Free Out of Touch by Clara Ward

him so openly?
    Does he understand the analysis? Why doesn’t he say something? Nigel thought, as he looked directly at James and smiled.
    Nigel wasn’t a telepath. His mind wasn’t even silenced. James glanced at the intelligence correlates poster and the name “Nigel Radford” popped out. With a dry mouth James said, “Nice analysis.”
    “Thanks,” Nigel bobbed his head. “It was my thesis work, but I added the cluster analysis and ran another set of data with the new groups.”
    James tried to look at the analysis section of the poster. Tried to formulate an intelligent reply. He couldn’t, and he felt there was no air to breath. “Excuse me, I don’t feel well.”
    “Maybe later.”
    James left the room, hurried down the hallway, and up the stairs to the mezzanine, just to avoid a group milling around the elevator.  He stood with his back against a wall, breathing hard. The hotel, so traditional in every other way, had modern plastic sculpture jutting out from the wall around him. It was like standing amidst a display of Halloween masks from his youth.  A green swirly oval slanted out on his right. A dark face-like distortion seemed to glower from the left.
    He had just made a fool of himself in front of, who, an English post-doc? Had anyone else noticed? Would Nigel Radford even remember the encounter? Why had his mind refused to focus on the puerile poster?
    Had someone really ordered Brandenburg’s death?
     
    August 9, 2024 – Bangkok, Thailand
     
    “Alak, I have a question for you.” James held the note upright, still bagged, between his index and ring fingers.
    The government man stood silently at the far side of the lab bench and nodded. He was a young, unremarkable bureaucrat of mixed Thai and Chinese ancestry. His face seemed chubby above his narrow shoulders and clinging suit. A navy blue briefcase bag weighed down his left shoulder, creating a disturbing asymmetry. James had never before seen a point to Alak dropping by after each foreign conference. As a scientific liaison, Alak was inadequate to understand the new research findings, as a government minder, he must be bored silly – until now.
    James flipped the ziploc with the note back and forth between his fingers, used to the feel of it now, the uncertainty it represented. “I wasn’t sure what to do with this.”
    James flipped the bag to a rhythm that might be his heartbeat, ten, twenty, thirty times. Surely an American functionary would have interrupted by now. “I think I’ve figured out what it means, but I need to know.”
    “How can I comment until I see what it says?” Alak spoke softly, in a voice like a shrug of the shoulders, but without the shrug.
    “But then, or later, you must tell me if you find out.”
    “If you want to find out—“
    “That’s your business not mine. I wouldn’t ask, unless I needed to know.”
    Another thirty heartbeats, James flipped the note between his fingers. He almost hoped Alak would never tell him. Could he satisfy his curiosity and still imagine himself free?
    He handed the note to Alak who kept it in the bag, read it, stared at it, then asked calmly, “You think you know what it means?”
    “Joseph Brandenburg, who worked with my father, died on June 23 of this year.”
    “And D?”
    “My best conjecture is Davies.”
    At that, Alak’s eyebrows rose, he slid the note into his dark bag. The bag was a hybrid of a purse and a briefcase and might look sporty, if it wasn’t always overfilled. James couldn’t stop staring at it once his note was inside.
    “I’ll pass this along.”
    “And tell me what you find.”
    Alak bobbed his head in either agreement or a pretense of respect. He left, and James missed the feel of the note between his fingers.
     
January 26, 2025 – Lucerne, Switzerland
     
    On the day Alak confirmed Davies’, now President Davies’, involvement, James gave himself a dot on his calendar. Then he added the new encryption software to his pilot. Alak