‘Goodnight, my friend.’ He gripped the man’s shoulder, walked thoughtfully back to his room.
So it wasn’t the Vatican. It wasn’t the CIA. He went to bed still thinking about it, hoping to wake in a whole skin.
Something roused him. A sound?
He put his hand out for the P90, then checked the perimeter alarm handset by his bed. The backlit indicator blinked CLEAR.
He sat up slowly, freeing the bedclothes from the gun, slid out of bed, grabbed his flak jacket, got it on. No time for pants, or boots. He stood up in the dark room, breath suspended, listening, then edged out into the hall.
Broken plastic under his bare foot.
He looked up.
The hall skylight — shattered — open to the stars.
Something stung the inside of his throat.
The last thing he knew was the flesh of his cheek dragging back as it slid down the cold wall.
29
LIMBO
Cain felt as if he were being cut apart. He tried to open his eyes but had to shut them against the glare.
The next time he knew himself, he was feverishly cold and the unbearable pain remained. When he opened his eyes he saw red-streaked gauze. He gulped air as if he couldn’t get enough. Then he seemed to be floating.
Later they described what they’d done to him.
First, the laparotomy. Bleeding points were ligated and, after peritoneal lavage, damage was assessed and the intestine resected. The surgeon performed an elegant midline opening and single-layer anastomosis of considerable facility.
The neurosurgical team shaved his shattered head, incised his scalp, drilled burr holes through the intact bone near the damage, then nibbled the bone away. The tangential bullet had caused a gutter fracture, subdural haematoma, contusion, and driven fragments into the brain. There hadn’t been time for fancy tests. Relieving pressure was one thing. Finding fragments was another. As bone doesn’t resist infection, debridement had to be complete.
Then, intestines resectioned, brain bruised and swollen, a mess of post-operative hazards, he was wheeled to the ICU. He was attached to nasogastric tubes, a drip, an oxygen sensor, ventilator. He had an ileostomy, abdominal drain, urinary catheter…
After days of sedation and checks for exudations and odour — bullets suck in bacteria and debris — he went back into the theatre for a delayed primary closure.
Eventually, two blurs, who were presumably people, persuaded him to hold up two fingers, follow a pencil with his eyes and say words. The words slurred and his left hand didn’t quite work.
The bigger blur said, ‘Obeys commands, opens eyes spontaneously, converses, has reasonable motor function. Now if we get him through biochemical and vascular changes, avoid peritonitis, epilepsy, myonecrosis, we’re crash hot.’
He dragged at a tube that seemed part of him but the smaller blur plucked his hand away.
The bigger blur resumed the record of disaster. ‘You’re looking good, Mr Cain. You have a drain but the colon wasn’t damaged so we’ve avoided a colostomy. You got a temporary stoma — be wearing a bag for a while. When the gut heals, we’ll close it and you can shit the usual way.’ He turned to the smaller blur. ‘When’s his next CT?’
‘Tomorrow,’ the sister said. ‘And Dr Mead wants an MRI.’
The next weeks were discomfort and pain. He was restless, coughed a lot. When he was a little less out of it, an EXIT staff surgeon came and, finally, he got hard details.
‘You’ve taken four hits. The cook found you, drove you to a doctor. We sent a chopper and handled it from there.’
‘How did they…?’ He was slurring.
‘Mortar. Gas canisters lobbed through the roof of the house. The gas was just to disable because they wanted the family alive. They plugged you and Stromlo.’
‘Stromlo’s…?’
‘Dead. You got one in the gut, one to the head. With all the blood from your head, they wouldn’t believe you’d survive.’
‘And my gut?’
‘You’ve lost small intestine basically. Could have been worse than the head. When a bullet connects with body tissue it develops a yaw.’ The man knew wound ballistics like all Beta medicos. ‘You get a stress wave, millisecond pulsations…’
‘I had the vest on.’ He couldn’t get his tongue around the words.
‘There’s still cavitation on impact. It stopped two rounds but weakened enough to let through a third although it absorbed most of its energy. Did no more damage than a low-velocity pistol bullet. But a rough way to lose an appendix. The vest probably saved you a kidney and a pulped liver on the round that got through.’ He replaced the clipboard on the foot of the bed.
‘The duplicates?’
‘In Russia.’
So it had worked. His mind was starting to drift but he mumbled the question that was haunting him. ‘Were we meant to be taken out?’
The doctor shrugged. ‘I’m not up with the politics. But Rhonda insisted we did everything to save you.’
He frowned under the bandage that was probably holding his head together. ‘How will I be after this?’
‘We’re not so worried about your guts now. Your head’s the iffy bit. We’ll know more in a few days.’ He waffled about secondary insults, BP fluctuations, torn bridging veins, blood absorption. ‘Considering what you’ve been through, you’re in great shape.’
‘Don’t snow me. Just tell me.’
The man nodded, strolled to the window, whistled tunelessly, turned around. ‘Okay. You won’t be the same. At best, you may have to walk with a stick.’
The shock of the statement went in. He knew a chapter of his life had closed.
After a month, the EXIT surgeon cleared him for the flight to Tasmania. He was shuttled to Beta by chopper and wheeled to a one-bed ward. He hoped Pat would come but they told him she was away having treatment.
Eventually Rhonda arrived, looking grave, her hair a mess. The ash and burn holes in the front of her dress told him how stressed she was. She put a hand on his brow.
His bleary look. ‘So were we expendable?’
‘We told you to get out, you mad idiots.’
‘Like hell you did. We got nothing.’
Shock on her face. ‘No signal?’
‘Nothing. We checked the night before. They’d even found the perimeter system.’
‘But the transmission was acknowledged.’
‘Not by us.’
She went almost crimson with anger. The reaction couldn’t have been faked.
‘So it’s still going on?’
She pressed his hand. ‘I’m sorry, Ray.’
‘I’ve been doing some thinking.’ His voice still slurred like a drunk’s. ‘Rehana wasn’t writing “Z”. She was halfway through an “M”. Murchison fixed the job in Chartres. And I reckon Vanqua’s running him.’
She pressed his hand again, tears of rage in her eyes. ‘Just… get well.’
30
EXPOSURE
It took him a year to recover.
The walking frame went early, the ileostomy after two months. But he needed the stick three months more and the slurring was still there.
After eight months he was well enough to direct again but did it mostly from a chair — stop-frame animation, paintbox stuff. He wore the SIG each day, trusting nobody now.
The change was more than physical. He dwelt on his life a good deal — on the training that justified killing as a job. Now that he’d experienced directly through his body what bullets did, viewing death at one remove became hard to distinguish from brutality.
As for the second aspect they’d formed in him, the inner search — the respect for all religions, the capacity to commune with popes — it made him think a lot about Stromlo, that other unfortunate taught to pray and kill. Would the ordeal of EXIT turn him into Stromlo’s clone — tear him apart inside until even death became more terror than release?