The Adjacent (7 page)

She turned her face further away from him and lifted her hair. Light from the overhead flood fell on her and Tarent saw the gleam of a metallic implant there, a tiny sliver of chased alloy, with three tactile keys. He instantly felt an irrational urge to cross to her, take hold of her, tip her head tenderly to one side and peer closely at the device. He could imagine how she would feel with her body against him, his hands on her, smelling the skin of her neck, feel the light touch of the hair that fell across her shoulders, see her lips close to his.

The thought dazed him.

She said nothing, but continued to stare at him. She let her hair fall.

He said, ‘All right.’ He felt as if he were about to faint, that if he stepped forward he would stumble against her. He groped around in his mind, trying to focus on what they had been saying. ‘Those shots are at my lab. They’ve been archived. I have to use the camera’s controller to access them. It’s in my room, with the rest of my gear. Come with me and I’ll download them now.’

He thought of the cramped space in the room, its constricting walls, the airless warmth, the narrow bed.

‘That’s a Canon S-Lite Concealable, isn’t it? The pro model.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I told you I have the EXIF data. You don’t need a controller with that version.’

‘You can view the pictures, but they can’t be downloaded.’

‘Are you using any other cameras I don’t know about?’

‘A Nikon and an Olympus. They’re in my room too, unless your friend has been in to take them.’

‘My friend?’

‘The man you’re travelling with.’

‘He’s a security officer from the department I work in. His name is Heydar. His official role is my minder, but they don’t call him that.’

‘Is he with you now?’

‘He’s taking an early night. He thinks I’m in my room.’ She made it sound like a confidence, then added, ‘He won’t go to your room unless I call him there.’

They had both already turned by unspoken consent and were walking back in the direction of the accommodation block. She strode ahead of him but as the entrance to the building came in sight she unexpectedly slowed her pace, allowing Tarent to come abreast of her. She walked at his side, looking down at the ground, the scarf hanging beside her face. They went along the disordered gravel path, under the silent trees, through the intermittent spills of light. Tarent’s hand, still palming the camera, swung beside hers.

‘Will you tell me your name?’ he said. He was surprised by the sound of breathlessness in his own voice.

‘Why should you need to know?’

‘Not need. I should like to know.’

‘Maybe later. Which room are you in, Tibor Tarent?’

‘So you know my name.’

‘I know a lot about you. More than you probably realize.’

‘Such as what?’

‘That you met Thijs Rietveld.’

Tarent did not understand. He made her repeat what she said.

‘Thijs Rietveld,’ she said. ‘The theoretical physicist. He was Dutch. Apparently you met him about twenty years ago.’

‘If that’s true I have no memory of it. Twenty years is a long time.’

‘Which room is it?’ she said, gripping his upper arm with her hand.

They passed through the main entrance to the block. They reached for their ID tags. Tarent found the slot first and swiped the card. He went through ahead of her, but she slipped in behind him before the door could close against her. Again she walked beside him. The corridor was narrow – sometimes they brushed against each other.

There was barely room for two people to stand inside his room. He had let her in first, so now she stood on the narrow strip of carpet, her legs pressing against the bed, her back towards him. The room was hot and airless. The bed was as he had left it, with the clothes he was wearing earlier scattered across it. He allowed the door to close behind him.

She glanced back, turning her head, watching for the tiny scarlet LED that confirmed the door was secure.

She unzipped her puffer jacket and shrugged it off. She slid the scarf away from her shoulders, shook out her hair. The scarf bunched lightly on the floor. Tarent swept his own clothes from the bed. She still had not turned, still presented her back to him.

She tilted her chin down, then lifted the hair away from her neck,
exposing the implant. His face was a finger’s length away from her. The implant glittered in the light from the overhead bulb. She leaned towards him, pressing her back against him and presenting her bare neck. Tarent leaned into her with his lips parted. He briefly glimpsed a company logo, deeply etched in the metal of the implant shield: it was a tiny letter ‘
a
’, stylized, surrounded by a pentagon. Nothing else. Then the hard shallow dome of the implant was in his mouth, his lips sucking on the skin around it, the metal rough and grainy against his tongue. She yielded, sideways in his arms, as his mouth roamed greedily across her neck, her ear, tasting her, wetting her, feeling the light brushing of her hair against his lips and chin and eyes. In his eagerness his front teeth grated audibly against the hard surface of the implant, and he pulled back from her.

‘You can’t damage it,’ she said, her voice sounding deeper, tremulous.

‘What about you?’

‘I’m beyond damage. You’ll find out.’

IT WAS HALF AN HOUR LATER. CRUSHED AGAINST HER ON THE
narrow bed, slimy with sweat, Tarent reached up and switched off the overhead light under the glare of which they had made love. One of the floodlights outside was close to the window and there was a spill of harsh light glancing through the top of the blinds. He reached across to the cord pull, managed to move the blind to block the worst of the light. Her limbs, her body, radiated heat at him.

She disentangled herself and sat upright, moving away from him along the bed. She faced him with her legs apart. Tarent sat up as well, arranged his own legs so they went around her. The light from outside still pouring in over the top of the blind laid a diagonal line across her, a pale radiance. She too was damp with perspiration – her hair clung wetly to the sides of her face.

Tarent felt his own sweat running through his hairline, down the sides of his face. He caught a bead of it, then smoothed a line of faint dampness across her left breast. He was short of breath in the stuffy room.

‘The window won’t open,’ he said. ‘I tried earlier.’

‘They’ve all been sealed. Every window in the building. MoD regulations. Shall we open the door?’

They had been hearing footsteps and voices outside. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ he said.

‘I thought you wanted fresh air.’

He leaned towards her, put his arms around her and they briefly caressed each other. He said, ‘I wasn’t expecting that. What we did.’

‘I was. I thought you knew. I’ve been waiting two days for you to make a move.’

He shook his head, remembering the hours in the Mebsher, what he had interpreted as the silent cold disdain pouring out of her towards him. Had he totally misunderstood? Well, it no longer mattered.

Now he could look at her directly he saw that she bore no physical resemblance to Melanie, even superficially. She was broader, taller, her breasts were slightly fuller, her waist was narrower. He guessed she was younger than Melanie had been, but it was difficult to tell by how much.

‘I still don’t know your name. Or who you are.’

‘You needn’t know.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because of what I am and why I’m here with you.’

‘Then what are you?’

‘A woman with physical needs.’

‘And why?’

‘The same needs.’

‘More than that.’

‘A woman whose job doesn’t allow her a private life, so her physical needs become urgent.’

‘So you take what you can.’

‘No, I have almost no life outside my work. You have no idea of the arranging I’ve had to go to for you, tonight. Or the risk I’m running.’

‘Please tell me your name,’ he said.

She held up her fingers, touched each one with her other hand, as if counting. She smiled. ‘Flo,’ she said. ‘You can call me Flo.’

‘Is that your real name?’

‘It could be.’ She was sitting erect, her back straight, her arms stretched out before her. She touched her fingertips to his chest. Her legs were folded around each other. She held his gaze steadily. It was an unnerving kind of calmness, not created by inner peace but by seeming to use some kind of tight control on herself. Tarent realized it made him tense up in reaction to it, because he did not know what she might do. He knew she was for some reason playing with him.
‘Flo was what they called me,’ she said. ‘Years ago. No one uses that name now, so you can.’

‘Is it based on Florence?’

‘For a time I was a Florence. But that was never who I was. Nor what I am. Not then, not now.’ She was obviously tiring of his questions about her name, and used her fingers to flick his bare shoulder in mock annoyance. ‘I still want those pictures you took of me.’

Trying to tease, he said, ‘You’ve gone to a lot of trouble for a couple of photographs, Flo.’

‘No. I wanted to fuck you. If you think that was trouble, you should see the trouble I can make for people if I have to. Going after a fuck is not what I call trouble.’

‘OK. Shall we have another fuck? Flo?’

‘In a while.’ She shifted her position, leaning back a little and stretching out her legs in front of her. She pinned them against his sides. ‘I’m still too hot.’

She raised herself, reached for the window catch behind Tarent’s head. Her breast brushed against his cheek as she strained at the immovable bolt. The window remained sealed up, and she subsided.

‘In some of our buildings, a few of the windows still open,’ she said.

‘Our buildings?’

‘The MoD.’

‘So that’s who you work for.’

‘Why are you so curious about me?’

‘I like to know who I’m with. All I know about you is that you travel about the country in an armoured Mebsher, with a minder.’

‘So do you.’

‘I don’t have a minder.’

‘As it happens, you do. As it happens, it’s me. I’ve been assigned to you.’

‘I was told – I’d missed the transport I was supposed to be in. They said there was another Mebsher in the region and it detoured to pick me up. That doesn’t sound like you were assigned to anything. You just happened to be aboard.’

‘We knew where you were. After the storm had passed a call went out for one of the personnel carriers to collect you. There are four or five Mebshers en route to Hull at the moment – there’s a departmental meeting coming up. When I heard it was you, I decided I’d be the one to pick you up.’

‘I thought you said you don’t go to trouble to get laid.’

‘I don’t. Trouble is what I do when I’m in the office. I wanted to meet you, not because I wanted to get laid but because of what happened to you in Turkey.’

‘So how do you know about me?’

‘We have ways. You’re at diplomatic level, which means the files are open to our office.’ She briefly tossed her head, flicked her hair back. She laid her fingers on the implant, indicating it. ‘I knew most things about you before the call, and today I found out the rest. Your wife – Melanie Tarent, I heard what happened to her. I also know where you were until last week, and what happened to Melanie. She was killed in violent circumstances that were never discovered or explained. Well, I can fill you in with a few details about that. We have established that she was killed by a radical wing of the insurgency in Anatolia, and they were using a new kind of weapon. We have people out in Turkey looking into that at the moment. Did you know they caught the people responsible?’

That startled him. ‘No, I didn’t. When did that happen?’

‘The day after you left. We were trying to get them back to IRGB – innocent until proved guilty, of course. We wanted to ask them a few questions first. On the way they were killed by another group of militiamen, who ambushed our convoy. Two of our people were killed too, several more injured. We think it was a local dispute, and there were two militias operating in that area. They were going for each other. But I thought you might like to know.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. I had no idea more people had died.’

‘They weren’t there for your sake. We wanted to find out where the insurgents were getting their weapons.’

‘You said it was a new device. I was there after the explosion and saw the crater. It was obviously some kind of roadside bomb. We saw those all the time.’

‘What did you notice about the crater?’

Her tone had been playful – Tarent nearly answered in kind. Instead, he said, ‘What should I have noticed?’

‘You were there.’ She had not changed her manner. ‘What did you see?’

‘It was a triangle. It had three straight sides, and they made up what looked like a regular triangle.’

‘Could you explain it? Did anyone else talk about it?’

‘Not that I remember. I wasn’t listening to anyone else. I think I was in shock, after Melanie.’

‘That’s what we are working on now.’ She sat forward, looked
around the tiny room. ‘Do you have any drink in here? I mean, a real drink?’

‘Just water. We’re in a government building.’

‘I could work around that if you’d like to wait here for half an hour. Anyway, not all government buildings are the same.’

‘Meaning that the one you work in isn’t?’

‘No – ours is the same. Alcohol not allowed. But there are ways. Come round to see me one afternoon and I’ll introduce you to single malt.’ She rolled to the side, climbed off the bed. Tarent stared greedily at her long legs, her toned upper body, the perspiration still shining on her in patches. She filled two plastic cups from the cooler tap, swallowed all the water from one of the cups in three swift gulps, then passed him the other. ‘That’s enough of a drink for now.’

She filled her cup a second time. She dipped her fingers in the cold water and flicked droplets across her arms and breasts, smeared a handful of water over her belly. She sat down on the narrow bed again, this time sitting close beside him. Playfully she splashed some drops on him. He wet his hand and slid it gently across her breasts, then let more drops fall around her neck. His fingers brushed against the implant again.