| Subject: Chapter Two |
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grit kitty
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Date Posted: 18:59:21 03/12/01 Mon
In reply to:
grit kitty
's message, "Learning Birkoff" on 18:56:34 03/12/01 Mon
~~~~
TWO
“Jason, come up here, would you?” asked Nikita’s clear voice through the intercom speaker at his desk.
“Why, of course,” he replied, lingering after the end of the word course so she might hear the implied darlin’ that he resisted adding. “I’ll be right there.”
He found her sitting on a stool at the back of that great, glass box, tapping a keyboard occasionally with one finger, reading text as it scrolled by.
“You wanted to…see me?”
Nikita shifted her glance from the monitor to his smiling face for a moment, the hint of a smile reflecting back at him.
“I wanted to tell you something, Jason.”
“And what would that be?” He moved closer, stepping that extra two inches closer than the normal boundaries of personal space allowed. A clean scent with notes of sandalwood hit his nose, a reward for his cheek.
Nikita looked at the monitor again. “I’ve pulled strings to keep you here in Section.”
“Oh, really. I must say, I’m touched, Nikita. I really am.” He edged another half-inch forward and leaned against the rail, gaining his upper body another full inch closer. “And what might be your reasons for doing that little favor for me?”
“I have your cooperation, then?”
“Completely, darlin’. Utter devotion to whatever it is that’s motivated you to keep me close by.”
Nikita looked at him. That same smile played on her lips, slight but genuine, and he could see her eyes leisurely take in his hair, his face, down his body and back up to his face again. She shook her head, three slow movements, side to side. “Actually, I’m doing it so you won’t be a one-trick pony.”
Jason’s smile froze for a heartbeat, but he recovered quickly. He had no idea what she was talking about, but at least she was talking.
“One trick pony? And what trick would that be? Maybe my devastating effect on women?”
Nikita’s smile threatened to break into a grin, but she reined it back to that amused lilt of lips. “In your time at Center, you did one thing, very well, it’s true, but basically, it was only one skill set in Communications.”
Jason straightened his spine a fraction, unsettled. He’d never before been so subtly criticized. His voice thickened, and fell back on his native accent. “Ah can do a lot of things. Very well, Ah might add.”
“You could do more, and here in Section is the best place to learn.”
“Are you sure it isn’t just to make sure I’m around?” Jason swallowed his momentary lapse, and leaned hard on glib flirtation. “Maybe just a little?”
Nikita opened a drive drawer and took out a disc. “Here.” She handed it to Jason.
“What’s this?”
“Your rotation schedule. I want you to learn everything you can in the next few months.”
“And then?”
“And then, we’ll see.” Nikita turned back to her monitor. “If you have any questions, ask me.”
She ignored him, then: a dismissal. He pocketed the disc and straightened, walking quickly to the exit, not bothering to swagger since he knew she wasn’t watching. He glanced at the looming windows, and resumed his usual springy stride. Nikita might not be watching, but everyone else in the entire area could see him. Much as he enjoyed his extroverted tendencies, the thought of working up here, always on display, soured the pit of his stomach.
~~
Jason wasn’t unhappy about his placement. As the weeks piled up under her administration, the politics in Section became refreshingly straightforward. Jason found it a nice change from Center. He still worried that rag of implied criticism that Nikita had tossed his way, but as he rotated through several divisions at One, he found he also liked his boundaries challenged. He began learning things: new skills sets and engaging sciences that educated him about advanced image manipulation, guidance missile technology, tracking systems, remote thermal tagging. Today, his on-going instruction drew him to the bowels of BioTech with a real-life lesson on slow-acting poisons.
He entered the outer office, a PDA full of the relevant data in hand. An older man pinned him with an authoritative stare.
“Hi, I’m Jason Crawford,” said Jason. “I…”
“I know who you are,” the man said brusquely. “You need to speak to Janklow.”
“Jenkl—“
“Janklow. In there.” He jerked his thumb to the door behind him.
“Why, thank you.” Jason breezed past him and through the door.
People in white lab coats ambled purposefully around a large lab environment. No one seemed to take notice of him, so Jason walked to the only office desk and stood in front of it, waiting for the man sitting there to look up from the papers on his blotter. When he didn’t move, Jason cleared his throat.
The dark-haired man glanced up, the lenses of his glasses magnifying annoyance in his eyes. “I’m busy. Try talking to Anita, over there…” He looked down, then snapped back again: a perfect double-take.
“I was told you’re the one I need to see.”
The man gaped at him for several embarrassing moments. Jason could see his eyes crawl over his face and hair, feeling a sense of déjà vu. Slow realization pulled the man’s features out of their stunned expression. “Oh, it’s you. The twin. I’d heard about you.” He shook his head, as if trying to clear it. “Damn, that’s weird.”
“I’m Jason Crawford.” Jason stuck out his hand challengingly.
“Of course you are. Who else could you possibly be? I’m Janklow.” He reached out and gingerly clasped the offered hand. After two quick pumps, he let go. “Damned weird. Almost like having the kid Birkoff around again.”
Jason put on Pained Smile Number Two, one of three special expressions he’d developed recently from the cumbersome burden of being his brother’s twin. Pained Smile Number One was for double-takes and that ridiculous ‘er, um’ sound that issued involuntarily from people; he used Number Two every time someone pointed out his resemblance to his brother, and Pained Smile Number Three was for when they mentioned the fact that Birkoff was his brother and added, “It was so tragic; that poor kid”. Although attrition in Section was high, Birkoff had been such an institution, affecting so many departments, that it happened often enough for Jason to develop the specific smiles in response.
“So, Jenkle, about this analysis --”
“It’s Janklow.”
“Of course it is. This analysis came in from the Beijing mission.” Jason set the panel on top of the papers Janklow had been reading. “The team leader needs specific work-up and antidote in twelve hours.”
“Okay. Leave it here; I’ll get a team on it right away.”
“I’m to observe.”
“Hah? What the hell for?”
Jason shrugged disarmingly. “Nikita said so herself.” He leaned forward and tapped the panel. “There’s the authorization.”
Janklow’s gaze swept over him again, resentment plain on his face. Jason felt an urge to stamp his feet and show his teeth like a horse for sale. Or maybe he should just slip into his ‘Birkoff mode’, like he’d had to at Madeline’s command before she shipped him off to Center. He could haunt the entire Section with a living representation of Birkoff’s ghost and satisfy the morbid curiosity that swiveled heads behind him wherever he went lately.
Building resentment tasted bitterly metallic.
~~
Classification of the poison eluded them for hours. The novelty of having a doppelganger at his elbow seemed to have waned; after the first hour, Janklow’s eyes stopped skittering off Jason’s face when he looked at him. Janklow took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose after another prolonged search through the microscope.
“It’s not acting like a poison, not really.” He opened his eyes. He looked older, tired, lines cutting fans from where his lids met. He looked at Jason myopically. “It’s really strange how it seems to affect only one system first, then… Shit, you look just like Birkoff.”
“No, I’m a better dresser,” Jason snapped.
“Sorry.” He returned his glasses to their perch on his nose. “I hadn’t seen him in ages, you know, before he, uh--um--.”
Jason hung out Pained Smile Number One automatically.
Janklow shook it off. Then, oddly, he began to laugh softly. “We were stuck, just like this once, me and Birkoff. Well, not just like this. Red Cell had managed to breach the entire operation with an engineered strain of bacteria. It had a nasty curve on the death rate, and even nastier progression of systemic attack. This was in the Paris facility, you know; that couldn’t happen here.”
“Really.”
“I sure as hell hope not. I don’t ever want to be in a situation like that again, ever.”
“You seemed to have survived it.”
“Yeah, well, I almost didn’t. The Alpha team nabbed the bug’s maker, and he mixed up a special antibiotic cocktail to kill the thing, but it was a damned uncomfortable day in Comm.”
“Comm?”
“Containment stuck me down there. Those barriers slammed shut and there was nothing we could do about it. Me and him, some Comm people, and that one guy who died, right there…I forget his name. And Gail.” He threw a smirk up at Jason. “Gail, she was fun. For a while.”
”Preaching to the choir, here. I’ve had a Gail or two myself.”
Janklow frowned. “God, not here, I hope?”
“Ah, no. Not yet.”
“No, that’s right. She was shipped off to Two years ago. Frankly, that’d have been too weird, really.” Janklow stared at him as if he were gaping at a sideshow exhibit, an oily mix of disgust and pity on his face.
“What?”
“Gail. She was Birkoff’s girlfriend, until she was my girlfriend.” He frowned again. “Kinda fickle, but good in the sack. Those hours were surreal. People falling down and dying in the hallways, and there was Gail, playing me against Birkoff, stuck together in the same small compartment for hours.” He shook his head. “I gotta admit it, Birkoff had cojones when he needed ‘em. Did you know he faced down Operations? And lived to tell about it?”
Jason’s throat wouldn’t work; a strange paralysis struck him instantly dumb. No, I don’t know anything about him spun around his brain, a phrase and a curse and a cry that shouted and echoed in the cavernous void in his skull. No knowledge, no expertise, no memories. Nothing existed in his brain but that one shameful thought. Without substance, another joined it, in Walter’s voice: Anyone ever tell you that? Some strangled sound escaped him; it must have sounded like a generic ‘uh-huh’, because Janklow kept talking.
“Oh, yeah, Operations flipped out, wanted to get out of containment, and he was ordering Birkoff to open the doors, threatening him, and Birkoff just said in this calm voice, ‘No, sir, I can’t do that’, over and over.” He turned to the microscope once more. “Then Operations just shot the damned door out, the crazy son-of-a-bitch. The real kicker is he didn’t cancel Birkoff the minute the containment doors went back up. Crazy.” He leaned over the eyepiece once more.
Jason worked hard to swallow with his dry mouth. “Uh, yeah. Operations was wound a few turns too tight, wasn’t he.”
“Hoo, you know it. Crazy son-of-a-bitch. Crazy,” he repeated. Janklow fell silent for a few minutes, and then abruptly sat up. “Hey, this isn’t a poison. This is a poison with an agenda! I think it’s a bacteria, disguised to look like poison.”
“Really.”
Janklow beckoned the other team members around. Excitement grew around that one microscope, and twenty-syllable words started flying. Jason sank through the throng until he stood at the periphery of the group. They could have been speaking Chinese for all he could understand them, but the flurry of voices faded to white noise, overpowered by that marching chant in Jason’s head:
I don’t know anything about him.
~~~
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