Devolution

From a distance, St. Vincent’s Hospital could have been police headquarters for all Joshua knew about the city of Sydney’s landmark buildings, but as they drew nearer he realized he had been mistaken.

‘This is a hospital.’

‘Yes,’ replied Ezekiel.

Joshua tried to hide his annoyance. ‘I thought you were taking me to the police.’

‘We called SCLAC before we left Turning Point. An Inspector Jacobssen informed us that we would be better off meeting them at the hospital instead of police headquarters. He said your friend Ted is there.’

‘Ted?’ said Joshua, immediately forgetting his anger. ‘Is he all right?’

‘They didn’t say anything other than what I have told you.’

Joshua sagged in his seat with relief like a balloon suddenly losing its air through a pin hole. He had thought about Ted and Veena continuously, worrying after them and felt the desperate helplessness of someone with no control over their circumstances. Circumstances into which he had drawn his friends, and now they were trapped like a fly in a spider’s web. How often he had pondered the guilt burdened life he would have to live without them if they were killed. He would rather have died himself.

The entrance to the hospital was heavily guarded, most likely with automatons assumed Joshua, as Ezekiel eased alongside the first of two check points and lowered his window just enough to converse with a guard.

Joshua looked at the hospital and imagined Ted and what he looked like. It had been two weeks since he had seen him. He wouldn’t have changed but how badly hurt was he?

Had he not been distracted with his own thoughts, Joshua might have wondered why the chat between Ezekiel and the guard was taking so long. As it was, the fizzling sound of an electrical short circuit preceded the slow slump of Ezekiel’s body sideways onto Joshua’s shoulder.

Glass shattered, shards filling the cabin as Joshua scrambled for the door release to escape. He felt heat at his back, or was it on his back as he fell out through the door onto the road. Someone grabbed him but he was too stunned to resist. They carried him quickly towards the hospital entrance as Joshua looked up to see another automaton crumple to the ground, the glass doors shattered as he entered the foyer surrounded by shouting and blinded by his own blood leaking from hundreds of facial cuts.

An alarm sounded as Joshua rolled onto his side from his back where he had been dropped or where he had fallen, he couldn’t tell. He saw a metal door slide down to block the entrance and smother the noise of the fighting and confusion outside.

He heard a distinct voice nearby which climbed out of the noise. ‘I guess that means they’ve decided not to pussyfoot around anymore.’

‘Looks that way,’ answered a second voice, also close.

A question for him. ‘Are you all right?’

Joshua tentatively put his hand to his face. Am I all right?

‘I’m bleeding a lot.’

‘Superficial cuts mostly by the look of them.’

Carefully bringing himself up to a sitting position, Joshua looked in the direction of the voices and through a wet and bloody mist saw a familiar face.

‘Inspector Jacobssen?’

‘Hello Joshua. This is Detective Hatsis.’

Following Jacobssen’s hand to the man standing beside him, Joshua saw him then quickly turned away back to the hospital entrance which was now closed off completely. What had he said about them giving up the subtle approach?

‘Do you know,’ said Joshua turning again to face Jacobssen, ‘who is responsible for this? I assume it’s me they were trying to kill out there.’

Jacobssen reached down and placed his large hand inside Joshua’s bicep and lifted him to his feet. ‘Good assumption.’

‘Sharp kid,’ added Hatsis.

‘Can I see Ted now? He is here, isn’t he?’

‘Maybe we should get your face cleaned up a bit first. You wouldn’t want to scare him.’

‘What about Ezekiel?’

‘Who?’

‘The guy who drove me here.’

‘He’s dead, and we lost three guards out there too,’ said Hatsis.

‘They’ve been replaced already I hope?’ asked Jacobssen.

‘It’s all quiet again now. The attack only lasted two and half minutes.’

Jacobssen looked at Joshua. ‘You were lucky. Those guys weren’t wasting any of their shots. I don’t know how they missed you.’

Having recovered his senses and now therefore more acutely aware of the pain of his facial lacerations, Joshua could only comment that he didn’t believe in luck. Hatsis and Jacobssen exchanged wry looks before a nurse appeared to lead Joshua away to a small examination room. She cleaned and dressed the more severe of his wounds, and pleasantly remarked that only two of the cuts would require stitching.

Joshua emerged from the room all patched up and trying to ignore how ridiculous he must have looked, he met Jacobssen who had been waiting for him and again asked to be taken to see Ted.

They walked silently down a short corridor to the elevators, pressed the button and waited for the lift. Inside, a mirrored wall reminded Joshua of his monstrous appearance whichever way he turned. Jacobssen asked for level four and in moments they were stepping out of the lift into a shiny floored, white walled foyer.

Jacobssen knocked gently on the door of room fourteen and on being given permission he pushed open the door and they entered.

Quickly to Ted’s beside, Joshua was about to speak when 3 beat him to it.

‘What the hell happened to you?’

’I cut myself shaving. How ‘bout you? What are you doing here?’

‘I’ll give you two some time alone,’ said Jacobssen as he turned and left the room. ‘I’ll come back in half an hour. I’ve got a thousand questions for you, Joshua.’

‘Ted, I’m sorry for dragging you into this mess. I’m so relieved that you’re okay. I was worrying and worrying myself sick about you and Veena. We still don’t know where she is, do we? Do you?’

‘Take it easy, Josh,’ said 3. ‘I’m sure she’s all right. We’ll find her.’

Joshua looked at his friend’s face and smiled as he realized the irony of the situation. Here was Ted, the complainer, the worry wart telling him to calm down. Reassuring him and offering words of comfort delivered in a smooth confident tone just like Joshua had done many times to him before. That was his role in the group. He was always the voice of calm, the voice of reason. The champion of faith.

This revelation made him feel worse with a cantankerous mixture of guilt, remorse and failure.

‘Listen to you,’ offered Joshua light-heartedly, ‘Mister cool and collected.’

‘Josh, I have to tell you how I came to be here. I escaped from them.’

‘From who?’

‘Don’t you know who they are yet?’

Joshua shook his head.

‘Neither do I,’ continued 3, ‘but we both know who we are talking about, don’t we? Even if we can’t name them.’

Joshua frowned.

3 got the joke and pressed on. ‘I was locked in a room for hours and hours after we arrived in Sydney. I didn’t know where I was. Every now and then a guard or agent or whatever you want to call them, you know the guys in grey shirts, came in to the room to ask me some questions. They wanted to know about you and Veena and what we were all doing in Australia.’

‘What did you tell them?’

‘I said we were here on vacation.’

Joshua laughed. ‘No doubt they bought your baby faced sincerity?’

‘No doubt.’

Leaning forward, 3 reached for the bedside table.

‘What do you want?’ asked Joshua.

‘Water please.’

Joshua poured him a glass of water and waited for him to drink it and settle back against his pillows. ‘How did you escape?’

‘Hang on, I’ll get to that. After a couple of these question and answer sessions, they became a little less congenial. Their questions became statements for which they presumably were looking to me for confirmation.’

‘Statements?’

‘We know your friend Joshua is a carrier and you and the girl are supporting him, for example, followed by a slightly arched eyebrow. Then another statement; the information stored on the disc relates to the murder of your father and of Senator Singh. Another raised eyebrow.’

‘What did you say to that?’

‘Nothing Josh. I don’t know what’s on the disc. Is it true what they said?’

‘I don’t know what’s on it either but I know plenty of people want it.’

‘Why can’t they, remember them?-just take it off you?’

‘Because it’s not on me. It’s in me. It’s been surgically implanted under my skin.’

‘Where?’ asked 3, horrified by the thought.

‘My thigh, and there’s another one, a smaller one in my arm but I think that one is a decoy.’

‘Why?’

‘Each time I have met my contacts, they remove the disc, put it in a computer, hit a few keys and then re insert it into me.’

‘Damn, doesn’t that hurt?’

‘No, I guess they use a strong local anesthetic. Anyway, they have never touched the small one in my arm.’

‘Can you see them?’

Joshua pushed up his shirt sleeve, revealing the smooth white flesh of his upper arm and then repeated the process with his shorts. The right thigh looked exactly like the left thigh just like it should.

‘No scarring?’

‘They make a very neat incision with a laser scalpel, and when they finish they put a dissolving band-aid on it, which fades into the cut skin in about five minutes and removes any trace of surgery.’

‘Fantastic!’ said 3 leaning forward with excitement. ‘Is that why they can’t take the disc? Because they don’t know where it is?’

‘No, each time I have made a contact, the agents used their biometers to locate the disc under my skin. I presume the grey shirts can do the same thing.’

’Why don’t they then?

‘I don’t know,’ said Joshua puzzling over it for the first time. ‘Anyway, tell me about your great escape.’

Ted regaled Joshua with an obviously trumped up version of events of which the main point of interest for him personally was the encounter with a prophet. As his friend spoke he detected a tone of voice previously unheard; the voice of faith. It seemed Ted had had a life changing encounter with one of God’s servants on earth. He remembered his meeting with a prophet in Mumbai, and with a tinge of bitterness, he recalled the prophecy, the angel in disguise had given him. So far, all he had spoken had come to pass.

‘Now do you believe?’ asked Joshua.

‘Now I begin to see that I may have been mistaken in my persistent adherence to the atheism of my father.’

Joshua laughed. ‘Well spoken good friend. Well spoken.’

He then related some of his escapades to Ted, although only briefly because he knew their time was short. Covering the flight in the desert, arrival in Sydney, the three contacts, and the nearly fatal meeting with Celeste, being followed by an assassin, welcomed into Turning Point, and Ezekiel’s demise at the hospital. Joshua summarized dispassionately as though reading the news, deliberately blocking the associated feelings swirling and surging beneath the surface. There would be time enough for those emotions to be given full vent later. For now, he knew the importance of concentrating on the task of finding Veena and cooperating fully with the police would obviously be the best way to achieve that.

They both turned towards the door at the sound of knuckles on wood.

‘Come in,’ said Ted, and in walked Jacobssen with Hatsis a pace behind him.

‘Okay boys,’ said the former, ‘Let’s get down to business.’