Border Lines

3

3Two months had passed since Mark Bellamy had been liberated from the work camp. He'd served eight months hard labour working a beet farm in the midlands, trying to stay alive and wishing he was dead. He didn't dare dream about being free when he was inside and now he was out he couldn't adjust to liberated life. And it wasn't just freedom, it was a new life away from the S'aven slums across the border. He didn't understand how it all happened, but he knew it was all down to his new boss, Special Agent Wade Adams.

Agent Adams was in his fifties, twice divorced and estranged from his kids, which seemed to suit him, and them, fine. He had arrived at the work camp looking for Mark – PC Mark Bellamy the cop killer. Mark was serving a life sentence for the murder of his partner and nobody believed or cared that he was innocent.

Then Adams showed up with a file full of pictures and enough authority to release any prisoner he wanted with a minute's notice. When Adams bundled Mark into the back of his ten-year-old Audi, on that scorching hot day two months ago, he had no idea why he was being freed and as he sat now, in a basement of the Office for Public Service, the reasoning was still a mystery.

The office had a*****e room which Mark was sleeping in but he preferred to spend his time at the spare desk – his desk. The room was cramped and messy, littered with files, cigarette butts, and empty coffee cups, but it was beginning to feel like home. There were no markings on the door. No signs to indicate what the office was for, and even sitting inside Mark wasn't totally sure what it was they were doing. Still it beat spending twelve hours digging for root vegetables in the baking sun while the other prisoners jeered and taunted him.

Adams returned with fresh coffee, he put the cups on the most stable pile of paperwork he could find and used one of the complimentary napkins to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. A dust covered picture of Adams a decade earlier sat on his desk. Back then he'd been fit, some might have even said handsome. But the years hadn't been kind to the special agent. His lifestyle of long nights at his desk, expensive cigarettes, and cheap takeaways had left him overweight and on the brink of a heart attack every time he had to tackle a flight of stairs. There was more hair on his face than his head and he was prone to wearing the same suit for days at a time when they were on a case. But then when they were working a case there was no time to worry about appearances, even Mark understood that. And work for them both was more an obsession than a vocation.

As well as coffee Adams had a file under his arm, another one for their vast collection of unsolvable cases.

“Here kid, cast your eye over this,” he said, dropping it on Mark's desk.

Gingerly, Mark opened the file. He used to be a cop, this wasn't the first body he'd seen, and it wasn't even the worst body he'd seen. But the girl's corpse was important and from the picture alone Mark understood what this meant. When he had worked the beat, it was his job to find the corpse, bring in the senior officers and clean up afterwards. He'd never even given it much thought until he met Adams. Now this was a crime – a real crime – and they weren't just cops, they were hunters.

“Same as before, she was strangled internally like the others. No bruising, no signs of a weapon. Just her neck shattered from the inside. Hope Allison to add to the list.”

Five bodies. All prostitutes. All strangled without ever being touched. Mark chewed on his fingernails. The cops hadn't even made a connection between the murders, it was the coroner that called them. And now the cops wouldn't need to think about these girls. That was Adams' job. Mark looked up at his boss – it was his job now as well.

This wasn't the life he'd dreamt for himself, but he was still a cop, even if he was outside the scope of the force itself. Their special isolated department dealt with paranormal crimes. Until Adams had plucked him from the work camp, Mark didn't even realise there was a Paranormal Crimes Unit – he figured Anti–Terrorism dealt with it, after all that was what the Reacher threat was all about. At least that was what everyone said.

But these murders weren't an act of terrorism or a strike against the government. Mark had seen this kind of thing in movies. This was a serial killer. Some sick p*****t that got his kicks from killing women in dirty alleyways.

A serial killer with Reacher powers.

“Are they all killers?” Mark asked. He'd been trying not to look stupid in front of Adams but the longer he spent in that office the more clueless he was.

Adams looked up from the file, cigarette fixed at the corner of his mouth – his staple look when he wasn't knocking back coffee.

“What's that?” Adams asked, he was going through the other files the coroner had given him on the murder victims.

“The Reachers, do they all kill?”

Adams sat back in his chair, allowing his gut to protrude forwards. He patted it proudly and regarded Mark – he did that a lot. “You want the p********a or the truth?”

“The truth.”

“What we know about Reachers is utter bullshit. I swear to you Bellamy, they have been pulling Reachers off the streets for nearly half a century, locking them up in the Institute for study and what have we got from all that? Nothing. We don't know where they came from, why they're different. Nothing. What the Institute warns us about is hyperbole at best. You know what that means, right?”

Mark thought he did.

“We all remember that kid in Piccadilly. That determined look he had on his face as he willed all those people to him. Just using his mind, he pulled them close and then blew them all to pieces. And the Institute warned people how a Reacher could just make people spontaneously combust, do you remember that?”

Mark nodded. It was one of the most infamous attack on London, even though he was just a kid when it happened he still remembered how it had shaken the country.

“Yeah, well, I was part of the first patrol on the scene. Anti–terrorist Reacher Division. We found the kid, what was left of him. And we found the bomb he'd had strapped to his back. We reported it to the Institute but those whitecoats said it would make people more vigilant if we didn't mention the bomb.”

Mark didn't know what to think. “But why would they say it if it wasn't true?”

Adams smiled and plucked the cigarette from his lips in excitement. “Because any normal son of a b***h could walk into a train station and set off a bomb. Hell, how many have b****y done it already? All that kid did was call the people to him for maximum damage. The rest you or me could have done. But those bastards at the Institute like scaremongering and they wanted the Reachers off the streets so we all went along with it.”

“That's a good thing though. They're dangerous. We do need to stop them.” Mark scowled at his own train of thought. He'd believed the p********a all his life, but since he left the work camp uncertainty was setting in. “They are dangerous aren't they?”

Adams finally smiled, exposing his nicotine stained teeth. “As I said to you before, we know nothing about them. So let's ignore everything we've been told and just look at the facts. In the past twenty years how many confirmed terrorist attacks have been caused by Reachers?”

“I don't know, a hundred?”

“One. The kid in Piccadilly is the only Reacher known to have caused mass damage on that scale.”

“But bombs are going off all the time.”

“Yes, they are. Reachers have nothing to do with what's happening to this country. That, my son, is a fact.” Adams paused sombrely. “And that is why I am stuck in this little room with a street cop reject, no offence meant. I've studied Reachers for years, trying to source this undercurrent of terrorism everyone was yelling about and then one day I just realised I knew more than the goddamn Institute and everything they were telling us was crap.”

“But you're still trying to catch Reachers. That's what you do, catch Reachers. You must think they're bad.”

“They're more powerful than us. That's all. When I started questioning my orders I was transferred here to solve the stuff that has nothing to do with terrorism.” He looked at the picture of the latest dead girl. “The kid in the station, he was a level three. Most of the Reachers Anti–Terrorism picked up were level one or two. Occasionally we'd get a three and have to watch ourselves. What we rarely saw were the fours or fives. The fives are the most dangerous. We can't just take them down like common criminals. We'd be lucky to take them down alive. And these are the ones you have to watch out for. I won't lie to you, they're not all bad – but this girl here, well she was killed by a level five. And this is why they still keep me on the payroll, because I'm the best chance they have at getting this bastard. Because if word gets out about him the Institute will lose control and when that happens – well let's just hope if it ever happens I'm on a beach in the Bahamas knocking back daiquiris.”

Mark leaned forward. The world was starting to look clearer in the smog, but he still had so many questions. This time he kept quiet. Adams was keeping him for a reason and he wanted to stay on his boss's good side for as long as possible.

“The good news I can tell you is level fives are rare so we don't need to look too far. Last year there were two suspected level fives in S'aven and that's the first place we look.”

“The ones who have Rachel?”

“The very same. They killed your partner and I'd bet my life on them taking out these women. Not all Reachers are killers, but these men, the Smith Brothers, mean death.”