Zero kill, p.26
Zero Kill, page 26
‘If you’ve been helping her, you must know where she is.’
‘Elsa has unfortunately disappeared.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We lost track of her in the early hours of this morning, along with one of our current employees. Have they been liquidated, Nigel?’
He shifted uncomfortably beside her. ‘Please don’t call me Nigel.’
‘Mr Plowright,’ she asked softly, ‘are they dead?’
‘If they are, it wasn’t us. I can’t speak for any of the other agencies.’
‘The information we obtained from the vault about Pilot Fish was trash.’
She was admitting her company’s culpability in the previous night’s raid on the vault; the statement, he presumed, intended as a quid pro quo.
‘We wouldn’t keep information about that mission there. It has a classification too secret to keep even in the drawer marked Top Secret. All Zero would have found were a few crumbs about a medical facility set up by the team leader as an adjunct to the incursion.’
‘We both have a desire to bring this situation to an end. There will be a considerable reputational and financial impact on RedQueen if it continues. It’s vital that we re-establish our standing within the intelligence community, even if it ultimately means regretfully cutting Elsa Zero loose. Nobody wants a war, Nigel.’ She gave him an encouraging smile. ‘Tell me what’s going on and we could be of mutual assistance.’
Plowright sighed. ‘Two nights ago, the US intercepted communications from Steve Carragher, a former SIS intelligence officer.’
If Mrs Krystahl was astonished, it didn’t show on her face. ‘He’s dead.’
‘Apparently not. Carragher was presumed killed during the operation called Pilot Fish to destroy the contents of a hard drive that contained data on how to genetically engineer a plague virus. Very contagious, very deadly; very fucking apocalyptic, actually. The Russians engineered this vile thing in an underground lab in Siberia as part of a secret bio-warfare programme. An unknown external threat actor stole the virus, and destroyed the lab to cover their tracks.’ Plowright paused briefly, unsure about whether to continue. ‘The communication revealed that the data was encoded in Zero’s DNA. If the sequence is mapped and the genetic structure of this pathogen replicated in a lab, it could be unleashed anywhere in the world, and there’ll be no stopping its spread. We’ve done the modelling on fatalities,’ he told her grimly. ‘And it doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘I don’t believe Elsa knew,’ Mrs Krystahl said.
‘No, me neither.’ After Zero tried to turn herself in, and then broke into Vauxhall Cross, he’d come to the same conclusion. ‘Steve Carragher spent two years trying to find the sequence that would be used to replicate the virus, but somewhere along the way he changed sides, and used the operation as a cover to encode it into cells in Elsa Zero’s bloodstream, and fake his own death.’
‘He knew the intelligence agencies would move heaven and earth to ensure that the genetic sequence for that virus would be wiped out.’
‘So he put on a big, bloody show for us. Look, the sequence was destroyed! Mission accomplished! I sacrificed my own life to get it done! When Zero came back from that mission, we looked thoroughly for implants and microchips, anything out of the ordinary.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘But we could have put her through three hundred genetic tests and still not found that information whizzing around her bloodstream. All these years, Elsa Zero has been a walking, talking schematic on how to make a biological weapon.’
‘And you think Carragher intends to recreate the virus, and release it.’
‘The intercepted communication made it clear Carragher intends to release it imminently, and revealed Zero’s role in the plot. Where imminent biological attacks are concerned, many agencies share information. As soon as that information came out, just before midnight two days ago, everybody mobilized. Before you know it, London was filled with assassins and snatch teams.’
‘If Mr Carragher was so clever as to put this nefarious plot together,’ Mrs Krystahl said, ‘it doesn’t seem like his style to carelessly spill critical information.’
‘We believe his intention was always to pit the agencies against each other, and to sow panic and discord. To make a big statement: just imagine the terror when the pathogen reaches Washington, Berlin or Beijing!’
‘The agencies must have moved damned fast, because Elsa was attacked on the stroke of midnight.’
‘The Yanks had a CIA agent embedded in Zero’s life. Like us, they long suspected that Pilot Fish was a farce. The agent, a guy using the name Joel Harris, tried to subdue her, but Elsa got away, and that put her on alert. Lucky for us, because witnesses saw Zero fighting a pair of paramedics at the scene, but the ambulance had gone before the emergency services got there. We think it was Carragher’s people.’
‘Encoding secret data into DNA, why did we never think of that?’ asked Mrs Krystahl.
‘The technology is still in its nascency. The only man we know of who has been making any headway on it is a synthetic biologist called Noah Pettifore, and he’s missing. We found three dead American agents in his apartment, one of them Joel Harris. The Yanks are livid.’ Plowright turned to look at her. ‘So now it’s your turn. Tell me something I don’t know.’
Mrs Krystahl sat with her red lips pursed, absently tapping an enormous gemstone she wore on her finger.
‘I’m afraid it’s not about Elsa any more,’ she told him quietly. ‘They’ll already have the virus.’
‘And how do you know that?’
Mrs Krystahl raised one threaded eyebrow. ‘Our employee who disappeared with Elsa is Camille Archard.’
‘One of the surviving team members of Pilot Fish.’ Plowright sighed. ‘Steve Carragher’s wife.’
41
Elsa was escorted back to the bedroom and told to wait. An armed man stood outside the door; she wasn’t going to be allowed to walk around at her leisure any more.
Head in turmoil, heart pounding, she paced tensely; felt like she had been punched in the solar plexus.
They intended to release a super pathogen in the city – expose innocent people to a highly infectious airborne virus. The Russian spoke some nonsense about forcing governments to their senses and bringing the world back from the brink. But what the project was really about – because what it was always about, in Elsa’s experience – was giving people like him yet more power and control.
When the time came for her to make her move, she had to be calm and focused, because it wasn’t just about that…
They had Harley and India.
They had her kids.
He had her kids.
He was still alive.
Steve Carragher was back from the dead.
Despite the overwhelming fear she felt for her children, her thoughts kept returning to him. The way he held their hands as they walked beneath the whirling blades of the copter had chilled her to the core. Screaming in fury, she had been dragged away at gunpoint.
Elsa let out a roar of anger and put her leg through the antique hardback chair. Pieces flew across the room. She picked up a broken chair leg. It wouldn’t get her far against Krupin’s security men, with their assault rifles and handguns; it probably wouldn’t even get her out of the door, but it was still more useful than Saint, who was comatose drunk somewhere in the building. Elsa dropped it.
A moment later, the door opened and one of Krupin’s goons gestured to her. She walked with him back to the front of the house, a couple of men behind her.
When she got to the lawn, Carragher was there, still dressed in his assault armour, drinking water from a plastic bottle as he spoke to Harley and India. They looked up at him warily.
He smiled at Elsa. ‘Hey, look who’s here.’
Her children flew into her arms. Elsa held them tight. Kissing their hot heads, drinking in their warmth and smell, feeling the rasp and rhythm of their breathing. Bewildered and terrified by what had happened, they clung to her.
‘Leave us alone,’ she told Carragher.
He looked surprised, as if he expected congratulations for coming back from the dead, but moved away across the grass.
‘I’m sorry,’ Elsa told her children quietly again and again, her lips moving across the top of their heads. ‘I’m so sorry.’
As if any of this was her fault. The genome sequence of a deadly infectious agent had been encoded into her DNA by people she trusted; by the only man she had ever loved.
‘Did they hurt you?’ Elsa checked Harley and India for signs of injury. If they had been harmed, she’d kill everyone responsible. But they shook their heads.
‘And… your grandparents… are they…’
‘Gran and Grandad hid us, there was shooting.’ Harley’s eyes were wide with fear and confusion, but he understood her unspoken question. ‘We don’t know what happened to them cos there was smoke, we couldn’t see, and the men took us away.’
‘I hope they’re okay,’ said India anxiously.
‘They will be,’ Elsa told them with a certainty she didn’t feel.
‘We came in a helicopter,’ said Harley, as usual finding a positive to his traumatic experience.
‘So I saw.’ Elsa smiled. ‘How exciting.’
But when he cried, she pulled him close.
India touched her mother’s face, tracing a finger along one bruise. ‘What’s happening?’
‘There’s been a silly mistake.’ Elsa didn’t know what to tell her daughter. ‘It’s going to be over soon.’
But India wasn’t fooled. ‘The men have guns.’
Elsa, who had lied and lied in her long career, and who was normally very good at it, forced herself to meet her daughter’s gaze. ‘You don’t have to worry about that.’
India looked at her steadily. ‘Are we going to die?’
‘No!’ Elsa pulled her into another hug. ‘We’re going home.’
‘Granny gave me this.’ India pulled something from her pocket, a gnarled and ancient piece of fabric. ‘It’s yours.’
Elsa took the bedraggled-looking thing with one arm, remembered it immediately. This small, ridiculous, patched-up Frankenstein’s monster of a rag doll was one of the few good memories from her childhood. As a little girl, she had been inseparable from it; she was amazed Howard and Greta had even kept it. When she lifted it to her nose it smelled damp, musty. Pressing her thumb along the rough cloth, Elsa felt something inside that shouldn’t be there, the size of a battery or electronic car fob. She didn’t want to rip the toy open in front of Carragher, and gave it back to India. ‘Keep it.’
‘It’s yours,’ her daughter said. ‘You have it.’
‘Granny and Grandad gave it to you,’ said Elsa. ‘Keep it for them.’
Harley held out his hand. ‘I’ll have it.’
But Harley would leave it somewhere. If she gave her daughter instructions, India would follow them, so Elsa told her quietly, ‘Don’t let go of it.’
The girl nodded and took it.
‘Will we see them again?’ asked Harley, and the question nearly tore her heart in two.
‘Of course!’ she said, believing that in all likelihood Howard and Greta were dead.
‘Can they come and see our house?’
‘Sure, I’ll phone and invite them.’
‘Are we really going home?’ asked India.
‘Hey.’ Elsa gave her daughter a surreptitious look that said, don’t upset your brother. ‘I always keep my promises.’
‘So you’ll get us each a Nintendo Switch, like you promised?’
‘And loads of games,’ Elsa told Harley, who was looking at Carragher.
‘Cool.’
There was something she sensed they wanted to ask. Carragher threw away the empty plastic bottle and started walking towards them.
‘Is that man our dad?’ India asked. ‘He says he is.’
Of course he did. Another dick move by the man with nine lives. She didn’t know what to tell them. She’d rarely mentioned their father; hadn’t even given him a name.
‘I thought our dad was dead,’ said Harley.
You and me both, Elsa wanted to tell him.
Carragher held his arms wide, as if expecting them all to rush to him. ‘You guys don’t know how long I’ve waited for us all to be together.’
Harley and India held on to their mother tightly.
‘Mum said you were dead,’ India told him warily.
‘Your mum isn’t right about everything, even if she likes to think she is.’ Carragher smiled at Elsa. ‘Are you guys hungry? I bet you are.’
Carragher told the security men to take the kids to the kitchen to get something to eat. Harley and India looked at their mum. The last thing Elsa wanted was to let them out of her sight again, but she needed to confront Carragher alone, and they needed fuel.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she said. ‘I’ll come and find you.’
‘Hey, guys,’ Carragher told the kids as they turned to go. ‘It’s going to be fun getting to know each other. I understand it’s a shock, but I’m here now, and we’ll be together.’
Elsa fought the urge to punch him. When they walked away, he didn’t take his eyes off the children.
‘They’re good kids, you’ve done a great job bringing them up.’ Like she gave a flying fuck what he thought. ‘And you look great, Elsa. Seriously. It’s good to see you again.’
When he reached out, she stepped away. ‘Are you for real?’
‘You’re angry, shocked, I get it.’
‘How would you know what I feel, Steve? You’ve been dead for the last nine years.’
‘Let me expla—’
‘You betrayed me, you betrayed us all. You nearly got me killed so you could hide data in my DNA, then faked your own death.’ Elsa snorted angrily. The only man she ever loved, and their relationship had been a massive clusterfuck of lies. ‘It’s no wonder I have trust issues.’
‘It was a last-minute decision. I had no choice. We had to move fast.’
‘But why me?’
‘If the agencies ever found out I was alive, suspicion would have fallen on Camille. You were pregnant and getting out of the business – the perfect recipient for the data.’
‘So you pretended to love me, slept with me, made me believe we had a future.’ All alpha males like Carragher knew how to do was lie and manipulate. He’d probably never had a genuine emotional relationship his entire life. ‘And getting every assassin on Earth to hunt me down, was that also your idea?’
‘We intended to remove the encoded sequence in the coming weeks. Arrange a routine hospital check-up for you where we would have woken the cells, taken blood, and retrieved the data. You would have been completely unaware of any of it. But forty-eight hours ago, SIS intercepted one of our burst transmissions and we were forced to bring the operation forward. We scrambled to keep up with you, Elsa, same as everybody else.’
‘And once you got what you wanted, you were happy for me to die.’
‘You’re standing here because of me,’ he insisted. ‘Camille would have killed you otherwise.’
‘Where have you been hiding all these years, Steve?’ She had so many questions. ‘What have you been doing?’
‘It’s taken a long time to get here.’ He turned towards the shuttered wing of the house where the biolab was hidden. ‘Years of careful planning to set up the facilities, source dangerous biological materials and get them into the country.’
‘To devastate the world.’
‘To save the world,’ he insisted. ‘There are like-minded people like me all around the world, embedded in government, the agencies, the military, in all walks of life. We call ourselves The Nexus, and we’re going to do what’s required to pull the world back from the edge of catastrophe. Many of us have been carefully working towards this point, and we will take control.’
‘Careful, Steve,’ she told him. ‘You’re sounding like one of the bad guys.’
‘I’m building a better world for the next generation. For my children.’
‘Don’t you dare talk about them,’ she hissed. ‘Don’t even think about them.’
‘I know everything there is to know about Harley and India. I’ve watched them grow up in that shitty little house.’ Elsa wondered if there was anyone who hadn’t been keeping her home life under close surveillance. ‘You’ve done well to bring them up on your own, Elsa, but I’m back now, and I’ll take it from here. I’ll give them a proper life.’
There had always been something implacable about Carragher, but anger and resentment poured off him. For nine years, she imagined, he had been forced to watch Harley and India going about their lives from the other side of the world. It must have torn him apart to know that they never gave him a thought, didn’t even know he existed.
But now he was back – and he was going to take them from her.
‘They don’t need a maniac like you in their lives, Steve.’ She couldn’t help but push his buttons. ‘You’ve been dead and buried for years. As far as I’m concerned, you still are.’
‘I could have killed your parents this morning,’ Carragher told her softly. ‘But I let them live, as a courtesy to you, the biological mother of my children.’
It was a relief to know they were alive, at least.
‘We’re going somewhere safe, Elsa, where we’ll ride things out when the pandemic hits. Come with me, come with us. We’ll pick up where we left off, Elsa, me and you. The four of us will be a family. Saint can come as well, which is why I had him brought here.’
The idea of spending years stuck in a compound or bunker with Carragher, playing happy families and making plans for the New World Order, didn’t appeal.
‘Thanks for the offer.’ She glared. ‘But I don’t think so.’
‘Okay, then.’ He sighed. ‘But let’s be clear, I came here for Harley and India. They’re coming with me.’
She felt her heart thump with fury. ‘There is another alternative, of course.’
‘Yeah? And what’s that?’
‘I kill you.’
Carragher smiled, as if she’d just said something funny. ‘The kids will miss you, Elsa… but only for a while. You don’t have to worry, they’ll be safe, they’ll have a life of privilege and comfort.’
‘Elsa has unfortunately disappeared.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We lost track of her in the early hours of this morning, along with one of our current employees. Have they been liquidated, Nigel?’
He shifted uncomfortably beside her. ‘Please don’t call me Nigel.’
‘Mr Plowright,’ she asked softly, ‘are they dead?’
‘If they are, it wasn’t us. I can’t speak for any of the other agencies.’
‘The information we obtained from the vault about Pilot Fish was trash.’
She was admitting her company’s culpability in the previous night’s raid on the vault; the statement, he presumed, intended as a quid pro quo.
‘We wouldn’t keep information about that mission there. It has a classification too secret to keep even in the drawer marked Top Secret. All Zero would have found were a few crumbs about a medical facility set up by the team leader as an adjunct to the incursion.’
‘We both have a desire to bring this situation to an end. There will be a considerable reputational and financial impact on RedQueen if it continues. It’s vital that we re-establish our standing within the intelligence community, even if it ultimately means regretfully cutting Elsa Zero loose. Nobody wants a war, Nigel.’ She gave him an encouraging smile. ‘Tell me what’s going on and we could be of mutual assistance.’
Plowright sighed. ‘Two nights ago, the US intercepted communications from Steve Carragher, a former SIS intelligence officer.’
If Mrs Krystahl was astonished, it didn’t show on her face. ‘He’s dead.’
‘Apparently not. Carragher was presumed killed during the operation called Pilot Fish to destroy the contents of a hard drive that contained data on how to genetically engineer a plague virus. Very contagious, very deadly; very fucking apocalyptic, actually. The Russians engineered this vile thing in an underground lab in Siberia as part of a secret bio-warfare programme. An unknown external threat actor stole the virus, and destroyed the lab to cover their tracks.’ Plowright paused briefly, unsure about whether to continue. ‘The communication revealed that the data was encoded in Zero’s DNA. If the sequence is mapped and the genetic structure of this pathogen replicated in a lab, it could be unleashed anywhere in the world, and there’ll be no stopping its spread. We’ve done the modelling on fatalities,’ he told her grimly. ‘And it doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘I don’t believe Elsa knew,’ Mrs Krystahl said.
‘No, me neither.’ After Zero tried to turn herself in, and then broke into Vauxhall Cross, he’d come to the same conclusion. ‘Steve Carragher spent two years trying to find the sequence that would be used to replicate the virus, but somewhere along the way he changed sides, and used the operation as a cover to encode it into cells in Elsa Zero’s bloodstream, and fake his own death.’
‘He knew the intelligence agencies would move heaven and earth to ensure that the genetic sequence for that virus would be wiped out.’
‘So he put on a big, bloody show for us. Look, the sequence was destroyed! Mission accomplished! I sacrificed my own life to get it done! When Zero came back from that mission, we looked thoroughly for implants and microchips, anything out of the ordinary.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘But we could have put her through three hundred genetic tests and still not found that information whizzing around her bloodstream. All these years, Elsa Zero has been a walking, talking schematic on how to make a biological weapon.’
‘And you think Carragher intends to recreate the virus, and release it.’
‘The intercepted communication made it clear Carragher intends to release it imminently, and revealed Zero’s role in the plot. Where imminent biological attacks are concerned, many agencies share information. As soon as that information came out, just before midnight two days ago, everybody mobilized. Before you know it, London was filled with assassins and snatch teams.’
‘If Mr Carragher was so clever as to put this nefarious plot together,’ Mrs Krystahl said, ‘it doesn’t seem like his style to carelessly spill critical information.’
‘We believe his intention was always to pit the agencies against each other, and to sow panic and discord. To make a big statement: just imagine the terror when the pathogen reaches Washington, Berlin or Beijing!’
‘The agencies must have moved damned fast, because Elsa was attacked on the stroke of midnight.’
‘The Yanks had a CIA agent embedded in Zero’s life. Like us, they long suspected that Pilot Fish was a farce. The agent, a guy using the name Joel Harris, tried to subdue her, but Elsa got away, and that put her on alert. Lucky for us, because witnesses saw Zero fighting a pair of paramedics at the scene, but the ambulance had gone before the emergency services got there. We think it was Carragher’s people.’
‘Encoding secret data into DNA, why did we never think of that?’ asked Mrs Krystahl.
‘The technology is still in its nascency. The only man we know of who has been making any headway on it is a synthetic biologist called Noah Pettifore, and he’s missing. We found three dead American agents in his apartment, one of them Joel Harris. The Yanks are livid.’ Plowright turned to look at her. ‘So now it’s your turn. Tell me something I don’t know.’
Mrs Krystahl sat with her red lips pursed, absently tapping an enormous gemstone she wore on her finger.
‘I’m afraid it’s not about Elsa any more,’ she told him quietly. ‘They’ll already have the virus.’
‘And how do you know that?’
Mrs Krystahl raised one threaded eyebrow. ‘Our employee who disappeared with Elsa is Camille Archard.’
‘One of the surviving team members of Pilot Fish.’ Plowright sighed. ‘Steve Carragher’s wife.’
41
Elsa was escorted back to the bedroom and told to wait. An armed man stood outside the door; she wasn’t going to be allowed to walk around at her leisure any more.
Head in turmoil, heart pounding, she paced tensely; felt like she had been punched in the solar plexus.
They intended to release a super pathogen in the city – expose innocent people to a highly infectious airborne virus. The Russian spoke some nonsense about forcing governments to their senses and bringing the world back from the brink. But what the project was really about – because what it was always about, in Elsa’s experience – was giving people like him yet more power and control.
When the time came for her to make her move, she had to be calm and focused, because it wasn’t just about that…
They had Harley and India.
They had her kids.
He had her kids.
He was still alive.
Steve Carragher was back from the dead.
Despite the overwhelming fear she felt for her children, her thoughts kept returning to him. The way he held their hands as they walked beneath the whirling blades of the copter had chilled her to the core. Screaming in fury, she had been dragged away at gunpoint.
Elsa let out a roar of anger and put her leg through the antique hardback chair. Pieces flew across the room. She picked up a broken chair leg. It wouldn’t get her far against Krupin’s security men, with their assault rifles and handguns; it probably wouldn’t even get her out of the door, but it was still more useful than Saint, who was comatose drunk somewhere in the building. Elsa dropped it.
A moment later, the door opened and one of Krupin’s goons gestured to her. She walked with him back to the front of the house, a couple of men behind her.
When she got to the lawn, Carragher was there, still dressed in his assault armour, drinking water from a plastic bottle as he spoke to Harley and India. They looked up at him warily.
He smiled at Elsa. ‘Hey, look who’s here.’
Her children flew into her arms. Elsa held them tight. Kissing their hot heads, drinking in their warmth and smell, feeling the rasp and rhythm of their breathing. Bewildered and terrified by what had happened, they clung to her.
‘Leave us alone,’ she told Carragher.
He looked surprised, as if he expected congratulations for coming back from the dead, but moved away across the grass.
‘I’m sorry,’ Elsa told her children quietly again and again, her lips moving across the top of their heads. ‘I’m so sorry.’
As if any of this was her fault. The genome sequence of a deadly infectious agent had been encoded into her DNA by people she trusted; by the only man she had ever loved.
‘Did they hurt you?’ Elsa checked Harley and India for signs of injury. If they had been harmed, she’d kill everyone responsible. But they shook their heads.
‘And… your grandparents… are they…’
‘Gran and Grandad hid us, there was shooting.’ Harley’s eyes were wide with fear and confusion, but he understood her unspoken question. ‘We don’t know what happened to them cos there was smoke, we couldn’t see, and the men took us away.’
‘I hope they’re okay,’ said India anxiously.
‘They will be,’ Elsa told them with a certainty she didn’t feel.
‘We came in a helicopter,’ said Harley, as usual finding a positive to his traumatic experience.
‘So I saw.’ Elsa smiled. ‘How exciting.’
But when he cried, she pulled him close.
India touched her mother’s face, tracing a finger along one bruise. ‘What’s happening?’
‘There’s been a silly mistake.’ Elsa didn’t know what to tell her daughter. ‘It’s going to be over soon.’
But India wasn’t fooled. ‘The men have guns.’
Elsa, who had lied and lied in her long career, and who was normally very good at it, forced herself to meet her daughter’s gaze. ‘You don’t have to worry about that.’
India looked at her steadily. ‘Are we going to die?’
‘No!’ Elsa pulled her into another hug. ‘We’re going home.’
‘Granny gave me this.’ India pulled something from her pocket, a gnarled and ancient piece of fabric. ‘It’s yours.’
Elsa took the bedraggled-looking thing with one arm, remembered it immediately. This small, ridiculous, patched-up Frankenstein’s monster of a rag doll was one of the few good memories from her childhood. As a little girl, she had been inseparable from it; she was amazed Howard and Greta had even kept it. When she lifted it to her nose it smelled damp, musty. Pressing her thumb along the rough cloth, Elsa felt something inside that shouldn’t be there, the size of a battery or electronic car fob. She didn’t want to rip the toy open in front of Carragher, and gave it back to India. ‘Keep it.’
‘It’s yours,’ her daughter said. ‘You have it.’
‘Granny and Grandad gave it to you,’ said Elsa. ‘Keep it for them.’
Harley held out his hand. ‘I’ll have it.’
But Harley would leave it somewhere. If she gave her daughter instructions, India would follow them, so Elsa told her quietly, ‘Don’t let go of it.’
The girl nodded and took it.
‘Will we see them again?’ asked Harley, and the question nearly tore her heart in two.
‘Of course!’ she said, believing that in all likelihood Howard and Greta were dead.
‘Can they come and see our house?’
‘Sure, I’ll phone and invite them.’
‘Are we really going home?’ asked India.
‘Hey.’ Elsa gave her daughter a surreptitious look that said, don’t upset your brother. ‘I always keep my promises.’
‘So you’ll get us each a Nintendo Switch, like you promised?’
‘And loads of games,’ Elsa told Harley, who was looking at Carragher.
‘Cool.’
There was something she sensed they wanted to ask. Carragher threw away the empty plastic bottle and started walking towards them.
‘Is that man our dad?’ India asked. ‘He says he is.’
Of course he did. Another dick move by the man with nine lives. She didn’t know what to tell them. She’d rarely mentioned their father; hadn’t even given him a name.
‘I thought our dad was dead,’ said Harley.
You and me both, Elsa wanted to tell him.
Carragher held his arms wide, as if expecting them all to rush to him. ‘You guys don’t know how long I’ve waited for us all to be together.’
Harley and India held on to their mother tightly.
‘Mum said you were dead,’ India told him warily.
‘Your mum isn’t right about everything, even if she likes to think she is.’ Carragher smiled at Elsa. ‘Are you guys hungry? I bet you are.’
Carragher told the security men to take the kids to the kitchen to get something to eat. Harley and India looked at their mum. The last thing Elsa wanted was to let them out of her sight again, but she needed to confront Carragher alone, and they needed fuel.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she said. ‘I’ll come and find you.’
‘Hey, guys,’ Carragher told the kids as they turned to go. ‘It’s going to be fun getting to know each other. I understand it’s a shock, but I’m here now, and we’ll be together.’
Elsa fought the urge to punch him. When they walked away, he didn’t take his eyes off the children.
‘They’re good kids, you’ve done a great job bringing them up.’ Like she gave a flying fuck what he thought. ‘And you look great, Elsa. Seriously. It’s good to see you again.’
When he reached out, she stepped away. ‘Are you for real?’
‘You’re angry, shocked, I get it.’
‘How would you know what I feel, Steve? You’ve been dead for the last nine years.’
‘Let me expla—’
‘You betrayed me, you betrayed us all. You nearly got me killed so you could hide data in my DNA, then faked your own death.’ Elsa snorted angrily. The only man she ever loved, and their relationship had been a massive clusterfuck of lies. ‘It’s no wonder I have trust issues.’
‘It was a last-minute decision. I had no choice. We had to move fast.’
‘But why me?’
‘If the agencies ever found out I was alive, suspicion would have fallen on Camille. You were pregnant and getting out of the business – the perfect recipient for the data.’
‘So you pretended to love me, slept with me, made me believe we had a future.’ All alpha males like Carragher knew how to do was lie and manipulate. He’d probably never had a genuine emotional relationship his entire life. ‘And getting every assassin on Earth to hunt me down, was that also your idea?’
‘We intended to remove the encoded sequence in the coming weeks. Arrange a routine hospital check-up for you where we would have woken the cells, taken blood, and retrieved the data. You would have been completely unaware of any of it. But forty-eight hours ago, SIS intercepted one of our burst transmissions and we were forced to bring the operation forward. We scrambled to keep up with you, Elsa, same as everybody else.’
‘And once you got what you wanted, you were happy for me to die.’
‘You’re standing here because of me,’ he insisted. ‘Camille would have killed you otherwise.’
‘Where have you been hiding all these years, Steve?’ She had so many questions. ‘What have you been doing?’
‘It’s taken a long time to get here.’ He turned towards the shuttered wing of the house where the biolab was hidden. ‘Years of careful planning to set up the facilities, source dangerous biological materials and get them into the country.’
‘To devastate the world.’
‘To save the world,’ he insisted. ‘There are like-minded people like me all around the world, embedded in government, the agencies, the military, in all walks of life. We call ourselves The Nexus, and we’re going to do what’s required to pull the world back from the edge of catastrophe. Many of us have been carefully working towards this point, and we will take control.’
‘Careful, Steve,’ she told him. ‘You’re sounding like one of the bad guys.’
‘I’m building a better world for the next generation. For my children.’
‘Don’t you dare talk about them,’ she hissed. ‘Don’t even think about them.’
‘I know everything there is to know about Harley and India. I’ve watched them grow up in that shitty little house.’ Elsa wondered if there was anyone who hadn’t been keeping her home life under close surveillance. ‘You’ve done well to bring them up on your own, Elsa, but I’m back now, and I’ll take it from here. I’ll give them a proper life.’
There had always been something implacable about Carragher, but anger and resentment poured off him. For nine years, she imagined, he had been forced to watch Harley and India going about their lives from the other side of the world. It must have torn him apart to know that they never gave him a thought, didn’t even know he existed.
But now he was back – and he was going to take them from her.
‘They don’t need a maniac like you in their lives, Steve.’ She couldn’t help but push his buttons. ‘You’ve been dead and buried for years. As far as I’m concerned, you still are.’
‘I could have killed your parents this morning,’ Carragher told her softly. ‘But I let them live, as a courtesy to you, the biological mother of my children.’
It was a relief to know they were alive, at least.
‘We’re going somewhere safe, Elsa, where we’ll ride things out when the pandemic hits. Come with me, come with us. We’ll pick up where we left off, Elsa, me and you. The four of us will be a family. Saint can come as well, which is why I had him brought here.’
The idea of spending years stuck in a compound or bunker with Carragher, playing happy families and making plans for the New World Order, didn’t appeal.
‘Thanks for the offer.’ She glared. ‘But I don’t think so.’
‘Okay, then.’ He sighed. ‘But let’s be clear, I came here for Harley and India. They’re coming with me.’
She felt her heart thump with fury. ‘There is another alternative, of course.’
‘Yeah? And what’s that?’
‘I kill you.’
Carragher smiled, as if she’d just said something funny. ‘The kids will miss you, Elsa… but only for a while. You don’t have to worry, they’ll be safe, they’ll have a life of privilege and comfort.’
