Lethal Profit (9 page)

Eva immediately rushed to the bed and pulled back her mattress. She dragged out her laptop and sighed with relief. Thank God. At least she hadn't been robbed. But when she opened the laptop she realised it was off. She had charged it overnight, which meant it had full power, and from the standby state she had left it in that morning would have had to be physically shut down in order for it to be turned off. She sat down on the bed with the laptop in her hands. A chill trickled down her spine. Someone had been in her room.

As she looked around it become obvious that, although not much was out of place, things had been moved. The wardrobe door was slightly ajar even though she had shut it firmly that morning. The two books on the night stand were not lined up as she had left them. The chair was not exactly parallel to the small, scratched dressing table. Eva suffered from a mild obsessive compulsive disorder, which required straight lines, clear surfaces and shut doors – she would not have left the room like this. She turned on the laptop and searched for anything that might have incriminated her. But incriminating for what? And to whom? There was nothing on there other than a few old articles for the magazine and some drafts of boring emails about bills or rent. If someone had been through her things, who were they and what were they looking for?

After several minutes of sitting on the bed, Eva began to move again. Methodically, she checked the latch on the one window in her room – locked – and on the small frosted glass opening in the bathroom – large and openable but barred from the outside. Gently she opened the door to her room and ran her fingers over the lock as she glanced down the shadowy hotel corridor. The metal felt smooth and unscarred. She looked more closely at the metal mechanism and gently moved the handle up and down. As she leaned in, she realised there were tiny, almost invisible scratches on the moveable part of the lock; the logical assumption would be that it had been forced. She closed the door again, locked it and took a long drink from a plastic bottle of water. There was a strong possibility that this was Leon's handiwork. He had known she would be out with Valerie today and she hadn't seen him at any point during the time she had spent with Jackson's old flame. But there was no logical reason for him to break in here when he had already made contact. Years of watching conspiracy films made Eva stand up and begin running her hands over and under surfaces for bugs or listening devices of any sort. But of course she didn't even know what she was looking for, and if that was the reason her room had been broken into then she doubted whoever had done it would make them so easy to find that an amateur could do it. This was a worrying development and one that made her feel even more vulnerable, as if she didn't feel that enough already. She needed to
do
something.

Eva flicked on the light on the bed side table and immediately her eyes fell on the sports bag that she had picked up from Jackson's old place of work the day before. She hauled it up on the bed and pulled open the zip. Inside was a mass of papers. Eva sat back in surprise. She had not expected that. Presumably, whoever had broken into her room had already had a good old rifle through these documents, but it still might be worth her having a look. She started pulling out pages of documents, some photocopies, some heavily redacted and some made up purely of graphs and tables. They made very little sense to her at first glance, particularly because they seemed to be in no particular order and the subject matter different in almost every case. Frustrating. She paused for several seconds and then picked up the bag by one end and tipped the whole mass of papers out onto the bed. Then she began the time consuming process of sorting each paper into a relevant pile.

It was 2am before Eva finished her mammoth sorting exercise. Now she was sitting on the bed thoughtfully, eating a strip of chocolate and staring at the achievement on the floor at her feet – twenty-five neat piles of paper. She finished the chocolate, wiped her fingers, picked up the pile nearest to her and began to sift through the papers once again. The theme for this pile had been ‘the Sudan'. All the documents related to that country, in particular an apparently fairly remote area in the vicinity of a town called Torit. There were ordnance survey maps, aerial photographs, a report entitled Spate Irrigation For Rural Growth and Poverty Alleviation by UNESCO, and several long, apparently unpublished, articles that looked at the health of the local population. The document that had really interested her was produced by the organisation Doctors Without Borders and reported in 2010 on one of the worst disease outbreaks in the region for eight years. The outbreak was described as a humanitarian crisis, one that had been made worse by a lack of basic sanitation or access to proper medical care. Eva tried to think back but she didn't remember seeing anything on the news about it. The disease was thought to be a strain of Kala-azar – fatal in almost 100% of cases – but there were parts of the report that questioned whether it wasn't some kind of new epidemic. The report interested Eva because it didn't seem able to make up its mind about the disease and yet it had still been published.

Other than the Sudan pile, Eva had tidied piles on ‘Paris' (more maps, photos and directions to places in the French capital), ‘Photos' (a collection of mug and action shots of people who she assumed could be Sudanese, mostly taken in Paris from what she could tell), ‘Paraguay' (more maps and aerial shots of some remote location between Brazil and Paraguay), ‘PX 3' (a pile of scientific formulas that she didn't grasp at all), ‘meetings' (a list of times and dates with apparent code names such as ‘Mr C' listed alongside them), ‘phone calls' (reams of print-outs of telephone conversations that she hadn't read all of but that seemed harmless enough) and ‘ACORN,' the biggest pile which seemed to be made up of almost completely useless documents about a company called ACORN that, as far as she could tell, was an all-purpose shelf company. Eva felt as if she had read and absorbed a hell of a lot of information but was still none the wiser as to what she had found. The only link with anything that had happened to her was Leon's reference to ‘the Africans', but he hadn't explained it so she couldn't realistically connect it to anything here. The heaviness of tiredness began to pull her downwards so she turned away from the papers, curled up on the bed with her mobile phone clutched in one hand and went to sleep.

T
HE
NEXT
MORNING
E
VA
AWOKE
with a start. Sophie. The name Sophie was running through her head and suddenly, as clear as a bell, she started to make connections. The face she had seen in Jackson's ‘friends' on Facebook and also in the picture Leon had shown her whilst at his flat; the name Valerie had mentioned as the suspected person with whom Jackson had been having an affair and now… she rolled over, bent down and rifled through one of the piles of paper on the floor. There… Sophie Vincent. The name was written in stark, black type along the bottom of one of the sheets of paper she had been sorting through the night before. Sophie Vincent had printed out these documents. Eva propped herself up on one elbow and stared at the name on the bottom of the sheet of paper as she realised that she had seen it on a huge number of the documents she had leafed through the night before. She threw back the bed sheet, slid off the bed into a crouch on the floor by all the piles of paper and started sorting through them again, this time looking for that name. Within thirty minutes more than half the papers previously divided into neat stacks were on the ‘Sophie' pile.

‘We can't find her.'

It was obvious to Nijam that his brother was not happy even before Wiraj had turned his narrow features to face his brother's broad face.

‘We must find her.'

‘She is impossible to find.'

‘I thought we had a tail on her.'

‘We did. And we found the man she spoke to yesterday – a journalist, Terry Dowler. But she slipped away and has not come into work today, Wiraj.'

‘She cannot have just disappeared in the middle of the night.'

‘It seems that she has.'

‘And what about her apartment?'

‘There is no-one there.'

‘Have you been inside?'

‘Yes. We have turned the place inside out but we had to do it at speed, Wiraj.'

‘Dammit, we should have acted sooner, why didn't we act sooner?'

Silence filled the room and Wiraj glanced slowly at each of the faces of the three men he had brought with him to fulfil this delicate series of steps. Delicate because with their dark skin and borrowed winter clothes they stood out so obviously in the areas of Paris they had so far had to operate in. And delicate because there was only so much room for failure before they would find themselves losing more than just the fee for the job.

Joseph Smith's bony face, with its dark hollow eyes and square-set jaw, filled Wiraj's mind. Back in the Sudan, Smith held an exalted position, having left at an early age for Europe and returned with money, power and influence that only a foreign business connection could buy. No one knew exactly what he did or who he worked for, but he had come back to his home town and begun recruiting former friends and acquaintances, offering the kind of money that no one could ignore. But what he gave with one hand, he took with another and since he had arrived in the village there had been many unexplained disappearances. Several of Wiraj's cousins had gone to work for Smith and never returned. As the oldest in his family, their father already passed, Wiraj had accepted Smith's offer of work for him, his brother and three of their friends, in spite of the risk, but had never foreseen it would bring them here, to Paris. He still had no idea who stood behind Joseph Smith, or why they were being asked to carry out the bizarre list of tasks they had been given. But Joseph Smith was not the kind of man that many people dared to question. If he wanted them to rub out every trace of a life that was what they would do. Wiraj glanced around at the faces in the room. They seemed anxious, deflated and lacking in fight. If they were going to get out of this situation with their money and their lives then he needed to be a better leader.

‘Come,' he said, taking a step towards the group. ‘We are not defeated yet, are we? Sophie Vincent will resurface, she must, she is just a common secretary, she doesn't have the resources to disappear.'

‘Yes,' said his brother, his face visibly brightening.

‘And in the meantime we know the location of the British girl.'

‘We know her hotel.'

‘And we have her mobile telephone.'

‘Not yet.'

Another burst of irritation pricked Wiraj's skin. ‘We don't have it?' he repeated, making sure he kept his voice as calm as possible.

‘No. But we will – we just need to collect it.'

Eva spent fifteen minutes staring at the bundle of papers in front of her before she finally got up and decided to take a shower. She had checked each one of the – now creased – documents and they all had the same tag-line at the bottom. Sophie had printed all of them out over the period two months before Jackson disappeared, at regular weekly intervals and almost at the same hour of the day each time. Most had been printed out at 6am but the last batch – the largest one – was time-stamped between 11pm and 1am. In the ‘Sophie' pile were all the documents that Eva understood the least. The aerial photographs and ordnance survey maps were in this pile, along with documents filled with what looked like mathematical calculations, a set of passwords and the strings of email conversations. Eva had read these several times but could see nothing more than a casual discussion about unimportant matters. She had found it impossible to draw together a common thread from everything in front of her – the only thing all these documents had in common was Sophie's name on the bottom.

As she climbed out of the shower and dried herself, Eva tried to imagine what it was that was connecting Jackson to any of the documents in the bag. Some of the materials related to Sudan and there the connection was obvious as that was where his work had been focused, but few of the papers dealt with anything related to the distribution of aid that had been his job. Perhaps the sports bag was simply a dumping ground for peripheral information that he meant to read later or wanted to take home with him and she was looking for meaning where there was none. At the back of her mind was the constant niggling thought that someone had been in her room the day before. She couldn't start getting too deep into that kind of paranoia, but if she was right, no doubt whoever it was would have searched the sports bag and if there had been anything in there of interest it was probably now gone.

Knotting the threadbare towel around her chest, Eva began drying her hair, brushing it through and following the slow brush stroke with the hotel's unenthusiastic hair dryer. She was going to have to contact Sophie Vincent and hope that was a good move. Leon had been in touch several times the day before trying to arrange another meeting and Eva was unnerved by the fact that he had programmed his number into her phone before he had given it back to her. It made her wonder what else he had done to it or taken off it. She hadn't forgotten their encounter several nights before and nor could she settle on whether or not she trusted him. However, the man he had shot outside his flat – the man who had put a bag over her head – gave her pause for reflection when she thought about trying to disappear from him. Perhaps she needed Leon in the sidelines – as long as she was in control– but the question of whether or not it was possible to remain in control of a situation that involved someone like Leon weighed heavy on her mind. Either way, he could not be her only option for moving forward. She couldn't solely rely on his conspiracy theories, she needed ammunition of her own. She would message Sophie Vincent through Facebook and hope she checked her messages. Leon would never know.