The Killing Files

by Nikki Owen

  My hand slides to my pocket and mama raises her gun to me. ‘What are you doing?’

  Almost in a trance, I take out the photograph and spread it out in my palm.

  Balthus gasps, his shoulder shaking, as I pinch the edge of the picture between my fingers and hold it out to him. ‘Isabella,’ he says, his voice barely audible.

  Tears well in his eyes as he looks at the photograph now that I hold in front of him unable to speak the words of sorrow and loss and confusion that I feel, locked in my emotional cage.

  Tears slide down his face. ‘Maria, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Oh, deary me,’ Mama says. ‘Balthus, you have got yourself into a pickle, haven’t you?’

  Balthus raises his head, eyes narrowed at Mama. ‘Ines, I asked you for help. You agreed to take Maria in when Isabella couldn’t look after her. And are you saying you gave Maria to the Project? You bitch, you fucking heartless bitch.’ He wipes his eyes, jaw locked, cheeks flushed.

  Chris throws his eyes to me and mouths, ‘Are you okay?’ but before I respond, the lights flicker and the air turns to a chill as Mama holds the gun out at us.

  ‘Maria,’ Balthus says, tears streaming down his face now, unchecked, unbidden. ‘I didn’t mean for you to find out this way. I was young and stupid. I …’ He drops his head into his hands, his shoulders shuddering.

  Mama tuts. ‘What, that’s it? No explanation?’ She sighs.

  ‘I didn’t know about the Project,’ Balthus says to me now. ‘Maria, when I saw you were in trouble—the conviction, the murder—I had to try and help you. You were—are—my daughter. I spoke to … I spoke to Harriet and she secured you a place at Goldmouth.’

  I blink back tears that I didn’t know were there as inside my head, everything seems to be happening at once. ‘Does she …’ I stop, swallow. ‘Does your wife know that I am your daughter?’

  ‘No,’ he whispers. He raises his eyes to mine. ‘Maria, that first time I saw you in prison on the day you arrived, I couldn’t stop staring at you—you were so beautiful.’

  I blink over and over, confused, sad, angry, happy—all of it. All the feelings at once and no way to express them. ‘You … you have been …’ I stop, struggling to find the words amidst the confusion and the chaos. ‘You have been a friend to me. And … and I do not have many of those.’ My finger starts to tap my thigh.

  Patricia looks at me. She shuffles a tiny amount, barely noticeable, nearer to me, when Mama suddenly lets out a large sigh.

  ‘So, not that this hasn’t been touching,’ she says, ‘but I think we’ve all said enough for one day. The Project will be here soon. They know how to deal with Maria.’

  ‘Deal with her?’ Balthus snaps, stepping forward. ‘Deal with her? She’s not a piece of fucking machinery, Ines, a fucking robot for you to discard for your own means.’

  Mama stares at Balthus then, smiling, says, ‘Oh really? You dumped her just to save your own career. You dumped her mother in some freak Swiss nut house to die, and it’s me you get cross with? Well, it’s good your precious daughter sounds like a robot most of the time, my dear Balthus, isn’t it? Because she’s perfect for the Project. She always has been and she always will.’

  ‘You bitch!’ Balthus says. ‘You fucking bitch!’ He launches himself at her, pounding his fist into her fragile face. ‘She was my daughter! She was my beautiful baby daughter! And you gave her to those fucking butchers!’

  ‘Balthus, stop!’ Chris shouts.

  Chris tries to drag Balthus away, but Balthus is too quick, darting at Mama, toppling her to the ground. She slams against the floor, smacking her head into the carpet, crying out, but Balthus springs up, and Chris goes again to grab him out of the way, all of us shouting at Balthus to calm down, the noise like a hammer in my head, when there is a loud blast. We all freeze as before us, almost in slow motion, Balthus slumps to the floor.

  Mama stands, gun held out in shaking hands.

  Blood pools from Balthus’s skull and immediately I drop to my knees, rip open his shirt and begin CPR, pressing my palms into his rib cage. I pinch his nose, breathe into his mouth, my own tears mixing into his spilt blood until I cannot tell one apart from the other.

  ‘Come on!’ I shout, sitting back up, recommencing the cardio pulmonary resuscitation. I repeat the procedure over and over again, oblivious to everyone around me, tears streaking my cheeks, chin, blood in stripes on my arms and legs and hands. One minute passes, two, three.

  ‘Doc,’ Patricia says after four minutes. ‘Doc, he’s gone.’

  My eyes lift to hers, sweat streaming down my face, blood specks littering my arms.

  ‘He’s gone, Doc.’

  I pause the compressions, my lungs heaving, and look at Balthus’s lifeless body. Everything becomes a blur, a wash of colour and darkness merging into one deep, cavernous hole as, slowly, I stagger up, wobbling, Patricia, Chris steadying me. ‘Balthus was my friend,’ I cry. ‘He was my friend.’

  I look at all the blood, blink at it as it pools on the wooden floor, seeping between the slats to nowhere. I smear the snot and tears from my face and touch my arm, feeling faint bumps of the words that Black Eyes scratched onto me: I am Basque. Balthus, his blood, his DNA. My papa. Ramon. My brother who loved me.

  All the thoughts colliding in my head at once, I spin round, blinded by a sadness so strong, so powerful that I barely know what to do. I take in Mama’s frame. She leans against the chair now, her bony body jutting out at angles that won’t protract.

  ‘You killed him,’ I say, now, my hand slipping into my pocket, feeling for what I need. ‘You killed Balthus, you killed Ramon. And you killed Papa.’

  ‘Doc? Doc, take a breath.’

  Mama takes a step back. ‘Maria, dear, let us talk. Balthus would have only messed the whole thing up anyway. You are better off without him—he gave you up, abandoned you, hmm? There is a solution here, sweetheart. You have to look at the bigger picture, at what can be achieved through the Project—peace, global harmony. It’s all for the greater good. I can’t let you run. And if you do,’ she points the gun at Patricia and Chris, ‘I will be forced, I’m afraid, to shoot your friends. Needs must.’ She levels the gun directly at them.

  I run at her. Without thinking, I jump on Mama, shielding my friends from the gun, clawing at her wisps of hair, but she cries out, shoots, misses, and I charge at her again, yelling, ‘You don’t hurt my friends!’

  I topple down, panic as she aims now at Patricia. Fumbling for what was in my hand, I dive, and ducking a bullet, I run at Mama and, raising my arm high in the air, I drive what is in my fingers down on her neck, every single emotion coming out through me as I do. It hits her jugular vein, blood spurting out and she starts to gurgle and her hands scratch for her neck.

  Mama slumps to the floor, so much blood around her that it is difficult to separate it from the colour of her skin.

  Patricia catches me as I stagger, lurching, Chris near her side.

  ‘She would have killed you both,’ I say to them. ‘She killed Ramon because he was going to go to the press about her. She killed Balthus—she would have killed you both.’ I look at Balthus’s broken body, at Mama’s bleeding corpse. ‘I’m sorry,’ I sob and start to rock. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  I collapse and Patricia kneels down, gripping me tight in her arms, rocking me back and forth. ‘Ssssh. Ssssh.’

  Chris falls down to kneel beside us, grasps my hand and uncurls my fingers, something falls out, dropping to the floor, sharp, splattered with Mama’s blood.

  The item from my pocket that I drove into my mother’s neck.

  The nail. The nail from the foot of the cross where the photograph lay.

  Chapter 43

  Madrid Barajas Airport, Spain.

  Present Day

  We sit in a dark corner of the airport as far away from the noise and the passengers and the smells as we can possibly be.

  None of us speak. The television in a nearby café delivers a steady chatter of
news as each of us cradles scalding hot take-out coffee in our hands. We heap in sugar and sip. The liquid burns my mouth but I barely notice, a numbness spreading tentacles over me with the pain of what we witnessed just hours ago at Mama’s house—at what I did. At what she did.

  We have cleaned ourselves up, but still I feel shaky. The images of Ramon, Balthus and Mama swirl in my mind in a red-tinted whirlpool, and, when I think of Balthus’s face, I see his black hair, his white teeth and I find myself thinking about the way he would check on me, often without me realising, so he could be reassured I was okay. He is gone, but I don’t know how I feel, because Papa will always be my father, and yet Balthus was connected to me. He was my friend.

  ‘Doc,’ says Patricia. ‘You okay?’

  I look down—her fingers are in a star shape. I touch mine to hers and breathe out, and, without saying anything, I feel a connection that a year ago, I could have never imagined I would have ever had with anyone.

  Chris is working on his laptop. He has secured us flight tickets in different names to Zurich, hiding out at a place he knows through his hacking contacts, having arranged passports for us all and cash that will last us until we need to get small jobs in a faraway place where we can easily go unnoticed. Chris has dyed his hair bright blond. He wears a smart navy suit with a white shirt and around his neck slips a golden yellow tie. Patricia wears a brown wavy wig, black trousers, cream blouse and matching black jacket, while I have a new long blonde mane with an emerald green skirt suit, all of us dressed in smart clothes, hoping to pass as co-workers simply travelling through Europe on business. Chris has said that now he’s on MI5 and the Project watch list, he may as well take his chances hiding out with us.

  ‘Hey,’ he says now, ‘isn’t that your mom’s house?’

  We glance up as, on the screen above, the news anchor reads a breaking bulletin.

  ‘…a triple homicide was reported in the Spanish capital of Madrid in what is being cited as a cartel crime. Spanish lawyer and member of parliament, Ines Villanueva, her lawyer son Ramon Martinez and a British prison chief, Balthus Ochoa, have all been implicated in what sources are saying is a decade-long fraud ring stretching into millions of dollars and includes the trade of illegal medical drugs. The bodies of the three were found at Villanueva’s central Madrid house this afternoon. Villanueva, who was hotly tipped to become the next leader of the right wing and prime minister-in-waiting …’

  ‘Fuck,’ Chris says. ‘They’ve covered it all up.’

  ‘They are lying.’ I spin round to Patricia. ‘Why are they lying? Balthus was not involved in any cartel.’

  ‘The Project must have got to the scene, rewired the story. And in the meantime, this Project bollocks continues to exist and there’s nothing we can do about it.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’ Chris sits forward, scratching his chin.

  I turn to him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I still have a copy of all those files, right, the ones we—you—hacked in Hamburg and the one I got into at the monastery.’ He taps his laptop. ‘So, how about we send those files to someone who can blast the living fucking daylights out of the Project’s ass?’

  I pause. ‘Does that mean expose what the Project does?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘If we expose the Project,’ Patricia says, fast, ‘then it all stops. They won’t be able to chase Maria and use her, because the public profile of the whole scandal will be so high, just like with Snowden and the NSA Prism files.’

  ‘The trick is,’ Chris says, ‘knowing who to send the documents to. It has to be someone who can really do something about it. Do you know anyone?’

  ‘Harriet,’ I say, immediately. ‘Harriet Alexander—the UK Home Secretary.’ I pause. ‘Balthus’s wife.’

  ‘Do you have her email?’ Chris asks.

  ‘No.’

  He bows. ‘Then allow me to hack into the British government system and find out what it is.’

  The flight boarding due soon, Chris works fast and hard, until, hacking straight into their system, he locates the right address, uploads all the encrypted files and prepares the message. He looks to me. ‘Okay, so, it’s on an anonymous proxy and I’ve encrypted it to your email, uploaded the files, so all it needs now is a message from you about what’s been happening with all this Project shit, and we’re good to go.’

  Hesitating, glancing to Patricia, I reach forward and, tapping the keyboard, write a detailed message, including all the facts, dates and details I can use to make the communication as authentic and believable as possible. Done, I lean back and exhale.

  Chris looks up. ‘Ready?’

  I nod, thinking of Balthus, Papa, Ramon. A family but not in the normal sense, but then, what is, these days, normal? Has the concept ever really existed? Normal is not necessarily safe. ‘Yes,’ I say to Chris. ‘I am ready.’

  We all glance to each other as Chris hovers his index finger over the enter button.

  ‘Wait!’ I say. Chris looks to me. ‘I did not ask her about Isabella. I did not ask where her grave was, if she knows anything about it.’

  ‘Doc, you know she could be alive.’

  ‘No. We saw the documents from the files. So many died. She would be old now, too. If the Project subjected her to unregulated tests, she has died, also.’

  Patricia and Chris throw each other a glance as, leaning to the laptop, I tap into the keyboard my enquiry then step back. I look at the words on the screen, at the finality of them, and want them somehow to make me feel better, to fill the new hole that has gaped open inside me, but no matter how much I stare at them, read the words gravestone and Isabella, nothing changes, and the empty feeling I have at my loss still sloshes around inside me, untethered and free.

  ‘You all done?’ Chris says. I nod. He hits send. ‘Then bye bye, Project.’

  We all stand staring at the laptop for a moment, and then while Patricia and Chris start to walk over to the departure board, I stop. Something is digging into me through my back pocket. I reach my hand behind me and, slowly, I pull out the item. It is the photograph. It is the picture of Isabella and me, the one hidden by my papa, hidden by him so the truth would always exist. I flip it over and read the name of the hospital in Switzerland.

  Patricia comes to my side as I blink at the image in my hands.

  ‘Don’t you want to find her?’ she says. ‘See if she’s still alive?’

  We look at the photograph together. ‘She is dead. Mama said she is dead, and the dates of her life are written down on here.’

  ‘But your mam, Ines, well, Doc, you can’t trust what she said, can you?’

  My sight swims at the image in my fingers. ‘I might go to the grave if Balthus’s wife knows of it.’

  Patricia sighs. ‘I’m sorry for all of this, Doc.’

  ‘Why are you sorry? It is not your fault.’

  She smiles at me.

  ‘Your eyes are downturned.’

  ‘I know,’ she says, her voice heavy. ‘I know.’

  Up ahead, Chris calls our names, jabbing a finger at the flight board. Patricia nods to him then, turning to me, holds out her hand and I hold out mine, and they touch, our fingers, just for three seconds, a wave of calm spreading over me.

  ‘Ready to go?’

  I look at the image of Isabella for one last time, at the dates and the details, then, folding the picture in two, slip it back into my pocket.

  One step in front of the other, we catch up with Chris, the Zurich flight notice flashing on the screen. Arriving at his side, he hands me his iPod player and ear buds and we walk away, all of us, away from Madrid and away from the Project, until all that remains to prove our existence at all is an email—one email. An email among the millions of miles of fibre optics that span the globe and are tracked every day without our knowledge.

  An email that will expose the entire Project and put an end to it all. For the greater good.

  ISBN: 978-1-474-04487-5

 
THE KILLING FILES

  © 2016 Nikki Owen

  Published in Great Britain 2016

  by HQ, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London

  SE1 9GF

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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