Killing Eva (21 page)

She felt fat and content.

‘Where were we?'

Jackson shook his head. ‘I just don't know how much I could or should tell you right now, that's the problem, Eva. It could put you in a position of real danger.'

She laughed at him and drained the brandy glass. She felt slightly tipsy.

‘You don't want to put me in danger?'

‘No,' he insisted.

‘That's hilarious.'

‘It's not funny.'

‘You really don't have to tell me that.'

‘It could be even worse than this.'

‘I doubt it.'

‘Seriously.'

‘Just tell me.'

TWENTY EIGHT

‘A joke. This
must be a joke.'

The staccato sentence echoed from the microphone in the side of the laptop. It melted away into a sinister silence. The man with the Mediterranean tan sat looking at the screen. He had a bullet hole in his head.

From behind the chair in which the corpse sat – sat? could a corpse sit? – Paul stood still. He was, himself, in a state of shock as this was not something he had planned to do. He was nervous. He knew he had essentially made a mistake – perhaps a serious mistake – and he wished he had more control over his temper. This hadn't been part of the plan.

He looked at the three faces on the screen in front of him and knew they were watching him, waiting for a reaction. That was why he was hiding behind the dead man's chair. Like a shy child behind its father.

He doubted these three men cared personally about the loss but he knew they would care very much about any impact it might have on their carefully laid plans. They were no doubt assessing him right now, wondering whether he could fill the enormous shoes he had caused to be vacated by silencing the pompous old man for good.

Which, of course, he regretted now. But this was the one action that simply could not be undone.

As he waited, for either a response from the screen or for some kind of inspiration to strike, Paul tried to be positive. On the upside, the other man could have revealed him at any time and that threat was now gone. On the downside, he had very little knowledge of the people for whom the pair had been working – he had not been given any information when he was parachuted in, although it was clear those supplying the parachute certainly knew plenty about them. The older man had been a shield, an additional layer of defence that he no longer had.

The silence in the room – and across the internet connection – was beginning to feel oppressive.

Finally, he took a step forward so he was next to the chair in which the dead man sat, rather than behind it. He tipped the screen of the laptop so they could see his face.

‘I will handle this.'

The answer was instant, angry. ‘How? You have absolutely no idea what you need to handle.'

‘I can do this, honestly, just tell me what needs to be done.' There was a part of Paul that just wanted these men to have faith in him. It was a part that surprised him. Why was he always searching for approval?

‘There is a great deal about this situation that you aren't aware of. We have three teams working without any knowledge of each other and it was up to him…' there was a pause while everyone regarded the silent, dead man, ‘to ensure that all worked separately, but together.'

‘I can
do this.
' Paul realised he may as well have finished the sentence with ‘Dad'.

He shook the thought from his head. ‘Honestly, I have been observing him, I can step up.'

‘It is not ideal.' The comment was between the talking heads.

The faces turned once again to Paul. ‘You have placed yourself at the head of an operation that is several decades in the making and now in the final, critical stages. We know very little about you and, so far, almost everything you have brought to the table – the technology that was the only reason we allowed you in at a low level – has brought additional issues.'

‘It was teething problems,' he repeated, trotting out the same excuse once again, ‘it's innovative technology, that's how it…'

‘
Regardless
,' said one of the faces on the screen, interrupting mid-sentence. The word sounded as if it was spoken through gritted teeth. ‘We don't have knowledge of you, we certainly don't trust you and we currently see very little value in you.'

Paul lowered his eyes and looked at the floor.

‘But you have put us in a position where we have no choice – at least at present – but to operate with you. Which I imagine was your intention.'

Paul looked up and stared straight into the webcam embedded in the slim frame of the laptop. That was not the case but it was preferable to appear a cold, calculating killer with an agenda than to reveal he simply could not control his temper.

‘You will step up then. Whether this part of the project stands or falls now comes down to your actions, as it did his.' The eyes on the screen moved momentarily in the direction of the corpse.

‘Your task is to establish control over the teams in play, keep them separate – they must believe they are working alone, in isolation, for this to succeed. Ensure that your technology works, no more
innovative
teething problems. The rest you will have no role in.'

‘I understand.'

‘If you fail…'

Paul was beginning to regret accepting the offer that had brought him here.

Now, one of the other men spoke. ‘I suppose you had better hope there isn't another “Brutus” waiting in the wings to dispatch you, too.'

Nobody laughed.

A beeping sound started at regular intervals on the other end of the connection.

One of the men looked down and moved something on the table in front of him.

‘You have two hours to confirm to us that you have taken control. After that, you're relieved of responsibility for everything.'

‘You mean leave?'

‘No.'

The screen went blank.

Eva was still waiting for Jackson to continue speaking, watching the smoke from yet another cigarette curl around the strong contours of his face and wind its way into his windswept hair. She was beginning to feel the unrealistic events of the past week coming into sharp focus in her mind – too sharp, almost agonising; she desperately needed answers. It was becoming clear she was emerging from whatever combination of shock and drugs had kept her suspended in a blind, emotionless fog. Physically, she felt as if she had a bad hangover – she was a little shaky on her feet, there was a headache that came and went periodically and she felt constantly either starving hungry or incredibly nauseous. And then there were the mental effects; the gaps in her knowledge were now becoming frightening. Extremely frightening.

An awareness of someone physically tampering with her body but no other memory to rely on. She had clearly been held in some sort of medical stasis but, for what reason, she could not fathom. There was nothing on her body to indicate what had happened – nothing she could see. Whatever it was had left no scar, other than the two on her arms, apparently unrelated. Either whoever it was had finished with her once the ‘treatment' was at an end or they had left something inside her.

Eva had never found ignorance to be bliss. A lack of knowledge left her anxious. As her mind returned to speed, it became clear she was ignorant of everything since the explosion in Berlin. Where to even start trying to piece it together?

Well, she had started trying with Jackson.

When Jackson failed, again, to provide an answer to a straightforward question, she stood up impatiently, lit another cigarette and walked to the pile of clothes in the room. She felt the layers on the top for damp but they were dry and almost warm. She picked up a large sweater and held it against her. She needed to re-establish contact with the world again. She needed clothes, a phone, money, credit cards. Right now, she was completely at Jackson's mercy. He might be her brother but she hadn't seen him for so long and had no idea of the person he had become.

Besides, she did not like to be ‘kept', guided or looked after. She craved the independence provided by a phone, bank card and her own possessions.

When she turned around he was watching her. She stopped where she was and inhaled the cigarette. The light in his eyes was odd. It was strange but it made her skin crawl, slightly. It was almost lascivious. She stared at him, trying to understand why he was looking at her with apparent desire; the look on his face flickered to the much more defensive expression of earlier that day.

He looked away, leant forward and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘We should go.'

She nodded silently and walked out of the room with the jumper still in her hands. It was absolutely paramount she obtain money and a phone, she thought to herself, as she walked back through the bar and towards the car. Even more so given the discomfort she had felt minutes earlier.

There was something wrong with this Jackson. Instinctively, she felt she couldn't trust him, regardless of any blood ties. There was too much unexplained – and that look he had given her in the restaurant. It had made her skin crawl. It wasn't right. Instinct was all she had to go on and her instinct told her to find an opportunity to obtain the tools to escape.

That moment came several hours later. With directions to stay on a single motorway, Eva had taken over the driving whilst Jackson slept. He had seemed exhausted and, after the soporific effects of the brandy, had appeared only too pleased to let Eva take over for a while. The trust he had shown had appeased her alarm and suspicion of him – momentarily, at least. Although, at the back of her mind, she was aware that this could have been exactly what it was calculated to do.

As he slept, he snored. Loudly.

Eva had turned on the radio to block out the noise and he hadn't even flinched, so deeply asleep was he.

At one point she leaned forward to change the radio station and, as she did so, spotted a black wallet falling half way from his pocket onto the seat below. She sat back and then looked again, glancing between the wallet, the road and his sleeping features. Briefly it had seemed as if his eyes were open and he was looking straight at her. But the next light they had passed under had shown his eyes shut fast.

Finally, she slowed the car down to around 50km an hour and, in one swift movement, reached over and grabbed the wallet. She sat with it in her lap for several seconds, glancing repeatedly at the sleeping man next to her, but his head was now facing the window on the other side and she had no way of telling whether or not he was awake.

Fumbling slightly, she wedged her right knee against the wheel, held the other side with her left hand and began using her right hand to try and liberate the wallet of its contents. The first thing to fall out was a thick wad of euros.

She glanced up at the road and then quickly over at Jackson. Her heart was beating fast.

The notes were large currency – 200 and 500 Euros – and she took a quarter of a centimetre's worth of money and shoved it into her jeans.

Another glance at Jackson.

No reaction.

Next she began trying – one-handed – to pull the rest of the contents from his wallet. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was very little in there. A credit card in a name she couldn't quite read in the darkness of the car, but which certainly wasn't his, several incomprehensible business cards, an identity card in what was presumably the same name as the credit card. She put everything back into the wallet – slowly, painstakingly, with one leg and one arm still wedging the steering wheel between them – and then, as she was lifting the wallet to put it back against Jackson's hip, another card fell out. It tumbled down below the handbrake but she had been sure she recognised it.

She took another look at the sleeping man next to her, then gently rested the wallet against him. She looked back at the road ahead; empty. She took her eyes off the road ahead and reached down for the card.

Immediately, she sensed movement next to her and quickly wrapped her left hand around the card on the floor. Then she was wrenched upright by strong hands.

As she sat up, her face was bathed in bright lights flooding the car. Her heart was in her throat. She was on the wrong side of the road!

Her hands flew to the steering wheel and she shoved it back to the right, taking them out of the path of a van steaming towards them at high speed, its horn on full blare.

Eva struggled to steady the car and felt Jackson's hand next to hers on the wheel. Her heart was beating so fast she thought it might explode. Her arms throbbed.

Fuck, she thought to herself.

Did he see her reach for the card? How had she not seen the van coming? Where had it come from?

But there were only seconds to think because the other vehicle had screeched to a halt, executed a swift turn in the road and was now behind them, bearing down at high speed, honking its horn and flashing its lights.

She looked over at Jackson, who was reaching across into the back seat for a large bag that lay in the footwell.

He turned to her. ‘Drive,' he said firmly. ‘If you want to live,
drive
.'

Eva pressed her foot to the floor and the car shot forwards.

The van behind picked up even more speed and the lights were switched up to high beam; she almost couldn't see for the glare in her mirror. She turned it away so it was not reflecting into her eyes and took the car up another gear. It was a good car, fast, and they were now going well over 130km an hour. Eva felt a slight gust of wind push the car from its course. At this speed, the forward trajectory felt fragile. But it was clear whoever was in the van behind was more of a danger than her driving. Or so she hoped.

Jackson wound down the window to his right. He had been assembling a large gun and seemed to be trying to lodge this on the descended window of the moving car.

Suddenly, there was a thud from behind and a screeching sound and the car was thrown forward as the van shunted them at high speed. Eva screamed inside her head as the steering wheel seemed to go from underneath her fingers and then she gripped the leather as tightly as she could, forcing it to stay in the same place.

There was another loud crash from behind and Eva struggled with the wheel once again.

Still Jackson fumbled with the gun, now apparently trying to load it.

The van behind was gearing up for another shunt. Eva was not entirely sure how much longer she could keep the car on the road.

What is he doing, she thought to herself, against the whining noise of the engine, her hair flicking in snapping movements around her face as the wind coming through the open window whipped it around.