True (2004)

by Cordy, Michael

  When the time came he was sure they would pay whatever he asked. The fear of losing the greatest happines they had ever known would be too compelling to resist. He looked across at Max, who was talking animatedly with Delphine. It was reassuring to know that his prodigal son had returned to the fold. Everything was back under his control. He was the puppet master and his blood sang.

  Two guests approached and offered their congratulations on his marriage. He smiled graciously, although he knew they had only come to see Phoebe. But that would change. After the wedding everything would change. Joachim and his wife Anna were talking with the Chevaliers. He beckoned to his son. "Venus?'

  'It's all prepared, but we must finalize some minor details.'

  'Good. You can tell me about them tonorrow.' He saw Warren

  Hudsucker approaching. 'Thank you, Joachim. You can go now. I want to introduce someone to Isabella Bacci.'

  As he watched Joachim walk away, Helmut's heart swelled with anticipation. Ilium had made him Cupid, but Venus would give him the world.

  SOMETHINGWAS VERY WRONG. ISABELLAFELT DISLOCATED, AS IF she was in a disturbing dream. The ball had come straight out of a fairy-tale: all the men were resplendent in evening dress, and the women wore the most exclusive designer gowns with jewels that threatened to eclipse the vast chandeliers hanging from the glittering crystal roof. Phoebe outshone them all in a figure-hugging, ankle-length cream dress, a gold necklace and gold slippers. Isabella had been observing her friend, and as they talked, Phoebe had kept looking over her shoulder to make sure Helmut was near.

  It wasn't Phoebe's behaviour, however, that had made the hairs stand up on the back of Isabella's neck. It was the way Kathryn was mooning over the short fat Russian, who, if he stood any closer, would soon smother her. It reminded Isabella of Phoebe's first meeting with Helmut. And Gisele seemed similarly captivated by a leering Frenchman, who stroked her arm with the familiarity of a lover. Even Claire was giggling like a schoolgirl with a man old enough to be her grandfather.

  Her fears increased when she noticed Klaus Kappel turn away from his wife and look directly at her. His cold eyes narrowed. Did he suspect that she had discovered something?

  Then Max appeared with Delphine on his arm. 'You remember Delphine?' he asked.

  'Yes, of course.' Isabella extended her hand. She imagined she saw a triumphant smile hover on Delphine's lips.

  'How was your flight, Isabella?' Delphine asked.

  'Fine. Yours?'

  Delphine looked up at Max and smiled. "We came together.'

  Their apparent intimacy added to Isabella's sense of isolation. Suddenly she felt cold. Max must have been involved in his father's abuse of the drug. All his recent kindness had been motivated by the need to keep an eye on her so that she didn't interfere in the smooth passage of her father's technology to Kappel Privatbank. Everything, including his claimed break-up with Delphine, had been a lie.

  As she processed this, Helmut appeared with a handsome man who seemed familiar. He was in his fifties, had a film star's tanned looks, thick silver hair, which was almost Kappel-white, and smiled at her as if she was the only person in the world.

  Helmut turned to his son. 'Max, perhaps you'd like to make the introductions.'

  'Certainly,' said Max. 'Isabella, let me introduce you to Warren Hudsucker. He's a senator for Nevada.' As Max spoke, Isabella noticed that Helmut was watching his son intently with a satisfied smile.

  She smiled at Hudsucker. 'I thought I recognized your face. How nice to meet you.'

  'I definitely recognized you.' He took her hand and kissed it. He had a small birthmark in the shape of Australia on the back of his hand.

  Helmut touched Phoebe's forearm. 'Come, Phoebe,' he said. 'I want to show you off to some of our other guests.'

  Hudsucker was charming and attentive, but as Isabella talked to him she had the uncomfortable sensation that she was being watched. She glanced away from him and saw Max looking in her direction. Then she caught Klaus, Joachim and Helmut staring at her. As Helmut's eyes met hers, she felt suddenly alone in the crowded room, a vulnerable deer in the cross hairs of four hunters' rifles. Seconds 'later he shifted his focus in turn to Kathryn, to Gisele, Claire and finally Phoebe. It was then, as she followed his gaze and saw what he was seeing, that she almost dropped her glass. They hadn't only used the drug on Phoebe. They had used it on all of her bridesmaids. They had used it on herself.

  She looked into Hudsucker's eyes, saw his hunger, and a rush of nausea threatened to overcome her.

  'You okay?' he asked.

  Tm fine. I just need some food.' She walked over to where Joachim and his wife were standing. Joachim put his glass beside him on a table laden with silver salvers of food, kissed both her cheeks and shook Hudsucker's hand.

  Isabella checked that there was no lipstick on her glass, placed it next to his, then greeted Joachim's wife.

  'So, what do you think of Valhalla?' Joachim said.

  'Fantastic,' said Hudsucker.

  'I've never seen anything like it,' said Isabella, and picked up Joachim's glass. 'How did you convince Odin to give you the run of the place?'

  'Well, he's a satisfied, loyal client,' Joachim said emphatically, and glanced meaningfully at Hudsucker.

  Isabella waited a few minutes, then excused herself. 'No, no,' she protested, when Hudsucker tried to escort her. 'I must go to the ladies' and I've left something in my room. I'll be back soon.'

  She wanted no witnesses to what she was about to do.

  holding joachim's glass, Isabella hurried away from the hubbub of the great hall. She passed Stein and one of his hard-faced men on the mezzanine above the entrance hall, but otherwise the corridors were deserted. Through the windows, she saw fresh snow dancing in the powerful arc lights that ringed the island below Valhalla, and a few metres from the ice lake the windows of a smaller building glowing in the night. Only a little snow had settled on its roof and she guessed, from the stack of fuel drums, that it housed Valhalla's boiler. Beyond, on the frozen lake, the ice chapel glowed an eerie blue.

  She climbed the sweeping stairs to her floor, reached into her clutch bag and extracted a cotton bud. When she reached her corridor, she walked past her room and stopped four doors down.

  With trembling fingers she wiped the cotton bud round the inner rim of Joachim's glass, glanced up and down the corridor, then rubbed it on to the sensor by the door. She had remembered that Sofia's father had told her that that facial-recognition system had a major flaw: if the facial profile in the scanned DNA matched the digital facial image stored in the computer database it granted access - whether or not the DNA belonged to the person wishing to enter. The new InterFace 3500 scanner incorporated a digital camera to photograph the person's face, but the earlier system did not. Within seconds the computer had isolated the unique combination of five hundred and ninety-seven genes that specified Joachim Kappel's face, and his image appeared on the monitor. The door unlocked.

  As she entered, the lights inside the room flickered on automatically. Unlike her room, where she had left clothes strewn on the bed, wardrobes opened and her case half packed, Joachim and Anna Kappel's was so neat and ordered it looked unoccupied. She closed the door and looked around the bed, the lounge area and the adjoining bathroom. There was no sign of Joachim's aluminium case.

  She opened the wardrobe. Suits and dresses hung in a regimented row. Shoes stood beneath them in perfectly aligned pairs. Joachim's clothes occupied half of the space and Anna's the rest.

  She looked on the top shelf, but apart from a spare pillow and blankets there was nothing. Then she spotted the case in the far corner of the wardrobe, beneath his suits. She retrieved it and laid it on the empty dressing-table before a large vanity mirror. Between the case latches a small red diode flashed on an otherwise black LCD monitor. Her breathing was shallow and she felt light-headed with nerves, but she had come this far and she wouldn't turn back now. She reached into her bag and got out the piece of pap
er on which she had scribbled the code Joachim had revealed when he had opened the case. She laid the paper flat on the table so she could read it and pressed the small keys on the alphanumeric pad beside the LCD: three, back slash, zero, one.

  Nothing happened.

  Panic rushed into her throat. She must have memorized one of the symbols incorrectly or omitted one. She had failed. She reached for the paper and was about to put it back into her bag when she spotted the code reversed in the mirror. Her already racing heart accelerated The inverted code looked like IO: if she inserted a forward slash between the back slash and the three, it would spell

  I. OVE.

  She pressed the keys again, inserting the forward slash. When she entered the last digit a message flashed on the screen. Access Authorized. The lock clicked. She opened the case. It contained a black laptop. Beside it were three foam wells, designed to carry cannisters. All were empty.

  With trembling hands she opened the laptop. She had been right: it was one of the new Toshiba Tecras with face-recognition security, configured to work only with the owner. She pressed enter and the screen lit up. It asked her to place her finger on the penny-sized white pad by the keyboard, then enter a code. She took the cotton swab from Joachim's glass and placed it on the sensor.

  Joachim's face appeared and a line of text: 'Welcome Herr Doktor Joachim Kappel.' Then the screen booted up in Windows. She glanced at her watch. It felt as if she'd been away from the party for hours, but only five minutes had passed.

  She scanned through the computer files until she found a folder labelled 'NiL: Project Ilium/Venus'. She double-clicked and two more folders appeared: 'Ilium' and 'Venus'. She double-clicked on Ilium, and a list of files appeared. She opened the first. It had been written in German and her schoolgirl knowledge of the language wasn't up to translating it. But as she scrolled down the text she came to a table. Four women's names were recorded in the left-hand column, four men's in the middle, and a figure in US dollars on the right. The amounts were vast, but that wasn't what had made her mouth dry and her hands tremble. It was the name at the bottom of the left-hand column: Isabella Bacci. All four bridesmaids were listed and each was paired with the men to whom they had been introduced earlier. Warren Hudsucker was listed beside her name.

  She sat back on the bed in shock, unconcerned now about time. Unconsciously she raked her fingers through her hair. She couldn't understand the language the document was written in but she had seen enough to guess the Kappels' plan. She reached into her bag, pulled out a portable hard drive and attached it to the firewire socket at the back of the laptop. Then she copied the entire Project Ilium/Venus folder.

  As she waited for the data to transfer from the laptop's hard disk to her hard drive' she considered what she had seen. She had come in here looking for possible proof that Helmut Kappel had abused her father's drug to win her friend's love. It was now clear that the Kappels' plans went way beyond that.

  Abeep signalled that the transferwas complete. As she reached for her hard drive she looked at the three empty wells in Joachim's case. Where were the canisters now? Had they already been administered? If so, why didn't she feel --'

  'Isabella? Isabella!'

  The first muffled calls from the corridor outside didn't register with her.

  'Isabella!'

  But the third did. She jumped up, unplugged her hard drive, closed down the computer and shut the case. She put it back into rhe far corner of the wardrobe and listened at the door. Silence.

  She took a deep breath to slow her racing heart, eased open the door, stepped into the corridor, and headed for her room. As she reached it she heard footfalls on the carpet and saw a man's shadow loom round the curve of the corridor.

  She put her palm on to her door's DNA sensor but her hand shook so violently that nothing happened.

  'Isabella! There you are!'

  She whirled round -- and gasped with relief when she saw it was Hudsucker.

  'I was worried,' he said, with a broad grin. 'Thought you might be trying to escape my clutches.' He linked his arm with hers. 'Luckily for me, that's impossible here.' He pointed out at the billowing snow, shimmering like quicksilver. 'How would you escape? You can't even call for help. The mountains block mobile-phone signals, and apart from Odin's satellite phone, there are no outside lines. He says he likes the seclusion but I hate being cut off. Usually.' He squeezed her arm. 'In this case I'll make an exception.' Music wafted up from the great hall. 'May I have this dance?'

  Isabella was struggling to control her shaking hands. She was also desperate to get back to her room and study the hard drive, but she didn't want to raise anyone's suspicions. 'I'd love to dance,' she lied, and let Hudsucker lead her back to the party.

  TWO HOURS LATER

  ISABELLAHAD NEVER BEEN GOOD AT KEEPING HER EMOTIONS IN check and the rest of the champagne reception passed in a hellish daze of false smiles, small-talk and polite laughter. She was aware of the Kappels constantly glancing at her. She tried to speak to Phoebe and the other bridesmaids but they were preoccupied with their freakish new partners, and Hudsucker never left her side.

  As soon as the party began to wind down, she excused herself, promising Hudsucker she would accompany him on a sleigh ride the next day. In her room she unpacked her laptop, attached the portable hard drive from her clutch bag and opened the Ilium file she had copied from Joachim's. It was clearly a management summary document but the German made it virtually incomprehensible. However, as she scrolled down to the end of the document she came to another table in bold type. As with the first, all four bridesmaids were listed in the left-hand column but now there were words in the middle column and dates in the third. 'Herzinfarkf appeared beside Claire's and Kathryn's names, 'Krebi beside Gisele's and her own. Isabella swallowed hard. She understood these words, which she had come across in medical journals and pharmaceutical literature. 'Herzinfarkf meant heart attack and iKreb's meant cancer. The dates in the third column were six months away. It was headed 'Todestag. She swallowed again. She knew that ''tod' meant dead and 'tag meant day. She was looking at the dates when she and her friends would die.

  She told herself she must be mistaken, that she had jumped to the wrong conclusion -- why would the Kappels want to kill them all? She clicked on the other folder, 'Venus', but as she scrolled through the German text all she could think about was the date when she was to die. Part of her knew she should stay calm, find a way to translate the German, then decide what to do. But there was no time, and she had never been patient. She had to act now, and there was only one thing she could do.

  She went to her toilet bag and extracted the canister. She read the scribbled label on the side as though it might tell her what to do. Then she unscrewed the cap and tapped a pill on to her palm. It was smaller than an aspirin with '#135' stamped on to one side. She put it into her bag, replaced the canister then went downstairs to the bar by the great hall. The barman appeared to be closing up, but when she asked for a bottle of Amaretto and two glasses, he handed them over without comment.

  As she walked upstairs, she saw only one couple. Everyone else must have retired for the night. On the top landing an arched window looked down over the lake, in all its shimmering glory. It had stopped snowing and the moon sat full and plump above the mountains that lined the fjord to the sea.

  There was a door on each side of the landing. Room one was Helmut Kappel's suite and room two was Phoebe's. Hoping Phoebe was alone, Isabella knocked at her door. Seconds later her friend appeared. She wore a dressing-gown and her hair hung loose to her shoulders. She gestured to the Amaretto botde and laughed. 'You must be joking, Izzy. Aren't you exhausted?'

  'C'mon, just a little one for old times' sake. Tomorrow's a full day and then there's the ball. And the day after that you're getting married. One last drink as single friends.'

  Phoebe sighed. 'Okay, you've convinced me. Come in.'

  'No, let's go outside. It's stopped snowing and the moon's up. I'm on your f
urs -- go on, it's beautiful. You've got the rest of your life to be the sensible Mrs Kappel.'

  Isabella led Phoebe downstairs and outside, past the boiler-house to the ice on the lake. The chapel was essentially a domed amphitheatre of ice. A semicircle of tiered seats fanned out around adais , with an altar. The seats had been carved from ice and covered with fur. An aisle down the centre allowed the bridal procession to reach the altar from the single doorway at the back. 'Isn't it beautiful, Izzy?'

  'Stunning.' Isabella opened the Amaretto and looked up at the domed ice vault. Moonlight filtered through the ice, turning it blue, adding to the glassy chill. Only the thick red rugs on the tiles and the furs on the seats gave any illusion of warmth. Isabella was frozen, but it had been important to get Phoebe away from the Kappels and any interruptions. 'Beautiful. But cold.'