Chapter 5 Past
Past
Rohan
FISA is, apparently, the nesting ground for all of Britain’s most terrifying women.
First I get to meet the director of FISA itself, a forty something ice glacier of a woman called Anabelle Snow. She watches me walk into her office like I’m a wet puppy, shivering with the need to piss all over her fancy carpet.
Snow sits behind her overlarge mahogany desk, dressed in a sharp green pantsuit, her dark hair cut into a severe bob that frames her narrow, pale face and frostbite-inducing blue eyes, and doesn’t say a single word. She lets the silence hang between us in a recognisable power move.
Aaron, the traitor, has abandoned me to wait outside her office, ready to escort me to HR once I’m done being interrogated by the bony ice dragon he works for.
We work for now, I have to remind myself. I chose this. It’s important to remember shit like that, so when things go sidewise, you know on exactly whose back each lashing of blame is supposed to land. Can’t go around ripping up innocent skin anymore. I’m one of the good guys now.
I hope I get a badge.
Unfortunately for Snow, I’m well adept at handling silence, awkward or otherwise.
There were times as a child when OI’s scientists would strap me down to a cold metal table and gouge out reactions with their tools, recording the data for my dad, but would otherwise ignore my existence, no matter how loudly I screamed.
I stand in front of Snow’s desk, arms crossed, hip cocked slightly to lean against a nearby bookcase, mentally calculating the likelihood that one of the books, once pulled on, opens up a secret lair.
If the agency is melodramatic enough to have an entire underground base buried in one of England’s largest crime-heavy cities, anything is possible.
To be fair to Snow, when she finally does talk, she asks a question I didn’t expect.
“Why do you hate your father?” She’s still staring me down, a contemplative expression on her angular face.
Since I didn’t realise we were going to be conducting an impromptu therapy session on the fly, I offer her the standard of reply that I think a question like that deserves.
“Because he bought me a Malibu Barbie for Christmas when I specifically asked for a Ballerina Barbie. I mean, hello.” I sweep a hand up and down the length of my body. “What part of this says Malibu Barbie to you?”
Snow doesn’t even have the common decency to look annoyed by my response. She leans forward in her seat and rests her elbows on her desk, folding her claws together in front of her.
“There were rumours that your mother died recently,” Snow says, eyes boring into me like she’s trying to call bullshit on a magic trick. “Was it your father who pulled the trigger on that, or you?”
It’s a two punch, one blow swiftly following another, right to the solar plexus, a merciless expanse of pain and fury spreading outward like heat from a detonated grenade.
“Dad didn’t fire the bullet,” I tell her, voice gone hard and smooth like fingers running over wet stone, “but he built the gun.”
That’s all she’s getting from me about my mum.
Let her think it was me who killed her if she wants to; I don’t give a fuck what this woman believes, and Snow doesn’t strike me as the type to care about hiring people suspected of matricide.
What self-respecting head of a shady government agency would put individual morality above community justice?
Snow takes my answer and rolls it around in her mind for about sixty-two seconds before coming back with the answer to a question I didn’t ask.
“We don’t build weapons out of meat and bone here, kid.”
Kid, not doctor. It’s the second time one of these FISA agents has decided I’m not worthy of my title. The lack of respect is genuinely thrilling.
“Maybe not,” I concede, a false peace offering that I don’t expect Snow to fall for. “But you take the weapons that were already built by other people and let them pull their own triggers on your agency’s behalf, right?”
Snow’s thin mouth slices across the bottom of her face, caged between her pointy nose and chin like a creature trapped inside her skull. It’s an ugly smile, different to Aaron’s in that the danger is still hidden behind all that tooth and marrow.
“Is that what you think we’re doing with you?” she prods. “Turning your own father’s weapon back on him?”
“I’m not a gun,” I promise her.
“Hmm,” Snow hums thoughtfully, her eyes narrowing slightly in a mix of interest and scepticism. “Then what are you?”
This time, it’s me cutting my mouth up into something ugly.
I push away from Snow’s bookcase and wander closer to her desk, stopping two feet away from it, within spitting distance of her face.
She doesn’t move back or flinch. She just tilts her head to glance up at me, patiently waiting for my truth.
I fold my hands behind my back and lightly shrug my shoulders. “I’m what you’d call an inevitable consequence.”
Snow doesn’t ask me to explain what that means. She looks at me like she already knows, and it’s the answer she wanted all along.
***
The second woman I’m thrown into the agency colosseum with is the head of HR, Elizabeth Yoshida. She’s one of burliest people I’ve ever seen in real life and has the furious and almighty scowl of a macaroni penguin. I hope I never have to meet whoever those eyebrows hail from.
Elizabeth’s perilous scowl is sat behind a pair of thin-frame spectacles, which are attached to a chain that loops round the back of her rather large head. She’s got a desk in her office that is much smaller than Snow’s was although part of that is the disparate sizes of the two women.
“Fill these in.” Elizabeth pushes a stack of multi-coloured dead tree and ink at me. “Answer all the questions, not just the ones you want to. Fill them in with a black pen, not a blue one, or a glittery gel pen, or a crayon.”
Is she just being facetious, or did an agent in the past try to fill out HR forms with a crayon? It’s impossible to tell from Elizabeth’s expression if she’s taking the piss or not.
There are several black pens in a pot sitting on her desk. I nod my head at them. “Can I borrow one of those?”
Elizabeth’s scowl somehow intensifies. It’s an absolutely terrifying arrangement of facial features.
“Give me twenty quid, rich boy, and find out,” she says.
Right, so she definitely knows who I am, then.
I grew up the son of a billionaire, including the expensive education that lifestyle entails, although I skipped several years ahead in school and graduated from Cambridge University at age thirteen.
When I ran away from my life as Rohan Stone, I drained a few of my dad’s accounts, taking an obscene amount of his money with me.
Still, who carries cash anymore?
“Can I use a pencil?” I ask dryly. There’s one in my bag that I use to sketch out ideas for inventions.
Elizabeth remains viciously uncharmed by my attempts at civility, wrinkling her nose and squinting at me like she thinks I’m a special kind of idiot. “Afraid you’ll forget how to spell your own name, are you?”
I exhale loudly, praying for calm, and turn my head toward Aaron, who’s standing behind me, just inside the doorway.
He has his obnoxiously large arms crossed over his equally obnoxiously broad chest, and there’s a mask of perfunctory patience on his face that I am not buying for a second.
He’s finding this whole thing funny; I can feel it.
“Hey, handler,” I call over to him, jerking my head at Elizabeth, “you just gonna watch me get shaken down by discount Roz?”
Aaron brings up a hand to rub at his jaw. “Thought I would, yeah.”
“You know what this is?” I demand indignantly. “Bullying in the workplace, that’s what it is.” I turn back to Elizabeth. “Where’s the form for reporting my extensive feelings about FISA’s toxic office culture?”
Elizabeth doesn’t even hesitate to yank open her desk drawer, dig inside it for two seconds, and then slap down another bright-pink form on top of all the others. She stares impassively up at me and says, “You’re still going to need a pen for that. A blue one.”
I snatch up the forms. “Why do I need to fill in all the others with a black pen and this one with a blue one?” I shake the pink form furiously. “What the hell difference does it make?”
Elizabeth sits back in her seat and crosses her arms, unimpressed by my theatrics. “It makes the difference between me filing the forms and me feeding them to Mr. Shredder.” She nods at a large black device set to her left that I assume to be the dreaded Mr. Shredder.
Aaron finally takes pity on me and steps up, making like a hero. “Come on, kid, I have pens in my office you can use.”
A wiser man would turn around and walk away from Elizabeth with their head held high. A better man would thank her for her time and try to retain some level of dignity.
As I am neither of those things, I give Elizabeth the shittiest grin I can slash across my face and say, “Fuck you, Liz, my new supervisor is flush with his own stationary.” I throw him a wink, adding, “And I’m assuming all he’s gonna ask for as payment is a blow job under his desk, which I will happily agree to. ”
Elizabeth barks out a laugh so feral it kicks off a fear response in me. Aaron, in contrast, doesn’t react at all.
Then I walk out with my head held high.
…….
Aaron takes me to his office and gives up his precious biros without any sexual favours exchanged, much to my very vocal disappointment.
I’m caught up on the first question the forms ask of me: my name.
All my life, the name “Rohan Stone” has plagued every little piece of my existence.
It’s dictated how other people have treated me and what decisions I’ve been allowed to make for myself.
It’s forced me to behave in certain ways and influenced how I’ve behaved toward people, whether they knew who I was or not.
If I put the name “Rohan Stone” down on these forms, that’s who I’ll be. Leaving my dad’s world was supposed to put an end to the power that name held over me. But as with many times in my life before, the very fact of who I am is the reason why this agency wants to hire me.
In truth, if I had really wanted to distance myself from my name, I should probably have moved to Australia and opened a bakery, or something equally mundane, and lived as an ordinary man would, with holidays and taxes and hobbies and boring relationships I’d never truly care about.
And if my dad hadn’t somehow brought back Liquid Onyx, maybe I would have done that. But he did, so I’ve got no choice other than to stick it out till the end. Whether that be his or mine.
Preferably his, but I don’t want to be greedy. An end is an end is an end, after all.
I must have been sitting here staring at the blue form, black pen poised over the name question box for too long because Aaron takes notice and decides to get involved. A strange decision from him, really, but people are strange sometimes.
We’re sitting on opposite sides of his desk, my third desk of the day, and by far the best suited to its owner, not too small or too ornate. Aaron watches me from across it with a steady gaze that has the hairs on the back of my neck pricking with awareness.
“What was your mother’s name?” he asks.
I frown at him, suspicious of the reason behind his question since I’m certain he already knows my mum’s name. He doesn’t elaborate or take back the question at my adverse reaction; he just sits there, patiently waiting for my answer.
For fuck knows what reason, I indulge him.
“Esha Sathe.”
Aaron nods, his mouth curving up on one side into a slight smile, a softer expression than I would have thought him capable of.
“That’s pretty,” he says. “I’ve seen pictures of your mother.
Names don’t always fit with the person they’re given to, but Esha Sathe suits her.
She doesn’t have any family, does she? No one else to carry the Sathe name. ”
It’s painfully obvious what he’s trying to get at, and the bluntness of it is almost too aggravating and guileless to take. But there are worse things to be than a bad manipulator.
“You’re really shit at this, you know,” I tell him just in case he thought otherwise.
Aaron raises his eyebrows. “At what?”
“Being wily.”
Aaron sighs, fixing me with a more intense look than I was mentally ready to defend against. “Not everyone’s first instinct is to trick people into things, kid,” he says, quiet and somber, like he’s try to be gentle with me.
I don’t respond to it, any of it, out loud, because I have nothing nice or inoffensive to say, but I do write the name “Rohan Sathe” on the form.