She entered the booth, picked up the phone, then counted the seconds until the connection went through, and she heard David’s voice, sounding exasperated. “I don’t mean to sound like somebody’s father, but I hope you have a good explanation for this,” he said. “It’s not just strange behavior. Considering that Barton’s dead, it’s disturbing.” Then his voice softened. “Sorry, but I’ve been worried sick. Where are you? And are you all right?”
“I’m fine, but it’s better you don’t know where I am. It’s too complicated to explain now. You can say no if you want. But I can’t think of anyone else I trust and I really, really need someone to help me right now.” She wiped away the tears that had started flowing.
“Hey, c’mon, don’t cry. Of course I’ll help you.”
“It’s not that easy,” she said. “I’m in danger. Not because of anything I’ve done, but because of what I know, about BarPharm. But I don’t know enough to protect myself. Does that make any sense?”
“To be honest, no. I mean, you’re in marketing, Tanya. Since when is marketing high risk?”
“It’s not about marketing,” she said. “It’s a product, an experiment I was tricked into taking part in. Pierre lied to me about everything, so I don’t even know who all’s involved: MI6, Russia maybe, assassins—”
“Whoa, hold on. Are you kidding me?”
“Do you have any idea how vicious Big Pharma is? Industrial espionage is a game played at the highest levels—and for the highest stakes. Please believe me.”
After a thoughtful pause, he asked, “What do you want me to do?”
“A small favor. No one knows that you know me, so I thought you could find an excuse to drop by BarPharm. Stop and pay condolences to Eleanor. See Becca. Ask what happened. See if anyone mentions me. If they do, just play dumb and ask questions. Remember, you don’t know me. Can you do that?”
When he told her he would, she said, “Good. When you’ve done it, stick another message to me in the Drafts folder, and I’ll get in touch.”
“I’m in back-to-back meetings on the new series, but I can stop by BarPharm Monday.”
No! she wanted to scream. Monday isn’t soon enough. But she didn’t want David deciding the situation was so urgent he might call the police. What were a few more days? So she said, “Monday’s all right. Whichever day you contact me, give me a time and a new pay phone number to call you at the following late afternoon or evening.”
“Got it. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m sure. And, remember, don’t use your own computer. I’ll speak to you soon. I’m fine. Honest. And I appreciate your help more than I can say. You’re special, David.”
“So are you. Or I wouldn’t be doing this.”
She paid for the Internet and phone call, wondering how special he’d think she was if he knew the truth. She went down the stairs on the corner of the street to the U-Bahn. A little later, as she walked from the Mehringdamm station to the apartment, she channeled Chyna and tried walking like different people she passed on the street—a businesswoman hurrying home, a middle-aged woman stomping along mad at the world, an older woman with a limp. Her Movement classes at Haddon House had taught her how to move like someone younger, but they hadn’t taught her what was much more important now: how to move like someone else.
The next day, she shopped.
It dawned on her that anyone looking for Tanya Avery might be familiar with her extremely limited current wardrobe. Plus, she knew her supply of YOUNGER would one day run out and she’d need more “Lisa” clothes. On Kirsten’s advice, she hit the mall at Alexanderplatz.
Not only were the clothes she ended up with more “her,” they were even more her than clothes in her closet back in Studio City, in that they were more fun, less dressed-to-impress. It was as if being Tanya had led her to who she really wanted to be. In the mall’s chain shops, she bought a lightweight long black duffel coat with a drawstring hood, high black boots with flat lug soles, and some stylishly hip yet unobtrusive black jodhpur-style pants that laced all the way up the sides. She bought mix-and-match clothes that could add up to ten outfits. No little black dresses, either—she wasn’t dressing to kill but to avoid being killed.
A plain black canvas messenger bag would replace the flashy Desigual bag she had habitually carried as Tanya, and, remembering how a darker lipstick had made Tanya look too hard, she picked up some dark, unflattering cosmetics. With her black wig, she could become a whole new person if she had to. And maybe she could feel as tough as she looked.
Her goal was to convince David to meet her so she could give him a flash drive containing the report on which she was now working, her diary pages, and the files she’d copied from Barton to give to Nelson Dwyer should anything happen to her. But she needed to hand it to him in person to know the information was safe. Was she fooling herself in the hopes of seeing David again? No, she decided. As much as she yearned to be with him, this was about life and death and not romance.
As to whom David might be meeting, she looked less like Tanya every day, and everything she’d been doing since she fled London had been leading up to ditching that identity completely. Ruefully, she admitted that the end of Tanya Avery would also eliminate the romance aspect. His kiss that last night meant he was physically attracted to twentysomething Tanya and not fiftysomething Anna. Now if she could just accept that!
She had enough YOUNGER left for just a few weeks. Tomorrow, she would start cutting back to every two or three days. Eventually, Anna would look more like her old self, a younger-looking old self until the fillers and Botox wore off, but no one anybody would mistake for a twenty-five-year-old. In the meantime, the changes should be subtle enough not to be noticed by her roommates. At a drugstore, she bought skin products to use on the “off” days.
While still continuing to go out by day to scour the Internet for anything about Barton and hurrying to pick up her electronics from the Südkreuz locker and return them charged the next day, she did what she could to act normal. Chyna was glad to take off a half day from busking to visit the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, with Anna pretending that, like Chyna, she’d been too young to remember the Wall coming down. With Paola and Kirsten, she saw a moving, if stark, production of La Traviata at the Staatsoper (“So very German, so very un-Italian the bare stage,” murmured Paola when the curtain went up), mascara running down their faces by the end. She cried as much from emotional exhaustion as from Verdi’s music.
Berlin had plenty of Internet cafés, so she went to different ones to check for a draft from David. She didn’t get one until a week after they’d spoken; it had been sent the night before. He’d said he’d dropped by BarPharm that day, asking Chas if he could scout up a copy of the commercial reel he had returned.
When I mentioned my shock at Pierre’s death, he murmured all was hush-hush, but think that was to keep me from thinking him a gossip. Also eager to show me he was in the loop. He asked if I knew U; when I said, ‘Who’s Tanya?’ he explained—praised U, btw—and told me a private det. working for Marina B. kept asking about U because U’d supposedly been on the way to hospital where they took Pierre but U never showed. He said this guy asked if U’d ever mentioned friends in Amsterdam.
Uh-oh, Anna thought, more mysterious detectives looking for me. Hurriedly, she read on. Eleanor, David said, looked terrible.
Venomous about Marina. Says Mrs. Barton took off for Moscow at earliest possible convenience after memorial service. Implied it was just to dump the boys at her mother’s.
Why didn’t U tell me your predecessor killed herself? Eleanor said people whispering that Ur office is jinxed. Figured I could throw in 1 more bit of nosiness so said I heard Marina had hired a private eye. It was odd, Eleanor said, because U’d been asking for the same guy’s phone # not long ago. some1 named Kelm.
I hope this helps U. It certainly worries me. I’ll wai
t for Ur call 2moro. Hope U can do 1 pm London time again cuz it’s hard for me to get away. If not, I’ll go back again at 8 pm. New phone booth, # below. Hope U’re all right & that everything will soon be cleared up. D.
Anna deleted the draft and then logged off, her mind racing. If Kelm had managed to trace her to Holland—through her BarPharm BlackBerry, obviously—he, or someone else, might soon know she was here. She almost groaned out loud. Once again, she needed to be prepared to leave at a moment’s notice. Back at the flat, she packed up most of her things, just in case. Then she got dressed and headed off to Adenauerplatz to make her phone call to London. She put the too-recognizable Desigual bag into a supermarket tote as she left and stuffed it into a collection box for the needy down the street.
She and David spoke only briefly. She thanked him for playing detective, then asked him to do one more thing. “Could you find out when Marina’s coming back from Moscow if she’s not back already, then call to express condolences and casually ask what her plans are for the company? You can say you’re interested in doing more work for them, whatever. Put a new phone number in the Drafts folder, and I’ll call you after that and try to explain more, I promise.”
“Are you sure all this is really necessary? Is there no chance Pierre died of a heart attack, end of story?” He sounded more as if he wanted reassurance than that he believed his own words, but Anna wouldn’t lie.
She sighed in exasperation, then realized David didn’t know Scotland Yard was supposedly involved, so he could be forgiven for thinking she was overreacting. “I can promise it isn’t the end of the story. Even if you think it is, it would mean a lot if you’d humor me.”
A few days later, there was a draft in the email folder saying only, “Marina back yesterday. U can reach me at # below Monday. 1 pm my time again.”
That was Sunday; Monday, she took pains to look as unlike Anna, Tanya, or Lisa as she could. She felt uneasy. She knew she was pushing her luck using the same call center yet another time. After today, she’d have to switch. She wore dark clothes and, even though it was mild rather than chilly, the duffel coat. At the last minute, she stuck on the black wig. With darker lips and cheeks, she became a stranger once again.
In her nervousness, she got to Adenauerplatz early. Not wanting to hang around the call center, she grabbed a cappuccino from the underground bakery at the U-Bahn station. But she could drink only half before she dumped it and rode the escalator up to the street. She usually took the stairs, not just for the exercise but because the escalator led to the opposite side of the broad Kurfürstendamm from the call center. But today she had time to waste, knew her disguise was good, and was more alert than ever.
Out of all the empty seconds and minutes spent and misspent in Anna Wallingham’s life, these were probably the most important of all, because if she’d gone up right away, she’d already be in the call center. Because if she’d finished her cappuccino and then taken the stairs, Martin Kelm would have been right behind her—or by her side.
She saw him on the other side of the street before she’d even cleared the top of the moving stairway. They must have just missed each other among the multiple exits underground. He’d just come up the stairs from the U7, by the stairs that were her usual route. The other side of the Ku’damm was about two hundred feet away, but in profile Kelm was unmistakable, his distinctive pointy nose giving him away.
Anna stepped off the escalator as briskly as she could on legs like jelly, being sure to turn fully away from the street as she did so, then walking straight to the window of a drugstore and gazing at Kelm in its reflection until he was out of the frame.
Then, slowly, slightly, she moved to watch him almost straight on. He didn’t look like either MI6 or a private eye today. In overalls and an ill-fitting denim jacket, his blond hair uncombed, he could have been just another Croatian or Polish workman going to call his family back home. Because, of course, he halted in front of the call center, his hand on the door. Anna quickly turned again and took a left into Wilmersdorferstrasse, walking away quickly but a little bent over and favoring her right side like someone with a bad knee. As soon as she was around the corner, she ducked down a side street, then doubled back to the main thoroughfare farther toward the east, hailing the first taxi that came by.
It took the whole of the fifteen-minute cab ride for Anna’s pulse rate to slow to normal, then just minutes to get her things together and leave her keys with a note to her roommates, some hogwash about that boyfriend of hers asking her to meet him in Barcelona. She’d pulled off her wig before entering in case anyone was home, but she carefully re-donned it before leaving, pulling her rolling suitcase behind.
In the taxi heading to Südkreuz, she texted David on her cheap cell: Sorry. Can’t talk today. In touch soon. Then she opened the phone, removed the German SIM card, and tossed it out the window as the driver tsk-tsked in the mirror. “Mein chewing gum,” she said apologetically, shrugging. He tsk-tsked again.
The station’s departures board listed a train leaving for Prague in just minutes. Anna bought a ticket for cash from the self-service machine, grabbed her backpack from the locker, and rushed to the track, just beating the train’s arrival. Her luck was holding: she found a second-class window seat with no one seated next to it or across the aisle, without a reserved sign, and close to the toilet, so she could bolt herself in and pull the emergency cord if anyone came after her. She pushed the large case into the space behind the seats, keeping her backpack on the empty seat next to her. The train, being German and in Germany, left precisely on time, which meant that less than an hour after spying the pointy nose of Martin Kelm poking its way back into her life, Anna was back on the run.
When the food cart came around, she bought a sandwich, chips, water, and coffee. Then she sat back and tried to unwind. Anna would be on this train more than four hours, and there was no way anyone in the entire world could know where she was headed.
She’d been halfway hoping she was wrong about Kelm, since his being in MI6 would mean he was her ally. But today’s sighting put the kibosh on the creep’s credibility. He could have been MI6 pretending he was a detective or some slick shamus masquerading as SIS—but an Eastern European laborer, he was not.
About an hour out of Berlin, her food and drinks still untouched on the tray table, Anna grabbed her bags and rolled her suitcase into the cramped lavatory compartment. She divided things between her handbag, backpack, and the case. The YOUNGER she had left, she unhesitatingly dumped in the metal toilet bowl. Then she pushed the flush button and watched as, she thought sardonically, her youth literally went down the toilet. The product may have been proven safe and effective, but it was toxic through and through. She had expected the product to bring her not only financial security but also happiness. Instead, it had brought her terror and perhaps fresh heartache if she lived to see David again. To others, it had brought death.
She wasn’t looking forward to being fifty-seven again. Not really. But she was looking forward to staying alive. Besides, she was fifty-seven and she was Anna Wallingham. If Anna Wallingham was unemployable, she would find a way to survive without working for other people. Hadn’t her whole life been about surviving? Wasn’t everyone’s? If she had been in a more humorous mood, she would have found her beloved slogo, “YOU, only YOUNGER,” laughable. All she wanted now was to be “YOU, still alive.”
Chapter 19
Shortly after the train pulled into Prague, Anna checked into a budget hotel near the station. It was shabby, and the bathroom’s fetid smell made keeping both the toilet lid and bathroom door closed at all times a necessity. But it was just for the night, and the room was clean even if the bed was harder than a park bench. She pulled the old I-need-to-unpack-my-passport trick on a desk clerk who cared only about getting back to computer solitaire. Since he’d never be seeing any ID, she filled out the registration card as “Lisa Smith,” paid in cash for the
room plus the extra night’s deposit that would be sacrificed, and then, carrying anything of value and with her cash in her boots as always, she locked her suitcase and went in search of an Internet café.
She found one with a call center attached and checked room rentals online. One in Vinohrady sounded fine, just three Metro stops from the old center, in what her Time Out guide called a good area. She made an appointment with a man named Adam to come by first thing in the morning. Then she wandered down to the famed Old Town Square with its Astronomical Clock. The pastel-painted gabled buildings lining the huge square lent it the air of a medieval fantasyland. Prague might be the most beautiful city she’d ever visited. She hoped it wouldn’t be the last.
The winding streets surrounding the square led her to the Vltava River. Prague Castle towering over everything made her think of Franz Kafka, whose books she’d loved in college. Now, here she was in his hometown, where, like Josef K. and Gregor Samsa, she was no longer sure who she really was and couldn’t figure out what was going on. Kafkaesque for sure, she thought wryly.
She’d read about Kafka’s old haunt, Café Louvre, and walked in that direction. Up two flights of stairs in the warm and noisy café, she snagged a table by one of the wide windows overlooking the street—the better to see who entered.
She gave in to thoughts of how pleasurable it would have been to be here with David. That would never happen, of course. She couldn’t stay long enough for him to join her, and, much as she hated thinking about it, she couldn’t count on his sticking with her after he found out who she really was. As for Kelm’s sudden appearance, not for a moment did she think David might have given her up. If she couldn’t trust him, she could trust no one.
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