Chapter 3 - Open the Trunk

Just outside Toronto, on highway 401 towards Montreal, Jane fell into a light doze, the habits of her old life creeping back in. Anytime she and Cooper were on the move, she slept, because she could crash basically anywhere. Cooper would rest when they stopped and she’d stay up, keeping watch.

Her dreams were chaotic and visceral, filled with hands that clutched at her, pulling her backwards. No matter how many she twisted away from, more would emerge to clutch at her. It was disorienting and she startled awake, feeling out of sorts.

“Hey, welcome back.” Cooper smiled and rubbed her leg. Liz Phair softly played from the stereo. “Want a drink?”

“Please.”

He passed her a bottle, and she took a long swallow. Outside, the monotonous lights of the 401 sped by as they drove down the sparsely populated highway. Despite being the only real route between Toronto and Montreal, it was mostly free of cars this late at night, and they wove between giant trucks hauling freight. Cooper drove skillfully, as he did everything, maintaining what she expected was the optimal speed to maximize mileage.

If she knew her husband, he’d probably come up with a couple hundred plans by now. Cooper’s ideas were very textbook. He strongly preferred rules and structure to innovation and invention, so of course she was the complete opposite. That’s how they made such a brutally devastating pair. His knowledge, her creativity. Plus, they both knew about eighty different ways to kill people, which tended to help in their line of work.

“We’re just coming through Cornwall,” he said, “We’re an hour to Montreal. I’ve found a place we can stop at. We’ll sleep and then grab something to eat. At eight-thirty we’ll contact Richards using one of the burner phones. He’ll set a place to meet and then we’ll go there, probably no later than eleven.”

“What if he says he can’t meet right away?”

Cooper grinned, but only with his mouth. “He won’t.”

“Did you practice that line in the mirror while I was sleeping?

“Yeah, a little. It’s been a long drive and this stretch of the 401 is boring.”

“Poor baby. Have you figured anything else out? Any new angles?” She turned off the stereo so she could hear better over the drone of the car engine.

“Nothing,” he said, and his frustration was obvious. “I’ve gone over it for hours. Not a single piece of it makes sense.”

“Want to walk through it together?”

“Sure. Let’s start with the most pressing question. Did whoever sent those duplicates want us dead?”

It was an interesting place to start and not something she’d thought about. For the millionth time she marvelled at the way his brain worked. He’d managed to cut through all the complexity and noise to get right to the heart of the problem. Before she answered, she reviewed everything that had happened.

“I don’t think so,” she finally said. “It’s too sloppy.”

“Me neither. They knew where we were. We had zero idea – I mean, zero – that they were coming. They could have used a sniper. Gotten to us while we slept. Probably dozens of different ways to kill us, but instead they sent a somewhat out-of-shape person who looks like me to electrocute me while I take the trash to the back shed. It’s insane. No one gets assassinated like that. If that’s how I was killed, I’d find way to come back to life if only so I could properly die of embarrassment.”

“The version that attacked me had no idea how to counter my punch,” Jane said. “A professional would have easily blocked that, it wasn’t a great shot. They walked right into it.”

Cooper continued to stare moodily out the window and for a time they were each lost in their own theories.

Jane’s thoughts were inexplicably stuck on the block party they’d been planning to attend two weeks from now. Cooper was going to make macaroni salad. She hated macaroni salad, but she loved how normal it was. They would have shown up a little late because they didn’t know that many people in the neighborhood and they would have wanted to blend in. Cooper was planning to watch baseball so he’d have something to talk about. There was every possibility she’d get into an argument with someone about what the neighborhood should do about the squirrels digging up everyone’s petunias. The answer was flyers, reminding people not to feed them. She couldn’t care in the slightest if she was right and it was only through arbitrary indifference that she decided to die on the hill of putting up flyers. It was blissfully, wonderfully low stakes and she’d been looking forward to it. There was a real possibility she’d get into a fist fight with Christina if that bitch pushed back against her plan.

Instead, they’d have to miss the party. Start all over again. She wasn’t sure how many more false starts her heart could handle. She’d already asked of it more than what was reasonable and part of her worried that the rest of their lives would be an endless sequence of running and resets until they were either caught or killed.

“We still have well-placed friends,” Cooper said, breaking her train of thought. “Maybe we reach out to a few of them, see if they’ve heard anything.”

“Let’s try to stay as retired as possible. Richards is plenty and we can decide our next step after we talk to him.”

Cooper rubbed his jaw. “This has to be related to that last missing month, right?”

“We don’t know that.”

“We do though. If this was any other circumstance, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. Coincidence doesn’t exist, it’s just cause and effect that haven’t been properly introduced. Us getting attacked by our own duplicates six months after we wake up in a hotel in Europe with no memory of the proceeding four weeks is pretty hard to swallow as just two random, unrelated occurrences.”

“The sort of lives we used to lead lend themselves to insane occurrences.”

“Insane, but not random. There’s a difference.”

She looked out the window, not sure how to respond. More than anything, she didn’t want the two things to be related, because then they’d have to go back to trying to figure out what had happened during that last month, and she felt they’d exhausted all their alternatives. Their hearts wouldn’t heal right if they kept picking at the scab.

They were the sort of people that didn’t deal well with unanswered questions. Ambiguity, sure. Vague mission guidelines? No problem. But both of them needed a firm goal, a well-defined objective. This was, so far, a bunch of weird stuff that was leaving them both unsettled. Neither were operating as well as they should and she worried about how many mistakes they were making.

Flashing lights from behind the car drew her attention and she sat up. The side mirror showed a police car following them close, lights on, the officer motioning for them to pull over. Cooper groaned and clenched the steering wheel. Her stomach clenched.

“How did I not see him?”

Jane rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s been a long day. Let’s just get this over with.”

Cooper pulled the car to a stop and Jane took a series of breaths through her nose, getting herself into character to deal with the cop. If she believed who she was, it wasn’t a lie. She was a ditzy, tired housewife, driving to Montreal with her husband. She most certainly was not on the run after faking her own death and her car absolutely did not contain two corpses. Ditzy housewife. No corpses. Ditzy. Breathe.

The officer flashed light through the window and Jane squinted from the glare. Cooper rolled down the window and Jane willed her heart rate to be normal.

“Hi folks, sorry to stop you so late,” the officer said, with false cheer in his voice. As he spoke, he darted his flashlight from Jane’s face to the backseat and then back up to the front. This wasn’t the slightly paunchy, bored, ‘just-doing-a-job’ cop she’d been hoping for, one that would crank out the ticket, wave them on and get back to his night. No, this one was young, with a lean face and suspicious eyes. This one was dangerous.

“Not at all.” Cooper said. “Was I speeding?”

“No, but you’ve got a busted taillight back there.”

“Sorry about that,” Cooper gave a sheepish chuckle. “I fell into it while we were packing the car, and the whole darn thing broke.”

Cooper’s ability to improvise was impressive and part of the reason he was so good at it was because he stayed as close to the truth. Lies, Cooper once told her, were too hard to keep straight, so why not try to tell as much of the truth as possible? While Cooper himself didn’t fall into the brake light, a person certainly did. Close enough.

“Bit late to be starting a trip, isn’t it?”

“We didn’t even know we were taking it when the night started.” Cooper laughed, once again dancing on the edge of the truth. “Going to Montreal at two in the morning was not on our bingo card.”

Cooper was charming and easygoing, but it didn’t relax the officer, who continued his precise scrutiny of the interior of the car. Jane didn’t like how this was going. She didn’t like it at all. That six sense that all successful agents had, that premonition that something wasn’t right – it was going off on full alert. This cop wasn’t going to be snowed by aw-shucks, easygoing Cooper. This cop was like her.

A shark.

“But you know how it goes,” Cooper continued. “You want to hit the road as fast as possible, so you rush. I understand why you had to pull us over.”

“Mm hm. License and registration, please?”

“No problem, officer..?” Cooper left it as a hanging question as he handed over the documents, trying to make nice.

“Wait here.” The cop grabbed the paperwork from Cooper’s hand and took them back to his cruiser, ignoring Cooper completely. Jane bit her lip.

“We are absolutely fucked,” she said. “He’s not buying anything you said.”

“Shit,” Cooper said.

They never questioned each other when they were working. There was never any, 'are you sure', or 'maybe you’re just tired'. Both of them had their own intuitions and while they were in synch seventy percent of the time, she’d often trigger to things he missed and vice versa. If they said it, they meant it and if they didn’t mean it, they didn’t say it. The fact that she said the cop was on to them was enough for Cooper and now it was them, together, against the problem.

“We don’t have great options,” she said.

“We do not.” Cooper kept a close watch on the officer through the rearview mirror. “He’s already punched in our license plate. If we knock him out, we’ve probably got ten minutes, tops, before they launch an APB for this car. We’d have to ditch and steal one and that’s a crazy amount of risk. It would turn the drive to Montreal into a Jane and Cooper Where’s Waldo game, only we’re not hard to find and the people looking aren’t bored teenagers from the nineties passing time on the toilet.”

“You’ve got to keep him out of the trunk. We can’t explain away two corpses.”

“There is another way,” he said.

“There is.” She knew what he was going to suggest. She’d already thought of it. She hated it, but it was probably less hassle than incapacitating him. They were both ruthless about confronting life as existed, not as they wanted it to be. Would she rather a universe where they weren’t pulled over? Sure, but that’s not the one she lived in, so they needed to deal with what was in front of them. Sometimes, the only choice wasn’t a good option, it was just the least bad option.

Waiting for the cop to return, she found her frustration growing. Without knowing how, she felt like they didn’t have time to waste with this. Dealing with this overeager police officer was just an unnecessary and complicated speedbump that she had no patience for.

The police officer’s return halted all further conversation. He sidled up beside the car and handed Cooper back their licenses. Once again, that flashlight, that pesky, snoopy flashlight, bounced around the car’s interior, taking a good hard shine on their luggage in the back seat.

“Where’d you folks say you were going? Quebec City?”

“Montreal,” Cooper said. Inwardly, Jane groaned. That was such a novice way of uncovering lies, repeating back a previous part of conversation, but changing it.

“Why’s your luggage in the backseat?”

“We’ve got luggage in the trunk, too.”

“More than the four bags you’ve got back there? How many more pieces do you have in the trunk? Why are you packing so much? How long are you going for?”

“Which of those questions would you like me to answer?” Cooper’s face had gone blank as he now realized what Jane had already picked up on. They were screwed. This cop wasn’t buying a single ounce of their story. The questions didn’t even matter at this point.

“Why don’t we start with taking a look in the trunk?” The cop smiled politely. Jane ran her tongue over her teeth. They were fucked.

“Pardon me?” Cooper asked, playing all innocent. It was pointless, though. Jane already knew they were cooked. Tonight wasn’t bouncing in their direction.

“I’d like you to open your trunk for me, please.” Now the officer put some steel into his voice. A little note of authority. He was getting in that trunk, one way or the other.

Cooper turned to her and raised his eyebrows.

You want me to take him out? they said.

Jane gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head. Too late. She sighed about what she’d have to do, and the cop flashed his light at her.

“This boring to you?” he barked.

“No. It’s not boring. But we can’t open the trunk.”

“I beg to differ, ma’am. Step out of the car and open the trunk. Now.”

“No.”

“I’ll give you until the count of three.”

Jane opened the glove box and reached for a small manila envelope.

“Hey, hey, hey,” the cop yelled, dropping his hand to his hip. Jane thrust the package at him, across Cooper’s lap.

“Open it,” she said.

“Get out of the car, now,” the cop said, close to pulling his gun. “What’s in the trunk? What’s in the trunk?”

The situation was close to deadly. If he pulled his gun, Cooper would stop him, and it would be violent. Simple as that. Despite the fact that Jane was about to have a gun pointed at her, she wasn’t afraid for herself, she was afraid for the cop. She needed to de-escalate and fast. She waggled the papers at him and the words fell out in a tumble.

“We have diplomatic immunity. These are our documents. If you look inside, you’ll find federal licenses and all the paperwork. There’s a code for both of us, you can run it back to your HQ and tell them to punch the code into CONSTAT. It will verify who we are.

The cop flicked his flashlight between both of them, uncertainty showing on his face. Jane continued.

“We’re not opening the trunk and without a warrant, you can’t make us. So, we’ll happily follow you back to the station house if you’d like, and while you file the paperwork, we’ll call our lawyers, who will verify our identities, at which point we will drop an avalanche of shit on you so monumental, you’d be able to give lectures on what the villagers of Pompeii went through. Or, you can just run the fucking documents and we can get out of here.”

She smiled sweetly at him.

“Either way, we are not opening the God. Damn. Trunk.”

The officer chewed at his lips, holding the small manila folder like it contained anthrax. He still didn’t remove his hand from the holster at his hip. Finally, after an uncomfortable several seconds, he spoke.

“Wait here.”

He spun and made his way, double time, back to the squad car. He practically ripped the radio from the dash. Jane rubbed her face.

“Well,” Cooper said. “This will now out us to pretty much every single intelligence agency in North America. Maybe some of the European ones, too. The second they type our codes into that system, about four hundred notifications are going to go out.”

“True.” She frowned. It wasn’t the play she wanted to make.

“Hey.” Cooper rubbed her knee. “It was the right call. We can’t be going around knocking out random police officers. All anyone will see is that we’re active and using credentials we really shouldn’t be using. They’ll send out some agents to talk to us, we’ll get a wrist slap, and that will be that.”

Cooper was trying to make her feel better and there was a good chance he was right. But truth was, this play was going to put out some alarms. Either you retire and stay out of the game or you make plays, but not both. This would confuse people and if there was one thing clandestine government agencies didn’t like, it was things that were confusing. Often the fastest way to resolve something complicated was to eliminate it.

The cop returned to the car, only now his face was flushed.

“Apologies,” he spat out the word like he’d eaten a rotten grape. “Your documentation checks out. Have a good night.”

With that, he spun and made his way back to the car. He slammed the door and drove the car around their vehicle, sending gravel and dirt flying up into the air. The noise of his engine soon faded and then it was just her and Cooper sitting alone on the side of the highway at two in the morning while trucks drove by.

“Well,” Cooper said.

“Well,” she agreed.

They sat in the car for awhile, the reality of what they’d just done sinking in. Jane’s eyes blurred as she watched the cars zip by, hoping those people were having a better night than she was. Cooper broke the silence first.

“Realistically, this hits the wires in about six hours. It will take them a bit of time to mobilize. As long as we don’t take more than a day with Richards, we should be okay.”

She leaned over to kiss his cheek. “We’ll figure it out. Together. Like we always do.”

“Yeah, we will.”

He started the car and pulled onto the highway, merging with the traffic. She hoped this was as bad as this night would get.

>> On to Chapter 4