Conspiracy Girl (20 page)

‘How long are we staying?’ she asks, her voice husky.

‘They know roughly where we are. They’ll have narrowed it down to a twenty-five mile radius, I would guess, which means it won’t be long before they find us. And I need to get
a signal. So our best bet is to head north. There’s a town where we can . . . ’ I break off. I had been going to say
steal
, but I amend it to, ‘
find
a
car’.

I set the pan down, noticing that it looks like jellied intestines and wishing the label hadn’t come off the cans so I could identify the animal, at least. Though maybe it’s for the
best that I can’t. I stick the knife into the mess of it, impaling a lump of something gross on the end and shoving it in my mouth. It tastes exactly what I imagine jellied intestines
marinated in botulism would taste like, but I keep chewing and then I swallow, because a bar of chocolate is not going to be enough fuel to take us ten miles cross-country in this weather.

‘How are we going to get anywhere in this snow?’ Nic asks. ‘We won’t even be able to get out the door.’

I look at her and grin. ‘Can you ski?’ I ask.

‘What?’ I ask, spearing a lump of questionable meat with the end of Finn’s knife and then sniffing it. It smells worse than Goz’s Thai chicken curry
poo.

‘Can you ski?’ he asks again.

I scan the cabin, but don’t see anything that we can craft two sets of skis out of, A-Team style. ‘Yes I can ski,’ I say, tentatively starting to chew. It doesn’t
actually taste that bad, if you can get past the texture, which reminds me of rubbery intestines. Where is he going with the skiing thing?

Grinning, Finn gets up and walks over to the other side of the room. Set into the floorboards is a metal ring. Finn prises it up with the blade of his knife and I get up and walk over to
him.

‘It’s a crawl space.’

‘I see that.’ It’s a hole about three metres wide by one metre deep with packed earth walls. It looks like a yawning empty grave and my spine stiffens at the sight.

Finn jumps down into it, pulling a torch from his back pocket. He flashes it around and I see that stockpiled at one end of the space are two old pairs of skis, covered in dirt and cobwebs, as
well as a pile of boxes and some blankets. Finn hands the skis and the blankets up to me. I pile them by the door and then offer him my hand to climb out. He takes it with a curious smile, and our
fingers stay linked for just a second longer than necessary before Finn drags his hand free and closes the lid with a bang. Is he feeling it too? Like there’s sheet lightning crackling
between us? Or is that just me? I keep catching him looking at me when he thinks I’m not aware of it, like when I was getting dressed.

Get it together, Nic
, I tell myself angrily.
As if he’s thinking about that with all this going on. And why the hell are you thinking about it? Have you forgotten about Hugo?
Forgotten about Goz?
Taking a deep breath, I force my eyes off Finn’s arms and turn back to the jellied meat instead.

After we’ve eaten, Finn hurriedly lays out a map he found in the trunk across the floor. I’ve never been one for orienteering, and the squiggly lines and little
icons scattered across the paper are as indecipherable to me as hieroglyphs.

‘If we leave in an hour,’ Finn says glancing at his watch, ‘we should make it before nightfall. The only problem is clothing. You should take my sweater.’

‘I’m not taking your sweater,’ I tell him straight up.

He sighs. ‘You only have that,’ he says, pointing at my hooded sweater. ‘It’s no wonder you almost froze to death yesterday.’

‘If I take yours
you’ll
freeze to death.’

‘I can cut up one of the blankets.’

‘We can both keep our sweaters and use the blankets.’

He frowns.

‘Where are we going to go?’ I ask, ignoring him.

‘We’ll head here,’ Finn says, stabbing his finger on to the map. I lean over his shoulder, feeling the warmth pulsing off his body and resisting the urge to lean in closer.
‘It’s a small logging town.’

‘Won’t they be looking for us there?’ I ask.

‘Look, there’s no other choice,’ he says tersely, and the voice in my head which pipes up ready to argue is silenced when I remember that he was almost an FBI agent and he has
got us this far. I didn’t even manage to stick out Girl Guides. He knows what he’s doing, he’s shown me that much. And he can at least read a map.

‘I didn’t mean to question you,’ I say, taking a step away from him and crossing my arms over my chest. ‘I just—’

Finn looks at me over his shoulder. ‘We’ve got no other choice.’ He gestures at the map. ‘You see anywhere else we could go? We need clothes, provisions, wheels and
–’ he pauses ‘– we need a signal.’

‘What about here?’ I say, pointing at a name on the map.

Finn peers down. ‘That’s just an old logging station.’

‘Is it closed?’

‘No. I don’t think so. I saw signs for it back on the road.’

‘Well, won’t they have vehicles? There’s an access road.’ At least, that’s what I think the thin white line snaking through acres of green stands for.

Finn frowns, then rubs his hands through his hair.

‘OK, fine,’ he says. ‘It’s the same distance. But if we can’t make it on the skis we have to double back, so you’d better be a good skier.’

I glance over at him and bite my tongue.

Finn is standing by the window. He’s been there for fifteen minutes, staring out with a look on his face that I’m coming to recognise. It’s unnerving, knowing
how good he is at figuring out problems in the real world, and how talented he is at discovering patterns and errors and loopholes in the virtual world. It makes me wonder what he might be able to
figure out about a person just by looking at them long enough.

I’ve never seen anything like the way his mind works. He’s always one or two steps ahead in his thinking – and he’s always watching, evaluating. He has the same look on
his face gazing out the window as he does when I say something he doesn’t understand. It’s like the world is a complicated puzzle that he’s trying to riddle his way through.

I wonder if he’s thinking about the man he killed. It’s hard to imagine what that would do to you. He didn’t seem that upset though. I’ve often thought about what
I’d do if I was put in front of my mother’s killers and given a gun. Would I be able to pull the trigger? Maybe not in revenge, but definitely in self-defence. Then I remember what Finn
said about the fact it wasn’t Miles or McCrory. He was right all along. I was wrong. It’s not a closed case.

So who’s behind it? And why?

I turn back to the job in hand. For now I have a task to complete. I have a notion that I’m going to somehow craft us both blanket ponchos. In reality I’m just trying to give myself
something to focus on other than the situation we’re in. Finn’s silence is unsettling me. What is he trying to puzzle out? Our odds of surviving?

Eventually he draws a deep breath, falls out of his trance and comes and sits down a few feet from me, sliding his backpack on to his lap. He pulls out two guns and starts taking them apart one
by one. I think he’s cleaning them, as he runs a strip of blanket through them and starts counting the rounds. Neither of us speaks. The crackle of the fire is the only noise. I glance around
at the rough wooden walls, at the door that’s only pulled to and held in place with a slab of wood. We seem dangerously exposed now the snow has melted from them.

There’s an irony, I guess, to my current situation. I’m stuck in a cabin in the woods with no electricity and without even a lock on the door. There’s no panic alarm, no motion
sensors, no guard dog, no ex-SAS soldiers about to rock up toting machine guns if I press a button (not that they did that anyway). We have a knife and a gun that looks to be nearly out of ammo.
And yet, as I glance over at Finn, for the first time in two years I realise that I don’t feel afraid.

I put the second gun, the one I took from the guy, into the bag. It’s a nine-millimetre Browning Hi-Power, a make most commonly used by mercenaries – hired
contractors who operate in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s another clue to the guy’s identity. I reach into the bag and offer a chocolate bar to Nic.

She takes it and breaks off a slab before handing it back to me. I shake my head. She needs the calories more than me. ‘Tell me something, Nic,’ I say, leaning forwards to poke a
piece of wood into the flames.

‘Tell you what?’ she asks, suspicion instantly lacing her voice.

I glance over my shoulder at her. Her cheeks are warm from the fire, her hair glinting reddish in the flames.

‘Who’s Marcus?’

She almost chokes on the chocolate. ‘What?’ she splutters.

I hold her gaze. ‘Who’s Marcus?’ I ask again. I’m telling myself it’s a purely disinterested question, that I’m just trying to eliminate all people from the
enquiry and I never fully eliminated Marcus the wannabe orthodontist, but the truth of the matter is I want to know who this guy Marcus is and whether he means anything to her, even though the
answer really shouldn’t matter to me at all.

‘Hang on . . . ’ she says, her eyes narrowing dangerously. ‘What the hell? How do you know about Marcus?’

I shrug and stare down at my feet.

‘My firewalls and encryption were supposed to be impenetrable,’ Nic shrieks. ‘I had them tested.’

I look at her with an expression that asks
Really? You’re still asking that question?

She shakes her head at me. ‘You’re unbelievable. Do you have any understanding whatsoever about boundaries?’

‘Don’t be mad,’ I say. ‘I needed to run a tracer on your emails, see if anyone had hacked into your account.’

‘Besides you, you mean?’

‘Yeah,’ I admit.

She glares at me but I ignore it. I was only trying to look out for her. It’s not like I was stalking her. ‘So who is he?’ I ask.

‘Like you don’t know already,’ she snorts.

I try not to smile or laugh. ‘OK, yeah, you got me,’ I admit. ‘I ran a check on him. Of course I did. I ran checks on everyone you came into contact with over the last three
years. But there’s something about this guy Marcus that doesn’t add up.’ I wonder if now’s a good time to mention the waxing.

‘What?’ she says, laughing scornfully. ‘Are you suggesting that Marcus is in on all this somehow?’

‘He’s studying orthodontistry and has a totally clean record,’ I say.

‘And?’ she asks, staring at me in total disbelief.

‘You’re seriously dating the guy?’ I ask, frowning at her. ‘He kind of looks . . . ’

‘He looks what?’ she asks, her voice hitching up a notch.

I’m starting to wish I hadn’t brought this up. But I have, so I may as well follow through. ‘Just,’ I say, looking for the right words, ‘he doesn’t seem like
your type.’

Her mouth drops open before she clamps it shut. ‘How do you know what my type even is?’ she spits. ‘I don’t have a type!’

I let out a snort. ‘Oh, yeah you do.’

She blinks at me twice in astonishment. ‘What?’ she asks. I don’t know Nic Preston very well, but I’m starting to know her a lot better, and I can tell that when her
voice goes low and quiet like it has just now, she’s on the verge of blowing her top.

‘You’ve rented every Ryan Gosling movie ever made in the course of the last six months. And you have a thing for period dramas. So I’m thinking your type is actually pretty
obvious. You want someone who’s like a cross between Noah from
The Notebook
and Darcy from
Pride and Prejudice
.’

She doesn’t talk for a few seconds and I start to think that maybe she really is about to lose her shit. I even glance around to make sure I haven’t left the gun lying around. Maybe
I shouldn’t have let it be known that I checked her Netflix subscription while I was doing background checks. She turns back to the fire, glaring into the flames and shaking her head.
‘My God, Finn, where do you draw the line?’ she mutters.

‘So why are you dating him?’ I ask.

It’s just a brief flash, but I swear a tiny trace of a smile appears before she stifles it. ‘What’s it to you?’ she demands.

‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Just curious. I’m gathering evidence for my theory that short, aesthetically challenged men have to work harder to please women, and hence make better
. . . boyfriends.’

‘He isn’t aesthetically challenged,’ she says indignantly, but there’s that smile again which she’s trying desperately to suppress. ‘He has good
teeth.’

I laugh loudly.

‘And I wouldn’t know if he’s a good . . . boyfriend,’ she adds.

I dart a glance her way but she’s staring into the fire again. ‘Look, I didn’t mean to bring him up,’ I say, trying to hide my smile. ‘You’re right.
It’s none of my business.’

‘Then why did you?’ she asks, raising her eyebrows at me.

It’s a good question. Maybe it’s because I want her to tell me she’s in love with him, because that would make things much easier. Or maybe the truth is that I can’t
stand the idea of her being with someone else. Unable to put any of that into words, I shrug.

The silence closes in and for a minute we listen to the dull thud of thawing snow dripping off the gutters and the wind whistling eerily through a gap in the window frame. A piece of wood in the
fire crackles loudly and I notice that Nic doesn’t flinch. She isn’t pacing either or checking the exit points every few minutes which strikes me as progress, given the
circumstances.

I get up and poke the wood back into the flames. We need to go. We should have already left, but I want Nic to be as well rested as possible before we set off. It’s going to be a tough ski
across country.

‘I think I was dating him because I thought it would be safe. No risk,’ she suddenly says.

I glance at her. She isn’t looking at me but staring into the flames. ‘I’m not good at trusting people, especially boys. After . . .’

‘That asshole ex-boyfriend of yours sold you out after the trial?’ I finish for her.

Her eyes fly instantly to me. Her cheeks flush. She nods.

‘You know I can remove every trace of that story from the internet if you like.’