No Way Out

it would be to jump.

“No! Wait!” he pleaded, stopping in his tracks and holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Andi listen to me. You’ve blotted it out of your mind. The rape. The pain. It was me. I was the man who raped you all those years ago. You’ve closed off the past and shut it out of your mind. But it’s been there all the time… in the background.”

“I don’t understand,” she said weakly, her voice now distinctly like a little girl’s as some distant memory pierced her consciousness.

“You’ve been doing these things to yourself,” he said, the desperation, “…the messages… the threats… switching the DNA files and then leaving a trail for them to get back to you, like you were framing yourself… it was you all along Andi. You were doing it to yourself!”

“Why would I want to do those things to myself?” she asked. He didn’t know about the pills or how mush she had drunk. But she was clearly out of it.

“It was your way of handling the pressure… the painful memories. You couldn’t take it, so you blotted it out. And then you must have created another person to carry the anger for you, so that you could get on with your life.”

“What do you mean ‘created another person’?” she asked, crying with the pain of recollection as she memories of the rape came fleeting in and out of her mind.

“I don’t know all the reasons. I only know that it’s because of what I did. You wanted revenge. You wanted me to be punished — as I deserved to be. But you also wanted to forget your pain. And I guess you couldn’t handle both. The one wasn’t compatible with the other. So the part of you that wanted to forget, blotted it out. And then the other part of you set about getting revenge. But then, just now at the trial, because you were helping me, the other part of you didn’t just want revenge on me. It sought revenge on you too.”

“Revenge?” she echoed confused, as her mind drifted into some far off world.

“Yes. You were the one who modified the jury selection software.”

“No!” Andi whined, wiping back the tears with the backs of her free hand. “It was Lannosea!”

“Don’t you see Andi? You are Lannosea. She’s part of you — the strong part. She’s the part that wants revenge, the part that wants to punish the other part for helping me. Lannosea is just the angry side of you. She carries the anger, but you still carry the pain. That’s why she hounded you with those E-mail messages and threats. That’s why she broke into the DNA database and framed you. It was you doing to yourself to punish yourself.”

“No you’re wrong! It can’t be that! I wouldn’t betray some one who trusted me.”

“Andi I’m not blaming you. God knows, I’ve got no right to blame anyone! But you need help.”

“I don’t need any help from you!”

It looked like she was about to jump. He had to stop her.

“Lannosea!” he shouted desperately. “If you let her jump, you’ll die too!”

Wednesday, 2 September 2009 — 19:38

Alex, meanwhile, was going nowhere. He was snarled up in traffic on the Bay Bridge. In the other direction, much of the traffic was headed towards the baseball game. But on days like this, the whole road network gets clogged up as people try to find alternative routes to beat the bottlenecks. The trouble is that everyone has the same idea and that just creates more bottlenecks.

He had tried calling Martine’s hotel room several more times, but got no answer. He had considered asking the hotel to send a member of staff to check. But they would probably think he was crazy and even if they didn’t they were unlikely to treat it as a matter of any particular urgency.

But Gene must be there by now.

It was strange the way she was suddenly helping him after what he had effectively put her through in court. And yet in a way it made perfect sense. She probably felt guilty about what she had done herself. And this was her way of trying to redeem herself.

But was she right to fear for Martine’s safety?

Alex had no way of knowing that. But he knew that Manning had escaped. He had heard the news reports on the radio, so he knew that what Gene had said about Manning’s veiled threat was true. And he knew that there was a certain underlying logic to her theory that Martine was the intended target.

There was just nothing he could do about it until the traffic cleared ahead of him.

But what about Gene?

He phoned her and waited desperately for an answer.

“Hallo Ale-”

Gene’s voice was cut short abruptly.

Something had happened. It sounded like some kind of a struggle, albeit a very brief one. For the next thing he heard was a man’s voice.

“I’ve got your bitch here.”

Wednesday, 2 September 2009 — 19:41

Holding on with only one hand, Andi swept her hair back with a self-assured, almost arrogant gesture. Then she gripped the rail with both hands. The tears seemed to dry up in an instant her face grew in confidence. Even her posture and body language was different. This was no timid little girl anymore. This was a woman with attitude.

“You were pretty smart to figure it out Claymore.” The voice was deeper now. “How did you know?”

“Some of the things you said — she said.”

“Well that’s pretty smart of you for a nigger! You’re right too, I was the one who hacked the jury selection software. I mean I literally hacked it to pieces with two snips of my intellectual scissors. Two lines of code swapped round, two memory heaps expanded and that was it. I did it in five years back in the Big Apple. Actually it was very easy.

While she was talking, Claymore was surreptitiously taking off his jacket.

“The source code was on public record and all I had to do was get my hands on it, switch the object calls in the main object and recompile it. The hard part was slipping it into the system afterward. Most of the States have firewalls in place on the jury selection systems. But I beat them. I beat the bleeding heart liberal motherfuckers! I’m good at what I do Claymore, just as you were good in your chosen vocation.”

“Then I guess I deserve to die too.”

“Probably,” she said, with an indifferent shrug of her shoulders.

“Then maybe I’m the one who should jump.”

“It’s up to you.”

Seizing his opportunity, Claymore edged nearer and began climbing over the rail, making sure that none of his movements seemed too threatening.

Now, with the menacing waters far below them, they were facing each other on equal terms for the only time in their lives. But he still had to get through to her.

“Why did you frame Andi for the break-in at the DNA database. I mean I can understand why you did the break-in. That was to frame me. But why frame Andi?

“I should think that’s obvious. Andi was making trouble for me. I had to stop her.”

“But in the end that was what gave her the ammunition to save me.”

“Yes, she’s a smart girl, that Andi. But then again that’s not surprising. She’s got part of me in her. But none of that really matters because it’s the end of the line for both us.”