The faces turned once again to Paul. ‘You have placed yourself at the head of an operation that is several decades in the making and now in the final, critical stages. We know very little about you and, so far, almost everything you have brought to the table – the technology that was the only reason we allowed you in at a low level – has brought additional issues.’
‘It was teething problems,’ he repeated, trotting out the same excuse once again, ‘it’s innovative technology, that’s how it…’
‘Regardless,’ said one of the faces on the screen, interrupting mid-sentence. The word sounded as if it was spoken through gritted teeth. ‘We don’t have knowledge of you, we certainly don’t trust you and we currently see very little value in you.’
Paul lowered his eyes and looked at the floor.
‘But you have put us in a position where we have no choice – at least at present – but to operate with you. Which I imagine was your intention.’
Paul looked up and stared straight into the webcam embedded in the slim frame of the laptop. That was not the case but it was preferable to appear a cold, calculating killer with an agenda than to reveal he simply could not control his temper.
‘You will step up then. Whether this part of the project stands or falls now comes down to your actions, as it did his.’ The eyes on the screen moved momentarily in the direction of the corpse.
‘Your task is to establish control over the teams in play, keep them separate – they must believe they are working alone, in isolation, for this to succeed. Ensure that your technology works, no more innovative teething problems. The rest you will have no role in.’
‘I understand.’
‘If you fail…’
Paul was beginning to regret accepting the offer that had brought him here.
Now, one of the other men spoke. ‘I suppose you had better hope there isn’t another “Brutus” waiting in the wings to dispatch you, too.’
Nobody laughed.
A beeping sound started at regular intervals on the other end of the connection.
One of the men looked down and moved something on the table in front of him.
‘You have two hours to confirm to us that you have taken control. After that, you’re relieved of responsibility for everything.’
‘You mean leave?’
‘No.’
The screen went blank.
Eva was still waiting for Jackson to continue speaking, watching the smoke from yet another cigarette curl around the strong contours of his face and wind its way into his windswept hair. She was beginning to feel the unrealistic events of the past week coming into sharp focus in her mind – too sharp, almost agonising; she desperately needed answers. It was becoming clear she was emerging from whatever combination of shock and drugs had kept her suspended in a blind, emotionless fog. Physically, she felt as if she had a bad hangover – she was a little shaky on her feet, there was a headache that came and went periodically and she felt constantly either starving hungry or incredibly nauseous. And then there were the mental effects; the gaps in her knowledge were now becoming frightening. Extremely frightening.
An awareness of someone physically tampering with her body but no other memory to rely on. She had clearly been held in some sort of medical stasis but, for what reason, she could not fathom. There was nothing on her body to indicate what had happened – nothing she could see. Whatever it was had left no scar, other than the two on her arms, apparently unrelated. Either whoever it was had finished with her once the ‘treatment’ was at an end or they had left something inside her.
Eva had never found ignorance to be bliss. A lack of knowledge left her anxious. As her mind returned to speed, it became clear she was ignorant of everything since the explosion in Berlin. Where to even start trying to piece it together?
Well, she had started trying with Jackson.
When Jackson failed, again, to provide an answer to a straightforward question, she stood up impatiently, lit another cigarette and walked to the pile of clothes in the room. She felt the layers on the top for damp but they were dry and almost warm. She picked up a large sweater and held it against her. She needed to re-establish contact with the world again. She needed clothes, a phone, money, credit cards. Right now, she was completely at Jackson’s mercy. He might be her brother but she hadn’t seen him for so long and had no idea of the person he had become.
Besides, she did not like to be ‘kept’, guided or looked after. She craved the independence provided by a phone, bank card and her own possessions.
When she turned around he was watching her. She stopped where she was and inhaled the cigarette. The light in his eyes was odd. It was strange but it made her skin crawl, slightly. It was almost lascivious. She stared at him, trying to understand why he was looking at her with apparent desire; the look on his face flickered to the much more defensive expression of earlier that day.
He looked away, leant forward and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘We should go.’
She nodded silently and walked out of the room with the jumper still in her hands. It was absolutely paramount she obtain money and a phone, she thought to herself, as she walked back through the bar and towards the car. Even more so given the discomfort she had felt minutes earlier.
There was something wrong with this Jackson. Instinctively, she felt she couldn’t trust him, regardless of any blood ties. There was too much unexplained – and that look he had given her in the restaurant. It had made her skin crawl. It wasn’t right. Instinct was all she had to go on and her instinct told her to find an opportunity to obtain the tools to escape.
That moment came several hours later. With directions to stay on a single motorway, Eva had taken over the driving whilst Jackson slept. He had seemed exhausted and, after the soporific effects of the brandy, had appeared only too pleased to let Eva take over for a while. The trust he had shown had appeased her alarm and suspicion of him – momentarily, at least. Although, at the back of her mind, she was aware that this could have been exactly what it was calculated to do.
As he slept, he snored. Loudly.
Eva had turned on the radio to block out the noise and he hadn’t even flinched, so deeply asleep was he.
At one point she leaned forward to change the radio station and, as she did so, spotted a black wallet falling half way from his pocket onto the seat below. She sat back and then looked again, glancing between the wallet, the road and his sleeping features. Briefly it had seemed as if his eyes were open and he was looking straight at her. But the next light they had passed under had shown his eyes shut fast.
Finally, she slowed the car down to around 50km an hour and, in one swift movement, reached over and grabbed the wallet. She sat with it in her lap for several seconds, glancing repeatedly at the sleeping man next to her, but his head was now facing the window on the other side and she had no way of telling whether or not he was awake.
Fumbling slightly, she wedged her right knee against the wheel, held the other side with her left hand and began using her right hand to try and liberate the wallet of its contents. The first thing to fall out was a thick wad of euros.
She glanced up at the road and then quickly over at Jackson. Her heart was beating fast.
The notes were large currency – 200 and 500 Euros – and she took a quarter of a centimetre’s worth of money and shoved it into her jeans.
Another glance at Jackson.
No reaction.
Next she began trying – one-handed – to pull the rest of the contents from his wallet. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was very little in there. A credit card in a name she couldn’t quite read in the darkness of the car, but which certainly wasn’t his, several incomprehensible business cards, an identity card in what was presumably the same name as the credit card. She put everything back into the wallet – slowly, painstakingly, with one leg and one arm still wedging t
he steering wheel between them – and then, as she was lifting the wallet to put it back against Jackson’s hip, another card fell out. It tumbled down below the handbrake but she had been sure she recognised it.
She took another look at the sleeping man next to her, then gently rested the wallet against him. She looked back at the road ahead; empty. She took her eyes off the road ahead and reached down for the card.
Immediately, she sensed movement next to her and quickly wrapped her left hand around the card on the floor. Then she was wrenched upright by strong hands.
As she sat up, her face was bathed in bright lights flooding the car. Her heart was in her throat. She was on the wrong side of the road!
Her hands flew to the steering wheel and she shoved it back to the right, taking them out of the path of a van steaming towards them at high speed, its horn on full blare.
Eva struggled to steady the car and felt Jackson’s hand next to hers on the wheel. Her heart was beating so fast she thought it might explode. Her arms throbbed.
Fuck, she thought to herself.
Did he see her reach for the card? How had she not seen the van coming? Where had it come from?
But there were only seconds to think because the other vehicle had screeched to a halt, executed a swift turn in the road and was now behind them, bearing down at high speed, honking its horn and flashing its lights.
She looked over at Jackson, who was reaching across into the back seat for a large bag that lay in the footwell.
He turned to her. ‘Drive,’ he said firmly. ‘If you want to live, drive.’
Eva pressed her foot to the floor and the car shot forwards.
The van behind picked up even more speed and the lights were switched up to high beam; she almost couldn’t see for the glare in her mirror. She turned it away so it was not reflecting into her eyes and took the car up another gear. It was a good car, fast, and they were now going well over 130km an hour. Eva felt a slight gust of wind push the car from its course. At this speed, the forward trajectory felt fragile. But it was clear whoever was in the van behind was more of a danger than her driving. Or so she hoped.
Jackson wound down the window to his right. He had been assembling a large gun and seemed to be trying to lodge this on the descended window of the moving car.
Suddenly, there was a thud from behind and a screeching sound and the car was thrown forward as the van shunted them at high speed. Eva screamed inside her head as the steering wheel seemed to go from underneath her fingers and then she gripped the leather as tightly as she could, forcing it to stay in the same place.
There was another loud crash from behind and Eva struggled with the wheel once again.
Still Jackson fumbled with the gun, now apparently trying to load it.
The van behind was gearing up for another shunt. Eva was not entirely sure how much longer she could keep the car on the road.
What is he doing, she thought to herself, against the whining noise of the engine, her hair flicking in snapping movements around her face as the wind coming through the open window whipped it around.
She glanced over at Jackson.
He seemed to be waiting for something. He was staring hard at the vehicle behind them, as if trying to make out the passengers.
Then he looked up into the sky.
The van once again drew closer. Eva rallied the car and pushed it further up the speed dial. She felt the effect on their car as the back bumper was grazed by the larger vehicle coming at them at full speed.
Still Jackson did nothing.
Was he afraid?
Was he hesitating?
What was he waiting for?
Eva tried to focus hard on the road ahead. But another headache was developing. Her vision was starting to swim, there was a blurring around the edges. The car was shaking now, they were going too fast, and at such speed that Eva could feel every single bump in the road.
Again, the edges of her vision went soft.
She glanced pointedly at Jackson, willing him to meet her gaze so she could communicate with him, perhaps so he would provide an explanation for his slowness. But he seemed to have frozen completely.
Then he was touching his face again – that same odd movement he had gone through back at the house after she had slapped him. Touching various points on his face as though he was trying to make sure the skin was still on.
She looked back at the road, realised she had drifted again, and righted the car.
She glanced in the wing mirror and realised the van was once again readying to shunt. They were going too fast now to cope with the pressure if it took her off guard. This could be it.
She turned to Jackson and screamed ‘Just fire the fucking gun!’
TWENTY NINE
As if kicked from behind, Jackson suddenly sprang into action and began firing the automatic weapon. Once again, it changed the balance of the car on the road.
Eva used all her strength to keep it on its path. She could feel the vehicle was reaching the edge of its tolerance for the forces pressing in on all sides and a stray rock or a momentary lapse in concentration could send them careering off the road. She stared straight ahead and the steering wheel vibrated under her hands, her foot pressed painfully hard on the accelerator.
She felt the car reaching to the right.
She pulled it back to the centre of the road. Her arms – already weak from the recent ‘surgery’ – began to shake ominously.
It didn’t help that Jackson was firing his gun, creating an additional destabilising influence, and introducing yet another force pushing the struggling car intermittently to the right. But at least he was trying to warn the other vehicle off now. And it seemed to be working.
The van behind them was no longer trying to shunt into their back bumper but the lights were still shining full into the mirror. It was maintaining speed. Despite the sporadic gunfire from Jackson, the vehicle was clearly not going anywhere.
Eva glanced over at him. He did not seem particularly focused on the task in hand.
In fact, was he even aiming at them? She couldn’t hear any impact from the bullets, no metal hitting metal, no smashing glass. Ok, it was a moving target but a very close one, surely some shots should be hitting home?
Despite the rushing wind through Jackson’s open window, she thought she might at least be able to hear a couple of hits. She glanced quickly at Jackson.
He had stopped firing the gun.
He looked at her.
His face changed.
Eva stared.
The flicker happened again.
Eva’s grip loosened on the steering wheel. The man’s features were distorting horribly. His face seemed to be melting, right in front of her eyes.
She blinked and looked harder and then, remembering the road, pulled her eyes back to the front. She stared hard at the road ahead as she heard Jackson put down the large weapon. Nothing wavered and nothing changed in the scene in front of her. Not the road, the inside of the car or her hands on the steering wheel.
Her thoughts were out of control.
Had she really seen that? It had been as if his face moved, shifted shape and changed altogether, as if a mask had been lifted.
Irene had kept her head low as the bullets whizzed past the side of the vehicle. They had to push that car off the road. They had to reach Eva, Irene needed this.
‘Stay as close as you can!’ she yelled at the back of the driver’s head.
‘He’s shooting at us, it’s too dangerous,’ was the response.
‘That’s an order!’
She was fed up with such insubordination in such a pressured situation. She could not help feeling they would have naturally accepted the authority of a man, without query. Life was full of that kind of everyday sexism, dismissed as paranoia or laughed off.
The bullets from the car in front had stopped. All they could hear was the whistling of the wind past the open windows as the van kept pace with the car in front.
She glanced down at the lit screen of the phone in her hand and continued trying to type the message. She knew they had very little time to get to the airfield, to deliver Eva into the hands of those who could give Irene what she wanted. There was no way the car in front would be allowed to escape. She still didn’t even know how the two people in the car had managed to leave the château without being caught. She had the sense that this well ordered organisation was in some chaos, that there were forces working at odds within it. Or perhaps this was all intentional. Either way, it was unnerving. If ACORN didn’t get what they wanted then neither would Irene. She had betrayed people left, right and centre for this and she could never go back.
She finished typing their coordinates into the lit screen, sent them immediately and turned to face the windscreen.
The bright lights of their van were shining into the car in front and she could clearly see Eva at the wheel. It was obvious she was struggling to keep control of the car. Irene watched as Eva apparently seemed to lose concentration, staring at the man in the seat next to her, before looking back at the road. She saw her glance again as the man continued to fiddle with some sort of weapon – he was sitting sideways on, so Irene could see his profile.
She did not recognise him.
The next time Eva glanced at Jackson, he raised a small hand gun. The muzzle was directed at her. She inhaled a quick, sharp breath and then her eyes wandered to his face, which had begun to morph again. His features seemed to be blurring like a TV picture receiving interference.
‘What are you doing?’ she shouted at him, looking him directly in the eye whilst trying to ignore the shifting shapes of his features, and pretend she hadn’t seen anything.
But she could see he knew she had.
When he didn’t reply, she tried again to reason with him. ‘Please, I need to drive or we’re going to crash. Do you want to die?’
When there was no response, Eva turned her face back towards the road, her heart smashing against the inside of her ribs. She righted the car and continued to drive, with the gun still pointed at the side of her head. She was barely breathing. The road in front seemed to rise up towards the car as she fought to maintain the fast pace at which she was driving, while also attempting to process what was happening .
Killing Eva Page 22