Face/Mask (39 page)

The agents on the street looked toward Janus’s vehicle as he waited nervously at a red light just a few blocks from his destination. Their mirrored air-masks gave them a faceless, inhuman appearance, adding to his sense of foreboding. They had surely noted his administration licence plate. He guessed that it was all that stood between him and certain detention, although he felt far from confident about his security. Even at the checkpoint off the bridge he’d been unsure if he’d be allowed to get through, but the guard there was as happy as always to take his money. At least one thing hadn’t changed since the bombing.

A few minutes later he got to the familiar building and parked in his usual spot in the lot. Heading for the door he spotted three heavily armed men walking in his direction. He slipped through the door and buzzed Sahar’s apartment. He was happy to be buzzed in right away, and didn’t notice that she’d done so without a word of greeting. He was more concerned about the armed men on the sidewalk.

The disinfectant beam couldn’t have cleared him for entry fast enough. Once inside he breathed a little easier, although he knew there was nothing to stop the RCMP agents from barging into the building if they wanted to.

He half-jogged to the elevator and pressed repeatedly on the call button. During the few seconds it took for the elevator doors to open Janus looked down the hall and through the building’s glass doors. He froze at the sight of the three men in front of the entrance, but they walked by without pausing.

I’d never be able to explain getting arrested here to Terry
, he told himself, feeling a weight slip off his shoulders as the elevator doors slid closed behind him.

Moments later he was standing in front of Sahar’s apartment, the door half-open and welcoming. He stepped through and locked the door behind him. The soft Arabic love songs that she favoured weren’t playing from her radio, but he heard movement coming from her bedroom. He headed in that direction, an aching need to hold her in his arms almost pushing him to run there.

He took a few steps and then heard a man’s coughing from the other room. The beaded curtains opened and Robert Sévigny stepped through them, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief.

“What…” Janus tried to speak, but words failed him.

Sévigny slid the handkerchief into his pocket and stood there for several seconds, waiting for Janus to speak first. When Janus finally spoke he shouted his question at the man who stood barely a meter away from him.

“What the hell’re you doing here?”

“
Monsieur le Directeur.
”

“Sévigny. What’s going on? Did something happen to…anyone here?”

“Come,
Monsieur
Janus. We both know who lived here. You can say her name.”

“What do you mean ‘lived here’? Where’s Sahar?”

“I’m sure you can put two and two together. You must have had some brains to get to your position, after-all.”

“Quit jerking me around, for Christ’s sake! What the hell are you doing here?”

Sévigny’s shoulders slumped and he looked disappointed.

“You can’t see the obvious. I came back here to see you.”

“Came back? How did you know I’d be here?”

“
Merde
, you are stupid. Thursday nights, eight-thirty PM, like clockwork. The guard on the bridge let me know when you entered Laval tonight, but that was a redundant precaution. I had no doubt you’d be punctual.”

Janus moved to the sofa he’d lain naked on so often over the previous months, and sat down, his head in his hands. He’d always known that his relationship with Sahar would eventually become known to the authorities, so he shouldn’t have been surprised. But this didn’t tell him the one thing he needed to know.

“So, where is she?”

“She’s gone.”

Janus jumped up at those words.

“What do you mean ‘gone’? What’ve you done to her?”

“I did my duty,
Monsieur le Directeur
, as a member of this administration. Something you haven’t done for far too long.”

“What duty? Did you hurt her? Did you…” Janus’s voice trailed off, unable to find the words to express what he feared the most.

“I arrested her.”

“Arrested her? For comfort?”

Sévigny eyed him carefully, before rubbing his unshaven chin and nodding in understanding.

“
Mon Dieu
, you really are stupid. No, not for comfort. For sedition. For conspiring with terrorists against our national interests. Did you truly have no idea what she was involved in?”

“There’s some sort of mistake. She wasn’t involved with terrorists. She was just a prostitute.”

“Yes? And what do you think she did when she wasn’t giving blowjobs to unhappily married men? You think she thought of nothing all day but the orgasms she had to fake for you each week? You underestimate her,
Monsieur
Janus
.
She was much more than you ever knew.”

“Is she at your headquarters, the one I met you at? Or do you have her here in Laval?”

Sévigny sighed again, as if tired of explaining the obvious to a particularly dense child. He stepped a little closer and put his hand on Janus’s shoulder, causing the latter to flinch slightly.

“No. She isn’t at a police station. She won’t be appearing at the
Palais de Justice
any time soon. Not for this. Not for someone like her.”

He pushed Janus gently aside and stepped past him, heading for the apartment door.

“Wait,” Janus called out, causing Sévigny to turn back toward him. “You can’t just leave like this. She can’t just disappear from the face of the Earth.”

“
Pauvre idiot
,” Sévigny said, and shook his head again. “Do you live all your life with your head buried in the sand? Sahar Chamseddine never existed. She was a pleasant fantasy you had during some free time. Now it’s time to go back to reality, to your wife and children. Even to your job. Things have happened which allow me to give you a bit of a reprieve, so go back to being a good little
fonctionnaire
.”

With that he left the apartment, not bothering to close the door behind him. Janus wanted to run after him, but he knew there was no use. He rushed to Sahar’s bedroom and found only the bare mattress on an old metal frame. The closet door stood open, as did several drawers in her dresser. Even as he approached he knew he’d find them all empty.

They had removed all trace of her existence, except the pain he felt. Janus sat on the mattress and wept.

October 21, 2039:

Sévigny had met Hans Schultz in person once before, at a ceremony celebrating the 10th anniversary of The Re-Constituted Military Police held in Ottawa. Schultz had just been named Homeland Security Czar and was making it a point to get to know as many of his Division Heads as he could. He wanted to “look each man in the eye and size him up,” he’d said on a number of occasions, the quote repeated slavishly by bloggers who followed him around.

On this occasion, Sévigny rode the elevator up to Schultz’s seventeenth floor office in Homeland’s regional headquarters. He kept his right hand in his pants pocket, wrapped around Sahar Chamseddine’s mirror-case. It held such a small object, yet it had the power to affect countless lives. He wondered how Schultz had been able to sound so calm and even cheerful when he called, considering what could happen if anyone learned of the chip’s contents.

The elevator door hissed open, and Sévigny walked down a long corridor lined with men in military-style uniforms standing at attention. He bristled slightly at this ostentatious display of power in his city. While the RCMP was a division of the giant Homeland apparatus, he didn’t like being reminded that there would always be a foreign leadership that he had to answer to.

When he came to a door at the end of the hall his breathing was laboured. He took a few moments to wipe his brow with the back of his hand before the unmarked door opened on its own. Once inside he saw a middle-aged woman sitting at a desk. She glanced up at him as he entered, and pressed a button beside her keyboard. From a door to her left Sévigny heard a faint click.

“He’s waiting for you,” she said in an accent that would have been more at home in Texas than in the second-largest French speaking city in the world.

Sévigny stepped through this second door into a large, sparsely furnished office that had little in the way of extravagant décor. He remembered the luxurious furnishings that filled Yves Prescott’s office. Homeland Security’s offices, even at this high level, were purely functional.

Schultz sat behind a narrow desk that was covered with reports, on both disc as well as paper. His narrow, bespectacled eyes were glued to his P-screen, which reflected an eerie blue on his pale face. Sévigny had no choice but to stand there, waiting to be noticed.

Suddenly, Sévigny felt the familiar burning sensation in his chest and knew that he was going to start coughing. He turned his head and pulled out his handkerchief, coughing harshly into it. He was gasping for air, but all he thought of was the embarrassment of this happening in front of the Homeland Security Czar.

Schultz looked up at him with a surprised and slightly hurt expression.

“Dear man,” he said, rising quickly from his desk and coming around to slap Sévigny’s back. “Are you quite all right?”

Sévigny nodded. His cough had slowed, although his eyes were filled with tears. He saw blood in his handkerchief and he crumpled it into his pocket before turning to face his superior.

“So rude of me,” Schultz went on, “I was just reading these awfully boring reports and didn’t see you standing there.”

“It’s quite all right, Mr. Schultz,” Sévigny managed to say. “I didn’t want to interrupt you.”

“Nonsense, nonsense. Could I get you something to drink, Robert? Perhaps some hot tea with lemon. Best thing for a cough, my mother always said.”

“That isn’t necessary,” Sévigny said, sitting down in the proffered chair. “Thank you.”

Schultz rushed around to his side of the desk and buzzed his secretary.

“Luanne, could you be a dear and bring us some tea. And see if you can’t scrounge up a lemon to squeeze into it. Thank you, hon.”

Sitting back in a plain cloth chair Schultz beamed at Sévigny, who wasn’t sure if he should smile back or maintain a more professional demeanour.

“Well, Robert…do you mind if I call you by your Christian name?”

“Not at all Mr. Schultz,” Sévigny answered, noting that his host didn’t offer him the same privilege of informality.

“Thanks, Rob. How have you been? You look under the weather.”

Sévigny was tongue-tied. The last thing he’d expected was to make small talk at a time like this. Fortunately, Schultz moved on quickly from this unanswered question.

“I know, I know. We’re all under
this
weather. Not exactly the fresh air and sunshine we had growing up in Virginia, is it? But still, there’s no time to rest, even if you aren’t in tip-top shape. I know you want to get out there and catch those bombers.”

“Yes sir.”

“I don’t mind telling you, Bob, that this is a bad business. Very bad. Until last week we’d all been very happy with how things have been going up here in Qwee-beck.”

Sévigny blinked at the way Schultz mangled his province’s name, but merely nodded in reply.

“A bombing of one of your police detachments; that’s going to get people’s attention. And you say that nobody has taken credit for this?”

“It has been four days, sir, and we’ve heard nothing.”

“My, isn’t that unusual. Well, any help you need from my office you will let me know, won’t you?”

“Thank you, sir. We have rounded up-”

“The usual suspects?” Schultz interrupted, with his eyebrows raised.

“Uh, yes sir. Quite a number. And we have many informants on the ground. We will eventually catch the people who did this.”

“Well, as long as you find somebody to hold responsible.”

“Sir?”

“Now don’t be naïve, Bobby. As far as the public is concerned the only thing that matters is that someone is punished for this attack on our administration. The last thing we want is for it to look like someone could attack us and get away with it.”  

“So you mean if we don’t find the actual bombers…”

“You just do what you have to,” Schultz’s face showed such little expression when he spoke that Sévigny wondered if he’d misunderstood his meaning.

Just then the door opened and Luanne the secretary walked in with a plastic tray and two Styrofoam cups, along with a small plate of lemon slices. She placed the tray on Schultz’s desk and wordlessly handed a cup to each man. There were no teabags in either cup, but they smelled like tea.

“Thanks, hon,” Schultz said, smiling brightly as he took a cup from her hands. “Careful, Robbie. It’s hot. And don’t forget the lemon.”

Once she was gone Sévigny wanted to go back to what Schultz had just suggested, but he’d already moved on to another subject.