by Mark Burnell
By the time they fell asleep daylight was seeping through the curtains. When Stephanie opened her eyes Mark was no longer in bed. He was on the far side of the room, almost dressed.
'Where are you going?'
'Back to where I came from.'
'Where's that?'
He shrugged. 'You tell me. You're the only one who knows.'
Which was true. Although it took her a while to realize it. By then, he'd gone. She'd chosen him, not the other way round. He'd understood that and had accepted it. Had been happy to accept it. She found him after lunch, on the observation deck again, reading his paperback, cloned from the day before.
'Is that it?'
He put down the book. 'Wasn't it what you wanted?'
'What did you want?'
'I thought we understood each other.'
'After one night?'
'I thought we understood each other yesterday afternoon.'
He was right. 'We did. But that was then. What about today?'
'Today?'
'Yes. And tomorrow.'
Now, standing on Mark's roof, rather than some remote roof of the world, it was hard to believe a year had passed. As far as Mark was concerned she was still Stephanie Schneider, a lie so slender she could sometimes convince herself it wasn't a lie at all; Schneider had been her mother's maiden name. Instead, she had been born Stephanie Patrick. But in a windswept cemetery at Falstone, Northumberland, there was a gravestone bearing her name, date of birth and date of death. Her stone was the last in a row of five that included her parents, Andrew and Monica Patrick, her sister, Sarah, and her younger brother, David. They'd all died together, but there was nothing of them in the cold ground. Their vaporized remains had drifted towards the bottom of the north Atlantic with the incinerated wreckage of the 747 they'd been in. Christopher, the eldest child, was still alive, still living in Northumberland, a wife and family to care for. The last time Stephanie had seen him had been at her own funeral. Through a pair of binoculars she'd watched him cry for her – for the last of his family – and had found that she'd been unable to cry herself.
Her coffee finished, she climbed down the stepladder and went into the bedroom. Mark was stirring. He looked a little groggy. She put the empty mug on a book shelf and began to undress. He propped himself up on one elbow to watch the performance. And she watched him as she pulled the T-shirt over her head.
'God, Stephanie, what happened to …?'
'Don't ask. Not yet.'
London might have been fifteen centigrade cooler than Marrakech but the climate was far less agreeable with reeking humidity trapped beneath a hazy brown sky. Stephanie reached the corner of Robert Street and Adelphi Terrace, overlooking Victoria Embankment Gardens which, itself, overlooked the Thames. A pair of barges crawled upstream, overtaking the tourist coaches congesting the Embankment.
The brass plaque beside the front door was original: L.L.Herring & Sons, Ltd, Numismatists, Since 1789. The firm still occupied a small part of the building. The other companies fell under the umbrella of Magenta House. An organization without designation, it had no official title and was not registered anywhere. There was no secret code of reference for it. It formed no part of MI5 or SIS, or any of the other security services. Magenta House was the name of the dilapidated office block on the Edgware Road that the organization had first occupied. Subsequently the building had been demolished to make way for a hotel.
Existing beyond existence itself, Magenta House was not constrained by law, by the fluctuating fashions of politics or by scrutiny from the media. It was established as a direct consequence of increased transparency in the intelligence services. Its creators regarded accountability as an alarming intrusion by an ignorant public whose right to know needed to be restricted to information they could digest. They felt that politicians, in thrall to the short term, should be bypassed. They believed there were areas of national security too vital to disseminate, and they knew, with evangelical certainty, that there were some threats that could not be countered by legal means. Stephanie had no idea who these creators were, but they had invested control of the organization in one man: Alexander. If he had a first name, Stephanie had yet to meet anyone who knew it.
She pushed the second button on the intercom, which was marked Adelphi Travel. The lens on the overhead camera turned before she heard the click of the lock. She pushed open the door and entered a parallel world. In the aftermath of 11 September 2001 Magenta House's area of responsibility had been expanded. So had its budget, which was bled from the military. Some of the changes were macro, some micro; the new smoke detectors, for instance, were a precaution with a difference. They functioned conventionally but were also capable of delivering an anaesthetic gas to counter hostile intrusion.
Soft pools of muted light fell onto the reception area: two sofas, two armchairs, newspapers and magazines in half a dozen languages spread across a coffee table, fresh flowers in a china vase on an antique sideboard. The paintings were nineteenth-century landscapes, oil on canvas, each individually lit. Even the receptionist had been overhauled: gone was the weary middle-aged chain-smoker of years gone by, replaced by a younger model with good cheekbones, a chic grey suit and cold zeal for eyes.
Stephanie said, 'Which room are we in?'
'Mr Alexander wants to see you before you go down.'
Alexander's large, rectangular office overlooked Victoria Embankment Gardens. In the winter he had a view of the river and the south bank. Now all he could look onto was the lush foliage of the trees in the garden.
The room was persistently old-fashioned: parquet floor, Persian carpets, a Chesterfield sofa, wooden shelves groaning beneath the weight of leather-bound books. At the centre of this office stood Alexander, in a navy chalk-stripe suit, a pair of black Church's shoes, a white shirt with a double-cuff secured by gold cufflinks, a silk tie. Which, appropriately, was magenta. When Mark wore a suit, Stephanie saw an animal trapped in a cage. Alexander, by contrast, wore a suit as naturally as skin. And in this environment he looked at home. But it was an environment that belonged to another era.
'I wanted to see you alone before we meet the others for the debriefing.' He was standing by the window, smoking a Rothmans, his back to her. The windows were open, rendering recently installed mortar-proof glass redundant. 'Were you injured?'
Not the first question she would have expected. It almost sounded like concern. Which made her suspicious. 'Nothing serious.'
'What went wrong?'
'They knew. He knew.'
'Mostovoi?'
'Yes.'
'But he saw you.'
'I know. When he agreed to see me, he must have thought the deal was valid. Or, at least, potentially valid. In the end, though, the deal was too big. It wasn't realistic. Not for Petra.'
'That was the point. He'd been invisible for a year. It needed to be something extraordinary to draw him out. To be honest, I was beginning to wonder whether he was still alive.'
'Well, now you know. Was and still is.'
'How close did you get?'
'Closer than I am to you.'
He turned round. 'You were in the same room as him?'
'Yes.'
'Face to face?'
'Yes.'
'And you didn't manage an attempt of any sort?'
Stephanie resented his tone. 'Actually, I did. After I'd handled his protection.'
'What happened?'
'The gun jammed.'
'You fired at him?'
'I tried to.'
'Then what?'
'There wasn't time for anything else. I had to exit immediately.'
Alexander shook his head in disbelief, then sat down at his desk. 'How can you be so sure about Mostovoi?'
'They had me tagged from the start. The day before yesterday they went through my hotel room while I was out and …'
'How do you know?'
'It was witnessed.'
'By?'
'Independent cover.'
> 'Presumably you didn't go back there.'
'I didn't need to. I'd already established a second identity.'
Alexander frowned. 'Was that sanctioned?'
'Under the circumstances I thought it better to act on instinct.'
'You're supposed to respond to instruction, not instinct.' He took a final drag from his cigarette, then ground the butt into an onyx ashtray. 'Let me guess. The independent cover and second identity were provided by Stern.'
Stern, the information broker, the ghost in the machine. His business was conducted over the internet. Nobody knew his – or her – identity, but Stephanie had used him since her days as an independent and he'd never let her down. Nor she him. In Stern's virtual world, information was both product and currency. Sometimes, as Petra, Stephanie had bought information with information. Alexander hated the idea of Stern because he was beyond Magenta House's control and because his electronic existence allowed Stephanie a form of freedom.
'As fond as you are of Stern, has it ever occurred to you that he might not be reliable?'
'Compared to?'
He stiffened, then tried to shrug it off – a pointless victory, perhaps, but sweet nonetheless – before changing tack. 'You didn't go home last night.'
'That's not home. It's a film set.'
'Did you go straight to his place after you left the courier?'
'None of your business.'
'If it concerns your professionalism, then it's my business.'
'We made a deal after New York. I gave you my word. Since then I've never given you any reason to worry.'
'Your private life is a worry.'
'Grow up.'
'One of us should, certainly. You don't just place yourself in jeopardy, Stephanie. You place everyone who comes into contact with you in jeopardy. That includes Hamilton.'
'Leave him out of it.'
'I'd love to. Really, I would. But your behaviour won't allow me to.'
'I've taken precautions.'
'Not good enough.'
'You have no idea whether they're good enough.'
'Perhaps,' he conceded. 'But what I do know is this: one slip is all it'll take.'
The first time I met Alexander he held the power of life and death over me. He saved me, then turned me into the woman I am today. Before him I was a drug-addict, a prostitute, a grim statistic waiting to happen. He could have hastened the predictable end. But he didn't. Instead he let his people loose on me. Now you can drop me anywhere in the world and, like a cockroach, I'll thrive, no matter how harsh the environment. I am any woman I need to be at any given moment, fluent in four foreign languages and able to scale a building like a spider. I can kill a man with a credit card … and not by shopping. I'm more than a woman, I'm a machine, and the man who made it happen – Alexander – is the man I detest most in this world.
The feeling is mutual. He can't abide me, despite the fact that I am probably his greatest technical achievement and his single most potent asset. Like magnets, we repel but are also drawn together. The deal we made after New York ensured that. At the time I could have walked away from Magenta House. Nothing would have given me greater pleasure. But I chose not to.
His name was Konstantin Komarov, and I was completely in love with him. Even though I am now with Mark, there is a part of me that is lost to Kostya and always will be. A complicated man, certainly. A man with a past, most definitely. But where Magenta House saw a threat, I saw a future. Alexander had promised to set me free after New York and was true to his word. But Kostya was a Magenta House target. I pleaded with Alexander to let him live even though I knew it was pointless. In the end I had only one thing to offer him. So we struck a deal.
A truly Faustian pact it was, too. I returned to Magenta House and Alexander suspended the order on Komarov. As long as I remain here, he's alive. The moment I leave, he dies. It's hard to imagine anything more perverse: I kill people to keep alive the man I used to love.
I haven't seen him since we kissed goodbye at JFK in New York. That was the final condition that Alexander insisted upon: I could save him but I couldn't be with him. I've thought about this so many times since then and have always come to the same conclusion: there was no good reason for this condition. I believe Alexander imposed it upon me simply to prevent me from being happy. In that, at least, he's failed. Kostya is alive, somewhere out there, and I'm in love again.
Mark has no idea about any of this. He's in love with a woman named Stephanie Schneider, a freelance photo-journalist, who is secretive about her past and whose work takes her to some of the world's riskier regions.
When we were falling for each other, I had no idea how complicated this arrangement would become. When Alexander first discovered that I was seeing someone – as opposed to just having casual sex, which would have been fine – he was furious and ordered me to drop Mark.
'How do you know about this?' I'd countered.
His initial silence was confirmation of a suspicion that he tried to justify. 'Everyone here is subject to periodic security review. You know that.'
'Even you?'
'You can't play this game, Stephanie.'
'It's not a game.'
'All the more reason to call it off, then.'
'Forget it.'
Eventually Alexander relented, even though he was right. A relationship is completely incompatible with my profession. To make it work I had to create an artificial environment for it. At first I was complacent; a few lies here, a few half truths there, I thought. And since lying was never a problem for me, I imagined it would be relatively simple.
Now I have two lives. I am Petra Reuter and I am Stephanie Schneider, with Stephanie Patrick stranded in limbo somewhere between them. I have my flat. This is the only interface between the two versions of me. It's Stephanie's flat – it contains all the paraphernalia of her life – but it's where Petra goes to and from. I think of it as an airlock. There are two environments, one on either side, and the airlock allows me to acclimatize from one to the other.
My relationship with Alexander is a balancing act that is constantly tested. Here was a battle he couldn't win, so, for the sake of the war, he withdrew. He even contributed to the cover. My assignments as a photo-journalist come through Frontier News, an agency that specializes in sending freelancers to the kind of trouble-spots where no one offers you insurance. The company was established ten years ago by three former soldiers. Two of them are dead; the first was beheaded by Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the second was shot by Chechen rebels in Georgia. Alexander knew the third and put me in touch. Which is not to say he's happy about it. He's like a father who hands his daughter a pack of condoms because the idea of her repellent boyfriend getting her pregnant is even more revolting to him than the idea of them having sex.
I know it's crazy to see Mark, but Alexander should consider the alternative. Mark gives me stability. Through him I've made friends; normal people living normal lives coloured by normal concerns. They have become an emotional cushion that makes it easier for me to continue to do what I do for Alexander at Magenta House.
Last night, after too many drinks at the Cunninghams' house in Clapham, we played the Kevin Bacon game. This is a movie version of the Six Degrees of Separation theory, which suggests you can connect any two people in the world in six moves. It occurs to me that there could easily be a Stephanie Patrick game. I can play Six Degrees of Separation without ever having to leave my own skin.
After a four-hour debriefing Stephanie went to her own flat, a third-floor walk-up on Maclise Road with a view of the rear of the Olympia exhibition centre. There was mail on the floor, dust in the air, nothing in the fridge. She opened several windows but there was no breeze to counter the humid heat. Then she checked the sensors: two micro-cameras, one in the living room, one in the bedroom, connected to an exterior base-unit that sent a coded message to her desktop. The cameras were activated by movement, the sensors detecting changes in air temperature and density. She'd bought the
equipment from Ali Metin, a Turk who owned a computer shop on the Tottenham Court Road. According to her monitor, neither camera had been triggered. There were no images.
Later she took the dirty clothes from the leather holdall to the launderette next to the Coral betting shop on Blythe Road. Back at the flat she made green tea, put on a CD she'd borrowed from Mark – Is This It? by The Strokes – and sorted through her post. Circulars and bills, mostly. There were two statements: one from HSBC, the other from Visa, both in Stephanie Schneider's name. The current account showed two credits from Frontier News for stories filed during the previous three months. The savings account held just less than fifteen thousand pounds. In a box-file beside her desktop computer, there were receipts for hotels she'd never visited, flights she'd never caught.
The flat was run down: a bucket beneath the sink in the bathroom because the pipes leaked, patches of damp on the kitchen ceiling, rotten window-frames. Stephanie never attempted to address these problems. On the contrary. She left dirty plates in the sink, unironed clothes on her bed, used clothes on the floor. There were papers across the table in the living room, books on the carpet, camera equipment in the kitchen.
By inclination, Stephanie was organized and tidy. Stephanie Schneider, however, was by her own admission a 'domestic slut', which had the intended benefit of discouraging Mark from spending time at her flat. As the portal connecting her two worlds, it was the one place where she felt uneasy with him. Consequently they spent all their time at his flat. Occasionally this was an issue he attempted to address by suggesting she move into Queen's Gate Mews.
'It's not that I don't want to live with you, Mark. It's just that I don't want to give up my own place.'
'But we don't spend any time over there. It doesn't make sense.'
'It doesn't make financial sense. But it makes a different kind of sense. Besides, what about all my stuff? You've hardly got enough space for your stuff.'
'We could convert the garage downstairs.'
'It's full.'
'Only of old climbing gear. I could put that into storage. Or sell it. Or throw it out. Then you could have an office, Or we could sell both flats and get somewhere bigger.'