‘God no. I usually save that one for the second date.’
It came fast enough to stun her. She glanced up at him to make sure they were playing the same game, and as she did he was sitting there, ready to catch her eye. Damn. The same instant their eyes met, she realised she’d lost. She didn’t have an answer. And that annoyed her. Almost as much as it annoyed her that it did.
‘Roger,’ he said, stretching out his hand towards her.
‘Janine,’ she replied, taking it. He had large, powerful hands and a British accent she couldn’t place. It bothered her that she noticed that, too.
‘No, that wasn’t why,’ he concluded. ‘The main reason I came to sit here was that you were the only person I could hear speaking a language that wasn’t just a lot of noise.’
‘I wish I could say the same.’
His turn to fumble for an answer. And he grinned, reluctantly but widely, and she returned to her glass and mentally chalked up a point for herself, fully aware the match had only begun.
When forty-five minutes later she caught sight of herself in the mirror of the ladies’, she was struck by an overwhelming feeling of guilt. She was smiling. She was smiling a relaxed, slightly inebriated smile and her cheeks were flushed and that was even worse. She was having a good time. No, she was having fun. Albert would be there in half an hour and here she was, giddy like an idiot and looking forward to going back out to a charming muscular man with a clipped English accent and what the hell was she doing?
She pulled out her phone and brought up Albert’s number. New text message.
I love you, she wrote. See you soon.
It was embarrassingly transparent. The whole thing was dripping with guilt, and she deleted it and started over.
I’m two and a half glasses ahead. If you don’t come in fifteen minutes I’m off with a strapping Englishman.
That was better. She sent it out. One last glance in the mirror, but she decided against fixing her hair – not now, not for the sake of the Englishman, perhaps later – and turned to go back into the restaurant.
To her surprise, he was waiting outside the door.
The cloakroom outside the toilets was unattended and empty, and a number of thoughts immediately flashed through her head. Perhaps he’d grown bored and wanted to leave, maybe he wanted her to come with him, or perhaps he wanted to try to pull her in among the jackets and coats in the hope of a quick cuddle.
The moment the situation changed from an adventure in her fantasy to a reality in a restaurant cloakroom it also changed from tempting to the opposite. Convinced as she was of his intentions, she was equally convinced that she wasn’t interested; she dodged past him and set off along the rows of coats and jackets, but he took a step forward and laid a hand on her shoulder. Her intoxication was gone now, and she sent her brain off in search of a suitably sarcastic response, her entire body bracing for the worst.
And then she stopped dead.
He’d stuck something in her neck.
She looked straight at him. He wasn’t smiling any more. And just as she found the words to say, her mouth stopped working.
Thirty-five minutes later the glass doors swung open, and a young man by the name of Albert van Dijk walked up to the maître d’, asking if there was a woman waiting for Emanuel Sphynx.
By that time, neither Janine nor the bull-necked man were anywhere near Amsterdam.
The muscular Englishman who’d once presented himself as Roger couldn’t quite put his finger on what made him react. But something felt wrong, and he walked up to the heavy door to her room and knocked.
He’d already made up an apology in his head. Not that he needed to explain why he wanted to know what she was up to, he was head of security and she was under guard and none of it was a secret, but the orders clearly stated that the guests shouldn’t have to feel like prisoners unless it was absolutely necessary.
Martin Rodriguez – that was his real name – understood exactly why. The Organisation relied on the guests’ willingness to do what they should. If they weren’t treated well they might refuse, or worse still, they might purposely deliver incorrect results, believing that the Organisation were the bad guys and that every attempt to go against them was an act of good.
Which was the reason he had an apology prepared. He’d thought he heard her screaming, and simply wanted to check if everything was all right.
He waited.
It had been seven months since he brought her here. Sometimes he tried to convince himself that the man she’d been waiting for was an idiot and a bastard, and that in fact he’d been doing her a favour. But that was a lie and he knew it. Some very thorough research had been done, and they knew exactly who she was. Her relationship was annoyingly good and the only bad guy was himself: he’d abducted her without explaining why, and whatever was happening to the world it wasn’t fair that Janine Charlotta Haynes should pay.
But nothing was fair, he reminded himself.
And even though he was merely a cog in a giant machine, he knew that what he was doing was ultimately right.
When Martin Rodriguez opened the door to her room, his thoughts changed completely.
It was empty, even though he hadn’t seen her leave.
Ten seconds later he alerted the others over the radio, and all hell broke loose, just as he knew it would.
A few hundred metres away the evening air hit William’s face, cool and refreshing as if he’d turned over his pillow on a hot night. It was later than he’d thought. Already dark. And he had no idea what awaited him.
He’d followed the young woman as she ran down winding staircases, along corridors and hallways, sometimes passing a passage he recognised from his walk with Connors, but for the most part he didn’t know where they were and could only rely on the stranger in front of him. Her, and that blue piece of plastic that got them through the heavy locked doors, one after the other.
Eventually they’d begun running upwards again, and she’d led him up a staircase that climbed so steeply he thought it must be a tower, until the moment she opened a low door and ducked through it, out on to a vast stone terrace.
He was already aware that the castle was large, but only now did he get to see just how impressively huge it was. The outer walls continued in both directions, weaving in and out to form alcoves and bay windows, and the terrace followed them along the castle’s entire length until it ran out of sight where the building came to an end. A stone banister was all that separated them from the landscape below, and from where they stood the drop to the ground and the alpine lake below seemed as good as endless.
It crossed his mind that if the woman wanted to kill him this was the perfect place. Physically he wouldn’t offer any resistance, she was quick and in extremely good shape and William, quite frankly, was neither.
But he shook off the idea. From what he could see, she’d rescued him from being caught by the guards. There was no reason to suspect she was anything other than a fellow prisoner.
‘I’m Janine,’ she said when she stopped running. ‘Janine Haynes.’
She was still short of breath, but her voice was focused, her clear gaze composed and alert.
‘I’m not sure how much time we have. I don’t know if they can hear us or see us; the only thing I’m certain of is that you and I aren’t supposed to talk. And if they knew we were here, they’d…’ She paused. ‘I don’t know what they’d do,’ she said.
‘Who are they?’ asked William.
‘I assume they’ve said the same things to you as they did to me. An organisation under the UN. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. The important thing is they lied to me and they’ll be lying to you as well. And we need to get out of here.’
‘Lied about what?’
‘You’ve seen the texts, right?’
‘The old keys?’ he said. ‘You were the one who figured them out?’
It took her a second to understand what he meant. But she shook her head. ‘I know nothing about code
s. That wasn’t me.’
‘So who are you? What are you doing here?’
‘Until the seventeenth of April I was a research student at the UvA. University of Amsterdam. PhD in Archaeology.’
Of course. ‘The cuneiform script,’ he said.
She nodded. ‘They did their best to make sure I didn’t understand,’ she said. ‘They gave them to me in the wrong order. I got texts that didn’t belong. And nobody told me what it was. The whole thing wore me down, I couldn’t think, I didn’t know where I was or why or —’
She’d raised her voice, and she stopped as she heard it, listened for noises around them. Nothing but wind and water. She calmed down.
‘How long have you been here?’ he asked.
She paused. There wasn’t much time, but she decided to give him the short version. The papers she’d published when she was an undergraduate in Seattle. The scholarships for her research on ancient written languages. The move to Europe to become a researcher, the wonderful life she’d had in Amsterdam with a cat and a cast-iron balcony and a view over a canal, and then everything went black and she woke up in the castle. That was seven months ago.
‘And you?’ she asked.
‘Same thing,’ he said. Except he didn’t have a wonderful life, and he was allergic to cats. But it didn’t seem relevant to the conversation.
‘I heard you arrive,’ she said. ‘I heard the helicopter. I knew they were bringing in someone new.’
‘New what?’
She tried to find the words. But it was too complicated; she didn’t know where to begin or how much time they had. So she shook her head, tried to structure her thoughts. The conversation was starting to go in the wrong direction, and if she was going to tell him what she knew, she had to start in the right place.
But William interrupted her. Rephrased his question, asked her again. ‘Why am I here?’
She looked into his eyes. That was an easier question to answer.
‘Because the woman who was here before you is gone.’
The guard who’d been half-asleep outside William’s office was more awake than ever.
He sprinted through the corridors, faster and faster every time he reached the end of a blind passage without finding William there.
He just couldn’t understand it. Only a few minutes had passed since he received the alarm that the girl was missing, the pretty American academic, and his first thought was that this time Rodriguez had screwed up big time and how the hell had he let it happen.
And here he was running around and understanding even less. Somehow, the old guy had vanished too. As if he’d managed to disappear through the locked doors, pass them without a key card and without setting off an alarm; it was categorically impossible and yet it had happened. And the guard cursed his way down the empty corridor, doubled back into passages he’d already checked, clinging on to an ebbing hope that he wouldn’t have to report that his subject was gone, too.
When Franquin called over the radio asking him where Sandberg was, he knew his chances had run out.
Several storeys below him, inside a musty underground room, Evelyn Keyes had already begun sifting through material in accordance with rules she had once reluctantly created herself.
A bank of monitors on the wall in front of her showed the fuzzy pictures from various surveillance cameras, and one by one she scrolled through the recorded material, swiping backwards and forwards over the timeline of the individual cameras in search of the tiniest movement that shouldn’t be there.
She already knew she wouldn’t find anything. They had too few cameras, and they sat in the wrong parts of the castle to be of any use. She was angry, and she had every right to be. What was the point in putting her in charge of a security system if it didn’t work?
She’d pointed it out before, but nothing had been done. She had warned them to expect disaster, long before the first one happened, and they had failed to act. And now here they were again, everyone caught napping.
They hadn’t fixed the holes.
The facility hadn’t kept pace with the developments of the last couple of decades; the system wasn’t designed to contain prisoners but to stop unauthorised personnel from gaining entry, and nobody had wanted to spend money on security. As if there was anything else to save money for.
‘Tell me what you see,’ Franquin said from behind her.
He said it so brusquely the words came out as a stream of consonants, his hands resting tightly on the back of her chair and his eyes anxiously hunting from screen to screen in the hope that Keyes had noticed some detail he hadn’t.
But she didn’t reply. Gave him a cold glance and indicated the monitors. He knew the problems as well as she did.
On the floors above them, guards ran down corridor after corridor checking that Haynes and Sandberg hadn’t somehow magically appeared inside their sectors. But in spite of that, they only occasionally appeared on Keyes’ monitors. They had thousands of square metres to cover and only a handful of cameras to do it. The chance they might spot something useful was slim to non-existent.
‘Whatever happens, they’ll never get out of here,’ he said. Registering her expression, he added: ‘We’ve made improvements since then.’
He saw how she made a conscious decision not to respond. She didn’t have to. He knew she was right. They should have upgraded the security, but then again, when? They were already racing against time. How could they prioritise something that wouldn’t tangibly advance the project?
Their only hope was that their two guests wouldn’t unleash a disaster before the guards could catch them. They were somewhere in the castle, they had to be, because what he had just said was true. It would be impossible for them to get out.
Nonetheless, he heard his headset crackle as the guards called in, one after the other, reporting that their sector was empty. That none of their doors were open. But that, even so, their guests were nowhere to be found.
Franquin shut his eyes for a moment. He didn’t want to be fatalistic. He knew everything pointed straight to hell, but he refused to accept it. There had to be some clue they’d missed, there must be some way of retrieving this situation. It wasn’t pointless to fight. Even if it seemed so.
Because if he was wrong, everyone had already lost. And he just couldn’t bear that thought.
‘Franquin?’
He glanced up. Keyes sat in front of him, looking at him with an energy that startled him.
‘Helena Watkins,’ she said.
For a moment, he wondered what she was talking about. And then she nodded at her computer. At a long table of never-ending columns running down the screen: numbers and times and numbers again. He immediately knew what they were.
The logs. Which key cards opened which doors, and when.
‘What about Helena Watkins?’ he said, fearing that he already knew the answer.
‘She’s up and about.’
All over the castle, guards on the various levels heard Evelyn Keyes’ voice in their headsets. They slowed down, stopped where they were, listened. Waited to hear what Franquin would say next.
There was silence for a few seconds. And then for a few seconds more.
‘What do you mean, up and about?’ Franquin’s voice asked. Calm. Measured. Definitely about to crack.
‘She’s gone through seven doors today alone.’
It was Keyes’ voice. And standing in his corridor, Rodriguez immediately knew what had happened. Said nothing, waited for Franquin’s voice to return, knew that it would.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ it said after an eternity.
Rodriguez didn’t need to hear more. He’d already raised his gun; as head of the guards it was time for him to take command. He pushed his radio button.
‘Which door did she go through last?’
Janine Charlotta Haynes had been inside the castle several weeks before she met Helena Watkins for the first time.
Those had been rough weeks, and Janine had broken down co
mpletely. She’d stopped eating, hadn’t been able to work, and eventually the Organisation had decided to introduce Watkins to be her friend and offer moral support.
And it worked. Not immediately, but Helena Watkins was a good listener and had almost twenty more years of life experience, and she’d let Janine talk and talk and talk again. And even if Watkins couldn’t give her any answers about why they were there or what they were doing, she gradually provided Janine with a new sense of purpose.
‘It didn’t take me long to understand that she was one of them,’ she said.
William was in front of her. The large terrace around them.
‘Helena wasn’t a prisoner like me. She knew things she didn’t want to talk about, or maybe wasn’t allowed to talk about – what do I know? But I needed her. She gave me routines. And as time went by I started doing my thing and gave up asking questions when she told me to. We became friends. Not equal friends. But friends.’
‘What happened?’
‘She was afraid.’ Janine paused. Searched for words. ‘One night, in the middle of the night, she came to my room. Or rather, she stood outside. Said I mustn’t let her in. And there we were, on opposite sides of the door, and she warned me, and…’ She shook her head. There was no point in telling him everything. Especially considering how little of it she understood herself. ‘And then she vanished. That’s more than a week ago.’
‘So I’m here to replace her?’
‘She was a mathematician. She specialised in ciphers.’
William felt the energy drain from him. She was right. Clearly he was there to replace Helena Watkins. He wondered whether they were standing by to replace him too as soon as he ceased to deliver the results they were looking for.
‘What do they want?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. At first all I knew about was the cuneiform script. And I thought that maybe it was some kind of historical discovery, an archaeological find so earth-shattering that it would turn our understanding of human history upside down and so revolutionary it was worth hiding away.’ She shrugged. ‘But they couldn’t keep everything secret from me, not with Helena so close to me. And eventually, I was able to put two and two together. For all I know, maybe that’s exactly what she wanted.’
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