by Karen Guyler
“I invented my work while I was still using my birth name. I’ve brought my original birth certificate, together with my legal change of name to Charles Buchanan. I didn’t plagiarise my own work.” And still he surprised her.
“This will need verification.”
“Naturally. In the meantime, I’ve patented it under my current name for any application of my two-part process.”
Kristina probed gently, expertly, trying to tie Charles up, but he was clever. If she got a little too close to his truth, he wielded his scientific armour, long and important sounding words used to bedazzle the blonde he thought was his only audience.
Then Kristina must have believed he’d relaxed, become cocksure enough. “Your statements given in here will go before the Committee to complement your application. Are you happy to give your consent to that?”
“Of course.”
A chair moved over the wooden floor. “Thank you for your time, Charles. Just wait there, someone will be along shortly.”
The door to the room in which Eva waited opened just a few seconds later and Kristina came in. Eva lay the phone handset on the desk for Kristina to listen to now and stood up, smoothing her skirt.
“You were amazing.” She hugged Kristina.
“Lycka till! But you don’t need luck, you’re your father’s daughter after all.”
Eva smiled her thanks at Kristina’s confidence and picked up the bottle of Scotch and two carefully wrapped glasses, one in pink bubble wrap, one in white, from the desk.
She blew out a breath. This wasn’t going to be easy.Her turn now.
Her battle.
60
Eva paused on the outside of Kristina’s office door. It should be fury surging through her, but she just felt an overwhelming urge to cry. She could conjure up one of the many news images she’d seen over the last couple of weeks to arm herself to get through this. Deaths in Morocco, many nations mourning their leaders. The terrible sight of soldiers in Seitu and Tirupudur keeping the people calmer while the agencies tried to deliver on their promise of safe water.
Her father, she should channel him. She would have, if she could have remembered much beyond the canonised version her eight-year-old mind and experience gave her. Beyond doubt, from all his stories that she’d read, reread, played, replayed, she could use his tenacity, his need to get to the heart of the matter, to lay bare lies and dissembling until he revealed the truth. She was his daughter, after all.
She pulled up a smile—easy, breezy, isn’t that what the Americans said?—and let herself into the mirror image of the office she’d just left.
“Eva?” Charles looked like she’d hit him with the bottle. “What are you doing here? I mean, it’s good to see you, I didn’t realise. . .”
Her heart contracted. “You’ve forgotten I’m half-Swedish? Everything is gone from my life now, so why not make a new start here?” She held his gaze, giving him the chance to do the most important thing and ask about Lily, to do the right thing and apologise.
“That’s great, that you’re moving on.”
“You’re not going to ask me about Lily? About what you did to her?”
He did a double-take. “I went back for her but there were police everywhere so I—”
“Left her again. She drank the tap water, Charles, your note fell off the bottle so she drank the tap water.”
He had the grace to look appalled. Eva hardened her heart. She didn’t want him to know Lily was healthy, spending time with Per’s widow while Eva did this. A sharp break was the kindest thing in the circumstances.
“I never meant—”
“For someone who never meant so much, you’ve caused enough destruction.” She softened her tone. “So the Nobel Committee will reconsider your work, I understand.”
“After this year, I’m not holding my breath. I was convinced Per would make it a done deal.”
Eva broke the seal on the Scotch bottle with more force than it needed. Not a thought for her loss? He had been her godfather, her mentor, her family. She’d spent sleepless nights wishing he’d followed Addison’s lead and just opted for a neat whisky.
She unwound the pink bubble-wrap and placed the glass on her right. Folding the packaging, she laid it on Kristina’s desk.
“You drink Scotch now?” Surprise hitched Charles’ voice up.
“There’s lots about me now that’s different. Still no water, ice?”
He shook his head. The irony.
She unwrapped the white bubble-wrap, her wedding and engagement ring clinked against the sturdy glass as she placed it on her left. Undoing the lid of the scotch, she waited for him to talk to her. He watched her pouring a measure into one glass.
“You know where the tradition came from, the clinking of glasses?” She filled the silence. He shook his head. “It came from right here, when the Vikings would go to each other’s halls and drink to peace or co-operation or the formation of raiding parties. They’d smash their tankards into each other so that the liquid slopped from one to the other. If the drinks were poisoned, both would die. Now we all use glasses, it’s become a gentler touch.”
The scotch glugged into the other glass.
“Why are you here?” Charles asked.
“As our marriage is over, one of us has to start divorce proceedings. Kristina mentioned she would be seeing you, so I realised it could be me.”
He nodded. Not even trying to save it? Had their life together been such a farce? How had she never noticed? Even looking at him now, she still couldn’t see a different man from the one she thought she knew.
She pushed the glass on the left-hand side towards him, the left, the link to her heart. The room was drowning in irony now.
He lifted it, inclined it towards her. “Skol.”
“I don’t feel like toasting you, Charles, There’s nothing for me to celebrate here.”
“You brought the scotch.” He sipped it. “Not bad.”
“Per bought it for you, he wanted us all to spend Christmas together.”
Charles tried it again. If he apologised, she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t smash the bottle over his head. “Very good, in fact.”
“Who was she, Charles, Nancy Seymour? To you, I mean. Was she your mistress?”
He looked at the amber liquid in his glass instead of her. “She was who I left you for the first time but things didn’t—”
“Don’t insult me with lies, not now, not after everything. You took so much from me, at least I deserve your truth, don’t I?”
He nodded. A sip more of Dutch courage. “I left her to be with you when I realised what you were doing with Every Drop. I’d discovered the agent before then, but I knew I could make an antidote to it. It was my agent that helped Jed Carson become a senator by contaminating the oil of one of his big rivals. Running for office in America is impossible without mega money. Thanks to my tech, Jed cleaned up, wiped out his competitor, took over his assets, his company. Turned it around, cashed in big time. Then he invested in my research to show he was legitimate.”
The politics didn’t interest Eva, though the listening audience wouldn’t feel that way. She allowed herself one final personal question. “You were always intending to go back to her, weren’t you?”
He nodded.
Eva gripped the edge of the desk. “Every Drop’s being dissolved. Did Stuart tell you?”
“No, I, it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t meant to be—”
“Wasn’t meant to be?” Eva almost shouted.
“It was an insurance policy. The monies paid by people for safe water would reimburse Stuart and myself for our time invested in the company, and provide ongoing income, enough that I could disappear. Jed Carson was working his way down his hit list, he had a long reach.”
Eva reined in her outrage, her anger at him, her grief at who he really was. She needed him to give her everything. “Your emergency fund, that was from the sale of your two-part process, wasn’t it?” He nodded, but she need
ed verbal agreement. “So who you sold it to had the knowledge and intelligence to manipulate your formula to work as a poison? They should work in your lab.”
“Well, no, obviously I had to help.” He tossed the rest of his Scotch back. “But it’s ironic that a US weapons unit bought it. I gave Jed the weapon he used against us—”
“I’m sure you didn’t give it, I’m sure he must have paid handsomely for it.”
“Not handsomely enough.”
She placed a pen in front of him. “Is all of this why The Society was after us?”
“No.”
“Explain it to me.” It was too hard to look at him. She fussed with picking up the A4 envelope from Kristina’s desk and drawing out the contents.
“My former colleagues, Tony Banks, Aleksandr Oblov and myself, we instructed them to kill Jed Carson when Duncan disappeared.”
“Duncan?”
“Someone else I trained with. He vanished about a month ago, his body still hasn’t turned up. We took out a contract on Jed Carson in self-defence. But the money I was counting on to pay my share of their fee, well, CJ kept more of the broker’s fee for arranging the sale of my process than he should have, so I came up short. You don’t mess with them, we short-changed them, so they came after us in retaliation. We’re very fortunate to be alive—”
“You’re alive, Charles, because I got the contract on you cancelled.” Eva snapped. “Though I expect Jed’s team is still after you. Isn’t killing the President treason?”
He moved in his chair in something resembling a shrug. So cold-hearted?
Eva distracted herself by pouring him another drink. “What about the other leaders you murdered, almost forty at last count, their partners, aides, half the hotel guests? What about the Moroccans you killed? How do you live with that?”
He leant forward to take the glass, “it was just like a drug trial. There are always casualties in those, but the knowledge gained and the leap ahead is worth the price. The greater good wins.”
“It was too high a price.”
He took a mouthful of scotch, drank it slowly before replying. “Scientific advancements cost.”
The effort of holding herself so tightly in check so she said nothing tensed her back, shoulders, jaw to breaking point.
She laid the document on the desk in front of her. “One last question, why the charm school? Why pretend to be British? The Americans are our allies, aren’t they?”
He half-laughed. “You think so. There’s a distrust even between allies, we all feel more comfortable dealing with one of our own. Suspicion never falls on them, only on the outsiders, and you Brits are the worst for that.”
She pushed the divorce papers across the desk to him and he signed by the pencilled crosses reading none of the text. “You always wanted to be like your father,” he laid the pen down parallel with the top edge of the document. “My parting gift to you is to say if you’d known the first thing about who he was as a person, you wouldn’t chase your starry-eyed version of him. He was egotistical, he’d stoop as low as he needed to get the jump on someone for his exclusive.”
Eva looked an icy warning at him. “Maybe I’m exactly like him. I know there’s enough evidence that was how he could be. But he would never knowingly have done harm to anyone. I knew the real him better than anyone, so did my mother. Why do you think she practically abandoned me when he died, let me raise myself? Because although she’d always looked elsewhere, she knew what she’d lost, that she’d never find it again, that mix that delighted, magnetised people to him, a heart that was pure.”
“You can twist any evidence to say what you want it to.”
“That’s not very scientific.”
He downed the rest of his drink and made to stand up but she held up one finger, who knew it was such a powerful gesture. “One thing you might like to know, for scientific purposes.”
“What’s that?” He leant forward in his chair.
“Did you ever test your agent in anything other than water?” She held back all her emotions, channelling nothing other than innocent curiosity.
“I told you it can be adapted to be used in anything.”
“How do you feel, Charles?”
His gaze snapped to the bottle on Kristina’s desk. Eva tossed the lid to him, the tiny puncture hole in its centre made by a syringe clearly visible.
“But, you wouldn’t.” He slumped as the realisation hit him.
“I think you’ll find I did.” She moved the bottle to the side. “It works well in alcohol, in case you were wondering.”
He stared at her untouched drink, sweat breaking out on his forehead.
“It was so helpful of you to leave your holdall behind at the riad. The compound and agent are being reverse engineered by British Intelligence. But I took a bit, for a road test. The agent’s in the Scotch. Our scientists weren’t sure it would work, thought alcohol might kill it but I can tell them the test has been a success. Or not, depending on who you are right now.”
“But you, you,” he conjured up a shout from somewhere.
“You can come in now.” Eva didn’t need to raise her voice, her quiet statement was heard by her audience on the other end of the muted phone and down the camera feed watching the scene from behind her.
Charles whipped round at the door opening but he wouldn’t recognise the tall brown-haired man in a black leather jacket and jeans who came in.
“This gentleman is going to escort you to where you’re going.” Eva told him.
“What, take me where?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? Who hates you the most, Charles?” Eva asked. “You have your whole journey to figure it out. Is it the Moroccans? Maybe the Russians, could be any one of the countries whose leaders you killed. What about Britain? In all your learning how to be English, did you forget we don’t like being embarrassed? What about your countrymen? They don’t like their President being assassinated. Thinking it over should keep you occupied. And you were right, by the way.”
“What? What’re you talking about?”
“I do always think too much about other people. You see that as a weakness, I think it’s a strength. Right now you should be grateful. The glass I gave you had been coated in your compound, if the alcohol didn’t burn it away.” She looked at the untouched one, “I chose not to give you that one with no compound in it, not because you didn’t deserve it but because I don’t want to live with the knowledge I killed you.”
“Let’s go.” the man crossed the room to Charles.
“Don’t send me with him.” Charles said. “That’s on your conscience.”
Eva shrugged. “What they choose to do with you is nothing to do with me. I’ve done the right thing in handing you over to justice.”
“I’m not going anywhere. You can’t do this.”
The man withdrew his service weapon. “It’s already done.”
61
Eva studied Owen Benfleet’s face on the secure video call while he watched the recording of her last meeting with Charles. Gordon stopped it at his admission that the US had been training sleeper agents to pretend to be British.
“Mr President, you understand now why this was for your eyes only.”
Benfleet looked sincere. “I appreciate you being so circumspect.”
“I realise you’re very busy with the change of administration.” Gordon went on, “so just two more minutes of your time, if you will.”
Benfleet smiled and nodded, Mr Benevolence.
“Just so we’re absolutely clear from the outset of our working relationship,’ Gordon went on, “I’m spelling it out. We are more than allies, we have our special relationship to consider. Obviously we won’t stoop to blackmail with this dynamite. However, as insurance, we’ll be keeping it safe.”
“I think we can both agree is not in the best interests of either of our countries for this to enter the public arena.”
“I think you’ll find the United Kingdom is the wro
nged party here and that’s the message the evidence reinforces. I should also tell you that we have evidence that your predecessor instructed the assassination of several of his former colleagues. Something else we’ll be keeping safe.”
Benfleet inclined his head. Would he curse or thank Jed Carson’s untimely demise, giving him the top spot when he hadn’t even spent a day in office as a VP?
“Well, if there’s nothing more, Gordon.”
“Just the one thing, Mr President, decommission the British village mock-ups. That kind of hackneyed tradecraft crap belongs in the Cold War, where it was born. From the Russians, I’d understand it, from you?” Gordon shook his head. “I know that wasn’t on your watch, but this is day one of a better relationship, isn’t it?”
The president nodded. “It is.”
“If a satellite were to fly over any of the co-ordinates of these places on, say Monday, it’d see nothing other than rubble?”
“It would not.”
“Thank you for your understanding.”
Gordon cut the link and pulled a bottle of whisky out of his desk drawer. “I think we’ve earned this.”
Eva looked at the drink in horror.
Luke laughed. “Don’t tell me you’re not a whisky girl anymore?”
“I never was.”
“In this line of work, you usually have to take what’s on offer.” Gordon poured three measures and handed them out. “Job well done.” They chinked and drank. Eva shuddered. “Forgiven me yet for not telling you about Luke?”
She nodded.
“Your takedown of Charles, that was masterful.” Luke raised his glass at her.
“It was hardly a do or die chase across the rooftops or any of the other things you spies get up to.”
“The greatest misconception, that.” Luke said. “It’s our biggest asset. Mostly we’re making use of what we have around us, of anything in the environment we can turn to our advantage, of anything we know about our enemy that can be used against them. You did all of that.”
Gordon leant back in his chair. “If I ask you to come back and work for us again, will you say yes this time?”