CHAMELEON
Mark Burnell

COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Mark Burnell 2001

Mark Burnell asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780008332662

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN 9780007372928

Version: 2019-07-24

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

PRAISE

‘Chameleon is a Casablanca for the 21st century. Burnell writes with verve and assurance about the unsavoury realities of international terrorism. Where he really excels, however, is with his characters. Not only are his two protagonists convincingly complex and three-dimensional, but they also share a love story which is as moving as it is passionate.’

Boris Starling, author of Messiah

DEDICATION

To Isabelle with love

EPIGRAPH

The only indecipherable code in the world is a woman.

Leo Marks

Special Operations Executive

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Paris

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

Moscow

Acknowledgments

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Mark Burnell

About the Publisher

PARIS

The rhythm of the windscreen wipers was hypnotic. The rubber blades squeaked against the glass, smearing rain left and right. James Marshall leaned forward and peered at the brasserie on the other side of the street. The clock on the dashboard said it was five to two. He checked his own watch – it was marginally fast – and lit a cigarette. The caller had given him the address, the time – two o’clock – and a reminder not to be late. That had been half an hour ago at a pay-phone at the Gare du Nord.

The other phone call – the one that had caught him at home the day before yesterday – had come out of the blue. And out of the past. He’d recognized the voice instantly. A simple job that paid cash in hand; that had been the offer. Good cash, too, considering how little work was involved. He wouldn’t even have to leave Paris. At first, that had made the proposal all the more attractive.

Would he consider acting as a courier? Nothing fancy, naturally, just a fetch-and-drop, as a favour from one seasoned veteran to another.

Of course, he’d said, he’d be delighted. There had been times in the not-so-distant past when he would have considered such a job beneath him, when he would have been offended by the offer. James Marshall, the courier? The errand boy? Now, he was as grateful for the opportunity as he was for the money.

He instructed his Tunisian taxi driver to drop him on avenue de Friedland, from where he walked back to rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré. The rain was growing stronger. And colder. A lead sky darkened everything. The driver of a delivery van attempted a U-turn in front of the brasserie. The vehicle stalled. He tried the ignition twice. Nothing. He slapped the steering wheel and tried again. Still nothing. A woman in a navy Mercedes saloon held open her hands in exasperation. The van driver shrugged. The traffic staggered to a halt. Headlights sparkled, exhausts wheezed.

Marshall tried to ignore the tightness in his stomach, the tightness that suggested it would have been better to ignore the money. He wished he was home. His chilly, damp, single-room apartment in Saint Denis had rarely seemed so appealing. He crossed the street, meandering through stationary vehicles, and entered the brasserie.

Half a dozen customers congregated around a curve of copper bar. A waiter took his damp raincoat and asked if he was alone but he was already moving into the dining room. Oleg Rogachev was in the far corner, at a table by the window. Marshall recognized him from the photographs he’d studied; built like a bull, a moustache like a slug, silver hair cropped to a spike. His collars and cuffs were tight to the skin, accentuating fat hands and a fat face. He wore a charcoal silk double-breasted suit.

Rogachev looked up from his plate – pig’s trotters and spinach – and nodded towards the seat opposite. The man sitting next to him was a stranger but not a surprise; a translator, Marshall assumed. Rogachev spoke no English and had no reason to expect Marshall to speak Russian. As it happened, he’d been fluent for thirty years.

With only a slight accent, he said, ‘In Britain, we have a saying. Two’s company, three’s a crowd.’

Rogachev raised an eyebrow. ‘This is Anatoli.’

‘I hope neither of you will be offended if I ask him to leave.’

There was a frosty pause. Then Rogachev said, ‘I’ll see you back at the hotel.’

Anatoli rose from the table and left. Marshall sat down. Rogachev pushed his plate to one side, hailed a waiter and gesticulated with chubby fingers. A clean glass arrived. Rogachev waited until the wine had been poured.

‘I hope your people recognize the risk I’m taking.’

‘They do.’

‘Then I hope they’ll show their appreciation.’

‘They will. But only unofficially. They’re keen to stress this and they’re sure you’ll understand their reasons.’

Marshall looked out of the window. Gridlock, a crescendo of car horns, teeming rain. When he looked back, he noticed the small device next to Rogachev’s glass. It resembled a travel radio but had no aerial or display. The Russian felt for a switch on the side. He saw Marshall’s expression and said, ‘It jams directional radio microphones. It emits violent electronic signals, casting a five-metre protective shield. Anybody trying to listen to us will hear only static.’ He smiled slyly. ‘Even though I’m not here, it’s better to be careful.’

Hence the delay in naming the rendezvous, Marshall supposed. In the old days – in his day – these types of precaution had been routine. Naively, he’d imagined things would be different now. He wondered where Rogachev’s friends and enemies thought he was. Moscow? Yekaterinburg? Miami?

‘What have you come to offer me?’

Marshall took a sip from his glass. The red tasted bitter but the effect was welcome. ‘It’s possible that the investigation into Weaver Financial Services will come to nothing.’

Rogachev pulled a face, unimpressed. ‘That is possible anyway.’

Marshall shook his head. ‘There’s something you don’t know. Weaver’s links to Calmex in Lausanne have been established. Arrest warrants are being prepared as we speak.’

The small, piggy eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Go on.’

‘If you accept our offer, the Weaver directors will still have to be replaced. That is non-negotiable. The company would also have to pay a small fine for a lesser misdemeanour. It’s better if the investigation comes up with something.’

‘What else?’

‘On the plus side, your assets would cease to be frozen. Also, your status as persona non grata would be revoked on the understanding that you do not try to enter the United Kingdom for a period of six months.’

A waiter came to clear plates and refill glasses. Rogachev ordered two espressos and the bill. ‘You should know that the reason I’ve decided to come to an arrangement with you is not for my own advantage. That is merely – how would you put it? – a bonus.’ He reached into his pocket and produced a gold Sony Mini-Disc which he placed on the table between them. ‘I’m a wheat trader, not a criminal. The people who are exploiting my commercial network are renegades. They are a threat to everyone.’

‘Of course.’

‘I want that distinction understood.’

‘Naturally.’

He tapped the Mini-Disc. ‘It’s essential they never discover the origin of this information …’

‘I understand.’

‘… because that could lead to complications. The kind of complications where everybody suffers.’

Marshall tried to ignore the threat. The espressos arrived. The Russian added sugar. Outside, the congestion caused by the delivery van had escalated. The driver was now standing next to his vehicle, arguing with half a dozen people. Some of those inside the brasserie had turned to watch the commotion.

Rogachev spoke softly. ‘The courier will arrive at Heathrow Terminal Two from Budapest on the third of April. Malev flight MA610.’

Marshall took a propelling pencil from his jacket and began to write notes on a small pad. ‘What’s the name?’

‘You get the name when the flight leaves Budapest. I don’t want him intercepted in Hungary.’

‘What’s he bringing?’

‘Plutonium-239.’

‘From where?’

‘MINATOM. I can’t be more specific.’

MINATOM was the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry, a vast department which had a history of not being specific.

‘How much?’

‘One thousand five hundred grammes.’

‘What’s he bringing it in?’

‘A suitcase with a shielded canister inside.’

‘Concealed or loose?’

‘Loose, we think.’

‘How pure is it?’

‘Ninety-four per cent.’

‘Anything else?’

‘He may be carrying quantities of Lithium-6.’

‘How much?’

‘We don’t know. Probably two to four kilos. Maybe nothing.’

‘Do you know the target?’

‘No.’

‘What about the end user?’

‘Unidentified.’

Rogachev glanced at the notes Marshall was taking. Bread, sugar, bacon, olive oil, kilos and grammes, pounds and ounces; it appeared to be a conventional shopping list. When they were finished, Rogachev paid in cash, leaving an extravagant tip. They collected their coats and stepped outside. The rain was heavier; there was a flash of lightning, a five-second pause and a rumble of thunder that was almost inaudible over the chorus of screeching horns. The soaked van driver was shouting. Rogachev erected an umbrella. He seemed amused by the scene in front of him.

Marshall was thinking ahead. The disk, the drop in Montmartre, then back to the Gare du Nord. From a public pay-phone, the London number that he’d memorized, the message relayed, then back to Saint Denis, perhaps stopping off at a café for a cup of coffee. Or something stronger. Then tomorrow, the delivery. A plain brown envelope, he expected. Full of francs …

It wasn’t thunder. It was louder than that. And sharper. The liquid that splattered across his face wasn’t rain, either. It was hot.

The umbrella slipped from Rogachev’s grasp. A gust of wind carried it away. Another deafening crack and he was spinning. Marshall didn’t move. Shock insulated him from what was happening around him. Time slowed to a standstill. He had no idea where the source of the noise was. He saw faces turning in the rain, hands rising to mouths, eyes widening. Nobody was paying attention to the van driver any more. Rogachev fell forward, smacking against the car at the kerb before collapsing to the ground. He left blood across the white bonnet. Rain diluted it pink.

Curiously, Marshall found himself thinking about the good old days.

1

She’s eighteen months old. Two years ago, she was twenty-five years old.

They made love slowly but it was a hot afternoon and soon their bodies were slick. Laurent Masson was a tall man with no fat on his sinewy frame; dark-haired, dark-skinned, dark dirt beneath his fingernails. When she’d first seen him, Stephanie had thought he looked slightly seedy, which she liked. She, by contrast, had never looked more wholesome, which she also liked. Plump breasts, the curved suggestion of a belly, a dimple in the soft flesh above each buttock. She’d allowed her hair to grow; thick and dark, it fell between her shoulders down half her spine. Summer sun had tanned her normally pale skin, a healthy diet had improved her complexion.

The first-floor bedroom was small; a high ceiling, floorboards worn smooth, two tatty Yemeni rugs, a narrow double bed with a wrought-iron frame. On one wall, there was a mottled full-length mirror. On the opposite wall, there were six sepia photographs of Provence’s brutal beauty.

Masson was on his back, Stephanie above him, his body between her thighs. Slowly, she rocked back and forth, trailing her fingertips across his chest and stomach. Neither of them spoke and there was no hint of a breeze to cool them. When she came, she closed her eyes, dropped her head back and bit her fleshy lower lip.

Later, Masson smoked a cigarette, rolling his ash onto a dirty china saucer. Stephanie stood by the window, naked and damp. Her gaze followed the land, falling away from the farmhouse, across the vineyard and the dirt track that bisected it. The vines shimmered in the heat. Somewhere at the bottom of the valley, screened by emerald trees, there was the road. To the right, Entrecasteaux, to the left, Salernes. Beyond either, the real world.

‘Last night, the dogs were barking all down the valley.’

Behind her, Masson shifted, the bed-springs creaking. ‘They kept you awake?’

She nodded. ‘Some were howling.’

‘You should have spent the night with me.’

‘Actually, I liked it. It sounded … sad.’ She crossed her arms. ‘Sad but beautiful.’

‘Will I see you later?’

‘If you want to.’

‘Do you want to?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t know. I never know what you think.’

‘Lucky you.’

Laurent leaves. From the yard, I watch his old Fiat lurch along the track, kicking up clouds of golden dirt. When the dust has settled, I go inside and make tea. The kitchen is cool and dark; a stone floor, terracotta walls, a heavy oak table flanked by benches. Bees murmur by the small square window over the sink. French windows open onto a terrace. A blanket of greenery laid over wooden beams provides dappled shade. Behind the house, olive trees are organized along terraces that climb the hill.

The farm belongs to a thirty-five-year-old German investment banker who was transferred from Frankfurt to Tokyo eighteen months ago. Initially, I rented it for six months through an agency in Munich. That was just over a year ago; I’m seven weeks into my third rental period. The roof leaks in places, some of the plasterwork is crumbling, the windows and doors are ill-fitting. But I don’t mind. In fact, I prefer it this way. It feels more like a home. Then again, how would I know? I’ve lived in too many places to count but not one of them has been a home.

When the tea is ready, I take it outside. The fragrance of summer is as strong as its colour; scents of citrus and lavender envelop me. I love days like this as much as the severer days of mid-December, when fierce winds scrape the harsh landscape, when rain explodes from pewter clouds that seem only just out of reach. Then, the dusty track turns to glycerine, cutting me off from the road. I always enjoy the artificial isolation that follows.

There is a large fireplace in the sitting room and a good supply of logs in the lean-to behind the outhouse. For me, there is a childish comfort in being warm and dry as I listen to the storm outside. I was raised in north Northumberland, close to the border with Scotland. Wild weather was a feature of my childhood. More than a mere memory, it’s a part of me.

That’s the thing about me, I suppose. I’m a collection of parts that never adds up to a whole. With me, two plus two comes to five. Or three. Or anything except four.

As far as the people around here are concerned, I am Stephanie Schneider, a Swiss with no parents, no siblings, no baggage. I live off a meagre inheritance. I spend my days reading, drawing, walking. I came from nowhere and one day I’ll return there. That’s what’s expected by those who gossip about me. Apparently, I’ve slept with a couple of men in the area – surprising choices, some say – and now I’m seeing Masson, the mechanic from Salernes. Another outsider, he’s from Marseille. The local word is, it’s a casual relationship.

This happens to be true. It’s because I can’t cope with commitment. Not yet – it’s too early for me – maybe not ever. But I am making progress.

I read my book for ten minutes – The Murdered House by Pierre Magnan – and then lay it to one side. From where I’m sitting, I can see my laptop on the fridge. There’s a fine layer of dust on the lid. It must be nearly a month since I last switched it on. In the beginning, it was two or three times a day. Slowly but surely, I’m severing my ties to the old world. With each passing day, I feel increasingly regenerated. But this process has not been without its setbacks.

The first man I had an affair with after moving here was a doctor from Draguignan named Olivier. I should have known better; he was very good-looking, always a danger sign. We met in Entrecasteaux during the firework display to commemorate Bastille Day. He was charming and amusing, so I started seeing him, which was when he changed. Sometimes, he would be jealous, at other times, indifferent. When I walked into a room, it was impossible to know whether he would say something wonderful or cruel. He was not interested in equilibrium; we had to be soaring or falling. And if we were falling, there would be reconciliation so that we could soar again. For someone of my age, I’ve had more than my fair share of highs and lows. The last thing I needed was Olivier’s amateur dramatics.

The night we separated, I drove to his house in Draguignan. The previous evening, he’d come out to the farmhouse. He’d arrived two hours late. The dinner I’d cooked had spoiled but he couldn’t bring himself to apologize. We had sex – it was coarse and uncaring – and in the morning, between waking and leaving, he managed to insult me four times without even realizing it. Not that I minded; I was already over him. I phoned him later that morning and said I would come to his house and cook for him again, and that I’d appreciate it if he was on time for once.

He was only an hour late. I put the plate before him – beef casserole in a red wine sauce – and filled our glasses.

‘You’re not eating?’

‘I ate when it was ready,’ I told him. ‘An hour ago …’

He shrugged and began to fork food into his mouth. I watched in silence as he finished the plate and took some more. When he finally laid his knife and fork together, I rose from my chair and dropped his spare keys onto the table.

‘I’ve taken my spare set back. Here are yours.’

He looked down at the keys, then up at me. ‘What is this?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Some kind of joke?’

I resisted a cutting retort and simply shook my head.

A frown darkened his face. ‘What are you saying, Stephanie?’

‘You drink with your friends but not with me. You fuck me but won’t kiss me.’

He sat back in his chair and sucked in a lungful of air. ‘So –’

‘So nothing.’ I didn’t want to hear a second-hand apology. ‘It’s over.’

‘Wait a minute …’

‘Why?’

‘Why?’

‘Yes. Why? Why wait? Why waste any more time?’

‘Can’t we at least talk about it?’

‘My mind is made up.’

‘What about me?’

I think I smiled at him. ‘Exactly.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You know. And if you don’t … well, it makes no difference.’

I picked up my car keys, which were lying on the draining board beside the sink.

‘Stephanie …’

I turned round. Given an opportunity, he couldn’t think of anything to say, so I said, ‘One last thing, before I go.’

‘What?’

‘Did you enjoy your dinner?’

He looked confused. ‘What?’

‘It’s a simple question. Did you enjoy it? Yes or no?’

He shrugged. ‘Sure, I guess. It was fine …’

I walked over to the swing-bin beside the door, stuck my arm inside, found the empty can and tossed it to him. ‘You’re a spoilt child, Olivier. For someone with some intelligence, your behaviour is moronic.’

He glanced at the label. ‘Dog food?’

‘Not just any old dog food, darling. Premium quality dog food.’

‘You gave me dog food?’

‘I wanted to do something that would make you understand.’

‘Understand what?’

‘How you’ve made me feel over the last few weeks.’

Stranded for a reply, all he managed was: ‘You said it was beef casserole!’

‘It was. Made with dog food. Beef heart and something else, I think … it’s on the label.’

The colour drained from his face. I couldn’t tell whether it was rage or nausea.

‘You lost interest in me but you lacked the courage to tell me.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Are you seeing someone else?’

He faltered. Then: ‘No.’

‘You are, aren’t you?’

‘No.’

I didn’t want an apology, just a slither of honesty. ‘Come on …’

His expression hardened. ‘Okay. If you have to know … yes.’

The change of heart was too abrupt. It left me more uncertain than before. I had the feeling his admission was a lie, designed to hurt me while he still could. Either way, I no longer cared. It was typical of Olivier not to see that.

‘Well,’ I said, unable to resist the cheap shot, ‘that would explain the drop-off in your sexual performance, I suppose. Recently, you’ve been dismal.’ Before he could respond, I went on. ‘The point is, you don’t feel anything for me and I no longer feel anything for you, so what’s the use?’

Outraged, he rose to his feet and jabbed a finger at me. ‘I can’t believe this! You … you’re …’

He frothed, spluttered and, eventually, found his insult. He called me frigid. A frigid Swiss bitch. It sounded so helpless and absurd – so castrated – that I should have felt a pinch of pity for him. But I didn’t. Instead, I laughed and Olivier, his anger now complete, threw a slap at me.

What happened next was automatic. I feinted to my left, ducking outside the arc cast by his arm. I intercepted his hand, crushed the fingers into a ball and twisted it. All in half a second. I heard his wrist crack, felt two fingers breaking. As he sank to his knees, I let go of him, took a step back, spun on one foot, lashed out with the other and broke three ribs.

The next thing I remember, I was standing over him. I was silent. The only sound in the room was Olivier’s breathing. He was gurgling like a baby. There was blood on his face, there were fragments of teeth on the floor.

In some ways, I think Olivier recovered quicker than I did. It certainly crushed my complacency. I had come to believe that I’d purged that part of my past. Now I know better and don’t take anything for granted. Violence is a part of me and probably always will be. I was manufactured to be that way.

After Olivier, there was Remy, a professor of economics from Toulouse who was taking a year-long sabbatical in order to write a book. That was nice. Older, wiser, more civilized, for a while the whole affair seemed more in keeping with my new frame of mind. But after three months, he started to talk about the future, about a life in Toulouse. The first hint of permanency was the beginning of the end.

Now, there is Laurent. I told him at the start not to expect any commitment.

‘I’ve only been divorced for three months,’ he replied. ‘The last thing I need right now is commitment. I just want an easy life. Some good times …’

Which is how it has been, so far. He’s bright, witty, kind. He’s wasted as a mechanic in Salernes. Then again, who am I to speak? After all that’s happened to me, I could live this way for years and not grow bored with it. I don’t know what the future holds and I don’t care. For the first time in my life, I’m happy with the present. Doing nothing and being nowhere seem perfect.

These days, when I think of 20 January 2000 and that tiny room on the second floor of that run-down hotel in Bilbao, I think to myself, was that really me?

She spent the afternoon at one end of the highest olive terrace, sketching the ruined shepherd’s hut at the farm’s edge. She made four drawings from two vantage points, ink and charcoal on paper. There was a constant hot breeze. By the time she returned to the house, she felt the sun and dust on her skin. She left the drawings on the slate worktop, drank a glass of water, refilled it and went upstairs.

The free-standing bath stood at the centre of the bathroom on heavy iron legs. The rusted taps coughed when turned. Stephanie pulled her linen dress over her head, dropped it onto the scrubbed wooden floor and lowered herself into the water. Through a circular window, she watched the vineyards turning blue in the evening light.

A steam shroud rose from the surface. She closed her eyes and the present made way for the past: an airless top floor flat in Valletta with a view of the fort; the crowded lobby of the Hotel Inter-Continental in Belgrade; Salman Rifat pouring olive oil onto her skin; a bout of dysentery contracted in Kinshasa; TV pictures of pieces of wreckage from flight NE027 floating on the North Atlantic; the message on the screen – I have work for you, if you’re interested; Bilbao.

Eighteen months ago, these memories would have provoked panic. Now, Stephanie felt calm in their company. She accepted they would never go away but the further she moved away from them, the easier it became. She was starting to feel disconnected from them. In time, she hoped she might almost believe that they belonged to someone else.

The door onto the street was open. Masson’s apartment was in a narrow side street off the main square in Entrecasteaux. A first floor with high ceilings, patches of damp and rotten shutters that opened onto a shallow balcony. The bedroom was at the back, overlooking an internal courtyard that reeked of damp in the winter. During the summer, it was a humid air-trap.

Masson was barefoot, his hair still wet from his shower. He wore faded jeans and a green cotton shirt, untucked and badly creased. Like his apartment, he was a mess. It suited him.

They ate chicken and salad, followed by locally produced apricots. The sweet juice stained Stephanie’s fingers. Later, they went to the bar on the square. Small, stuffy, starkly lit, it lacked charm, but Masson was friendly with the patron and Stephanie had grown to know the people who went there. There was a TV on a wall bracket in one corner, a European football tie on the screen, a partisan group gathered in front of it. Behind the bar, there were faded photographs of a dozen Olympique Marseille teams, all taken in the Stade Vélodrome. Children scuttled in and out of the bar, some dressed in the white and sky-blue football shirts of l’OM. It was quarter to midnight by the time Stephanie and Masson returned to his apartment. A little tired, a little drunk, they made clumsy love.

In the morning, Stephanie woke first and went out to collect fresh bread. When she returned, Masson was making coffee, smoking his first cigarette of the day.

‘Are you busy tonight?’

‘Yes.’

He turned to look at her. ‘Really?’

‘You seem surprised.’

He looked back at the ground coffee in the pot. ‘Not really. It’s just …’

‘Just what?’

‘I don’t know …’

‘It’s okay, Laurent. I’m not busy.’

Uncertainty made way for a lopsided grin. ‘No?’

‘I just don’t want you to take me for granted.’

‘How could I? I don’t even know you. You tell me that you have a temper but I’ve never seen it.’ Stephanie grinned too. Masson let it drop, as she knew he would. ‘You want to come here again?’

‘Why don’t you come out to me?’

‘Okay. I’ll be finished in the garage at about six thirty, seven.’

When Masson went to work, Stephanie climbed into her second-hand Peugeot 106 and drove back to the farmhouse. She parked beneath a tree and left the windows rolled down. Despite the cool dawn, it was already a hot morning, a firm wind among the leaves and branches. The lavender bushes were clouds of bright purple that whispered to her as she climbed up the stone steps to the rough gravel beside the terrace.

It wasn’t anything she saw or heard that made her stop. It was a feeling, a tightness in the chest. Just like her reaction to Olivier’s slap, it was an instinct she couldn’t rinse from her system. She stood still, held her breath and felt her pulse accelerate. There was no apparent reason for it; no door forced, no window broken, nothing out of place. She waited. Still nothing. She told herself she’d imagined it. But as she took a step forward, she heard a noise. A soft scrape, perhaps. One hard surface against another. The sound was barely audible over the wind. It could have been the gentle clatter of a branch on the clay tiles of the barn, or the creak of a rotten shutter on a rusty hinge.

The memory triggered the response. The mind functioned like a computer. Gathering information, analysing it, forming strategy, assessing risk. She felt herself begin to move, directed by a will that didn’t seem to be her own.

She hummed a tune to herself as she strolled round the farmhouse to the back. To look at, a girl without a care in the world. Behind the house, she shed her shoes and clutched the drainpipe which rose to the roof gutter. When she’d moved in, it had been loose. During her first week, she’d bolted it to the stone wall herself.

She began the climb, the surface abrasive against the soles of her feet, the paint flaking against her palms. She was out of practice, testing tissue that had softened or tightened, but her technique remained intact. She pulled back the shutter – always closed, never fastened – and made the swing to the window, grasping the wooden frame, hauling herself up and through, and into a tiny room that the leasing company had fraudulently described as a third bedroom.

She paused on the landing to check for sound but heard nothing. In the second bedroom, which overlooked the courtyard at the rear of the house, she opened the only cupboard in the room, emptied the floor-space of shoes, pulled out the patch of mat beneath and lifted the central floorboard. Attached to a nail, there was a piece of washing line. At the end of it, there was a sealed plastic pouch, coated in dust and cobwebs.

For all the serenity of the life she’d made for herself, it had never occurred to Stephanie to dispense with her insurance. She took it out of the pouch. A gleaming 9mm SIG-Sauer P226. In the past, her gun of choice. She checked the weapon, then left the bedroom.

The staircase was the worst part, a narrow trap. She eased the safety off the SIG and descended, her naked feet silent on the smooth stone. On the ground floor, she moved like a ghost; the sitting room, the cloakroom, the study.

The intruder was in the kitchen. She felt his presence at the foot of the stairs but only spied him when she peered through a crack in the kitchen door, which was half open. She saw a patch of cream jacket, some back, a little shoulder, half an arm, an elbow. She tiptoed inside. He was facing the terrace entrance, his back to her. He was standing, as if expecting her. Perhaps he’d heard the Peugeot park; he couldn’t have seen her approach from the steps, not from any of the kitchen windows, and yet he seemed to know that she most often entered the farmhouse via the terrace.

Stephanie managed to place the cold metal tip of the SIG’s barrel against the nape of his neck before he stirred. When he did, it was nothing more than a gentle flinch. He made no attempt to turn around or to cry out with surprise. That was when she recognized the clipped, snow-white hair.

‘Hello, Miss Schneider.’ And the clipped Scottish accent. ‘Or should I say, Miss Patrick?’

2

You tell yourself it can’t be true. For once, you’re honest with yourself but your first reaction is denial. It has to be a mistake. Your mistake, somebody else’s, it doesn’t really matter. Any excuse will do when you can’t face the truth about yourself.

Everybody has a talent. This is what the cliché tells us. I think it depends on what you regard as a talent. When the lowest common denominator determines the threshold for that talent, almost anything can count; having a nice smile, being a good liar, not succumbing to obesity. Personally, though, I reject the idea that everybody has a gift. It’s rather like saying ‘art is for the people’. It isn’t. It’s for those who can appreciate it and understand it. It’s elitist. Just like talent.

Most people have no particular ability. Mediocrity is the only quality they have in abundance. I should know. For a long time, I was one of them. But that was before I discovered that there was an alternative me, that there was another world where I could rise above the rest and excel.

It’s one thing to discover you’re exceptional. It’s quite another to recognize that what makes you exceptional is unacceptable. What do you do when you finally see who you really are – what you really are – and it’s everything society rejects? You tell yourself it can’t be true. That’s what you do, that’s the first thing. And maybe it’s what you continue to do. But not me. I’d already lied to myself for long enough. When the moment came, I stopped pretending I was someone else and chose to be the real me instead. I chose to be honest.

Brutally honest.

‘How are you, Stephanie?’

Slowly, he turned round, his face emerging from her memory; ruddy skin stretched tightly across prominent bones, aquamarine eyes, that white hair. He was wearing a cream suit, a dark blue shirt open at the throat, a pair of polished black slip-ons.

‘I heard the rumours, of course. That Petra Reuter was back. Naturally, I didn’t believe them. But when it turned out that there was some substance to them, I assumed that someone had hijacked her identity in order to protect their own identity. Just as you once did.’ He squinted at her, perplexed, offended. ‘It never occurred to me that it might actually be you, the real Petra Reuter.’

Alexander was a man who believed mistakes were made by other people. That was why he was staring at her so intensely. He was looking for an answer.

‘I was sure that once you vanished, I would never hear of you again, let alone see you. But for more than two years, you were Petra. The question is, why?’

Stephanie said nothing.

‘And then you stopped. About eighteen months ago, wasn’t it? No reason, no warning. Again, the question is, why?’

Alexander. A man with no first name. A man she’d spent four years trying to forget.

‘What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?’ He took a packet of Rothmans out of his jacket pocket. ‘How unlike you.’

Stephanie couldn’t help herself. ‘Fuck off.’

She’d wanted to stay silent. Now, Alexander had his reaction. ‘That’s more like it.’

She jabbed the gun against the bridge of his nose. ‘Get out.’

‘Are you familiar with the phrase “act in haste, repent at leisure”?’

‘Are you familiar with the phrase “I’m going to count to three”?’

He didn’t even blink.

‘You rented this property through the Braun-Stahl agency in Munich. You bought your Peugeot from Yves Monteanu, a dental technician from St Raphael. Did you know that his father was a Romanian dissident? He used to publish an underground pamphlet in Bucharest each month. All through the seventies and into the eighties. A brave but foolish –’

‘One.’

‘No, I don’t suppose you did,’ Alexander concluded. ‘But that would be because you didn’t do as much research as we did. You know what we’re like, though, how thorough we are. For instance, I know that you rarely stray further than Entrecasteaux or Salernes. I know you have a checking account with Crédit Lyonnais that receives fifty thousand francs a month. Which seems a lot, considering the life you’re leading. Each month, it’s from a different source that vanishes as soon as the transaction’s complete. A neat trick – one day, you’ll have to explain it to me. I also know that you’re having a relationship with Laurent Masson, a car mechanic from Marseille. I assume you know that Masson has an ex-wife …’

‘Two.’

‘… but I wonder whether he’s told you about his criminal record.’ Stephanie was betrayed by her expression. ‘I didn’t think so.’ Alexander took his time, making a play out of plucking a cigarette from the packet. He tapped it on the lid. ‘He’s a car thief. Three convictions to his name. Last time out, he got four months inside. That was when his wife decided she’d had enough. She moved out. Took everything with her; furniture, carpets, curtains, the lot. You can imagine his surprise on the day of his release when he got back home. Mind you, it must have made it easier just to walk away … there being nothing to walk away from.’

Stephanie increased the pressure of metal on skin.

Alexander met her stare fully. ‘Three?’

There was a moment where she could have done it. In her mind, there was nothing but static. It was fifty-fifty. She felt that Alexander sensed it too, yet he hadn’t backed down.

She eased the safety on. ‘What are you doing here?’

When she pulled the gun away, it left a pale, circular indentation over the bridge of his nose.

‘I guess Masson thought he’d come to a quiet little town like Salernes – or Entrecasteaux, for that matter – where nobody’d bother him. Where he could start to build a new life for himself. Just like you. Right?’

There was a briefcase on the kitchen table. He opened it and produced an A4-sized manila envelope, which he handed to her.

‘Take a look.’

Inside, there were about twenty photographs, half of them in black-and-white. The first was of a school playground, five girls in uniform, aged seven or eight. They were playing, laughing. From the grain of the print, Stephanie could tell that the photographer had used a zoom lens. For a few moments, the significance of the shot wasn’t apparent. But then she saw.

It was the hair that fooled her. Brown and thick, it was almost waist-length. Four years ago, it had been cropped short. She was tall, too, taller than the girls around her. As a four-year-old, she’d been small for her age. Now, she’d caught up with her school friends and surged ahead. The facial features began to chime; Christopher’s nose, Jane’s eyes. The girl at the centre of the photograph was Polly, her niece.

‘I don’t believe you’ve ever seen Philip, have you? The last time you saw your sister-in-law she was pregnant with him. We were standing on the road overlooking Falstone Cemetery. Your family were burying you after your fatal car crash. Remember?’

Stephanie ignored the barb. There were five photographs taken on a beach. Bamburgh, perhaps, or maybe Seahouses. Those were the beaches Stephanie’s parents had taken them to as children. They’d remained popular with Christopher and Jane and their children. She saw James and Polly running through ankle-deep surf, Christopher with his trousers rolled up to the knee, Philip on his shoulders, tiny hands in his hair. It looked like a windy day. As she remembered them, they always were. There was a golden retriever in two of the shots. She wanted to know if it was theirs but knew she couldn’t ask. The final photographs were taken at their home, overlooking Falstone; Christopher rounding up sheep in the field below the paddock, Jane captured in the bathroom window, unfastening her bra, unaware. Stephanie recognized an implied threat when she saw it.

She put the prints on the table. ‘I imagine there’s a point to this.’

‘Been to Paris recently?’

She said nothing.

‘What do you know about James Marshall?’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘How about Oleg Rogachev?’

‘No.’

Alexander finally lit his cigarette. ‘Ever heard of a man named Koba?’

‘No.’

‘Another Russian.’

‘I would never have guessed.’

‘Not even when you were Petra?’

‘No.’

‘I have a proposition for you …’

‘Not a chance.’

‘You haven’t heard it yet.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I’m not interested.’

‘You will be. So why don’t you sit down and listen?’

She remained standing.

Alexander looked bored. ‘I’m not leaving until you hear me out.’

‘Then get on with it.’

‘You have no right to expect any leniency from me, you know. You belonged to Magenta House. You still do. The last four years count for nothing. You should bear that in mind when you consider my proposition, which is this: one job in two or three parts –’

‘No.’

Alexander continued as though he hadn’t heard her. ‘Afterwards … well, you’ll be free. You won’t have to see me again. A pleasure for both of us, I’m sure.’

‘No.’

‘Stephanie …’

‘You don’t understand. I can’t work for you again.’

‘You mean, you won’t.’

‘I mean, I can’t. I’ve changed.’

‘We’ve all changed. Some of us more than others. But no one changes quite like you. Changing is what you do best, Stephanie. And once you’ve changed into Petra Reuter and taken care of business, you’ll be free to change back into who you are now. Or anyone else you might want to be.’

‘Didn’t you hear what I said? I’ll never work for you again. I’d sooner be dead.’

Alexander took a long, theatrical drag, then exhaled slowly, smoke spilling from his nostrils. ‘I don’t expect you to agree. Not here, not now. You have your pride. But when you manage to put that to one side, you’ll see that this is a good offer.’ He picked up the photographs from the table. ‘It’s Monday afternoon now. I’ll expect you at Magenta House by the end of the week.’

‘You must be out of your mind.’

His shrug was dismissive. ‘You seem to have made a good life for yourself here. Why ruin it? Why go back on the run? Which is what you’ll have to do. Think about it. You can set yourself free.’ He was about to put the photographs back into his briefcase but changed his mind. ‘I’ll leave these with you.’

‘You don’t really think you’ll see me again, do you?’

‘Were you really going to shoot me?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t.’ He headed for the terrace, then paused. On the slate worktop, next to the sink, were the drawings she’d made of the shepherd’s hut the previous afternoon. He picked one up and examined it. ‘Yours?’

‘Get out.’

He dropped the sketch back onto the pile with casual contempt. ‘You should stick to killing people, Stephanie. That’s where your real talent lies.’

‘I’m retired.’

Alexander smiled. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen him do that. He said, ‘You’re twenty-seven. You’re too young to retire.’

Stephanie watched Alexander walk down the track towards the road. She hadn’t noticed a car on her return from Entrecasteaux. Perhaps he had a driver nearby. She didn’t wait for him to fade from view.

You can make a home for yourself, you can make a life for yourself, but don’t make anything for yourself that you can’t walk away from in a second.

There was no need to think. The procedure was self-activating.

She collected a paring knife from a kitchen drawer and went upstairs to her bedroom. Beneath her bed, there was an old leather suitcase with brass locks. She opened it and slit the stained fabric lining near the bottom, so that the contents would not be damaged. A German passport in the name of Franka Müller and two thousand Deutschmarks. That was enough to get her to Helsinki. There, in a safe-deposit box at the 1572 Senaatintori branch of the Merita-Nordbanken on Aleksanterinkatu, the ingredients of Franka Müller’s life awaited collection; keys to a rented bed-sit in Berlin that was paid for monthly by direct debit to a management agency, a birth certificate, a valid American Express card, a German driving licence, personal bank records. A dormant but complete identity.

She opened the cupboard to the right of the bed and stood on a chair so that she could reach the back of the top shelf. Behind an old shoe-box, there was a small black rucksack. Everything was already packed; some underwear, socks, a pair of trainers, a pair of black jeans (now probably too tight), a couple of T-shirts, a sweatshirt, a thin grey anorak with a hood. Also, a wash-bag containing a few toiletries and a medical pack that included sutures, disinfectant and painkillers.

Stephanie looked at her watch. It was only ten thirty. Traffic permitting, she’d be at Nice airport by twelve thirty. From there, one way or another, she’d make sure she was in Helsinki before the end of the day. Tomorrow, once she’d gathered the rest of Franka Müller, she would have the whole world in which to lose herself. Tomorrow, there would be no trace of Stephanie Schneider left on the planet.

Seven fifteen. Masson entered the kitchen from the terrace, as he sometimes did, and stopped. On the floor, there was smashed crockery, shattered glass, cutlery. The wooden chair that had been next to the fridge was broken. Not just a slat here or a leg there, but destroyed.

He shouted her name but got no response.

In the sitting room, books had been torn from their shelves and hurled about the room. A turquoise china vase lay in pieces in the cast-iron grate. He ran upstairs to the bedroom; untouched, she wasn’t in it. Back in the kitchen, he noticed blood for the first time. A trail of glossy drops led through the back door and vanished into the coarse grass outside. He looked up and saw her sitting beneath an olive tree, legs dangling over a stone ledge.

‘Stephanie!’

She’d been ready to leave before Alexander had reached the road. But she hadn’t. She’d hesitated. Now, she found she couldn’t remember quite why. An hour had passed. Her mind had drifted. She’d been perversely calm. Later, she’d walked among the vines, and among the lemon trees on the steep bank that rose to the east. Sometime during the afternoon, though, the psychological anaesthetic had begun to fade. First there was sorrow, then incandescent fury.

‘Your hand,’ panted Masson, as he reached her and dropped to her side, ‘what happened to your hand?’

Both hands were in her lap. The left was lacerated over the back and across the knuckles. Sharp fragments protruded from dark sticky cuts.

‘What happened?’

She had no sequential recollection of the passage from late afternoon into early evening. The black rucksack was by the front door. She couldn’t remember putting it there but she did know that Franka Müller’s passport and Deutschmarks were tucked into a side pocket.

‘Should I call the police?’

She shook her head.

He began to protest but stopped himself. ‘You need to see a doctor.’

She saw herself spinning like a dancer. A whirlwind of fury, striking out at anything, her vision blurred by tears of frustration and rage. She wasn’t sure what she’d hit but the pain had been cathartic. As she knew it would be.

They turned off the main road, Masson’s Fiat creaking over the winding track. The headlights flickered on the vines, bugs dancing in weak yellow light. Neither had spoken since leaving Salernes. There were four stitches in the back of Stephanie’s left hand. The smaller cuts and grazes had been picked clean and disinfected. She’d declined the offer of painkillers.

They entered the kitchen. Masson’s eyes were drawn to the one thing he’d missed earlier: the gun by the sink. Stephanie watched him pick up the SIG and turn it over in his hands. She saw anxiety creep across his face.

‘Is this yours?’

She could see that he desperately wanted the answer to be no. ‘Yes.’

‘What are you doing with a piece of hardware like this, Stephanie?’

‘Don’t ask.’

‘I am asking. Just like I’m asking what happened here.’

‘I can give you answers, if you want. But they’ll be lies.’

‘You owe me more than this.’

‘I don’t owe you anything,’ she snapped. ‘No commitments, remember?’

‘Don’t you think this is different?’

‘I think we all have our secrets, Laurent. Pieces of the past that are better left in the past.’ She let him consider that for a few seconds. ‘What do you think?’

He turned away from her. ‘I think I’ll start to clear up some of this mess.’

She reached out and put her good hand on his arm. ‘Not now. It can wait.’

They ate bread and cheese. Masson opened a bottle of wine. They sat at the table on the terrace listening to the chorus of cicadas. When they’d finished, he cleared away their plates and returned with coffee and a dusty bottle of Armagnac. She said she didn’t want any. He said it was medicinal, so she relented and he poured an inch into a dirty tumbler.

When she’d decided not to run, she hadn’t had a reason. It had simply been instinct. Now, she saw why. Alexander had been unarmed. Subconsciously, that fact had registered. No gun, no accomplices, no protection at all. Under the circumstances, an incredible risk. She could have killed him in a moment. He would have had no chance at all. Hindsight prompted the question: why?

Masson poured a glass for himself. ‘Look, about before. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay. But if you do, you can trust me.’

‘I know.’ She gathered her tumbler in both hands and stared at her stitches. ‘Someone came to see me today.’

‘Who?’

‘A man from my past.’

‘What did he want?’

‘A bit of my future.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know yet.’

Masson avoided eye contact and made a show of picking at a thread on the seam of his trousers. ‘That gun … I mean, if you’re in some kind of trouble … if you need help, there are people I used to know who …’

‘I know.’

He looked up at her. ‘You know what?’

‘Why you’re a mechanic.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I know you like cars, Laurent. You like them a lot.’

They sat in silence for a minute before Masson spoke again. ‘Anyway, like I was saying, I know some people who –’

‘It won’t make a difference.’

‘Well, if you change your mind …’

‘Thanks.’

He lit a cigarette. ‘The people in those photographs in the kitchen. Who are they?’

Stephanie shrugged. ‘Just a family I used to know.’

The struggle lasted through Tuesday and Wednesday. She barely slept, barely ate. Sometimes she panicked, sometimes she was almost catatonic. All her arguments seemed circular; her new life was worth fighting for, worth revisiting the past for, except nothing was worth that, nothing except the chance to leave it behind permanently.

On Wednesday, she spent the whole day in the hills, beneath a fierce sun, among the jagged rocks and thorny bushes. She could run, she knew that. And perhaps she’d stay ahead of Magenta House but for how long? If she stopped, they’d find her again. She saw now that it would only be a matter of time. And even if they didn’t find her, the possibility would linger. No matter how hard she tried to pretend it hadn’t, the threat had always been there.

More than anything, she wanted to stop running. The life she’d created for herself at the farmhouse had taught her that, if nothing else. Ultimately, she didn’t know where she was destined to settle. But that didn’t matter. It was the act that was important, not the location. To abandon the dream was to let Alexander win. That had been the insurance against the risk he’d taken in approaching her unarmed. He hadn’t offered his word as a guarantee because he knew she’d reject it – there could never be trust between them – but perhaps the risk had been a gesture of good faith.

By dusk, her feet were blistered, her skin burnt, her mind scorched.

The pretence was over, the memories resurrected. That night, she couldn’t sleep. Repulsion, fear and anger kept her awake. Later, at dawn, there were moments when she almost convinced herself that it wouldn’t be too bad. It’s just one job. But she knew that wasn’t true. Eighteen months of a real life had seen to that. No amount of effort would ever reclaim the edge she’d once had. Despite everything, that made her happy because it made her human.

Magenta House. An organization that doesn’t exist, run by people who don’t exist. An ironic consequence of the modern era. In a time of greater openness, somebody still has to get into the sewer to deal with the rats.

I don’t know how many assassins Magenta House operates – four or five, I should think, perhaps six – but I do know that I was unique among them. They were simply trained in the art of assassination. I was trained for more. Operating under the alias Petra Reuter – a German student turned activist turned mercenary terrorist – I was taught to infiltrate, seduce, lie, eavesdrop, steal, kill. I learnt how to withstand pain and how to inflict it.

It’s been four years since I vanished and I’ve been running ever since, first as Petra, then as me. Even now, after more than a full year living here, I’m still on the run. Alexander’s terms represent an opportunity to stop.

On paper, it’s an easy choice. One job buys any future I want. But I’ve changed since I stopped being Petra. I think I’m becoming the person Stephanie Patrick should have been. And that’s the problem. She might be difficult and selfish – she might be a complete bitch – but she’s not an assassin. Not like Petra, who was never anything else.

I find myself thinking about people like Jean-Marc Houtens, Li Ching Xai, John Peltor, Zvonimir Vujovic, Esteban Garcia. Like Petra Reuter, they are names without faces. I wonder what they’re doing at this precise moment, wherever in the world they are. Petra’s was never a large profession. Sure, you can find a killer on a street corner in the run-down district of any city. You can even find self-styled assassins relatively easily; in the Balkans, or the Middle East, you can’t move for enthusiastic amateurs. But those of us who formed the elite numbered no more than a dozen. Our backgrounds were diverse but we were united by the quality of our manufacture.

I used to imagine meeting other members of the club. I pictured us around a table in a restaurant, trading industry secrets, putting faces to names, assessing the competition. I’d hear gossip from time to time. Usually from Stern, the information broker, who’d offer a morsel in the hope that I would pay for something juicier. For instance, I know that former US Marine John Peltor was responsible for the Kuala Lumpur car-bomb that killed the Indonesian ambassador last year. And that Li Ching Xai was the one who murdered Alfred Reed, founder of the Reed Media Group, in Mumbai in May 1999. A five-hundred-yard head shot in a stiff crosswind, according to Stern.

When I was Petra Reuter, none of the concerns of Stephanie Patrick affected me. Nor did any of the issues surrounding my profession. I didn’t worry about morality. I worried about efficiency. I didn’t worry about the target. If I was offered the contract, he or she was already dead because if I didn’t accept the work, somebody else would. When I looked through a telescopic sight, or into the eyes of the victim, I never saw a person. I never thought about the money, either; that came later. Instead, I was always thinking … would any of the others have done this better than me?

As any female in a predominantly male profession knows, you have to be better than the men just to be equal with them.

Thursday morning. Stephanie watched the sun come up from the terrace. It was chilly for a while. Later, Masson appeared, a cup of coffee in his hand, stubble on his jaw.

‘So, you’re going, then?’

‘You saw the bag?’

‘I saw what you’re leaving behind.’

‘Meaning?’

‘The clothes you’ve left in the cupboard – well, I wouldn’t take them either.’

‘They wouldn’t fit you.’

‘You’d be surprised what I can get into.’

‘The image in my mind is not a pretty one.’

He grinned, then said, ‘Look, are you sure you know what you’re doing?’

‘To be honest, not really. But I know what will happen if I don’t go and that’s something I can’t face. The last year and a bit has been really good for me but before that, well …’

‘What?’

She sighed deeply. ‘For a long time, it was a bad time.’

‘You’re not the only one,’ he said, in a tone that was sympathetic rather than confrontational.

‘I know.’

‘What did you do?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Stephanie …’

‘Just like I don’t want to know about your convictions for auto-theft.’

For a moment, he was stunned. Then he shook his head. ‘You knew?’

‘Not until the other day. But that’s the world I was in. I knew things I never wanted to know. Saw things I wish I could forget. For months, then years, I drifted from one bad hotel to another, from one country to the next, and the things I did … they were …’

She faltered and he put his hands on her shoulders. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

Looking at Masson, she felt helpless. ‘Laurent, I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘I should have said something.’

‘No. I don’t think so. We’ve had a good time, just the way it’s been.’

She couldn’t bring herself to look into his eyes. ‘True.’

‘I always knew it wouldn’t be forever with you. That was part of the attraction.’

‘Thanks very much.’

‘You know what I mean.’

She nodded. ‘I am planning on coming back, though. If I can …’

He took her right hand in his. ‘Let’s not talk about it. Let’s sit here and drink coffee in the sun. We can pretend you’re going away and that you’ll be back for the weekend. I’ll cook something special for you. We’ll make love, drink too much wine. And we’ll do the same thing the day after, the week after … and before you know it, summer will be gone and it’ll be autumn.’

3

Stephanie had never imagined that the sight of Brentford would trigger any kind of emotion within her. But there it was, a tightening in the chest. She pressed her face to the window as the aircraft ducked out of the clouds. Terraced streets, crumbling tower blocks, storage depots. Her first sight of London in four years and she hadn’t missed it at all. What she felt was not some misplaced sense of nostalgia. It was anxiety.

She took the Underground into London, changed from the Piccadilly Line to the District Line at Gloucester Road, rising to the street at Embankment. It was hot and humid, the sky a dirty grey smudge. Tourists swarmed around hot-dog stands, the smell of fried onions corrupting the air. Across the Thames, the Millennium Wheel turned slowly. Stephanie slung her rucksack over her shoulder and entered Victoria Embankment Gardens. Through a veil of leaves, she saw Magenta House; a network of company offices housed within the single shell of two separate buildings. The main entrance was on the corner of Robert Street and Adelphi Terrace, where she recognized the thing she liked most about Magenta House: the brass plaque by the front door. Worn smooth by years of inclement weather and pollution, the engraved lettering was still legible. L.L. Herring & Sons, Ltd, Numismatists, Since 1789. She glanced up at the old security camera above the door. On the intercom next to the plaque, she pressed the button marked Adelphi Travel.

The voice was terse and tinny. ‘Yes?’

‘I’m here to see Alexander.’

‘Alexander who?’

‘Very funny.’

‘I think you must have the wrong –’

‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. It’s been four years.’

‘I’m sorry, madam, but –’

‘And you can drop the “madam” thing.’

‘There’s no one of that name –’

‘Just tell him Stephanie Patrick is here.’

Inside, the reception area was as she remembered it. On the wall to her right, there was a polished wooden board listing the names of companies. Some existed, others didn’t, and the relationship between them and Magenta House was as complex as the maze of corridors and staircases within the building. She remembered a few – Galbraith Shipping (UK), Truro Pacific – and saw others that were new: Galileo Resources, WB Armstrong Investments, Panatex Ltd. A bored-looking woman sat in front of a ten-year-old computer terminal, playing Hearts, smoking. Middle-aged beneath a crumbling mask of make-up, she was designer-shabby. Just like the security camera over the front door, the worn carpet and the faded blue-and-grey striped wallpaper. Each was a brick in the façade behind which Magenta House hid. Stephanie knew there were miniature security cameras concealed within the lights over the paintings, that the quaint front door was actually grenade-proof, that the weary harridan had a fully-loaded Glock attached to the underside of the table.

She spoke out of one corner of her mouth, the cigarette wedged in the other. ‘Down the hall, take the stairs and –’

‘I know the way.’

Margaret Hornby, Alexander’s secretary, was not at her desk. Stephanie opened the door and saw him standing by the window.

‘Don’t you believe in knocking?’

‘I don’t believe in anything. Not any more.’

‘You’re too old to play the teenage rebel, Stephanie.’

‘But too young to retire?’

She didn’t think anything had changed; the shelves crammed with leather-bound books along opposite walls, the Chesterfield sofa, the parquet floor and the Persian carpet, the antique Italian globe in the corner. She remembered how disappointed she’d been to learn that it wasn’t a tasteless drinks trolley.

‘What happened to your hand?’ asked Alexander.

‘I cut myself flossing.’

He let it pass and moved away from the window. Curiously, on home ground, he seemed more cautious.

‘You’ve made the right decision, you know.’

‘It had to happen some time.’

He slid an envelope across his desk. She picked it up and felt keys inside. There was an address on the front. Alexander said, ‘This is where you’ll stay. It’s a furnished rental. We start on Monday morning at nine. That gives you the weekend to get settled.’

Stephanie smiled without a trace of humour or warmth. ‘That’s going to take more than a weekend. That’s going to take years.’

The two-bedroom flat was on the top floor of a five-storey Victorian red-brick building on Bulstrode Street, just off Marylebone High Street. The communal entrance hall was dust and junk mail. The staircase grew narrower and darker with each floor. The locks on the front door had been changed. Inside, the air was still and stale. Stephanie dumped her rucksack in the hall and opened windows in a futile attempt to encourage a cleansing breeze.

The floors were sea-grass, except in the kitchen and bathroom, which were tiled. The walls were all painted off-white and the windows had blinds, not curtains. She ran a tap in the bathroom; there was hot water. In the kitchen, the stainless steel fridge was cool but empty. She looked through the cupboards. Nothing except a jar of Marmite and half a bag of long-grain rice. The main bedroom had a low double bed, a mattress as hard as concrete, and a pristine white duvet.

In the sitting room, there was a TV in one corner, a black leather sofa, a table with a top that was a large disc of etched glass. There were paperbacks on the shelves, CDs in a rack, framed black-and-white prints of pouting models down one wall. Definitely a man’s flat, Stephanie decided, but a real man? There were some framed snapshots on the mantelpiece above the Victorian fireplace. She picked one up; a shot of a pretty girl with long, light brown hair. She was smiling. Stephanie turned it over, released the clip and opened the back. The cosy, family photo had been culled from a glossy brochure. She examined the paperbacks. Not a single crease along a single spine.

Stephanie recognized the signs; the clumsy, artificial human touches that only served to underline the place’s cold sterility. Pure Magenta House.

After the rank heat of a Monday morning rush hour on the Underground, the cool air conditioning of the subterranean conference room was welcome. The walls and carpet were the same dark grey as her T-shirt. There were sixteen screens set into the wall on her left, in a four-by-four arrangement. At the centre of the room, there was an oval cherry table with ten chairs around it, black leather over graphite frames.

‘Hey, Stephanie.’

Stephanie turned round. Rosie Chaudhuri was standing in the doorway. She was slimmer than four years ago and it made her look younger. She wore a tight dark red knee-length skirt and a black silk shirt. Her lustrous black hair was gathered into a thick ponytail.

‘Rosie.’

‘I’m sorry to see you again.’

‘Me too.’

They smiled at each other.

‘Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea? A ticket out of here?’

‘Sounds good.’

‘You look well.’

‘So do you.’

When Alexander entered the room, Rosie left, taking the warmth with her. He sat at one end of the table, Stephanie sat at the other. There was no small talk. He pressed a button on a silver remote control and a single picture appeared over four screens; a black-and-white portrait of a dour-looking man with a long face, a craggy brow and thinning hair swept over the scalp from one ear to the other.

‘This is James Marshall. A former SIS employee who came to work for us and then retired early.’ Alexander shifted awkwardly. ‘Unfortunately, he developed a drink problem that … well, it got out of hand and affected his reliability.’

‘I can’t imagine how that could’ve happened working here.’

‘In the past, he’d proved to be an effective field operator. Which partly explains why, out of some misguided notion of loyalty, we continued to employ Marshall on an informal, part-time basis. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement; he got a little extra cash to supplement his disgraceful pension, we got someone we could rely upon for the odd job that was better handled by an outsider. Which was why, in April, I chose Marshall to run an errand for me in Paris. It seemed perfect since he chose to live in Paris after leaving us.’

Marshall’s face was replaced by some footage from a security camera. Run in slow motion, it showed a man moving through a customs hall before being beckoned by officials. The footage then froze to focus on him; tall, with sandy hair slanting across the forehead down towards the left eye. The next images were stills; head-and-shoulder shots from the front and side.

‘Hans Klepper, a Dutch career criminal based in Amsterdam, heroin his speciality, all of it through Indonesia, the routes secured by influential friends bribed in Jakarta. The video footage we’ve just seen was taken at Heathrow on December the sixteenth last year, as Klepper stepped off a flight from Baku. Acting on an SIS tip-off from Moscow, but originating in Novosibirsk, customs officials intercepted Klepper, who was travelling on a false Belgian passport. Being well aware of Klepper’s reputation, they expected to find him carrying heroin. Instead, they found Plutonium-239. Seventeen hundred and fifty grams of it with a purity of ninety-four per cent. Do you know why that’s significant?’

Stephanie shook her head.

‘Anything above ninety-three per cent purity is weapons-grade. What’s more, you only need about eight kilos of it to make a nuclear weapon. Klepper was carrying the Plutonium-239 in protective canisters inside two suitcases. He was also carrying quantities of Lithium-6, which enhances bomb yields, even though it’s not radioactive itself.’

‘What’s a heroin dealer doing with nuclear material?’

‘The obvious question.’

‘What was Klepper’s answer?’

‘He didn’t have one. He died.’

Stephanie raised an eyebrow. ‘There and then?’

‘Within an hour.’

‘How?’

‘Heart attack.’

She glanced at the stills. Klepper looked as though he was in his late thirties or early forties. ‘Heart attack?’

Alexander nodded. ‘Artificially induced. Klepper would’ve known that once his case was marked for examination he was in trouble. He’d have known that in the custody suite he’d be stripped and searched. The postmortem revealed a pin-prick on his left wrist. An examination of his clothes and effects revealed a Mont Blanc pen that had been adapted to act as a syringe, attached to a cartridge of chemically doctored Alfentanil. The pen acted as a delivery device, like those gadgets used by diabetics. As a weapon, it was not unlike the umbrella tip used on Georgy Markov, the Bulgarian dissident, here in London in September 1978.’

The slow-motion footage resumed. Klepper approached an examination bench, hauled both cases onto it and handed his passport to an official. Then he reached inside his jacket pocket and took out his Mont Blanc pen. The most mundane action imaginable. He appeared to adjust the pen, holding it with one hand, twisting with the other. He was looking the officials in the eye, giving silent answers to their silent questions. They never noticed the jab. Discreet but firm, he never flinched.

Stephanie shook her head. ‘Without a care in the world.’

‘Or maybe with every care in the world.’

‘But to be so casual about it?’

‘Perhaps suggesting that he was under the impression that he was injecting himself with something else. Something that would provoke a reaction but which wouldn’t kill him. In any event, it’s unlikely we’ll ever find out what he thought he was doing.’

Stephanie continued to look at Klepper. ‘Still, no great loss, I suppose …’

‘We now know that he was the first of five couriers, two of whom were UK-bound. We don’t know about the other three. We do know that the action was abandoned after his death but SIS was unable to discover the target or the identity of the end users. As for the suppliers of the Plutonium-239, the intelligence community looked no further than the former Soviet Union. One name emerged. Or rather, an alias. Koba. But that was the end of the line. Until March. Then, out of the blue, SIS were contacted by Oleg Rogachev, head of the Tsentralnaya crime syndicate, an organization that has been strongly linked to nuclear smuggling in the past.’

‘How was the contact made?’

‘Through a Kazak investment company. Almatinvest. They have an office here in London but the contact was made through their Moscow office. An Almatinvest representative got in touch with the British Embassy on Rogachev’s behalf. The request was for a secure face-to-face with a senior SIS official. The job of evaluating that request fell to Roger Stansfield, a man I know personally. He concluded that the approach was bona fide. The representative said that Rogachev wanted to give SIS Koba’s real name.’

‘What did Rogachev want in return?’

‘Nothing.’ Alexander saw her expression change. ‘I know what you’re thinking. But maybe fingering Koba was some reward in itself.’

‘Or maybe Rogachev saw SIS coming and figured that he could get them to eliminate a rival on his behalf, at no risk to himself. Koba probably doesn’t even exist.’

‘That thought did occur to Stansfield. Which was why he didn’t want anyone from SIS involved. Not directly.’

‘So he asked you.’

‘Exactly. The plan was simple enough. Masquerading as a senior SIS officer, Marshall met Rogachev in Paris. At the meeting, Rogachev was supposed to hand over a disk containing information on the terrorists, the end users and the couriers. The two men met at a brasserie on the rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré. As far as we know, the meeting went to plan. However, as they stepped out of the café …’

Alexander changed the picture. There were two bodies lying face-down, one splayed across the pavement, the other crumpled in the gutter. The blood looked black. Although Stephanie was looking at the screens, she could tell that Alexander was staring at her.

‘No disk was recovered from either body. Nobody recalls the assassin frisking either man. It’s possible the disk was removed later. It’s also possible that the disk had already been lifted – perhaps in the brasserie. The only thing we know for sure is that it’s now in the possession of George Salibi.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘A Lebanese banker. Lives in New York. Founder of First Intercontinental.’

‘How does he fit into this?’

‘The way he fits into everything else. Money. God knows how he got hold of the disk but you can be sure he’ll use it.’

‘How?’

‘He’ll auction it or use it as leverage. Either way, the disk is now currency. And that’s not a situation we can tolerate.’

‘Salibi’s a target?’

‘The disk is a target. If Salibi gets in the way … well, that’s his problem.’

‘So that’s the job, then? The disk.’

Alexander’s glance was scathing. ‘James Marshall’s murder cannot go unpunished.’

‘Sounds a bit Old Testament to me.’

‘It’s not purely a question of revenge. It also sends out a message. Then there’s Koba. We don’t know whether Klepper’s consignment of Plutonium-239 was destined for Britain or whether it was merely in transit. And because we don’t know, we have to assume the worst. That being so, we need to find out who Koba is, who he’s supplying and what their target is.’

‘And then?’

‘As long as Koba’s alive, he’s a threat. The problem is, if we simply wanted to find a Koba, that would be easy. There are plenty to choose from. But we need to find the Koba.’

‘I’m not with you.’

‘There’s a tradition of Russian criminals adopting aliases. The original Koba was a Georgian robber who protected the poor from their oppressors. A sort of Caucasian Robin Hood, if you like. The legend has lasting appeal. Criminals today are still calling themselves Koba. Even Stalin fell for it, adopting the name while he was robbing banks in Georgia at the beginning of the twentieth century.’

‘So you have no idea who you’re looking for.’

‘On the contrary. We’ve narrowed our Koba down to two. By the time you’re ready, we’ll know which one he is.’

‘And what if you don’t?’

‘There’s always the fail-safe option.’

‘Both men?’

‘There would be no other way to be sure.’

‘Cute.’

‘Believe me, the world wouldn’t miss either of them.’

‘Which makes it okay?’

‘If you spared yourself the pretence of a conscience, you’d see that it makes it better.’

Stephanie couldn’t be bothered to argue the point. ‘Could Koba have killed Marshall and Rogachev?’

Alexander shot her a withering look. ‘I don’t know. You tell me.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

He looked back at the images of the dead men on the screen. ‘There was one assassin, two shots per victim. Neither had time to react. In the panic that followed, the assassin escaped easily. There were witnesses but their accounts varied wildly. It was raining hard at the time. It was a dark afternoon. The killer was dressed in black or blue or grey, and wearing some kind of dark jacket with a hood to obscure the face. An anorak, maybe. There might have been an umbrella for extra cover. Physically, we have almost nothing to go on. A slim build, between five foot six and six foot tall – let’s say five foot nine, for the sake of argument. In other words, about your height.’

With the conference room lights dimmed, part of his face was hidden in shadow. She could see the flickering screens reflected on his eyeballs.

‘Might have been a man.’ He held her gaze completely. ‘Could have been a woman.’ Alexander leaned into a cone of pale light. ‘Is any of this starting to sound familiar?’

Stephanie was incredulous. ‘You think I had something to do with this?’

‘There’s a rumour going around …’

‘You’re out of your mind.’

‘Really?’

‘If you provided me with the date, I could probably tell you.’

‘Let me guess. Masson would vouch for you. I was with her the night before and the night after. But from where you live, Paris is a day trip.’

‘You’re serious?’

‘Always.’

‘You can’t prove it, though, can you?’

Alexander’s smile was cold. ‘I don’t need to. You’re the one with something to prove.’

The hijack at Malta was my last job for Magenta House. In the chaos of its aftermath, I vanished. That should have been it. Instead, for the next two and a half years, I was Petra Reuter, more than I ever was before. Life imitated art and I became the professional assassin.

Today, sitting in this room, I can look at the way Magenta House originally transformed me into Petra Reuter and I can understand that process, even though I’m repelled by it. What I don’t understand is why I chose to embrace her so completely once I was free of her. Alexander doesn’t understand it, either. Which is why he’s wondering whether I killed Oleg Rogachev and James Marshall. Two years ago, I wouldn’t have hesitated, as long as the contract was right. So why not now?

I can see where this is leading. I need to find the culprit in order to prove that it’s not me. Although Alexander says he needs Koba and the disk, what he really wants is the Parisian assassin. He craves revenge because he feels responsible for Marshall’s death and this is the only way he can deal with that. Somebody else must pay. A life for a life. That’s what Magenta House trades in.

‘You chose to learn Russian. Why?’

‘For professional reasons. I was led to believe there’d be plenty of work for me – for Petra – in Russia. Or at least from Russian criminals.’

‘And was there?’

‘Actually, no. I never took a contract from a Russian, although I came into contact with quite a few.’

‘Where?’

‘Serbia, Cyprus, Latvia. In Paris and Zurich, too.’

‘Who led you to believe that learning Russian might be a good idea?’

‘Stern.’

‘You were in contact with Stern?’

The surprise in his voice was, itself, a surprise to Stephanie. ‘Yes.’

‘Do you know who Stern is?’

‘Of course not. That’s the whole point of him.’

Stern, the information broker. A man who existed only in the ether of the Internet, trading secrets and rumours for cash. Some said he was Swiss, others thought he was German. Or Austrian. Or even American. Like Alexander, a man with no first name. Or perhaps with several. Stephanie had always called him Oscar when they communicated. It had been his suggestion but she’d never believed that was his real name. He might once have been a spy although no one could agree for whom. Others said he’d been a journalist, or a mercenary. Stephanie had heard a theory that Stern didn’t exist at all, that he was a collection of people. Or perhaps a single woman.

‘Tell me about him.’

‘After Malta, I scanned all the old websites looking for messages for Petra. I didn’t expect to find anything but there he was, casting into the dark. I replied and we began to correspond, both of us cautious at first. Eventually, he told me he had work for me, if I was interested.’

‘How did your relationship evolve?’

‘We came to an arrangement. I agreed to let him act on my behalf. Essentially, he became my agent. It worked well because it meant I never met the client face-to-face. And no one ever met Stern. Everyone’s anonymity was protected. Stern used to joke that it was a perfect example of practical e-commerce. He said the Internet was invented for people like us.’

‘Sounds as though you two were made for each other.’

‘It was a relationship with no downside.’

‘You paid him, I suppose?’

‘He took fifteen per cent of the fees he negotiated on my behalf. On top of that, he offered other services, which I bought separately.’

‘Such as?’

‘Information, general or specific. Or reliable contacts in strange cities. That kind of thing.’

‘You never worried about that?’

‘Not unduly. If anything happened to me, he stood to lose money. And Stern hates to lose money.’

‘Don’t we all?’

His tone took her by surprise, so she stayed silent.

‘You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?’

She knew perfectly well. ‘No.’

‘One million and eighty thousand dollars, give or take some loose change.’

Stephanie felt herself harden. ‘I earned that money.’

‘It belonged to us.’

‘It belonged to Petra.’

‘Petra belonged to us.’

‘Petra belonged to nobody. Not then, not now.’

The colour began to drain from Alexander’s face. ‘You will return it.’

‘Are you a betting man?’

‘Petra was our creation. You were playing a part. Nothing more.’

‘What about after Malta?’

‘We’re talking about money earned before Malta.’

‘Well, guess what? Before Malta, after Malta, I don’t give a toss what you think. I was Petra. I’ve always been Petra. If you want the money, sue me.’

4

The first week is the worst. Some mornings, we talk in his office. On other mornings, we use a briefing room, or an office I’ve never seen before. It’s just the two of us. He makes occasional notes on paper, taking care to prevent me from seeing what he’s written. We break for lunch – an hour usually – then continue until five or six. Spending so much time alone with him is a form of claustrophobia.

At first, the questions are general, as he establishes a chronological order for everything that happened after Malta. I don’t mind that so much. Later, when he grows more specific, focusing on detail, I start to lie. Not all the time, only when it matters. I give him some dry bones to pick over, but I won’t give him my flesh and blood.

‘You’re wasting your time,’ I tell him on the fifth morning. ‘You have no idea whether what I’m telling you is the truth.’

‘Believe me, I’ll find out.’

‘Only if I let you.’

Which, on occasion, I do. Despite a general instinct to give him nothing, there are some exceptions. I want him to know that the Petra I became was better than the Petra that Magenta House created. When I describe how I infiltrated Mario Guzman’s fortified villa overlooking Oaxaca and then silently assassinated the Mexican drugs baron, I can hear the pride in my voice. Alexander pretends not to have noticed. And I’m happy for him to know how I lived in a shattered storm drain in Grozny for almost a week, before taking the single sniper’s shot that killed Russian General Vladimir Timoshenko.

I should feel too ashamed to boast about such things but I don’t. Not when I’m with him. Instead, I feel pleasure. That’s the corrupting effect he has on me.

At the end of each day, I try to leave my anger at Magenta House but it’s almost impossible. Another gruesome rush-hour ride on the Underground, a few groceries from Waitrose, an evening in front of the TV, a night of fractured sleep. I miss Laurent and the sound of the dogs barking in the valley. I miss the murmur of the cicadas, the scent of lavender and a glass of wine on the terrace.

On Friday afternoon, Alexander says, ‘Stern handled all your financial affairs, did he?’

‘He’s an information broker, not my accountant or banker.’

‘But he negotiated your contracts?’

‘Yes.’

‘How much money did you make through him?’

‘That’s none of your business.’

‘I’m making it my business.’

I shrug in an off-hand way. ‘A lot more than I took from you.’

Alexander looks absolutely furious.

I smile slyly. ‘A lot more.’

We move into the second week. Sometimes I’m moody and silent, sometimes I’m ready for a fight. We argue several times a day, which brings out the worst in my vocabulary. On Thursday afternoon, we have a stand-up row in his office. I storm out, slamming the door behind me. I don’t slow down until I’ve left the building. Rosie Chaudhuri catches up with me in Victoria Embankment Gardens.

She approaches me as though I’m a dog that bites. ‘Stephanie?’

I’m pacing but I’ve got nowhere to go. ‘What?’

‘You okay?’

‘What the fuck do you care?’

‘Hey …’

‘What is this? Good cop, bad cop? Are you going to sweet-talk me, then run back inside and tell him what I tell you?’

‘Is that what you think?’

It wasn’t. ‘You work in there, don’t you? For him …’

She looked disappointed, not cross. ‘I thought you knew me better than that.’

I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘Christ, Rosie …’

‘It’s okay.’

I put my hand on my forehead, shielding my eyes. ‘No, it isn’t. I’m sorry.’

At the weekend, I decide to strip the flat. I’d sooner it was bare than cluttered with someone else’s idea of personal touches. I take the pictures off the walls and dump them in the storage room in the basement. I empty the photos and paperbacks into black bin-liners. I sift through the CDs to see if there’s anything worth keeping. It’s a collection of chilling mediocrity; Michael Bolton, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Elton John. Not a decent song between them and the rest. I reject all thirty-four albums in the rack.

I spend an hour of Saturday afternoon in Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street, where I buy a few paperbacks of my own. On Sunday afternoon, I buy half a dozen CDs at Tower Records on Piccadilly Circus, including two Garbage albums and Felt Mountain by Goldfrapp. In the early evening, I watch Wonder Boys at the Prince Charles cinema on Leicester Square. When I come out, I go back round to the front and pay to watch the next film on the bill, Buena Vista Social Club.

Wednesday afternoon. The febrile humidity of morning had made way for rain. They were sitting in Alexander’s office. Two windows were open; the downpour drowned the sound of traffic on the Embankment.

Alexander lit a Rothmans and said, ‘Tell me about Arkan.’

Arkan and his paramilitary Tigers. Stephanie’s skin prickled. ‘What about him?’

‘There was a rumour that Petra Reuter killed him.’

‘I never read that.’

‘It wasn’t in the papers.’

Stephanie tilted back on her chair. ‘Arkan was a dog. Not a tiger. And he died like a dog; he was put down, not assassinated.’

‘Did you kill him?’

Stephanie closed her eyes. It was 15 January 2000. Arkan – real name, Zeljko Raznatovic – was striding through the lobby of the Hotel Inter-Continental in Belgrade. For a fraction of a second they’d looked at one another. It had been his last fraction of a second. She’d used a Heckler & Koch submachine gun and had aimed for the head because Stern’s sources had said that Arkan would be wearing a bullet-proof vest. Which turned out to be true. Three of the bullets she fired found the target.

‘Eye-witnesses spoke of two assassins. Who was the other?’

‘It doesn’t matter. He’s dead.’

Stephanie saw something in Alexander’s reaction. Surprise, distaste, consternation? She couldn’t tell. He said, ‘The contract came through Stern?’

‘Yes.’

‘With no indication of the client’s identity?’

‘Not at first. Stern described the job as domestic.’

‘How did you interpret that?’

‘Slobodan Milosevic.’

Alexander reflected for a moment and then nodded. ‘I agree. You never met Milosevic, I assume.’

‘No. But I met his idiot son, Marko.’

‘How did that come about?’

‘Stern set up a meeting with an intermediary. I travelled from Belgrade to Pozarevac –’

‘Milosevic’s home town?’

Stephanie nodded. ‘I met the intermediary – a Belgian named Marcel Claesen – at Bambi Park. It’s a kind of sick amusement park that Marko Milosevic built.’

‘And he was there?’

‘Yes. With Malizia Gajic.’

‘Who?’

‘His partner. They had a child together.’

‘Did she have any connections that you know of?’

‘Only to a plastic surgeon who evidently believed the bigger the breasts the better.’

‘What about Marko?’

‘He thought he was a businessman.’

‘But you didn’t?’

‘I thought he was as thick as elephant shit. He had a peroxide spike for a haircut and wore a lot of Tommy Hilfiger.’

‘Did he appear to know the Belgian?’

‘In a manner of speaking. They were talking but I got the impression that Claesen was embarrassed to be seen with Marko.’

‘Do you think Marko passed on the information to Claesen?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Was Bambi Park simply the rendezvous or was Marko in the loop?’

‘I doubt it. I mean, Claesen was the intermediary. If Marko had been involved, he could have just given the information to me himself. There would have been no need for Claesen.’

‘Yet they clearly knew each other. Suggesting previous associations. Perhaps involving other members of the family?’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘Then what?’

‘Claesen and I drove back to Belgrade and he provided me with the information.’

‘Which was what?’

‘Where to pick up the weapons, where to meet the second gun, what Arkan’s schedule was.’

‘Why did you pick the Inter-Continental?’

‘It was nice and open, plenty of scope for panic.’

‘Did you kill the bodyguard, Momcilo Mandic?’

‘No. I focused on Arkan. The second gun scattered the protection. And everyone else.’

‘There were suspects arrested, I seem to remember. A man called Dusan Gavric, who was wounded.’

‘Getting shot doesn’t make him guilty. It makes him unlucky. Or careless. Having said that, I wouldn’t have fancied being in his position after he was arrested …’

‘Petra’s name was linked to other murders in the region. What about Pavel Bulatovic?’

‘No.’

Stephanie remembered the details clearly, though. The federal defence minister of Yugoslavia had been eating at the Rad restaurant in Belgrade, an establishment that looked onto a football pitch. The gunman had fired his Kalashnikov through the window in three concentrated bursts, cutting across the room in a diagonal, before using the pitch as his escape route. Following so soon after Arkan, Stephanie had wondered whether both assassinations had been ordered by the same individual.

‘What about Darko Asanin?’

She’d heard the name, a former Belgrade criminal. ‘No.’

‘Anybody else I should know about from that part of the world?’

Stephanie smiled coldly. ‘Arkan isn’t enough for you?’

I can’t face the Underground. It’s a foetid evening. Businessmen sweat into their shapeless suits. I walk beneath Hungerford Bridge, along Victoria Embankment, past the Ministry of Defence, towards Westminster Bridge. Gradually, the noise of the traffic, of the aircraft overhead, of the multitude around me, begins to recede. In my mind, it grows darker, cooler. The open spaces restrict themselves to four walls until I’m in a cramped room in a small hotel. There is a narrow bed with a thin mattress, a single wooden chair between a cupboard and a chest of drawers.

I’m lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. I’m cold but I’m perspiring. I look as though I’m saying something but there’s nothing to hear. I don’t notice when I urinate, soaking the lumpy mattress. I only move when I know I’m going to vomit. But I react too slowly. I fall to my knees and throw up onto the floor. My back arches as I retch, and when it’s over I collapse onto my side and roll myself into a ball. I don’t know how long I stay there.

January 20th, 2000, Bilbao. Five days since Belgrade, five days since Arkan. Three days since I arrived in Bilbao and checked into this black hole. I was only supposed to be here for thirty-six hours. The arrangements were not complicated: pick up the package at the post office, use the new identity to travel to Rabat and then discard it, spend a week relaxing in Morocco as Delphine Lafont – the identity I used to enter Morocco ten days ago – and then return to Paris, as scheduled. Simple, clinical, perfect. Pure Petra.

At first, there was an overwhelming lethargy. My muscles turned to lead, my blood cooled. I imagined it congealing, turning black. With it came a sense of dread. Creeping up on me, smothering me. For two and a half years, I had functioned without fear. In my pursuit of mechanical perfection, I turned anxiety into caution, pain into penalty. I wanted to feel nothing, no matter what I did. And whatever I did, I wanted to do it with ruthless efficiency. I thought I’d eliminated doubt and chance from Petra Reuter’s life.

Now, lying on the floor, drenched in sweat, my head a sandstorm of emotion, I know that I’ve snapped. For two days, I’ve been unable to eat or drink. My body has rejected everything I’ve put into it. My body and also my mind. I can see that in some ways I’m rejecting myself. Seen from another perspective, however, I’m rejecting an intruder.

Later, I told myself that this was the moment I chose to stop being Petra Reuter. But the truth is, my body had already made that decision for me. Two and a half years of Petra had poisoned me.

She didn’t recognize the room, which now belonged to the Thurman Mining Company. Through the window, she saw the monumental Adelphi Building on the other side of Robert Street. One wall of the office was covered by two huge maps, one of Brazil, the other of Mongolia. Small areas on each had been staked out in blue, black and red ink. Lists of hectares had been pinned next to selected areas. On the desk, a paper Brazilian flag sat in a mug that had Ordem e Progresso stencilled around it. There were framed photographs on the wall beside the window; miners in hard hats at the mouth of a mine, men in short-sleeved shirts in front of a wasteland of felled forest, the horizon smudged brown by smoke.

The door opened. A skinny man in khaki combat trousers and a blue Nike T-shirt entered. His light brown hair was clipped short. He wore glasses, the grey frames with a matt finish, the lenses with a tint.

‘Hey, Steph. Sorry to keep you waiting.’ Stephanie stiffened; the familiarity of strangers had always had that effect upon her. His accent sounded mildly Lancastrian. He offered a hand. ‘Martin Palmer.’

She didn’t think he looked any older than she did, which – with the exception of Rosie Chaudhuri – made him the youngest person she had seen at Magenta House. Palmer had a grey nylon satchel slung over his left shoulder. He took it off and sat in the swivel chair behind the desk, relegating her to the plastic seat opposite. He produced a pad of paper and a pencil, and then apologized for not being able to offer her coffee.

She said, ‘I’ve never seen you before.’

He looked coy. ‘I’m new.’ He offered her a conspiratorial smile that she didn’t reciprocate. ‘I’ve got a few questions I need to ask you. It’s just routine.’

‘What kind of questions?’

‘Personal, mostly. If that’s all right?’

‘What are you, a psychologist?’

‘Something like that.’

‘You look nervous.’

‘Well, I’m not.’

‘I didn’t say you were nervous. I said you looked it.’

Now, he looked embarrassed. ‘Do you mind if we start?’

The balance shifted, Stephanie shrugged. ‘Sure. What do you want to ask me?’

‘Well … let’s see. You’ve been coming in here for … what is it? Three weeks?’

‘And two days.’

‘For debriefing?’

‘That’s not what I’d call it.’

A soldier had once told Stephanie that debriefing was therapy. That it helped him to come to terms with the things he’d had to do – and the things he’d had to see – during active undercover service. Each mission had always been followed by intense analysis; what went wrong, what went right, the lessons for the future. Some of the scrutiny was technical, some of it personal. By the end of the process, he’d always felt mentally exhausted but, crucially, he’d also felt that no element had been overlooked, that every aspect had been examined and rationalized in the minutest detail. And that no matter how draining the experience, it had left him better equipped to cope with his memories.

Stephanie understood what he’d meant but did not feel the same way. As the soldier had pointed out, to succeed as therapy, it was important to place one’s trust in those conducting the sessions. Over three weeks, the more Alexander probed, the more violated she’d felt, and the more she’d reacted against it. From sullen silence to outright hostility, she’d felt unable to stop herself.

Palmer jotted something onto the pad. ‘What are you doing away from here?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘In the evenings, for instance.’

‘I just stay in the flat. I buy something to eat on the way home, cook it, watch TV, read a book.’

‘You haven’t gone out at all?’

Only once, during the second week, after a long day lying to Alexander about a contract she’d taken in New York. She’d felt she needed a drink so she’d stopped at a bar on St Martin’s Lane. She’d picked a small table by the door and watched the pavement traffic for half an hour, letting alcohol soften the ache. The place had been busy, the after-work crowd unwinding; groups at tables and around the bar, laughter, gossip, cigarette smoke.

He wore a cheap pin-stripe, she remembered. Thick around the waist, growing a second chin. Pink cheeks and ginger stubble. He emerged from a crowd at the far end of the glass bar, a pint in one hand. He offered to buy her another drink. She smiled and declined but he sat down opposite her.

She said, ‘I’m waiting for someone.’

He grinned, revealing smoker’s teeth. ‘Me?’

Stephanie said nothing.

‘Seriously, love, sure you won’t have another?’

She glanced at his group. ‘Am I part of a bet?’

‘Don’t worry about them.’

He was slightly drunk. She could smell the beer on his breath.

‘I’m not worried about them.’

‘I’m Charlie.’

‘I’m not interested.’

When he offered his hand, she took it, rolled the fingers into the palm and crushed the fist against the table-top. He sucked air through his teeth, his eyes widened and perspiration sprouted instantly across his pale forehead. Stephanie felt as though she was watching someone else hurt him. But when she thought of how she’d turned on Olivier, she was filled with self-disgust. She let go of him and he sprang up from the chair, backing away from her, bumping into other customers, muttering something she couldn’t hear.

Martin Palmer was waiting for an answer.

Stephanie said, ‘I’m not much in the mood for partying at the moment.’

‘Are you drinking?’

‘What?’

He kept his eyes on his notes. ‘Are you drinking alcohol?’ Now, he looked up. ‘At night, when you go home?’

Beneath the anger ran a current of sadness. ‘Not enough.’

She was aware of her defences rising, which made her aware of how quickly they’d been lowered. Not by Palmer’s crafty questions – she was surprised by his clumsiness – but by something within her. She recognized the feeling. It was the desire to unburden herself. But Palmer wasn’t the right confessor. For two hours, they talked. There were many questions she wanted to answer honestly but couldn’t, not to him. To have done so would have been to cheapen the truth.

She was disappointed, then frustrated and eventually bitter.

‘Let me see,’ Palmer murmured. ‘This Turkish arms dealer, Salman Rifat. According to Mr Alexander, you told him that you had to sleep with Rifat in order to gain his trust and earn yourself access to files he kept at his villa.’

‘Sleep with?’

Palmer looked annoyed by the semantic distinction. ‘Have sex with.’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, how did you feel about that?’

‘How did I feel?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sore.’

He blushed. ‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I know what you meant,’ Stephanie snapped. ‘But sore is what I felt. And do you know why? Because Rifat had a dick as thick as your wrist and there wasn’t a part of me he didn’t like to force it into. And I let him do that to me because that was part of the job.’

Palmer tried to convey control and began to scribble notes. ‘Fine. I see. Okay …’

‘Okay?’

He winced. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean it to sound like that.’

‘What did you mean it to sound like? Compassion? Comprehension?’

‘Look, I’m trying to help here …’

‘Let me tell you about Salman Rifat. He’s an arms dealer. A charmer. A monster. And he has his pleasures.’ She hesitated, then looked at her feet. ‘His favourite thing was to make me strip for him, usually in a living room, never in a bedroom. While I stripped, he’d tell me to do things and I’d do them. But the end was always the same. He has this estate in Greece. It produces olive oil. And wherever he is in the world, he has these small bottles of home-made olive oil with him. Dark blue glass, a miniature cork in the top. What he liked to do most was to make me bend over something – the back of a sofa, a table – and he’d pour a little of this oil onto the centre of my spine. He liked to watch it run over skin. That was his thing. He’d tell me to move this way or that. And the more turned on he became, the more aggressive he became. Finally, when the oil ran over my backside, he’d fuck me. One way or the other.’

She looked up. Palmer was staring at her and appeared to have stopped breathing.

‘So when you ask me what I felt and I say I felt sore, you can bloody well write that down. Along with all the other shit that’s going to tell Alexander what he wants to know.’

‘Look, Steph …’

She snorted contemptuously. ‘Steph? You make it sound as though we’ve known each other for years.’

‘I’m only trying to be friendly.’

‘Don’t waste your time. Or mine.’

‘There’s no need to be so hostile.’

‘Why are you asking me these questions? What do you think my answers are going to tell you?’

He averted his gaze. ‘It’s just a routine evaluation.’

Stephanie smiled and it was enough for both of them to understand the lie. ‘Have you ever wondered what it feels like to kill somebody? I mean, as a psychologist – or whatever you are – I imagine you must have considered it. From a professional point of view.’

Palmer couldn’t find anything to say.

‘To look into someone’s eyes – both of you fully aware of what’s coming – and then to pull the trigger. Or to stick the blade in, to feel the hot blood on your fingers and around your wrist. Because I could tell you, if you like. I could describe these things in as much detail as you could take. But it wouldn’t mean anything. Not by me telling you. My answers to your questions won’t tell you anything about me. You’re theory, I’m reality, and the difference between us is something you will never understand.’

Stephanie rose to her feet and began to circle the table, drawing closer to him.

‘Look at you, all dressed up in your street-cred gear, trying to be someone I can relate to, not someone remote. You read my file and picked this as a look, didn’t you? Did you get your hair cut like that especially?’

There was an affirming silence. She rested against the edge of the table, her leg almost touching his. Now, she felt the icy calm that came with full control. Palmer was pale.

‘You’re in a conflict zone,’ she whispered. ‘You’re hiding among a pile of dead bodies. You see conscript soldiers rape a young girl, then decapitate her. From start to finish, they’re laughing, these bakers, teachers, farmers. Once seen, never forgotten, it’s tattooed onto your memory. The only question that remains is this: how do you cope with it?’

His eyes were grey, she noticed. And unblinking.

‘You’re the psychologist. Do you know?’

He shook his head.

‘Exactly. I don’t know, either. You just do. Most of the time. Until there comes a time when you don’t. And that time does come.’ She turned her back on him. ‘Don’t take it personally – it’s not your fault – but I won’t answer any more of your pathetic questions. As for Alexander, tell him what you like. I don’t care.’

5

You can make a home for yourself, you can make a life for yourself, but don’t make anything for yourself that you can’t walk away from in a second.

The man who’d taught her that was Iain Boyd, a reclusive figure cut from Sutherland granite. Boyd’s past lay with the military. The details of that past were consigned to files that had been conveniently lost so that his career was now a matter of sinister silence. More than any other individual, he’d been responsible for turning Stephanie Patrick into Petra Reuter. He’d taught her how to survive in the harshest conditions, how to kill, how to feel nothing. Under his supervision, she had become stronger, faster and fitter than she’d ever imagined she could be. As teachers went, Boyd had been harsh, sometimes cruel. As curricula went, the lessons had been distasteful, sometimes brutal. As pupils went, Stephanie had never been less than exceptional.

She saw him through the carriage window as the ScotRail train slowed to a halt at Lairg Station. Big-boned but lean, with weather-beaten skin, he was leaning against a Land-Rover, arms crossed, a stiff wind raking thick blond hair. He wore old jeans, hiking boots and an olive T-shirt.

Stephanie was the only passenger to disembark. Boyd opened the Land-Rover door for her but made no attempt to help her with her rucksack. They pulled away from the station, passed through Lairg and travelled along the east flank of Loch Shin. Boyd drove fast, squeezing past other vehicles in the narrow passing spaces, occasionally allowing two wheels to chew the sodden verges. Stephanie clutched the door handle tightly and hoped he wouldn’t notice.

The clouds raced them north, allowing occasional patches of brilliant sunlight. For a moment, there would be a shimmer of gold, purple, emerald green and rust, then the reversion to slate grey. The wind made the white grass a turbulent sea. They drove past the crumbling shells of stone houses left derelict since the early nineteenth century, past the boarded windows of houses more recently abandoned. The scars of progress. Intermittently, near the road’s edge, they passed stacks of peat, cut in rectangles, piled high, awaiting collection and a slow burn in some local grate.

As they overtook a yellow lorry – the local mobile public library – Boyd said, ‘Alexander tells me you’ve been living in the south of France.’

‘Yes.’

‘Under the surname Schneider.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Your mother’s maiden name.’

‘Yes.’

He shook his head. ‘That’s very disappointing. You of all people, Stephanie.’

At the Laxford Bridge, they turned right, then right again, onto a rough track. It twisted and turned, compromising to the demands of the terrain. Over jagged ground, around vast boulders of granite sheathed in soggy moss, through pools of peaty water, across uneven bridges constructed from old railway sleepers.

She knew what lay ahead: bruises, strains, cold, exhaustion. Despite that, she felt at home. Or rather, she felt a connection. The further north she’d travelled, the clearer her mind had become. It was three days since Martin Palmer’s failed assessment of her. She’d seen the resignation in Alexander’s eyes; Boyd had been the only option. She was under no illusion about the regime but she was glad to be back.

The lodge was close to the loch, on a gentle grass incline, high enough to be safe from floodwater. Fifty yards away were three long cabins with new tarpaper roofs. Between them and the lodge, a large garage doubled as a workshop. Behind the lodge, there was a general outhouse and a second, smaller outhouse containing a diesel generator.

When she’d been here before it had been winter and she and Boyd had been alone, but during the summer months he ran corporate outward-bound courses, designed to foster teamwork among jaded office workers. Sometimes, the company client asked him to identify specific qualities among individuals in each group. Who’s a natural leader but doesn’t know it? Who thinks they’re a leader but won’t carry the others? Who’s the subversive troublemaker?

The courses ran from May to the end of September. The men and women Boyd hired as help were all former colleagues from the armed services. During the winter, when the place was closed, Boyd remained open to friends. That category included special requests from the military. Or from climbers looking for tough physical conditioning. Or from Alexander.

Boyd brought the Land-Rover to a sharp halt outside the lodge.

‘We’ve got a group in just now so you’ll be staying with me. You might see them from time to time, but you’re not to speak to them. Understood?’

‘Yes.’

‘Same goes for the staff. Not a word.’

‘Whatever you say.’

His look was withering. ‘That’s exactly bloody right, Stephanie. Whatever I say.’

The first fortnight was a routine that didn’t vary; the bedroom door banging open in the darkness, the cold dawn run, the medicinal heat of the shower, breakfast at a scrubbed wooden kitchen table. Boyd tended not to eat with Stephanie. Between breakfast and lunch, they sparred, self-defence or attack, mostly with hands, sometimes with blades. He reminded her how to transform a household implement into a weapon, how to kill with a credit card, how to incapacitate with a paper clip. They studied points of vulnerability: joints, arteries, eyes.

These sessions usually occurred in the garage, a space large enough to take three trucks. There were kayaks stacked on racks along two walls. At the far end, there was a wooden bench, a heavy vice, trays of oily tools. A punchbag was suspended from the ceiling. He began to instruct her on elements of Thai boxing. He had no interest in the sport itself but admired it for the flexibility and speed of its best practitioners.

Lunch tended to be meagre, a little vegetable soup, some bread, water. Too much food and Stephanie knew she’d throw up during the afternoon. Which most often happened anyway. Boyd didn’t feel he’d worked her hard enough unless she was on the ground, retching. They ran through coarse thigh-high grass that hid the treacherous ruts beneath, up and down scree slopes where even the surest footing failed constantly. Each tumble was marked by a new graze. They ran shin-deep through peat hags of liquid black earth. Stephanie remembered now what she had discovered then: nothing saps energy faster than a peat hag.

They ran in howling winds, through horizontal rain, under crisping summer suns. Even when cold, a northern Scottish sun tanned a skin as quickly and painfully as any other she’d experienced. Mist was the only exception, confining them to areas close to the lodge and loch. There were no patterns in the weather. It was not uncommon to experience all four seasons before lunch and another full year in the afternoon.

Knowing what to expect made it no less painful. The muscles she had allowed to soften burned in protest. Aches matured into cramps. Grazes and cuts were constantly aggravated and so never healed. Boyd kept her on the edge of exhaustion and she understood why; he wanted to provoke a reaction. Physical or emotional, either or both.

Four years before, Boyd had bullied her. That had been his task – to make her quit. The regime had been executed to a score of abuse. This time, it was different. Too much had passed between them the first time. From RSM and raw recruit, to mentor and understudy. Behind the granite façade, Boyd had been proud of her then. And she had felt some pride, too. In the end, he’d treated her with respect. There’d been equality. And with that, there had been something else. A subversive sexual undercurrent.

Neither had acknowledged it. Neither had wanted to.

Now, Boyd retained the power to intimidate but not indiscriminately. He’d tried to break her once and failed. They understood something of each other. They were not so different. The element of hostility upon which Boyd’s training regime relied felt contrived. He knew that Stephanie would never do anything less than he ordered. She would always try to do more to show that her spirit had always been beyond his reach and, by proxy, beyond Alexander’s.

In the evenings, Boyd allowed her to have a bath instead of a shower, to cleanse and soothe her collage of cuts and bruises. While she was soaking, he prepared supper. Some nights he ate with her, most nights he didn’t. Afterwards, he read by the peat fire in the sitting room, or went to his small office, shutting the door on her. She was free to do as she pleased. That meant going to bed as early as possible because she knew that in the morning the routine would resume and that there weren’t enough hours in the night for her to recuperate fully.

I’m sitting on a stone beside a cluster of mountain ash trees. Slender branches sag under the weight of dense clusters of brilliant red berries. According to Boyd, this is the sign of a harsh winter ahead. He might be right, but I predict some severe frost far sooner than that.

The weeks roll past as the tension between us grows daily. I know that I’m not helping matters because I react badly to his continual provocation. But that’s the way I am. I use aggravation as a spur.

I can feel the metamorphosis. The body I had is reducing, hardening, changing shape. I preferred myself as I was – happy, healthy, feminine – but there is another part of me that celebrates the new condition. It toughens me mentally to see the physical change. It’s difficult to rationalize. Perhaps it’s the sense that Boyd is only making his task harder. The more I improve, the less his jibes matter. And the more distracted that seems to make him.

Within the parameters of our narrow existence, this should give me some pleasure. But it doesn’t. I would like to ask what the matter is but I can’t. Just as when he asks me about my time as Petra, I refuse to give him an answer. Not because I don’t want him to know but because I don’t want Alexander to know. Perhaps part of the reason for my discomfort lies there; I don’t like to see a fiercely strong and independent man like Boyd acting as a mouthpiece for a snake like Alexander.

I’m watching from afar. He’s by the cabins, flanked by three assistants, two men and a woman, all ex-Army. By the edge of the loch, the latest batch of guests have congregated around half a dozen kayaks. They’ve come from Slough. They work in telesales, peddling advertising space in magazines specializing in second-hand cars, DIY, computing, kitchens and bathrooms. I wait until Boyd steps forward to address the group before retreating to the lodge.

Inside, it’s cool, dark and still. I hear the murmur of the Rayburn in the kitchen. Nothing else. I step into Boyd’s office, the only room in his home from which I am expressly forbidden. It’s a small cube with a single window onto the loch. A sturdy seasoned oak desk occupies much of the floor-space. Along one wall, there are four filing cabinets, all locked, which seems strange considering Boyd rarely bothers to lock his front door unless he’s away for a matter of days.

I sift through the papers on the desk; a phone bill with no numbers I recognize, some correspondence from Sutherland Council, a receipt for a Caledonian MacBrayne ferry ticket to Islay, several letters from companies booked with Boyd over the summer. I ignore the computer, suspecting he’ll know if I’ve tampered with it. Instead, I dial 1471 on the phone to see who his last caller was but they haven’t allowed their number to be passed on.

Some of the shelves are occupied by books, mostly history, no fiction. There are two dozen CDs above a mini-system. They’re all classical. Above the CDs, there are two rows of box files, each with headings down the spine. Most of them appear to be business accounts stretching back over a decade. On one shelf there are two small silver samovars. On the shelf beneath, there are framed photographs; Boyd in combat gear, hot scrub for a background, three other soldiers in the foreground, machine guns clutched as casually as friends; Boyd looking younger and with longer hair, Manhattan behind him – a snap from the top of the Empire State Building, I think; a head-and-shoulders portrait of a woman with light brown, shoulder-length hair, grey eyes, a petite nose and thin straight lips. I pick it up. Rachel.

There are other photographs of her, some with Boyd, some alone. In the ones that feature him, I see an entirely different man to the one I know. A man who used to smile, a man without emptiness for eyes. He looks warmly happy in every one. He hardly looks like Boyd.

All I’m aware of is the ticking of the carriage-clock on his desk.

I’m still holding Rachel. Something seeps out of the frame, through my fingertips and heads for my chest. Shame. Boyd has his reasons for banning me from this room and now I have my own. I watch him through the window. He’s still talking. I wonder what it was that Rachel possessed to make Boyd fall in love with her. And then I wonder what kind of woman would fall in love with a man like Boyd.

Boyd had his back to the sink. Stephanie was leaning close to the Rayburn, letting its heat warm the backs of her thighs. Outside, a storm rampaged. Earlier, she’d watched the clouds gather. The rain had arrived as the light died in the west. Four hours later, the tempest was intensifying.

‘When I heard you’d run after Malta, I wasn’t surprised. I warned Alexander. I said you would, right from the start. I told him, if she gets a chance, she’ll take it. But you were so good, he didn’t believe me. He thought I’d trained you too well for that.’

‘But you hadn’t?’

‘Depends on how you look at it. I take the view that I trained you well enough to think for yourself. Once you were out there, you weren’t a programmed machine. You were versatile. Imaginative. Beyond containment.’

‘Am I supposed to be flattered?’

‘You’re supposed to ask what went wrong.’

‘Maybe nothing did.’

‘You became Petra, didn’t you? That was never supposed to happen. Once you’d vanished, you should have stayed vanished.’

‘Nobody stays vanished. Not from them.’

‘You could’ve.’

‘They found me, didn’t they?’

‘Living under the surname Schneider,’ Boyd said, making no effort to disguise his contempt.

Stephanie wasn’t sure that had anything to do with it.

‘If you’d been more careful, you could’ve made it work. You could’ve created a brand-new life for yourself. A good life.’

‘I did. In the end.’

‘It should have happened straight away. You had enough talent to do it. Once you were free, you could’ve done anything …’

‘Like what? Settle down in Sydney or Reykjavik? Get a job, have children?’

‘Why not?’

‘I guess you don’t know me as well as you think you do.’

‘Maybe you didn’t try hard enough.’

Goaded, Stephanie retorted, ‘You mean, like you? Let’s face it, we’re not that far apart, you and I. Both of us are screwed up, neither of us able to live in the real world with real people, doing the nine-to-five.’

Boyd refused to rise to the bait. ‘Mentally, you’re in worse shape than when we first met. Then, you were just out of control. You were angry and aimless. Now? I don’t know what it is but it’s something more complex …’

His regret was wounding to her. Upset, she resorted to cheap sarcasm. ‘A shrink as well as a soldier. You’re a man of many talents.’

‘And you used to be a woman of many talents.’

‘If you see damaged goods, you should take a look at yourself. You made me.’

‘I know. And I’m aware of that responsibility. Now more than ever.’

‘It’s a bit late in the day, isn’t it?’

‘Why did you become Petra after Malta?’

‘That’s none of your business.’

‘You can’t carry on like this forever.’

‘Like what?’

‘Avoiding the only issue that matters.’

‘You mean, like you have? Look at you, living here in the middle of nowhere, trying to forget that Rachel’s no longer alive.’

He contained himself but only just. After the silence, he said, ‘I think we’d better call it a night.’ He turned his back to her. ‘Before one of us says something we’ll regret.’

She lay on her side, curled into a ball, wide awake despite her exhaustion. Rain rattled the window. In the darkness, she could hear the curtains creeping on the draught. She felt the chill of loneliness. There was confusion in her mind, anger in her heart.

She rose from her bed, pulled on a large black sweatshirt, and tiptoed slowly down the passage. The floorboards were cold against the soles of her feet. Boyd’s bedroom was over the kitchen. She opened the door. It creaked and she paused for a response. Nothing. Boyd was a man who heard whispers in his sleep; sure enough, when she put her head round the door, his bed was empty. She went downstairs and heard him in the kitchen. He was heaping coke into the Rayburn. She waited silently in the doorway. He sensed her before he saw her. He put the bucket down, stood up straight and turned around.

She said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Forget it.’

‘The way I’ve behaved isn’t the way I feel.’

‘You’re trained not to behave the way you feel.’

‘I know. But I don’t need to make any more enemies.’

She stepped forward and kissed him on the mouth. He neither embraced her, nor pulled away. When she broke the kiss and retreated, he said nothing.

‘I’ve spent all my adult life not talking about the things I feel.’

‘Stephanie …’

‘Are you going to tell me this is a bad idea? Because if you are, don’t bother. This isn’t some reckless impulse. It’s been in the back of my mind for the last four years. When we’re running through the middle of nowhere, you shout at me but I can hear that your heart isn’t in your voice. When you glare at me, your eyes give you away. Tell me it hasn’t been on your mind, too.’

When he spoke, she knew his throat was dry. ‘This is a bad idea.’

She pulled the black sweatshirt over her head and let it drop to the floor. It was warm in the kitchen, the heat welcome on her naked skin.

‘Is this some kind of game, Stephanie?’

‘It’s no game.’

‘What, then?’

‘We’re just two similar people in a situation. With nothing to lose.’

‘Nothing to lose?’

‘Do you know what I want more than anything?’

‘What?’

‘I want someone to see me as a woman. I want you to see me as a woman. I’m not a man masquerading as a woman. I’m not a robot, I’m not a killing machine. When Alexander looks at me, he sees a device. When I was Petra, the people I met looked at me and saw a threat. When I looked at them, all I ever saw was fear. That’s not what I want.’

‘Are you sure this is what you want?’

‘I want someone to know me.’

‘What about your friend in France?’

For a second, there was guilt. Then there was perspective. ‘Laurent was lovely. We had a good time but it was a casual arrangement. It could never be anything more than that because I could never show him who I really am. He didn’t know me at all. But you could.’

A silence grew between them.

Boyd hadn’t allowed his eyes to leave hers.

She said, ‘For Christ’s sake, look at me.’

He couldn’t.

‘I’m a twenty-seven-year-old woman. I’m standing naked in front of you. Do something.’ She was amazed at how small her voice sounded. ‘Please.’

‘It’s not that simple. I … I … don’t know what to think.’

It seemed a strange thing to say. It made him sound helpless.

‘You’re not supposed to think.’

‘I’m not like you.’

‘Which is one of the things that makes it easier for me to like you.’

‘You don’t like me.’

‘You’re wrong,’ Stephanie insisted. ‘I do.’

‘If you saw me on a crowded street in a city, you wouldn’t see me at all.’

‘We’re not in a city.’

‘Put the sweatshirt back on, Stephanie.’

‘Make love with me.’

‘No.’

She felt the onset of panic. ‘Then fuck me.’

He winced. ‘No.’

‘Then let me fuck you.’

‘No.’

‘You won’t have to do anything.’

‘Go to bed.’

‘You’re humiliating me.’

‘You’re humiliating yourself.’

Stephanie took a step forward. Boyd stood his ground by the Rayburn.

‘I know you want me.’

‘I don’t want you.’

‘Liar. I’ve seen the way you look at me. When we’re running, when I’m stretching, when we’re both drenched to the skin. I know what you’re thinking. The same thing I’m thinking.’

‘Stop it.’

She moved closer. ‘Has there been anyone since Rachel?’

‘That’s enough.’

She was within touching distance. ‘Has there?’

‘I mean it.’

The Rayburn door was still open. She saw dark orange flicker across her stomach.

‘You don’t want me to go away. I know you don’t.’

‘Stephanie …’

She reached for his hand and pulled it close so that his fingertips brushed her pubic hair. ‘If you want to, you can pretend I’m her.’

The light went out in his eyes.

He snapped his hand free of hers. Stephanie lurched backwards, caught her hip on the corner of the table, and stumbled. She clutched the sink. The moment fractured, her nakedness felt clumsy and cheap. Boyd gave her a look that was as full of hatred as any she’d ever seen.

‘You’ve got sixty seconds to get dressed.’

They started along the track. By dark, it was treacherous. Then Boyd told her to veer right and they left behind the only relatively even surface for miles. It was a foul night; torrential rain, thunder, a piercing cold, flashes of sheet lightning. As the incline grew steeper, the grass began to cede to heather and rocks. They tripped and slid, jarring ankles and wrists, grazing shins, knees and palms. Only when she fell would Boyd allow himself words.

‘Up! On your feet! Get up!’

She tumbled down a grassy slope to a rocky ledge fifteen feet below, landing on soaking granite, winding herself. Boyd scrambled to her side.

‘Don’t just fucking lie there! Run!’

She tried to get to her knees. Boyd bent down, grabbed her by the hair and started to drag her over stones. Despite herself, Stephanie yelped. When she clawed at his wrist, he kicked back with the heel of his boot, hitting her on the elbow. She cried out again.

‘What are you squealing for? Isn’t this what you wanted?’

On they went, Stephanie losing all sense of time and location. Somewhere amid the confusion, it began to occur to her that Boyd wasn’t merely content to force her past the point of collapse; he wanted to force himself past it too.

They were climbing higher, the gradient growing steeper. They pressed along a ledge two feet wide, a slick wall of stone to the left, an incalculable drop into darkness to the right, loose scree beneath their feet. Scrawny trees sprouted from beneath slabs of black rock, spindly branches and twigs slashing at skin and cloth alike. Squinting fiercely through the rain, Stephanie slowed to try to make out the route ahead, only to feel the heavy prod of Boyd’s fist in her back.

‘Faster, not slower!’

When she fell, he made no attempt to catch her. She reached out blindly, her left arm clattering against a branch. She wrapped herself around it. Bark shaved skin off the crook of her arm. Her feet were airborne. Blinking furiously, she saw Boyd on the track, hands on hips, watching. She slowed her swing, steadied herself and climbed back to the ledge. On her hands and knees, she looked up at him. She expected an insult but he said nothing. He didn’t have to. The message was in his stare; there’s no safety-net out here.

They reached a plateau. Stephanie guessed it was the saddle between two peaks because suddenly the wind was stronger, the rain horizontal. With the incline gone, he forced her to go faster still. At the higher altitude there was no thick grass, just greasy tufts between slivers of sheered rock and sheets of smooth stone. Her T-shirt clung to her body like an extra skin.

Recklessly, they ran without direction, burning the last of the air in their lungs, the wind moaning in their ears. When she retched, she didn’t stop. She just spat the last of her bile and saliva into the night. Sometimes she fell, sometimes he fell. She’d hear the grunt as he hit the ground and the crackle of loose stone beneath him. She never looked round. She carried on, forcing him to make up the lost ground. Will-power drove her on when her stamina began to fail.

Until she twisted her ankle.

It was a flat slice of land but her right foot skidded and then wedged itself between two rocks. She went over on it, felt the wrench in the joint, the searing heat up her calf and shin. The foot broke free as she fell.

She came to a stop close to the edge of a small pool of icy black water. She lay on her back, her spasmodic breathing beyond control. Boyd barked at her to get up. She did nothing and felt his boot in her ribs again. She rolled onto her side and then dragged herself to her feet. But when she placed the weight of her body on the right ankle, it folded. Boyd yelled at her once more.

‘I can’t!’ she panted.

He grabbed the collar of the T-shirt, squeezing cold water from it. ‘You will.’

‘My ankle … it’s sprained … twisted …’

‘I don’t care if it’s broken! Run!’

Three times she tried, three times she fell, but Boyd was having none of it. As she lay on the ground, he stood over her and pressed the sole of his boot onto her right ankle. She squirmed but refused to cry out.

‘The next time you fall down I’m going to stamp on this bone until it’s fucking paste! You understand, you shilling slut?’

She staggered to her feet once more. The strike caught both of them by surprise. Stephanie wasn’t fully aware of throwing it and Boyd had no time to avoid it. Her right hand cracked against the side of his face, loud enough to over-ride the cacophony of the storm, strong enough to put him down. But like a rubber ball, he was on his way up the moment he hit the ground. Stephanie never even raised her hands. He threw a punch, not a slap. It caught her on the right cheek, just below the eye. As she collapsed, stars erupted on the inside of her eyelids, the only spots of brightness in the night.

For a moment, there was nothing but rain and cold.

When Stephanie opened her eyes, Boyd had moved away. He was sitting on a mossy ledge, his head in his hands. She watched him, as still as stone, water dripping from him. Eventually, he looked up at her. Despite the darkness, she could see that the hatred was gone. In its place, there was sorrow.

6

It took two hours to return to the lodge. Boyd supported Stephanie so that she wouldn’t have to put any weight onto her right ankle. At first, she was oblivious to the wind and rain but when she saw the faint shimmer of the loch and the vague outline of the cabins beyond, the cold cut in and the last of her strength evaporated.

Inside, he led her to the kitchen, sopping and shivering. He pulled a wooden chair from the table and turned it to face the Rayburn, making sure not to place it too close, before collecting dry clothes for her. He removed her wet T-shirt first – replacing it with a thick burgundy sweatshirt – followed by her tracksuit bottoms and trainers. After jeans, he pulled thick Alpine socks over her frozen feet. Finally, he wrapped a scarf around her throat. Then he put the kettle on one of the hotplates before disappearing to change his own sodden clothes.

Outside, the storm continued to rage.

Gradually, Stephanie drifted back. The thaw in her fingers and toes began to burn. They drank two mugs of sweet milky tea, Boyd telling her to sip not slurp. The clatter of wind on glass was curiously comforting now they were warm and dry. She was a child again.

Boyd waited until her body was able to generate its own heat before attending to her. He removed the scarf and pulled her chair a little closer to the Rayburn. He examined her right ankle, turning and pressing it. He strapped it with a bandage, wiped her grazes with antiseptic and rubbed arnica into the worst of her bruises. Neither of them spoke. Later, he fed her Nurofen, led her to her bed and told her to go to sleep.

It was mid-afternoon. She dressed slowly, easing her muscles through the stiffness. She pulled on the same pair of jeans, a thick roll-neck jersey, climbing socks and a pair of boots. Outside, the weather had cleared. The air was sharp, the sky a deep sapphire. She found Boyd servicing the diesel generator in one of the outbuildings, his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, his hands and forearms black with oil and dirt. There was a mark on the side of his face. She couldn’t tell whether it was a bruise or just grime.

He laid a wrench on a strip of stained cloth. ‘How’s the foot?’

She shrugged. ‘Okay.’

‘And the rest of you?’

‘Look, about what happened …’

‘Don’t say anything, Stephanie. It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does matter.’

‘Well, it’s in the past now. Better that we leave it there, don’t you think?’ When she didn’t reply, he added: ‘For both of us.’

‘Can I ask you to do something for me?’

‘What?’

‘Cut my hair.’

Boyd frowned. ‘I’m not much of a barber.’

‘You won’t need to be.’

The following morning brought frost, the start of a four-day cold snap. Stephanie awoke late and rose slowly. The wood-framed mirror above the chest of drawers was only large enough to reflect half her face. She had to crouch a little to see her dark hair. Cropped close to the scalp in ragged tufts, she thought it made her look vulnerable. Which was how she felt. And which she didn’t mind.

Outside, the ground was glass beneath her boots. Above, the sky was almost purple in patches with a few wispy cirrus clouds. Boyd had gone on a run without her. She could see him on a ridge on the hill on the far side of the loch, a green-grey spot moving against a backdrop of wet rust.

She was waiting for him in the kitchen when he returned. He wasn’t short of breath but the cold air and his heat had turned his cheeks red. Sweat lent his forehead a sheen.

He looked at the kitchen table. ‘What’s this?’

‘What does it look like?’

‘You don’t have to make breakfast.’

‘I know.’

‘What I mean is, you don’t have to make amends.’

‘I know.’

Valeria Rauchman was a Russian-language teacher sent by Alexander during the last week of September. Snow-skinned with large, dark brown eyes, she had black hair with silver streaks that she wore in a bun at the nape of her neck. She looked as though she was in her mid-forties but Boyd later told Stephanie she was older. Squarely built, she was nevertheless elegant. Usually stern, she could never quite extinguish the sparkle in her eyes. For every obvious feature, Valeria Rauchman possessed a contradictory quality not far beneath the surface.

The first few days of tuition were intense since Stephanie was unable to exercise. ‘Not as good as I’d expected,’ Rauchman declared after the first lesson. ‘But with a lot of time and effort, who knows?’

A week after Rauchman’s arrival, the last commercial group of the season left. Stephanie watched them file onto two minibuses bound for Inverness. Boyd spent the next two days with his assistants, cleaning the cabins and closing them down for winter. On their last night, he spent the evening with them at the staff cabin. Stephanie and Rauchman remained at the lodge. After supper, Stephanie stood by the sitting-room window and looked out. Weak orange light spilled from the cabin’s windows. It was a still night. Intermittently, they could hear faint peals of laughter.

Rauchman said, ‘It’s good that he’s happy tonight.’

Stephanie looked across the room at her. ‘How well do you know him?’

‘I’ve known him for years. I knew Rachel, too.’

‘What was she like?’

‘Lovely. Quiet but strong. Stronger than him.’

Stephanie felt a pang of jealousy. ‘How did you meet him?’

‘That’s not for me to say.’

‘But you knew him before he came here?’

She nodded. ‘We used to run into each other from time to time. Zagreb, Jakarta, Damascus.’

‘What was he doing in those places?’

‘The same thing I was doing. Working.’

‘In a place like Damascus?’

‘When I saw him in Damascus, he was on his way home from Kuwait.’

‘The Gulf War?’

‘After Iraq invaded Kuwait, he was sent in to gather intelligence. For the six months leading up to Desert Storm, he lived in Kuwait City itself. On his own, on the move, living in rubble, living off rodents, transmitting information about the Iraqis when he could. He stayed until the city was liberated.’

‘And then you just happened to bump into him in Damascus?’

Rauchman smiled. ‘Don’t pretend to be so naïve, Stephanie. I know who you are. So you know how it is.’

‘He doesn’t talk about those things to me.’

‘Of course not. He never talks about anything that’s close to him. That’s why he’s never mentioned you.’

It was a week before Stephanie resumed training. A fortnight later, Rauchman was called to London for several days. Stephanie and Boyd embarked on a four-day trek. Boyd selected their clothes and prepared a small pack for each of them. He carried a compass, but when it was clear he made her navigate using a watch and the sun. She remembered the process: in the northern hemisphere, you hold the watch horizontally with the hour hand pointing at the sun. Bisecting the angle between the hour hand and the twelve, you arrive at a north – south line. From there, all directions are taken.

Her ankle healed, her stamina almost as developed as his, they travelled quickly, no matter what the terrain. Stephanie enjoyed the daily distance covered. By daylight, they stuck mostly to high ground. In the late afternoon, they would find a river or burn and descend towards it. Being the harsh landscape that it was, food was scarce. They had nothing to bring down a stag, a hind or a bird, so they fished for trout. In each pack there was a tin containing fishing line, a selection of hooks and some split lead weights. Stephanie proved to be useless at fishing and caught just one trout in four days, Boyd snagging the rest.

They carried groundsheets for night-time shelter. They plundered saplings from forestry plantations and draped the groundsheets over makeshift frames. Boyd had allowed them the luxury of lightweight Gore-Tex sleeping bags. By choosing places that offered some natural cover, the groundsheets proved largely effective against rain.

Each pack contained waterproof matches to light small fires at night, the flames securely contained within stone circles. They cooked gutted fish over glowing embers. Boyd supplemented their diet with bars of rolled-oat biscuits. When it was clear, he taught her how to read the major constellations in the sky: the Plough, Cassiopeia, Orion.

On the final morning, Stephanie awoke before Boyd. It was still dark. She watched the creeping daylight in the east and the rise of a plum-coloured sun. She heard the distant roar of an old stag on the slope above. Later, they spotted it, corralling its hinds along a ridge. They tracked the animals, taking care to remain downwind and out of sight. Boyd brought her close to them. They crawled through a peat hag rank with the stag’s musky scent and then found a flat slab of rock that overlooked the deer. When the animals moved on, Stephanie and Boyd climbed to the peak, from where they saw the lodge, a speck dwarfed by a wall of granite.

They sat on a rocky lip, their legs dangling over a fifty-foot drop, and ate the remains of their rations. Stephanie glanced across at Boyd, who was chewing a rolled-oat biscuit. He was looking down at his filthy boots and at the air beneath them. He was smiling.

‘What are you thinking about?’

He shook his head. ‘I was just wondering what it must have been like for your parents. Having you as a child, that is.’

‘And you find the idea of that funny?’

‘I find the idea of it terrifying.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

‘Were either of them as strong-willed as you?’

‘Both of them.’

‘Christ.’

‘So was my sister. And one of my brothers.’

‘Must’ve been a lot of noise.’

Stephanie laughed out loud. There had been. All the time. ‘But I was the worst.’

‘You reckon?’

‘I was a nightmare for my parents. Especially when I was a teenager. Too bright for my own good, too headstrong for anyone’s good. I never wanted to be anything like them.’

‘What teenager does?’

‘True. I always tried to disappoint them. And I was pretty successful at it. I was the brightest in my school but I underachieved. I got caught smoking and drinking. I listened to the Clash and the Smiths and hung around with the kind of boys I knew they’d dislike.’ Stephanie gazed at the drop, too. ‘Is there anything in the world more self-centred and pointless than a teenager?’

‘Of course not.’

‘The strange thing is, now my parents are gone, I find I’m envious of them. If I ever got married, I’d want a marriage like theirs. With stand-up rows and unruly children.’

‘And I thought the idea of you as a child was frightening.’

Stephanie turned to him. ‘You can’t see me as a wife? Or a mother?’

He opened his mouth, then checked himself. ‘I was going to say “no” but the truth is, I really don’t know.’

‘I’d want a house like the one I grew up in. I’d want a childhood like the one I grew up in.’

‘Don’t tell me. You’re just an old-fashioned girl at heart.’

She giggled, which was something she rarely did. ‘I know. All that rebellion for all those years and then it turns out there’s a part of me that’s just dying to be a conformist.’

It was a wet Wednesday. The previous evening, Valeria Rauchman had returned from London. When Stephanie came downstairs, she and Boyd were talking in the kitchen. There was a large package on the table.

‘Look what Valeria’s brought us from London.’

‘What is it?’

‘George Salibi.’

The man with the disk. ‘Any news on Marshall’s killer? Or Koba?’

‘Not yet.’

‘What’s the story with Salibi?’

‘The disk is – or will be – in a safe in his penthouse in New York. This is the background material we’ll need.’

They opened the parcel and spread its contents across the table. George Salibi, Lebanese billionaire banker, founder of First Intercontinental, aged sixty-four. A man with a penthouse on Central Park West, a house in London on Wilton Crescent, an enormous residence overlooking the sea at Villefranche-sur-Mer, a one-hundred-metre boat moored at the International Yacht Club at Antibes – named Zara, after his daughter – and a Gulfstream V to ferry him from one property to the next.

Salibi’s wife was an Argentine called Sylvia, daughter of an army general who’d fled to Switzerland in 1975 with twenty million embezzled dollars. Ten years younger than Salibi, Sylvia remained a stunning woman: high cheekbones, large emerald eyes, Sophia Loren’s mouth. She’d been twenty-seven when she married Salibi and it was not hard to see what the stout banker had fallen for. Her beauty was reflected in their children, Felix and Zara. Stephanie returned to a photograph of Sylvia at the time of her engagement. She’d been the same age as Stephanie was now. She’d had poise, sophistication, elegance. She looked entirely at ease with the glittering diamond choker that circled her slender throat. No rough edges, she looked everything that Stephanie wasn’t.

‘Salibi’s a renowned paranoid,’ Boyd said. ‘He has security at all his properties whether he’s there or not. Most of them are ex-Israeli Army, including his personal bodyguard, who’s by his side twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.’

‘No holidays?’

‘Not for more than three years.’

Boyd handed Stephanie a head-and-shoulders photograph: a stern expression, olive skin and chocolate eyes, black hair cut to stubble, powerful shoulder muscles.

‘A woman?’

Boyd nodded. ‘Ruth Steifel. Ex-Army, then ex-Mossad. Magenta House believe she may also have been seconded to Shabek on at least one occasion. Since she’s worked for Salibi, she hasn’t had a day off.’

‘I wonder what Sylvia says about that.’

After lunch, they examined the architect’s plans for the Central Park West penthouse. In a folder, there were photographs of the building from close and afar. There were three lists of observations and twelve pages of technical notes. It took Boyd and Stephanie an hour to go through the material for the first time.

‘Initial thoughts?’

Stephanie was studying the vertical plans. ‘Initial thoughts … if the disk is up for sale, perhaps it would be easier if Magenta House bought it.’

‘I think it’s going to be out of Alexander’s price range. People like you are very expensive to run.’

‘I had no idea I was such a luxury.’

‘You’re not. You’re an unfortunate necessity.’

Stephanie returned her attention to the plans. ‘I don’t think I can get into the place from below so it’s going to have to be from above.’

‘I agree. But how?’

‘Well, I can’t go up the outside. I’d be seen.’

‘And you can’t go up the inside because it’s secure.’

‘And I can’t drop onto the roof. Not realistically.’ Stephanie looked at the plans again. ‘The lifts …’

‘No. The main lift and the service lift both stop automatically on the floor beneath the penthouse. Every time the doors open, they’re checked by the guards. You wouldn’t even get to the right floor.’

‘Not the actual lifts. The lift-shafts.’

It takes forty-five minutes to reach it. A large ledge of soaking black granite, sodden grass beneath it, grassy tufts and dead trees above it, and above them, a one-hundred-foot granite wall.

I look at Boyd. He grins mischievously. ‘Not that. The ledge.’

Icy water falls from the ledge, a veil made of dozens of streams, some as heavy as a running tap, others needle-thin. The sound of the trickle, gurgle and rush is all we can hear.

‘Look at it. Doesn’t it remind you of something?’

I shrug. ‘Not immediately.’

‘Central Park West. The cornice around the top of the building.’

In my mind, I see the photographs again. Gothic, heavy, monstrous.

‘The cornice above the penthouse is about the same size and angle as this piece of rock. You’re going to have to come down over it.’

‘I’ll be suspended, though …’

‘Yes. But you need to climb down over it, not drop.’

‘Okay.’

‘But before you make a descent here, I want you to try to climb up it.’

I look at the reverse angle. I’ve tackled far worse and Boyd knows it. My mother, who was Swiss, was a climber of some fame when she was young. She made it to the top of Everest at the second attempt and conquered most of Europe’s greatest peaks, with the notable exception of the Eiger, which denied her twice. I’ve inherited her love of climbing and her lack of fear on rock.

I walk up to the face and place my palms against it. Hard, wet and freezing cold. Before I start, I make a map in my head of the route I’ll take. Crevices for toes, slender finger-holds, chunks small enough to grab but large enough to take the whole weight of my body. It’s join-the-dots. When I’ve seen exactly how I’ll make it to the lip of the ledge, I start.

I’m ten feet off the ground when I fall. I’m reaching to my right, spread-eagled across the rock, leaning back at an angle of almost forty-five degrees. I grab a sharp but thick ledge and I’m beginning to transfer my weight when, without warning, the rock shears, coming away in my hand. There’s no time to react. I’m already falling. I land on thick grass with a squelch.

As I struggle for breath, Boyd says, ‘You okay?’

I try to say something but can’t form a word. He leaves me to recover for a moment.

‘I thought that might happen.’

To prove the point, he steps through the gossamer waterfall, grabs a secure-looking wedge of rock and yanks it. It snaps free of the face, leaving a light scar beneath.

‘Bastard,’ I gasp.

‘It could happen again.’

I sit up. I’m soaked to the skin. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The plasterwork on the cornice. It’s old and rotten. It’s liable to come away in your hand.’

‘You must be pretty pleased with yourself.’

‘Very. Now let’s try it from the top.’

Stephanie pulled the curtains. It was a breezy morning, the wind sending washboard ripples across the loch. There was frost on the grass. She dressed quickly. The T-shirt she’d left to dry overnight was stiff and smelt of peat. She pulled a sweatshirt over the top. She collected her boots from the small drying room by the back door. They were warm.

Boyd was in the kitchen, drinking coffee, leaning against the sink. He wore an old pair of combat trousers and a chunky black V-neck over a white T-shirt.

‘Aren’t we going for a run?’

‘Valeria’s gone. She didn’t want to wake you. She asked me to say goodbye to you.’

‘When did she go?’

‘Early this morning. I drove her into Lairg.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Your preparation is over. At least, this part of it is.’

Stephanie wanted to say something, to protest. But she couldn’t.

Boyd seemed to sense it. ‘I got a call last night, after you’d gone to bed. Tomorrow morning, you’re going home.’

‘It’s not home.’

Boyd poured coffee from the pot into an enamel mug and offered it to her. ‘You can go for a run if you like, but I thought we might give it a miss this morning. You’re in good enough shape.’

‘But not so much fun to look at?’

He smiled. ‘No, I’m afraid not. I miss the bouncy bits you arrived with.’

‘You’ll get over it.’

‘Don’t be too sure.’ He refilled his own mug. ‘I need to go to Durness. Do you want to come?’

She could taste the sea before she saw it. They drove slowly on roads where sheep were the major source of traffic. They entered Durness at midday, sweeping past the primary school before halting outside the Mace store, a small supermarket with a post office counter, where green fees could be paid for Durness Golf Club, mainland Britain’s most northerly and windswept course. There was a BP filling station opposite the store, a small wooden hut beside the old pumps.

They bought groceries at Mace. There were half a dozen people inside the store. Boyd appeared to know them all. He fell into conversation with a couple at the till. A wiry man with copper hair shot a glance at Stephanie and then cracked a sly joke she couldn’t hear. Laughter all round. A fat woman in a grubby black fleece asked Boyd how his season had been.

He caught Stephanie’s eye. ‘More challenging than usual, Mary. But more rewarding, too.’

There was more conversation, more laughter, Boyd at the centre of it, relaxed, social. To Stephanie, who was silent and watching, it was a minor revelation. Outside, he suggested a walk. They headed out towards Balnakeil, a mile away, past the Balnakeil Crafts Centre, where small shops were located in corroding concrete huts erected in the Forties to house German prisoners-of-war. Boyd parked the Land-Rover by the old house at Balnakeil, on the opposite side of the road to the walled churchyard. Stephanie said she wanted to look inside. He shrugged and said he’d wait for her by the gate onto the beach.

The tiny stone church had no roof. Its walls were coated in ivy. The graveyard was crowded. Most of the headstones were old, their engraving partly erased by decades of ferocious weather. Many commemorated men and women who were not buried in the cemetery: those who’d been lost at sea, or in colonial wars fighting for the expansion of the British Empire, or those who’d emigrated to Australia, India and South Africa, in search of a life less gruelling. Scattered among the old graves, there were a few more recent.

Including Rachel’s.

It was in the far corner, by the stone wall. A small, unremarkable square headstone laid down the basic facts of her life. Dead at thirty-five. It made no mention of the cause but Stephanie knew that it had been breast-cancer. Beloved wife of Iain. The bottom half of the headstone was blank, leaving enough space for another entry.

She looked across the cemetery. He was facing the sea.

She joined him at the gate and they walked onto the beach in the direction of Faraid Head, the farthest tip of the headland. The tide was coming in, but still low. The sand was hard, wind blowing a thin film of it across the rippled surface. They stepped over squelching beds of seaweed and scattered rubbish: a single shoe, part of a seat-belt, strips of slime-coated plastic. At the far end of the beach, a concrete track rose between dunes. In some places sand obscured it, but the direction was clear and they followed it. Between the dunes the wind died, in the open it was fierce.

As they crossed a cattle-grid, Stephanie said, ‘There was a man in London before Malta. Frank White. I was in love with him. He was in love with me, I think. But it was a strange kind of love. I couldn’t tell him anything truly personal. It was a love built on lies, except at the end. Then, I told him everything, and he accepted it. He’d known there was something about me right from the start.’ She shook her head at the memory. ‘After Malta, I disappeared. But I sent messages to him. I gave him the opportunity to follow me, to meet me. To vanish with me.’

‘But he didn’t?’

‘No.’

‘Any idea why not?’

‘I guess he didn’t love me as much as I thought he did. Or as much as I loved him.’

‘Maybe he had too much to lose by following you.’

‘Believe me, he didn’t.’

‘Have you tried to contact him again since you’ve been back in London?’

‘No. It’s been four years. He belongs to another part of my life. A part that … well, the idea of it’s just too complicated.’

‘I know what you mean.’

Stephanie doubted that. She took a deep breath. ‘Anyway, when I realized there wasn’t going to be a future with him, I didn’t feel there was any future at all. I didn’t disappear to escape from Magenta House. Not really. I disappeared to be with him.’ Boyd had stopped walking so she stopped too. She smiled sadly. ‘My first broken heart. I was twenty-three but I took it like a fifteen-year-old.’

‘And became Petra because of it?’

‘I didn’t become anybody. I was already Petra.’

‘I’m not with you.’

‘I didn’t choose to live Petra’s life because my heart got broken. But I was confused and angry. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s self-pity, but when I look at the way I was then I don’t see that I had much of a chance. Trained to perfection – to breaking point – I was bound to fracture sooner or later.’

‘Probably,’ Boyd conceded.

‘In the end, all I did was not change. There was no real decision. Instead of Alexander, there was money, although it wasn’t about the money. It was about the work. The day-to-day existence; rejecting contracts, accepting contracts, planning them, executing them, getting away with it. Attention to detail in all things.’

‘What were you looking for?’

‘Mechanical perfection. I wanted to be a machine. To feel nothing at all.’

‘And did you succeed?’

‘I think so. For a while …’

Beyond the cattle-grid, the road was tarmac with grass on either side, sheep roaming freely. In the distance, at the tip of the headland, Stephanie saw a small building, a look-out tower with black and yellow squares painted on the walls. An old Ministry of Defence facility, Boyd told her, with a concrete helicopter pad. Useful for air-sea rescue.

As they approached it, the incline grew steeper. Dozens of rabbits ran wild. Stephanie walked to the cliff’s edge and peered at the two-hundred-foot vertical drop. She watched raucous waves hurling themselves onto the rocks below, cracking, foaming, receding. She felt the vertiginous pull, as familiar to her as the desire to succumb to momentary madness and to make the leap herself. She leaned further over and sensed Boyd tensing beside her.

‘Why did you stop?’ he asked.

She described Bilbao. ‘I don’t know why it happened. It just did. In the first few weeks after it, I thought it was some kind of nervous breakdown. But now, when I look back at it, I think it was some kind of breakthrough. I think the nervous breakdown came before Bilbao. And after Malta.’

‘And lasted for two and a half years?’

‘Yes. I think my whole independent career as Petra was one long nervous breakdown. And that Bilbao – well, Arkan, to be specific – was the snapping point.’

Boyd was placing squares of peat onto the dying embers of the fire. He stood up and collected his glass from the mantelpiece. When he turned round, he found Stephanie at his side. She took the glass from his hand and returned it to the mantelpiece.

‘Are you going to tell Alexander what I’ve told you today?’

‘Not if you don’t want me to.’

‘He’ll want to know.’

‘He wants to know whether you’re up to scratch.’

‘And am I?’

‘You’re more vulnerable than you used to be.’

‘That’s not an answer. Am I up to scratch?’

‘Yes. I’m afraid you are.’

She kissed him and tasted Pomerol. Boyd had produced a dusty bottle of Clos René at dinner. Stephanie had looked surprised and he’d said that he’d been saving it for a special occasion.

‘You mean like finally getting rid of me?’

‘No. Nothing like that.’

‘What, then?’

‘You work it out.’

She’d blushed instead.

Now, Boyd broke the kiss. But not by much. The only sound was the crackle of flame on peat.

Stephanie whispered, ‘I want to make love with you.’

‘No.’

‘This isn’t like before …’

‘I know.’

He was still holding her. Stephanie looked him straight in the eye when she asked, ‘Is it because of Rachel?’

‘In a way, yes.’

Slowly, reluctantly, she began to move clear of him. ‘Then I’m sorry. I don’t want things to be awkward between us.’

‘There’s nothing to feel awkward about, Stephanie. I just don’t want to get into that position.’

‘What position?’

He turned away from her and collected his glass again. ‘I was in love with Rachel. We both thought we had a long future ahead of us. But we didn’t.’ Stephanie watched him drain the last of his claret. ‘The world you’re about to go back to … we both know what the score is. I’ve already lost somebody I loved. I don’t want to allow myself to get into the position where I might have to go through that a second time.’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.