Page 1 of 72 Hours

​​​Chapter 1 – Monday 05:30

I watched the five people stumbling up my path with bags and boxes, but I didn’t go to help them at first. In fact, I didn’t move from the doorway of my trailer at all. I just leaned against the open aluminum door, cultivating the nonchalant look. The nonchalant “I never asked you here in the first place” look.

Didn’t work, of course.

It was so early in the morning that the sun had that pale white shine. The air was sharp and a little damp. There was no one else around except a wheeling bird high above us.

I couldn’t mistake the twist of misery on Simon Wagner’s face. He was genuinely distressed. His soft blond hair looked like he’d run his hands through it a million times this morning, and there were dark shadows sketched in under his baby-blue eyes. His whole expression said, “I’m confused. I’m pissed. I’m out of my depth here.” It hit me as strongly as if I felt it myself. I had, of course, in other circumstances. He was a guy who’d always found a way under my defences, and—just for that moment—my hostility wavered.

Judith Harrington was beside him. Her expression was less easy to read. Nothing new there, then. Even when I’d worked for her, I’d never dared assume I knew what she was really thinking. When she darted one of her glares at me, I stirred myself down the couple of rickety steps and sauntered along the path to take my share of the baggage. I lifted a couple of boxes off of Simon and his assistant, and I helped Judith balance her briefcase on the top of some packaged books. Then I also took two clothes bags off her assistant, Cissy, slinging them over my shoulder. But I refused to help the fifth visitor. I reckoned he was tough enough to take the whole damned lot himself.

We all tottered through the narrow doorway into the trailer, one by one, and piled the stuff in the corner of what I laughingly called my living room. I had to wedge everything between my shaky, tubular steel couch and the standard lamp that only worked, as far as I could tell, at its own whim. That was the only free space available. Our huffing and heaving brought down a couple of the pictures I’d tacked up on the wall behind the couch, but I didn’t make a fuss about it. They were only cut out of magazines, after all.

Instead, I stared at the baggage invasion. Boxes of books and papers and maps, a couple of kit bags of presumably more personal things, a modest pile of clothing protected by thin plastic covers. A cardboard lid flapped shut suddenly, expelling a small puff of dust. A small enough collection of belongings, I guessed, for a single person. The sum total of a life, of twenty-three years. I could tell it had all been packed pretty hurriedly. Some of the boxes were charred slightly at the corners, and there was water damage on the book covers.

Looked pretty pathetic. I swallowed down a comment to that effect.

No one was talking, apart from breathing more heavily from the effort. Judith sank on to the couch with a tsk sound, which was probably her only concession to admitting pain. She had a weak ankle, and this removal business wouldn’t have helped it. She fell once on a mission, when she’d hurtled down two full floors from an outside fire escape. But as I heard it, she struggled on to the end, supporting a wounded teammate out of the building with her and only then admitting she’d fractured a bone in her ankle. Tough cookie.

She made some small gesture with her hand to Cissy and Greg—Simon’s assistant—and they backed off outside again to stand near the foot of the steps. They pulled the door closed behind them, but not completely. I breathed a little more steadily; it had been getting a tad crowded indoors. Just the four of us left, now. Someone cleared a dry throat.

Simon spoke first. He never could stand awkward silences. “It’s not for long, Tanner, or so we hope. But there’s nowhere else we could find, and no one else we dared ask. You know that, don’t you?”

I caught Judith’s look out of the corner of my eye and shrugged. “Things must be really bad. I’m not exactly Employee of the Month, am I?”

Simon scowled. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it. He’s in danger. We all are. However, the Department insists we involve as few people as possible outside of the core team. You’re one of the very few that has adequate clearance.” His voice was thick with repressed emotion. “One of the few that we can trust, dammit!”

I bit at my lip. “Tea, anyone? Beer?” Then I remembered there was no beer. I gave it up a while back. I found all sorts of maudlin feelings crept in when I allowed it around me. No one answered my question, at first, but neither did it stir them into any other action. The mutual glances being thrown around excluded me by their very existence. It reminded me of when I’d last been part of that clique. When I’d been a damned critical part.

And how I no longer was.

Simon sighed. “There’s a hell of a lot to be done before any of us can rest again. Oh, and tea? Yes please, for me and Judith. I’ll give you a hand with it. Then we can talk everything through together. That okay with you, Tanner?”

“Yeah,” I answered slowly, making sure my gaze stayed on him. “Sure it’s okay.”

SIMON MADE HIS WAY out to the kitchen area ahead of me, lifting aside the bead curtain with barely a glance. I kind of liked it, though purple and black wouldn’t have been my first colour choice if I’d decorated the place myself. I pushed after him, needing to get in there before he discovered just how few creature comforts I actually had. I reckoned I could remember where there were a few more tea bags left in a cracked pot; perhaps a couple of washed mugs apart from the large blue one I used daily. It’s not like I’d wanted to entertain, right? Didn’t say that to the blond guy with the tortured eyes, though.

“You haven’t called Brad or me for a while,” he said. His voice was low, and it didn’t sound like he put his whole heart into the rebuke. Even so, I felt like a major arsehole.

“Not a lot of news to share.”

He raised a cynical eyebrow. “Just so we know you’re okay. We don’t need a full news report for that.”

I nodded and shrugged. “Okay. Of course I’m okay. But that’s fair enough.” I flipped on the kettle, knowing we had a couple of minutes before Judith got impatient for us to return, and the noise of the bubbling water would hide our voices. “So let’s have the truth here, Simon. I’ve been out of it for almost three months now. What the hell is this all about? Far as I know, there’s been nothing much going on in the Department since Mission Dove wrapped up.”

“Far as you know?” His eyebrow rose again.

“Right.” I sighed. “So I’m not on the circulation list nowadays. But I can find out what’s going on if I want to, you know?”

“Yes, I imagine you can.” His eyes sparkled briefly with amusement. “You always did find access to all kinds of places. But you’re right. The Project Team hasn’t been called up for any more work on that scale. All we’ve been working on are minor investigations, some local security issues. Housekeeping tasks for the Department, you might say.”

“So....” The kettle shrieked and rattled to a boiling halt. The condensation dripped with familiar glee down my wall cupboard. “So what’s this sudden crisis?”

It was obvious that it took him an effort to appear calm. “I guess it’s important to get you up to speed. We’ve all been unwinding after Dove, and maybe we’ve been too complacent. But most of us were just looking forward to taking a break. We were all exhausted, still pretty tensed up from it. As you know.” He glanced at me, and I knew what he was referring to.

Not now, Simon. Leave it.

Mission Dove had been the last major exercise I’d been involved in, before I... left the Project Team. It had been the most important to date, not that the Team could take any specific credit, working as it did behind the scenes. “Anonymous” was our group’s directive. We were agents of a confidential cell within the Department, kept under the radar of its governmental bosses. But we all knew that one of the most significant peace talks of the last forty years had been concluded without incident, and that our small but highly specialised team had been a contributor to that success. None of us had specific job titles; flexibility was the name of our game. But our brief had included sweeping the conference sites for trouble before and after the events, monitoring communication systems that’d shame the flight deck of a military jet, and tracking any potential hostility, whether from or to the participants. We’d added our covert protection to the delegates in just as significant a way as the official security forces. It had been a damned fine time, the best work we’d ever done. Though I say so myself.