Outside the bedroom window the doppler-wail of sirens screamed pass and brakes screeched as unmarked police cars careened around the corner. Mathilde heard the heavy, air-cutting whop-whop of a police chopper’s rotor blades from somewhere above her fourth floor safe house and paused in the process of applying her foundation.
The lights were low in the flat, the heavy curtain pulled almost closed, allowing only a hint of the chaos outside to seep in with the muggy, mid-summer air. Ninety minutes ago, the ambassador was murdered at a diamond tiara and black tux affair in the political heart of the city. The perpetrator was still at large.
But not for long. Mathilde looked down at the array of make-up spread out before her in disgust. All of it was department brand only, in a myriad shades of bland with the occasional splash of humdrum thrown in for added spice. The make-up belonged to Melanie. So too did the off-the rack party dress hanging from its hanger on the back of the wardrobe. A hideous thing, it looked like someone had beheaded and plucked the top half of an ostrich, while leaving the bottom fully feathered before applying silver sequins to the torso. Mathilde would sooner slit her own throat than wear it.
She clenched her fists. That was the point though, wasn’t it? Mathilde wouldn’t be wearing it. Melanie would. Stupid, bubble-head Melanie stumbling home from a work’s party with her hair in last season’s style, her face spattered in department store beauty and her backside waggling in feathered delight. God damn Melanie Tumbridge, orthodontic nurse, depressed singleton; a woman who had never travelled further than a trip to Sharm El Sheikh. A woman who spoke only English, and only just. A woman who could barely raise a hand to a spider let alone swat a diplomat straight off the mortal coil.
Melanie was her antithesis. Her nemesis. She was everything Mathilde despised in this world. And yet they had never met. Nor would they ever meet. It was impossible. Like a couple of cursed Gemini twins, she and Melanie were two minds trapped in one body, doomed to exist as nothing more than distorted reflections of the other.
According to the Division, this was the best way to protect operatives and prevent exposure. How could anyone hope to catch a killer who could cease to exist? No polygraph could catch out Melanie. Facial recognition technology could not account for two women with one face who shared not a single facial expression in common. Mathilde left not fingerprints, no traces, but even if she had it wouldn’t matter. DNA might be all but infallible, but the human mind was not. It was easy to fool a mind to disbelieve the eyes when confronted by a pudding like Melanie Tumbridge. Melanie would never crack under interrogation; never slip up. Because she could not slip. As far as she knew she had a full life of blah-blah-blah, don’t-forget-to-floss to account for every hour of her day.
Slowly, Mathilde breathed out, unclenching her balled fists. She flexed her fingers, encouraging blood flow. It did no good to get upset. Reaching up to unclasp the elegant tear-drop diamond necklace from around her neck she pooled the platinum chain in her palm, stroking a fingertip over the cool stone.
This was her seventeenth successful liquidation for the Division. She’d gouged out her legend from Barcelona to Bila Tservka, Phnom Penh to Perth, and criss-crossed the globe back again. She was the best. The diamond of the Division.
And yet, they thought nothing of erasing her.
Restless, Mathilde stood. The bedroom of the safe house was made up to look lived-in and was used by any operative who needed a bolthole in the city. It looked like a room someone could live in and maybe even like it. But not Mathilde. She had no home. She’d lived out of a suitcase since she was eighteen. A creature of purest utility, the Division had taken her and whittled down her softer edges until all that remained was something flat and hard and sharp enough to cut.
Was that why they’d made Melanie so fluffy? Melanie who wore a purple feather boa to a friend’s party unironically. Melanie who had a tasselled counterpane on her bed in her alarmingly aquamarine bedroom with its flat-pack white painted dressing table and backlit mirror covered in failed selfies. Melanie with her love of sour cream and onion flavour crisps and freezer aisle lasagne. Melanie. Melanie. Melanie. Why was it that her life with all its clutter and needless distractions filled Mathilde’s head even before the switch?
Mathilde paced between the bed and the door, on the far side from the window. She beat her right fist into her left palm, the diamond chain still around her wrist. If only she could pulp Melanie’s memory so easily.
It wasn’t supposed to work this way. Melanie was supposed to be the airhead armour that kept Mathilde safe. Melanie was meant to be the cipher. The pretender to the air they both breathed, and the life Mathilde owned. So why was it growing harder to escape her fluffy clutches every time Mathilde emerged from the Deep Sleep?
‘It could be that increased duration increases the risk of false memory saturation,’ Jose had suggested the one and only time Mathilde had mentioned it after the job in Taipei. She’d had to go under as Melanie for nine months that time. Her revival had felt like a bad birth; she’d emerged into the light blinking Melanie out of her eyes, the memory of the bubble-head’s terrified pleading still ringing in her ears.
‘Why are you doing this to me? Let me go. I don’t want to die.’
Stupid Melanie. She couldn’t die. She wasn’t real. And yet…she felt real.
‘Naturally,’ Jose replied. ‘Deep Covers are meant to provide a fully immersive experience, or what’s the point?’ The technician had tossed the spent hypodermic into the medical waste bin.
Mathilde had watched him do it, thinking that everything she was had been condensed into that syringe. What did it say about Mathilde that she was the toxic agent that needed to be inserted to be brought back? Exactly who was the cover and who was the real person; the woman who died after every successful mission or the woman who lived in-between?
Mathilde glanced at the digital radio on the bedside table –an old-fashioned thing without a connection to Wi-Fi. She was running out of time. She was expected at the rendezvous point in forty minutes. From there she’d be taken to one of the Deep Sites dotted around the city. Jose or another almost identical lab drone would sit her down, swab her arm and prepare to put her under. Another job done. Another small death as a reward.
What if she ran? Like a bullet from a gun, the thought tore a path through her mind. What if she ran and never stopped running? What if this time she didn’t consent to lie down and die to protect the Division? What if this time she lived and used what they’d taught her to spring from one hotel room to another, to dance across borders, to hew too close to enemy lines? She was the Division’s diamond, but to their enemies she was more precious than that.
Ridiculous. The Division was everywhere. It had its fingers in everything. Mathilde knew how it was. She’d seen behind the curtain. There was no escaping. And why would she want to? What life was out there for her, if not this one? A life like Melanie’s, full of banal pleasures and friendships with people who had no idea she was an empty vessel? Mathilde might have no one, but she had herself and her skills; her peephole into the world behind the curtain. Why would she give that up and risk death?
To live, a little voice whispered in her head. It wasn’t Melanie. The Happy Tooth Fairy wasn’t astute enough to realise Mathilde existed. The treacherous voice belonged to Mathilde, which only made it worse. Like a diamond, she was in danger of fracturing. Her fatal flaw exposed.
She twirled around the room, Melanie’s stupid dress fluttering around her backside. The tote bag with the needle mocked her from the dresser. The bag was Melanie’s. It had a pattern of cherries on it. Mathilde scraped the blunt nails of her hand over her palm, nipping her bottom lip hard enough to bleed. The weak, salt tang of blood was sour on her tongue.
Mathilde had her orders. Inject the contents of the syringe, head to the rendezvous; go to the Deep Site. Die so Melanie could live. Wait until the next time the Division needed its diamond agent.
Rinse and repeat.
Mathilde reached down to brush her fingers through the poofy feathers of Melanie’s dress. The other woman’s thoughts were seeping into her brain. Gemma would be at the party; she could ask her about Layla and Collette’s new baby and coo and ooh over pictures of tiny, wrinkled walnut people to her heart’s content.
She might call Iain; try and patch things up. Explain her odd disappearing acts. Maybe she and her friends would talk about the tailbacks and roadblocks caused by the assassination? Or maybe Melanie wouldn’t care about trivial matters of international espionage. Because Melanie had a life. A life that didn’t start and end with murder.
Mathilde frowned, swiftly reaching up to brush wetness from her face. Tears? Mathilde hadn’t cried for real since completing basic training. What was this? Had the Melanie-rot spread so far, so fast? She shivered, breathing through the hitch in her throat. There must be a glitch in the programming. She’d tell Jose and— The burner phone on the bed rang exactly twice. Mathilde flinched. It was time. She had to go. She was already late.
She swept up the tote bag, dug out the needle, prepped it with practiced, sure hands –and set about performing her second murder of the night. The drug hitting her blood stream was cool, soothing, washing away all regret and leaving only clarity.
It was almost a relief. Death was easy, after all. Mathilde understood it. It was all she understood. She’d leave the living to her enemy. Melanie was better at it. And then, after yet another bloody birth, she might finally have the strength to fix her broken whole.
ALDLIS CHRONICLES 