreign to fathom. Sighing, I went to make myself a coffee.

My shoulders shrugged into a hunch as I pressed my palms onto the cool counter
– tensing my arms and letting the rest of my body slump – and stared at the kettle: willing it to boil.

So
...here’s the thing. Yes: everything up until that point had seemed like a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside of some other totally incomprehensible bullshit. But in this particular situation...there was something entirely different going on. I was trying not to consider it; trying to dismiss it...because the possibility that any given thing I might uncover could actually lead to something was – for me...at that precise moment in time – exponentially more frightening than the familiar certainty that whatever was in front of me would lead to nothing.

How frightened was I? Well
...I was standing there...futilely trying to convince myself that I had no idea what that little .txt file was there for, or what it meant, or that it was some sort of cache file, or something else that had been automatically generated by the system. And yet...the file name was ten digits. All numbers.

It isn’t rocket science.

No. It wasn’t. It was a fucking phone number.

While the kettle started to whistle, I stomped back to the computer with a beleaguered, melodra
matic sigh: I grabbed my mobile...opened the ‘phone’ app...and stabbed the numbers into the glass panel with my index finger. I took the phone back to the kitchen – wedged between my ear and shoulder – to finish making my coffee. It rung once. Twice. Three times.

Don’t keep me waiting, or I swear to
Christ
...

“Hello. Mrs Arden, I presume?”

“Donohue. And it’s ‘Ms’.” I countered reflexively: his formal tone throwing me off slightly. When you expect to hear a familiar voice, and the voice you heard isn’t familiar, your brain’s first reaction isn’t to recognise your unfamiliarity but to be surprised that a familiar voice sounds different than it should. The impulse is quickly shaken off – it usually takes less than a second – but in such situations, you can’t help but feel an ever so slight...
twinge
, of subconscious familiarity, however unjustified, based on that split second of mistaken belief that the unfamiliar is familiar. Formal and detached tones, in those situations – though perfectly reasonable and normal tones for complete strangers to use with one another – seemed dismissive, somehow: cold, as if you’re being snubbed by an acquaintance. All it takes is a millisecond of mistaken identity to become vulnerable; to let someone far enough in to your emotional world to damage you.

“Of course.” He pleasantly conceded.

“You have an APIAD login?” It wasn’t a question. The kettle finished boiling; the burbling and whistle of it terminated by a sharp click as it shut itself off.

“Naturally.”

“Is it mine?” He laughed pleasantly.

“Please, Kayla. Credit us with a
little more nuance than that.” Pouring boiling water into my mug, I watched the brown gravel of my instant coffee turn to paste...then sludge...then brown, opaque water. I set the kettle down, learning back against the counter; pursing my lips and blowing steam from the top of the mug.

“And the email? Did Darren
actually email me, or was that just some bullshit to get me to log on?”

“You’ll have to take that up with ‘Darren’, I’m afraid.” He seemed bored by that. It rea
ssured me, in a way. It reassured me because it was a mannerism that I was familiar with. One that I could, potentially, work with. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: boys are easy.

“
So...
Ambrose.
Just out of interest: who’s John Galt?” The words were sweet...with an edge of mockery. I don’t even really know why I asked. Just to see if it got a reaction, I suppose. Just to ‘test the waters’.