Tham Cheng-E - Surrogate Protocol

They regard each other at eye level, both being of considerable size and height. Denied of audible speech, John questions Marco’s arrival by lifting his eyebrows. Marco keeps up his grin, waving and pointing towards something. John takes a moment to comprehend Marco’s gesture, then reaches over and tapping the door-release switch. The glass door between them hums open.

“Thanks.” Marco winks his good eye. “Left my pass in the car when I got back from a meeting and the car keys are in my drawer.”

John smiles politely.

Marco holds out his hand. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

They shake hands. John pulls out his pass from his breast pocket. “SCD,” he says.

Marco squints at the name. “Bowen? I’m Marco. Thought you look familiar.”

“We work in the same building.”

“On a tough case?” asks Marco, his toothy grin melting into an expression of concern. “Terrible to be working so late.”

“Yeah, the Sheik Didi case.” John holds up the case files. “Setting up a video conference with Interpol. Time zone problem.”

Marco sympathises, shaking his head; his good eye, unblinking, remains fixed on John. “Turn on the lights next time you drop in.

Wouldn’t look good to be seen snooping.” He draws quotation marks in the air at the word “snooping”. “Does umm, whoever you got the files from know you’re coming?”

“Of course.”

“All is well then.” Marco’s grin returns. “Good thing you’re here or I’d be rolling in hot shit.” He guffaws raucously and John joins in as naturally as he can.

The flame in the kerosene lamp is long and still. Landon doesn’t sleep. He sits in bed and riffles through one journal, then he tosses it and picks up another, his eyes travelling, groping for the revelations of a distant past. Vivian, Hannah and Clara are but one woman— that much he now comprehends. She is a relic like himself, one of many lives, and he must confess that the prospect of meeting her now carries a dangerous, irrational thrill.

If she isn’t the one out to kill him then who is? John has assured him that the surveillance is just a precaution, though he isn’t convinced anyone would get here in time if something happens. Unless , he thinks, John wants me right where I am.

The possibility frightens him. It’s like a nightmare where you flee to your parents only to have them turn into the very demons you are running from. But things have taken a different turn. He finds relief in having confided a part of himself to Dr Peck. CODEX alone does not own his secret. Now he has an ally and he intends to keep it because for once he might find the unhidden world on his side. He looks at the slip of paper bearing Dr Peck’s number and enters it into his mobile.

He only has to wait until Friday.

A stuttering honk sends him leaping out of bed and racing down the stairs. He throws open the front door to an arriving Datsun pick-up truck. He jogs across the driveway to unlatch the gates. The truck rumbles in and halts to a screeching jerk.

“ Whoa ! What’s the rush?” he says, even as he rejoices over the company.

Cheok pushes past him without a word. He marches straight into the kitchen, his short, beefy arms swinging wide from his swaggering stride. He checks the toilet, then the yard, does a quick round along the perimeter and returns to the porch where Landon stands waiting with a frozen half-smile. He then grabs Landon by his sleeve and hauls him into the truck.

“Get in, we’re leaving now.”

“Okay.” Landon lifts his hands. “You’re scaring me, man. Where’re we going?”

Cheok doesn’t answer. He reaches for the ignition, checks the rear view mirror, and what he sees stops him cold.

“What?” Landon asks.

The gate is closed and latched, and its lock isn’t what Landon recognises as his own. Even then there’s a good chance the old hinges wouldn’t stand up to a reversing truck. Cheok twists the ignition. The engine stutters but doesn’t start. He bolts out of the vehicle and finds the dislodged fuel-injector placed neatly on the front bumper.

Cheok draws a pistol. “Back to the house.”

Landon cowers into the corner where two windowless walls meet. Cheok goes to the back of the truck and returns with two heavy, khaki-coloured vests and throws them over Landon. Then he crouches with his back to the wall, breathing deeply and slowly, the air whistling faintly through his nostrils. “I’m not a gardener,” he confesses.

“I figured.” Landon watches him, wide-eyed. “You’ve been very convincing.”

“I didn’t lie about everything.” Cheok swallows and sweeps his gaze across the house. “My wife—she lost her mind; the disease, you know. But we still share the bed, our time together at night. One morning I woke up—she dead already, beside me. Eight years ago.”

Landon feels a throb of pain in his chest.

Cheok’s fingers squirm restlessly over his pistol. “Don’t forget me, okay?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Write about me in your notebooks, okay?”

“I write about us all the time! So I won’t forget our football games!”

Cheok pulls the vests over Landon’s chest, gives him a thumbs-up and exits through the front door.

Under the vests Landon stays so still his limbs ache with fatigue. An eternity later he catches spectral shapes flitting across the curtained windows, backlit by security spotlights that John installed on the lawn. He hears a composition of skids and steps that suggests a struggle. Fits of fear rack his body; he’s too frightened to offer aid, and fiercely hates his cowardice. From the window he thinks he hears a gasp. Is it death? His mouth goes dry, his heartbeat rushing in his ears.

Then all at once the shapes disappear, and an eerie silence settles.

It doesn’t last. Moments later the roof comes alive with a fretful pounding. He hears roof tiles crashing. A shape appears near the kitchen. Someone cuts the power and a stifling darkness swallows everything.

Streams of white light erupt from the rear of the house, punching smouldering holes through wood and glass. Plasma and ozone scorch the air. The shots miss Landon by a mile but they induce such fear it triggers a seizure.

Through the convulsions he hears screams: Amal’s, the bayoneted victims’. Someone approaches. The sound of muted thudding morphs into the clatter of military boots. He stares down the barrel of a Nambu pistol, and behind it he sees the bearded, vengeful countenance of the Japanese officer.

A pair of arms enfolds Landon’s chest and drags him through the door and across the driveway. Landon is shoved once more into the back of a car. A sting at the side of his neck, and the hiss of a pneumatic needle follows. The convulsions abate, and a wave of drowsiness steals over him.

His sub-conscious construes the possibility that John has rescued him. But upon shifting his sight he finds Hannah in the driver’s seat, ostensibly enraged over something, and sees her toss an object resembling a pistol onto the seat next to her.

26th July 1938, Tuesday

My name is Anton. It poured today, a harsh, unrelenting torrent that hurt as it drove sideways against my face. I made a successful rendezvous with my “mate”. I met her by the right-hand post of the gateway to Happy World. She was standing under the Mandarin character for “happiness” and clutching her baby swaddled in chequered cloth.

So it was arranged.

The rain in all its fury played cruelly against her. She did not budge and stood drenched with her back turned to it, just so that I could pick her out. I went up to her and said that Vivian sent me. At once she proceeded forth and led the way, rejecting even my offer of an umbrella. I don’t know why Vivian set us up here; there are other registration stations closer to town. By the time I got there my toes were already pickling in my squelchy shoes, all raw and shrivelled from the trek along a flooded Grove Road. I knew my laments were unwarranted. This woman had it worse.