Catch Your Death

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‘So Redfort, I hear you screwed up.’

‘I think you’re putting a very negative spin on it,’ said Ruby.

‘Please feel free to convince me that there is a positive spin to your performance – based on the fact that you completed your task arriving thirteen hours late?’

‘Twelve hours,’ muttered Ruby.

LB checked the document again. ‘Oh yes, let’s be accurate: twelve hours, fifty-seven minutes and three seconds late.’

That sounded worse.

‘I rustled the horse OK, I swam over the river, didn’t drown – I was just a little tardy is all.’

LB looked down at her papers. ‘Let me check that. . . no, here it would suggest, and I quote Agent Emerson’s words: “You completed your mission unnourished, ate nothing for almost two days and arrived bewildered and exhausted.”’ She gave the papers a second glance. ‘Oh yes, and: “You lost some valuable kit.”’

Ruby was about to speak, but LB held up her hand. ‘One moment,’ she said. ‘I see you are a stickler for accuracy so let me check which items you actually lost.’ LB read through the long list of missing kit before saying, ‘That’s right. Everything you were issued with.’

There was no mention of having been found injured, bleeding and unconscious by Sam Colt, no mention of him dropping her off just yards from base camp because she was barely able to walk. So Sam bent the rules. Ruby had suspected as much. She owed him one.

‘But I arrived, didn’t I?’

‘If crawling into camp is arriving, then I guess you did,’ said LB.

LB raised an eyebrow.

Ruby opened her mouth to speak, but LB clucked her tongue to indicate she hadn’t finished.

‘And, to cap it all, you got sick. How incredibly careless.’

‘I appreciate your sympathy,’ said Ruby.

‘Cut it out Redfort, and by the way I should warn you that I have a chronic headache so if I were you I’d keep it short and stick to explaining what in the name of stupid was going on.’

‘The thing is I wasn’t really hungry,’ said Ruby.

‘I think we all know that had there been a donut tree out there it would have been quite a different story,’ said LB. ‘You failed to forage, failed to eat, failed to nourish your brain, you lost energy and you couldn’t navigate your way back to base in the time allocated.’

‘Look, I wasn’t going to share this with you, but I sorta lost my glasses.’ Ruby hadn’t meant to bring this up, but she was getting desperate. Perhaps it would bring out LB’s sympathetic side.

LB looked at her quizzically. ‘Your judgement is way off Redfort, if you think that’s going to put you back in a professional light.’

‘Yeah, but the thing is, I’ve learned from my mistakes,’ said Ruby.

‘The point of the exercise is to prove that you don’t make mistakes,’ countered LB.

Ruby sneezed again. ‘But I rustled the horse pretty well. So I caught the flu. I made it back, didn’t I? Isn’t that the whole point – surviving?’

‘You nearly caught your death. What’s the point of a dead agent?’

‘But I didn’t, I survived.’

‘Only because Emerson waited around for twelve hours, fifty-seven minutes and three seconds to bring you in – in my book that’s called getting rescued.’

‘Sometimes people need rescuing. You’re telling me you’ve never been rescued?’ said Ruby.

‘Not because I lost my glasses,’ said LB.

‘It doesn’t have to mean everything,’ argued Ruby.

LB looked at her hard. ‘In Spectrum’s book it means failure; maybe you’re just not cut out for this.’

Ruby opened her mouth to protest, but LB raised her hand.

‘You want me to make my decision now,’ she said, ‘or after I’ve had a cup of mint tea and swallowed two aspirin?’

Ruby kept her mouth shut.

‘If you’d prefer me to spend time evaluating your rather desperate performance instead of making a judgement here and now, then I’d keep your mouth shut, firmly shut, as in clamped, closed, zipped.’

Ruby said not a word. LB looked down at her files.