CLOSE PROXIMITY
Chapter 2
Day One – 06:30
The trailer park was still quiet with the early
morning. Well, quiet in that the only
background noise was a mixture of barking dog, shrieking spouse and the
melancholic turning over of a dead car battery.
The usual.
No-one got up to work in the city from around here.
The guys left with the same care and secrecy that
they’d arrived with. Relena went to call
her assistants and Cissy came over quickly to guide her back to the car, a
dull-coloured vehicle with its plates artfully obscured which had been parked
round the back of the gravel heap. That’s
where most of the vehicles from the site were left, a close jumble of vans and
cars that often vanished or changed mysteriously overnight.
Greg was somewhere around by a nearby trailer and came
running over to help Cissy shield Relena with his body, the pair of them always
looking out for any threat. I almost
laughed aloud when a large Rotweiler poked its head around the trailer after
him, and snarled aggressively. The kid
lost several steps in his surprise; seemed to speed up a bit after that,
too.
And so off they went, rolling quietly through the back
streets, returning to the Department with their Mission Nursemaid – or whatever they might call it in memos – well
and truly accomplished. Quatre had been
the last to leave me, but also the most eager – the look on his face might have
been described as mounting hysteria. He
was worrying about Trowa – I knew it. We
all knew it. Trowa would feel the same, if the situation
were reversed. It had been a bit of a
joke when I first joined the Team – the way that the two of ‘em seemed joined
at the hip. Not physiologically, you
understand, but in the way that they understood each other without a load of
hand signals, in the way that they cared for each other. They didn’t make much of an issue of it,
keeping anything they shared outside work pretty discreet – but they weren’t
making excuses for it, either.
When I got to know what genuine guys they were – and
after I had some experience of my own… well, it wasn’t such a joke then, was
it? I rather envied them, to tell you
the truth.
Heero had nodded to Relena as she left, but when I
turned back from seeing them off, I found he’d barely moved from his stance in
the corner of my room. A narrow shaft of
morning light sneaked through the broken blind, dissecting the shadow of his
body. For a few long, silent moments we
stared in tandem at some disturbed particles of dust that glittered within
it. When they settled at last on the
cushions of the couch, I cleared my throat.
This was my place, after all.
“No-one’s going to steal any of your stuff,” I
said. “You can sit down at least. You make the place look untidier than it
already is.” My voice sounded very
brittle in the suddenly empty room. I’d
abandoned my tea mug a long time ago, it seemed. I couldn’t remember if I’d eaten anything
since last night’s supper. The call had
come from Relena less than three hours ago – it felt like weeks.
His sigh sounded like it was dragged out of him. He shifted on one foot, then the other, but
he still didn’t sit down. “I feel the
same way you do,” he said at last, his voice a ripple of something rich and
angry. “If that’s any
consolation to you. I tried to
find someone else – tried to convince them I’d be OK somewhere else. You know what Relena’s like, though.”
I didn’t answer that one. It was unnerving enough, listening to
him. Having to listen to him. The voice was just as I remembered. Just the same as the late-night dreams, the
mockery, snagging at my nerve endings.
Fuck. For the first time, I wished
the others would come back. I wondered
why basic training had never covered this
precious scenario.
He looked like he struggled with words, with talking
to me. Hadn’t that always been the case? I felt the wave of frustration from him as
clearly as I read the clench of his fist.
“Duo – we have to cope with this, right?
Just for the bare minimum of time.
I can’t go out yet – you have to keep a low profile too. We’ll have to sort out some compromise.”
Obviously ‘fuck off and leave me alone’ wasn’t
an option, I
thought. Then I despised myself for the
sudden, childish aggression. My social
skills were lapsing, rather. Perhaps I
was becoming the loud-mouthed boor that many have accused me of being in the
past.
Perhaps – just at that moment – I could care less.
*
He sat at last – even his iron-cast limbs couldn’t keep him up indefinitely. I drew the stool out from under the kitchen
counter and dragged it into the room in front of the couch. I sat myself down on it somewhat gracelessly;
he folded himself down on to the couch itself.
He moved a little gingerly.
I felt the familiar buzz inside me as I watched his
movements. Partly
because my job was to evaluate a person’s characteristics. Partly for other reasons. He was nursing an injury to his left leg,
probably the hamstring – he had some hearing restriction in his left ear. That was apart from the external cuts and
bruises. My appraisal of his condition
was swift and instinctive, even as I hated myself for bothering.
“So how bad was it?”
He looked up quizzically, and for a moment my breath
caught in my throat. It was the way that
his chin thrust up, in a familiar, defiant move, the way that his dark eyes
widened as they met my focus. He never
asked me what I was talking about – because he knew, of course. He was damned smart. “You want to know?”
“Asked, didn’t I?”
Christ, I thought, was this
how it was gonna be?
He continued regardless, his voice quiet. Almost a monotone. I knew it was his way of controlling his
emotions, but it could still grate on your ears. “It was bad. Happened last night – early
evening, about 19:25. It was pure
luck that we were on our way out to get some takeout and were almost out of the
building. Otherwise we’d have been
caught in the full blast of it…” He paused, swallowing a lump in his dry
throat. “As it is, the main structure of
the building was completely demolished.
They took out the ground and first floor; it must have been a ring of
connected detonators around a central charge, heavy duty explosives, staggered
timing. It’s a style that some
terrorists and saboteurs use.” I
wondered if he were cataloguing the materials used, considering the likely
suppliers. Appraising
the efficiency of the job. It was
his speciality, after all. “The police
are giving out the message it was some kind of gas explosion – they don’t want
anyone thinking it’s terrorism. But it was directed specifically at us, no
doubt of that. The charges had been set over a period of days – there’d
obviously been detailed surveillance of the site. They’d have seen enough comings and goings to
be able to establish who was at home and who wasn’t, and we don’t allow
civilian tenants there, you know?” It
was a rhetorical question – it was as if he were giving an official statement
all over again. “The other floors just
crumbled down on top. My – the apartment
was buried under the weight of the floors above; almost all the stuff has been
crushed or destroyed. It’ll be months
before it’s safe to go back, let alone consider rebuilding.”
I had to open my mouth, didn’t I? I felt pain; I felt aggrieved. I let the resentment and the shock tumble out
in ill-chosen words. “Guess it won’t be
such an issue now then, me forgetting to return your spare key –“
He shuddered.
“Cheap shot,” he said, in a very tight voice.
“Cheap? That’s
me all over!” I hissed. Comeback was automatic. “As you were so fucking keen
to tell me!”
“It was the only fucking thing you wanted to hear, Duo!”
My eyes widened at his vehemence; my breath
shortened. I bit my lip, knowing I could
take him on – knowing I could escalate an argument beyond belief, in short,
stunning seconds.
I didn’t do it, though. I dragged my control back from the brink –
teased the nonchalance back into my voice.
“The Board will get you another place soon, I expect.“
His eyes narrowed.
With anger?
Suspicion at my sudden change of mood? “Sure they will,” he replied, his voice also
calm again – though I could hear in his tone what an effort that took. “They say they just need to evaluate a couple
of other potential properties; make the areas secure; investigate the previous
tenants and surrounding industry. Then I
can move on. They said that the
apartment at Westbridge was nothing special.
That there are plenty of others. It was only a place to live, right?”
I stared at him.
“Right.”
He made a sudden noise of impatience that startled me,
his leg jerking against the small card table by the couch. Relena’s half empty mug rattled nervously on
it, the reflections from the overhead strip lighting shivering in the skin of
the cold tea. Heero righted the mug with
exaggerated care, but the scrape of the china on the plastic tabletop was still
too sharp for my ears. It seemed to
affect Heero just as badly. He lifted
his hands as if to bury his head in them, but then he paused, and let them fall
back to his lap. His voice hitched up a
couple of notches on the volume control.
“But it wasn’t just a place to
live, Duo! Was it? It was my home! So maybe I’ve had to move around in the last
year or so; learned to be ready to mobilise at a moments’ notice, never let my
roots go very deep. But that place –“
“Don’t.” I said
just the one word. I knew he’d know what
I meant. I knew he’d ignore me, too.
“Not just where I lived,” he persisted. “It was more than that.” His voice faded, and stopped. He looked damned pale. I suspected he was still in some kind of
shock.
I sighed. This
was my room, right? But it seemed an
alien place right then, an unfamiliar room, miles away, perching at the wrong
end of a telescope. There wasn’t much
else except the ratty furniture to distract me – I’d never been one to collect
trinkets of any kind. Even the pictures
had only been sheets of crass advertising colour that had just caught my
eye. There was nothing and no-one but
Heero to draw my attention. It had been
a while since I’d heard him raise his voice like that. And for once, I agreed with everything he
said. “It was indeed, Heero. Much more than that. I liked it.
Good place.”
He looked up at me again then, the anger fading as
quickly as it had come. Maybe he
recognised something in my expression.
There was too much we could both have said – but not enough to ease the
moment.
“Were you badly hurt?”
I asked.
He shrugged.
His limbs looked weary. “I doubt
you need to ask. You can assess me as
well as I can myself.”
I winced inside.
He knew me well. But then – we’d
been trained well, too, hadn’t we? That
was my speciality – the evaluation
and measurement of people: their strengths; their vulnerabilities. The professional perception
of place and opportunity. Critical to any – and every – mission. “Maybe. But tell me how you think you are.”
“Just shock I think.
Some bruises.”
I nodded, knowing he was in pain, and knowing he knew I knew he was in pain, and that I knew – well, the hell any of that
mattered! “You want to sleep?” The moment of truth had come at last. I had submitted to the Department’s demands
and was resigned to offering what sparse hospitality I could. Hurrah for me. I braced myself for Heero’s scorn – for the
inevitable resistance and resumption of hostilities.
None of it came.
“Yes,” he replied quietly, and rare though it was, he surprised
me with his tone. Guess he was definitely in shock. Or maybe I’d never seen him in such a
position before.
“I just want to lie down here and crash out for a few
hours,” he said, softly. “If you’ve got
a blanket, fine, but I’m not cold or anything.
If you need to work here or something, just say. If I’m in the way, I can go somewhere else.”
I was listening to his words, but not hearing. I was just watching his mouth, alert to his
body language. He was fucking unhappy, I
can tell you that. And
tired beyond exhaustion.
“It’s been a hell of a time, Duo. I reckon you’ll agree with me on that.”
We stared at each other then, for a few long, painful
seconds. His eyes were full of shock and
horror and sadness and anger. Hell,
maybe that’s what mine looked like, too!
I turned away from his gaze, in the end.
It was all just that little bit too uncomfortable.
“I’ll get a blanket,” I said, levering myself off the
stool with a smile that was more of a grimace.
“Damned couch is more like the back of a drunken camel – but I guess
that’s all there is on offer in a mansion like this. You’re welcome to it.”
*
Day One 21:00
In the end, he slept right through the day and on into
the night. The flatbed trucks screeched
over the gravel paths, the dogs barked and the kids shrieked in some homicidal
superhero game. Life at the trailer park
made no concessions to him. I mean, I
was used to it by then. But he must
either have been extraordinarily tired or medicated, because he didn’t stir.
I got on with my usual stuff – well, I cleared up and
read the paper and pottered about with some projects that I’d been dabbling
in. The details weren’t important to
anyone but me. There hadn’t been very
much else in my life for the last couple of months, not that I was
complaining. Well, OK, maybe I was. But it wasn’t like there was anything I was
prepared to do about it. Not at the
moment.
I walked around Heero a couple hundred times. Sometimes I stopped to watch him sleep, his
body stretched out as best he could on my miserable, second-hand couch. Head cushioned on his arm, dark hair caught
up against his cheek, legs half folded, hips shifting occasionally, seeking a
more comfortable position. But I tried
my hardest to resist that entertainment – it didn’t exactly give me any
peace. I napped for an hour or so
myself, though thanks to Relena and Quatre’s visit, I was a little less relaxed
than I might have been. When it grew
dark outside the trailer and things quietened down a bit, I ate a cheese sandwich,
drank some coffee and decided to spend my time in wondering what the hell was
going on.
When Relena set up the Project Team we all knew the
risks. She’d gone out on a limb with the
Board as it was – but she believed there was a need for a specialist team to
take on the more sensitive and challenging missions of the Department. She chose her own guys – ran it her own
way. She was a very fair boss, with an
unusually compassionate care for her staff – and that was for all of them,
right down to her devoted assistant Cissy and the drivers and clerical guys in
the office..
A couple of early successes and she was cautiously
settled in place. There’d been a foiled
assassination attempt of a Presidential candidate, then an expose of the
taxation frauds of an evangelical TV preacher.
We brought it all to book, quietly and effectively, and without the
glare of publicity. We had a unique
balance of skills, y’see.
I’ll run through the major players – kind of like the
cast list.
I was on infiltration – everything from surveillance
of a target to donning the old false beard and trying to sell ‘em bibles on the
doorstep. I’d had a fairly varied life,
and I had a knack of understanding what made people ‘tick’. Pretty good at encouraging it to go the way I
wanted, too. No client ever believed
that Duo Maxwell could be anything other than a loud, vulgar extrovert, but
that was before I blended into their particular crowd for a couple of hours of
harmless play. They never noticed me as the guy who sold them
their groceries or the kid who played baseball on the pitch at the end of their
block. Or the guy who
was fixing the elevator on their floor.
Or the man who took their wife’s elbow at a cocktail party and left her
with no memory of individual features except for the waft of an
expensive cologne, an offering of an overly dry martini, and a smiling
insolence that could bring a shocked blush to her cheeks.
Never noticed until I told ‘em, that
was. I’d been
described as a chameleon, and I didn’t dislike the comparison. I liked surprising people. A personal character that’s ‘in-your-face’
can be as much a sleight of hand as a nondescript mouse of a man, right?
Trowa Barton came from an army background, so they
said. He was a guy
who didn’t waste words, and he’d never mentioned anything more prestigious than
a decorated grandparent or two, but there was definitely more to it than
that. Few months back, I was around when
the Department was visited by senior military personnel. There was a classic moment when the general
in charge saw Trowa – did a double take – and then looked deeply confused, like
he was seeing someone familiar but out of context. Not just that, but I saw him snatch back an
instinctive salute, hoping none of us had noticed the faux pas. There was stuff to Trowa that went way back,
and whatever it was struck a certain amount of fear and respect into the
institutional heart. He was an expert on
communications of all kinds, including an unhealthily deep knowledge of the
Quatre – well, the earnest, spectacularly efficient
Quatre Winner had analysis skills to match my own, but he’d used them for
slightly less legal purposes in his past life.
He came to us from a minor correctional facility where he was serving a
short-term sentence for a rather sophisticated computer fraud. They’d been sorry to let him go – not because
they didn’t want him to go ‘straight’, or because they were worried about
issues of national security, but because he was the only one who’d proved up to
the task of redeveloping their transport facilities. He’d also motivated the whole damned place
into a new workflow pattern that had increased efficiency by 25% over the year,
and his revolutionary new training plan had reduced the rate of re-offending by
40% over the same period. Damned guy
should have been running the country.
Rumour had it that there were
talks with one of the political parties at one time… but maybe that was yet
another urban myth.
Wufei Chang was the other main player – he was of
Chinese extraction, built like a brick wall but with considerably better muscle
definition, and with a steely self-discipline that could chill a normal guy’s
blood. He brought the most incredible knowledge
of combat into the group; no fighting style had been invented that he hadn’t
heard of – and probably mastered. He was
a ruthless and extremely effective teacher – hell, he’d taught me a few styles and I’d hated him
passionately for every damned second of it!
So I’m not the most amenable pupil at the best of times, but Wufei was a
walking block of relentlessness, and never flinched from criticising me for all
the things I - apparently just to infuriate him - persisted in doing
wrong. I assumed his other pupils felt
the same way about him, and yet they were all devoted to him at the end of
training like they’d follow him over the cliff edge in battle like
lemmings. He advised Relena on matters
of strategy in any conflict – as did the others. He was the only guy who could match her in
martial arts. And that’s all I care to
say about him at the moment.
And there was Heero Yuy, of course…
Hey, so he was critical too, right? I hadn’t forgotten. He’d appeared from some unknown background,
with knowledge of both hand-to-hand weaponry and tools of mass destruction like
you couldn’t imagine outside of a sci-fi film.
He knew it all – had, apparently, lived
it all, read the book, worn the tee shirt, you name it. Never talked about it much – but it permeated
everything he was, like a simmering
gas that sometimes seeped from within him, especially on a mission. I sensed a predatory violence coiled inside
him like a sleeping snake, only bursting out then. And when he did release the aggression, it
would be both tightly controlled and hideously effective – he rarely killed
unless there was no other choice, or so it appeared to me. Of course, I may have been a little naïve
there.
He, also, was an excellent trainer, and exemplary
leader of his team. Fit – strong – quiet
in company, unassuming as far as general chatter went. He just absorbed a mission and carried it
out. It had been his intervention that had disarmed a thirteenth-hour challenge to
the peace talks. A mainly peaceful
opposition group had been hijacked by a rather more militant faction, and it
quickly threatened to develop into a full-scale physical riot. Then Heero and a couple of choice acolytes
had moved swiftly and secretly in amongst the ringleaders. The protestors’ weapons had been removed and
‘lost’; their principals had been persuaded to take their provocation elsewhere
- preferably somewhere under close police supervision - and the danger had
passed.
He was a powerful and dangerous guy, was all. That’s all I was saying.
Day One 23:45
It was coming on for midnight. I stretched rather awkwardly on the floor,
perched on some cushions and flicking through a catalogue of various ‘might be
useful if I ever got back to active duty’ goods. God knows what the other guys on the trailer
park thought I was up to when they saw me rummaging in the waste site next
door, collecting up a wide selection of discarded, dog-eared publications. Stage Makeup and Costumes for Halloween; ‘Be
Seen in the Scene’ - this season’s
ladies’ fashions; How To Build Scale Models; Amateur Film-Making Techniques;
Calligraphy for Beginners; ‘When Sports Stars Misbehave’ – you name it, it was
likely it’d have use for me at some stage.
Heero expelled a breath, shifting a little
uncomfortably on the couch. I assumed
he’d sleep through until morning now. I
wondered what I had to offer for breakfast, but then he never ate much in the
morning, I knew. Some memory tugged at
me, a flare of anger stabbed through me.
Damned Department, still hounding me, landing this particular bombshell on my front steps…
I punched viciously at a cushion, and settled myself
again.
So was this threat to the Team really to do with
Mission Dove – with the intercontinental peace talks? From what Quatre had said, there’d been attacks
on enough places and people connected with it to substantiate the theory. There were always a few people who didn’t
want success – who didn’t want peace, for whatever warped reason they
personally thought justifiable. I
thought we’d weeded most of those out – neutralised ‘em, one way or
another. Guess a couple may have escaped
our clutches. I’d left the tidying up at
the end of the mission to Relena Peacecraft, our boss.
Relena had been the favoured daughter of a famous
political family. An
independently rich family, too.
It had been expected that she’d marry a high profile governor, or
equally disgustingly rich industrialist, or perhaps even a member of a minor
royal family…
Instead, she’d shown the lot of them the virtual
finger, and gone her own way. Used her
family’s influence to get accepted into the Department, then
cut a swathe through it so that she was in a senior position after eighteen
months. I wasn’t there then, but the
stories still rattled through the canteen of how she’d become the first woman
on the Board; of how her innovative approach to budgeting changed the whole way
of resourcing missions; of how her arbitration skills saved more than a couple
of the Department’s missions from disaster.
Oh, and she kicked ass, too, had I mentioned that? People still talked in whispers about the
disgraced Director who made a crass pass at her, and how he still found it
difficult, one, to get a job elsewhere, and, two, to make a proper fist of his
crushed right hand.
So we moved in dangerous waters, as a matter of
course. But then why had the target
suddenly changed to include members of the Project Team themselves? To me, that was of more concern. The members of the Team had never been
high-profile – even some of the Board members didn’t know us individually - and
we worked damned hard to maintain that anonymity. Otherwise we’d never have been able to do the
things we did, reach the people we did, or involve ourselves in the
organisations that we did. OK, so we
couldn’t all hide away in some
So where had the security been for Heero’s home?
Heero’s
home…
I felt the return of familiar nausea. He might have been killed. It had been a matter of luck that he wasn’t. I hadn’t seen him for three months, and when
I did, he was stumbling free of the jaws of a crumbling, crushing death.
No point being coy about this, of course. You need to understand things that maybe I’ve
only hinted at so far. You need to know
the context of this whole mess. I’m not
trying to justify anything – not begging for sympathy or anything. But Heero and I had history. You know how it
is? Like, we weren’t born glaring at each other the way we
did today. No, we’d been excellent colleagues
and fellow operatives: mature young men with a commitment to the Department and
the Project Team. We’d been bright and appropriately
aggressive and everyone had rated us well.
At least, that was in our professional life.
I couldn’t stop my thoughts returning to the
accident. Relena had told me sparse
details, but Heero had confirmed that his apartment was completely gone, now -
it presumably lay in a mess of brick and exploded mortar in a city that was a
state boundary away from here. I’ll tell
you now - the thought of that wreckage stung me almost as much as it had distressed him. Even leaving aside the
injury to Heero and others in the building, there’d been things in that
apartment that were now destroyed for ever – things that I’d known.
No, not just that.
Things that had been mine, or at the very least shared between us. Things that were treasured for memory alone –
for a sentiment that nowadays I tried fucking hard to despise. Things from a time that I
tried even harder to forget.
For many months, you see, I’d spent more time there
than at my own apartment. There was a
time when we virtually lived there together: ate together; did laundry together;
watched TV; played chess; rehearsed our parts in upcoming missions, and rested
after the frenzy of completed ones.
Lived, washed, cooked, breathed, laughed together.
Went to bed together; or the couch; or whatever square
metre of floor we reached first.
Yeah. You get the picture.
A time when we were lovers.