The Society

by Karen Guyler

  He nodded. “Appreciate that.”

  “Not a problem, get the message out to the rest of the team. Stay safe.” He watched Seaton until the elevator doors closed on him, taking him away from Jed.

  And, just like that, Charles was in front of his old friend, his now adversary, arguably the most powerful man in the world.

  “Jed, you don’t look so good, buddy.” Charles was over to him where he was sitting on the couch.

  “Charles? What’re you doing here?”

  “Same as you, I came for the summit. Water, it’s quite a hobby of mine. You must be aware my wife has a charity that dispenses safe drinking water in the Third World.” Charles dropped his phony accent, curious, that he thought the one he grew up with was the false one and the one he’d affected, the British well-to-do, was now his natural choice. The brainwashing had really worked. “Would you like me to check you out, give you a once over. I’ve seen this before, this virus.” He took hold of the President’s wrist, counted his pulse rate, as rapid as he thought it might be.

  “Couldn’t get fresh water for the President, could you?” He looked around the room, huge arrangements of flowers and fruit on the table and desk. “No bottled water?”

  The agent shook his head. “No Sir, water’s safe here.”

  “Fresh from the kitchen’s good then.” Charles threw over his shoulder at the bodyguard.

  Jed nodded his agreement with the instructions. Charles heard the issuing of the order to someone else. Of course, they wouldn’t leave him alone. That simple, over-looked, truth meant he couldn’t tell Jed the true nature of what he’d ingested. If he knew there was no coming back from it, Charles would spend the rest of his life in solitary and that was never happening.

  “Where’s my physician?”

  “In isolation, all of them, this is a nasty virus.”

  “But I need something—”

  The door opened and another suited, earphoned, Secret Service agent came in, had a quiet conversation with the first. Charles didn’t have much time.

  He dropped his voice. “How’s Mack Hillard III these days?”

  “We agreed never to speak of that.” Jed shifted on the couch, his forehead beaded sweat as though the air conditioning wasn’t on full blast.

  Charles sat next to him.

  “You’re not worried about catching it?”

  “Not one bit. I just wanted to say a couple of words to you.” He turned to watch Jed’s reaction. “Nancy,” her name sighed out of him, “Tony, Hunter, Duncan.”

  Jed waved a that’s not important gesture.

  “I don’t understand.” Charles said.

  “Does it matter? That’s all in the past.”

  Conscious of the two itchy trigger fingers standing near the door of the suite, Charles locked away what he really wanted, needed, to say.

  “What about the rest of us who helped you? Rory, Ted, Aleksandr, me?”

  “You were safe enough, I’m not stupid enough to harm my money tree. I wanted to shake you up a little, remind you who’s calling the shots. We want more of what you just did, the poison thing, it’s the flagstaff product in the arsenal of our special weapons unit.”

  Charles stared at Jed. He bought it? It was on him he hadn’t looked too deeply at the shell corporation that CJ had sourced as the buyer. But it had been Jed behind it?

  Jed looked at Charles, he was growing greyer by the minute, his breathing becoming more laboured. But his eyes remained sharp, the knowing in them something Charles wanted to beat out of him.

  “Ingenious by the way, we’d have paid more. Aleksandr,” Jed shook his head, “his wife, as I understand it, were perfect test subjects. Your wife not so much, we dodged an international incident there, got the wrong target.”

  “You went after Eva?”

  Jed pulled himself upright, not entirely succeeding. Another agent came into the room, right up to him.

  “Are you okay, Sir?”

  “Feeling a little rough, gotta admit, not bad enough to alert Owen though. Where’s that water?”

  Charles would have been surprised if the Vice President wasn’t already aware.

  “I’ll chase it, Sir.”

  “You went after Eva?” Charles hissed again.

  “I did think twice, innocent as she is in all of this. But, you were getting,” Jed coughed. “You needed a tighter leash.”

  “You’ve overstepped.” The rant, the rage, the gloating over what was happening to his former friend, Charles wanted to let it all loose. But scrutiny from the doorway and strategic points in the room, held him in check.

  “I’m holding the cards, Charles. I wasn’t going to tell you but hell, since we’re being so honest, you should understand your position completely. Your Nobel nomination, why you lost it, I did that, I told them you’d plagiarised it, sent them the specs you drew up to cripple Hillard’s product. All done under your birth name if you can remember, Maxwell Peyton, who had an unhappy meeting with the bottom of a cliff after you left the programme for the UK. A potentially brilliant man, life cut tragically short. So you see, your insurance, the one you were bleating about to Dennis, it’s useless, it’s already out there in the world. Any comeback over the Hillard thing can be explained away.”

  But I killed you, Charles screamed it in his mind. Him knowing he’d got the last shot in, the one that counted, wasn’t enough. He wanted, needed, Jed to know it as he took his last breath. But if Charles gave into the white hot fury rampaging through him, his future would be worse than Jed’s. He needed to leave before he couldn’t hold it in check any longer. “I’ll get you something.”

  “I’m just going to get some medication for the President, okay?” Charles told the agent. “I’ll be back momentarily.”

  He walked towards the lifts. Over so quickly, after everything he’d expected to feel more.

  58

  “It was a clever idea.” Luke handed Eva a glass of freshly squeezed orange. “You’ve probably saved thousands of lives.”

  But what about the ones who didn’t hear the warning in the call to prayer before they drank? Before every mosque in Marrakech picked it up and broadcast it? What about Lily who wouldn’t understand it?

  She stared at the drink.

  “I saw them make it, no water.”

  The juice was sweet, delicious. Maybe it would stem her rising nausea, tensing panic.

  The restaurant was crowded, the laughter and chatter all at odds with what she imagined was happening behind closed doors in houses downstream from the pumping station.

  “Why didn’t you tell me we’re on the same side?”

  Luke leant in towards her. “Gordon wanted you to be unbalanced, to keep Charles off guard. He wasn’t sure where his loyalties lay.”

  Neither was Eva.

  Luke’s mobile rang.

  Please let it be something.

  In the deepening chaos tearing through the city, a fan of banknotes was the best way to hail a ride. The man who stopped didn’t have a taxi sign on his roof, nor a numbered sticker on the door. Eva didn’t care.

  Luke showed his phone, gestured with the notes, said something Eva had no hope of understanding. The man nodded and drove like the back of the car was on fire.

  Dropped at the dead-end of a road, Luke rushed them on in the darkness where Google maps lit their path through a maze of pedestrian only walkways.

  He stopped in front of a riad set below the pavement level. “This is it. But it could be nothing to do with Lily.”

  Eva nodded, yes, yes, but it might.

  The tile set into the wall beside a substantially padlocked wooden door read ‘Riad Lucky Eight’. How did this fit into Charles’ life? Who lived here?

  She pulled at the padlock. Charles had locked Lily in? A six-digit combination code, she had no idea where to begin guessing. She tried his date of birth, then Lily’s, even hers. They were all wrong.

  “Eva,” Luke’s voice was all reason, his hand in his jacket. “Out of
the way, behind me.”

  He fired into the hinge that held the hasp on the door. Once was enough to tear it away from its housing though the echo suggested he’d shot his whole magazine into it. “That’ll bring the authorities. They already have a report of a suspicious smell, that’s how Nora found this place, so they’ll come quicker now. Wait there until I call you.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Stay behind me then.”

  She nodded. Come on, come on.

  Following his broad shoulders, his surefooted steps, they walked into the cooler air of the unknown, one silent step, two careful strides.

  “Lock the door,” he whispered.

  The bolts slid across as though they’d just been oiled.

  Luke peered out of the short hallway, his gun held in front of him. Cautious movements across a small courtyard, his gun pointing ahead, at the upper levels where bright lights blazed against the full darkness of night, to the opposite side of a plunge pool. A door ahead on their left from which leaked the suspicious smell.

  “Wait there.” Luke hissed, nodding at the tiny room ahead of them that housed the staircase that led to the upper levels.

  She shook her head.

  “We’re easy targets here, I can’t check and protect you. If it’s—you don’t want to see that. Go.”

  Eva stepped into the shelter of the room, turned to watch him.

  Not Lily, it couldn’t be Lily, Eva would know wouldn’t she?

  Luke steeled himself, took a breath, and opened the door. A buzzing confirmed Eva’s worst fears, even before the gut-heavingly awful odour reached for her. Not Lily, not Lily. Eva grasped the newel post. It couldn’t be. Please.

  Luke was back in the courtyard, closing the door quietly, gulping in the fresher air. He shook his head. “Not Lily.”

  He pointed up the uneven staircase, and she followed him around its 180° turn onto the galleried balcony on the first floor, off which were several rooms.

  “Wait there.” He motioned for her to move up against the whitewashed wall that leached its coolness into her through her clothes. The stench from downstairs wafted towards her, making her gag. Was that why Charles had said she needed to get to Lily quickly? She swallowed hard, breathed through her mouth. This must be the right place?

  Luke went into each room on their right, gun at the ready, arms sweeping cautious arcs, coming out again in seconds. A clatter from the room furthest away from them on the left tensed them both.

  Luke was there, tiptoeing towards the door. Eva felt as if she might snap into tiny pieces.

  A groan reached her from that far corner.

  She wasn’t waiting.

  It was a kitchen, the room into which she charged, but she saw only one thing.

  “Lily!”

  “Mum?”

  “Are you okay?” Eva rushed to her, hugging her tightly. Thank God, thank God. Her baby girl, safe again with her.

  “Do you have any painkillers?” Lily wriggled out of Eva’s arms, gripping her stomach. In the harsh overhead light she looked grey.

  “What’s the matter?” More than Mum-mode, Eva snapped the question out. “You didn’t drink the water?”

  “Of course I did. You know about single use plastic.” Her face screwed up against the pain. “The President of Morocco’s all over the news telling everyone it’s safe, that’s what the summit Dad was going on about is all about. What is it with you and him and the water, it’s not like I’ve been drinking all the vodka.”

  A big plastic bottle of water sat beside the sink, the seal of its top still intact. “Didn’t he tell you to drink the bottled water?”

  Lily winced, holding her hand against her stomach. “He didn’t tell me anything, he hasn’t been here most of the day. I’ve been so bored, this holiday hasn’t been any fun.”

  She wobbled a little. Eva only just caught her before she passed out.

  Too late, she was too late. The words hammered at her beyond anything, beyond the argument she’d have with Charles—argument? She’d kill him.

  As Luke carried Lily to the nearest bedroom, Eva saw it. A flash of neon yellow half under the mismatched run of kitchen units. The note he’d left their daughter. ‘Don’t drink the tap water, drink this instead.’ She imagined the Post-it losing its stick against the damp plastic, fluttering to the floor where Lily wouldn’t read, heed its warning. He hadn’t even bothered to make sure she understood.

  Lily came round before Eva had arranged her face into her mum’s everything’ll be all right mask.

  “Sweetheart, you need to drink this.” Eva gestured for her to sit up, holding out the glass of salt water Luke had made. “Quickly, come on, it’ll make you feel better.”

  “Painkillers will make me feel better. Don’t you have any?”

  “They won’t work, you need to be sick. The water is poisoned.”

  “Mum—”

  “Just do it,” Eva snapped. “You need to drink now.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” Lily groaned around a wave of pain that almost bent her in two. “I have a bad period pain, the worst ever. I need a painkiller. The water’s fine, there’s a well in the cellar. This place isn’t on the main supply. You’d think Dad would know, it’s his brother who lived here.”

  “His brother?”

  “My Uncle Terry, except he was dead when we got here.”

  Eva pulled Lily into her arms and hugged her like she would never let her go. Anything else would wait.

  “It’s going to be some debrief.” Luke said.

  59

  It was an unlikely battleground.

  Eva watched the TV in the minimalist office while she waited. The voiceover sounded strange, familiar but not familiar, a knowledge she should have had but one denied her by her father’s absences from her childhood. The language might not have spoken to her, but the images on the screen did. Weeping, wailing adults, bewildered crying children, a row of flagpoles with the flags of the countries of every nation who’d attended the summit flying at half mast, a flashback to that awful night in Marrakech three weeks ago. It didn’t ease her guilt that the authorities still praised the warning rung out over the city through the mosques. She couldn’t help but feel responsible, even though the sabotage-proof system had kicked in as she’d gambled and diverted the supply when it detected the flask. She should have stopped Charles tipping any of his agent in.

  Eva stared at her left hand, her rings nothing more than a subterfuge, an augmented reality, just for the next few minutes.

  She flicked off the TV; it was time.

  The knock at the neighbouring office door reached into her space, a short sharp one rap of the knuckles. The phone on Eva’s desk rang.

  “Ready?” Kristina Ekstrom asked.

  “Ready, I’m on mute.” Eva muted her phone.

  “I’m putting me on speaker,” the quality of Kristina’s voice changed, more echoey but the system was a good one. Her ‘come in’ was clear.

  Eva had replayed this moment, planning how it might go. But none of it had prepared her for the wave of fury that tore through her when Charles’ cut-glass accent came down the phone. She needed to calm herself, this was no good if she couldn’t hear anything through the rushing of blood in her ears, the demand for justice her heart rapped out, the ‘how could you’ she wanted to scream at him.

  She relaxed her grip on the handset, slowed her breathing. This was now what she felt for the man who’d been her husband for seven years and her first proper relationship before that when she’d been just eighteen?

  When had love turned to hate? Was it in the pumping station or when she stood on the wrong side of a padlocked door in Marrakech?

  Had it been an incremental thing, the eroding of what she thought they’d had, as she learned his secrets, or when he’d pulled her in harm’s way? When she’d seen him with Nancy? Or had it been from their second beginning? She could be honest enough to admit she’d always found being a single parent a struggle, to
o much a mirroring of her own childhood, that she hadn’t looked too hard, just gratefully assumed the Charles that came back to her was the one who’d walked away.

  She should have been more wary, she should have been stronger. Ensam är stark. You were right, Daddy.

  “Please, call me Kristina.” Kristina’s confidence down the phone handset grounded Eva. “Take a seat. I’m glad you responded to our reaching out. With a new Chairperson we thought it an opportune time to enhance the process by which we consider work for the Nobel. Coffee?”

  “Can I meet the new Chairman while I’m here?” Charles asked.

  “That’s not how the process will go.”

  Eva had to admire Kristina’s coolness. She would have thrown the pot over him, but that wouldn’t avenge Per.

  “So, Charles, obviously after what happened in Marrakech and at the water sites in Africa and India, it’s clear that keeping water supplies safe is one of the world’s most urgent needs. I understand that you’ve invented a compound that can do that. Can you explain it to me in layman’s terms?”

  “It’s my pleasure.” A cup chinked onto a saucer. “The compound sanitises water from the deadliest of bugs, it uses a lock and key mechanism. If you think of a contaminant as a key, the compound acts as a magnet, if you will, attracting the microbes to it and enclosing them, locking them safely away.”

  “But it’s not a biological agent. Please correct me if I’m wrong.”

  “No, you’re quite right, it’s more of a chemical agent.”

  “Can this system collect any contaminant?” Kristina asked.

  “I am confident it will sanitise water regardless of the contaminant involved.”

  Eva let his self-congratulatory waffle wash past her, but she knew how important it was for him to spell it out.

  If they just kept him away from any water supply, everything would be fine. No agent, no need for the compound.

  “The Committee received intelligence that this wasn’t your original—”