Bio-Edge: Vol 1 - Secrets

Chapter 1

Everyone wants an edge. Ever since one of our ape-like ancestors picked up a stick and brained a fellow-ape, and all the rest of the furry thugs sat around thinking, ‘hey, that looked easy’, we’ve been at it.

Don’t mind me though. It’s been a rough week. I’ve known it was coming. I received the letter four months ago and time ran out last Friday. No more spec ops for me. Superannuated. Forcibly retired by the powers that be at 40. Too fucking old and too fucking young. Go figure.

I was the edge. Now I don’t know what I am. Killing is not a recognised civilian skillset. It didn’t bother me that much though, other than the lack of any structure to my day. That bugged me, but not hugely yet. It had only been a few days, after all. Today was Wednesday, so I’d only been idle for five full days.

What I was doing in the army had stopped making sense before I hit my early twenties. I’d kept doing it because I was good at it and yeah, I’m a bit of an adrenalin junkie. Action lets me feel that I’m alive. Now I’d have to find something else to do.

So, I was just moping about, on my fourth pint of real ale in the Montague Pyke, a pub off Charing Cross Road. Kind of a work-life balance to the five-mile run I’d done earlier in the day. I was sitting at a table on my own. The other three chairs were empty. Not too many people walk up to a table with a bloke like me, six-four and a face that’s seen way too many dead bodies, and say, hey, mind if I join you?

Of course, there’s an exception to every rule. It happened to me once in Kabul, but the two men who invited themselves to my table turned out to be CIA. However, that’s a story for another time and not one I like dwelling on.

Two tables away a woman in her late twenties, early thirties – who can tell? –turned the same glass of G&T round and round. She’d been at this for most of the last hour since she sat down with her drink. Her mind was clearly miles away. She was cute with shortish, spikey-cut black hair, blue eyes and black-rimmed glasses, which give her an intellectual look. Yeah, okay, of course I was looking. Peripheral vision, not out and out staring.

Her expression was morose. Kind of matched my mood. I wondered, idly, if maybe her favourite cat had just passed on to kitty Heaven, or if her boyfriend had told her he had chlamydia and she should get herself checked. It’s not so farfetched. There’s a lot of it going about, I understand.

She wore a blue blouse tucked into black trousers and thick-soled black running shoes that came halfway up her ankles and were mostly covered by the black trousers. It was kind of an odd fashion statement. There was a big blue and white bag next to her on the floor.

My attention was caught by two blokes coming in the door, not your usual pub-goers. These two rang loud warning bells in my head. One was about two inches taller than me, which made him really tall. He was almost unnaturally thin, with a long, bony horse-face and was dressed in a black suit, white shirt and tie. He could have walked into a job at any undertakers.

His companion was about five-ten in height and seemed as broad as he was high. Not many people are wider across the shoulders than me, but horizontally at least, he was an inch or two broader. I was used to spec ops soldiers with similar builds and would have pegged him for one if it wasn’t for his well-tailored blue suit, complete with a white and light blue striped shirt and a natty dark blue tie.

Horse-faced stood and cased the room. I could see the slight bulge of a shoulder holster under his suit jacket. His companion had a short blonde crew cut and wouldn’t have been out of place as a Nazi in a World War II film. He’d be the kind of Nazi you were itching to see getting his head blown off sooner rather than later. You know the kind, bright but bent and sadistic as hell. I couldn’t see any sign of a gun but it was probably tucked into the back of his suit pants.

The gun bulge made it obvious that something was going to go down. Guns are not kosher in London and no one carries. Not unless you’re a criminal, a nutter or a terrorist. These two didn’t tick any of those three boxes. I pegged them for either a high-end close protection team or Special Branch. I knew several Special Branch officers and I’d never seen these two before.

The way the broad-shouldered member of the duo was looking at the woman on my right, made it pretty clear where their interest lay. Not my business, I decided. Not unless they made it my business.

My neighbour was still staring into her G&T, oblivious of the new arrivals. The next moment they were both heading in our direction. When they were just a few paces from my table, she glanced up. Her expression registered shock and fear. Horse-face stopped right opposite me.

“Please to stay seated, Sir. This is official business,” he said. I couldn’t place the accent. Belarus or something from that area, Serbian maybe. I’m better at placing Middle East accents. I was marginally impressed that he’d pegged me as potentially troublesome, but not surprised. My size tends to trigger that kind of reaction. His companion smiled at the woman. It looked like the kind of smile a cobra might give to a mouse.

“Now, Ms Grainger,” he said, emphasizing the Ms, “don’t do anything foolish. You know you have to come with us.”

The woman looked around wildly. She seemed in a total panic. She looked like any second, she’d make a break for it, which wouldn’t go well for her. Broad-as-a-bus saw the same thing for his hand shot out and seized her wrist.

“Please, no silliness,” he said softly.

“Let go of my wrist, Gustaf,” the woman said, somehow getting both fright and fury into her voice.

Ah well, life is full of tipping points. At least, that’s how it’s been in my world. Two men, one certainly armed, the other probably. One looming over me, the other some six or seven feet away, my side of the woman’s table, getting heavy-handed. I could have made a reasoned intervention, questioned their right to disturb the lady, but what the fuck? The places and situations I’d been in, that kind of soft-pedalled intervention would get you dead the next instant.

So, I did the thing that came most naturally to me. I stood and picked up my table in the same movement. The sudden lift sent my drink bouncing into horse-face’s chest, gifting him with half a pint of real ale artfully painted across his shirt, tie and jacket. This would certainly have annoyed him if it wasn’t for the fact that he was probably more bothered by the edge of the table that I rammed into his belly, sending him sprawling.

I was immediately on the move, with my table held before me. Broad-shoulders was fast. He’d let go of the woman’s hand and half turned, one hand going behind him under his jacket when the edge of the table hit him in the throat. It was a round table, with four sturdy legs set six inches in from the circumference. Tailor-made for the job, really. I couldn’t have asked for better.

The gun he had been reaching for spun out of his hand and he went to his knees clutching his throat. I dropped the table on him, feeling one of the legs crunching something. I turned, took a big step and kicked horse-face in the belly as he was rising, putting a lot of forward momentum and a good deal of my two hundred and thirty pounds into the kick. I turned again and caught his over-developed buddy with a head kick just as he was coming out from under the table and scrabbling for the dropped gun. Game over.

I went back to horse-face, bent, got a good grip of his mousey brown hair and bounced his big head firmly off the wooden floor. Nighty night horse-face.

I have a simple maxim, never leave guns in the hands of fallen enemies. I relieved horse-face of his shoulder gun, a Walther. Patting him down I found an ankle gun, a Beretta this time, and a wicked little slim-bladed sheath knife strapped to his left forearm. The beanpole was just a bundle of surprises.

All three weapons went into the pockets of the bulky zip-up I was wearing. He had an identity card in his inner jacket pocket which announced him as Walther Karnitsky, Deputy chief of security for Polymicron Biolabs. Hooray. So, not Special Branch or I’d be in a world of shit. He also had a roll of twenty-pound notes, which I left in his pocket. I’m not a thief and I don’t have money problems. My real problem with money in the sandbox was finding something to spend it on and the time to spend it.

There was also the matter of several bonuses or bounties that I’d collected while over there and a whole bunch of special projects which I won’t go into just yet. No, money was not my problem at present.

The other chappie, Gunter the woman had called him, had a Glock in his waistband and two clips in his jacket pocket. I took all three. He, it turned out, was Walther’s superior, since his ID proclaimed him as Head of Security, last name, Hauser.

All of this took maybe three minutes, maybe less. I looked at the woman, who was now standing well back from her chair.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

“Does it matter?” I asked, somewhat surprised.

“Why did you do that?” she asked, blinking at me behind her glasses. She was seriously cute.

“Kind of an impulse,” I answered, after a moment’s thought. “You seemed scared. They didn’t seem nice. And I didn’t think they were up for a chat over things. So, it came down to take them out or watch them march you outside against your will. That last would not have sat well with me.”

By now the pub was in something of an uproar.

She gave her head a little shake and shrugged.

“Damn, a real-life Sir Galahad. I didn’t think they existed, or not anymore.”

“Yep,” I nodded. “We’re kind of thin on the ground. I may be the last of my kind.”

I took a quick look around.

“One of the bar staff is trying to work up enough nerve to come over and ask us to stay until the police arrive. I’d rather not,” I told her.

She nodded and we both walked quickly out the bar. The barman made to approach us as we neared the door. I gave him a dead-eyed look and he retreated. I turned left out the bar and she kept by my side. A few paces later she stopped.

“Don’t stop. Keep walking,” I said. “We need to put a few blocks between us and this place. There’s a pub in Dean Street I drink at sometimes. We can sit there till the fuss over what went on in there dies down. They serve food.”

She looked like she was going to say something, then she shrugged and fell into step beside me.

“It’s as good a plan as any,” she said.

We’d barely walked a block when two police squad cars, sirens blaring and blue lights flashing, passed us headed in the direction of the pub we’d just left.

She glanced up at me. At five-four she had to look up to make eye contact.

“I’d still be in there, and they’d have picked me up from the police station, sure as anything,” she murmured. “I’m Sarah.”

“I’m Joe,” I said since she’d put us on first name terms. “I’m guessing the ‘they’ you are referring to is Polymicron Biolabs.”

She stiffened and stopped dead. I took her by the elbow and got her moving again.

“Don’t panic. It was on horse-face’s ID,” I said.

She relaxed and I stopped having to tow her along. I let her arm go and for a few minutes, we made our way through the fairly crowded pavement without speaking.

“They want to do things with my research I don’t want them to do,” she said finally, looking straight ahead as she walked.

“Whatever,” I said, though my curiosity was piqued. I wasn’t wildly keen on getting into whatever this was, any more deeply than I was already in. If Gunter and his chum felt raw about our little encounter and wanted to look me up to even the score, that was fine by me. I’d happily do it all, all over again if they were so minded.

I’d already decided I didn’t like those two guys. I could still see Gunter’s hand squeezing her wrist. And then there was horse-face Walther’s brazen cheek, standing in front of me telling me to be a good boy. Yeah, like that was going to happen. However, I was not committed to getting further involved. My vaguely formed plan right now was to walk Sarah to the pub, buy her a drink or lunch, whatever she fancied, then watch her walk away. 

Not that I had a shitload else on my plate at the moment. Early, involuntary retirement is a bitch, though I was fairly confident I’d sort something out eventually. How hard could it be? Folks got up every morning, put on their suits and went off to sit behind desks and do stuff. Not hard at all really, if you can stand the boredom.

“What are you?” I asked, the next moment, the words out my mouth before my brain could catch up. Thinking about Gunter had kind of got me off the track of thinking I didn’t want to be involved any more. That’s what happens with curiosity and it’s why it killed the cat. Do-then-think is a very bad plan. The correct order is think, then do, and I’d just fucked it up. Ah well. I was with a gorgeous woman and there was no point over-analysing the moment. Enjoy the sun while it’s shining, is not a bad way to go.

She gave an irritable shrug with one shoulder and a little toss of the head that sent those spikey bits dancing. I kind of realised that I wasn’t thinking with my head any more. She glanced up at me and I guess she caught something of that in my eye because she pursed her lips and gave a hint of a smile.

“Don’t go getting ideas,” she said.

That tickled me and I grinned.

She half stopped. Her eyes widened behind the glasses and her eyebrows went up.

“Wow. I didn’t know that face could do that,” she muttered, more to herself than me.

“What?” I said, moving her forward again. “I smile sometimes, even laugh occasionally.”

“Good to know,” she said, disengaging her elbow firmly.

We arrived at The Coachman in Dean Street, one of my favourite pubs when I happened to be in London, without another word passing between us. I led the way to a vacant table a good distance from the door. It was getting on for three o’clock and most of the lunch crowd had munched, drunk and departed. The landlord, a large man with a broken nose came over, flicking a dishcloth back over one shoulder.

“Hello Joe, back from the wars again?” he said.

“Back for good, Bob, bastards pink-slipped me,” I said.

“Damn,” he muttered, “still, nothing lasts forever. You might want to get in touch with the Colonel, then. I have his number.”

“Nope, don’t fancy merc jobs. That US bunch, Sloan Security already made an offer. I turned them down,” I said.

The prospect of escorting VIPs around the sandbox had zero appeal, and Colonel Southby was Lord and Master of half a dozen shit-shows around the world I didn’t need any part of.

“Man’s got to do something, Joe. You’ll end up in a puddle of beer otherwise,” Bob grunted.

I appreciated that he cared but right now what I wanted was a pint of his best real ale and a plate of toad-in-the-hole, followed by his excellent treacle tart. I said as much and turned to ask Sara what she wanted. She’d been following the conversation intently.

“I’m not hungry but I’d like a glass of white wine please, Chablis if you have.”

“Coming up Miss,” Bob said and sauntered off back behind the bar. He vanished through a door into the kitchen and I could hear him giving my order to Moira, his wife and chief cook. As far as pub grub went, this place was golden and it was all Moira’s doing.

“So, you’re a soldier, just recently cashiered,” Sarah said, looking at me speculatively. She grimaced. “I still can’t quite believe how quickly you disposed of Gunter and Walther. I’ve never seen anything so brutally effective in my life. Not that I’m not grateful. Actually, I haven’t even said thanks yet, so, thank you.”

I shrugged.

“You’re welcome, think nothing of it,” I said.

My pockets felt weighted down with the two security types’ handguns. If a policeman searched me right now, I’d probably get fifteen years for carrying multiple concealed weapons. The thought made me smile a little and also reminded me that I needed to dispose of the arsenal.

“Excuse me for half a mo,” I said and stood and went behind the bar into the kitchen. Bob looked at me with raised eyebrows.

“Need a favour, Bob. A few minutes ago, we had a run-in with a couple of security types from some firm Sara works for. I had to take their toys away and put them to sleep. Can you hold the toys for me?”

“Fuck’s sake, Joe. What kind of trouble are you getting yourself into? I thought she was a bit toffee-nosed for you,” Bob grumbled.

I let that remark slide and unpacked the hardware. I laid the guns and the two clips of ammo on the steel work-surface, having done a quick check on each to ensure they were safe. They were. I kept the knife and slipped it, in its sheath, inside my coat inner pocket, which was fairly deep.

Bob looked at the hardware and sniffed.

“Nice collection. Want me to sell them or keep them?”

“Just hold them for now. I don’t know where this thing with Sarah is going,” I said, settling my zipper jacket back in place.

“That will get you two years minimum if the Old Bill pats you down,” Bob said, making a face and looking pointedly at my jacket. 

           “Shaving utensil,” I said.

           “Sure, and good luck with that story when they catch you. Seriously, dump it.”

           I gave him a wave, by way of thanks, and went back to Sarah. Milly, Bob’s regular barmaid, had brought Sarah her glass of wine and my pint was waiting for me. Sarah had already had a few hefty sips from her glass, by the look of it. Bob didn’t serve short measures. She had both hands flat on the table to stop them trembling. Delayed shock. It happens that way sometimes.

           “Give it a few minutes, it will pass. It’s the body’s reaction to adrenalin leaving the system,” I said, sitting back down.

           She looked at her hands and took a sip of wine.

           “This is the first time I’ve felt safe in three days,” she said. “Thank you for that.”

           “Well, don’t celebrate just yet,” I said, then took a good swallow or two of my pint. I’d lost the rest of the last one over horse-face Walther, I remembered. Great use for it, really. I looked her in the eyes and put the question that had been niggling at me.

           “Do you know how they found you? Is the Montague Pyke your regular haunt or something?”

           She frowned.

           “I’ve never been in there before in my life,” she said. “It was just somewhere to sit and think. They must have followed me.”

           I shook my head.

           “That doesn’t work. You were in there for over an hour before Gunter showed up. Maybe someone else was following you and had to put in a call to him to tell him where you were holed up.”

           It was her turn to shake her head.

           “The Head Office is in Manchester. It would take him a lot longer to get here from there if he got a phone call.”

           “Mobile phones are a wonderful thing,” I said. “He could have been in London already if they were following or tracking you.”

           “Tracking me how?” she asked, fixing me with a look.

           I shrugged. “Your mobile phone for a start. Please take it out and remove the sim card.”

           “I already dumped the phone. I watch the odd film, you know,” she said snarkily.

           “Good first step. But if I wanted to track you, I’d probably take a moment when you and your handbag were in different places to bug your handbag. Have you searched it lately? Because if those clowns come through the door again, I’m probably going to have to end them, which will not sit well with the police, unless you are whiter than white. If you’re in the wind, as it were, with company property, I’d end up getting life. Just saying.”

           “I’m putting you in danger. I get it. Let me sit here for a moment and I’ll go,” she said nervously, both hands clutching the stem of her wine glass.

           “Lady, I’ve been in danger since I was eighteen. It didn’t start with you and it won’t end with you, so don’t bother yourself over it,” I said.

           She sat still, shoulders hunching in, closing off the world.

           Okay, change of plan. No way was I walking away from this.

           “Sarah, do me a favour. Check your fucking handbag, please?” I said.

           She gave me a startled glance, pushed back a little from the table and began to fumble furtively in her handbag.

           “Do you have a clue what you’re looking for?” I asked.

           She stopped fumbling, shook her head and sighed.

           “Empty the contents on the table then feel the lining. See if your fingers can find any small, hard object behind the lining, or a tiny, neat cut that wasn’t there before.”

           She frowned. What woman likes emptying her handbag in front of a bloke?

           “Do you want to see Gunter again when he wakes up? He’s going to be pretty riled up, I imagine,” I nudged.

           She looked at me.

           “If he wakes up,” she said. “That was a very hard kick.”

           “Measured force. He’ll wake unless he suffered a brain aneurism. That’s kind of out of my hands,” I said.

           She began unpacking the handbag. I turned a little away in my chair in order to lighten the embarrassment a tad. Out the corner of my eye, amongst the usual clutter of lipstick tubes, makeup compacts, tissues and yup, a box of tampons, plus two metal pens which would do nicely as weapons, there was a bigger than fist-sized something covered in bubble wrap.

           “What on Earth is that?” I asked as Sarah emptied the last few items out of her bag and began feeling the lining.

           “That’s what all this is about. And before you ask, you’d have to sign any number of non-disclosure agreements and get cleared by the MoD before I could tell you anything,” she said.

           “I’m already cleared by the MoD. Let me introduce myself, Sergeant Joe Slater, 22nd Battalion SAS. Twenty-one years in the army with a whole bunch of missions I can’t tell you about. So, rest assured, your secrets are safe with me,” I said.

           She held the handbag up and thrust it towards me, one hand still in the bag.

           “I think I can feel something here,” she said.

I slipped my big hand into the bag and found my hand covering her little hand. The contact was like an electric jolt. She flushed and pulled her hand out the bag. I gave a mental shrug and put my reaction down to a severe lack of nookie on my part. I was well short on the female companionship side. Ten days ago, I’d been in Mogadishu, closing out a mission. I told myself not to be an ass and felt the bag lining. Sure enough, I could make out a two-centimetre by one object that was no more than a couple of millimetres thick.

           “Wait here,” I said, and walked out the pub with the handbag. I walked two doors down and left the bag against a wall at the edge of the pavement. I walked back to the pub door and stood, watching the bag. Within a minute a teenage girl stopped, looked at the bag and picked it up, furtively. She gave a quick glance around then hurried off with the bag. That should give the hounds a new scent to follow. I went back to our table.

           “My bag?” Sarah queried, raising her eyebrows.

           “In the wind,” I said.

           “Damn. That was a Gucci bag. Do you have any idea what it cost me? You couldn’t have just taken the whatever it was out and thrown it away?” she demanded. Lord love us, what is it with women and handbags?

           “Would you rather have the bag and be back in your company’s clutches or have the bag wandering off on a random trip that will keep Gunter busy for a while?” I asked, eyeing the clutter on the table. “I’ll buy you a replacement when I’ve eaten but we have to move on from here.

           I got up and asked Bob for a plastic bag, then swept all her bag clutter into it. The bubble wrap parcel was clutched tightly in her left hand and she didn’t seem disposed to hand it over.

I told Bob I’d have to pass on the grub and gave him a tenner.

           “Tracker in the lady’s handbag?” he asked, raising one eyebrow. Bob is nobody’s fool and he put that together quicker than I liked.

           “Yup so, it’s off on a little journey now, and that should buy us some time.”

           “You probably know this, Joe, but don’t go back to your place. Whoever you’re in trouble with might make you from the cameras in the last place you were in if they have any clout.”

           “Got that already, Bob, but thanks. I may be back for the guns sooner rather than later.”

           “Watch yourself. If it gets heavy, call me and I’ll whistle up a few of the lads for you. Some of them are in and out of here pretty regularly.”

***

Chapter 2

We left the bar and I flagged down a cab and gave the cabbie the address of another Wetherspoons pub near Broad Street Station. Some ten minutes later we were again seated with wine and beer in front of us, and I had a plate of fish and chips on the way. Sarah had ordered a small pizza at my insistence. The body needs fuel after it’s been revved up, no matter what the source of the revving.

           “So,” I said, “are you going to take me through it from the beginning?”

           She fretted with her wine glass for a long moment. The bubble wrap package was on the chair between her knees. 

           “You said you were sort of between jobs, I think,” she said.

           “That’s true enough,” I answered.

           “Would you consider working for me? As my bodyguard?”

           “Nope,” I said. “But I’ll do the same job as your friend. I’m not looking for an employer right now.”

           “As my friend? You don’t know me at all,” she replied, looking away.

           “True, but I know you need help, and as you said, I’m here with not much else of importance going on. And I didn’t like our two friends back there very much.”

           She gave a brief half-smile.

           “I noticed. I think they did too,” she said. “That bar owner – I guess he was the owner – he knew you and he clearly trusted you. You went into the kitchen with your pockets bulging with those guns. When you came out your pockets were empty. So, he knows you well enough to hold guns for you, no questions asked. That’s kind of strange, but it makes me a bit more disposed to trust you,” she said.

           “Well, halleluiah,” I said dryly.

           “Yes, well, I don’t have much option, do I? You’ve already shown me that I’ll be back in their hands in next to no time left to my own devices.”

           Our food arrived and I tucked in immediately, which put a stop to further conversation for the moment. She picked at her pizza, eating minuscule mouthfuls conveyed daintily on the tip of her fork. Face to face she was absolutely stunning. A cute mouth that looked made for kissing. Lovely deep blue eyes. Mine are very pale blue. When my face goes blank and I narrow my eyes at someone they often experience an urge to pee themselves.

Does the job wonderfully with new spec ops recruits, I’d noticed. It’s a look that’s worked pretty well for me in the world I was in. I was going to have to get out of the habit of scaring the shit out of folks, living out here in the ordinary world, among the innocent and the not so innocent. 

           With that thought in mind, I smiled at Sarah.

           “Don’t do that,” she said, wrinkling her nose and frowning.

           “What, don’t smile? Seems a little harsh,” I said.

           She fiddled with her wine glass for a moment or two before replying.

           “When I see you as a highly competent killing machine, I know where I am. When you smile it confuses me,” she said, speaking more to her wine glass than me.

           What to make of that? Was she trying to say she was attracted to me? That would complicate the hell out of keeping her safe, however that was going to be defined. I’d remarked on more than one occasion that it was not mere coincidence that one often sees tiny women with really tall men. It’s like, finding out as girls that they’re below average height, somewhere deep in their psyche a little voice pipes up: ‘I need to get me a caveman.”

The bloke, of course, doesn’t stand a chance once she sets her sights on him. He’s hard-wired to protect her. There was a lesson in this for me, I told myself if I wasn’t too stupid to heed it. Hmmm. What exactly was I doing here anyway?

“Fine,” I said, round a final, large mouthful of fish and chips. I managed to swallow it down without choking myself and chased it with a few swigs of beer.

“Change of topic. I can help you better if I know what exactly is going on. So, please, enlighten me.”

           She sighed and put down her knife and fork. The pizza was only slightly damaged.

           “Look,” she began, “I want to get it clear from the outside that when I

began this research what I was trying to do was to find a way of treating spinal lesions. I wanted to help people.”

           “Broken backs?” I interrupted. I’d seen a number of good soldiers turned into paraplegics because a bullet or a piece of shrapnel had shredded a vertebra or two, taking the spinal cord out along the way. “That would be awesome.”

           She nodded and her eyes lit up briefly.

           “I know. A school friend of mine, Janie Gibson, had a riding accident. She’s in a wheelchair now. I made a vow at the time that I would find a way of helping her to walk again and I’ve dedicated my life to it ever since.”

           “Good for you,” I said. “I dedicated my life to serving Queen and Country and all it did was get a boatload of people dead. They’re even letting the Taliban take back control in Afghanistan. What a pointless shit-show. Guess you wouldn’t want to swap.” 

           Sarah made a sour face.

           “I found myself headed in exactly that direction, that’s why I jumped ship and that’s why Gunter and Co are after me,” she said.

           I kept my face neutral and stifled a sardonic laugh. The notion of this little five-foot-four slip of a thing racking up anything like my body count was ludicrous. However, she was serious, that much was clear, so there was more here than met the eye.

           “What exactly is your skill set? Or sets?” I asked quietly.

           Sarah went back to fiddling with her wine glass and spoke to it, rather than to me.

           “I qualified as a biochemist at Cambridge with a side specialism in the predictive modelling of chemical reactions. It’s a software analytics thing,” she said, in answer to my raised eyebrows. “Then I did a second PhD in chemo-electrical synaptic reactions – how the body’s nerves conduct messages,” she said.

           “So, you could work out how to bridge snapped spinal cords,” I said.

           She nodded, pleased that I’d followed. 

           “To cut a long story short, I discovered how to create self-assembling nano-wires that would wrap themselves around all the body’s nerves, and how to write a kind of artificial intelligence that would allow the brain to regain motor control of the muscular-skeletal system and the involuntary nervous system – that’s the bit that keeps your organs functioning. It meant that even someone whose spine was severed at the brainstem could recover all their functions. I’d basically succeeded in my goal.”

           “Fantastic,” I said and meant it. “That has to be worth a Nobel Prize, surely to God?”

           She grimaced.

           “You’d think.”

           There was enough in her tone to make me pause.

           “Okay,” I said. “I see we have a twist in the tale. Let me guess. Your discovery came to the notice of the Department of Defence and they slapped a “Top Secret” label on it.”

           She looked at me and nodded.

           “You’ve got it. One of the professors at the University research department had a contract with Polymicron Biolabs. He used his influence with them to get me the funding I needed to complete my research. They funded me to the tune of some two and a half million pounds over seven years, no questions asked.

“All they demanded was that I provide them with regular reports. Initially, they wanted me to sign a contract which would have given them a 70 percent proprietary stake in any commercially viable outcome from my research. I bargained that down to 45 percent, not because I’m greedy, but because I wanted to keep control of the project. They agreed without a fuss, but they insisted on a clause which said that if anything happened to me, all rights to my research would pass to them.”

           “You signed that?” I said, raising my eyebrows in disbelief. “It sounds like a suicide note to me.”

           “At the time I was still a little way from a really key breakthrough. I saw that there was conceivably a danger in it, but the idea that this benevolent organisation would turn murderous, seemed far-fetched. I needed the next tranche of cash to make a real breakthrough and I figured, what the hell, what I was doing was way more important than me.”

           She paused and took a big swallow of her wine, which didn’t leave much in the glass. I beckoned a barmaid over to refresh our drinks.

           “Anyway,” she resumed, “what I didn’t know was that they were working with the Department of Defence’s ‘Defence, Science and Technology Laboratory’ and that the funding they were passing on to me was coming directly from the DoD.

“When I made the second or third of the breakthroughs I needed, I got a visit from Special Branch officers. They made me sign a non-disclosure agreement on my own work and told me that it was now deemed work of national importance. They spun me some bullshit about how the Government saw it as a way of helping badly wounded servicemen to regain their health.

“Obviously, it was that, but that’s not why they wanted it. Polymicron’s director of research, Oliver Tombes, told me I needed to focus on the potential for enhancing ordinary motor functions, instead of simply restoring them.”

She grimaced.

“That was probably where I crossed the line. It was a fascinating intellectual problem. I could do it dumb, or I could do it smart, by enhancing the AI and using it to speed up neural transmissions. If I did this, I had to also enhance a subject’s cortical, visual and endocrinal functioning. This was a long, long way beyond just helping my friend to walk again. In the hands of any military, it’s about creating super-soldiers.”

She looked directly into my eyes.

“Imagine yourself with your skills enhanced tenfold, or higher, maybe a lot higher. How would you like to face that?”

I sat back in my chair and thought about it while I drank half my beer. If what Sarah was telling me was true, and I had no reason to think she was simply making the whole thing up, it wouldn’t be just Gunter and Polymicron who would be after her. Special Branch would be involved for sure and they had my number. Then there was the by no means insignificant additional fact that if wind of this got out, and as far as I was concerned, our Government was far from leak or hack-proof, other players would be dead keen to get their hands on Sarah. This was starting to look like a royal fuck-up.

“How much of your research is already in Polymicron’s hands?” I asked.

“Not enough for them to duplicate my research. I began to suspect that Tombes was trying to duplicate what I was doing, so I started leaving out key steps, and I refused to release the AI code. I wrote everything important secretly on a laptop that had no connectivity capabilities at all. On my work laptop, I wrote code that wouldn’t work. I added a few routines to show me if it was being hacked. It was. If you’d like a jewellery ring metaphor, they have the precious metal setting but not the stones.”

“And that package you’re protecting, the one in bubble wrap, what’s it’s significance?” I asked.

“That’s my secret,” she said and clammed up.

“Let me rephrase the question. What happens if Gunter gets his hands on it?”

“He’ll give it to Tombes and that will probably unlock enough of my work for them to figure out the rest,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, finishing my beer. “So, you’re probably absconding with property the DoD will claim belongs to them, through some tortuous paper trail or another, real or faked for the occasion. That means they can enlist the help of the police. If you prove hard to get hold of, they may brand you a traitor who has stolen secret technology she intends to sell to a foreign power. Then they can use the media to alert the public and they can bring in military as well as police assistance. Hell, they could bring in the CIA and Interpol if they felt like it.”

Her face fell and I felt terrible for her. There wasn’t any easy way out of this.

“What can I do?” she asked.

“We’re going to have to disappear. It will take them no more than an hour or two to make me as the guy who helped you. I’ve dealt with Special Branch before. They know me. I’m careful when I go into bars or walk about the street. I don’t look up and I wear this cap with a nice peak to it. I choose tables that are in the blind spot of the pub’s cameras, and again, I don’t look at the camera, ever. But it won’t take them long to make me once they get the camera feed. When I took out your two admirers, the cameras would have got a good look at me.”

I took out my smartphone and removed the sim and broke it up. Then I stood and crushed the phone under my boot. I’m a cautious guy. I learned long ago to trust no one, especially not the MoD. The senior officers who ran the regiment I’d mostly trusted, but they were servants to the politicians and who knew what instructions they’d be given at any point in time?

When I was younger, I didn’t bother my head about where the orders came from. But the deeper I got into things the murkier it all looked, so I started setting up my own plan B. Then I added C, D and E, because, hell, that’s basically how they trained me to work.

I have bank accounts in ten countries in fifteen different names. The missions I went on gave me the opportunity to collect cash and valuables along the way. Some I shared with the team, some I didn’t. The Iraqi brass and the Baathist high-ups I went after, were loaded. I regarded it as an honest transfer of wealth.

Again, in the early days – I’m talking just after the start of the second Gulf war, in 2003, when I was 23, we handed over what we found in the righteous belief that it was all stolen from the Iraqi people. Everything we handed over went straight into the pockets of the new Iraqi administration. Then I found out that they were feeding crap info to senior command in order to have the SAS take out wealthy ‘traitors’. Then the Iraqis the US had put in power simply stole whatever the target had possessed.

That pissed me off. On top of that, I found out that a certain Colonel on loan to the Regiment was in on the game and was taking a backhander from the politicians. After that, me and the squad took everything that wasn’t nailed down and we handed in nothing. I took one of the IEDs we’d recovered and put it under the Colonel’s car when he was offsite having what he thought was a secret meeting with his political buddies. Boom. How sad.

The missions got a little straighter, after that, though who knew where the info was coming from to hit this group or that. Whatever, if I found cash, jewels or gold, I stashed it and kept it. Dishonest, you bet, but there weren’t any honest roads to go down. Whichever way you turned you were knee-deep in shit.

Through no fault of her own, and with the best of intentions, Sarah had stumbled into the same cesspool, from the sound of it, only she’d been working to help people, whereas I’d just been following orders I knew were mostly crap. She deserved a hell of a lot better.

I finished my few minutes of brooding, to find her watching me.

“Are we safe here?” she asked, nervously.

“Probably. We’ll move on shortly. Help me to understand how you managed to put all this stuff together. You finished your first degree when you were what? Twenty-two or three? Doesn’t seem like enough time to make all those breakthroughs,” I said.

She grimaced.

“I started my first degree when I was twelve. My parents recognised early on that I was bright and kept challenging me to think and to learn. Janie’s accident happened when I was eleven. After that, I really focused on the problems I’d set myself.”

I gave a low whistle. I was in the presence of genius.

“Okay, you were bright. I get it. Out of curiosity, what age were you when they gave you your first doctorate?”

“Going on sixteen,” she said. “I was nineteen when I completed my second doctorate, on nerve transmissions.”

“Damn,” I murmured. “I was kind of proud of getting my black belt in Shotokan Karate at seventeen. Doesn’t exactly compare, does it? I knew there were people like you around. I just figured if I was lucky, I’d never actually meet one.”

She looked a bit embarrassed.

“It’s not like I’ve got two heads or something,” she muttered.

“Nope, just one rather pretty one,” I said.

That made her go red and frown.

“Okay, what we’re going to do, basically, is to vanish,” I added quickly. “I’m good at vanishing. But there are certain necessities one needs in order to do it right. We’re going to change your appearance and get you a false passport. I think we’ll be Iranians. We’ve both got black hair and we can darken your skin. Thanks to the deserts I’ve spent so much time in, my face is tanned dark enough to pass for Asian. We’ll go to Germany. I have a small flat in Munich under a different name. When we get there, we can figure out the next step.”

“What do we do if they do as you said, and declare me a traitor?”

“We brief a few top UK journalists, long-range by phone, the Guardian and the BBC for instance, and tell them plainly what’s happening. Then we sit back and let them run the story. I imagine the powers that be will recant pretty quickly. The MoD press team will say someone got their wires crossed, terribly sorry to besmirch the reputation of such a brilliant scientist. Please come home, Sarah.”

Her face brightened.

“Would that mean I really could come home?” she asked hopefully.

“What are you? Ten? Don’t let yourself be fooled so easily. They’d welcome you home then spirit you off someplace where you’d be working for them with a chain around your ankle, probably a metaphorical chain, but a chain nonetheless.”

“Shit,” she muttered.

“I haven’t mapped an end game for this yet, but it probably comes down to signing up with a big research company in some neutral state, Switzerland for choice, after we’ve had a proper contract drawn up by a shit-hot lawyer. One thing’s for sure. You can’t unlearn what you’ve learned. Once someone finds a way of doing something, they prove that it’s possible and it doesn’t take that long before someone else figures out a road to that same goal.”

“I don’t want to be responsible for super-soldiers. I want to help people walk again,” she said fiercely.

“Great. I applaud the sentiment,” I said, trying to keep my words from sounding like sarcasm. “However, from what you’ve discovered, I’d say super soldiers are now inevitable at some point. But don’t fret. Drones are a hell of a lot more frightening, especially the little scuttle-bug ones, with an explosive charge strapped to their tiny backs and their six spidey legs going like the clappers.

“You could make a zillion of them for the cost of a single super-soldier. Get your AI skills working along those lines and we could both retire as billionaires and watch the world go boom,” I said.

Her jaw dropped and her eyes went big in alarm.

“Just kidding. Don’t get your knickers in a twist,” I said hastily. “The point I’m trying to make is that war is getting nastier all the time – not that it was ever anything less than nasty in the first place. That’s just the trajectory we’re on. Whatever you’re discovering probably won’t accelerate the pace that much.”

“Oh, fine,” she said snarkily. “I feel so much better now. Thank you so much.”

A sudden thought occurred to me.

“That second doctorate of yours, how much does the dissertation give away?”

She looked at me like I was an idiot, which, comparatively speaking, was probably about right. Except I knew a hell of a sight more about the world she was now in than she did.

“Don’t you think Oliver Tombes would have already discovered all he needed to if that was all it took? That was the start of the road for me, not the end point. And Tombes doesn’t have the brains to even see the start point,” she said.

I held up my hands to placate her.

“Fine, just wanted to check. What about scientific papers? You guys write these things up all the time, don’t you? Sharing knowledge?”

“I’m not selfish, but I knew I was doing things no one else was doing and if anyone is going to get a Nobel prize out of this, it’s going to be me, not some hack who has ridden on my back to get there!” she snapped.

Okay, so she was seriously ambitious and very driven. Fine, no problem. I wouldn’t get my fingers slammed in that door again.

I asked one of the young chaps behind the bar to call us a cab. He gave me a funny look as if to say, “What’s wrong with your phone,” but then he took a good look at me and meekly took out his phone and dialled a cab.

“Cab company wants to know where to?” he asked.

“Camden,” I lied. Lesson 101 of running, leave as many false trails as possible. When the cab arrived, I gave him an address off the Old Kent Road. I have four small properties in England that I rent under assumed names. Call me paranoid, but the places I’ve been and the things I’ve done, certain precautions are necessary. About four different fundamentalist groups have bounties on my head. I’ve had to off two adventurous types over the years who’ve tried to collect.

One tried in Amsterdam, one right here in London. The Amsterdam woolly beard I dropped out to sea in a black bag. The London hopeful I buried in a Christian graveyard. I figured he and the other skeletons could discuss theology together, assuming they’re capable of discussing anything, which I highly doubt.

I’ve never given much thought to the after-life, though I’ve sent quite a few in that direction. I figure if there is one, it’s bound to be a surprise and probably unlike anything the Good Book suggests. And if there isn’t, we’ll be past caring, so why worry?

Doesn’t mean I don’t go to funerals and bow my head with respect when one of the lads cops it. That’s simply showing respect.

Dust to dust, ashes to ashes. To this, we must all come. Brrrrr. That much I believe with all sincerity. 

***