the earbuds I wear can’t cancel out the chaos and noise. People march back and forth, left and right, criss crossing the glaring bright gloss of the polished airport walkways. Babies scream and toddlers yell, coffee cups clink and trolley wheels screech, tannoy systems above my head bark the next flight departure as, in the near distance, wine glasses tinkle at a champagne bar, and a group of people laugh at a joke I will never understand.
I stand and blink and watch it all as the airport scene crashes into my senses, body and mind temporarily paralysed by everything. The noise, the smells. Tinny music from open shops. Coffee, beer, oil, sickly sugar, stale cigarette smoke, burger fat, perfume, leather, sweat, the faint soak of breeze block urine. The slurp of a straw. The bite of a sandwich. Every single scent, I smell. Every tiny pinprick of noise, I hear. It all smashes into my brain, colliding into my white and grey matter until I don’t know which way to look.
‘Doc?’
I slip out an earbud and look to my friend.
‘They’re not going to spot us,’ Patricia says, her voice low, calm. ‘We’ve got through security and I know airports are a nightmare for you, but look at us.’ She points to herself. ‘We’re in business suits and wigs. Jesus’— she smiles,— ‘I’ve never looked so smart. So it’ll be alright. Okay?’
I nod and tap my finger.
Another smile. ‘Good. You’re doing great. I’m right with you.’
She looks down at herself now and I watch her angled arms, her swan neck and her shaven head disguised by a long, mouse-brown wig that settles on suited shoulders. A cream, silk blouse slipped under a black jacket sits against smart tailored trousers and neat, flat ballet pumps on the end of flamingo stalks for legs. My friend. My first true friend.
‘It is too loud here,’ I say.
She takes my palm and presses her five fingertips into mine as she has always done. ‘I know, Doc. I know it’s too much information flying into your head from the airport, but I’m here.’ A group of passengers shuffle nearby and Patricia forms a little bubble of space around us so no one brushes against me. I catch her familiar scent of talcum powder, fresh linen, bubble baths. It makes me breathe a little slower.
Chris wanders over. He fiddles with his suit and his newly dyed bottle-blonde hair, and shakes his bright red Converses. ‘The security guards are hanging around a bit back there. We need to get moving towards boarding.’
Patricia eyes his feet. ‘You couldn’t have worn a pair of smart shoes, could you? We’re supposed to be pretending to be professional business people.’
He fidgets, pulling at his yellow tie, at the sleeves of his smart navy suit, shoulders twitching. ‘I feel like an idiot.’
‘You look like one.’
Chris glares at Patricia. He scratches where a white shirt clings to a flat surfer stomach and pulls at his trouser band muttering, ‘It’s too fucking tight.’
I observe my friends without any understanding of what their exchange means, the glances between them, the words. Funny or serious? Heartfelt or fickle? Ahead, a large bang slices the air as a café tray clatters to the floor, cups and plates and cutlery smashing into cold cream tiles, the sound of it hammering my head. I wince. It’s exhausting. I need stability, something factually familiar for my mind to cling onto, a lifeboat of facts.
I turn to Chris. ‘The term “idiot” means a person of low intelligence. You hacked into a CIA website, that takes intelligence to achieve. Therefore, the term idiot in describing you is wrong. On this occasion.’
Chris pulls his tongue out at Patricia. ‘See.’ Then he turns to me. ‘Thanks, Google.’
‘I have informed you before – that is not my name.’
He smiles, big and wide. ‘I know.’ Then he starts humming a song I have come to recognise from a singer he seems to greatly admire called Taylor Swift.
‘That is the melody entitled…’ I listen… “Shake it Off.”
He grins. ‘In one.’
Patricia rolls her eyes. ‘We have to go. Doc?’
‘Yes?’
‘Stay by me.’
We find a semi-quiet patch in a coffee shop and sit. Immediately anxiety hits. The slurp of peoples’ lips and tongues as they sip their drinks. The clink of cups. The steam from the milk machine and the mechanical grind of coffee beans. Teeth biting down into crunchy lettuce. Someone’s lace undone, the thread hanging loose, dragging along the floor. It all collides inside me. I try to focus, count, look to Patricia who mouths to me, ‘How can I help?’ except I don’t know the answer, only know that here and now I need to keep any potential meltdown under control so no attention is drawn to me or to us. Three hours ago we were in Ines’s apartment and I killed her with an iron nail to the neck, and watched Ramon and Balthus die. The last thing we need is a scene.
‘Doc, deep breaths.’
I nod, watching Chris closely as he walks to the counter, orders our drinks, but immediately, this tips me into a panic.
‘I want a black coffee,’ I say. ‘What is he ordering for me? It can only be black.’
‘It’s okay,’ Patricia says. ‘He asked me and I said black coffee. I told him for you.’ She smiles. Soft cheeks, lines opening wide at her eyes. ‘Okay?’
I nod, but inside I am panicking.
Chris is talking to the barista now, easy, light, making random conversation about the bustle of the airport. To give myself something to focus on, I examine his movements, his facial expressions. How easy it seems to come to him, how simple such dialogue appears for him. I try pressing some of it into my memory, the way in which he acts, remember it so I can perhaps use it, mimic it, cover me up. It’s hard to find a place in the world when you don’t know who you’re expected to be.
Done with that yet still anxious, I turn my focus to checking and rechecking the time of our flight to Zurich where Chris has secured us a safe house through his hacking contacts until we can get further away and out of sight. Finally, Chris returns and it’s only then I can be assured that the right drink has been bought. I sip slowly. The liquid is hot, scalding my palate and tongue, but I like it, as if it polishes the tips of my mind so they are ready to be used. Now and then the multiple sights, sounds, smells of the airport hit me, make my body go rigid, but breathing and counting help, and so I do that, run through numbers in my mind, murmur the digits with the tips of my fingers pressed one after the other into my thumb, all the while glancing to my friends, grateful that they are here.
‘Okay, so, I checked my email,’ Chris says, emptying two full sachets of sugar into a latte, ‘and my buddy in Zurich is all set for us to rock up there. All secure. Also, from what I can tell, it looks as if the Alexander woman has read the message we sent her.’
Patricia looks up. ‘What? The Home Secretary?’
‘Yep, Balthus’s wife, Harriet Alexander herself.’ He draws out a computer tablet and taps the screen. ‘About twenty-seven minutes ago. No, wait…twenty-eight minutes ago she read the whole file that reveals the Project Callidus bombshell, from way back in 1973 up to right now.’ He starts listing things off with his fingers. ‘The thousands of Basque blood-type people they’ve been testing on, the cancer drugs for Ines, the Project taking Maria and drugging her, Maria being Balthus’s kid, all of it, all of the stuff we hacked into in Hamburg.’ He grins at us and I wonder if his face has ever, in his life, been fixed into a frown; I resist the temptation to stick my finger into the dimple on his chin.
‘Well,’ Patricia says, ‘hopefully that’ll be it. That’ll be enough for the government to kick-start an investigation into the whole Project bollocks and it’ll finally all be over. No more running.’
‘Can your software connect to her server system?’ I ask.
‘Ah,