CLOSE PROXIMITY

Chapter 11

Day Three 05:27

…buzz…

This time it was me who scrabbled for the cell phone when it rang. It was on the floor of my room and I snatched it up, my tired eyes wincing against the onslaught of the morning sun. For a second, I forgot where I was – I just cupped the cell tightly against my ear in the hopes of not waking Heero beside me.

Then realised he wasn’t. Fucking false memories, right?

“Heero?” someone barked.

“No,” I grunted. “Duo. And good morning to you too, Wufei Chang.”

He made a short growling noise on the other end of the line. “No time for your sarcasm, Maxwell. Are you both safe?”

“Yeah.” I was still trying to wake up properly and remember what the hell was going on. “So what’s new with you?”

“I wanted to check something with Heero. I’ve had a chance to finish our analysis of the toxins that were used on Relena. I’ve also examined the debris from the Westbridge bomb to identify the explosives –“

“Fuck,” I groaned. “Aren’t you meant to be post-operative, confined to a hospital bed -?”

He growled back. This conversation was decidedly animalistic. “Things are moving on around us, Maxwell, regardless of personal irritations. Trowa tells me that you’ve been shot – and there’s been the second attack on Relena’s office. It’s critical that we find out who’s doing this and why.”

“Trowa’s there with you?”

“Got here early this morning. He told me he spoke to you on the way.”

“And Relena’s there as well?”

“She’s on her way, driving over with Cissy. We’ll use this place as a base for the moment; it’s well protected. We’ll gather all the Team members here and consolidate our knowledge. Is Yuy there?”

I sat up and stretched, rolling my legs over the side of the mattress. I’d spent the night in my clothes and my wound had stiffened up. My mouth felt I’d been eating damp, rotting leaves all night. I felt less than vibrant. “He’s still asleep,” I snapped. “Tell me what you’ve discovered.”

He was silent for a moment, and I could just picture the look on his face, full of disapproval and caution. It was almost a surprise when he finally did speak to me.

“There are several concerns that I have. All of the supplies were internal – the poison, the explosives, the fuses. Even the packaging.”

“Internal? You mean from the Department itself?”

He grunted assent. “That, or at the very least from the same suppliers, to the same specification. One of the fuses only came into our catalogue at the beginning of Mission Dove – it’s very new, and I believe it’s not publicly available anywhere else yet. Either I’m leaping to conclusions, or this has serious security implications. I need to talk to Quatre about it – to discuss the control of access to our equipment and stores.”

“Yes,” I said, carefully. “You do. He’s not there yet?”

There was another pause. For the first time I could hear the sound of medical equipment beeping in the background, and the sound of voices bouncing off plain, high hospital ceilings. “No. No-one can reach him, it seems. Maxwell… maybe you and Yuy have some views on all this that may help.”

“I’ll let you know when he’s up,” I said. “Maybe we ought to come down to the hospital too. You trust me to pass all this on to Heero without losing things in the translation?” I know I sounded rather petulant; the conversation had reopened all the previous day’s worries, like raw wounds. As Wufei said, things were moving on around us, regardless.

“Yes,” he said, his voice confidently calm. “Of course I trust you to handle the information correctly. I always have trusted you, Maxwell, else I couldn’t have worked with you in the first place.”

I was temporarily speechless.

*

There was another beep at the hospital end of the conversation.

“How…” I paused, trying to make my dry morning mouth work properly; trying to find some appropriate words, maybe. “So how are you, Wufei?”

He was quiet for a heartbeat, too, then he laughed; a short, humourless sound. “Reports of my one legged-ness have been greatly exaggerated,” he said.

Fuck, was that a joke? From Chang? I couldn’t help it, I felt a smile of relief creep across my face. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“Me too,” he growled. “It’s bad enough being out of action for a few months without giving someone the satisfaction of crippling me for life. How is Heero?”

“Not so bad,” I said. “Cuts, bruises, a little shock –“

“The truth, Maxwell, not patronising trivia like the doctors feed you here.”

I swallowed. Like I once said, Chang was a fierce guy. “He’s tense. Reactions a little slowed; wrenched hamstring. Some hearing loss still.”

Wufei was silent. I hung on to the cell, wondering what else he’d wanted to hear. “What about you?” came his low voice.

Me? “What the fuck do you care about me, Wufei? I’m not the one got buried under the rubble –“

“You were shot, Trowa said. If we’re still all under threat, it’s important to know what status we all are.”

Status? “I’ll tell you what status we are,” I said, gritting my teeth. “I need a fucking good bath and a decent meal. I need eight hours’ sleep, minimum. My left arm feels like it’s made of wet cereal, and my knees are skinned like a kid’s. On top of that, I need Heero Yuy out of my hair and this homicidal lunatic caught and castrated, all before breakfast. That too much to ask?”

“A certain degree of stress, then,” said Wufei’s steady voice. I could see him there in the hospital bed, leg up in traction, snapping orders to simpering, little nurses. But it wouldn’t work with me…

He was continuing, regardless. “I warned Relena not to place Yuy with you, but she seemed to think I wasn’t equipped at the time to make sensible decisions regarding strategy. I didn’t think either of you would benefit from meeting up again under such circumstances –“

“And you’d fucking know about that,” I hissed. I wanted to shout at someone – but I didn’t want to wake Heero. I wanted Wufei to get the hell off the line so I could have a proper think about his news. And a coffee. Or two. Hell, I didn’t know what I wanted.

“Yes, I would know,” he snapped back. “Listen to me, Maxwell! I have an almost pathological dislike of discussing my personal life with anyone not directly involved, but I think it’s time that I was a little more forthcoming. Maybe my change of attitude is the result of lying under piles of smoking rubble for an hour and knowing that someone wanted it to be even more permanent.” He cleared his throat; it seemed to have become dry. “You were always very hostile towards the friendship between Heero and me, and for a while I couldn’t understand why. But someone has recently explained to me that you may have developed some personal – and obviously irrational - jealousy of us. I thought Heero would have made everything clear to you, but then he never seemed to be very objective in his actions towards you. If you had let me explain instead –“

“Now isn’t the time, Chang,” I ground out.

He’d ignored me, he was still talking. “- I mean, I can see the attraction, if I were interested in men that way, because he has a good physique and a superb intelligence. His sense of loyalty and fine ethical standards would make him an excellent partner, personally as well as professionally –“

Roll that across me again, will you?

*

“Wait up, Chang. You don’t see Heero as a lover?”

“Duo, aren’t you listening to me? I’ve no time to waste on lies and confusion. No, I am contentedly heterosexual, although I don’t have my sexual preferences tattooed on my forehead, and I may not have broadcast the fact around my friends. One wonders why it should be necessary, to be honest –“

“You’ve got a girl, then?” My face felt like it was twisted in a mixture of humiliation, amazement and a grin. Sure glad I didn’t have a mirror to hand.

“Hell, Duo…” His sigh was very protracted. “I don’t see the point of gossiping about this like schoolboys, but yes, I do have a current relationship with a woman.”

“So tell me who?” Now I wasn’t asking for anything to do with my past relationship with Heero – I was just damned curious!

“I’m not about to tell you over the telephone, Maxwell. It’s obviously a private matter.”

“Neither of you want it to interfere with your professional relationship, eh?”

“Well of course we both consider that the main issue, but I hardly think –“ he went silent. “Maxwell, forget I said that. I despise your tactics.”

“You won’t be the first,” I grinned. I could guess who he was dating. There weren’t many women could match the proud, intelligent Wufei Chang. And it’d have to be someone who could match him in the dojo as well as the classroom. I cleared my own throat, self-consciously. “Guess I’ve been a prize asshole, haven’t I?” Wufei’s silence confirmed it. “Guess I owe you an apology.” And doesn’t that sound feeble, I thought.

“None required,” he said, sharply. “I never intended that I should be part of the problem, Duo.”

“I know,” I said, grudgingly. “I think you’ll find it was a big pile of other shit too, Chang. But I admit my jealousy was no help to the mix.” It was both a symptom and a cause, I thought. My head hurt from too much soul searching at this hour of the morning. My body hurt from the battering it’d taken over the last twenty four hours. My heart hurt from a regret that was both painful and ingrained.

“Maxwell… Duo? Are you still there?” I grunted into the phone. Wufei continued. “There are some things that I have less inhibition in discussing, though I know you still won’t like it. I wanted you to seek some help after the incident – after the attack at the club, at the beginning of Mission Dove. I thought that your behaviour had become erratic –“ He coughed gently. “Even more erratic than usual, that is. You were obviously distressed by it, though all the attention was directed to Heero’s physical injuries and the punishment of the perpetrator. Neither you nor Yuy would listen to me about it, though, and we were all needed elsewhere. I thought the best I could do was help get Yuy discharged from hospital and recovered as soon as possible; I thought the rest would settle itself. I never thought to pursue it further, I’m no psychiatrist myself…”

“It’s OK,” I broke in. “I’m good.”

He made a sound suspiciously like a snort. “That day, the day of your – altercation, at the end of the mission. I got to the pair of you as soon as I could, to break you up, but the damage was done by then. Relena couldn’t have condoned such behaviour on duty.”

“Sure,” I said. “I understand. Own worst enemies, and all that.”

But he didn’t seem satisfied with my continuing self-condemnation, speaking carefully again. “You were a good complement to each other, Duo. I could see that each of you brought out some good traits in the other; it was a pity to have lost it all. Heero has many regrets about it, I believe. He doesn’t speak easily about these things – about personal things.”

“I know,” I said. What fucking inadequate words they were, eh? “But we’ve … sort of cleared the air a bit over the last day or so.”

“You have?” He sounded almost admiring. Definitely surprised.

“You reckon we brought out some good shit in each other?” I asked, musingly.

He snorted again. “Not quite the words I used, but yes. I’ve neither the skills nor the appetite to analyse your relationships any further.”

I laughed, then. “Never thought I’d be taking lonely hearts advice from you, eh, Chang?”

“Is that how it is?” came his earnest voice. “You have a lonely heart?”

“Fuck’s sake,” I groaned almost to myself. “It’s just a phrase –“

And then he laughed.

I grinned, wishing he could see it. “OK, you got me. Wufei – look, I appreciate all this. All that stuff about you being concerned about me.”

He growled again. “I have to go. The consultant’s review is at 08:00. Call me at once with any theories you have about the materials used.”

“Will do. Give my regards to Relena, OK? When she gets there, keep the welcome kisses to a minimum and tell her to call us as soon as she can.”

“I will.” His angry growl crackled down the line. “That crack about the welcome kisses – I expect you to honour the confidentiality of this conversation, Maxwell.”

“That’s a given,” I said, almost cheerily. “Go concentrate on getting better, Hopalong.”

There was a sound of annoyance and the connection was broken at once

*

Day Three 07:50

Heero came grumbling into the kitchen. “Why the hell didn’t you wake me? Trowa will be at the hospital by now, and we can contact Relena –“

“He’s already there,” I said, rather smugly. “No Relena yet, though. But they’ll all be together soon, all the Team. Just us missing.”

“You called them?” he asked. He poured some coffee as he spoke, as if he was on automatic pilot. “Is Quatre there too?”

“Ah … no, not yet,” I said. “Not that I know of.” I saw the tightening of his shoulders. There was a slight trail of water on the side of his neck, where he’d obviously hurried through his morning wash. He was wearing his jeans and one of my undershirts, noticeable for its lack of ironing. The muted khaki colour suited him; it blended well with the dark flush of his skin. We used to do that a lot, borrow each other’s clothes when we stayed over. As I stared at him, words temporarily eluding me, he reached across me for a spoon and the fabric rode up on his torso.

The scar was still there, a shallow, shining red tramline across his left side, slashed across his waist. I glanced away quickly, before he caught me looking, and moved a pile of papers from under the coffee pot with a growl of mock annoyance. “Be careful, will you? I didn’t want to wake you so I laid some stuff out here to work for a while.”

He turned then, noticing for the first time the sticky notes all over the doors of my cupboards. “Hell. What’s all this?”

“It’s the way I work,” I said, defensively. “Bit of brainstorming – sketching – word patterns –“

“I know that,” he shook his head, dismissing the explanation. He was used to the method. He stared at the tabulated numbers and the lines of letters ranged against them. I’d moved into several colours of highlighter – and three shades of sticky notes. Place looked like a small nuclear device had gone off in a paper mill. “The email address?”

I nodded.

He moved back to the doorway, but stood there watching me. “Tell me about it,” he said, quietly, though there was a tightness to his voice that betrayed his tension. “Or do you want to get dressed first?”

I looked down at myself. When I got up after Wufei’s call, I finally shucked off the grubby sweats I’d been wearing since I was shot, changed into some more comfortable shorts and peeled off the shirt, too. I’d just forgotten to put another one on. The thoughts had started to crowd my mind and I’d stumbled into the kitchen past my sleeping guest, grabbing for pen and paper to scribble down my first thoughts. Decency was the last thing on my mind, you see.

I grinned ruefully. “No,” I replied, my voice tripping over itself with eagerness. “No, I don’t want to get fucking dressed, I want to tell you about it first! That a problem?”

He smiled slightly, and his eyes lifted from my bare chest. Six months ago, I’d have recognised the look in his eyes as one of eagerness for some other kind of communication; three months ago, I’d have taken it for distaste and disapproval. This morning I hadn’t got the faintest idea, but I actually didn’t care to stop to analyse it.

“I spoke to Wufei while you were asleep,” I rushed on. I reached to peel my first sheet of notes out from under a couple of forks. They clattered into the sink, completely ignored. “He told me the materials used in both the poison attack and the bombing of your apartment were possibly Department issue. He said some of them only came into use since Mission Dove, as in relatively recently.” I ignored Heero’s raised brows at the mention of Wufei, and hurried on. “Also, Trowa said to check out his notes, and I found them in amongst your stuff.” I looked across quickly, to check he was all right with me rifling through his papers while he slept. He nodded to me, and I took that as OK. “So I went through the whole pile. Most of the mail that was being diverted was only since we began Dove – again, within a relatively recent time frame. A lot of it was to do with the raid on the club, right at the beginning – our plans, the attack on you, the subsequent investigation and post-mortem – even though there was plenty of other stuff that might have been useful to an enemy. Trowa puzzled over this apparently selective process for a while; I managed to decode his own brand of shorthand to read some of his initial thoughts. He just never spent the time on following it through. His interim conclusion was that the hacking concentrated on the attack at the club and its aftermath, then on the subsequent movements of the Project Team members – you, especially.”

He was frowning, absorbing this information. “What do you think, then? That it’s a personal vendetta? Why the attacks on everyone else, then?”

“No, not personal against you except to the extent that you were on the team that raided the club in the first place. There were several medical reports diverted, fairly boring except for information about your wounds and the weapon used and such. But there were other mails selected, full of anecdotal stuff about the rest of us, what our duties were during the rest of the mission, where our current homes were, what transport we were using…”

He raised an eyebrow, questioningly this time. “No,” I said, anticipating the question. “Not a lot about Quatre – just the rest of us, including Relena as controller of the mission.”

“But if someone wanted to know what had happened, wouldn’t they have been better served by stealing a look at the Mission file itself? Everything was in there.”

I nodded. “But it’s only since I looked through Trowa’s notes that I realised the file hasn’t been at the Department at any stage. After the attack on you, Relena’s bosses took it aside during the investigation, and everything we did since then had to be passed through them. I think she was on some kind of probation, even though the investigation found no-one else to blame specifically. Most of us knew what was going on throughout Dove because we were directly involved and kept in touch with each other. But anyone else would have found it difficult to find a single comprehensive record of the mission in one place at any one time.”

“So we’re back with our original theories.” Heero narrowed his eyes and folded his arms as if to protect himself. He looked casual, leaning against the doorway, but I knew different. “It all has something to do with Mission Dove.”

“But not the peace talks, I reckon,” I said. “The pattern of the intelligence is far more specific than that. It’s about the raid on the club – the attack on you – the Project Team who carried out that raid. There’s no interest in the rest of the mission, except as a means of tracking our whereabouts. No reference to the Joint Committee or the ambassadors or the needs of global peace, for God’s sake. It’s all about a seedy club with some abused kids and the team of agents who were in there mopping up the crap at the end of it all.”

Heero glanced up at the sticky notes again. “So did you crack the code?”

“Please,” I said, with exaggerated affront. “You insult me. It’s a nine-number matrix, like those number games that are so popular. You have to fill each box with one each of the numbers 1 to 9, never repeating on a line or in a box or on a diagonal –“

Heero coughed, pointedly. I sighed. “I fitted the patterns to the alphabet, though I don’t know how long it would have taken me if I hadn’t found a couple of messages that Trowa intercepted that were also in the code. There was only one letter repeated in the email address, but that helped me to –“

“What is it, Duo?” There was a dangerous edge to his voice. Guess he hadn’t had breakfast yet.

“Melting pot,” I said, simply. “That’s what the mail address is. Something that Wufei said to me – or I said to him – about a mixture, made me think about the pattern of the numbers, made me consider this kind of encryption. Made me think about the phrase itself.”

“But…” Heero looked stricken. “But that’s what Quatre calls his department, isn’t it? And all your theories about no-one having access to Mission Dove – isn’t Quatre the one whose records would have been the most complete? He knew where we all were, where we were posted, what we were using, how we were resourced. Any gaps in his knowledge were things he could have got from us directly because we worked together on the mission. I know I was the one brought him to mind yesterday, but I really hoped I was on the wrong track. Doesn’t all this lead straight back to him? Shit, Duo, couldn’t you be wrong -?”

“Chill,” I said, and I could see I was annoying the hell out of him in my refusal to get upset. “Yeah, Quatre could have got all the information he wanted from us, Heero, you’ve put your finger on it there.”

“What the hell -?”

And then I started to laugh.

*

“What the hell is there to laugh about, Duo?” Heero sounded both astonished and angry.

“No, sorry,” I hiccupped, trying to rein it in. “But you see, that’s the whole point! That’s why I’m sure now that Quatre doesn’t have anything to do with it! Why should he go through this ridiculous charade of diverting emails and hacking into medical reports when he already has access to any information he might need to turn against us, discreetly and – more importantly – secretly? And this whole hacking thing is just so amateur that it’d offend me if I wasn’t so shit scared of one of us coming to serious harm.” I waved a sheaf of my notes at him by way of emphasis. “Think about it! Which one of us would be so crass as to use a code name that referred to his own department? To his own personal nickname for it? Even if it’s encrypted, it’s so blindingly stupid that it’s alien to us. It’s like leaving the network password on a scrap of paper in the drawer by the local PC. You know?” Heero was staring at me, his mouth half open as if he were trying to find a suitable response to my excitement. “Heero, don’t you see? Quatre is no fool – very far from it. And this ridiculous numeric code that’s been used – that wouldn’t have been Quatre either. Dammit, he hates these things, I can’t even get him to spend time on a crossword, let alone a numbers game. Only numbers he likes are the serial numbers in procurement catalogues for special equipment, or the telephone and zip code numbers for safe hotels, or the amount of money you spent last month on ammunition alone against the current credit limit –“

“OK, OK, I get you.”

“So he’d never use ‘melting pot’ himself – it’s been used either in ignorance, or as a deliberate ploy to make us think it’s Quatre. I’m beginning to believe there are quite a few red herrings swimming around in the events of the past few weeks. Place is starting to stink of them, in my opinion. Soon as we find out where he is and sort this whole thing out the better. It’s all getting beyond a joke…”

Heero’s expression cleared – I’d never seen such a look of relief. “So we are back where we started – but we know where it was planned and what was used. Maybe even a clue as to why we’ve been targeted. And we seem to know who it’s not! We can work on that, right?” He grasped my arm and I felt his excitement at the prospect of positive action. Its warmth coursed through me like fresh blood. “Well done, Duo! Smart work.”

Then his other hand slipped round my bare waist and he pulled me in for a kiss.

I don’t think he’d thought it through – it was instinctive, a result of the sudden rush of satisfaction he was feeling after a period of such frustration and inactivity. All sorts of psychological shit like that, you know? I could empathise with it, all too well. But I didn’t restrain him this time. It was a firm, rich kiss, full of enjoyment and fun and an intimacy that we used to take for granted. Not necessarily sexual – but bringing us as close as we could get. I opened my mouth and plunged into it with just as much enthusiasm; I tangled my hand in the hair at the nape of his neck and hugged him tightly.

We broke after a couple more moments, both a little breathless. It had been exciting, yeah – but something more than that. Something that thrilled more of me than just my treacherous groin. His hand still lingered at my waist, his fingers warm on my flesh; his eyes were wide and shining.

“Wow,” he said, softly. His lips looked rather swollen. “That was – unexpected.”

“Uh-huh,” I agreed. I wanted to grin – I wanted to cheer to the heavens, to tell you the truth, I hadn’t felt so good for months. Oh, and by the way, I wanted more. I leaned back into him and he looked just as keen to continue.

And then the trailer rocked on its very base, my papers slid spectacularly all over the kitchen floor, and we were thrown back against the doorway through no move of our own.

Heero’s face had whitened in a second and the rush of noise was ringing in my ears. I knew the sound of an explosion when I heard one – and a damned big one.