Perfect Sins (30 page)

What
would
they do, the pirates, if their call went unanswered? Call again, obviously, try to reestablish contact. Their business depended on it. But what would they do about the woman? Would they keep her alive because the source of their information had built up a useful rapport with her? Would they hurt her to make Graves feel guilty? Or would they kill her to show him they meant what they said? There would be other women they could use to keep him in line—if he was willing to compromise himself for one stranger, he'd probably do it for another.

All this passed through—no,
raced
through—her mind in much less time than it takes to read it. The computer in the next room demanded attention again, but only once. She had to make a decision, and good or bad, she had to make it now. She wished she knew more about this kind of operation. She wished, desperately, she had someone to advise her.

With the force of a thunderbolt came the realization that she
did
have someone to advise her. Someone with experience of exactly this kind of operation. Someone whose government had thought highly enough of his abilities to vest him with the job of closing it down.

Someone the pirates feared so much they'd destroyed his life in order to keep him off their backs.

Hazel half turned to Ash, hesitantly. The time-dilation effect of the emergency made her voice sound slow and echoey. “Gabriel…”

“Answer it,” said Ash without hesitation.

“Are you sure? If we don't, they'll have to call back. By then we could have an expert here to take it.…”

“
I'm
the expert on this,” Ash said tersely. He said to Graves, “Answer it. Don't tell them we're here.”

Graves nodded but still checked with Hazel for confirmation. “Officer?”

Inwardly, Hazel squirmed in an agony of indecision. She trusted Ash's intellect. She didn't entirely trust his emotions, and somewhere in his mind he still thought that the woman whose life they were gambling with could be his wife. Maybe he was right anyway. Maybe he was terribly wrong. Hazel had no way of judging. Nothing in her training had prepared her for this. Perhaps nothing could have done.

“I don't know,” she admitted, and whether or not the men heard it, she detected the tremor in her own voice. “God help me, I don't know.”

“I do.” It was almost as if everything that had happened in the last four years had been leading Gabriel Ash to this moment. As if the horrors he'd suffered, and had to confront, and had finally to move past had been steeling him. For four years he'd spent a significant part of every day considering how he would face the men who had taken his wife, if ever fate presented him with the opportunity. There was probably no way that contact could have been made that he had
not
contemplated. All the murderous hours he'd spent sweating his way through one scenario after another turned out after all to have had some kind of a point. He
was
prepared. The grief, the agony, the madness had all contributed to the staggering fact that, here and now, he knew what to do.

“Answer it. Do what you normally do, say what you normally say. Don't let them know we're here. But keep them talking—or her, if it's the woman. Out of sight of the webcam, jot down everything you see. Everything in the room, everything anyone's wearing, every symbol that comes up on the screen. Never mind whether it makes sense to you. Put a pad beside the monitor, don't move your hand too much, but jot down everything you see. We can use it later to work out where they're calling from.”

There was no time left, least of all for an argument when she had no confidence that he was wrong. Hazel nodded. “Do it.”

Stephen Graves did as he was told: followed the protocol exactly as he had all the previous times he'd done this. He keyed in his user name and password. They needed to know it was him they were talking to.

As always, there was a delay. An image tried to form, broke up, tried again, so bleached by distance and the marginal quality of the equipment that it was almost monochrome. Seconds passed. There was nothing unusual in that, only today the seconds stretched till their sinews groaned.

Once the decision had been made, Hazel had quickly taken up a position to the right of the monitor, out of view of the webcam, not even her shadow showing—she'd checked. From here, bent awkwardly because there hadn't been time to pull up a chair, she had a tangential view of the screen and also of the pad where Graves's right hand was already sketching letters and numbers and symbols. This was her field, at least it had been once, but she didn't even try to analyze them now. There would be time for that later. Right now the priority was to keep Graves on track—support, encourage, help him out if he stepped into the quagmire. With only a tiny sideways glance he could see her face, lip-read her silent instructions, and no one in Mogadishu would have any reason to guess.

Ash was on the other side, also invisible to the computer's camera, paying for his privacy with an on-screen image even poorer than the one Graves was seeing. Of course it was coming a long way—no one had Somalia at the top of their agenda when they were designing their satellites' orbits; in addition, there were undoubtedly measures being taken at the other end to keep the signal untraceable.

In spite of all that, a picture was forming. A face—a woman's face. Still too grainy to read much of an expression into it, and nothing whatever in the background—plain, colorless walls. Words came over the speaker, and a moment later her lips began to move. “Stephen? Stephen, are you there?”

“I'm here,” Graves said quickly. “Are you all right?”

A pause long enough to become uncomfortable, but it was only because of the distance the signal had to come. As soon as she'd received his transmission, she'd answered it. “I don't know. Things are happening. I don't know what it means. I think they're going to move me again. Stephen—try to help them. Whatever they want, try to do it. They say you're my only chance.”

She was an Englishwoman. It took Hazel a couple of sentences to be sure, because of the sound quality, but she had no doubt now. Well, if she was English, even if she'd been living abroad, it should be possible to find out who she was. There would be a record somewhere of her disappearance. Just how much help that would be, Hazel wasn't entirely certain, but it seemed to her to matter. The woman must have family and friends somewhere, people who'd want to know that at least for now she was alive.

She concentrated on the imperfect picture of the woman's face. It's harder than anyone ever imagines to positively identify a picture of someone you don't know. Hazel made a note of all the things that might help. Age, she thought, somewhere between forty and forty-five—though the life she'd been forced into would put years on anyone, so she could be younger. Thin, but that was only to be expected. Fairish hair, light skin; eyes looked washed-out, so probably blue or gray. Wearing a T-shirt you could buy in any bazaar anywhere in the world. It wasn't much to go on.

She was concentrating so hard on doing her job that, incredibly, for a moment she had forgotten who else was here doing it with her. Remembering with a start, wondering how he was dealing with this, she looked guiltily across at him.

Ash was transfixed by the image on the screen. She might have been Medusa, with the power to turn men to stone, rather than an exhausted, terrified woman begging a man she had never met for help he couldn't now give her. Ash's lips moved, but it was like the transmission from Mogadishu—the sound was out of sync and came moments later. “Cathy?”

Hazel didn't believe for one moment that it was Ash's wife they were looking at. The man was trying to see what he wanted to see above everything in the world, and it had been four years, and the picture was poor enough for him to project even his most desperate hopes onto it. Another moment and he'd see he was wrong, and then the disappointment would take him like an avalanche, crushing him.

But something was going to happen before that, and arguably it was even worse. He was shifting his position to get a better view of the screen. Another second, less, and he'd be where she could see him. And if the woman could see him …

Hazel mouthed urgently at him, flagging her arms to get his attention, waving him back out of the line of sight. Ash saw nothing but the computer screen, and the grainy, jerky picture of a woman that he was trying with all his might to force into the image of his lost wife. He leaned closer. “
Cathy
?” he whispered again.

And then it was too late. She'd seen him. Her pale eyes flicked sideways from Stephen Graves, and her mouth fell open with shock. Her pale, dry lips tried three or four times to form a word before anything came, and this time it wasn't just the lip-sync problem. She looked as if she'd been sideswiped with a length of two-by-four.

And then she said, “
Gabriel
?”

 

Also by Jo Bannister

Deadly Virtues

Death in High Places

Liars All

Closer Still

Flawed

Requiem for a Dealer

Breaking Faith

The Depths of Solitude

Reflections

True Witness

Echoes of Lies

 

About the Author

Jo Bannister
began her career as a journalist after leaving school at sixteen to work on a weekly newspaper. She was short-listed for several prestigious awards and worked as an editor for some years before leaving to pursue her writing full time. She lives in Northern Ireland and spends most of her spare time with her horse and dog or clambering over archaeological sites.

 

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

PERFECT SINS.
Copyright © 2014 by Jo Bannister. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein

 

Cover photographic illustration by Tom Hallman

 

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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-1-250-05420-3 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4668-5722-3 (e-book)

e-ISBN 9781466857223

First Edition: December 2014