Zero kill, p.20
Zero Kill, page 20
‘RedQueen will know it’s me.’
‘You can say we assaulted you. Tell them we threatened to break some of your fingers. We’ll break two or three for you, if you want us to make it look realistic.’
Saint slammed the fridge door hard, making Flex jump. He started talking very quickly.
‘We analysed the jumble of information you photographed on the screen, and there was hardly anything.’ Flex tipped the remaining takeaway boxes onto the floor to make room for the laptop. ‘I swear there was nothing about the mission itself, all those files had been deleted or moved at some point previously, maybe years ago. What you found was some kind of auxiliary file that had been left on the drive.’ He glanced up at Elsa, who trembled in her damp clothes. ‘There are towels, if you want.’
‘Please, just get on with it.’
She leaned over his shoulder as he accessed the RedQueen server. Flex’s fingers tapped fluidly across the keyboard, circumventing an endless cascade of log-in pages, as Saint put a pie into the microwave.
‘Here, look.’ Flex finally pointed at JPEG files of the photos she had taken in the vault. ‘All that block text you saw, it was just a coded invoice, some kind of requisition order for medical equipment and staff.’
‘The hospital facility Carragher set up in the petrochemical plant,’ Elsa said to Saint, as he came over, stuffing his face with the pie. ‘If it wasn’t there, I’d have died. And what else?’ she asked Flex.
‘It’s literally all there is.’ He angled the laptop so she could see the data he had extracted from the blocks of text. There was a sequence of letters and numbers in one column, a list of equipment and supplies in another. For an oxygen tent and canisters, a defibrillator, mobile bed, drugs, utensils for surgery; other equipment Elsa couldn’t identify.
At the bottom of the page were four names.
Elsa pointed. ‘Who are these?’
‘The people who worked there.’
She knew they would be military medics, pulled in from British stations in that hemisphere. Their involvement would be secondary and kept top secret. The requisitioned staff would have a strictly limited knowledge of the operation; their role was to provide medical attention to whoever came through the doors of the facility. Once their job was done, they would be flown back to their bases, and the temporary medical station dismantled.
Elsa read the names. Karen Naismith, Timothy Mabey, Nicole Tennant, Aisha Chen. She didn’t remember any of these people; had spent most of her time at the facility unconscious.
The file wasn’t exactly the bonanza of information she was hoping for. She couldn’t see how it could unlock the mystery of what was happening to her. A British military field hospital set up on foreign soil was a classified secret, yes, but the information was at best peripheral to Pilot Fish. It told her nothing.
‘It’s hopeless!’ In a fit of anger, she swiped a mug off the table. ‘We keep coming up against one brick wall after another!’
‘Sure, it all looks a load of garbage.’ Saint wiped crumbs from his beard. ‘But if there’s one thing I know about you, Elsie, it’s that you ain’t no quitter.’
The only way out is into the heart of the storm.
This small, stupid pocket of information was all they had. She pointed at the names. ‘How do we find these people?’
Flex yawned. ‘Search me.’
She spun him round in his chair to face her, leaning so close that their noses almost touched. ‘Last time I looked, Simon, you were a computer hacker, so get hacking!’
32
‘There’s something missing,’ Tim Mabey told the Artex ceiling in his therapist’s office.
Dr Turnham scratched at a stain on the fat end of his tie. ‘Can you elaborate?’
Sitting in an armchair in the consulting room of his Pimlico house, the therapist glanced at a clock on the wall.
‘I just feel like I’m always on the periphery of things.’ Tim clasped his hands over his chest as he lay on a recliner. ‘That somehow life has passed me by.’
‘You’ve had an exciting life in many ways, haven’t you?’ Dr Turnham had heard it all before. ‘You’ve seen the—’
He looked up sharply when he thought he heard a noise inside the house. He listened for a moment, didn’t hear anything more, then continued.
‘You’ve seen the world.’
‘I’ve seen the world from behind the fences of various military bases, I suppose, but overall my life has been uneventful… sensible,’ Tim said. ‘I grew up in a loving, sensible home and fell in love with a kind, sensible woman, and I’ve got three sensible kids, who all go to good schools. The divorce was amicable and largely without conflict. I’ve a very sensible job as a doctor. I can’t help but think another word for sensible is boring.’
‘You were a medic in the RAF.’ The therapist was still distracted. ‘That must have had its moments of excitement?’
‘There was the odd occasion that was exciting, but it was mostly dealing with sprains and—’
To the surprise of them both, the door opened and a woman walked in.
Turnham’s notebook fell from his lap as he stood. ‘Who are you, and what are you doing in my house?’
Ignoring him, Elsa spoke to the man on the couch. ‘Tim Mabey?’ Shocked, he nodded. ‘Come with me.’
When Dr Turnham demanded, ‘What’s going on?’, Tim held up his hands, no idea!
He followed her down the stairs and into the kitchen. Every time he came for his therapy session, Dr Turnham marched him directly from the front door to the consulting room, but the woman walked around like she owned the place.
‘My name is Elsa Zero,’ she said. ‘You won’t remember me.’
He stared. ‘I dream about you sometimes.’
‘Okay, so that’s weird.’ She gave him an uncomfortable look. ‘Do you dream about the people you’ve operated on?’
‘No.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Just you.’
She went on quickly, ‘I need to ask you a few questions. You’re a doctor in the RAF Medical Services, right?’
‘Not any more.’ He’d been in therapy for eighteen months, but didn’t go around telling people where he was of a weekend. ‘How on earth did you find me here?’
‘It’s not so hard to find out.’ Elsa Zero started opening kitchen cupboards. ‘Your diary is in the cloud.’
She found a glass and poured water from the tap, just as Dr Turnham came into the room.
‘I don’t know who you are.’ He stood with his hands on his hips. ‘But I demand you leave this instant.’
‘I’ll be gone in a minute.’ She sipped water. ‘When I’ve asked Tim a few questions.’
‘You’ll go right now.’
She gave him a fierce look. ‘Two minutes.’
Dr Turnham whipped a phone out of its cradle on a counter. ‘I’m calling the police.’
‘Come on, let’s get out of here, I know a place nearby we can talk.’ Tim smiled at the therapist. ‘Same time next week?’
He took her to a café close by. A few hours ago, Elsa wouldn’t have dared go to such a public place, but everywhere she went and everything she did was now a dangerous choice, so she thought, what the hell.
Tired and aching, damp clothes chafing her cold skin, she could do with some caffeine. Elsa kept her head down and the peak of her baseball cap pulled low, because there were cameras everywhere. Her image could punch up on an image-recognition system at any moment, anywhere in the world, and assassins would mobilize. For all she knew, the AI could be so sophisticated it could identify her by her gait, the swing of her arms, the roll of her shoulders.
She was lucky Tim Mabey even lived in London. The other members of the Pilot Fish medical team were scattered across the world. One worked in Ho Chi Minh, another in Dubrovnik; the third had proved untraceable, even to someone as clever as Flex.
Picking up on her wariness, Tim eyed the shambolic figure who lumbered behind them at a distance.
‘There’s a man following us.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘He’s with me.’
The café was on the corner of a row of shops. The first thing she did was identify where the rear exit was.
‘What would you like?’ he asked. ‘My shout.’
‘Get me a coffee,’ she said. ‘And as many bananas as they have.’
When he came back from the counter, Tim looked across the table at her in wonder. She was deathly pale, her face covered in angry cuts and contusions, but her eyes blazed with an extraordinary energy and defiance.
‘Stuff like this doesn’t happen to me every day,’ he said.
‘Why do you go to a therapist, anyway?’
‘I guess I feel like I need to kick-start my life somehow.’ He grinned sheepishly. ‘It can be… hard, sometimes, can’t it?’
Therapy felt like an indulgence to Elsa. There was no better way of learning to appreciate your life, and how to make the most of the present moment, than by being inexplicably targeted for liquidation by the world’s most lethal killers.
A waitress placed the drinks and fruit on the table. ‘Two coffees and a couple of bananas.’
‘All you have is two?’ Elsa asked her.
‘Looks like it,’ the waitress said, eyeing Elsa’s muddy clothes and dirty, bruised face.
‘So… Elsa Zero,’ said Tim cheerfully when she had gone. ‘I’ve often wondered what your name is.’
Elsa stuffed half a banana in her mouth. ‘Seriously?’
‘Who you are, where you are, whether you were even still…’
She finished the sentence for him. ‘Still alive?’
Tim nodded. ‘And here you are.’
‘I’m sure it’ll give you a lot of good material for next week’s therapy session, Tim, but I need to ask you about Buenos Aires, when you… saved my life.’
‘Am I allowed to talk about that?’ The teaspoon tinkled noisily against the side of the mug as he stirred his coffee. ‘They said I wasn’t allowed to say anything.’
Elsa, whose thoughts had returned anxiously to her kids, looked up sharply when she realized what he’d said. ‘Wait, who did?’
‘Some people have come to me, several times, actually, and made it clear that my life would be in danger if I ever spoke about that… mission.’
‘Let’s put it this way, Tim.’ Elsa touched his hand to stop the stirring. ‘Your life will be in immediate danger if you don’t talk to me about it.’
‘Wow, just… wow.’ If she meant to frighten him – it didn’t work, because he grinned. ‘Who on earth are you?’
She peeled the second banana. ‘Just tell me who they were.’
‘I don’t know, they looked like intelligence agents. You know, spooks. It’s always different people. They turn up at the hospital, or at my home, and warn me never to speak to anyone about it. The first time was straight after Buenos Aires when spooks flew to my base, they came a long way south, and questioned me for hours.’
‘What did they ask?’
‘About what happened, and who I met – it was just you, actually – and whether you were in secret communication with anyone while you were at the facility, that kind of thing.’
‘And what did you tell them?’
‘That you were unconscious for most of the time, and that only the medical staff went near you. Not that there was anybody else there.’
Sitting opposite him now, Elsa vaguely remembered Tim, and got flashes of the other members of the team who nursed her back to health. She’d been unconscious when she arrived, and rushed straight into theatre, where she was given a massive blood transfusion and underwent a long operation to save her life. Days later, when she finally regained consciousness, Saint and Camille had already flown home. Other than the medical staff, she had been alone inside that temporary facility in the bowels of the abandoned petrochemical plant. Left to recuperate inside a curved structure of inflatable plastic erected inside the vast building’s gutted shell.
Organizing the emergency medical facility had been Carragher’s final legacy. Without it, she would have died.
‘How did you get involved in Pilot Fish?’
‘Pilot Fish?’
‘It’s the code name of the mission.’
‘Okay,’ Tim said. ‘So, I was an RAF doctor, at that time stationed on Ascension Island. Very occasionally I’d be drafted in as medical support on covert operations. Me and the other members of the team would be expected to treat any injured operatives who arrived at the facility. I did half a dozen of those covert missions, the first five times we weren’t even needed, we all sat around and were flown back to base without seeing a single person, and the medical tent dismantled. But on the last mission you were brought in. You were in very bad shape, Elsa, it was touch and go in surgery… at one stage I thought you were a goner. You were in haemorrhagic shock, had lost a huge amount of blood, and there were several bullets inside you. We took them out and cleaned you up as best as we could, and gave you a transfusion.’
‘The other medical people,’ she asked. ‘Did you know who they were?’
‘I’d worked with them all before, actually stayed in touch with a couple of them over the years. I can assure you, they knew as much about the operation as I did, which was absolutely nothing.’
‘And there was no one else there?’ she asked.
Maybe a senior spook had turned up, someone in authority who could shed light on the nature of the mission. Someone she’d be able to locate; she’d go to the ends of the earth if she had to.
Tim sipped his coffee. ‘Your two colleagues were there briefly, I didn’t get to speak to them, but… wait.’ Elsa watched him carefully as he replaced the cup on the saucer, looking thoughtful. ‘There was one other guy.’
She tensed. ‘Go on.’
‘He was there for a very short time, just before you arrived, in actual fact. He brought the blood. We needed different supplies, obviously, in case any members of your team needed treating. You’re AB negative, I remember, which makes you a universal recipient. I barely saw him because you arrived soon after he did and we rushed you straight into theatre. By the time I finished operating, he was already long gone.’
‘So you didn’t see him interact with anyone?’
Tim thought about it. ‘When you came in and we were putting you on a trolley, he spoke briefly to one of your colleagues. The woman who came in on the copter with you.’
Camille.
‘Can you describe him, the guy who was there?’
‘I can do better than that, I know exactly who he is.’ Heart pounding in her chest, Elsa stared at him. ‘Back then he was a nobody, but in the years since this gentleman has made quite a name for himself. It doesn’t really make sense to me why he was there, but it’s not like I could ever tell anyone.’
Elsa leaned forward. ‘Who was the guy?’
‘Hold on to your hat.’ With a dramatic flourish, Tim held his hands out wide. ‘It was… Noah Pettifore.’
Elsa scowled in incomprehension. ‘I have no idea who that is.’
33
Arkady was chatting to Kieron in the parlour room that contained his full-length bar: a beautiful walnut counter one of his architects had found in a derelict Brooklyn bar, and which he’d had shipped over. Its shelves were stocked with enough alcohol to supply a string of hotels. It was another of Natalya’s ideas: she had demanded somewhere to entertain all the VIP guests she dreamed of inviting to this ridiculous house. He was speaking about his stable of thoroughbred horses in the Far East when Hazlett came over and whispered in his ear.
‘They’re sequencing now.’
Arkady looked up at him with a combination of exasperation and fondness. His executive assistant really had no manners at all.
Still, it was the news he had been waiting for, so he drained the last of his martini and stood. ‘Kieron, would you fetch me a coffee from the kitchen? Drinking in the morning is never wise.’
His head of security disappeared to the kitchen as Arkady and Hazlett made their way along the endless corridors of the mansion. The more time Arkady spent in this sprawling place, the more he considered preposterous the vast sums he had spent refurbishing it. In retrospect, his marriage was doomed to fail, and the outlay a colossal waste. As beautiful as it was, he hated the estate now, and would be glad to be free of it.
‘Two of our men were found in a car in the Thames.’ His assistant’s hands fluttered anxiously as he gave the grim news. ‘And Zero is on her way to Pettifore’s now.’
Arkady wasn’t surprised. He had learned a saying over here: to make an omelette, you must break eggs. In an operation as delicate and finely poised as this one, with events always fizzing and twisting in unexpected directions, like firecrackers in the sky, the situation was always going to be fluid.
But it didn’t matter any more. The woman was a sideshow now. They had what they needed: it was retrieved in the early hours of the morning and brought here. Zero’s role in events was now as negligible as her name. If it was up to Arkady, they’d leave her to her fate, she was now a hunted beast in a world of predators, but he’d made a solemn promise to his absent business partner.
‘That’s good, then,’ said Arkady, and Hazlett looked surprised. ‘The situation has changed, Anthony.’
He told Hazlett his intention where Elsa Zero was concerned.
‘What?’ His assistant’s trembling face was a picture. ‘Why wasn’t I informed?’
‘It was only decided a few minutes ago when I took the call. I was going to tell you as soon as I had finished my martini.’
Hazlett frowned. He was a worrier and catastrophizer; adapting his thinking to swiftly changing situations had never been a core strength. But there was no one better at swiftly putting into action Arkady’s commands.
‘Why would you want to do such a thing?’
‘It wasn’t my choice, but it’s none of our concern.’ Arkady shrugged. ‘We have enough to worry about, so let’s stay out of it.’
‘But how will we even make it happen?’
‘We have an excellent opportunity coming up.’
Walking into the large reception, with its medieval suits of armour, coats of arms and other accoutrements of country living, all bought at auction by Natalya, they saw a commotion at the entrance. Luke had come in the open doors on his bike and was weaving between the security men, who were trying to grab him. Arkady wagged a finger at the men and laughed. The boy skidded to a stop in front of him.
‘You can say we assaulted you. Tell them we threatened to break some of your fingers. We’ll break two or three for you, if you want us to make it look realistic.’
Saint slammed the fridge door hard, making Flex jump. He started talking very quickly.
‘We analysed the jumble of information you photographed on the screen, and there was hardly anything.’ Flex tipped the remaining takeaway boxes onto the floor to make room for the laptop. ‘I swear there was nothing about the mission itself, all those files had been deleted or moved at some point previously, maybe years ago. What you found was some kind of auxiliary file that had been left on the drive.’ He glanced up at Elsa, who trembled in her damp clothes. ‘There are towels, if you want.’
‘Please, just get on with it.’
She leaned over his shoulder as he accessed the RedQueen server. Flex’s fingers tapped fluidly across the keyboard, circumventing an endless cascade of log-in pages, as Saint put a pie into the microwave.
‘Here, look.’ Flex finally pointed at JPEG files of the photos she had taken in the vault. ‘All that block text you saw, it was just a coded invoice, some kind of requisition order for medical equipment and staff.’
‘The hospital facility Carragher set up in the petrochemical plant,’ Elsa said to Saint, as he came over, stuffing his face with the pie. ‘If it wasn’t there, I’d have died. And what else?’ she asked Flex.
‘It’s literally all there is.’ He angled the laptop so she could see the data he had extracted from the blocks of text. There was a sequence of letters and numbers in one column, a list of equipment and supplies in another. For an oxygen tent and canisters, a defibrillator, mobile bed, drugs, utensils for surgery; other equipment Elsa couldn’t identify.
At the bottom of the page were four names.
Elsa pointed. ‘Who are these?’
‘The people who worked there.’
She knew they would be military medics, pulled in from British stations in that hemisphere. Their involvement would be secondary and kept top secret. The requisitioned staff would have a strictly limited knowledge of the operation; their role was to provide medical attention to whoever came through the doors of the facility. Once their job was done, they would be flown back to their bases, and the temporary medical station dismantled.
Elsa read the names. Karen Naismith, Timothy Mabey, Nicole Tennant, Aisha Chen. She didn’t remember any of these people; had spent most of her time at the facility unconscious.
The file wasn’t exactly the bonanza of information she was hoping for. She couldn’t see how it could unlock the mystery of what was happening to her. A British military field hospital set up on foreign soil was a classified secret, yes, but the information was at best peripheral to Pilot Fish. It told her nothing.
‘It’s hopeless!’ In a fit of anger, she swiped a mug off the table. ‘We keep coming up against one brick wall after another!’
‘Sure, it all looks a load of garbage.’ Saint wiped crumbs from his beard. ‘But if there’s one thing I know about you, Elsie, it’s that you ain’t no quitter.’
The only way out is into the heart of the storm.
This small, stupid pocket of information was all they had. She pointed at the names. ‘How do we find these people?’
Flex yawned. ‘Search me.’
She spun him round in his chair to face her, leaning so close that their noses almost touched. ‘Last time I looked, Simon, you were a computer hacker, so get hacking!’
32
‘There’s something missing,’ Tim Mabey told the Artex ceiling in his therapist’s office.
Dr Turnham scratched at a stain on the fat end of his tie. ‘Can you elaborate?’
Sitting in an armchair in the consulting room of his Pimlico house, the therapist glanced at a clock on the wall.
‘I just feel like I’m always on the periphery of things.’ Tim clasped his hands over his chest as he lay on a recliner. ‘That somehow life has passed me by.’
‘You’ve had an exciting life in many ways, haven’t you?’ Dr Turnham had heard it all before. ‘You’ve seen the—’
He looked up sharply when he thought he heard a noise inside the house. He listened for a moment, didn’t hear anything more, then continued.
‘You’ve seen the world.’
‘I’ve seen the world from behind the fences of various military bases, I suppose, but overall my life has been uneventful… sensible,’ Tim said. ‘I grew up in a loving, sensible home and fell in love with a kind, sensible woman, and I’ve got three sensible kids, who all go to good schools. The divorce was amicable and largely without conflict. I’ve a very sensible job as a doctor. I can’t help but think another word for sensible is boring.’
‘You were a medic in the RAF.’ The therapist was still distracted. ‘That must have had its moments of excitement?’
‘There was the odd occasion that was exciting, but it was mostly dealing with sprains and—’
To the surprise of them both, the door opened and a woman walked in.
Turnham’s notebook fell from his lap as he stood. ‘Who are you, and what are you doing in my house?’
Ignoring him, Elsa spoke to the man on the couch. ‘Tim Mabey?’ Shocked, he nodded. ‘Come with me.’
When Dr Turnham demanded, ‘What’s going on?’, Tim held up his hands, no idea!
He followed her down the stairs and into the kitchen. Every time he came for his therapy session, Dr Turnham marched him directly from the front door to the consulting room, but the woman walked around like she owned the place.
‘My name is Elsa Zero,’ she said. ‘You won’t remember me.’
He stared. ‘I dream about you sometimes.’
‘Okay, so that’s weird.’ She gave him an uncomfortable look. ‘Do you dream about the people you’ve operated on?’
‘No.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Just you.’
She went on quickly, ‘I need to ask you a few questions. You’re a doctor in the RAF Medical Services, right?’
‘Not any more.’ He’d been in therapy for eighteen months, but didn’t go around telling people where he was of a weekend. ‘How on earth did you find me here?’
‘It’s not so hard to find out.’ Elsa Zero started opening kitchen cupboards. ‘Your diary is in the cloud.’
She found a glass and poured water from the tap, just as Dr Turnham came into the room.
‘I don’t know who you are.’ He stood with his hands on his hips. ‘But I demand you leave this instant.’
‘I’ll be gone in a minute.’ She sipped water. ‘When I’ve asked Tim a few questions.’
‘You’ll go right now.’
She gave him a fierce look. ‘Two minutes.’
Dr Turnham whipped a phone out of its cradle on a counter. ‘I’m calling the police.’
‘Come on, let’s get out of here, I know a place nearby we can talk.’ Tim smiled at the therapist. ‘Same time next week?’
He took her to a café close by. A few hours ago, Elsa wouldn’t have dared go to such a public place, but everywhere she went and everything she did was now a dangerous choice, so she thought, what the hell.
Tired and aching, damp clothes chafing her cold skin, she could do with some caffeine. Elsa kept her head down and the peak of her baseball cap pulled low, because there were cameras everywhere. Her image could punch up on an image-recognition system at any moment, anywhere in the world, and assassins would mobilize. For all she knew, the AI could be so sophisticated it could identify her by her gait, the swing of her arms, the roll of her shoulders.
She was lucky Tim Mabey even lived in London. The other members of the Pilot Fish medical team were scattered across the world. One worked in Ho Chi Minh, another in Dubrovnik; the third had proved untraceable, even to someone as clever as Flex.
Picking up on her wariness, Tim eyed the shambolic figure who lumbered behind them at a distance.
‘There’s a man following us.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘He’s with me.’
The café was on the corner of a row of shops. The first thing she did was identify where the rear exit was.
‘What would you like?’ he asked. ‘My shout.’
‘Get me a coffee,’ she said. ‘And as many bananas as they have.’
When he came back from the counter, Tim looked across the table at her in wonder. She was deathly pale, her face covered in angry cuts and contusions, but her eyes blazed with an extraordinary energy and defiance.
‘Stuff like this doesn’t happen to me every day,’ he said.
‘Why do you go to a therapist, anyway?’
‘I guess I feel like I need to kick-start my life somehow.’ He grinned sheepishly. ‘It can be… hard, sometimes, can’t it?’
Therapy felt like an indulgence to Elsa. There was no better way of learning to appreciate your life, and how to make the most of the present moment, than by being inexplicably targeted for liquidation by the world’s most lethal killers.
A waitress placed the drinks and fruit on the table. ‘Two coffees and a couple of bananas.’
‘All you have is two?’ Elsa asked her.
‘Looks like it,’ the waitress said, eyeing Elsa’s muddy clothes and dirty, bruised face.
‘So… Elsa Zero,’ said Tim cheerfully when she had gone. ‘I’ve often wondered what your name is.’
Elsa stuffed half a banana in her mouth. ‘Seriously?’
‘Who you are, where you are, whether you were even still…’
She finished the sentence for him. ‘Still alive?’
Tim nodded. ‘And here you are.’
‘I’m sure it’ll give you a lot of good material for next week’s therapy session, Tim, but I need to ask you about Buenos Aires, when you… saved my life.’
‘Am I allowed to talk about that?’ The teaspoon tinkled noisily against the side of the mug as he stirred his coffee. ‘They said I wasn’t allowed to say anything.’
Elsa, whose thoughts had returned anxiously to her kids, looked up sharply when she realized what he’d said. ‘Wait, who did?’
‘Some people have come to me, several times, actually, and made it clear that my life would be in danger if I ever spoke about that… mission.’
‘Let’s put it this way, Tim.’ Elsa touched his hand to stop the stirring. ‘Your life will be in immediate danger if you don’t talk to me about it.’
‘Wow, just… wow.’ If she meant to frighten him – it didn’t work, because he grinned. ‘Who on earth are you?’
She peeled the second banana. ‘Just tell me who they were.’
‘I don’t know, they looked like intelligence agents. You know, spooks. It’s always different people. They turn up at the hospital, or at my home, and warn me never to speak to anyone about it. The first time was straight after Buenos Aires when spooks flew to my base, they came a long way south, and questioned me for hours.’
‘What did they ask?’
‘About what happened, and who I met – it was just you, actually – and whether you were in secret communication with anyone while you were at the facility, that kind of thing.’
‘And what did you tell them?’
‘That you were unconscious for most of the time, and that only the medical staff went near you. Not that there was anybody else there.’
Sitting opposite him now, Elsa vaguely remembered Tim, and got flashes of the other members of the team who nursed her back to health. She’d been unconscious when she arrived, and rushed straight into theatre, where she was given a massive blood transfusion and underwent a long operation to save her life. Days later, when she finally regained consciousness, Saint and Camille had already flown home. Other than the medical staff, she had been alone inside that temporary facility in the bowels of the abandoned petrochemical plant. Left to recuperate inside a curved structure of inflatable plastic erected inside the vast building’s gutted shell.
Organizing the emergency medical facility had been Carragher’s final legacy. Without it, she would have died.
‘How did you get involved in Pilot Fish?’
‘Pilot Fish?’
‘It’s the code name of the mission.’
‘Okay,’ Tim said. ‘So, I was an RAF doctor, at that time stationed on Ascension Island. Very occasionally I’d be drafted in as medical support on covert operations. Me and the other members of the team would be expected to treat any injured operatives who arrived at the facility. I did half a dozen of those covert missions, the first five times we weren’t even needed, we all sat around and were flown back to base without seeing a single person, and the medical tent dismantled. But on the last mission you were brought in. You were in very bad shape, Elsa, it was touch and go in surgery… at one stage I thought you were a goner. You were in haemorrhagic shock, had lost a huge amount of blood, and there were several bullets inside you. We took them out and cleaned you up as best as we could, and gave you a transfusion.’
‘The other medical people,’ she asked. ‘Did you know who they were?’
‘I’d worked with them all before, actually stayed in touch with a couple of them over the years. I can assure you, they knew as much about the operation as I did, which was absolutely nothing.’
‘And there was no one else there?’ she asked.
Maybe a senior spook had turned up, someone in authority who could shed light on the nature of the mission. Someone she’d be able to locate; she’d go to the ends of the earth if she had to.
Tim sipped his coffee. ‘Your two colleagues were there briefly, I didn’t get to speak to them, but… wait.’ Elsa watched him carefully as he replaced the cup on the saucer, looking thoughtful. ‘There was one other guy.’
She tensed. ‘Go on.’
‘He was there for a very short time, just before you arrived, in actual fact. He brought the blood. We needed different supplies, obviously, in case any members of your team needed treating. You’re AB negative, I remember, which makes you a universal recipient. I barely saw him because you arrived soon after he did and we rushed you straight into theatre. By the time I finished operating, he was already long gone.’
‘So you didn’t see him interact with anyone?’
Tim thought about it. ‘When you came in and we were putting you on a trolley, he spoke briefly to one of your colleagues. The woman who came in on the copter with you.’
Camille.
‘Can you describe him, the guy who was there?’
‘I can do better than that, I know exactly who he is.’ Heart pounding in her chest, Elsa stared at him. ‘Back then he was a nobody, but in the years since this gentleman has made quite a name for himself. It doesn’t really make sense to me why he was there, but it’s not like I could ever tell anyone.’
Elsa leaned forward. ‘Who was the guy?’
‘Hold on to your hat.’ With a dramatic flourish, Tim held his hands out wide. ‘It was… Noah Pettifore.’
Elsa scowled in incomprehension. ‘I have no idea who that is.’
33
Arkady was chatting to Kieron in the parlour room that contained his full-length bar: a beautiful walnut counter one of his architects had found in a derelict Brooklyn bar, and which he’d had shipped over. Its shelves were stocked with enough alcohol to supply a string of hotels. It was another of Natalya’s ideas: she had demanded somewhere to entertain all the VIP guests she dreamed of inviting to this ridiculous house. He was speaking about his stable of thoroughbred horses in the Far East when Hazlett came over and whispered in his ear.
‘They’re sequencing now.’
Arkady looked up at him with a combination of exasperation and fondness. His executive assistant really had no manners at all.
Still, it was the news he had been waiting for, so he drained the last of his martini and stood. ‘Kieron, would you fetch me a coffee from the kitchen? Drinking in the morning is never wise.’
His head of security disappeared to the kitchen as Arkady and Hazlett made their way along the endless corridors of the mansion. The more time Arkady spent in this sprawling place, the more he considered preposterous the vast sums he had spent refurbishing it. In retrospect, his marriage was doomed to fail, and the outlay a colossal waste. As beautiful as it was, he hated the estate now, and would be glad to be free of it.
‘Two of our men were found in a car in the Thames.’ His assistant’s hands fluttered anxiously as he gave the grim news. ‘And Zero is on her way to Pettifore’s now.’
Arkady wasn’t surprised. He had learned a saying over here: to make an omelette, you must break eggs. In an operation as delicate and finely poised as this one, with events always fizzing and twisting in unexpected directions, like firecrackers in the sky, the situation was always going to be fluid.
But it didn’t matter any more. The woman was a sideshow now. They had what they needed: it was retrieved in the early hours of the morning and brought here. Zero’s role in events was now as negligible as her name. If it was up to Arkady, they’d leave her to her fate, she was now a hunted beast in a world of predators, but he’d made a solemn promise to his absent business partner.
‘That’s good, then,’ said Arkady, and Hazlett looked surprised. ‘The situation has changed, Anthony.’
He told Hazlett his intention where Elsa Zero was concerned.
‘What?’ His assistant’s trembling face was a picture. ‘Why wasn’t I informed?’
‘It was only decided a few minutes ago when I took the call. I was going to tell you as soon as I had finished my martini.’
Hazlett frowned. He was a worrier and catastrophizer; adapting his thinking to swiftly changing situations had never been a core strength. But there was no one better at swiftly putting into action Arkady’s commands.
‘Why would you want to do such a thing?’
‘It wasn’t my choice, but it’s none of our concern.’ Arkady shrugged. ‘We have enough to worry about, so let’s stay out of it.’
‘But how will we even make it happen?’
‘We have an excellent opportunity coming up.’
Walking into the large reception, with its medieval suits of armour, coats of arms and other accoutrements of country living, all bought at auction by Natalya, they saw a commotion at the entrance. Luke had come in the open doors on his bike and was weaving between the security men, who were trying to grab him. Arkady wagged a finger at the men and laughed. The boy skidded to a stop in front of him.
