11th May
‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ I said to Helen as we lay in bed on the morning after the briefing.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I want to do that again before we get up.’
I laughed. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I mean this whole thing – the asteroid issue, the spies, the intrigues.’
‘It’s funny,’ she replied, ‘when I was young, people sometimes told me to just be myself. The problem was that I never knew who I was.
‘In any case, it would have been hard to experiment with different ways of living. In our society, social and cultural norms, and the necessity to make a living, limit the sort of person you can be – they force you to create a certain persona.
‘For me, and I guess for lots of people, that persona was totally different from who I felt I was inside.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Since the meteorite, I’ve felt really alive for the first time in my life. Fighting deranged fundamentalists, kidnapping bishops, flying to the edge of the space and trying to save the world from destruction weren’t discussed with me as options at school – they recommended a bloody secretarial course. All the things that I’ve done since the meteorite have been done by the person that I really am.’
‘You’re very brave,’ I said.
‘I’ve thought about that,’ Helen replied. ‘In the past, I never thought I was brave. I was very cautious. As things stand at the moment, however, we might all be dead in five months – it might be the end of all life on Earth. There’s nothing to lose anymore, so there’s nothing to fear.’
Helen moved close to me and put her arm around me. ‘That may explain why sex is so much better too. …’
~*~*~*~*~
Two hours later, Helen, Etienne and I were having lunch in the dining hall at Bovington camp.
Joan joined us. ‘Paul should have landed at Heathrow by now,’ she said as she sat down. ‘Robin is returning on a military plane with Walt Cooper.’
‘Walt Cooper!’ I repeated in surprise.
‘It seems that our old friend, Walt, tried to kill Paul, in his guise as Swan, but they caught him.’
‘Is Paul OK?’ asked Helen.
‘Yes,’ said Joan, ‘he was wearing a bullet proof vest.’
‘Why’s Walt Cooper being brought to the UK?’ Etienne asked. ‘Why don’t the Americans want to interrogate him?’
‘President Redman trusts his national security advisor, Charlotte Goldman, but doesn’t know who else he can rely upon,’ Joan replied. ‘He has no idea which of his staff works for one or other of those ultra-secret organisations. He wanted Cooper to be away from Washington as he believes that Cooper is secretly working with one or more people in the White House. The president wants us to interrogate Cooper to keep him away from people with other agendas.’
‘Why does the president think that others in the White House might be collaborating with Cooper?’ asked Etienne.
‘When Robin caught Cooper,’ explained Joan, ‘he also got the van he was using. There were documents in the van that seemed to indicate that Cooper used the code name “Rigel”, and that he was communicating with someone in the White House who used the code name “Saiph”.’
‘That’s interesting,’ I said. ‘Rigel and Saiph are the stars that mark the feet of the hunter, Orion, in the night sky. That implies that they know something about the asteroid.’
‘Indeed,’ Joan replied. ‘Even more reason why we need to get as much as possible out of Cooper.’
Etienne looked at his watch, looked at me and then stood up. ‘I’ll see you at the interview room in half an hour,’ he said to me. ‘It’s time to interview Forrester.’