Ross smiled back, couldn’t help himself laughing. ‘Because the files were stolen,’ he said.
‘The Gravity Well was never mentioned in any discussions, negotiations or documents. For them to have done so would be to admit complicity in industrial espionage and latterly a whole raft of more serious crimes. We’ve got our investment, Ross. Deimos has a bright future. Well, as bright as it gets down a big hole under a mountain.’
* * *
‘Willis,’ Bett said, shaking his head, ‘that fly old bastard.’
‘You said it to me yourself,’ Jane reminded him. ‘Act awkward and clumsy and people write you off as no threat. He plays the bumbling old fool …’
‘And no one sees him coming until his knife is in up to the hilt. They thought he was there for the taking but he played them all, even me.’
‘He played you, how?’
‘Oh, a small but crucial role. The real con was in making people believe in the technology, which he did by making it the most jealously guarded secret. Expensively guarded, too: he contracted me as consultant to overhaul Marledoq’s security, and my recommendations weren’t cheap, nor were my services. But that was all crucial to the deception.’
‘If he’d paraded them around at an exhibition, people would have been more sceptical,’ Jane surmised. ‘But instead they believed the videos were real because they thought they’d been stolen, and stolen with some difficulty. This Segnier – whoever he really is, and if he really exists – gave Parrier the impression that he didn’t even know what the big secret was. I suppose it might have set off alarm bells if he just handed over the files, so not only did he make out a third party got hold of them during some one-off opportunity, but he got everyone to pay through the nose for them too.’
‘People are always more valuing of things that cost them dear, and information is no different.’
‘Any guesses who this third party might have been?’ Jane asked.
‘Oh, I’m starting to get an idea.’
‘You okay, girl?’ Rebekah enquired as Air Bett prepared to touch down inside the Marledoq facility’s recently electrified perimeter fence. Lex had been staring transfixed at the compound throughout their approach, this place the occasion of an unease that had never quite left her. She’d been on tenterhooks the whole time Ross Fleming was around Maison Bla, but her fear of what he might say wasn’t the sole reason she’d felt compelled to take this flight. Having been the fool whose betrayal set this whole thing in motion, she needed the closure of seeing him returned, safe and sound, where it all began, the scene of the crime.
‘I’m good,’ she said, as the wheels gently took the chopper’s weight.
‘You looked kinda spaced.’
‘Just weird being back here, you know?’
‘Yeah. This was my first real exercise. Looks different in the daylight. Less threatening – though I guess we constituted the real threat that night.’
You got that right, Lex thought.
It did look different, and not just because of the time of day. Bett’s recommendations had all been implemented, such as the removal of the above-ground, sabotage-friendly electrical sub-station and the construction of a high-security tamper-proof housing for the facility’s previously vulnerable ventilation intakes, pumps and filters. (Bett had opted against pumping the place full of sleep agent during the Tiger-Team raid on the tripartite grounds that it was too expensive, too easy and ‘just no bloody fun’.) Inside the deliberately innocuous-looking warehouses there were now retinal scanners controlling the lifts, with inter-level access (and even certain individual rooms) also protected by optical-recognition equipment. If they were to stage a raid on this place again, somebody really would have to lose an eye.
Lex jumped out of the cockpit door while Rebekah killed the engines and reached, vigilantly as ever, for her maintenance paperwork. With the rotor sound dying off, she heard a keening noise from behind and looked over her shoulder to see someone approach in an electric buggy, coming to pick up the VIPs. She slid open the cabin door and offered both passengers a hand down on to the tarmac. They both looked pretty pleased about something. Willis emerged first, Fleming at his back. The lab-geek stopped in front of her and kept hold of her hand a moment.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘For everything.’
‘Don’t mention it. Can I just say, your mom’s an incredible woman.’
‘You’re telling me.’
He walked off towards the approaching buggy, which was now only yards away, close enough for her to see the driver.
‘Oh shit,’ she muttered to herself. She was looking once more into the face of the nameless man who’d seduced her all those months ago with his talk of influence, of contacts, and his bullshit promises. He got out of the buggy and shook hands with Willis and Fleming, laughing, ushering them aboard. All pals. Then, before he got back into the driver’s seat, he turned to look at Lex, smiled and put a finger to his lips.
‘Son of a bitch.’
Lex watched the buggy drive off. She heard the slam of the pilot-side door, then Rebekah appeared alongside her.
‘What the hell was that about?’ Rebekah asked.
‘What?’
‘That finger-on-the-lips deal? Who was that guy?’
Lex was about to plead ignorance when her cellular began ringing. She fished it out of her pocket and looked at the LCD, saw the name scroll across the panel.
Bett.
She pressed talk. ‘Sir?’
‘I know,’ he said simply.
She swallowed, tried to think of a response, felt as though her throat was swollen, blocking her words.
‘Fool me once, shame on you, they say. Fool me twice, shame on me. You’re about the only person I believe could fool me twice, Alexis, and I can’t afford to let that happen. You’re fired.’
She gasped, the sudden intake of breath about the only sound she felt capable of making. A thousand thoughts rushed around her head, none of them lucid.
‘Okay, fired is a little harsh. But definitely suspended. Or rather, indefinitely suspended. Mrs Fleming has informed me you’re under the misapprehension that there’s something you could still be taught about computers if you went to college. As I believe the only way you could be disabused of this notion is to actually go there, I am prepared to facilitate it in any way I can. And given that I now understand you’re not quite as adept as your “data salvaging” achievement suggested, then who knows?’
Lex felt her eyes fill up. Her throat was still swollen, but she managed three weeping, whispering words.
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘There is a condition.’
‘Uh-huh,’ she managed.
‘Stay in touch. Because once you’ve gone back to Canada, got your degree, worked in an office for a while and generally acquainted yourself with how tedious normal life actually is, there will still be a job waiting for you here.’
‘Sure,’ she sniffed. ‘You’d always be able to find me anyway.’
‘This is true,’ he said, and hung up.
‘Is everything okay?’ Rebekah asked.
‘Yeah,’ Lex replied. ‘Everything’s okay.’
Jane found Bett in the drawing room where they’d first met, standing by those huge windows and looking out upon the gardens in the twilight. A call had come through from the hospital, which he had transferred to her in her bedroom where she was getting ready for dinner. A final meal here, a time to say thanks, a time to say goodbye. His voice had been soft but a little stiff as he informed her of the call, much as he’d sounded any time the subject of Tom came up. She knew then that he’d be in that room, knew that he would be by those windows. He had his sanctuary upstairs, but that was where he retreated to be alone; this was the place he felt most robust in dealing with others.
‘Tom’s awake,’ she reported. ‘I’d better go in and see him. I know we’re supposed to have dinner, but …’
‘Not at all. I understand. I’ll drive you.’
&n
bsp; ‘No, no, never bother. Best that I go myself,’ she suggested.
‘Of course, whatever you think. But before you do, before you see him, we have to talk.’
Jane wanted to procrastinate, tell him she had to go right away and that they could talk later, but she knew neither of them would buy that. She took a seat at the big table. ‘Okay,’ she said.
Bett walked over and sat down next to her.
‘You’ve taught me a great deal this past week or so, Jane,’ he said.
‘I’ve taught you?’
‘Yes. And I’ve very much enjoyed having you around. Which is why I have to ask, before you see your husband, whether I might yet be able to tempt you to stay.’
Jane thought this sounded as desirable as it sounded insane, and her self-defence mechanisms went into operation upon reflex.
‘We were two people thrown together in extremely emotional circumstances,’ she said, thinking aloud. ‘I don’t believe in fairy tales, Bett. I can’t see a happy ever after for the two of us here in your mansion.’
‘I don’t believe in fairy tales, either, and you should know that. What happened between us meant a lot to me, but I’m not kidding myself. Neither of us is exactly naive.’
‘Then why are you asking me to stay?’
‘Because I just let my most talented protégée go and I need a replacement. I’m offering you a job.’
‘Oh come on, Bett. I survived what we did but I don’t think I’d be so brave or daring when it’s not my nearest and dearest that’s at stake.’
‘Neither do I, and I believe your judgement and discipline would be the better for it. You’re a natural, Jane. You were born for this.’
She looked at his face, realised he wasn’t kidding. Bett was never kidding. That, of course, left deluded, but he was never that either. And she knew the only reason she was trying to convince herself that this idea wasn’t viable was that she wanted it so much. It was like all her life she’d had dreams she could fly, and every morning she woke up and found her feet stuck to the ground; but this past couple of weeks, she had flown, she had soared, and now that she knew what that felt like, she wasn’t coming back down again if she could help it.
‘You can stay here until you find a place of your own. I can offer good wages, foreign travel, company car. Not that company car. Though, if that’s what it takes … Name your terms.’
‘I have only two,’ she stated. ‘One, plenty of time off to see my family.’
‘Not a problem. What’s two?’
‘The firm does a wee “homer” for me before I start.’
Jane let him off with the offer of the Diablo and instead borrowed his other car, a Porsche Carrera, to get to the hospital in San Raphael. She stopped it at the end of the drive, watching the gates slowly open, her eye caught again by the name etched amid the iron creepers and thorns, and then it hit her. Maison Blah, she’d heard Lex say, assuming she meant as in blah blah blah, but it wasn’t, and nor was it Maison Rla. She’d misread the curlicued caligraphy: it was Maison Bla.
Bla an Tir. Gaelic.
She laughed as she put it together, where he was from: a town by a river, sure enough, but not one you’d want to grow up in if you were a boy called Hilary. No wonder he’d learned how to fight.
She remembered when Ross was wee, how Tom used to tick him off if he left his bike lying outside rather than storing it in the garage: ‘If you don’t look after it, some bad boy from Blantyre will come and take it away.’
Pity he hadn’t heeded his own lesson. Now a very bad boy from Blantyre was taking away his wife.
They had a wedding photo sitting on top of a nest of tables in one corner of the living room, dwarfed now by larger portraits of Rachel and Thomas. A full-sized print of it had hung in the downstairs hall for several years, until the glass had smashed when it got knocked off the wall by Ross during a misadventure involving a bow and a rubber-suckered arrow. It was sun-faded by that time anyway, and should have been taken down long before. Jane’s admonishment of Ross for his carelessness masked her gratitude to be rid of it, and, truth be told, she’d been reluctant to look out even the smaller print she had by way of a replacement. Something about it had always bothered her. She looked good enough in it, hair and make-up immaculately (and unaccustomedly) administered by professional hands, her dress so delicate, and Tom beside her, so smart and undeniably handsome. But while he was staring into the camera, uncomplicatedly happy, she had this far-off look about her, dreamy but not quite smiling, disconnected.
It had been on the photographer’s instruction. He’d told her and Tom where to look, composed the frame. ‘Look like you’re already thinking of leaving,’ he’d joked to her. But down the years, even when things were better, that far-off look unsettled her. Yes, it was posed, but she couldn’t help wondering whether the photographer saw something and acted upon it, whether she was already looking far away on the inside. His direction notwithstanding, it wasn’t where her eyes were pointed that haunted her about the portrait: it was how distant she seemed from her newly married spouse.
She found Tom sitting up in his hospital bed, reading the Daily Record. He was in the south of France, but there was some alchemy by which West-of-Scotland males could always procure a copy of that awful rag no matter where they were.
‘Catching up on the Celtic?’ she asked.
‘Aye. I’d forgotten all about the UEFA Cup. We ended up watching the Barcelona game on that bloody boat, can you believe that?’
‘After the past fortnight, I can believe anything. Who do they have in the next round?’
‘Ach, some mob called Villareal. Never heard of them. It’ll be a skoosh. Shooty-in.’
‘Good, good. How’s the wing?’
‘Well, we’ve Agathe down the right and …’
‘I meant your arm, Tom. Sore?’
‘A wee bit, but I’ve got this patient-controlled thing for analgesia. I just push a button when it starts to hurt.’
‘So you’re sitting comfortably, then?’
The homer
He stood with his back to the bar, a bottle of lager in his hand, and surveyed his men: assembled around him and awaiting his command. It was half past midnight and they had a lock-in, the landlord turfing out all but his crew when the time came. But this wasn’t for a bevy session. This was for business. Serious business.
They had all answered the call: Tommy, Deek, Panda, Jai, Goggsy, Wee Flea, Fat Paddy. All, that was, except Big Chick, who wasn’t expected to be answering any calls for a while. The poor cunt was cooped up in his bedroom back at his mammy’s house, a quivering wreck who couldn’t get to sleep at night because he went mental if the lights went off.
Two days they’d been chained up in that basement, in the dark, in complete blackness. Two fucking days. Pishing where they sat, drinking water through a tube, starving hungry and all the time having no idea when or if they’d ever get out.
But one thought had sustained him throughout it all, and now it was time for that thought to be made flesh.
The bitch had been seen again, at last. She was back in EK, arrived just today. He knew, because he’d had somebody watching the house for a week. She had returned, stupid or arrogant enough to think she could just waltz back into town and forget who ran the fucking show, forget the liberties she’d taken. He didn’t care who she thought she was or who those bastards in Barcelona had been. The point was, they fucking well weren’t with her now, were they?
The way he saw it, she’d left him no choice. This wasn’t just about revenge, it was about reputation. So far, nobody else knew what had happened in Barcelona, other than that it had left Big Chick greeting like a wean every night, but it was only a matter of time before the rumours started. He couldn’t afford that, and he really couldn’t afford the truth to get out.
So tonight was a simple necessity, and one he was sorely looking forward to. He’d soon see how she liked being tied up and knocked fuck out of, how she enjoyed all the things he’d
been dreaming up for her while he rotted for two days in that stinking hole.
‘Right, boys,’ he announced, calling them to order.
Which was as far as he got.
The lights went out and, a fraction of a second later, there was a deafening crash of glass, like every window in the place had been simultaneously smashed. He heard panicked shouts, soft impacts, groans and heavy thumps, sensed movement all around him but saw nothing. Then he felt arms about him, struggled in vain as he was pinned and twisted, violently hauled off his feet and brought down, hard and horizontal, on the pool table.
The lights came on again. He sat up and looked around. All his men were unconscious, lying on the floor where they had fallen, the coloured-fibre tails of tranquilliser-darts jutting from each of their chests.
But they were not all he saw.
There were three figures standing before him, dressed all in black, each holding a pistol, their faces masked by some kind of goggles, presumably for seeing in the dark. The one dead ahead began walking slowly towards him, the other pair moving in again to hold him as the figure approached. Some craven sensation of fear told him he knew that walk, a woman’s walk, that he’d seen it before in Y-pishingly familiar circumstances.
The woman put a hand to her forehead and removed the goggles.
Oh shite.
The other two sat him up to face her. She stared at him, coolly contemptuous, then reached into a pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. She unfolded it and handed it to him.
‘Read it,’ she said. ‘Aloud.’
He looked at the sheet, his hand trembling as he held it. It looked like a blown-up photocopy, the type oversized and slightly distorted.
‘READ IT,’ the woman demanded.
He read.
‘Retribution,’ he began. ‘Noun. Punishment or retaliation for an insult or injury.’
‘Very good,’ she said. ‘You see, Anthony, it occurred to me that following our last encounter, in your juvenile wee mind you may believe you’ve some account you need to settle with me and mine. So I ask you: Retribution. Do you know the meaning of the word?’
All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye Page 45