Aside from the amount of equipment and the level of sophistication with which the space had been kitted out, the main thing that shocked Bella was the number of people in the room.
She recognised Field Cupule James, sitting at the control panel – he turned and gave her a brief nod as she came in. Beside him was a woman she didn’t recognise, and there must have been ten or fifteen other people she didn’t know sitting around tables, most of them American by the sound of their accents. One of them turned around and Bella recognised Theresa.
‘Hey, Bella!’ Theresa got up and came across to give her a hug. ‘Glad you decided to join us.’
‘Theresa! I wasn’t expecting to see you. What is this place?’
‘An old field cupule outpost,’ Ben said. After a quick word with James, he’d come over to join them. ‘Decommissioned years ago, but James knew about it and was able to get it up and running for us.’
Ben brought Theresa up to speed about Oscar and Lauren. Maggie, who had shot off as soon as they got inside, reappeared round the side of the glass partition leading a familiar-looking man whose checked shirt bulged around his pot belly.
‘Say hello to Bella, Teddy,’ Maggie instructed.
Teddy held out a plump hand. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you. Conscious, that is,’ he added, with a shy smile.
‘Hello, Teddy. Lovely to see you recovered,’ Bella said, squeezing his hand before she released it.
‘Not recovered,’ Maggie admonished, reaching a hand across to pat his belly. ‘He’s a shadow of himself. Needs feeding up.’ She slipped her arm under his and pulled him closer to her side.
Ben and Theresa had gone across to confer with James and, excusing herself, Bella joined them. As she approached, her eye was caught by the banks of screens. Some of them showed shots of the outside of the farm, some were linked up to cameras in the AC grounds and OAK interiors; but there was one in particular that caught her eye. In a bare, cell-like room sat a neat little woman in a Chanel suit and pearls, hands folded in her lap. On the table next to her was a full glass of water and an untouched plate of food. Almost as if she sensed Bella’s eyes on her, Isadora slowly raised her head and stared down the lens of the camera, her face expressionless. After a moment or two when Bella found she was rooted to the spot, holding her breath, Isadora’s lip curled into the faintest sneer before her face again lost all expression and she dropped her gaze. Bella shivered.
‘Bella?’
She realised Ben had been trying to get her attention.
‘Sorry, I was distracted by your guest.’ She motioned towards the image of Isadora on the screen. ‘What did you say?’
‘I was asking for your opinion. We all agree we need to get Oscar and Lauren out as soon as possible. If Catherine and Finn know Lauren’s working with me, they’ll do all they can to get information out of her.’
Bella nodded. ‘And they already pressured Oscar to tell Catherine how to get in touch with me, and that I have the USB. Plus, he told them about these farm buildings – he doesn’t know where they are, but I’d lay odds Finn has teams searching local farms as we speak.’
‘We need to catch them off guard,’ James said. Indicating the group of people at the far side of the room, he said, ‘We’ve got more manpower now, thanks to Theresa. They won’t be expecting us to turn up at OAK. We can get in there, get Oscar and Lauren and get out. I know where they’ll be holding them.’
‘It’s too risky,’ was Theresa’s instant response. ‘These guys aren’t cupuli, James. They’re agents, we trained them to be kind, not to storm buildings.’
‘We have to act,’ James urged, punching one fist into his other palm. ‘Waiting here doing nothing is suicide.’
‘How about calling the police?’ suggested Bella.
As one, all three turned and stared at her, as if she’d suggested they all smear themselves in chocolate and dance the Macarena.
‘We can’t send the police into OAK,’ Ben explained, as if to a small child.
‘But…’
‘It’s not an option,’ Theresa said with an air of finality. ‘We can go into the whys and the wherefores later, but for now, we need a plan that doesn’t involve the police. A sensible plan,’ – looking at James – ‘that won’t endanger the lives of my staff.’
‘Agreed,’ said Ben. ‘Catherine’s not going to stop until she’s got Isadora back, along with that incriminating evidence on the USB.’
They were silent for a moment, Theresa removing her gold-rimmed glasses and rubbing the bridge of her nose. Bella watched her then took a sharp intake of breath.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Oscar couldn’t remember a time when he’d felt this miserable. In his late teens, he’d broken his jaw in rugby practice and had to drink all his food blended through a straw for weeks. The memory of the pain of the initial collision and the subsequent operation, as well as the misery of not being able to open his mouth wider than the diameter of a straw for all that time, paled into insignificance in comparison with this mental anguish.
At the moment of Catherine yelling ‘Three!’ he’d looked in desperation at Lauren, seen her lips pressed firmly together and been convinced no help was coming from that direction. He’d thrown his hands up in surrender and screamed that he’d tell Catherine whatever she wanted to know.
His panicked mind had tried to sift through his bits and pieces of knowledge and work out what to feed her and what to hold back, but in the end, he’d told her how they’d escaped from the garage at OAK, the fact of Bella having her old phone with her, that she’d been at her house to get the USB but had escaped somehow, and the description of the farm buildings where she’d found Ben.
The one thing he’d kept back was the phone call to his mum to pick them up and take them to Bella’s house. No one noticed a timing issue between them leaving the AC grounds and arriving at Bella’s – he’d been careful to be vague about when they’d escaped. Telling them about Gladys was too much, he couldn’t bear the thought of her answering the door to an intimidating cupule.
Now the immediate jeopardy had passed, he went back over the scene in his mind, forcing himself to relive the moment he’d let physical cowardice overcome any principles of loyalty or a sense of standing up for what was right.
He’d heard it said you find out who you really are in a crisis. He’d found out – and it wasn’t an acquaintance he was relishing.
Shivering, from cold and exhaustion, he pulled the grey blanket closer around his shoulders, hugging his knees to his chest. He was hunched on a bunk at the side of the cell. Lauren sat with her head in her hands in a chair on the other side of the room.
They hadn’t tied her up this time, but Catherine had warned her when the cupuli were taking her and Oscar away, that if Oscar’s information didn’t get them what they wanted, they’d be back to speak to Lauren. Oscar had had his head injury checked out in the medical centre and then had been put back into the cell.
‘Lauren,’ he whispered.
No sign that she’d heard him.
He tried again. ‘Lauren.’
She sighed and raised her head. ‘What?’
‘I’m sorry. I should have realised you wouldn’t be working against OAK. I’ve known you long enough. But it all seemed so odd – I saw you and Ben with that field cupule, and then it seemed like Ben was the one behind Isadora going missing…’
She jerked around, putting a finger to her lips and looking around the room as if to indicate cameras and bugs.
Oscar rubbed his shins to get the circulation going. ‘I’m not saying anything they don’t already know. I mean, fuck it, I don’t know anything they don’t already know after spilling my guts back there.’
Lauren crossed the cell and sat down next to Oscar on the narrow bed. She put an arm around his shoulders.
‘She was threatening to shoot you in the leg. If you hadn’t said something I would have done.’
He pulled back a lit
tle and twisted around so he could see her face.
‘I looked at you,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d been turned to stone.’
‘I was trying to stay strong because I knew what a risk it was for so many people if I said anything. But I promise you, I’d taken a breath to speak as soon as I heard her say “three”. At first, I’d thought she was bluffing, but then I saw the expression in her eyes change when she was steeling herself to do it. I couldn’t sit there and let it happen.’
The noise of a bolt being drawn back made them both jump.
Finn stood in the doorway. There was something different about his bearing from the desperate man they’d seen earlier. He stood a little straighter. Something had been done to freshen up his clothes.
‘Up, both of you,’ he barked. ‘We’re going for a ride.’
Twenty minutes later they were being bundled out of the back of a van, blinking in the early morning sunlight. They’d been cuffed again and Oscar stumbled as he jumped down, Finn reaching out a meaty hand to haul him upright.
From a field on the other side of the road came the plaintive bleating of lambs. A light breeze caressed his skin. Oscar couldn’t open his mind to the charms of a fresh spring morning, because it was too crammed full of apprehension. Finn and the other cupuli guarding them had given no indication as to why they were leaving OAK or where they were going. In the back of the van, he and Lauren had exchanged murmured guesses but anything they could come up with seemed worse than being left undisturbed in a cell. And his first thought on seeing the acres of empty landscape around him was that they’d been taken there to be… disposed of. A second glance as they stepped away from the back of the van, however, revealed a group of large farm buildings in the distance, and Bella’s description of the barns where she’d found Ben sprang to mind.
Lauren clambered out of the vehicle and stood beside him, shivering a little despite the sun’s rays.
Behind them two more vehicles pulled up, Catherine emerging from the first. She strode towards Finn, her attitude suggesting to Oscar an undergraduate crossing the stage to receive her degree, her buoyant step a mixture of anticipation and jubilation.
‘This look like the right place?’ she queried.
‘By the group of ash trees, with the barns due south-west of us,’ Finn confirmed, as if he were reciting an instruction. ‘Rawson says he thinks there used to be a field cupule post round here.’
They both looked across the field to the steel-framed wooden buildings in the distance. There was no sign of life. Catherine gripped her phone in her hand.
‘They’re due to call back at seven am,’ she said, looking at the time on the screen. Catherine and Finn exchanged glances and then surveyed the fields and barns again. They reminded Oscar of figures from an old Soviet poster, drawn in profile, chins uplifted against a rising sun, ready to face innumerable hardships in order to protect the motherland.
They all waited. A couple of cupuli lit cigarettes and talked in low tones.
The phone rang and Catherine answered before the first tone had finished ringing out.
‘Yes?’
She’d put it on speakerphone and held it in the palm of her hand so Finn could hear.
‘Catherine?’
It was Bella’s voice on the other end of the line and Oscar’s stomach lurched.
‘Yes,’ Catherine confirmed. ‘We’re here, where you told us.’
‘Okay, good. You need to follow my instructions to the letter. If anything varies from what we agreed, the deal’s off.’
‘I understand.’
‘We’ll give you Isadora and the USB in exchange for Oscar and Lauren, as agreed.’
Out of the corner of his eye, Oscar saw Lauren shake her head no. He reached out with his bound hands and squeezed her arm.
‘This is how we’re going to do it,’ Bella continued, her voice ringing metallically out from the phone, which Catherine had turned up to full volume. ‘You’re going to release Oscar and Lauren from where you’re standing and they’ll cross the field to the buildings. They won’t be handcuffed or restrained in any way. At the same time, we’ll release Isadora and she’ll cross the field to you. She’ll be holding the USB, raised in her right hand so you can see it. No one else will enter the field. We won’t take a step past the boundary point of the buildings and if we see any of you on the field, the deal is off. When Isadora reaches you, you take her and the USB back to OAK and you get on with your lives. Don’t try to come after any of us, don’t go to the police. Agreed?’
‘Wait,’ Catherine snapped, then pressed mute on the phone.
Finn was watching her face as she digested what she’d heard. ‘Do you trust them?’ he asked.
Catherine laughed. Oscar rarely heard her laugh and it wasn’t a pleasant sound, it reminded him of the humourless, ack-ack of a chimpanzee.
‘No, I don’t trust them at all. But if we do what they say, we’re both in the same boat. We can station our team with Oscar and Lauren in their sights the whole way across the field. They’ll have Isadora covered in the same way. But I need to know she’s safe first.’
She unmuted the phone. ‘I want to speak to Isadora.’
There was some muffled noise through the speaker, what sounded like chair legs scraping along the floor. After a couple of seconds, a new voice came on the line.
‘Catherine?’
Oscar was close enough to see Catherine’s eyes fill with tears as she peered down at the phone cradled in her hands.
‘Isadora!’ she cried. ‘Are you alright?’
Finn had stepped up behind her and they both gazed down at the phone as if contemplating their newborn baby.
‘I’m very well, Catherine, thank you,’ Isadora replied, her voice fainter than Bella’s had been. ‘How is OAK?’
Before Catherine could reply, Bella was back.
‘We don’t have time for that. Are you happy with the arrangements now?’
‘No!’ Catherine snapped. ‘Put Isadora back on. I need to know she has the USB before I agree to anything.’
They heard Bella say to Isadora, ‘She wants to know if you’ve got the files,’ before Isadora could be heard speaking into the phone once more.
‘I have them,’ she said. ‘They put the memory stick into a computer to show me the documents then ejected it and passed it to me.’
‘In that case,’ Catherine responded, the slightest of smiles lightening her expression, ‘we’ll see you very soon.’
There was more rustling on the phone line then,
‘Okay, you agree to the terms?’ Bella asked. ‘You’ll bring Oscar and Lauren to the edge of the field now?’
Catherine nodded to Finn who took out some wire cutters and snapped off the hard plastic binding Lauren’s wrists, then did the same for Oscar. Gripping them both above the elbow, he walked them up to a barred gate set in the hedge.
‘Good,’ Bella said. ‘Get him to open the gate and then step back. Oscar and Lauren have to come through on their own.’
Finn made a move but Catherine called out, ‘Stop.’ Then, into the phone, ‘We need to see Isadora first.’
‘Hold on.’ They could hear muffled movement and footsteps on the other end of the line, then silence as if the phone had been muted. A couple of minutes passed, then a diminutive figure appeared, dark against the bright sky between two barns. The figure moved forward until it was standing at the point where the concrete apron of the barns met the green-brown of the scrubby pasture.
Bella’s voice could be heard again through the speakerphone. ‘Get him to open the gate and send them through.’
Finn threw a questioning look at Catherine who nodded. Oscar reached out and took Lauren’s hand – whether to reassure her or himself he wasn’t sure.
The field sloped gently down to the barns, coarse grass punctuated here and there by clumps of cowslips and daisies. Finn stepped back from the open gate and the two hostages passed through, hand in hand. He pushed the gate closed behind
them.
At the same time, the small figure in the distance began to walk.
Catherine ended the call and put the phone in her pocket, clinging to the top bar of the gate as she watched Isadora pick her way across the pasture. One hand was raised as Bella had promised it would be, but she was too far away to be able to see what Isadora was holding.
She was vaguely aware of Finn conferring with the cupuli behind her, putting them into position along the hedge with their guns trained on the tall figure of Oscar and shorter one of Lauren beside him as they crossed the field. Lauren stumbled and Oscar grabbed her arm, pausing for a second to speak to her, before they continued on.
It seemed to Catherine to take an age. ‘Come on, come on!’ she urged under her breath.
After all the tension of not knowing where Isadora was or if she would ever see her again, to have her so close but to be unable to go to her was agony. And to see her like this, in her neat clothes and pristine court shoes picking her way through ankle-length grass and weeds, one hand in the air – it was undignified! The leader of OAK should never be treated in this way. It was a monstrous lack of respect for both the woman and the office of CEO of OAK, the most important organisation in the world.
Rage built inside Catherine as she saw Isadora nearly lose her balance and fling out a hand to steady herself. Bella might have made her promise to leave them all to get on with their lives, but Catherine had no intention of honouring that promise. As soon as Isadora was safe, Bella and the others wouldn’t know what had hit them. Finn and his troops would storm the buildings and capture everyone inside. She wasn’t going to risk them going free, possibly with copies of the USB files to make public.
She became more aware of the men and women ranged on either side of her as one of them shifted position and she heard the sound of a mechanism engaging on a rifle.
‘Be careful!’ she snapped. ‘Isadora Faye is on that field.’
‘Fingers off triggers,’ Finn called out. ‘No one shoots unless I give the order.’
The three hostages were nearing each other now, Isadora still holding one hand in the air, and it seemed to Catherine that perhaps she could see something small and black gripped in her fingers. But it could be her tired eyes playing tricks. She blinked several times, trying to relieve the dryness.
Acts of Kindness Page 19