You'll Never Believe A Man Can Fly: Chapter Nineteen by Lee Barnett

Chapter Nineteen

As they walked into Downing Street that afternoon, Davies was tired. That he shared that tiredness with his companions didn’t help any. He was beginning to wonder whether or not his powers required more rest than previously. But then, when he totted up the amount of sleep he’d had over the past few days, and then balanced it against what he’d actually been through during that same time, he realised that it was purely what it appeared to be: he was unreasonably overtired. He was also irritable, something that a policeman at Number Ten had discovered when he’d stopped them in the corridor on a spot check and asked for identification, despite them having been through the same procedure five minutes earlier.

In a fit of annoyance, Davies had looked at the man and the police officer had suddenly found himself lifted six feet off the ground. Docherty turned to Davies. “Put him down, Ian, gently,” he said, a touch of irritation colouring his words as well.

Davies did just that and smiled an apology at the officer.

They were asked to wait in a large room while the PM finished a meeting. When they’d arrived, Docherty had known that there were more people than had been asked originally to attend. When he’d explained to his boss that morning what he’d come up with, an enormous amount of activity had taken place in the ensuing hours, the very least of which had involved informing Downing Street that instead of four people meeting the Prime Minister, it would be seven. Docherty thanked his lucky stars that one of the directors of Monkton and Doncaster was an ex intelligence man, since that meant that both Williams and Monkton had been vetted previously, when Patt had joined the agency. It made matters go so much quicker.

He had to admit, he thought, looking around the room, that if, forty-eight hours earlier, he’d have been told that he’d be working with them all, he would have either laughed, or simply resigned his commission. He leaned against the wall, desperately wanting a cigarette, but knowing he was unable to have one, and let his eyes rest upon them each.

To his mild surprise, he’d grown to like Ian Davies enormously over the past day, although he wouldn’t admit to feeling any guilt at all about trying to blow his head clean off his shoulders less than a day earlier. That was different; that was when he was acting under instructions to protect the nation. He wasn’t blind to Davies’ faults. Docherty thought that Davies was incredibly naļve about matters in general and the state of the world in particular. He’d given him a pop quiz on current affairs that morning and had noted that Davies had been pleasantly surprised to score four out of ten. Docherty was incredibly disappointed that the man fate had chosen to be one of the most powerful men on the planet hadn’t scored at least eight. On the other hand, he was pleasant, had a fast wit and seemed to feel a genuine responsibility to use his powers responsibly. But not, he had made clear, at the whim of government.

Docherty’s eyes moved on to Grable. Ah, he thought, and moved on. He wasn’t quite ready to deal with his feelings about her yet.

Next, he looked at his Head of Section, a man who Docherty had come to respect enormously in the past few days. How he had dealt with all of what he had to have on his desk and this at the same time shook Docherty. Up until this week, he’d always sort of wondered whether he had it in himself to rise through the ranks to take on such a job. Now he was pretty sure that even if he could do it, he had a lot of thinking to decide whether or not he wanted such a role.

Docherty considered the three men from Monkton and Doncaster, who once he’d spoken to them, he had sought and received permission to bring along with him. He knew that opposites often attracted, as much in business as in personal lives, but he would never have put the three of them together in any form of business. Well, not unless he wanted the business to catastrophically fail. But incredibly, as the financial statements of the company confirmed, the agency went from strength to strength. It was only now, watching them together, that he realised why it worked. Despite their obvious professional respect for each other, the truth became equally obvious, once you looked for it: they couldn’t stand each other personally. And the ‘agreeable tension’, as he had once heard the relationship between a Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer described, seemed to work well.

His eyes moved back to Grable. Nope, he decided, he still didn’t want to think about her. He was saved from having to do so as an impeccably dressed man in his late forties knocked on the door and entered the room without waiting for a reply.

“Doctor Grable? Gentlemen? The Prime Minister will see you now.”

They got up as a group and followed the man through another corridor, Docherty’s Head of Section taking the lead. They arrived at a set of double doors and the man who had fetched them knocked twice on the room. He waited a moment and then led them into a room that had a large oval table in it. Docherty caught his breath. The Cabinet Room.

The Prime Minister was seated half way down the table and stood to welcome them. “Thank you all for coming. Please, sit down.”

They all took seats apart from Davies, who remained standing. The PM looked at Davies and asked him again to take his seat.

Davies looked at the Prime Minister and spoke. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather stand.”

The Prime Minister smiled gently. “It’s all the same to me, Mr Davies, but not, I’m afraid, to my security people. I’m sorry, but I really do have to ask again. Please sit down.”

Davies shrugged, took a seat and then reversed it, straddling the seat with his hands resting on the back of the chair.

The Prime Minister spoke briefly, confirming that he’d been briefed on the outline of the plan about to be presented. “However,” he said, “I’ve yet to be convinced of its merits. So, gentlemen,” he said to the agency directors, “convince me.”

Williams and Monkton had agreed, over Patt’s objections, to brief without any visual aids. “This has to be on your feet stuff,” Williams had insisted, and then, hunting around for a suitable phrase to swing the day, he had said to Monkton, “The only visual aid we need is Davies.” Monkton had seized on that and had agreed.

Monkton stood and addressed the room. “Prime Minister, after a chat we had with Ian,” a brief nod in Davies’ direction, “we agreed with him that he had four basic problems to address. In no particular order, they are: credibility, complete loss of personal identity, money and the future effects of his powers. I think we’re agreed on that.”

The Prime Minister raised his head. “I think there’s a fifth problem he has, but we’ll get to that later.”

The other people in the room shot looks of concern at each other, but Monkton continued as if the PM hadn’t spoken. “Every scenario we could think of that doesn’t involve the government and still remains legal only solves three of the four problems. It’s a different one that’s left out each time, but we can only solve three. We believe, however, that there is a scenario in which both the State is secure, while answering all four concerns. However, it requires government co-operation.”

The Prime Minister looked curious, and only realised when Monkton stopped talking that he was expected to comment. He gestured for Monkton to continue. Instead, he sat and Williams rose. “The only thing that everyone is agreed about is that the current situation cannot be allowed to continue. Under no circumstances can Ian be allowed to have powers that he doesn’t know how they will develop without control of any sort.”

Davies reacted with a start. This wasn’t what they’d discussed. What he didn’t know was that this part of the briefing had been deliberately kept from him. He stood up. “No way am I being controlled by anyone,” he said, and started walking towards the door.

“Ian,” said Williams, “how long have we worked together?”

Davies stopped and turned to Williams. “About three years, why?”

“Have you ever known me to lie to you? Not to tell lies, but to lie to you?”

Davies thought for a moment. “No.”

“Then sit down and listen to me, please,” stated Williams. This was the dangerous bit, he’d always known. Curious, Davies took his seat again.

“Therefore,” Williams resumed, “given that and Ian’s reluctance to either be controlled or to be answerable to the government, and wrapping into that the fact that Ian needs money and a personal life, while being able to act in public without his powers going out of control, there’s only one thing that works.”

Docherty noticed the other two partners nodding in agreement. “The government must cover Ian’s expenses, look after his health, create a new identity for him, train him in the use of his powers and yet have no say whatsoever in how he uses those powers.”

There was a brief moment of silence, before the Prime Minister laughed out loud. “OK,” he said, “and what’s the real plan?” Everyone in the room except for Davies looked at the Prime Minister without so much as a smile on any of their faces and the truth slowly sunk in.

The Prime Minister opened his mouth and then closed it. And then he repeated the exercise. And then, for good measure, he did it again. When he finally found his voice, he spoke relatively calmly and reasonably given the situation. “Are you all stark staring mad?” he asked.

“No, we’re not,” said Grable, speaking for the first time. “Look, Prime Minister…” That was as far as she got before the Prime Minister spoke to Davies directly.

“What do you have to say about this?” he asked.

Davies considered his answer carefully. “I know what the fifth problem is,” he said in reply. The Prime Minister didn’t look surprised. Davies spoke slowly. “The fifth problem is how do I convince you and your successors that I’m not about to take over the country the next time a policy of the government pisses me off?”

“Exactly,” said the Prime Minister, exceedingly pleased that he’d not had to say it.

“I can’t,” said Davies, “except to ask that you look at my record since I gained these powers. Do I agree with your government’s policies? No, not entirely. But then I’ve never agreed with any government’s entire manifesto of policies since I became an adult. All I can say,” he said to the Prime Minister, slowly, “is that if I did want to interfere, I truly believe that there’s very little you or anyone else could do to stop me.”

“And that being the case,” said the PM, “why not assist you in the meantime?” He ran his fingers through his thinning hair. “Yes, well you have a point.” He looked at Williams, who was still standing, “OK, Mr Williams, convince me.”

And Williams started outlining the plan.

It’s reckoned that in the public relations industry, the average length of employment for anyone is a shade under three years. Given that, and the publicity he’d gained, it surprised no one when Ian Davies resigned from the job he’d loved for the past few years and the email he had sent around to the company expressed his gratitude to everyone for their best wishes and promised that he’d keep in touch.

However, emails addressed to the address he’d left bounced back as undeliverable and calls to his telephone only got a “Number unobtainable” signal.

The directors of Monkton and Doncaster made all the right sounds publicly about losing Davies but as previously mentioned, it wasn’t a huge surprise. What did surprise them all though was Lester Williams’ announcement that due to health reasons, he was semi-retiring, and would only be in the office a couple of days a week, and even then it was ‘understood’ that he was just ‘keeping himself busy’.

At the same time, Doctor Betty Grable resigned from Dance-Oliver Medical Research (to the intense delight of Mark Toster) and took up a post she described to friends and family as “something incredibly boring working for the Department of the Environment, but paying shitloads”.

And despite no new public sightings of the “Public” Defender, police officers in London were becoming used to criminals telling them that they’d been stopped in their tracks in muggings, bank jobs, rapes and drug sales by “this bloke dressed all in black, like that super-hero fella.”

Philip Samuels, The Chief Political Correspondent of the BBC, was irritated beyond measure. It was understandable. He regarded his time as valuable and not to be wasted. He’d been called into the office on his day off, and his wife had given him hell over it. What irritated him even more was that he’d been required to come in to attend a meeting about office reallocations.

He walked into the reception office of the Head of News trying to control his temper. “I swear,” he told his wife before leaving, “if he still has those damn fish in that tank in his office, I’m going to have sushi for dinner.”

Samuels knocked on his senior’s office door, opened it without waiting for a “come in” and stopped dead in his tracks. As well as his boss was a man standing in the middle of the room, dressed all in black. Well, floating in the office would have been a more appropriate description. Samuels recognised him at once.

Ian Davies moved smoothly towards him, dropping in height all the time. He touched the carpet directly ahead of Samuels and extended his hand. “Hello, Mr Samuels. Want to interview me?” Samuels smiled wanly at him, his head already filled with the questions he wanted to ask.

Gathered around a television that night in an office in the centre of London, four people watched anxiously as the interview on the specially extended ten o’clock news began. As it progressed, Grable squeezed Docherty’s hand gently. He leaned over to her and kissed her.

“Yes,” came Davies’ voice from the television, “for obvious reasons, I abandoned the secret identity idea.” There was a sympathetic laugh from one of the camera crew which quickly died out.

“It’s working,” she said. “The camera loves him.”

“Quiet,” Williams said, from the other side of the desk, his pen scratching notes in the pad he was leaning on. Not bad, he thought, not bad at all. We’ll have to explain that answer, but he got away with that and that.

“No,” the slightly distorted version of Davies’ voice from the television, “I have no idea where my powers came from; one day they were suddenly just there.”

There was a sound from behind them and the three of them glanced at the open window, the net curtains flapping in the wind.

Docherty looked at the others. “Well, he said he might not want to hang around.”

Grable smiled and turned back to the television, squeezing Docherty’s hand again, thinking of the lab that had been set up for her to run, and how Davies’s powers had blown seven sets of measuring equipment in the first week. They were waiting for new equipment to arrive.

There was a beep from the computer terminal and Docherty said “leave it until the interview’s over.”

Grable let go of Docherty and walked around to her terminal, scanning the email. “It’s from that fellow from the Depot.” She scanned the email and gasped. “He asking whether or not we want to know about the other super-human that was created by something from Roswell?”

Docherty and Williams gaped at her as Davies continued in the interview with “I suppose, yes, I am the first super-powered human, although I’d quibble about the term super-hero…”

Four miles away in distance, and eleven hundred feet up, Ian Davies hovered above London. He opened his senses just slightly and heard a scream suddenly cut off. His eyes seemed to know where to look and his brow furrowed slightly as the scene a fifth of a mile away snapped into sharp focus.

Not your day, my friend, he thought as he saw another mugging taking place. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly and then he aimed himself at the scene, gathering speed as he went.

You know, he thought, I could get to like this…

THE END

This week’s artist: Mike Collins
Mike Collins, as well as being an incredibly nice fellow, is also one of the mainstays of the British comics industry. A writer and artist since 1983, he's worked on pretty much every major comics property at one time or another, including Judge Dredd, Rogue Trooper, Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt, Superman, Batman, Teen Titans, X-Men, and Spider-Man as well as on licensed comics properties such as Star Trek, Babylon 5, Dr.Who, and, my personal favourite: Thundercats. He currently does Pocket Book's digital paintings for their ebooks. Mike lives in Cardiff, Wales with his wife and three daughters and way too many comic books.