Age of Voodoo (43 page)

FORTY-TWO

HOME

P
UDDLE
J
UMPER
HAD
taken off from Anger Reef with seven people on board.

It landed at Manzanilla with six.

Pearce and Tartaglione were whisked straight off to hospital.

Sampson accompanied them.

Buckler returned to the Cape Azure Hotel to file his mission report to his bosses in Washington.

Wilberforce and Albertine both drove to their respective homes for a shower, a meal, and a good long rest.

F
OR THE NEXT
several days, Rikki the mongoose hung around outside Lex’s house. He snuffled about in the garden and along the verandah, perpetually on the lookout for food. There was always plenty for an omnivore like him to eat—grubs, rats, small birds, fruit, the odd snake—but he especially enjoyed the tasty scraps the human gave him. That was the extent to which he missed Lex, unsentimental beast that he was.

Rikki wasn’t actively waiting for the human to return. The house felt strange without its owner there, however. Too quiet. As the days passed, the mongoose began to think about moving on elsewhere, finding a new burrow, new hunting grounds, a new home...

EPILOGUE

C
AROLINE
H
ARTINGTON SWITCHED
on the house’s security system, as she did every night at roughly the same hour, 10PM. A series of bleeps and flashing LEDs indicated that the entire building was in lockdown mode. Every door and window was now electronically bolted and wired to sound the alarm at the least sign of forced entry. The CCTV cameras that covered porch, driveway and back garden were all fully active. The panic buttons were live. The Hartington family’s large Victorian semi-detached villa in Holland Park had become effectively a fortress.

She went upstairs to check on the kids in their rooms. Saskia was Skyping with her best friend Emily. Teddy was doing his homework, nodding along to the music in his earbuds while he sourced facts for a history essay online.

Caroline then popped her head round the door of Peter’s study. He too was at his computer, going over the closing figures on Wall Street with a glass of brandy to hand. She tiptoed in and planted a kiss on the bald crown of his head. Peter patted her rump with absentminded affection.

All was well. All was as it should be. Her home was quiet and peaceful. Her family were all safe and sound under one roof. A feeling of inexpressible contentment washed over Caroline.

She went to the kitchen for a glass of Chablis. This, too, was part of her evening routine, an indulgence at the end of the day, a signal to herself that she could finally begin to unwind and relax. She would sip the wine while checking her phone for any last messages that needed attending to, and then maybe draw herself a nice hot bath laced with lavender oil.

She opened the door of the huge Smeg refrigerator and fetched out a bottle.

When she closed the door, a man was standing beside her.

An intruder.

The chilled, condensation-slick bottle slipped from Caroline’s grasp.

The man caught it before it hit the floor.

“Mustn’t waste that,” he said. “Looks like a decent tipple. Oh, and a loud crash might bring hubby running, and we wouldn’t want that, would we, Caroline?”

He smiled.

“Or should I say Seraphina?”

“Leonard,” Caroline managed to stammer out.

“No. Lex. Remember?”

“Lex. But—but you’re...”

“Dead?” The smile widened. “So Lieutenant Buckler said in his report. So you were meant to believe.”

Caroline whipped round and lunged for the knife block on the countertop nearby. She drew a huge Sabatier carver and brandished it in front of her defensively.

Lex shook his head, pitying. “Come on, Caroline. We both know I can have that off you before you ever get a chance to use it.”

“Don’t come any closer.” Caroline began edging away from him. The microwave was just a metre away, almost within arm’s reach. “Don’t even think about it.”

“And you,” said Lex, “stay absolutely still. Don’t move another inch. I know there’s a panic button inbuilt into that microwave. You tap in a four-digit code, and a car full of MI5 operatives will be here in under three minutes. How on earth is that going to help you? In three minutes I can kill you, both your children and the very wealthy Peter, and be long gone before the security detail arrives.”

Caroline halted. The logic in Lex’s statement was irrefutable. Hitting the panic button would achieve nothing apart from hastening her death and the deaths of her family.

“Kill me then,” she said, “but for pity’s sake leave my husband and kids alone. They’ve done nothing.” Her voice dropped an octave, becoming the husky, seductress tones of Seraphina. “Please, Lex. At least do that for me. After all we’ve been through together, all we’ve shared...”

“I have questions,” Lex said. “Here.” He handed her the wine. “Sit. Have a drink.”

Caroline was puzzled, but she sensed she was being granted a stay of execution—a chance to state her case—and she took it. She uncorked the Chablis and glugged some of it into a glass with a trembling hand. She sat at the island in the middle of the kitchen, placing the knife next to her on the marble work surface. Lex perched on a stool on the opposite side. Caroline took a long swig of the wine. The knot in her stomach loosened a little.

“Well now, where do I start?” Lex said. “It was all a set-up, wasn’t it? Me going to Anger Reef. I was never meant to be just a liaison for Team Thirteen in Manzanilla. The plan all along was that I would have to participate in the actual mission.”

Caroline nodded. “Why else do you think we offered you silly money?”

“That was you? Not the Americans?”

“Us. I faked that whole business of checking to see if they would agree to raising the offer. We were prepared to go up as far as five hundred thousand if you’d kept haggling. The whole point was to make the financial carrot irresistible. A sum you couldn’t turn down.”

“And getting Wilberforce involved—another essential component of the plan.”

“Absolutely. Team Thirteen could have inserted into that installation in any number of ways. But since you happened to have a close friend who happened to be a seaplane pilot... Well, it was perfect. We predicted you would never let Allen go on his own. You’d tag along to make sure that he was okay. And then his cousin got drawn into it as well, that girl, what’s her name? Augustine?”

“Albertine.”

The way he said it confirmed Lieutenant Buckler’s hints in his report. The girl and Lex were an item. “Albertine,” Caroline said. “We had to make sure that you had plenty invested in the mission, a significant personal as well as practical stake. Did you work all of this out for yourself or did somebody tell you?”

“It should have been the former but in fact it was the latter.”

“Who?”

“Buckler. He wanted a clean slate with me.”

“How indiscreet of him.”

“Maybe. But the Tom Buckler who went into Anger Reef was not the Tom Buckler who came out. He’s a changed man in so many ways.”

“I’ll say,” said Caroline. “Medics at Walter Reed Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, have been poking and prodding him like mad.”

“Bet he’s loving that.”

“They can barely account for what’s happened to him, but they’re very excited. He’s become almost superhuman, I hear. Increased strength, enhanced endurance...”

“At the expense of being clinically dead. Hardly a fair deal, I’d say. What I want to know—need to know—is why? Why do this to me? Why drag me into a mission long after I’d officially retired?”

Caroline took a fresh sip of wine, this one calmer and more measured than before. “Why do
you
think, Lex?”

“I assume to get rid of me,” he said. “You suckered me into going on a high-risk op in the expectation that I wouldn’t return.”

“And what benefit would that be to us?”

“Old wetwork pros aren’t meant to live out the rest of their days in peace. They know too much. They know—literally—where the bodies are buried. You yourself told me that you were still keeping tabs on me in case I was bribed or captured by people from the other side. Simpler, cleaner, to do away with me. Snip the thread rather than let it unravel.”

“So you faked your death. You had Lieutenant Buckler claim in his report that you’d been killed at Anger Reef, another mission casualty like Hospitalman Morgenstern.”

“Wilberforce dropped me off close to Manzanilla. I swam ashore at a quiet cove and I’ve been lying low ever since.”

“Except here you are,” said Caroline. “Suddenly back in the land of the living.”

“I had to stay off the grid so that I could travel to London and have this chat. It was the only way I could get answers.”

“You could just have phoned. Far less effort than crossing the Atlantic, locating me, staking out my house, breaking in...”

“Face-to-face is better.”

“You wanted to see me, Lex. Admit it. After all this time, you were curious to get a glimpse of the real Seraphina.”

“That was a factor,” Lex acknowledged.

“And?”

“You’re not what I imagined. But then I didn’t think you were going to be.”

Caroline pouted, but she knew it was true. The persona she projected as Seraphina did not reflect the real her. The real her was an average-looking fortysomething wife and mother with a bit of a turkey neck and boobs that were nowhere near as pert as they had been before childbirth. She ate sensibly, did Pilates, tried as hard as she could to keep in trim. Expensive auburn highlights masked the ineluctable onset of grey hair. Ultimately, though, she was waging a losing war against age and cellulite.

Seraphina was an idealised version of herself, a role she played, a slim, gorgeous, commanding figure who flirted outrageously, never grew old and always had fun. This was one reason she was glad none of the operatives she controlled was ever likely to meet her in person. The woman she wanted them to picture was a far cry from the woman she was.

“Also,” Lex said, “on the phone you could tell me anything, any old rubbish. This way I’m guaranteed to get at the truth.”

“You’d like the truth?”

“I’ll be annoyed if you try to fob me off with anything else.”

“Then here it is. We didn’t want you dead.”

“Really?”

“No. It would be a shame, a great loss. We do still trust you, Lex. You were a loyal knight for so long. All the psychiatric evaluations have you down as someone who would never betray his country. We wanted you back in the game. That’s all.”

Lex was startled.

“Oh yes,” Caroline went on. “You’re too valuable an asset to be languishing out there kicking your heels in some Caribbean nowhere. You still have plenty of years of usefulness in you. When the Yanks contacted us about hiring you, we saw a chance to lure you back. We thought, ‘Give him a taste of action again, remind him what it was like, he’ll come crawling on hands and knees begging for more.’ We’ve never regarded the past few years as retirement. You may have, but we’ve always thought of it as a sabbatical.”

Lex was silent, digesting the news. The kitchen clock ticked softly.

He said, “Part of me thinks you’re lying. Just trying to save your own skin. But another part of me...” He trailed off.

“Do you want to be back in, Leonard?” This time, her use of his former forename was deliberate. “The door is wide open. We’d welcome you like a shot. I’ve got at least three Code Crimsons I could send you on right now. How does South Africa sound? I’m told Cape Town is lovely this time of year.”

She could see he was debating it inwardly.

But not for long.

“No,” he said. Firmly. With finality. “I have a new life. I like it. I have friends. A woman—an amazing woman. It’s all waiting for me back on Manzanilla. That’s where I belong. That’s the future. Me and Wilberforce out on our boat. Me and Albertine, getting to know each other better. I’m... I’m happy, Seraphina. Happy in a way I’ve never known before. So thanks, but no.”