The Organization (39 page)

Harriet told the group, “The police are calling it a terrorist attack, but they have no leads.  They know that a bomb was set off in the courtyard of Portcullis House, but they don’t know how someone got it in there.  Two dozen people were killed, although not all of the bodies have been identified.”

“It was Joanna,” Zoe blurted.

“Excuse me?” Harriet asked, placing one hand on the back of a chair to steady herself.

“We know it was Joanna who was behind it,” Zoe said.

“You should have told me this as soon as I arrived,” Harriet said angrily, feeling suddenly hot and cold at the same time.

“We tried to tell you,” Thomas said.  He explained, “Earlier tonight, we sent Zoe back to the Sisters and Brothers meeting house –”

“You did what exactly?  That was foolish and incredibly dangerous.”  Harriet could hear her voice getting louder.

“They cleared the place out,” Zoe said.  “Only Sarah was there.  And she had a note – a real, paper message – and it was addressed to you.”

Harriet looked at the table and saw the unfolded piece of paper, wondering how she didn’t notice it sooner.  There was nothing else on the table near it, as though no one wanted to place their cup or a coffee carafe too close to it for fear of contamination.  Harriet moved to where she could read the message.  A sloppy, undisciplined hand had printed the words:
You’ve no one to blame but yourself. – J.

Harriet reached down and snatched up the paper, crumbling it in her palm.

“Now what?” Harriet demanded of her group.  “We can’t go to the police because we can’t explain how we know it’s Joanna.  So tell me we have a plan.”  When no one answered she asked, “Is she in the wind?  Have we lost her yet again when we’ve finally gotten so close to catching her?  Is she just going to get away with everything again?  Someone tell me that we are going to catch that vile excuse for a human being.”

“Harriet,” Thomas said, “We’re all exhausted.  It’s been a stressful day and it’s now nearly three o’clock.  Let’s get a few hours of sleep and regroup in the daylight.”

“You just want to go home?” Harriet asked, aghast.

“None of us can think clearly right now,” Thomas replied.

Harriet looked around at the faces of her inner circle, their disheveled appearances and slumped shoulders, dark circles under their eyes.  Harriet realized they had been waiting around for her.

“Fine.  You’re right, Thomas.  Let’s regroup here at nine o’clock,” Harriet said as calmly as she could manage.

Rhys, Marta, and Zoe slowly got up from their seats and said their goodbyes.  Ethan, too, headed to the floor below to retreat to his bedroom.  As Charlotte and Harriet went to leave, Thomas said, “I’m coming with you.”

“What?  No,” Harriet told him.

He rolled his eyes and said, “I’ll sleep in the guest room, or even on the couch – I don’t care.  But I want to be there, just in case anything happens.”

Too tired to argue, Harriet acquiesced.

#

The next morning, Thomas left the house early so he could stop by his flat to shower and change clothes.  Even without much sleep, or perhaps because he hadn’t had much sleep, he wanted the shower and clean clothes to see him off to a fresh start for the day.  He made an offhanded remark about how things would be simpler if he hadn’t moved out, or at least had kept a change of clothes at the house, and Harriet ignored the comment, telling him they would meet him shortly at Bermondsey Street.  She knew that Thomas’s transition from being her lover to being her ex-husband was difficult for him.  Unlike other divorced couples, Thomas and Harriet still needed to maintain a trusting relationship.  The organization was bigger than either of their egos.

As soon as Thomas was out the front door, Harriet walked into the dining room with a tea tray and began piling their teacups, breakfast plates, and cutlery onto the tray.  What a mess of dishes from just one meal.  Harriet, too, had wanted to be fresh and alert for the meeting, and indeed she knew that it was more crucial for her than for Thomas, and she thought having had breakfast would help.  At least the tea was caffeinated.  Thomas had joined her for breakfast while Charlotte hadn’t budged from bed, saying she’d rather have the extra forty-five minutes of sleep.  Harriet wondered if, in part, Charlotte had wanted to avoid being stuck at a table with just Thomas and her.  Perhaps Charlotte still felt like a usurper and didn’t want to be reminded that this house was even more familiar to Thomas than it was to her.

Harriet thought about what the day ahead would hold.  They needed to find out what the Sisters and Brothers’ next move was going to be.  She worried that she was pushing her inner circle too hard, that they would arrive to the meeting exhausted and sluggish, but she also knew that they were loyal and she needed to give them more credit.  They would do as she asked.  But would Charlotte?  In some ways, she was still such a mystery.  She had always been quiet, so prone to hiding her thoughts and feelings, but prison had also changed her, driven her even more inward.

Harriet heard the creak of the floorboards just outside of the far end of the kitchen.  “Thomas?” Harriet called, wondering if he had forgotten something.

The hairs on the back of her neck prickled as footfall, lighter than Thomas’s, sounded in the kitchen as a voice said, “Hello, Harriet.” 

Harriet knew that voice.

She turned and looked into the galley kitchen to see Joanna standing there, a smirk on her face – and a gun in her hand.  Harriet had never had a gun pointed at her before. 

Joanna gestured with the barrel of the gun toward the dining room table as she walked slowly toward me.  “Sit down."

Joanna stopped walking as she reached the midpoint of the kitchen, a mere eight or ten feet from where Harriet sat down at the head of the dining room table.

Harriet didn’t take her eyes off her.  She thought about Charlotte sleeping upstairs, praying that she would stay asleep and not make any sound.  Her mind flashed to the thought of a squeak upstairs, or the turning on of the faucet in the upstairs washroom, and seeing Joanna rush up the stairs to confront Charlotte.  No, Harriet couldn’t let that happen.  With Joanna’s gun pointed at her, at least she knew Charlotte was safe, that the gun wasn’t pointed at her instead.

“How did you get in here?” Harriet asked her in a surprisingly steady voice. 

Joanna laughed and asked, “Do you really think it was so difficult?”  Her smirk turned into an uglier expression as she said, “You realize, don’t you, that I’ve had her people watching Zoe for a few weeks now.  I know all about your place on Bermondsey Street.  I know exactly when each day that Ethan goes down the block to get a sandwich.  I could have easily gotten in there as well.”  She looked so self-satisfied.

“Then why didn’t you?” Harriet asked. 
Keep her talking
.  She needed to buy herself some time to figure out how she could get out of this situation.  She told herself that, somehow, there must be a way out.

“Because when I kill you,” Joanna said, a small, menacing smile forming on her lips, “I want you to feel as vulnerable as you actually are.  Don’t you see, Harriet?  You’re not safe here, you’re not safe at work…” She paused, cocking her head and asked, “What did you think of my little display yesterday, incidentally?”

Harriet thought about the broken bodies, about her eager young intern, Dillon, and how merciless of an act it had been.  And then she heard a familiar creak, knowing immediately what the sound meant.  She watched Joanna’s face for a sign that she had heard the sound too but it didn’t seem that she had. Harriet rushed to get her next words out, eager to cover any additional sounds.

“I thought it was the work of a coward,” she replied. 

“Well,” Joanna said with a sneer, “You would know all about cowardice, wouldn’t you?  Hiding behind your position as an MP now, turning the organization into some sort of political party.”  She paused and then added, “What was it that you always used to say?  That you’d do whatever it takes?  Let’s just say that I’m taking your advice.”

“If you say so, Joanna,” Harriet replied, focusing her energy on keeping her eyes on her.  While looking Joanna in the eye, she could see the flash of Charlotte behind her, picking up the potted fern – Daniel’s fern – and swiftly raising it to come crashing down on the back of Joanna’s head.  Joanna collapsed unconscious on the kitchen floor, her body falling as though she were a marionette and someone had cut her strings.

Harriet rushed over and kicked the gun away, hearing it skid across the marble floor.

Charlotte, astonished, said, “I couldn’t get back to sleep after the tea kettle was whistling.  And then I heard her, and I thought maybe I was asleep after all.”  Charlotte looked at Joanna’s bleeding head wound and, brow furrowing, asked, “What now?  I didn’t think I hit her quite that hard.”  Harriet could hear the regret, perhaps even guilt, in Charlotte’s voice.

Harriet ran her fingers through her hair and said, “We need to tie her up before she wakes up.”

Charlotte knelt down and felt at Joanna’s neck and, apparently satisfied that she still had a pulse, stood back up again.  “All right.  Do you have any rope?”

“No,” Harriet said, feeling absurd.

Charlotte stared in silence at Joanna’s unconscious form.  Finally she said, “I’ll be right back.  Just have to go upstairs for a sec.”

Charlotte took the stairs by twos on the way up, and then sprinted back down the steps, a pair of handcuffs dangling from one hand.  Harriet’s mouth dropped open as she recognized them as the handcuffs from the bedroom.  She recovered after a moment, nodding at Charlotte and telling her, “Well done.”

Harriet rolled Joanna onto one side as Charlotte applied the handcuffs.  Charlotte then looked at Harriet and said, “Give me that dishtowel for her head, will you?”

“Are you serious?” Harriet asked her.

Charlotte shrugged and Harriet heard a noise as someone was opening the front door.  She scrambled to retrieve the gun from the kitchen floor and told Charlotte in a low voice, “Stay here.”

Her heart pounding, Harriet moved around the corner of the hallway to the foyer, where she saw Thomas coming through the door.  His eyes widened immediately as he cursed in surprise. 

“What the hell are you doing?” he asked.  His eyes focused in on the gun that Harriet was still holding at her side and he asked, “And where did you get that?”

Feeling paranoid, Harriet kept the gun trained on him.  She asked him in return, “Why did you come back?”

“I had this vague… feeling… that something was wrong,” he said, swallowing hard. 

She judged him to be telling the truth.  She lowered the gun.

“Joanna is here.  We have her knocked out on the kitchen floor,” Harriet told him.

His eyebrows arched toward his hairline as he asked, “In the kitchen?  Joanna?”

Harriet nodded, and they hurried together back into the kitchen, where Charlotte was applying the dishtowel as a compress against the back of Joanna’s head.  Soil and pieces of the pot covered the kitchen floor around Joanna.

Harriet exchanged a look with Thomas and then quietly told Charlotte, “We’ll take it from here.”

“What?” Charlotte asked, looking up at Harriet in surprise.

Thomas said, “You need to go to Bermondsey Street and alert the others.”

“No,” Charlotte said, standing up.  “I’m not going to leave you, Harriet.”  Her eyes locked on Harriet’s, but Harriet looked away when she heard Joanna rustling.

Harriet took a cup off its hook on the wall, quickly filled it with water from the faucet, and splashed the water on Joanna’s face.  Thomas hoisted her to her feet as she groaned but came back to consciousness.  “Bitch,” she said, spitting in Harriet’s direction.

Joanna struggled against Thomas’s grip but he had both a height and strength advantage on her, and she was in a substantially weakened state.  Still, she thrashed and twisted until she caught sight of Charlotte, who stood awkwardly off to one side. “And I see you’ve got your little lovesick puppy dog here too,” Joanna said. “Did you really think I believed that story you tried to sell me the other night?  You thought I believed that you would ever turn on Harriet?  You’ve been infatuated with her since the moment you saw her at my party all those years ago.  If you didn’t give her up when I had you arrested, why would you turn on her now?  Pathetic.”

Harriet turned to the kitchen drawer that held all her miscellaneous junk, and she retrieved the roll of duct tape, tucking the gun away in its place.  It occurred to her that they could have used the tape to tie up Joanna. 
Hindsight
, she told herself, as she ripped off a generous piece and unceremoniously applied it over Joanna’s mouth.

Charlotte stood up straighter and then slowly approached Joanna.  Harriet could see Thomas’s muscles flexing as he restrained Joanna. 

“Don’t, Charlie,” Harriet told her, her voice shaking slightly.  Harriet wanted to say so much more.  She wanted to tell her not to let her anger make her do anything she would regret.  She wanted to tell her not to even listen to Joanna’s insidious words.

Charlotte stood in front of Joanna until a calm, perhaps even pitying expression came over Charlotte’s face.  Her hands shoved deep into her pockets, Charlotte said quietly, “Someday you’ll look back on what you did and you’ll be ashamed.  When that day inevitably arrives, I want you to remember that I forgive you.”  She hesitated, seeming to want to say more, but then headed for the hallway.  As she was about to leave, she caught Harriet’s eye and said, “I’ll be at Bermondsey Street.”

Harriet waited until she heard the front door close, and then she waited until she counted to fifty in her head.  They were fifty very long seconds.  She walked over to Joanna, who was still struggling against Thomas’s grip and trying to say something through the tape over her mouth.  Harriet studied her face, wondering how she had ever trusted her.  They had worked together for years, seemingly on the same side of the fight, seemingly wanting the same results.  But Joanna had betrayed her – and more than that, Joanna had tried to destroy her.  In her search for destruction, Joanna had killed innocent bystanders, and she had killed Daniel.