by Karen Guyler
His message could only be read by his intended recipient, but he kept it cryptic, this mission being what it was. ‘Staged burglary at the house, possible other player showing their hand.’
He uploaded the photos he’d taken of the three men Annabel had pointed out. His money was on the one Eva had called Stuart, but he knew hunches had to be proven.
The screen remained static while the person at the other end deliberated.
‘Too soon to move in, call it a night, new orders tomorrow.’
The response Luke had expected.
In Addison’s car, he looked at the seat Eva had taken. But orders were orders.
14
Eva’s front door opened easily this time. “Charles?”
In the lounge, he nursed a whisky, staring at the TV frozen on the image of the US President’s press conference where he had vowed he would hunt down those who had murdered his friend, Hunter Malone. As though this was a normal evening.
Charles didn’t hide his surprise at how she looked.
“What’s all this about? I’m in so much trouble for walking out of the ball. How could you have threatened to leave me? How could you hold our marriage hostage?”
“I’m trying to keep you safe.”
“By strong-arming me?”
He tried for a smile. “I know how stubborn you can be.”
“You don’t get to do that, make this about me. Explain or I’m going back, see if I can salvage anything of my reputation.”
“This isn’t going to make sense but I need your phone.”
“It’s in pieces. We can’t be here, the police said—”
“The police?”
“I had to come home earlier, I reported the burglary.”
“We haven’t been burgled.”
“Are you blind?”
He sat so heavily on the edge of the sofa, the contact with the wooden frame jarred him. He got up and threw the coverless cushion on it, sat more carefully. “I was looking for something.”
Eva opened her mouth, closed it again, searching for the right words, but her shriek that came out wasn’t. “You trashed our house? You did this?”
“Tell the police it’s a mistake, we can’t have them turning up here.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose, closed her eyes. What the hell was he talking about?
“I need you to trust me. Tell the police it was a mistake.”
“We promised when we got back together there would be no secrets, we’d be a team. No non-communication.”
“I know.”
“So what is this?” It hurt to admit it. “I’m not calling the police until you tell me what’s going on.”
“It’s not safe for us to be here.”
“If you did this,” she gestured at the carnage of their things, “how can it not be?”
He looked at the TV. “You trust me, don’t you?”
“You’re my husband, of course I do.”
“We need to leave, we’re in danger here.”
“What about Lily?”
“She’s best off where she is.”
But if he trashed their house, it meant whoever had poisoned her cake hadn’t been there.
“I’m not going anywhere until you talk to me. Where were you this evening? You know how important the ball is and now you’ve made me leave it and for what?”
“There’s no time.” Charles walked to the lounge door. “If you won’t come, I can’t make you, but I can’t stay here.”
He went out into the hallway. She heard scuffling. He’d picked up their family photo and replaced it on the cupboard.
“You’re holding us to ransom again?”
He put his hand on the front door handle, “I wouldn’t call it that.” Turned it.
“Wait, look at me.” Eva gestured at her dress. “Let me get changed.”
Charles looked out into the street, closed the door. “Two minutes.”
15
“Have I got this straight?” Limping up a hill behind Charles, Eva was getting out of breath. “Someone is after us, but you can’t tell me who for reasons you can’t tell me. You’ve lost something vital, but you can’t tell me what. But it’s so important, not having it puts our lives in danger and running around London all night will keep us safe? Did I miss anything?”
“No, that’s quite succinct.”
A laugh burst out of her, but nothing about tonight was funny.
“Down there.” He ignored her sarcasm, gestured at the side street on their left.
“No, Charles.”
He pulled up short. “What do you mean, no?”
“No, niet, non, nein, take your pick. No. I’m not wandering around the streets. My knee’s killing me, I got hardly any sleep last night and today has been, well, least said about that. I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what the hell is going on.” Eva’s demand echoed around the quiet street. “No one’s following us.”
But the only place they would be safe was somewhere she couldn’t take him. He didn’t have clearance to go in Gordon’s building and she couldn’t get in anywhere else until the morning at least.
“They’re after us, we just can’t see them.”
“Who?”
He looked around as if he expected whoever it was to leap out of a building or from behind a parked car. “We won’t know them, they’re just there with orders to kill.”
“Why?” Did he know that what happened to Eric was meant to happen to her?
“I can’t tell you.”
Why was he putting up this wall between them? “Then we’ll go to a police station, we’ll be safe enough there.”
“No, we won’t. These people, you don’t understand.”
“Tell me then, so I do.”
But he was off again, loping down the street.
She limped after him, stopped after a few steps. Enough. “Charles.”
He came right back at her call. “Ssh, no names.”
Eva grabbed his hands. “Let’s go to your lab. You have decent security there.”
“Absolutely not, no.” He broke away from her, was halfway across the road.
He’d been behaving so weirdly since he’d lost the Nobel nomination. Maybe he was having a breakdown or something. She knew nothing important about his long dead parents, his family medical history.
“Are you okay?”
“What kind of question is that? Come on.”
She gestured at her knee. “I can’t run.”
In the streetlight something flitted over his face, but from the distance she couldn’t tell if he was upset or angry at her or himself.
He came up to her again, whispering, “We can perhaps get a train out of London—”
“I’m not leaving Lily.”
“It’s only—”
“Not doing it.”
The headlights of a car had Charles ducking into the front garden of a mock Tudor house. “Eva, here.” The bush didn’t quite conceal them both, a toddler would see past their flimsy camouflage. Eva’s knee protested.
The car passed by.
“Enough.” She limped back to the pavement. “We’re grown-ups, Charles, not actors in a spy spoof. Are you going to tell me what’s going on?
He looked up the dead street, down. “It’s safer if you don’t know.”
Maybe it was Charles’ odd behaviour, maybe how ridiculous the night had been finally hitting her, it didn’t matter what or why. Hysteria nudged at her, she was close to screaming, crying, laughing, probably all three. “I’m not spending the night out here. Up to you if you come with me.”
16
“Late night or early start?” Eva didn’t recognise the security guard at the entrance to the building where Every Drop had its offices. But even she didn’t normally come to work at this time.
“I’ve been wondering that myself.” She pretended he wasn’t inspecting her face, the dressing on her forehead, concentrating instead on signing Charles into the building with a scrawl n
o one would be able to read.
“Lock it.” Charles said when they reached her office.
“We’re behind two card swipes in an access controlled building with a security guard and a direct response alarm company, that’s why you agreed to come here. I don’t need to lock this door too. Now explain.”
He checked the blinds she’d closed against the darkness before the ball, then at the all-glass door and the floor to ceiling windows that looked into the corridor. The blinds she never closed rattled against the glass, bucking into place when he released them.
“Now you talk to me.” she said.
He nodded, pacing around while his brain wrestled with whatever this was. Was it so hard to share? Eva dropped onto her chair, smoothed her jeans, pressed her lips together. She wanted to give him the time he needed, pretended to ignore the hurt that he had something he couldn’t bring himself to say to her.
The sudden ringing on her laptop made her start. Too cheerful, the Skype incoming call tone.
“That’s probably urgent.”
At that time of night he was right.
She woke up her laptop, scrabbling to click the right places when she realised who it was.
“Milo, where are you?”
His profile picture was an echo of every borrowed memory she had for her father when he’d spoken to her through patchy comms, the shots that made the evening news, a shorthand to the viewer something awful was coming: a tumbledown building, everything flat yellow, bleached by a harsh sun, unforgiving heat and blinding light by suggestion.
Milo appeared on her screen, his image a little fuzzy. “What happened to you? I’m the one supposed to be in the danger zone.”
Eva should have disabled her video. “Are you?”
“I’m not sure. There’s more sickness at Seitu, cause still unknown. I was sorting travel there but people are falling sick in Tirupudur.”
That’s what Amelia Moore was talking about when she’d said sites. “Is it the same?”
Milo looked to his left, back at his camera. “It’s hard to say with no one on the ground in Africa. What do you want me to do?”
Seitu, smaller than Tirupudur, was logistically more of a challenge, but any sickness would spread in Tirupudur faster. Africa losing out again to another part of the world, but she had to follow the logic.
“Do we know it’s the water? Could it be an outbreak of disease?”
“I’m talking to people, nowhere near enough yet to establish anything beyond doubt, but so far the common denominator is the water.”
Eva pushed her hair back, brushed her bruised cheek. Shouldn’t do that. “Stay in Tirupudur, can you get labs run? Once we’ve identified what we’re dealing with, we’ll have a better idea how to treat it, and that’ll give us a benchmark for Seitu. Any of the other agencies have anything yet?”
Milo shrugged. “On the ground it’s taken us by surprise, hundreds sick already.”
Hundreds? How could they get ahead of that, a sickness spreading that fast would be impossible to contain. “Have there been any fatalities?” Eva discounted the conclusions her brain was lining up. They didn’t know enough yet, but what were the chances of a pathogen leaping from Africa to India so directly?
He shook his head.
“What are you doing to stay safe?”
Milo’s face froze, his voice had stuttered to silence.
“Milo, can you hear me?”
She disconnected, pressed recall, letting a minute tick by, two, giving him the chance to call her back, tried again, again, half a dozen more times. The line stayed stubbornly silent, India not co-operating. Eva closed her eyes, she could have slept right there sitting upright in her chair.
She typed a message to Milo, then one to her staff outlining the situation. She tasked the logistics team with hunting down water purification options, Dario to co-ordinate with medical agencies on the ground while they worked on identifying any common elements that might explain what was happening.
Beyond that, she needed to sleep. Just a few hours, enough to reboot. Massaging her temples, she blinked a few times. She was actually seeing double.
In the staffroom Charles had curled up on the smaller sofa, his legs flopped over the end. He’d left her the three seater, even though he was taller. In spite of the day, the everything, she smiled at him, zonked out, like Lily able to sleep anywhere.
Painkillers, then sleep for her too. She took the cushions from the staffroom sofa and laid them on her office floor, closing the doors between her and Charles so at least he could sleep uninterrupted if Milo called back.
The sound of her name made Eva claw her way back from her welcome oblivion.
“I’ve heard of taking your work home with you, but this is new.” Stuart was standing over her.
Dream-addled, her brain took its time to catch up. Sleeping in her office, not an ideal way to be found by anyone, and definitely not the Chairman. She rolled up and off the sofa cushions that had parted company during her short night. Still sore from her pavement tumble, she stretched out the kinks in her back while she checked her laptop. No missed calls.
“Sorry, Stuart, I don’t have time to chat but Charles is in the staffroom, he’ll be happy to have coffee with you.”
“Right now I’ve got damage control to deal with.”
“I’m waiting for a call about Seitu, but a similar thing is happening in Tirupudur. Milo’s been trying to call me, he’s on the ground—”
“Not Africa or India, I’m talking about here, with you.”
“That’s not important when we’re looking at people falling sick.” She checked her laptop screen again, hit refresh.
“I wish I had your confidence. Annabel Grayson is beyond reason, she’s threatening to blacklist us.”
“For what? You know what happened, don’t you? I wasn’t filming her, I was waiting for a call. I don’t make it my business to film people having sex in toilets. I don’t care what they were doing. I’m the one who should sue her for attacking me and smashing my phone.”
“It’s in the media so it’s truth for the public and our donors.” His voice softened. “You must see how damaging this is to Every Drop’s image. Annabel Grayson has dynamite contacts we can’t afford to alienate. And then there’s the matter of not capitalising on a whale donor. I’m afraid we have no choice.”
He held out a sealed envelope.
17
“Sorry I’m late.” The journalist who’d accosted Eva at the hotel walked into her office as though she worked there. “Stuart Worthington, Chairman of the Board.” She stuck her hand out at him alongside Eva’s own, reaching for the envelope that he withdrew. “Amelia Moore, I’m here to interview Eva, I can do you too, Stuart, two for the price of one, excellent.”
Eva didn’t have time for this today. “I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted trip, Ms Moore, I still haven’t heard anything.”
Amelia’s gaze sharpened. “The sickness spread so much?”
Eva aimed for dismissively calm. “It’s Africa, communications take longer, break down all the time. As I’ve already told you, it would be irresponsible of me to speculate on anything. I’m afraid you’ll have to come back.” If she and Stuart would both go, she could get on with her job.
“This is me coming back.”
“Did you cover that the Every Drop infrastructure hasn’t made anyone ill?” Eva looked at Stuart, it hadn’t? “It’s the other suppliers who have the problem. Every Drop is honouring its promise to provide clean, safe water for all.”
Since when had he taken a PR pill?
“How does that reconcile with your comment that no one has an inalienable right to water?” Amelia snapped back.
“Taking remarks out of context, I’m sure you can do better than that.” Stuart fixed her with his steely gaze. “You must excuse us, that’s all we have time for.”
“How did your fundraiser go?”
She’d seen? Eva felt a flush rising up her face. Of course she had.
Along with far too many other people. “It’s too early to say, but we’re hoping to reach a significant milestone with the donations.”
“What happened—”
Eva cut her off. “As I said yesterday, you’ll be the first I call once I know anything. Sorry you’ve had a wasted trip.”
“Oh, nothing’s ever wasted.”
That was what Eva was afraid of.
“I’ll show you to the lift.” Stuart handed his envelope to Eva as he fussed the journalist out.
The contents were something she’d never expected to see, something she’d never have predicted pushing her from calm to raging quicker than Lily, when she’d been the tantrum queen of two-year-olds. Eva’s wild gaze around her office snagged on the black-and-white photos Stuart should have paid attention to: moments of Every Drop’s successes measured in the smiles of children around a standpipe, relief on the faces of pregnant women, a high five almost like a prayer, one hand black, one white, an angled shot of the expanding labyrinth of their ground-breaking aerial network of pipes.
“I imagine you’ll need a couple of minutes.” Stuart looked in her door.
“You can’t do this.” She jabbed the paper at him.
“It’s legal, all the Board members signed it last night.”
“It might be legal, but it’s wrong.”
“What’s all the shouting? Stuart, hello.” Charles shook his hand like everything was normal. “Good to see you.”
Eva brandished the letter. “They’re putting me on sabbatical.”
“There was an incident last night between Eva and one of the guests. It has the potential to bring Every Drop into disrepute with some key donors. We’re only asking her to step back for a time—”
“How long?” She interrupted. The letter’s open-ended ‘until further notice’ made her nervous.
Stuart held his hands out as though he were placating a small child. “As long as is necessary to repair the damage, soothe some offended egos.”