by David Caris
It was deeply satisfying to feel her plan reaching fruition. And this despite Malone’s girlfriend losing her nerve and betraying them, Kapoor’s suicide, and the crash in Vienna.
Not to mention Van Heythuysen’s inability to seduce Megan Curzon and drop the requisite hints about Spain…
Bibi returned to her laptop. She activated a VPN and opened an encrypted email account she used when communicating anonymously. She created a new email and put in Bain’s address. She attached Kovac’s confidential file, along with details of Curzon’s lax BoNT security protocols.
A scoop by any other name…
In the subject bar, she typed: “Curzon International commercializes terror”. Then she changed her mind. Instead of sending the email, she saved it as a draft and shut the account. She wanted Yvette Morris to find it all on her own. It would read better if it was earned. She had chosen Morris because she wanted an edgy millennial to break this story, and because Morris was a real journalist with tenacity. The girl had already made a name for herself covering Isis recruitment tactics in London, and she was perfect for this job. Bibi hadn’t given up on her yet, but she was ready with a Plan B if Morris let her down. If worst came to worst, she would go direct to Bain herself.
Bibi pocketed her phone and collected up her keys. With Paris in motion at last, and Luther en route, there was no backing out now. It was time for her final departure in Spain, where she would mark the anniversary of her sister’s death in the most public way possible, and expose Curzon’s brutality for all the world to see. She was going to Rose.
Chapter 52
Luther Curzon’s previous fights with cancer – if such a thing could ever really be considered a “fight” – had resulted in victory. That should’ve given him confidence now. But as he well knew, there was a world of difference between his thyroid cancer of old and this new threat. Thyroid cancers took years to become lethal, and surgery provided good options. If it had been a fight, it had been a fair one.
This new cancer was a different beast. It wasn’t even clear it was related to his previous bouts. It had started as a persistent cough, along with pain in his back. Luther had allowed a chest X-ray, hoping for good news but suspecting he wouldn’t be so lucky. He wasn’t. His left lung had collapsed and his chest was filled with fluid. Doctors had talked in vague terms about infection. They got out the long needle Luther knew so well from previous hospital visits and drew the fluid. Off it went for testing, like so many samples before, and back it came with the news. Lung cancer.
Luther’s oncologist – a dour fellow if ever Luther had met one – had explained it was already on into the lining of his chest. He had put it well. He’d said: ‘Luther, keep in mind, you’ve had your nine lives.’
Luther had noted the hidden kindness in those words.
Know when to fight, know when to quit.
When he was discharged, he had sat with his wife and held her hand, the two of them overlooking Pemberton’s beautiful lawns. The lawns had just been cut and watered, and Luther had enjoyed the smell as he tried to absorb what this new cancer meant for his retirement plans.
Was it his fault? He had been slack with his exercise. He hadn’t been eating well either, he knew that. In point of fact, he hadn’t been eating much at all.
His wife blamed herself, her smoking.
But in truth, there was no one to blame.
It was life, that was all.
They had talked about the looming “fight”, deciding chemo this time would be short and strategic. And when the time came to quit fighting for extra months and weeks, Luther would switch to a new fight, a fight for gratitude and dignity. As with everything he did, there had to be a goal, a North Star. Dying was a part of life, and damned if he wasn’t going to approach it like any other challenge. He would go out with purpose and fortitude.
Right now though, all that was in the future. Right now, he was gearing up to work. He was in the air, approaching London. Which meant he would soon be distracted, and the cancer would become an afterthought. His greatest concern was a physical failure while he was preoccupied. Could he expect to hold up physically?
He realized the time to address that question was now, before he landed and forgot all about cancer.
By far his greatest worry was this new shortness of breath. His flight had every creature comfort, but creature comforts didn’t help with the physiological stress of a flight. He had endured this once in the past, and it had turned out to be a pulmonary embolism. Hopefully not that again, he thought, climbing out of bed. The blood thinners for that particular ailment had left him horribly constipated.
He sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, his head spinning.
Despite himself, he wondered about the chemo.
Carboplatin and paclitaxel, this time? Gemcitabine maybe. Or perhaps even Pemetrexed…?
‘Dignity.’ He said the word in a croak. That was the guiding light now. When it all momentarily felt like too much, as it did now, he could remind himself that more time wasn’t the only goal. He had to appreciate what he still had, and he had to stand tall.
But this pep talk didn’t automatically provide the strength he desired. Instead, it nagged at him. Where was the dignity in the instructions he was giving Bishop? In this warped, last-ditch effort to save Curzon? He was acting rashly, losing track of himself.
He shifted into the wheelchair without standing and rolled it out of his room, on up towards the staff seating near the front of the enormous plane. He didn’t need the chair, strictly speaking, but was using it to rest up now while he still could.
He pulled up level with the doctor he had brought along, just in case cancer did plan on interrupting his work. They spoke softly and the doctor asked all his usual questions. Was there any pain? How was the appetite? The sleeping? Was there any thirst?
‘No thirst water hasn’t been able to solve,’ Luther said, trying to get to the point of his visit.
But the questions kept coming as the doctor attempted to prove his value. ‘Any confusion or anxiety, restlessness perhaps?’
Luther had to smile at that one. ‘Still some shortness of breath,’ he said, subtly taking back control. ‘I don’t want to get around with this wheelchair, or with the liquid oxygen when we land. I can rest until then, but could I get by with just the nebulizer in London?’
The doctor took his headset from around his neck. He switched off his screen and folded it away, as if any answer he gave would require time and concentration. ‘That depends…’
‘On?’ Luther wanted a simple “yes”.
‘On what you want to do.’
‘Meetings and the like, I expect.’
‘And you said you’ve rested up on this flight?’
‘I have, yes.’
‘Then at this stage in your illness, yes, you should be okay once we’re back on the ground.’
‘Will I appear well?’
‘Well enough, yes.’
‘Good.’ Luther patted the man on the shoulder, then turned his wheelchair around in the expansive aisle. ‘One final question, though.’
The man had been about to return to his TV show. ‘Yes?’
‘How long?’
‘How long?’
Luther could see he understood the question. He waited.
The doctor sighed. ‘It’s very hard to say with these things. As doctors, we give the median, but there’s great variance around –’
‘The median’s all I need. Months?’
‘We don’t know the exact spread of the cancer yet, Luther. If it’s into your lymph nodes it’s –’
‘Assume the worst. Assume I’m riddled with it. Months?’
‘Probably. But that’s with treatment. And you will, in your weakened state, suffer significant side effects.’
Luther nodded. So probably four to six weeks, assuming he cut the treatment off quickly or skipped it altogether. It felt like an impossibly short span of time in which to get everything done and get back to
Pemberton; but it was possible, and he needed to be grateful that it was.
In the meantime, he would just have to do his best moving around London as if healthy. He didn’t want to add an additional source of stress to Megan’s list.
The doctor was studying Luther’s face. He seemed to guess at Luther’s thoughts. He added an unexpected sentence. ‘Prepare for the inevitable, Luther.’
Luther smiled. ‘Oh I am, believe me. That’s why we’re on this plane.’
Chapter 53
It was late afternoon by the time Virat Kapoor’s daughter opened a door, leading Megan up a narrow wooden staircase. The young woman didn’t look into the room, as if aware the sight of her dead father would only send her reeling backward. Instead she groped for a wall and, propelling herself off it, started straight back down the stairs.
Megan stepped under the police tape, entering the room ahead of her police escort. Flecks of brain, shattered skull and… ugh, blood.
‘With a headshot like this,’ the cop said, ‘the amount of blood is always pretty confronting.’ He looked at her with obvious confusion. ‘Believe me, Ms. Curzon, you really don’t want the memory of this. The less you see right now, the better.’ He glanced back down the stairs, in the direction of Kapoor’s daughter.
Megan could hear her wailing hysterically. ‘You should check on her,’ she said, ‘make sure she’s okay. I know she insisted, but we shouldn’t have let her show us up to this office.’
The cop looked torn. He started down, then paused. In the end, guilt and human compassion won out. ‘You won’t touch anything, right?’ he said, resuming his descent. ‘I’m meant to stay with you is all.’
‘Don’t worry about me. Help the people who need it.’
As soon as the cop was talking with Kapoor’s wife, Megan circled Kapoor’s body and put on latex gloves. She was taking an insane risk doing this, but Kovac had given her clear instructions, and it was only fair – given where he was and what he was dealing with – that she took some chances, too.
It helped that Kapoor had worked for Curzon. Megan could pass this off as a visit to a family in need of comfort at a terrible time. As far as the world was concerned, Megan had been made aware of this suicide at her press conference, and this visit was a perfectly natural, very human reaction. She was reaching out, offering support, doing all she could.
She turned on the spot. The first thing she noticed was a business card for a freelance journalist, Yvette Morris. It was on Kapoor’s desk.
Using her phone, Megan photographed this card without disturbing it.
The second thing she noticed: Kapoor was a hoarder. It looked as if he had kept everything he had ever come into contact with. Shelves were bowed under the weight of it all, and every stretch of floor was filled with junk. There were old device chargers in weird shapes, golf clubs, cushions, even a collection of old stereo speakers.
Megan decided it was all irrelevant and went through the desk drawers, careful not to touch Kapoor’s body or the revolver. She found more junk and, in the bottommost drawer, a hard drive. It wasn’t old like everything else. It was a Samsung solid-state drive, roughly as big as a playing card and not much thicker.
She pocketed it, then looked at Kapoor’s blood-spattered cell phone on the floor.
She took note of its exact positioning, before gingerly picking it up. It was locked. She used Kapoor’s finger to open the device, disturbing as little about him as possible. Then, using her own phone again, she photographed Kapoor’s call log.
Returning the phone to its exact position, Megan exited the study and re-entered the staircase. She didn’t go down towards the wailing. She continued up, all the way to the top level, where she noticed a half-open door emitting a faint humming sound.
She eased the door the last of the way open, entering an attic full of computers. The room had a sloped ceiling, matching the building’s roof, and it smelled of some kind of cheap air freshener. It was a server center, but it was no Google. Very few of the machines were in cabinets or even in steel frames. Many were mounted on plywood, which had been cut to size and attached to walls with simple metal brackets. Some of the wires were carefully arranged by color, with strategically placed cable ties. Others ran chaotically across the carpet, ending up in tangled wads behind computers and desks. This was what Curzon entrusted its finances to?
If she had known this was all that lay behind Wilson Software Solutions, she would’ve raised the alarm. But she had seen the Wilson website, and it gave the impression of a cutting-edge data center.
It was yet another IT vulnerability that Juliette had either failed to catch, or deemed a low priority.
Megan knew her way around Windows just fine, and she could handle the fancy equipment and software that sometimes came with her roles at Curzon. But that was about the extent of her computer knowledge. It didn’t extend to servers and networking. She went down on her haunches to study the base of a wonky server tower in the furthest corner of the room. A few of the servers were shaped like pizza boxes, but most looked to be simple disk drives.
Still in a crouch, she swiveled and took in the room segment by segment. She forced herself to absorb the details people’s eyes normally drifted straight over. She had the feeling that bits and pieces had been bought online, the room gradually taking shape as Wilson Software Solutions expanded its work for Curzon. It was clearly a room that had been cobbled together, not one which had been bought off the plan and built to spec by IT contractors.
But surely Curzon had paid well?
Where had all the money gone? Why was this man struggling to make ends meet, pretending to be a type of company he in no way was?
She rose and walked to the middle of the room, where a string dangled in midair. She pulled on it, and a cheap blind rocketed back in a skylight overhead. The light that came in illuminated swirling dust, and a single photograph fluttered down. Megan caught it. There was writing on the back, which said only “London”. She turned it over and was shocked to find a photo of her father sitting with an Indian woman. He was young. He had his arm around her shoulder and she had her head to his neck.
As if in love, Megan thought.
She pocketed this too, without letting herself analyze or dwell on it. Making use of the new light from above, she resumed her search, but the building shuddered as a nearby commuter train tore past. Everything rattled and Megan was startled by a voice.
‘Did you find what you were after?’ It was the cop, appearing at the open door. Megan hadn’t heard him coming over the train. His eyes immediately locked in on the gloves. ‘What are they for?’
‘You’d rather I walk around fouling things up?’
‘No. I just thought we agreed you wouldn’t…’ He shrugged, as if on second thought the gloves were sensible.
‘How’s his daughter?’ Megan asked.
‘I’m sorry, but they don’t want to talk to you.’
‘That makes sense. They don’t need a stranger in the house at a time like this. I can come back when they’ve had some more time. I’ll let myself out.’
The cop nodded, like he was relieved she had offered this. ‘I’ll let them know you pass on your best.’
‘Thank you. Tell them Curzon will cover all costs. Whatever they need.’ She slipped past him at the doorway and started down the stairs. She called her driver as she went, telling him she was ready to leave, but apparently there was a new car waiting.
She walked back outside, confused.
What new car…?
The Kapoor’s home opened directly onto the pavement and she found her father with his phone to his ear. He looked as if he had been pacing back and forward, talking while waiting on her. He had his own SUV and driver, presumably the vehicle Megan was now expected to use. Her father had obviously released her driver and bodyguard, replacing them with his own.
As soon as he saw her, he ended the call. ‘I know, Megan. Don’t say it. But I wanted to be on hand, so here I am. I work for yo
u. Anything I can do, put me on it. I’ll ensure it gets done, and done right.’
‘How did you know I was here?’
‘Long story.’ He flapped a hand, as if to say “not important”. ‘The journalist who went after you at the press conference, we have her name. Yvette Morris.’
Something about this grated. Why was her father here, giving her the exact details she was after? She thought of the business card on Kapoor’s desk.
Luther pointed to his SUV. ‘Can we maybe go somewhere, get a coffee? There’s a lot to discuss.’
Megan forced a smile. Confused though she was, this was a positive development. God knew, she needed her father’s help right now. She walked to him and embraced him. ‘It’s great to see you.’
‘And you. A coffee then?’
Her father was turning back to the car, guiding Megan towards it, when a woman called out from the Kapoor family’s front door. ‘Luther?’
He turned, startled. ‘Feryal.’
The woman approached him and they embraced tentatively. When she stepped back, she studied his face as if noting changes. ‘Kind of you to come,’ she said, seeming to ignore the fact he was actually leaving.
‘I didn’t want to intrude. I wasn’t sure if –’ Luther seemed to catch himself. He cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry for your loss. He was a good man.’
‘He was.’
‘You’ve met my daughter, I take it? When I heard she was coming here, I –’
Megan noted that he again chose silence over a lie. ‘You both know each other?’ she asked.
‘Feryal’s an old friend of mine, yes.’
Feryal smiled and lowered her head slightly, like a nod but not quite. More like she was giving them both permission to leave. Luther smiled back, but with obvious guilt. ‘Is there anything we can do for you? I realize this must be an incredibly difficult time.’
‘You’ve done too much already.’
‘I… well, it is lovely to see you again.’