I look up; his head and shoulders are silhouetted against the black horizon of the wall. He clings to the chain with his right hand, takes the blanket from around his neck and lobs it up and over. The wire is covered. Damn.' The man's a genius!
Now he's balanced up there with one leg over the wall, and he's reaching down for me. My heart is thudding, hammering away in my chest, but at last I'm on the chain. Up I go, and I reach for Paolo's hand. But what? What? He withdraws it!
I don't believe it! (But I do, I do! I just knew it was too bloody easy!) And I cling to the chain and look up at him, look into his eyes that are looking down into mine. Except now they look beyond me, into the night.
And dangling there, I glance over my shoulder and see them: prison guards, armed and taking aim across the exercise yard. I look up at Paolo, and his sweat falls on me like rain. He gives a shrug, says: 'I sorry, Jake, but they promise me…' And then he jerks and I hear the shot. And now Paolo's blood splashes me as his right eye turns black.
He's falling, taking me with him… we hit the ground like a ton of bricks! Paolo's body is on top of me, which is just as well, because I can feel it jerking, shuddering to the sound of more gunshots. I struggle under his dead weight, somehow manage to throw him off and rise into a crouch. But God, I'm a dead man — I have to be! Fat white sparks light the night like angry fireflies where bullets ricochet off the wall and spit concrete splinters at me. But now—
— Now there's a spark that… that isn't a spark! 1 don't understand it, haven't the time to understand it. But it hovers there like a golden dart, level with my eyes, only twelve inches away, seeming to follow my movements as I dodge bullets. And now it moves, too. And I know that it has to be a bullft after all, because it smacks me right between the eyes!
And I fall face first, but I can't feel it when I hit the ground. Of course I can't feel it, because you don't feel anything when you're dead.
Dead and weightless and rushing somewhere, rushing out of my body, I suppose. Rushing to heaven or hell, if I believed. I wish I had believed now… and I'll bet I'm not the first man who thought that! But Jesus, I'm not going out without a fight… not Jake Cutter! I struggle and twist and tumble. But this can't be right, because I can feel myself. I'm not dead yet!
And now I see a light in the darkness. I rush towards it, fall into it… No, I fall out of the darkness!
My head! God, I'm sick, dizzy, and my head…!
But I'm not dead yet.
I'm not dead yet.
Not dead yet.
Not dead.
Not.
No. i
'It's been an hour/ said McGilchrist's voice. 'Ye ought tae be comin' out o' it now, Jake mah lad.'
Jake remembered where he was and would have jerked erect, but since he was already erect — sitting upright in his chair, just as the 'doctor' had ordered — instead he became aware of incredible cramps in all his limbs, whose pain was physical and of course far worse than the imagined thump on the head that he had 'experienced' for the second time around just a few moments ago.
He opened his eyes, tried to reach up and touch his head, maybe cradle it in his trembling hands, but even the slightest movement caused violent shooting pains in his arms and shoulders, freezing him in position. And:
'35
'G-God Almighty!' he groaned, his throat dry as kindling.
McGilchrist dropped two white pills into a glass of water, swirled them and watched them dissolve. 'These'll do ye a power o' good/ he said.
'And I… I should believe you?' said Jake, blinking rapidly as his eyes grew accustomed to the full dawn light.
'Eh? But they're only wee aspirins, man.'' McGilchrist told him. 'For yere headache, ye ken? Which is a side effect o' that draught o' mine. What, d'ye really think Ah'd poison ye?'
Slowly, Jake allowed himself to slump in his chair. And as his blood began to circulate and pins and needles took over from the true pain, so he took the glass and drank. And then he remembered not only what had gone before, but also something of his regression.
Again he straightened up, but much more carefully now, and said, 'That dart. A golden dart or splinter. I seem to remember it… it entered my head?'
'Just like you told me,' Liz Merrick sighed from where she sat close to him. 'Except you didn't call it a dart.'
Jake carefully turned to squint at her through the tent's luminous air. And Ben Trask said, 'I think that's all we needed to know. It makes any further questions I might have academic, conjectural, meaningless. For the time being, anyway.' He, too, was seated — looked like he needed to be — and his voice was trembling to match Jake's limbs.
'Great,' said Jake, unsteadily. 'Fine. So now that all of your questions are answered, how about mine?'
'Yours?' said Trask, stopped dead in his tracks. And: 'Ah, well! We'll deal with those shortly, yes. And Jake, I'm really, really very sorry about that — I mean, that I had to be so secretive. I'm sure you'll understand when you know it all.'
'But for the next few minutes/ said McGilchrist, with his massive hand on Jake's shoulder, 'ye're tae take it easy, until ye're back on yere feet. And then ye should stop worryin' about what's happened tae ye. Ye're in the verra best o' hands, after a'.'
The stiffness was draining from Jake's limbs and his headache was in recession. 'Did I do okay?' he said, looking at Ben Trask. 'Did you get all you wanted? It was that dart, right? It was that dart that I thought was a bullet. What in hell was the thing?'
But while Jake was beginning to feel okay, Trask was still shaken. 'It's not so much what it was,' he replied, 'as what it is, but definitely. And what that makes you.'
'Makes me?' Sensing something of Trask's quandary, perhaps his reluctance to accept whatever he was having to accept, Jake had stopped feeling okay on the instant. Now, frowning, he said 'How do you mean, what it makes me? What I am is plain: a fugitive from so-called justice, hiding out under the protection of E-Branch. Unless you've changed your mind, that is. Is that it? Did you learn something that makes you want to throw me back to the wolves? Am I in fact the sick, psychotic killer that people have been made to believe I am?'
And perhaps Trask would have started to tell him there and then, but at that moment lan Goodly's piping, excited voice was heard from across the clearing:
'Ben, Ben!' the precog was calling. 'Those serials. I know which ones are missing. And I think we're in a lot of trouble!'
'Think?' Trask called from the open door of his tent.
'I know we are,' Goodly was closer now, and his voice commensurately less strident. 'I've seen it coming, Ben,' he said, heading towards Trask's tent at a fast, agitated lope. 'Trouble with a capital "T", yes. So whatever it is you're doing, put it aside for now. This is just as important — maybe more so — and I think you need to hear me out'
As Trask ducked out under the tent's awning, Liz took hold of Jake's hand and said, 'No one thinks badly of you Jake. What you told us when you were under only serves to corroborate what Ben Trask has been hoping all along. But that's for him to tell you, not me. And as for throwing you to the wolves… au contrain, Jake Cutter: on the contrary. But it could be his intention to throw you at them…'
Ten minutes later, Trask had called his small nucleus of Branch people to him. And at the last moment he'd invited Liz and Jake into the briefing. Everyone was crowded into his tent.
Wasting no time, when all of his people had arrived, Trask said, 'I won't make a meal of this and as soon as we're through here I want you to start packing up. I'd like to be out of here A.S.A.P. Ops truck and vehicles: strip them of everything important to us because we're leaving them behind. Our next target is too far away that we can simply drive to it. It was possible we might have stayed just as we are now, but something has come up. Our Aussie friends will have to follow on behind us, but as the brains behind the brawn, as it were, time is a luxury we've just run out of. So… what's the big hurry, eh?