Never Say Spy (8 page)

Kane’s gaze swivelled slowly back to me, pinning me to my chair.  Spider’s eyes were like saucers.

“Show the record,” Kane said to Spider, not breaking eye contact.  His voice had a distinct edge.

What record?  Oh, please, God, tell me this isn’t happening.  It’s all a bad dream.  I’ll wake up soon…

Spider turned back to his keyboard and typed for a few seconds before swivelling the laptop around so we could all see the screen.  He pressed a key, and the display opened to a rear view of Ramos, just as I’d first seen him in my fantasy four days ago.

No, no, no...

I appeared in the frame as if from nowhere.  The camera’s vantage point was behind me, but my long red hair was a dead giveaway.

“Rotate,” Kane growled.  Spider pressed a key, and the camera angle changed to a front view of me, grinning lasciviously.

“How did you get inside my head?” I whispered.

The whole humiliating sequence played out, the uninhibited kissing and pawing, my guilty start as Connor arrived, the whole agonizing enchilada.  Long, mortified minutes slunk past while the video ran.  Mike Connor yelled at Ramos and then led me out of the frame, both of us winking out of existence.  After a few seconds, Ramos followed us, disappearing from the same location.  The video ended.

A heavy silence settled while Kane’s stare burned into me.  I could feel the flush on my face deepening as I looked back at him helplessly.  Connor studied the tabletop with intense concentration.  Spider’s face held a kicked-puppy expression of betrayal.

The silence stretched.  At last, Kane said coldly, “It’s a very bad idea to lie to me.”

I had felt comfortable and safe with him earlier.  Now I had a vivid impression of the suppressed energy of a nuclear warhead.  Aimed at me.  With the timer counting down.

Shit, shit, shit!

“Let’s start at the beginning,” Kane continued in the same deadly voice.  “Maybe you could try the truth this time.  How do you know Samir Ramos?”

“I don’t... didn’t know him.  That was the first time I ever saw him.”  My voice sounded guilty and scared, even to me.

Kane gazed at me with biting contempt.  “So you jumped a man you’d never seen before, in a portal which you have no clearance to access in the first place.  Does that about cover it?  How did you get the fob?  Who are you working for?”

He might as well have been speaking Swahili.  I stared at him open-mouthed.  After decades of scrupulously obeying every law, I’d managed to commit a crime without even knowing I was doing it.  If only I knew what I’d done...

“What... I never saw a portal.  I don’t have a fob.  What’s a fob?” I stammered.

“Don’t play games with me,” Kane grated.  His expression smoothed into his cop face.  “You’ve committed an offence under the Criminal Code of Canada.  You have the right to have a lawyer present before you answer any questions.  Would you like me to call a lawyer for you?”

He was arresting me.

The bad guys were trying to kidnap me, the good guys were going to put me in jail, and I didn’t even know what I’d done.

I would go crazy and die in jail.

I hadn’t had a panic attack for years, but I felt one coming now.  Adrenaline spiked into my bloodstream and my hands started to shake, my breath coming shallow and fast.  I held onto control with grim determination.  Breathe, belly breathe.  In, out.  I deliberately slowed my breathing, reaching for calm.  Think about something else, something absorbing.

What did I need to finish up in my bathroom at the farm?  I mentally stepped into the bathroom, surveying the gaping hole in the floor around the toilet stack.  I knelt beside the hole and pulled experimentally on the drain.  There was enough play in it, good.  I’d be able to replace the cracked flange and bring it up to the correct floor level.

Blocking.  I’d need some wood blocking to stabilize the new plywood floor.  I put on my safety goggles and earmuffs and picked up the piece of two-by-two.  It fit perfectly between the floor joists, and I smiled, pleased with my accuracy.  I picked up my air nailer.  Bang, bang.  The wood was secured in place, and I reached for the next piece.  I moved to the side of the hole to get better access while I positioned it against the next joist and brought the nailer up to it.

My bathroom door crashed open and I leaped to my feet with a scream, nail gun brandished in front of me.

Kane flowed through the broken doorway with the same smooth, fast motion I’d noticed when he first jumped out of the Suburban.  He loomed larger than life in green combat fatigues, and this time he held a much larger firearm.  I didn’t know anything about automatic weapons, but it was big, and it was pointed right at me.

Behind him, Mike Connor looked ridiculously short, clad again in his paramedic’s uniform.  Wide-eyed Spider Webb was incongruous in a Star Trek uniform from the original series.  He was wearing a red shirt.  A hysterical giggle bubbled from my throat.  Ensign Expendable.

I was insane.  At least I knew that now.  I hadn’t realized insanity was so frightening.

“Put the weapon down,” Kane commanded.

“It’s not a weapon, it’s an air nailer,” I quavered.  “What are you doing in my bathroom?”

“Put it down!  Do it now!” he roared.

My brain flipped into overload.  I was clearly nuts anyway, so what did it matter?  I copped an attitude.

“So shoot me already.  Put me out of my misery.  You’re a figment of my fucked-up mind anyway, so whatever.”  I squatted down beside the hole again and nailed in the strip of blocking.  Bang, bang.

I reached for the next piece and positioned it.  Bang, bang.

I decided I liked doing construction work while I was insane.  I didn’t even have to cut the pieces of wood, they were just there at hand when I needed them.  And they fit perfectly.  This was easy.  I smiled and reached for the next piece.

There was a large black boot on it.  I tugged, but the wood didn’t move.  My gaze tracked from the boot up the camo-clad leg, ‘way, ‘way up to Kane’s face.  He was frowning, but at least the gun wasn’t pointed at me anymore.

“Why are you still here?” I complained.  “This is my delusion.  I don’t want you here.”  I glanced past him to where Webb still hovered in the doorway in his red shirt.  I giggled and turned back to Kane.  “But if he’s Ensign Expendable, why aren’t you dressed like Captain Kirk?”

“Where do you think we are?” Kane asked cautiously.

“Well, duh, in my bathroom.  If you’re going to hang around, would you pass me that piece of plywood?”

He glanced over to where a square of plywood had appeared, leaning against the wall.  Removing his foot from the two-by-two, he stepped over to pick up the plywood.  I snatched up the blocking and nailed it into place.  Bang, bang.

“Thanks.”  I took the plywood from him and test fitted it over the opening.  As I’d expected, it fit perfectly.  I laid it aside and reached for the cordless drill that hadn’t been there a second ago.  Materializing a piece of steel strapping out of thin air, I screwed one end of the strapping to the top of one joist, then passed the other end of the strapping under the stack drain.

“Hold this.”  I placed the end of my level on the floor next to me, extending past the stack.  I shot an impatient look up at Kane.  He was frowning down at me, clearly puzzled.

“Come on,” I said, wiggling the end of the steel in his direction.  He squatted down warily and grasped the end of the strapping.

“Pull up a bit.  Bit more.  Good, hold it,” I ordered when the top of the flange reached floor level.  I reached over and screwed in the end of the strapping he had held.

“Stop,” he said firmly.  “Look at me.”

When I did, I discovered he’d changed his clothes.  Now he was clad in the T-shirt and jeans he had worn in the morning.  Assuming it was still today in la-la land.  I giggled again, teetering on the edge of hysteria.

“You look good in black,” I told him.  “That army uniform wasn’t a good colour on you.”

“Aydan,” he said.  “Come with me.”  He stood and held out his hand.

I rose, too.  Why had I ever thought he wasn’t handsome?  He was amazingly hot.  I stepped closer, unconsciously reaching for his extended hand.  Then I remembered that getting busy with a hot guy was what had gotten me into trouble in the first place.

It was a trap!

I sprang back and my foot dropped into the hole in the floor, throwing me off balance.  I flung up my arms in an attempt to right myself, but I was too close to the wall.  I staggered back and struck my bruised head as I fell.

Blinding flashes of agony coursed through my skull, and I swore loudly and continuously, tapping into my considerable store of invective.  The pain began to subside around the same time I ran out of fresh curses, so I stopped swearing and groaned wordlessly instead, rocking back and forth.

At last, I stopped moaning when the pain receded to bearable levels.  An overly loud voice from above inquired, “Are you done?”

I cracked one eye open.  Kane towered over me.  “Can you clean it up a bit?  There are ladies and children present,” he said, waving a hand toward Webb and Connor, now back in their original clothing.  Kane seemed to be having difficulty keeping a straight face.  His lips twitched, and he ran a hand over his mouth and chin.

I opened the other eye.  Connor’s face was pale, his eyes wide.  “You kiss your mother with that mouth?” he stammered.

“Not recently.  She’s been dead for thirty years,” I snapped.

“Oh...” he sounded shell-shocked.

Spider Webb’s eyes were wide, too, but with awe and delight.  “Wow,” he was saying, “Wow!  I’ve never heard anybody swear like that, not even Hellhound!  ‘Snot-gobbling fuck-pig’, I’ve never heard that one before.”  His lips continued to move silently as if practicing his new vocabulary.

Kane turned his back to me, his broad shoulders quaking as if in laughter, but when he turned back, his face was composed.  I crawled across the carpet and shakily propped myself against the wall, discovering as I did that we were back in the meeting room at Sirius Dynamics.

I propped my elbows on my bent knees and rested my aching head in my hands.  “Sadly, I can’t take credit for the originality of the material,” I addressed Spider.  “My Uncle Roger was an equal-opportunity thinker well before his time.  He thought little girls should learn to swear just like little boys.  I always loved him for that.”

I massaged my aching temples, fear gnawing at me.  I was crazy.  They were going to put me away.  Just when I thought I was getting a new start.  I’d been so excited about my new farm.

“We need to talk,” Kane said.

“Okay,” I mumbled, holding onto my fraying composure.

“Aydan, I want to search your waist pouch.”

“Okay.”  I handed it to him.

Stay calm.

He went through it systematically, laying out its contents much as he had done with my backpack earlier.  When it was empty, he turned the pouch inside out and examined it, too.  Then he turned back to me.

“I’m going to need to search you, too.  I’m sorry there isn’t a female officer here to do that, but it needs to be done right now.”

“I’m not carrying any weapons,” I told him.  “The only sharp object I had was the jackknife in my pouch.”

“That’s not what I’m looking for,” he said, and helped me to my feet.  I held my arms out from my sides and he patted me down thoroughly but impersonally while the other two looked on.

Shit, I get felt up by a hot guy for the first time in friggin’ years, and I’m stuck with an audience and about to be incarcerated.

“You can sit down now,” Kane said a few minutes later.  I let my trembling knees drop me into a chair and mechanically began to repack my waist pouch.  “Nothing,” Kane said to the others, his face showing bewilderment.

“That’s not possible,” Spider said.  “We need to try the RFID scanner.”

“I’ll get it,” said Connor, rousing himself from his trance to go out the door.

Spider sat down at his computer again, rapidly clicking keys.  “That’s impossible,” he said again.

“What?” Kane asked, moving over to look at the screen.

“I just reviewed the data record, and there’s no RFID signature for her.”

They put their heads together, muttering over the laptop, and I slumped in the chair.  Nothing mattered now.  I was nuts.  I’d be in an asylum, or in jail.  My beloved cars would end up in someone else’s garage.  My dream of living in the country, my bright new life, all shrivelling away to dust and ashes.

Mike Connor returned, bearing a handheld electronic device.  Spider took it from him and waved it over my body, much like the metal-detecting wands in airport security.  I sat still, staring blindly into middle distance and clamping down panic.  Stay calm.

Maybe the insane asylum would let me go outside with supervision.  Maybe they’d let me paint.  Painting was nice.

Don’t panic.  Think about painting.

I stepped up to the big easel and opened the can of liquid white paint.  With my one-inch brush, I applied an even coat over the canvas, just the right amount.  I squeezed out a dab of blue on my palette and barely touched the brush to it.  With short criss-crossing strokes, I applied the paint, darker at the edges, fading toward the middle.  A nice, translucent summer sky...