‘I have to go into my flat or they’ll get suspicious,’ he says. ‘Will I see you again?’
She turns and hurries back down the stairs without answering.
The sound of her footsteps echoes in the stairwell. She is aware of Michael watching her until she is out of sight.
Back outside, Neva retrieves the clipboard and makes her way out to the main street, striding quickly away from the man on the motorbike, who is now puffing on a vape as he continues to stare at Michael’s front door.
Down the street she pauses. She’s aware of the knife in her wrist holster. She glances back at the stupid youth. She could kill him, just for the hell of it. After all, she is the converse of heaven and death still means nothing to her. She feels the ebb and flow – the urge to kill – surging through her veins in a rush of adrenaline. Her blood sings in her ears, an unnameable melody that calls to the darkest, deepest depths of her being. Her never forgotten mantra plays around her consciousness, while calming her subconscious: I am death. And she acknowledges that, in the end, there is no escaping from this final eventuality. Why not take more down with you before the inevitable?
Her body moves of its own volition and she takes a step towards the novice as though she’s being carried on an irresistible tide.
But no. She stops. She has to be smart and not draw attention to Michael, or herself.
For the moment.
Chapter Three
Michael
I enter my flat with a sense of dread. Despite the warmth of the day and the heat of the apartment, stifled as it has been with the windows securely fastened throughout the day, I feel cold. But this chill is far from physical.
I open the windows now, walking through the lounge, passing on to the kitchen and ending up in my bedroom, which is the hottest room in the place. There isn’t a breeze tonight and the air is slow to circulate as the evening draws in.
My apartment is in central London and I’ve lived here for years, never craving any other life. Until now.
I feel suffocated. My chest aches and the shallow breaths I take burn as though I’m inhaling the direct heat of the sun. But it is not the heat or the imagined chill that creates this pain. It is the dull twinge of abject sadness.
I’m miserable as I pull off my tie, and peel away the white shirt that is damp with sweat.
A shudder ripples down over my skin as I strip and head for the bathroom and a cool, refreshing shower that should make me feel a little more comfortable. Physically anyway.
Neva is on my mind as I come back into the bedroom, and the thought of her being here in my bed again won’t leave. I can smell her still, the slight scent of perfume, the aroma of salty perspiration. Delicious and clean on her skin. The taste of her mouth too still lingers on my lips. I’m not given to poetry and declarations of love. Could I ever even say that to her? I’m not sure what it is I feel. She’s inscrutable, unattainable. Even when I’m holding her, I don’t know what she’s thinking. I don’t believe she can ever truly be mine.
I dry my body and pull on a pair of boxers, and then I walk out of the bedroom. In the kitchen I pour myself a cold beer from the fridge, a habit that has become all too frequent since I’ve been home on gardening leave.
I mull over the sudden change. So, I’m back in at Archive – well, partly anyway. Is it a coincidence that Neva has returned to me now?
I try to push away the suspicion. What is the point of worrying about motive? We all have our own agendas.
My phone rings and I glance at the screen, seeing Mia’s name flash up. My sister. I feel a clench of regret and guilt. I’ve been distant from her, trying to keep her out of this as much as possible. Mia must never know that our whole lives have been a lie.
‘Hey, Sis,’ I say, answering.
‘I thought you were going to leave me hanging there!’ Mia says. ‘How you doing?’
‘I’m fine. How are you?’
‘I’d be better if you could find time to come and visit. See your niece. She’s almost four months old and changing by the day.’
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Work commitments.’
Mia sighs. ‘What’s happening, Mike? I thought you were on gardening leave?’
She knows a bit, a story I’d spun her about a security breach. Accusations that had put my job in jeopardy. Ray had agreed to the story to cover all of our backs and to keep Mia ignorant of the work I had done with Archive and our connection with the Network.
‘She’s innocent in all this,’ I had told him. ‘And pregnant. Why drag her in? Does she really need to know that our parents weren’t who they said they were?’
Ray had agreed after a great deal of begging on my part. I think he didn’t see any point in ruining her life as well. And so they’d kept Mia out of it, and she’d never know about the surveillance she was under. At least, I hoped she wouldn’t.
‘Well, I’m back at work,’ I say. ‘All is okay.’
‘You’ve been reinstated? That’s great news!’
We talk for a little longer. Mia babbles about the new baby, Freya, and about her husband, Ben, whom I’ve always got along with. When we hang up, she sends me several pictures of Freya. Looking at them compounds my guilt and breaks something inside me. I’m not as strong as I once was, but I’m getting better. Freya is a reminder of all I feel I have lost with the newfound knowledge of my origins.
The reason I haven’t been to see her yet is that I’m afraid to get attached to Freya. She and Mia are my true family. Just as surely as I had been trained to be a killer and spy, I was sure that Mia had been groomed as a breeder for the Network. Even though she’s unaware of it. If we hadn’t closed the kill house, my little niece could have ended up there in a few years’ time. Unbeknownst to Mia she is only my half-sister, and not my maternal twin. We were both lied to, subjected to conditioning and sent out into the world as sleepers by the man who’d sired us. I find myself wondering if Beech had any redeeming qualities at all. Would he have really taken Freya from Mia in the future? Could he have subjected his granddaughter to the torture of the house? I’ll never know the answer but suspect that he would have. He hadn’t shown any remorse about doing it to me – his son – after all. Or any other child for that matter. Bastard.
I put down my phone on the kitchen table and look around the apartment. This place has never felt less of a haven. Within hours of my return, I’d found the surveillance that Archive had put in while they had me under lock and key (for my own safety they said) while we debriefed.
In the bathroom there is a microphone secreted along the light above the mirror. In the bedroom I’m wired for sound via a microphone placed by the window. In the living room and the kitchen, they have camera surveillance. Micro pieces of tech, no bigger than a fly, which are placed in appropriate positions. At least they have afforded me some privacy when I’m naked.
I go back into my bedroom and pull on a pair of chinos and a T-shirt. Then, taking my wallet and keys, I leave the apartment and head towards the tube. The ‘obvious’ tail watches me, while he talks into his shirt. By the time I reach the station, another follower has tagged on and travels with me on the train to Soho.
My favourite sushi restaurant is here and ignoring the woman following – at least she’s a bit savvier than the last one – I go inside and sit at the bar.
I reach for salmon and avocado maki rolls. My favourite king prawn tempuras soon follow along with teriyaki chicken. Hungry, in need of comfort, I eat my fill.
Outside my tail watches from across the street. I continue to ignore her. I order Asahi beer and sip it as I study the offerings that go around on the conveyor belt.
The restaurant is busy and I cast my eyes around the room, assessing whose company I’m keeping. There is a young Japanese couple sitting by the window, a family of four close by who talk too loudly to each other. Then there is a man sitting on his own in the corner. I feel a little sympathy and camaraderie with him as I eat my lonely dinner, but I’m out of sync with the
world.
Eventually I have had enough. I call the waiter over and hand him the empty plates and I pay my bill. Then I leave and walk the streets for a while.
My mind won’t settle on anything important, but Olive Redding’s file floats behind my eyes. Information. Sentences giving detail of who and what she was. Talking about a child as an asset. Disgusting. Vile. The unredacted detail of the torturous process of conditioning. My stomach roils now at the thought.
The parents… Olive’s parental details had been redacted, but the names had been missed on one of the pages. Her real name was Georgia Stanners and her father was Lord Stanners! I make a mental note to ask Beth tomorrow if she has seen and pursued this information. I’m kicking myself that I hadn’t picked up on it earlier: maybe it wasn’t there at all and I am imagining it. The shock of being back in Archive can be blamed for this, plus I haven’t been working for six months, no wonder my skills are rusty.
It’s after nine when I get home. I try not to think about Neva as I go to bed, determined to be in the office by eight the next morning. Besides, retiring early will end this interminable evening.
Going out has done me some good though. It’s freed my mind, relieved a little tension. I’m itching now to get this investigation underway and to regain my stripes and the respect of my colleagues. However long that might take.
Chapter Four
Michael
Dressed in a smart suit, new shirt and tie, I’m the first in the next day. I go straight to my office and open Olive’s file. There it is: her real name, I hadn’t imagined it. A quick search on the internet reveals something about little Georgia’s disappearance. It’s odd that this one isn’t linked to other missing children of that era, and I hadn’t seen her appear in the names Beth originally listed when we first started to look at these cases.
As I begin writing up a report to add to the file, it feels as though I have my mojo back. I hadn’t realised quite how much I’d missed being productive during my weird hiatus. Now, I am excited and motivated as I scan the other files, looking for similar information of other children that had passed through the house.
‘Hi,’ says Beth from the doorway. ‘You’re early.’
‘I remembered something,’ I say as I drop back into our old working habits. ‘All the real names are redacted but Olive’s was missed on one page.’
‘Really? Let me see,’ says Beth.
When she reads the information and my notes, she shakes her head. ‘Just shows you how overworked we’ve been. None of us saw that, Mike!’
‘Someone should go and speak to Lord Stanners,’ I say. ‘Though he will be fairly old now. It was thirty-odd years ago when she went missing.’
‘If we have this information then Olive certainly knew who she really was. Maybe we can pick up her trail through them.’ Beth turns to leave then she pauses, looking back at me. ‘Welcome back, Mike. We’ve missed you.’
Beth goes away and I consider her response to the information. Did she pretend she hadn’t seen it in order to make me feel useful? I have the uncomfortable suspicion that I’ve just been patronised.
I try not to think about it as I take more care reading the other documents and I find three more names buried in the notes. These children are all from varying generations.
A girl referred to as ‘Jewel’ was formerly known as Elizabeth Denver, a young man called ‘Drake’ was born Dennis Proctor and a final boy with the codename ‘Anchor’ was originally Stefan Oliver. Jewel is the youngest of the three and is the same age as Neva. I wonder if they trained together.
I open up Beth’s notes on Amelie Arquette’s suspected peer group – the same that Neva was given over to. There are seven children that went missing that year under similar circumstance. Elizabeth Denver’s name is not among them. I know from Ray that Amelie Arquette didn’t survive the first few weeks of conditioning, and it was at this point that Neva was brought into the house and I first met her. There are no photographs of Elizabeth Denver in the file, and I wonder if she, like Neva, was a replacement for another child. The folder doesn’t mention anything, at least the unredacted parts don’t. What’s under those definitive blocks of black I just don’t know.
I lift one of the sheets up to the light and look through it. Sometimes the redacting is insufficient to totally obscure what was beneath. But these are solid and are photocopies anyway, so any evidence of the original content is long gone.
Curious, I spend some time reading the achievements of all three of these operatives. Drake and Anchor were particularly brutal in the execution of their assignments. I make notes on this to share with the team and then I go in search of Ray to discuss my findings. There is no further mention of Jewel.
Ray, Leon and Beth are all together in Ray’s office. They have a slide projected on the screen, which Beth closes down from her computer when I rap on the open door.
‘Sorry if I’m disturbing you,’ I say and I can’t help the slight resentful tone that slips into my voice as I stare at them.
‘That’s okay, Mike. My door is always open to you,’ Ray says.
‘I’ll come back later when you’re free, but I wondered if you had anything else for me to look at in the meantime?’
Beth stood and went to the filing cabinet behind Ray’s desk.
‘The next lot are here,’ she says, removing a handful of folders from the cabinet. ‘Did you find anything useful in the others? I told the guys about Olive…’
‘A few more names came to light that could be leads,’ I say. ‘I’ll add them all to my report. One in particular is interesting. No photos in the file. Same year group as Neva.’
‘Great. Here are some more files we found in Beech’s office.’
Feeling dismissed, I take the files back to my office. Behind me I see flickering light from the screen as Beth puts the slide back up for the three of them to discuss as I walk away.
I should be happy that I’m back at Archive but instead I feel like an outsider. I don’t know if things will ever be normal again.
Chapter Five
Neva
Neva shuts down her encrypted laptop and stares at the blank wall of her basic hotel room. She’s been searching for information on a missing plane. Zen Airline flight 723 was carrying 299 passengers and 12 crew on its way to Shanghai. A Boeing 777 300. The situation resembles the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 some years previously. In that instance it was a Boeing 777 200 bearing 227 passengers and 12 crew. While the plane was never found, several theories were bandied around about its disappearance. Neva knew what those hypotheses were because she’d taken particular interest back in 2014.
The disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines flight had been made very public, and yet, strangely, the Zen one has not. Instead, it seems to be hushed up, with very little online about it and no real information. Just a sequence of complaints and legal attempts to get the airline to assume some sort of responsibility for the disappearance of all those people. Even the press has been strangely silent on it, but Neva knows that often those in power and with great wealth will simply buy the press’s silence through their contacts with the various billionaire owners.
Neva closes the lid of the laptop and stands. She had resolved to stay away from Michael but now feels she has to approach him again. It’s a concern that he has rejoined his former colleagues and returned to work at Archive, even though such a circumstance will grant him access once more to information that could help her. But would he jeopardise himself again for her sake?
She boards the tube near Michael’s work and, dressed as an inspector for TFL, she inspects tickets, scans oyster cards and debit cards up and down the track. Then she waits on the platform at Michael’s station until he arrives. As he boards the train, Neva enters his carriage and works her way towards him. She notes the tail – another snot-nosed youth barely out of school and keeps her back to him. She reaches Michael two stops before he’s due to depart, and as she asks for proof of payment,
she slips him a note. He recognises her but keeps his face straight, palming the note and pushing it into his wallet along with the card.
Neva exits at the next stop and walks away.
Chapter Six
Michael
After reading Neva’s note I get off the tube at my usual stop. The tail follows, but I make a quick change of direction and lose myself in the crowd that pours up and out of the station. The man following had been complacent – they are used to me doing exactly as expected. Now I cut across the road, hurry into a back street and hide behind a dumpster. I turn my phone off so that I can’t be traced. From my vantage point I see the man passing the end of the alley. He glances down but can’t see me. He rushes along the road, speaking into his jacket. I stay there for a long time before emerging back onto the street, then I head back to the tube and make my way to the rendezvous point.
Two hours after leaving work, I sit at a small table in a city centre bar waiting for Neva.
Nervous that I’ve still somehow been followed, I look around, studying the occupants of the bar. It’s a Thursday evening and trade is good. By the door is a good-looking blonde girl in a skin-tight catsuit talking to the bouncer. She is enjoying the fact that the man is hitting on her, and that she keeps placing her hands on the T-shirt over his muscled chest is speaking volumes.
My eyes trail over into the dark corners of the bar. I feel anonymous and safe when I realise that no one in the place is watching me. My eyes continue around the room and then I see her – at the other end of the bar watching me in the bar mirror.
She’s ditched the TFL uniform now and is wearing a simple pair of tight jeans and for once her own hair is on display. She had it tied up at our last meeting and now I can see that it has grown, almost down to her waist. She’s understated and stunning.
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