While Ella looked at him, he returned the compliment, his gaze trailing languidly up and down Ella’s body in a most disconcerting manner. The look in his eyes was part curious, part predatory. Ella felt an instinctive rush of blood to her groin. She gripped the perfume bottle tighter.
‘Tell me, right now, who you are and why you’re following me or I’ll call the police and have you arrested for trespassing.’
‘No you won’t.’ The man turned and walked into Ella’s living room, sitting down at the table and stretching out his legs with a maddening lack of concern. If he’d had a cigarette, he would have lit it.
‘I might,’ Ella protested weakly, unsure how she’d somehow lost the upper hand in their interaction. ‘Or for harassment.’
‘No one’s harassing you, Ella.’ It was the first time he’d used her name. ‘Sit down.’ He gestured to the chair opposite him, as if this were his apartment, not hers. Ella contemplated refusing, but then decided it would look weak and churlish. Besides, now that the shock at being ambushed had passed, she felt more intrigued than threatened. Putting down the bottle she joined him at the table.
‘Good.’ He smiled again, flashing his white teeth like a wolf. ‘Now, I believe you had some questions for me?’
‘Why were you at Mimi’s funeral?’ Ella began.
‘To see you.’
‘But you didn’t see me. You didn’t introduce yourself. You left before I could speak to you.’
‘I saw what I needed to see.’
Ella scowled. She’d never been a fan of riddles.
‘What does that mean? What do you want from me?’ Her exasperation was starting to show. ‘You show up at my grandmother’s funeral, uninvited. Then you walk into my home, unannounced, and actually at a really bad time. I lost my job this morning.’
The man shrugged, showing zero interest in this information, never mind sympathy.
Christ, he’s rude, thought Ella. Of all the obnoxious, self-centered …
‘You would have had to leave your job anyway,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘You’re going to be working for us from now on, Ella.’
Ella raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh I am, am I? And who exactly is “Us”?’
The man leaned forward, suddenly animated. ‘The organization I represent is a secret but powerful group. We work as a force for justice around the globe.’
Ella stifled the urge to laugh. What was this, a comic book? Next he’d be telling her that they all wore capes and lived in Bat-caves. But when he spoke again he sounded deadly serious.
‘There are things I can explain to you today. Other things will become clear over time. Once you start your training.’
Training? For the first time it occurred to Ella that perhaps this good-looking stranger was actually unhinged. Some sort of paranoid schizophrenic who’d seen her on the street or in the coffee shop and decided to stalk her. First to Mimi’s funeral and now here, at her home. Perhaps she ought to be concerned for her safety?
‘Listen, I’m sorry,’ she said, getting up and walking, calmly, to the front door of the apartment. ‘I’m sure you mean well, but I think you must have me confused with someone else. I’m not going to be doing any “training” or joining any group. I have an ordinary life. I work in an office.’
‘I thought you said you were fired?’
Wow, thought Ella, frowning. He has even worse social skills than I do.
‘Well, yes. I was fired. But that’s not the point. The point is I need you to leave now.’
She held open the door. The man didn’t move.
‘Please go.’ Nothing.
‘I’m serious.’ Ella’s tone hardened. ‘If you don’t leave, I’ll—’
‘Your parents, William and Rachel Praeger, were both important members of The Group,’ the man said, without looking up from the table. ‘They devoted their lives to the cause.’
Ella froze. ‘You knew my parents?’
‘Not personally,’ the man said. ‘I knew of them, naturally. They were legendary in their time. Everyone in The Group knows about the Praegers.’
Ella closed the door. Her heart was beating so fast it was hard to breathe.
She looked at the man. ‘You used the past tense. They “were” legendary.’
‘Yes.’
‘So … my parents are dead?’
‘Yes.’
There was no soft-soaping. No ‘I’m so sorry’ or ‘I thought you knew’. He answered her as bluntly as if she’d asked him the time, or some trivia question. Tactless. Like me, Ella thought again. Not that their similarities eased the blow.
Leaning back against the wall, she fought to steady her breathing. All her life, up until ten days ago, she’d believed her parents were dead, killed in a car crash when she was very young. But since finding the stack of letters hidden in Mimi’s ceiling, she’d been living on hope. Angry hope. Confused hope. But hope nonetheless. That perhaps, miraculously, it wasn’t too late. That one day she would see her mother and father again and they would explain everything. Make everything all right.
But now, with a single word, this stranger, this bizarre, arrogant, handsome man had extinguished that hope, like a priest at the end of Mass, casually snuffing out a candle.
‘Are you sure they’re dead?’ Ella whispered.
‘Quite sure,’ said the man. ‘They died on a mission for us in 2001.’
Two thousand and one. That was the year the letters had stopped.
‘I believe you were eight years old at the time,’ the man said.
‘What sort of “mission”?’ asked Ella. It didn’t occur to her to wonder how he knew her age, or indeed anything about her. ‘Are you trying to tell me that my parents were spies?’
He shrugged. ‘We prefer the term “agents”.’
‘How did they die?’ demanded Ella, who didn’t give a damn what terms the man preferred.
He hesitated for the briefest of moments, then said, ‘They were murdered.’
Ella swallowed hard.
Murdered.
For a few seconds she was left mute. ‘How?’
The man held up a hand. ‘I can’t say any more, I’m afraid. Not yet. But you should know that your parents were both tremendously brave people, Ella. They did their best to protect you, to allow you to enjoy a safe and happy childhood.’
Safe and happy? thought Ella, bitterly. Those were hardly the words she would have chosen to describe life up at the cabin with Mimi.
‘I want to know how they were killed, and why.’
‘And you will,’ said the man. ‘When you’re ready. It was always your parents’ wish that one day you would join us. Carry on their legacy.’
The man continued talking, about ‘The Group’ and ‘missions’ and ‘training’, but Ella had tuned out. She didn’t care about whatever cult it was that he was trying to persuade her to join. All she cared about was that this man knew things about her mother and father. Real things. Specific things. For the first time in Ella’s life, someone was offering her answers – actual, factual answers, not the stream of lies and half-truths and platitudes she’d been fed by her grandmother, well intentioned or not.
‘What else do you know about my parents?’ she interrupted him, reclaiming her place opposite him at the table. ‘You said you never met them.’
‘No.’
‘But other people in your group did?’
‘There are people still in The Group who would have known them, yes,’ the man answered cautiously.
‘Who? Can I talk to them?’
‘I can’t give you names at this stage, I’m afraid.’
‘What do you mean “at this stage”?’ said Ella, growing more strident. ‘And why can’t you? They were my parents. I have a right to know.’
‘As I explained, once you start training for your first mission, you’ll be briefed more fully,’ the man said calmly.
Ella rubbed her temples. This entire conversation had been surreal from the beginning, but all this talk o
f ‘training’ and ‘missions’ was going too far. She wasn’t about to join this weirdo’s cult, still less volunteer for any sort of ‘special ops’. Whatever number these people had pulled on her parents’ back in the day wasn’t going to work on her. She wasn’t Lara Croft. She was an unemployed statistician with questionable social skills and some sort of undiagnosed mental disorder that made her feel as if hundreds of little men with pickaxes were permanently mining the inside of her cranium, day in, day out. Most of the time it was a ‘mission’ for Ella just to get through the day.
Wearily, she pressed her splayed fingers to the side of her skull.
‘Your training will help you with the headaches you’ve been experiencing,’ the man said nonchalantly. ‘As well as with the other side effects of your … gifts.’ He chose the word carefully, turning it over in his mind, like a squirrel trying to select a particular nut. ‘The nausea, hearing voices, all of that.’
Ella’s stomach lurched. How on earth did this complete stranger know about the voices in her head? She’d never told anyone about them, not even her useless doctors.
‘What do you mean my “gifts”?’ Her voice came out scratchy and strained. ‘How do you know these things about me?’
‘Here.’ The man reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a silver USB memory stick that looked like an old-fashioned cigarette lighter. ‘Look at this after I’ve gone. It will give you more clarity on the details. You’re unique. But the important thing to understand is that there’s nothing wrong with you, Ella. Your brain was simply designed differently to other people’s.’
‘Brains aren’t “designed”,’ murmured Ella, gazing at the stick in her palm and talking as much to herself as to him.
‘Yours was,’ said the man. ‘In vitro. Your parents were pioneers in gene editing. As individual scientists they were each brilliant, but as a team they pushed boundaries that none of their contemporaries dared even approach.’
‘Wait.’ Ella held up a hand. ‘My parents were both doctors. Medical doctors.’
‘That is not accurate,’ said the man.
‘Yes it is accurate,’ insisted Ella, angrily. ‘My grandmother told me—’
‘Is this the same grandmother who told you that they’d died in a car crash?’ The man gave her a pitying look. ‘Surely you’ve realized by now, Ella, that your grandmother lied to you. Repeatedly. About many things.’
Ella bit her lip. She wanted him to be wrong, wanted to be able to leap to Mimi’s defense. But she couldn’t.
‘What I’m telling you now is the truth,’ said the man. ‘Whether you choose to believe it or not. Your parents were not doctors, they were research scientists. Your mother was a neurologist and your father a geneticist, and they were two of the most brilliant minds of their generation. You were their greatest achievement.’
Ella waited for him to go on.
‘The voices and messages you’ve been hearing aren’t auditory hallucinations. They’re all real,’ he explained. ‘They’re electronic signals – emails, texts, data and voice transmissions. You were genetically modified before birth to be able to receive and, theoretically at least, to unscramble them. We believe you have visual capabilities too, but we won’t know the full extent of your gifts until we get you into the lab. It’s really quite exciting,’ he added cheerfully.
Exciting? To be told that your own parents had conceived you as some sort of experiment? The words ‘genetically modified’ made Ella think of those perfectly round, red tomatoes that looked pretty on supermarket shelves but that tasted like tennis balls when you bit into them. Fake. Ruined.
‘You’re saying my parents caused the problems with my brain?’ she reiterated slowly. ‘On purpose?’
‘Not problems. Abilities,’ said the man. ‘You’re looking at this all wrong, Ella. Just imagine the possibilities. You’re gifted. You can access the unknown. You’re like a … a human receiver.’
‘Well if I am, I’m a broken one,’ Ella snapped. ‘I can’t “unscramble” anything. All I hear is white noise until my head feels like it’s going to explode. I’m sick, all the time. That’s the only “gift” they gave me. The only “ability”.’
There was no mistaking the bitterness in her voice. The anger.
‘I understand it’s a shock,’ said the man, with an attempt at empathy that clearly did not come naturally to him. ‘But those things will all improve. With training. Once you’ve learned how to master your abilities, we hope they will prove to be an invaluable asset to The Group, and to the greater good. Just as your parents intended.’
He stood up, pushing back his chair and straightening his silk tie with a perfectly manicured hand. ‘I know it’s a lot to take in. Download the information on the memory stick. Try to focus when you do, because once viewed it will automatically and permanently delete. I’ll be in touch in the coming days about next steps.’
Ella stood up too. She couldn’t just let him leave. She no longer thought he was deranged, but at the same time none of this made the remotest bit of sense. How dare this man, this stranger, walk into her life and drop bomb after bomb after bomb, refuse to answer her questions, then saunter off, leaving Ella to pick up the pieces?
Reaching out, she put a restraining hand on his arm. ‘Wait! Hold on. Please.’
‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said, shrugging off her hand and heading for the door.
‘You know what? Don’t bother!’ Ella yelled after him defiantly as he started down the stairs. ‘Because I’m not joining any stupid Group. Not for you or my parents or anyone else. So don’t come back here!’
The man kept walking.
‘I have a life of my own, you know,’ shouted Ella.
He stopped and turned to look up at her, his expression curious rather than angry.
‘Do you? No job. No family. No friends. No real purpose.’ He counted off Ella’s deficiencies on his fingers, not spitefully but in a matter-of-fact way, like a scientist letting the data speak for itself. ‘That’s not what I would call a life,’ he concluded. ‘But perhaps we have different standards?’
Ella spluttered furiously, trying to think of a suitable comeback, but by the time it came to her the man had gone. She stood alone at the top of the stairs, the silver USB stick clutched in her hand, feeling as if a tornado had just swept into her life and upended every single thing in it. If the man had still been in range, she would have hurled the stick at his head and hoped she knocked him out cold. Smug bastard.
Well, if he thought he was going to determine her future, he had another think coming. Ella wasn’t Frankenstein’s monster, whatever her parents might have intended. The man could take his stupid Group and his training and his missions and stick them where the sun didn’t shine.
I’ll show you, Mr ‘perhaps we have different standards’? Mr …?
It dawned on Ella in that moment that this man who claimed to know so much about her and her parents; this stranger who’d unlocked the mystery of her secret voices and solved the riddle of her past, hadn’t told Ella a single thing about himself.
She didn’t know how he’d come to join The Group, or what he did for them.
She didn’t know how old he was, or where he lived.
She didn’t even know his name.
CHAPTER FIVE
Helen Martindale pushed her greying hair back from her doughy, round face and fixed it back in place with a bobby pin. She smiled patiently at the young woman opposite her, who hadn’t looked up from the single-page contract Helen had handed her more than six minutes ago, reading and re-reading every line of text as if it held the answer to the meaning of life.
‘It’s just our standard vendor’s agreement,’ Helen explained. ‘Shouldn’t be any surprises in there.’
The young woman kept reading.
‘We’ll get you a fair price for the place,’ Helen said reassuringly. She was delighted that Mimi Praeger’s granddaughter had chosen to list the valuable Paradise Valley ranch with Martindal
e and Jessop, rather than go with some fancy city realtor, offering all of those ‘virtual tours’ and ‘social media presence’ and promising pre-drought prices that locals like Helen Martindale knew couldn’t be achieved any more.
‘Is there something bothering you, hon?’ Helen asked, once a full ten minutes had passed.
‘Hmm?’ Ella looked up, bewildered, as if suddenly seeing the older woman for the first time. ‘Oh, no. Thanks. Everything’s fine. Do you need me to sign something?’
Helen Martindale pointed to the dotted line at the bottom of the page and handed Ella a pen. The poor child seemed to be in a world of her own. Of course, she’d always been a funny one, a few biscuits short of a breakfast, as Helen’s daddy used to say. No wonder, given the isolated life she’d been forced to lead up at that ranch. Other than at school, she barely ever got to play with other children and learn how social interactions were supposed to work. But she seemed worse than usual this morning. Maybe parting with the ranch and saying goodbye to the cabin she’d grown up in was proving more of an emotional wrench than she’d anticipated.
‘Are you staying on the property while you’re here?’ Helen asked, kindly.
‘No,’ said Ella. She didn’t intend to be rude; she simply didn’t have any facility for small talk.
‘Well, that makes things easier from our point of view.’ Helen smiled. ‘Feels hard for you, I daresay, coming back to the valley now your grandmother’s gone?’
Not sure how to respond to this observation, Ella stood up, shook Helen’s hand stiffly, and left, closing the office door behind her.
Helen Martindale looked through the window as the girl stood on the sidewalk, swaying like a poplar tree in the wind, uncertain which way to go, before suddenly deciding to make a left on Main Street.
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