Blink and You Die

  Beep: ‘Hi Ruby, it’s Quent. I have this invitation, it’s for a bring your dog party and I’m going to take my dog and I’m allowed to bring one person with me and their dog and I wondered if –’ oh brother, muttered Ruby, here it comes – ‘you and Bug would be my plus twos!’

  Beep: ‘A message for Ruby Redfort. This is Daily Supplies up in Little Mountain Side, those hen of the woods mushrooms you were after have finally come in. If you can get in early I’ll be there, but later than noon I’m shutting up the store. I got an appointment I can’t miss. But don’t worry, I’ll leave them with Clara in the bookshop, can’t risk leaving them at the Little Green Diner – they might eat ’em. So just say Mo Loveday left you a box behind the counter.’

  Bang.

  Mo Loveday.

  Morgan Loveday.

  One and the same.

  RUBY LEFT EARLY IN THE MORNING on the first bus out of Twinford, the dawn bus. She changed at the city terminal, took the mountain road bus to Maple Falls and the mountain pass bus up through the Sequoias to Little Mountain Side.

  She was there waiting for him when he arrived at 7am to unlock the store, sitting on the little wooden bench bundled up against the cold.

  He smiled in a puzzled sort of way.

  ‘Ruby?’

  She peeped out from the hood of her snow parka.

  ‘Boy, you must want these mushrooms a lot.’

  She didn’t reply.

  He took his key from his pocket and turned the lock. ‘I’m telling you, you’re not the only one, I’ve had a lot of orders.’

  Silence.

  ‘Are you going to be cooking them up or are you going to leave that to somebody else?’

  Still she said nothing.

  ‘Hey, kid, I gotta be honest here, you’re spooking me a little.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’

  He stood on the threshold looking at her, and then, ‘Sounds serious. I guess you might want to come inside.’ He switched on the lights.

  ‘You look near frozen. You want tea, chocolate, coffee?’ he asked.

  Ruby nodded. She didn’t much mind what the beverage was, so long as it was piping hot.

  He lit the wood burner and went into the back room to boil the kettle. Ruby thawed her hands and waited to deliver the news which would erase Morgan Loveday quicker than you could blink.

  He returned with tea and a couple of muffins which she was grateful for, having left the house with nothing but a pack of bubblegum – chewing on that only made the hunger grow.

  He sat down opposite her and said, ‘So what’s the big deal, why the early visit?’

  ‘I figured something out,’ she said.

  ‘Must be pretty important to have you on the dawn bus from Twinford.’

  ‘It’s big,’ she said. ‘Important.’

  ‘Important to me or important to you?’ he asked.

  ‘Important to everyone,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘OK, so what is it?’

  Ruby looked him hard in the eye and said, ‘You’re not Morgan Loveday.’

  The guy smiled. ‘I’m not?’

  ‘No,’ said Ruby.

  He shrugged. ‘I’d argue with you, but I don’t have much of a memory.’

  ‘And why is that?’ asked Ruby.

  ‘I was hit by a truck, got a nasty bang to the head.’

  ‘You think you were hit by a truck, but there were no witnesses,’ said Ruby.

  ‘OK, there’s no proof, but I do have the scars, pretty good ones too.’ He rolled up his sleeve. ‘Plus there’s my leg injury and let’s not forget a punctured lung – they had to be caused by something pretty dramatic, right?’

  RUBY: ‘I agree, but what were you doing walking along that stretch of mountain road?’

  MO: ‘Hiking?’

  RUBY: ‘Doesn’t it strike you as odd that you were out there alone, no backpack, no flashlight, no hat, no gloves in what was it, October?’

  MO: ‘So maybe I was driving, maybe I crashed my car and it rolled down into the gully?’

  RUBY: ‘Lenny Rivers, the man who found you, went back and he searched, but he didn’t find any wrecked vehicle nor was there any sign of tyre marks – I read his whole account.’

  MO: ‘Sounds like you’ve been doing your homework. So what’s your take on it? What hit me?’

  RUBY: ‘I think there was an aircraft.’

  He furrowed his brow.

  MO: ‘You’re suggesting a plane hit me?’

  RUBY: ‘Not hit you, of course not hit you. I’m saying you were in an aircraft, and that craft crashed.’

  MO: ‘But then wouldn’t every TV station in the state have reported it? They would have known who died, who survived.’

  RUBY: ‘But you weren’t flying a passenger plane.’

  Pause.

  MO: ‘Wait a minute, you’re saying I was flying the plane?’

  Ruby nodded.

  MO: ‘I can fly planes?’

  RUBY: ‘You can.’ Pause. ‘Well, you could, you’re probably a little rusty now. I mean don’t go climbing into a cockpit any time soon.’

  MO: ‘So what kind of plane was I flying, a freight plane, a light aircraft?’

  RUBY: ‘A Delta V DSO.’

  MO: ‘I don’t even know what that is.’

  RUBY: ‘Well, no one does, at least no one who isn’t part of Spectrum’s space programme.’

  MO: ‘I have no idea what that is either – Spectrum? You’ve gone all sci-fi on me.’

  RUBY: ‘Well, I guess it is a little sci-fi.’

  He cocked his head to one side, trying to understand what she was saying.

  RUBY: ‘Listen, it’s probably gonna blow your mind, but stay with me because it gets weirder.’

  He nodded the way someone who was under hypnosis might nod.

  RUBY: ‘Spectrum is a Secret Agency.’

  MO: ‘And you work for Spectrum?’

  RUBY: ‘Yes.’

  MO: ‘And you’re saying I did too?’

  RUBY: ‘Uh huh.’

  MO: ‘So are we the good guys or the bad guys?’

  RUBY: ‘Excuse me?’

  MO: ‘Spectrum.’ Pause. ‘Are we the good guys or the bad guys?’

  RUBY: ‘Oh, we’re the good guys.’

  MO: ‘Everyone always thinks they’re the good guys.’

  Ruby smiled, remembering how she had uttered the exact same words when she had first learned about Spectrum.

  RUBY: ‘Actually, you have a point, cos to be totally honest I’m no longer sure.’

  MO: ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

  RUBY: ‘No, but I think it’s all connected to what happened to you.’

  Pause.

  RUBY: ‘Someone infiltrated Spectrum. It wasn’t an accident, the order to vaporise your aircraft, it came from someone inside the agency … well, the boss actually.’

  MO: ‘My boss tried to kill me. We not get along or something?’

  RUBY: ‘You got along pretty well.’ Pause. ‘Actually better than well. To be clear – your boss was your most trusted ally.’

  MO: ‘I guess I’m a pretty bad judge of character.’

  RUBY: ‘Actually, I think you are a good judge of character.’

  MO: ‘So you mean maybe I deserved it?’

  RUBY: ‘No, I don’t think that’s right either. Nothing I read in the files nor anything anyone has ever said about you leads me to believe that you were anything but on the level.’

  MO: ‘So …?’

  RUBY: ‘So I got it from the horse’s mouth, meaning the boss, and it all made sense.’

  MO: ‘How so?’

  RUBY: ‘You ever heard of the Trolley Problem?’

  MO: ‘Maybe, maybe not.’

  RUBY: ‘So your boss was given an impossible decision. One life or one thousand and twenty-seven lives. – 1 = + 1027.’

  MO: ‘So my boss chose to minus one.’

  RUBY: ‘You.’

  MO: ‘So h
e made the right decision.’

  RUBY: ‘She – she made the right decision, if there is a right decision here.’

  MO: ‘OK, she made the right decision.’ Pause. ‘So what’s her name? This boss of mine who likes me so much she decided to kill me.’

  Ruby looked at him.

  RUBY: ‘LB.’

  He blinked several times, like he was trying to conjure some long-dead memory.

  RUBY: ‘You remember her?’

  MO: ‘No.’

  RUBY: ‘Do you believe me?’

  MO: ‘About what?’

  RUBY: ‘Everything.’

  He looked at her then, and nodded. He was sure. It was something to do with the way the girl was staring at him that made him believe; something to do with her green eyes made him trust that what she said was true.

  RUBY: ‘You see if you are him, it explains why a guy with a not-so-great leg is able to virtually run up a giant redwood and solve cryptic crossword clues without a second thought.’

  He was looking at her, really looking at her. This thirteen-year-old girl had his past, and understood what he had struggled for more than a decade to know. This kid held the answer to the most important question he had ever asked himself: who am I?

  RUBY: ‘All along I just thought, boy, this guy is unusual for a grocer, but I really had no idea who you really were. How could I?’

  ‘So who am I?’ he asked.

  Ruby looked him hard in the eye and said:

  ‘You’re Bradley Baker.’

  RUBY WAS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT what she should do next. It was one thing locating a dead man only to find him alive and in pretty good shape (if you ignored the slight limp and the long-term amnesia), but now she had the problem of who to tell and how to break it to them.

  Hitch? Well, of course she should tell Hitch, but hadn’t he said ‘unless you’re dangling by one finger from the Skylark Building, you’re gonna have to hold on’?

  LB?

  Ruby wasn’t sure how her boss was going to take this news. How do you tell a person that the man they had shot out of the sky more than a decade ago was actually alive and well and eating a blueberry muffin in the grocery store he now ran in a one-horse town in the Sequoia Mountains? Oh, and by the way, LB, he has no idea who you are.

  Yes, if anyone was going to deliver this news then it sure as eggs wasn’t going to be her.

  Of course there were other agents of senior rank, but there was no one she felt comfortable broadcasting this news to. For a start, she had a feeling she would spend a whole lot of time trying to convince them that it wasn’t some prank.

  The other question was, who to trust? Blacker? Of course, she could trust him with her life, but this was bigger than Blacker.

  Agent Delaware? She couldn’t contact him without going via Hitch or LB. Agent Trent-Kobie, same problem.

  In the end, it was Hitch she told. Although she didn’t actually tell him anything, she just contacted him via the fly-barrette emergency locator, and left it at that. Let him figure out where she was.

  She left the barrette in the coffee shop, with a note attached which simply said:

  wait here

  because she knew Hitch would need several good cups of coffee when he came face to face with this news and his old colleague, agent Bradley Baker.

  When Ruby and Baker walked into the Morning Star coffee shop half an hour later, Hitch was already sitting at a table in the back. He was pouring a heavy dose of sugar into a mug of coffee and stirring it slowly round and round with a teaspoon. While he stirred he gazed out of the window at the view. He was twitchy but he wasn’t showing it – only the tiny movement of his jaw muscle betrayed him. He didn’t catch sight of Ruby until they were almost at his table and by the look in his eye he was pretty mad.

  ‘You know, you don’t look like you’re hanging by one finger from the Skylark Building.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Ruby, ‘but what I have to tell you is a thousand times more dramatic and if by the time I finish telling you you don’t agree, then I promise to go directly to the Skylark Building and get climbing.’

  ‘All right, kid,’ said Hitch, ‘you’ve got my attention. Why the big mystery? How come you’ve got me helicoptering out to the back of beyond at …’

  He didn’t finish his sentence; something to do with the man standing just behind Ruby.

  He squinted as if the strangest thought was occurring to him. He dropped the spoon, which fell into the coffee, which splashed onto his suit. He stood up, knocking the cup onto the floor, but he didn’t seem to register any of this. All he could see was that the man standing there in the Morning Star might just as well be the man from Mars.

  ‘Bradley?’ he said. ‘Bradley Baker, is that you?’

  ‘Actually, I have no idea,’ said Mo.

  ‘You’re not dead?’ said Hitch.

  ‘So I’m told,’ said Mo.

  ‘So how … why … who …’ Hitch wasn’t getting his words out.

  ‘I’ll let your friend here field the questions,’ said Baker. ‘I still feel a lot like the guy who runs Daily’s Grocery store in Little Mountain Side.’

  Ruby explained as much as she could, as much as she had managed to put together, that is.

  RUBY: ‘I wasn’t even trying to find him, I mean why would I? As far as I was concerned he was dead. So the fact that I had actually met him never occurred to me.’

  HITCH: ‘I can see that.’

  RUBY: ‘I’ve only seen two pictures of Baker and in neither one did he have this whole wild man of the woods deal going on.’

  HITCH: ‘You mean the facial hair?’

  BAKER: ‘It’s just a beard, for crying out loud.’

  HITCH: ‘How are you not dead? No one thought it was possible you could have survived.’

  BAKER: ‘Did anyone look?’

  HITCH: ‘Sure they looked, but when you weren’t found, the area was cleared because the mission you were on was top secret, and the explosion and subsequent fire and crater in the mountainside … well, that was all left to the public imagination.’

  RUBY: ‘Most people concluded it was a meteor.’

  HITCH: ‘So how did you make it out alive? Did you deploy the ejector?’

  BAKER: ‘I remember nothing – remember?’

  HITCH: ‘I forgot, sorry.’

  RUBY: ‘The knock on the noggin erased his past.’

  HITCH: ‘All of it?’

  RUBY: ‘He retained all the stuff about rescuing cats up two-hundred-foot trees but he can’t remember the name of a single person he once called friend.’

  HITCH: ‘Really?’

  BAKER: ‘Try me.’

  HITCH: ‘Did you know me?’

  BAKER: ‘I have no idea.’

  HITCH: ‘We worked in the same department for about seven years straight.’

  Baker shrugged as if to say, you see?

  HITCH: ‘So where does the name Morgan Loveday come from?’

  RUBY: ‘It’s what he mumbled to Lenny Rivers, the old guy who found him dying on the road.’

  HITCH: ‘So who is the real Morgan Loveday?’

  RUBY: ‘There isn’t one. I mean of course there is likely to be a Morgan Loveday somewhere in the world, probability and all that, but Bradley didn’t acquire the name from an actual person.’

  BAKER: ‘You’re suggesting they are random names I came up with?’

  RUBY: ‘Oh no, not random, not random at all. Just … two people’s names, squished together.’

  BAKER: ‘So people I know? People I like?’

  RUBY: ‘No and yes.’

  BAKER: ‘OK. So who was Morgan?’

  Ruby took a deep breath.

  RUBY: ‘A kid who tried to kill you.’

  BAKER: ‘A kid?’

  RUBY: ‘Yeah, a kid.’

  BAKER: ‘This kid, did he catch me by surprise or something?’

  RUBY: ‘Yeah, but if it makes you feel better it happened more than thirty years ago and you were a kid too.’
>
  BAKER: ‘And Loveday?’

  RUBY: ‘The kid who saved you.’

  BAKER: ‘Where did this happen?’

  RUBY: ‘Australia.’

  BAKER: ‘How did I come to be in Australia?’

  Ruby looked across at Hitch, expecting him to at least question how she had come by all this confidential information, but he said nothing so she continued.

  RUBY: ‘You were part of the Junior Space Recruitment Programme, also known as Larvae. In fact you were the first kid ever recruited, therefore older than the others. Larvae got shut down when Casey Morgan, the one who tried to kill you, went rogue.’

  BAKER: ‘What did I do to make this kid Morgan so mad?’

  RUBY: ‘You made it to Larva level, meaning you became a recruit for the Spectrum Space programme. Morgan’s ambition was to be part of the Space Encounter team but from what I read he couldn’t even graduate to Larva recruit – he had too much self-interested ego to make it to agent or astronaut.’

  BAKER: ‘And this kid who saved me was also from the programme?’

  RUBY: ‘No.’

  BAKER: ‘No?’

  RUBY: ‘This was a kid who just happened to be there, a kid who was fishing or camping out or something and observed the whole thing.’

  BAKER: ‘So do we know if Loveday is a first name or a surname?’

  RUBY: ‘Only thing I know is that Loveday is Australian and was around the same age as you .’

  HITCH: ‘As I understood it you were almost dead when they fished you out of that river, so who says you even got to meet Loveday? Why would this name come to mind when you were found half dead on the road?’

  RUBY: ‘So perhaps they did meet, perhaps Loveday became someone Baker trusted.’

  HITCH: ‘I don’t see how we can ever know the truth if we don’t know who the kid is.’

  BAKER: ‘So the million-dollar question is: who is this Loveday?’

  It was only then that they became aware of the woman standing not far from the table.