THIRTY-FOUR
IRENE HUNT TOOK A SHORT SIP OF her tea. They were sitting in the plush surroundings of The Wolseley on Piccadilly in London. Eva had finished her plate of scrambled eggs and was two-thirds of the way through her second coffee.
She had recapped for Irene how she had run from the scene of the crash back to the car park and hidden until the first tourist bus had arrived. Through those three hours she had looked continuously for Leon but he had not appeared, even though she had kept a careful watch on the path he would have to have taken if he had made it from the car before it fell. She had approached one of the tour operators as soon as their passengers were off the bus, claiming to have been kidnapped and mugged. Without her passport and with her obvious injuries there was great concern and, as the bus-load of German tourists returned from viewing the Falls, it was decided that they should take her to the tour company’s headquarters in Iguaçu. There she had contacted the British Embassy in Lima who had flown a representative to meet her and to whom she had told a carefully patched-together story about where she had been held and by whom. They had found Daniel’s ranch with enough evidence of smuggling and murder to make her story believable but the place was empty of anyone with a heartbeat and ransacked by the time they got there. Then Eva had put in her call to Irene Hunt leaving only two words in her message: ‘Joseph Smith’.
As it turned out, two policemen – one of whom happened to be Hunt’s first husband – had identified one of Joseph Smith’s fingerprints from the flat in Paris where Eva had found the dead red-haired Englishman, and had provided that, along with evidence they had apparently already uncovered about Daniel’s algae, virus and all, to Irene.
And then the algaecide had appeared and an antidote was delivered, the name of the donor organisation – the Association for the Control Of Regenerative Networking – known only to those who could be relied upon to keep their mouths shut.
‘The government paid a fortune for it,’ Irene Hunt had told her. ‘That company forced them to pay an enormous premium. I’ve never heard of such large figures going through unofficial channels.’
‘Who were they?’
‘Of course there was no time to check them out properly. Some faceless front no doubt.’
‘Was that all they wanted then – money?’
‘It would seem that way, yes.’
Eva thought of the four men she had seen on the screen deep underground in Paraguay. Daniel’s reference to their organisation’s ‘long game’ made her feel convinced that there was more to it than simple financial blackmail. What had their ‘exercise’ been and was that the end of it? She had mentioned these questions in her debrief but there was no apparent enthusiasm to pursue them. ‘You don’t seem particularly shocked by this.’
‘Little shocks me any more,’ said Irene.
The waiters came to clear the plates and Eva finished off a glass of water and then her coffee.
‘I want to know the truth about Jackson,’ she said when the table was empty.
Irene looked up at the unexpected question. ‘I told you, we still don’t know what happened to him.’
‘Not that.’
‘Then what?’
‘I don’t think you told me the truth about why he came to you. I still don’t believe he would ever have left our family like that without a good reason – my father’s affair wouldn’t have been enough for him to abandon me and my mother. It’s not his style.’
Irene Hunt looked down at her tea – lemon, no milk – and then finished it.
‘Eva, you would be best advised to let this drop now.’
‘Why, because the powers that be want me to, or because you do?’
The other woman looked at her hard and for a moment there was a screen of hostility between them.
Finally, Irene sighed. ‘Because I do.’
‘Why?’
When Irene responded, she spoke quickly, as if she felt ashamed. But her face wore an expression of great relief. ‘After the affair with your father things were very difficult for me, Eva. Granted it was a situation of my own making, but nevertheless it was not easy. You saw how badly it affected Henry. He was a new relationship, my first since my last husband, and we were held together by a very fragile thread. If I hadn’t been pregnant at the time I wouldn’t have seen him for dust. I still sometimes feel he has yet to forgive me.’
‘Why did you do it?’
Now Irene was uneasy. ‘I don’t know, Eva, why do we make any of the mistakes that we do in life – never consciously. At the time, I was in an environment where I was struggling. The Lebanon was not an easy place to be, especially for a western woman. I needed comfort and that came in the form of your father.’
‘But it went on for such a long time.’
Irene pushed her cup away. ‘It was intense. When we returned it felt like no-one else really understood what had happened – that can push you closer to someone and create an artificial need for them like you wouldn’t believe.’
Eva didn’t say anything. For once she felt some sympathy for the situation Irene had been in, particularly after the way things had unfolded with Leon.
‘When Jackson came to me, I helped him – because he helped me. I doubt you know this but he was already running from Daniel Marchment. Just a week before the affair was exposed your brother witnessed Daniel take a crystal decanter to a woman’s head on a boat in St Tropez. It was a rape gone wrong – apparently Daniel had a habit of taking what he wanted but this time the girl had resisted. When her body washed up on Pampelonne beach Jackson confronted Daniel and that was when his father weighed in and threatened Jackson. Daniel’s father is someone we had been watching for some time – although we have never been able to catch him, we know that he has long been associated with criminal networks, and most recently with the Russian gangs taking over the French Riviera. When our microphones picked up your brother telling that man that what his son had done shouldn’t go unpunished – followed by Marchment’s death threats – we unofficially recruited Jackson in return for offering protection. I helped him fake his own death and he began as a semi-official employee, a disposable asset to be used in volatile situations.’
Eva frowned.
‘I had agreed with Jackson to contact your father,’ continued Irene, ‘and tell him the truth but then the affair blew up and I was so angry about the effect it had on my marriage I never did. And then when you turned up at my house… I just wanted you to go away. I couldn’t bear for all that to be resurrected once again. Guilt is such a very powerful emotion.’
She paused.
‘I’m aware that I made an enormous mistake allowing who you were to stop me taking the information you had about the algae. I have let my emotions cloud my professional position. I’m not sure my career will survive it.’
Eva noticed Hunt didn’t actually apologise.
‘But what about Jackson, why didn’t you listen to him?’
‘By that point he had become discredited. His information was coming from someone we thought we knew to be a false source and he was behaving incredibly erratically. His file is full of his escapades into narcotics and it seemed fairly clear that this was the road he had once again gone down. In the end we cut him loose. It’s not particularly admirable but as far as the powers that be were concerned he was entirely disposable.’
Eva left Irene Hunt at The Wolseley and took a walk through Green Park. It was a bright morning, cold air but blue skies, her favourite kind of December day. She had time to kill and thinking to do after the conversation with Hunt.
She decided to go and get a coffee.
Seating herself in the window of a chain coffee shop across from the park, Eva ignored the looks from passers-by staring at the injuries on her face and gazed out at the street. It was mid-morning and all around people were rushing to their everyday lives. Tourists were taking pictures and paying overinflated prices for bus trips, lovers were kissing, sharp-suited business people were taxiing to meetings
. Everything around her was normal. Nice and normal. She smiled to herself and sipped her strong coffee. A newspaper lay on the next table so she picked it up and began to read. The headlines trumpeted the defeat of the mystery algae, giving full credit to the government for developing the algaecide, and naming John Mansfield as the government representative responsible for the disastrous Bioavancement S.a.r.l. deal. The article said he had been found dead in his home, apparently from a heart attack. But there was no mention of the virus. Instead the algae story had been pushed to the second page by a scaremongering article on a new strain of bird flu – something no-one could be blamed for specifically. Everyone was to be vaccinated and the article listed vaccination muster centres and help-lines for those infected. My God, Eva thought to herself, are we never to be told the truth?
As she was sipping her coffee and making her way through the rest of the day’s news she felt a gentle vibration in her bag. She opened it, pulled out her phone that Leon had returned to her in Paraguay and held it in her hands. Her eyes came to rest on the lit screen. Suddenly her body was alive with adrenaline. She stared at the phone, eyes wide in disbelief as the letters of the display flashed up again and again.
‘Jackson calling.’
First published in the UK in 2013
by No Exit Press
an imprint of Oldcastle Books
PO Box 394,
Harpenden, AL5 1XJ
noexit.co.uk
@noexitpress
© Alexandra Blackmore 2013
The right of Alexandra Blackmore to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988
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ISBN
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Lethal Profit Page 28