He thought he might do some packing, not like him, as he usually left such mundanities of life for Ben to do for him, but if he did something uncharacteristic then perhaps his characteristic sense of impending doom would subside.
If he could go back, he wouldn’t have agreed to split the family. He’d have insisted they travel a day later, or that Ben reschedule his test. But they were all just inCornwall. He’d checked the seismic predictions. No tsunamis forecast. And they were going toLight Island.
His phone buzzed as he was walking back towards the house. Ben was at the kitchen table utterly engrossed in his books. Aleksey went to the glass window just behind him and rapped on it hard. Ack, if he couldn’t annoy Ben Rider, what was the point to life? Ben’s outrage, and possible embarrassment at the height he’d lifted from the chair, and the consequent tussle that had ensued, led to some extremely unexpected but welcome sex against the kitchen counter. That, they definitely hadn’t done for a very long time. Even though working around healing burn-blisters wasn’t fun, unloading some of his anxiety deep into Ben cheered Aleksey up immensely, so studying abandoned, they took it to the hot tub for a second round.
It was only as they were going to bed that night that Aleksey remembered the text. He clicked on it as Ben was punching his pillow and trying to get it into a satisfactory shape.
‘Squeezy?’
‘Peyton.’
‘What does he want?’
There was a brief text and attached document. Aleksey pondered the single line. ‘He just wants to know when we’re leaving tomorrow.’
He didn’t even know why he lied.
But what could he say to the fact that the van they’d seen at the custom house was registered to Belleropon Laboratories?
He realised he’d made a bad tactical error.
He wasn’t vulnerable and neither was Ben.
But in his paranoia that something was coming forthem, he’d overlooked those who were. He’d split his forces badly.
He checked the time.
In less than twelve hours they’d all be together again. He glanced over at Ben. Ben was already asleep. It was just his way.
He was worrying about nothing.
Maybe.
What could possibly go wrong in less than twelve hours?
* * *
He dropped Ben off at Exeter airport in the morning. The flight school which Peter Bennington owned was at the far end of the main commercial runway, and used their control tower. Three training Cessnas were parked outside a hanger on the school’s taxi runway, and Ben hopped out and told him he’d see him in a couple of hours for their flight to St Mary’s.
Aleksey nodded.
He watched the tall, powerful, ridiculously handsome figure stride confidently away.
Aleksey fidgeted with his bandaged hand for a while, thinking about promises. Thinking about his thinking, which wasn’t an easy thing to do. He ran his finger around the steering wheel as he recalled, once more, someone called General Primakov, and how he had sat in vehicles, considering, planning…thinking. Aleksey Primakov had never once second-guessed his own thought processes. Sometimes, it didn’t help a psyche to pretend to other people that name changes altered a fundamental personality. Or that they overlaid a superficial new man upon an older, more ingrained one. Perhaps he should not so readily have capitulated to Ben’s reversion of his name to Aleksey—or pushed Ben to accept it, was probably more accurate. Maybe he should have chosen an entirely different one to begin this new chapter of their lives. For, of course, General Primakov had not been called that by his friends, his lovers, or, come to think of it, his enemies. It had always just been Aleksey.
Ack, he’d known what he was going to do when he’d woken up that morning. It was depressingly predictable. If there was an ever-decreasing spiral, a pattern of any kind to his life, then he was on it as sure as a man stuck on an insane carousal, and he could not now jump off.
He blew out his cheeks to the inevitability of his life and then looked up an address. He wasn’t sure whether to be surprised that Rachel’s laboratory was attached to some of the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital buildings or not. Or that these departments were on the river—the river that joined to the canal. He wasn’t sure whether any of this was a good sign or not. He wasn’t sure of very much.
He really didn’t know why, fifteen minutes later, he was parking up and walking across to the reception. None of it made any sense.
It was only as he got to the door that he realised it was Sunday.
A sign at the reception gave him slight pause. What you saw wasn’t necessarily what you got. A good lesson for a lot of things in life, he reflected. What he was standing alongside was only the top floor of a number of levels which went down, each mapped and named for potential visitors to call the appropriate staff number.
The levels had nice names: Streatham, Knox, Calvin, Knight.
He wondered if, being microbiologists, they’d decided just Levels 1 to 4 was a little ominous.
