Jane Higgins - The Bridge

She punched my arm. ‘Are you truly coming back?’

‘I guess. I can’t let it go at one meeting. Maybe he was having a bad day.’

Maybe.

‘Tasia, I want you to look at this.’It was him, my father, striding into Levkova’s kitchen, holding a piece of paper. He saw me and stopped.

‘Of course,’ said Levkova. She took the paper and headed out the door.

‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘I need an answer straightaway.’

‘And you shall have one. I won’t be long.’ She closed the door behind her.

He went to the fire and stood staring down at it. I picked at the bandage on my hand. Silence for a while, then he said, ‘What happened to your hand?’

‘I met Fyffe’s kidnappers.’

‘Damage?’

‘I don’t know. My index finger doesn’t move very well, and there’s parts with no feeling. The doc says nerve and tendon damage, wait and see.’

‘You came a long way for this Hendry boy.’

‘Yeah, well, he matters to me.’ Like family, I almost said, but didn’t. I watched his back, his head bent to the fire. I couldn’t read what he was thinking, but all that compressed energy of the day before had gone. I said, ‘If ISIS had sent me, don’t you think I’d have done something by now – tried to go back over the river to report that you’re alive, or had a go at killing you?’

Silence.

‘Or do you think they’re playing a really long game where even I don’t know I’m a spy?’

He turned around at that and I thought he might leave but he just looked at me like he had no idea what to do with me. He was probably a man who was used to knowing what to do with people. ‘You have questions,’ he said. ‘Ask them.’

Just that. Questions. Ask them. I could hear Lou saying, Jump! He had a deadly imitation of Gorton: My boy, when the freight train of opportunity speeds by, you gotta jump . I looked at my father, and thought, yeah, sure – on it, or under it?

‘Well?’ he said.

I sucked in a breath. ‘Did you know about me?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘And that I was in that school?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why was I in that school?’

‘I don’t know. I was in the Marsh. When I came out, Elena was dead and you were gone. I found out later where you were.’

‘Why did you leave me there?’

‘It was logistically impossible to do anything else.’

‘But isn’t that your job? To do the logistically impossible?’

Silence at that. Maybe rhetorical questions weren’t part of the deal. Then he said, ‘Tornmoor wasn’t a school. It was an ISIS training facility.’

‘Well, it seemed like a school to me. We did calculus and algebra and geometry and physics and chemistry and…’

‘History? Social analysis? Languages? Any of that?’

‘It was a science school.’

‘Where ISIS trained recruits – why else the assault course on the back field, the training in ciphers and electronics, the laboratories and computer systems beyond anything a school would need, Scripture indoctrination to keep you all in line, and the selection, every year, of an elite to join the Service?’

‘So they came recruiting, okay. But it’s not like they were in the classroom every day—’

‘No?’ He ticked names off on his fingers. ‘Stapleton, Tremewan, Lewis – all senior ISIS agents; Gorton was retired, Williams was in the Marsh and Burton—’

‘Wait! Dr Williams was in the Marsh?’

‘Before my time, and not in any senior capacity, but yes. He trained there. All their medics do their psych training there.’ He looked at me. ‘You know what the Marsh is, don’t you? It’s where ISIS turns thinking, questioning, rebellious individuals into compliant drones. They do it with drugs in what they like to call therapeutic interrogation. They’ve been doing it for years. We’ve lost some of our best people in the Marsh.’

I stared at him. I didn’t dare ask what had happened to him in there, but I was starting to think that the reasons he hadn’t come for me weren’t simple.

‘I’m not surprised you didn’t know,’ he said. ‘ISIS prides itself on its control of information, particularly when it comes to indoctrinating potential recruits.’

‘And now you think I’m one of them – a city kid, a fascist-in-training?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Do you?’ I demanded.

Finally, like it was wrenched out of him, he said, ‘Tasia thinks highly of you. So does Sim. They don’t bestow that judgment lightly.’ He glanced at his watch and moved towards the door.

I said, ‘One more! One more question.’

‘Well?’

‘Why did you change your mind?’

‘About what?’

‘About telling me all this.’

He hesitated in the doorway, then he looked straight at me. ‘You look like your mother.’

And that was that. Question time was over and he was gone.

I shut my eyes and pressed on them hard with the heels of my hands, and I hurt with an old ache that I’d thought I was done with a long time ago.

A while later Levkova stuck her head through the door. ‘Come into the study.’

Commander Vega was there, and my father, and the rest of the CFM leadership who’d been there the day before. Levkova closed the door. ‘We’re coordinating an operation to retrieve the Hendry boy. He’s in Blackbyre. We’ve learned that much. DeFaux was eager to help, you’ll be glad to know. We’re sending a squad…’

At last, I thought. He’s alive. This will work. ‘Can I go with them?’ I asked.

‘Yes. We want someone who knows him.’

‘Then Fyffe can take him home.’ Looks were exchanged. ‘What?’ I said. ‘Why not?’

‘We can’t just let him go,’ said my father. ‘He’s too valuable. We’ll set up a prisoner exchange.’

‘No!’ I looked at Vega but he was staring out the window. ‘He’s eight years old!’ I said.

My father said, ‘He’s valuable however old he is. We have someone over there we need to get back.’

I said to Vega, ‘An exchange. Like with Kasimir? A suicide switch?’

‘We can’t let an opportunity like this go,’ said my father.

‘Yes, you can,’ I said. ‘You can decide that he’s only eight and just let him go home.’

‘Enough,’ he said.

‘Is this what you want?’ I said to Vega.

‘That’s enough,’ said my father. ‘You can go. Now.’

Okay. So I blew that. If I’d shut up and gone along with them and their stupid plan, they’d have taken me to Blackbyre and I might’ve been able to get Sol away from them and back over the river without going through with the switch. As it was, I shot my mouth off and they shut me out of the whole deal.

Next day, a hand-picked squad set offto snatch Sol from under Blackbyre noses. They were ultra-confident of their ability to do this, and that confidence bled through into a staunch belief that they were good enough not only to snatch him but also to make a switch work – never mind what had happened to Vega’s son.

They didn’t let me near the op. I tried the ‘you need someone to ID him’ line and they said, ‘yes, we do,’ and took Fyffe instead. Which left me behind, kicking the doors like a two-year-old.

I sat in Levkova’s kitchen, inscribing the top of the table – an old school table – with a blunt army knife, tracing years of grafitti left by bored kids (Deter ♥ Chara. Chara is easi as π…). I scrubbed out πand scratched 3.14159265358979323… to one hundred places exactly, then started to do it all again in binary. Levkova came and went, and Lanya made flatbread with Max. By midnight Lanya had finished the bread and was so fed up with me she went to bed. Around 2am Levkova came to the table and said, ‘I take it you intend to sit there defacing the furniture all night?’