Free Time Is Broken by Samuel Clark Page B

resigned himself to the day-to-day tasks of the job.  The money was good, the apartment he lived in was luxurious, his living circumstances were greatly improved, and he balanced it against the cost of keeping his mouth shut and living a solitary existence. It couldn't go on forever... could it?, he rationalised.    
    He stepped inside the elevator and pushed the button for the 3 rd floor, and walked into the dark room, the windows were blacked out and there was only lamp light, monitor light and the flashing green, red and blue of the hard-drives. There were five stations in all, each with four screens. He took a seat at his desk, placing a cup of coffee at the side.
    “ Hey!” the employee to the left of him said. “Everything good?”
    “ Yeah, all good. You? How's the wife and kids?”
    “ They're good.”
    “ Good.”
    And that was the extent of the conversation.
    He'd given up putting the call out as soon as he located her and decided to wait for a month plus one day. If she disappeared inexplicably during that time, he would start over again. Since there was no advice on how to proceed coming from his superiors, he had to devise his own method, adaptive thinking. He had doubts, maybe a month was too long, maybe he should reduce the time window to a week, maybe two weeks. A period of consistency in Emilie's location was indefinite and he wondered if she might be aware that she was being tracked and watched, as if she knew, precognitively, the fields agents were coming. Stick to the plan, one month plus one day, he assured himself. He pulled up the footage from the C.C.T.V. feed, grainy green-screen, and watched her as she left her apartment building and made her way along the street. He switched camera view points whenever she disappeared out of frame, then waited a few minutes for her to appear in the next. Sometimes she wouldn't appear at all. It was as if she simply disappeared into nothingness and he would start the month plus one day over again. She hadn't vanished in thirty two days and her routine remained consistent. Morning coffee in the café 'Chez Joesphe' on the Promenade de Anglais. Everyday she would have a single pull on an antiquated fruit machine and she would predict, like clockwork the three symbols that came up.
    “ Deux cerises et sept,” she would say, then slot the coin in and pull the lever. Sure enough, two cherries and a seven would appear. This happened far too often for it to be a mere coincidence and the bar owner would recoil in shock every time, and then merely shake his head and shrug when Emilie couldn't or wouldn't explain how she did it. 
    Then to work, she owned a watch repair shop on a cobbled back street just off the promenade. At first, the voyeurism didn't sit well with him, but as the months progressed he became more and more comfortable with it. He never used the cameras to watch her in an inappropriate manner and as long as he stuck to this caveat, he could live with himself and the invasion of privacy involved.
    He watched as she opened the store and rearranged some of the antique time pieces on display in the window, satisfied that this was stable activity he picked up the phone and gave the field agents the all clear.
    For the rest of the day he typed up his report on Emilie's activities and the reasoning behind his method, all the while anticipating and dreading a call back from the field agents telling him that Emilie could not be found. The call never came and at five p.m. he finished up his days work, which included a plan for locating Thomas Abbt. He had found a small lead, a plane ticket bought under the name Tom Sabbath, an anagram. A one way Air India flight from Paris to Kathmandu that departed a year ago.
    Throwing caution and the earlier warning to the wind he rewarded himself with an expensive bottle of wine, and sat in the open air of the B.F.I. Southbank bar. He watched people pass by, skateboarders, tourists, the young, the old and overheard