This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by White Stack Limited
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Originally published in Great Britain by Orion Books, Ltd., an Hachette UK company, London.
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DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Jacket design by Evan Gaffney
Jacket photograph © Nathaniel Goldberg/Trunk Archive
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Giltrow, Helen.
The distance : a novel / Helen Giltrow.—First U.S. edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-385-53699-8
ISBN 978-0-385-53700-1 (eBook)
1. Upper-class women—Fiction. 2. Prisoners—Fiction. 3. Assassins—Fiction.
4. Disappeared persons—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6107.I495D57 2014
823’.92—dc23
2013033513
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Day 25: Saturday: Karla
Part I
Day 1: Wednesday–Day 2: Thursday: Karla
Day 2: Thursday: Johanssen
Day 2: Thursday–Day 5: Sunday: Karla
Day 5: Sunday: Powell
Part II
Day 7: Tuesday: Johanssen
Day 7: Tuesday: Karla
Day 7: Tuesday: Johanssen
Day 7: Tuesday: Karla
Day 8: Wednesday: Johanssen
Day 8: Wednesday: Karla
Day 9: Thursday–Day 10: Friday: Johanssen
Day 10: Friday: Karla
Day 10: Friday–Day 11: Saturday: Johanssen
Day 11: Saturday–Day 12: Sunday: Karla
Day 11: Saturday–Day 12: Sunday: Johanssen
Part III
Day 12: Sunday–Day 13: Monday: Karla
Day 13: Monday: Powell
Day 13: Monday–Day 14: Tuesday: Johanssen
Day 14: Tuesday–Day 15: Wednesday: Karla
Day 15: Wednesday: Johanssen
Day 15: Wednesday: Karla
Day 15: Wednesday–Day 16: Thursday: Johanssen
Day 16: Thursday: Karla
Day 16: Thursday: Powell
Day 17: Friday: Johanssen
Day 17: Friday: Karla
Day 17: Friday–Day 18: Saturday: Johanssen
Day 18: Saturday–Day 20: Monday: Karla
Day 20: Monday: Johanssen
Part IV
Day 20: Monday: Karla
Day 20: Monday: Powell
Day 21: Tuesday: Johanssen
Day 21: Tuesday: Karla
Day 21: Tuesday: Johanssen
Day 22: Wednesday: Karla
Day 22: Wednesday: Johanssen
Day 22: Wednesday–Day 23: Thursday: Karla
Day 23: Thursday: Johanssen
Day 23: Thursday: Karla
Day 23: Thursday: Johanssen
Day 23: Thursday–Day 24: Friday: Karla
Part V
Day 24: Friday: Johanssen
Day 24: Friday: Karla
Day 24: Friday: Johanssen
Day 24: Friday: Karla
Day 24: Friday: Johanssen
Day 24: Friday: Powell
Day 24: Friday: Karla
Day 24: Friday: Powell
Day 24: Friday: Karla
Day 24: Friday: Johanssen
Day 24: Friday: Karla
Day 24: Friday: Johanssen
Day 24: Friday: Karla
Epilogue
Day 55: Monday: Karla
Acknowledgments
About the Author
DAY 25: SATURDAY
KARLA
There’s blood in my hair. Twelve hours and I’ve still got blood in my hair.
“Are you all right?”
The uniformed officer standing guard by the door is staring at my face in the washroom mirror. Breaking rules: she’s been ordered not to talk to me. Maybe she thinks I’ll faint.
They took my coat away from me last night, at the scene: the blood had soaked through to the lining. There was blood on my face, too, and blood on my hands, working its way into the cracks around my nails—the doctor who examined me cleaned most of it off before declaring me fit to be interviewed. I dealt with the rest as soon as I could, ignoring the pain, scrubbing my skin red-raw to get it out.
Nobody told me about my hair.
I pick at it with my good hand. A brownish clot glues the strands together. I wish I had scissors. I’d cut it out.
Don’t think about it. Don’t.
It’s ten o’clock on Saturday morning. That’s what my watch says; without it I couldn’t even guess. I last slept, for a few broken hours, on Thursday night. Thursday … We had a plan in place then. I’d ceased to kid myself that I had the situation under control, but at least we had a plan. We could see a way through all this.
Now there’s just me, in a police station toilet, pulling at my hair, trying to ignore the knot in my chest, holding myself together, sticking to my story. How many times have I rehearsed this situation in my head? But it’s nothing like I imagined.
My whole adult life I’ve devoted to the pursuit of information, the analysis of patterns; to data and cold fact. This is just another fact, isn’t it? And that’s how I’ll get through this, how I’ll remain professional, detached—
But it hurts. I never guessed how much it would hurt.
The officer’s still watching my reflection.
“I’m fine,” I say. “Really. Thank you.” I try to smile at her, diagonally, through the mirror, but my face is gaunt and slack.
Her gaze skates away. “We’d better go back,” she says.
On the interview room table, the plastic cup of cold coffee by my seat has developed a greenish-white scum. My stomach flips, and I push the cup away. Immediately the officer says, “I could get you another?”
“No—”
Too abrupt: she’s only being kind. Try again. “Thank you, but no.”
She takes the cup and goes out, shutting the door. There are voices in the corridor outside, then silence. I’m alone.
More than anything I want to put my head down on the table and weep.
But any minute they’ll be back, with their questions. Just one more time, Charlotte, from the beginning. What did I see? What did I hear? Still they’re checking the details from different angles, listening for a piece that doesn’t fit. Because they have to be absolutely certain how much I know; or how little.
So I’ll start again, from their beginning, the one that makes the story neat and containable, and my part in it entirely innocent. But there are other beginnings.
Eight years ago: a stranger sitting in a warehouse, with a bright light shining into his face; a stranger who should have been afraid, and wasn’t.
Or the eighth of December, just over a year ago: a woman in a dark coat crossing a hallway, her face unreadable.
Or a Wednesday in January, less than four weeks ago, when Simon Johanssen found me, and I learned about the impossible job.
DAY 1: WEDNESDAY–DAY 2: THURSDAY
KARLA
I’ve always known the past might hunt me down—despite all my precautions, the false trails and the forged histories
and everything else I’ve done to distance myself from it.
But not like this.
It happens while I’m standing in the interval crush of a Royal Opera House bar, listening politely as a portly banker expounds on the proper staging of Götterdämmerung’s final act: I glance up, and in that second my two lives—lives that I have taken so much care to keep apart—grind against each other like tectonic plates and set the room rocking.
He’s loitering at the edge of a nearby group but angled fractionally away from them: he isn’t with them, though you might be forgiven for thinking that he is. The beautiful suit, the tie, the glass of champagne held loosely in the fingers of his right hand, even his haircut and his stance, mark him as someone who belongs here. Only I know that he doesn’t.
Two years. Two years, and only one reason he’d be here. He’s come for me.
A beat—I swallow my shock—then I turn back to my companion and smile and provide the right response. But my peripheral vision strains for a fix on him: I need to watch him, as if he’s some unpredictable animal, potentially dangerous. I want to turn and stare. But right here, right now, I’m Charlotte Alton—polite, wealthy, idle Charlotte Alton—and she emphatically doesn’t know the man I’ve just seen. Instead I must maneuver myself so I can survey the crowd over the banker’s shoulder. By the time I’ve done so, he’s vanished.
Carefully, discreetly, I sweep the room.
It’s a sold-out performance, and the bar—the biggest in the opera house, like a giant Victorian glasshouse under a high curved roof—is packed, the north and south balcony tables full, people crowding around the circular copper counter of the central servery. Too many men in dark suits who could be him but aren’t. A wall of rippling mirrors doubles the size of the place, reflecting the elaborate ironwork of the huge arched window and turning the crowd into a throng. He and his reflection have melted into it. At the top of the mirrored wall, the glass oblong of the upper bar’s balcony seems to float suspended above us: the people lounging against its rail look like boxed exhibits. I glance up there, too. He isn’t among them.
But he’s here, somewhere, and he’s found me. Of course he has. And whose fault is that?
The five-minute bell goes. Around me, glasses are drained. “Here, let me”—the banker takes mine, but as he turns away another of our party, a senior City lawyer, lays a hand on my arm—“Charlotte, I was hoping for a word—shall we?” So I fall into step beside him as we join the patient shuffle toward the auditorium, and I smile, and focus, while the blood beats harder behind my eyes.
Even though I’m searching for him, I don’t see him until he’s right beside me. He doesn’t look at me, but his hand finds mine. Then he’s gone, blending into the crush around me.
The lawyer and I move along the corridor toward the grand tier: the lawyer is on the board of a charity, there’s an auction coming up, might I possibly …? The object nestles in my closed hand. It’s sticky and warm with perspiration when, bending to take my seat, I slip it into my clutch bag.
It is a tiny Christmas-tree decoration, a little red-and-purple bauble that has embedded glitter into the skin of my palm.
The lights dim. The final act begins. Wagner’s tale of assumed identities, broken promises, betrayal, and murder storms toward its end. I barely register it.
The bauble is a message, a prearranged signal in a code devised on the fly years ago. Simon Johanssen wants a meeting. But not with discreet, well-bred Charlotte Alton. Johanssen wants a meeting with Karla.
The easy excuses come unbidden. You haven’t been near a client in months. You’re out of the game. Send Craigie. He’ll deal with it. It’s what you pay him for.
It’s a pointless debate. I’m going anyway.
The early hours of the next morning. The cold is like grit, stinging the eyes.
Up on the main road in this part of East London there are glass-fronted office blocks and smart, new light-industrial units, and in the distance the towers of Docklands—my apartment building among them—glitter like something out of a fairy tale, but from down here they’re invisible and a world away: a burned-out van slumps on its axles beside the approach road, and the gutters are choked with rubbish.
An amusements company uses the site for storage: decrepit fairground rides, tatty street decorations. Broken machinery litters the yard like the fossilized remains of prehistoric beasts: a giant petrified octopus with its tentacles drawn up around it, a stretch of track like the curved spine of a tyrannosaur. Inside the warehouse, underpowered fluorescent tubes send a grimy wash of light across the aisles, illuminating a sheared-off dodgem car still with its pole, a painted board with the words THE ULTIMATE THRILL.
It’s January, I’ve been here for twenty minutes, and I’m cold. Perhaps that’s why I miss it.
Not movement. I would have spotted movement. He is simply there, in the gloom, watching me.
“I’m sorry,” he says, but still I find myself sucking in air.
It’s as if he’s been here all along, among the grinning plastic Santas, the concertinaed Chinese New Year dragons, and only a change of focus has brought him into view. Or as if he’s developed fractionally, like the grass growing or the accumulation of dust: the shadows thickening into human form.
He’s thirty-eight years old. Six feet tall and spare, with the lean muscle mass of a distance athlete. The beautiful suit’s gone; now his clothes are understated, anonymous, his wristwatch mass produced. The bones of his knuckles are prominent, and scarred.
As always I’m struck by his stillness.
“I wanted to be sure we were alone,” he says. His voice is quiet, polite. The flat northern vowels betray his roots; nothing else does.
Two years since we last met. Fielding couldn’t tell me where he’d gone. The trail he left petered out in Amsterdam. A scatter of rumors after that came to nothing. I’d almost come to believe that he was dead. But here he is.
So why now, after all this time? Why come to find me now?
Instead I ask, “You didn’t try the number?” and I sound calm.
He says, “I didn’t know the man who answered.”
“He works for me. He’s safe.”
He nods, but his gaze goes sideways, away from me.
“Two years,” I say. “I thought we’d lost you.”
“I was keeping my head down.”
“Any particular reason?”
He just shrugs.
What does he want? Up until two years ago a meeting like this meant he simply needed an ID, or information for a job. That’s what people came to Karla for: the unauthorized obtaining of data, whether by bribery or blackmail or hacking or straightforward physical theft; the deliberate destruction of other data that would, if left intact, be of benefit to law enforcement agencies; the forging of identities or their deletion.
It can’t simply be that; not after two years of silence. But perhaps he’s out of the game, too, perhaps he’s ceased to be the man who—
“Tell me about the Program,” he says.
One extra second of silence, that’s all. But I’ve schooled myself too long and too hard, and nothing else shows.
You could call it a prison, but it’s like no other prison standing, apart from the wall and the wire.
When Johanssen left two years ago it didn’t exist. It came only after the prison riots. Which came after the recession and the crime wave and the prison overcrowding and the budget cuts … Five thousand inmates dumped out of overflowing jails and into the care of a private security firm, to be housed—temporarily—in a collection of rundown suburban streets that had been emptied for redevelopment just as the economy crashed. A stopgap, certainly—but a stopgap that might run for years, so they pasted on a snappy Americanized name and set up a website extolling the theory behind the move.
And they came up with the experiment.
“And this experiment?” Johanssen asks, though he must know the answer already. It’s on the Internet, after all.
“Teaching criminals to function within a self-regulating society.”
“A self-regulating society made up of other criminals.”
“That’s right.”
“And in return for taking part they get—?”
“ ‘Enhanced individual liberty and responsibility within a secure environment.’ ”
Keys to their accommodation. Access to TV and newspapers. The opportunity to sit on self-governing councils, make rules. Educational support, vocational training, small-business initiatives. Health care, sports facilities, even a restaurant. According to the website.
“Sounds too good to be true,” he says.
“Then it probably is.”
“Is it safe?”
“ ‘Regular patrols by armed officers ensure the safety and well-being of all residents.’ ” Then, “Charlie Ross went in there when it opened. One of the first batch. He was dead in three months. Came out in bits.”
He doesn’t blink. Of course: he knew that, too.
“So who’s in there?”
“Mainly career criminals. Thieves, racketeers, pimps, dealers, human traffickers, murderers … but no pedophiles or terrorists.”
“Psychopaths?”
“Officially, no: can’t be trusted to take their medicine. Unofficially? Dozens at least, maybe hundreds. All learning to be good citizens.”
“You know people in there?”
“Knew.” I smile. It feels glacial. “We’re no longer in touch.”
“Internal surveillance?” he asks.
“Cameras.”
“Communications?”
“A landline system for inmates, all calls recorded. No mobiles.”
“Security?”
I’ve been asked that question so many times that I can reel it off in the blink of an eye; in a heartbeat.
“Double perimeter wall: forty feet high above the surface, thirty feet below. Electric fence, razor wire, heat and motion sensors. Twenty-four-hour guard on the walls. Air exclusion zone above. All underground connections are sealed apart from the main sewer; the contents of that are—processed—as they pass under the perimeter. A rat couldn’t get out.”
“What about in?”
“No one wants to get in.”
“What if I did? Could you get me in?”
The Distance: A Thriller Page 1