Tham Cheng-E - Surrogate Protocol

“Don’t lie to me, Hannah. My bodyguard’s filled me in quite a bit.”

“Still so sweetly naïve,” she says, her eyes squinting in a smile. “You don’t realise there’s no such thing as a bodyguard.”

Landon doesn’t reply. He crosses his arms snugly over his chest, as if to warm himself from a bitter cold.

“He didn’t tell you about Internment ?” she asks him.

“No.”

“Well, here you are.” She lifts her palms and brings them back between her knees. “When all possible information has been fished out of a Chronie the investigation concludes and the Tracker keeps him under full surveillance while he awaits the order—all done under the pretext of round-the-clock scrutiny, which explains the gizmos in your house.”

Spot on. Landon grits his jaw. John is a darn fraud.

“Your friend is a Tracker, just as I am,” she adds after a thoughtful pause. “When he receives the order you’ll be on your way to a safe place where they calm you like a heifer and milk you of the Serum before the slaughter.”

A wince puckers Landon’s face. “Milk? Me?”

“That’s the way it’s done on his Side.” Hannah’s gaze hardens. “And that where we differ—they milk the Serum and destroy the host but we destroy both Serum and host. Who knows what would happen if it falls into the wrong hands?”

The intrigue wears away and mortification takes hold. Landon holds his head. If it has to be he’d want it quick and painless. “Might as well do me now,” he said.

“There’s a slim chance the order won’t come. I’m hoping against hope for that because I really don’t want to kill you.”

“What have you done to my life, Hannah?”

“I’ve been hiding it,” she says. “After Amal died I made sure no one found you. I hooked you up with the operatives after you killed Khun, had you exiled to London and masked your signature so you wouldn’t be tracked. I had to make sure you stayed clear of the system.”

“And why would you do that?”

“Because I think you’re a good man.”

The response forces a sardonic laugh out of Landon. “It’s been an entire century so don’t tell me we got nothing going between us.”

Hannah’s head lists. “You’d feel better if I said it was because of love?”

Landon glowers. He so badly craves for the courage to confront her and shake her up because he is sick of her shrewd little remarks that always leave him no room for retort.

“Between the both of us, it’s official,” she adds soberly. “You messed up that surrogate-stunt at the hospital and someone assigned you to me.”

“To stalk and then kill?”

She looks down at her feet. “I’ll work something out.”

“How?”

“Don’t ask.”

“Cheok and John…” Landon says haltingly. “They’re dead?”

Hannah rises from the bed. “It’s complicated.” “Where’re you going?”

She opens the door and steps outside. “Don’t go exploring.” She lifts a sententious finger. “You never know who else might drop in.”

The order arrives just before nightfall. It comes through the omnicron in code while Landon is sleeping away the vertigo. It is past 11pm when he wakes, having at last been completely purged of the effects of the powerful tranquiliser.

Hannah fetches him a hot cup of tea. She is smiling, and his spirits lift.

“Does that mean I’m off the hook?” he asks. “At least from your side of the picture?”

“No,” she says. “Directive four-eighty-seven means they are thinking of reviewing you. We’ll rendezvous with an Agent who will assess your case. I could exert some influence.”

“When?”

“I’ve sent in our coordinates. They’ll have an Agent contact us soon.”

Landon puts his tea on the nightstand. “I’m hungry.”

The remark amuses Hannah and makes her feel motherly all of a sudden. “There’s a supermarket across the street. We might even finish the dinner we never had.”

Landon pulls a vacuous expression.

“You don’t remember it?”

“No,” says he. “Was it bad?”

“Didn’t you write it down somewhere?”

He shakes his head.

“Then it probably was.”

The supermarket is a tranquil haven at midnight, its half-depleted shelves and empty aisles accented with the ambience of a dystopian film. Light piano music haunts the forlorn spaces. Here and there gaunt, shadowy figures flit about with packs of beer and nuts. One of them picks out a bottle of cheap Chinese liquor. An employee stoops at a corner and stocks a shelf. A lone cashier sits at an open till and entertains herself on her mobile. Landon and Hannah saunter down an aisle, swinging their shopping baskets. Time slows to a crawl.

“Where were you all these years?” Landon asks.

Hannah flips a pack of crisps over and looks at it. “Everywhere, doing what I do best.”

“Killing?”

“Cleansing.” She replaces the pack and moves on. “There’re many rogues out there.”

“Like me?”

“Worse.”

For a while they strolled in silence, then Landon succumbs to a compulsion to warm the chill between them. “I’ve got an idea if they decide to kill me in the end.”

“What’s that?”

“We could kill ourselves.”

“Done that a dozen times over.” She reaches for another packet. “There is a fail-safe for Trackers like us. A part of the Serum can be programmed to respond to neuro-stimulus arising from suicidal tendencies, like serotonin levels, and prevent an act of suicide.”

“How?”

“It stalls your brain.” She taps her temple. “Induces a seizure.”

“Maybe I could do you first then myself.”

“Word of advice.” Hannah stops and turns around to look at him. “Never fraternise with your executioner.”

Her response blanches him to a chalky pallor that drives her into fits of lavish, velvet laughter. “You’re a darling, you know that?” she says, still tittering. “A century-old darling.”

The remark leaves Landon dry and cold.

Her laughter recedes into giggles. “I’ll go get some bread. You hit the warmers.”

A feeling of insecurity gnaws. “Perhaps we should go together.”

“Afraid I might disappear?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that a good thing, considering what I’m supposed to do to you?”

Again Landon finds himself in a fix, unable to retort, and once more his wretched disposition tickles Hannah to laughter. “Don’t worry, Arthur.” She runs her fingers through her hair. “Now it is I who won’t let you go.”

A familiar pang of loneliness descends when he sees her disappear around an aisle. He shrugs it off and considers picking up some canned ham and sausages. At the same time Hannah makes her selection and drops a country loaf into her shopping basket along with a slab of butter. The entire operation has taken her three minutes or less.

And at the end of it she finds Landon missing.

THE RICKSHAW PULLER dropped Anton off at a three-storey tenement along Guthrie Lane, just a block west of Meyer Chambers at Raffles Place. He ascended a teak staircase that led to a corridor smelling of stale sweat and disinfectants. The psychiatric clinic was on the left, where the doctor’s name, speciality and credentials were engraved on a bronze plaque beside the door. Anton jimmied the brass doorknob and found it locked.

“I’m afraid he’s passed on,” said a burly brunette who had been stamping up the stairs after him. Her hair stuck out from the sides of her sun-hat in tiny red curls.

Anton gasped. “He did? How?”

“His heart,” she said. “So I heard from the constables. Pity, he was such a gentleman.”