by John Marrs
Later, the three separated to ask in shops and cafes about their mark. But all were regarded with suspicion and the fed-up town closed ranks; they gleaned nothing they didn’t already know. It was only later when Emilia viewed footage of interviews from the other two’s body cams that the young woman who ran the B&B caught her attention. She was clearly accustomed to—and annoyed by—strangers enquiring as to the whereabouts of Britain’s most wanted woman. But Emilia intuitively read something else in her expression—disappointment. She suspected they had been more than landlady and tenant; they had been friends. And even weeks after her sudden departure, this Grace girl was still struggling to come to terms with who Flick had really been. It was how Emilia was going to lure her out of hiding.
Early the next morning, Emilia found herself standing over Grace’s trembling body, watching the helpless electrocuted woman’s arms jerk. Gradually Grace’s fingers spread out and her wrists turned as if preparing to crawl away. It was a futile gesture. The heel of Emilia’s boot crushed Grace’s fingers.
“I don’t think so,” Emilia said quietly. “This is only beginning.”
CHAPTER 83
FLICK, ALDEBURGH, SUFFOLK
The smart glasses were shaking in Flick’s hands as she slipped them on. Her irises directed the zoom function to scan the property, fifty metres ahead. The curtains behind each of the three windows were closed and the lights turned off. The front door, however, was slightly ajar.
She switched to thermal-imaging mode in the hope it might pinpoint how many people were inside. But the glasses, all the motorway service station had to offer, were inexpensive. A faint yellow dot appeared upstairs in the house, suggesting someone was inside.
Flick desperately wanted to run across the road, burst through the doors of the B&B, and discover exactly what Grace’s attacker had done to her. But she was certain this was a setup designed to ensnare her. So she took shelter from the weather under the porch of an empty property instead of reacting with a knee-jerk response.
The cloak of dusk she’d arrived under had made way for nightfall, the sky illuminated by a rainbow of colours projected by the bright lights of a nearby fun fair, merry-go-round rides and stalls. She’d forgotten it was the final day of the carnival, and the vast number of participants made remaining unnoticed more challenging. The rain that had soaked her that morning in Cornwall followed her cross-country but hadn’t put off hundreds of people parading along the nearby high street, carrying illuminated Chinese lanterns on sticks and making their way to the beach to end the celebrations with a firework display later that night.
Flick arched her back and pushed her fingers into her lower spine, where a stitch had appeared. She was unsure if it was the pregnancy or the long drive knotting her muscles. She’d had plenty of time during the seven-hour journey to Aldeburgh to decide how to respond to Grace’s plight. Her conscience wouldn’t allow her to do nothing, but more importantly, she made the decision to no longer run from the person who wanted her dead. It would be an impossible feat to keep looking over her shoulder for the next four and a half years and at the same time provide a safe, secure environment for her baby.
The enemy had succeeded in what they’d set out to do. They had lured Flick out of hiding and back into the open. But if they wanted to kill her, she wasn’t going to make it easy for them.
Her glasses targeted the B&B one last time before Flick removed a hunting knife from her pocket and slipped it inside the right sleeve of her coat. She practised snapping her wrists back to judge how quickly it could slip out.
She made her way towards the end of the garden and to the road outside Grace’s house. Flick ran her fingers up and down the gateposts searching for sensors that might warn Grace’s captor of her arrival, but they were clear. There were no laser alarms surrounding the length of the path either.
Arriving at the front door, she assumed it was nerves making her stomach flutter until she realised it was the baby turning inside her. She rubbed it, almost apologetically, and hoped her stress levels weren’t being felt by her child. Not for the first time that day she questioned whether she was doing the right thing. But this was uncharted territory—there was no right or wrong, only survival of the fittest.
Flick wedged the front door open with a rock as she slowly stepped inside the entrance hall, moving towards the lounge. Her glasses revealed the room to be empty. So were the communal dining room, kitchen, utility room, and bathroom. Upstairs, it was the same for each guest bedroom with the exception of the one she had once rented. As she approached it, thermal-imaging sensors made the yellow dot expand. If it was Grace, she was radiating heat and that meant she was alive.
Flick swallowed the sour taste of bile as it rose up into her throat. The cool tip of the hunting knife grazed her wrist as she turned the door handle and slowly opened it. The first thing to strike her was the intense heat. Only it wasn’t coming from a body but, judging by the circular shape of it, from an electric heater next to one. Then she spotted a figure lying on the bed.
“Grace?” she whispered, her voice no louder than a whisper. “Grace, please wake up.” Flick drew closer and fumbled until she could place two fingers on the side of the person’s neck, searching for a pulse. She withdrew her hand when she felt something wet. She frantically located the bedside light, illuminating Grace’s body. Her throat had been slashed.
Flick cast her gaze across her friend. Her skin was a greyish white; her lifeless eyes stared up at the ceiling. Blood had oozed from her throat and seeped into her T-shirt and bedsheets. The heater had been used to fool the thermal-imaging camera and had already dried the blood brown. Grace’s hands and feet had been bound, but she hadn’t been gagged. Flick shuddered at what level of pain her terrified friend must have suffered in her final moments.
A tidal wave of emotions threatened to consume her. She sank to her knees, grabbing Grace’s hand as she apologised over and over again. This time, the bile rose too high to swallow and she only just made it to the sink to vomit.
As she palmed Grace’s eyelids shut, she spotted something poking from the corner of her mouth. She carefully parted Grace’s lips and removed a scrap of balled-up paper. As she uncurled it, she recognised it as the line drawing of Flick that Elijah had sketched the night they met.
It struck in an instant. Flick had spent so much time worrying about Grace that she hadn’t given a thought to who else the killer might use to reach her.
Elijah.
With rain lashing against her cheeks, Flick ran through the back streets and alleyways before reaching the road behind the beachfront. She kept her hood pulled over her head, to protect her from the elements and to avoid being spotted by lantern-bearing carnival-goers heading to the beach.
She couldn’t think clearly enough to prepare herself for what she might find inside Elijah’s house. And on her arrival, the privacy glass was already on, giving nothing away about the activities inside. Unlike at Grace’s B&B, she didn’t scope the building before entering. Instead, she keyed in the digits to the security code and his front door opened with a click. Then she clasped the handle of her hunting knife, ready to strike at a moment’s notice.
Flickering lights greeted her as she entered the corridor, illuminating the Perspex staircase. The bass-heavy rap music that Elijah favoured as he worked blasted throughout the house, offering her a shred of hope that the killer had not yet reached him. Slipping on her smart glasses again, Flick made her way along the corridor until she reached the unlit, open-plan kitchen and lounge. There was no sign of Elijah even with the thermal-imaging lens.
She felt another twinge in her back but didn’t have time to pay it attention. Instead, she made her way upstairs until she reached the closed door of his studio. Please be alive, she thought, and pulled at the handle to open it.
Suddenly, a figure inside rushed towards her. Instinctively, she ducked, then swung her knife out in fro
nt of her, slicing the air with the blade. However, the figure vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
A disorientated Flick turned, trying to locate the person, only for another to appear on the other side of the room. They too flew towards her, then vanished as she tried to strike them. It was only when a third came at her that she saw who the enemy was—herself. They were the three-dimensional moving holograms of her, the ones Elijah had created for his exhibition. Flick scowled at the soulless, empty, ghostlike apparitions and wondered how far removed from her they actually were.
Without warning, they changed direction and began marching towards a frosted-glass window. There, they paused in height order, from the tallest at the front to the real Flick at the back, like a row of Russian dolls. It was as if they were staring at something.
“OS—turn off music and clear glass,” Flick yelled. The room fell silent, enabling her to see outside. It was then that she spotted the building in the distance. There was a yellow cross illuminated on the steeple and a dim light coming from inside. It was the former church that Elijah used as his second studio. That was where the killer was hiding him; that was where Flick would find them both. And that was where she, Elijah, their baby, and the secrets that she held might die.
CHAPTER 84
EMILIA
Emilia splashed water against her face until her skin cooled. She gave a short, sharp sniff under each arm, aware of her sour body odour. There had been no time that day to change her clothing or to freshen up. She slipped off her top, washed her armpits with liquid soap and water, then warmed the damp patches of material under the hand drier.
She glanced upwards as she made her way from the vestry’s bathroom back into the echoing stone church nave. The ceiling was so high that in the dim lighting, she couldn’t make out the detail painted upon it. She took in the parts of the stained-glass windows that she could see, which depicted the firing of arrows into a saint. She too knew how it felt to suffer at the hands of others.
It won’t be long now, she thought. Once she got what she needed from Flick, she would find out who she was, be free of the Hacking Collective, and be reunited with her husband and daughters.
Her earpiece beeped and she took a deep breath. She had already rehearsed what was to come next.
“Delta Team, an update, please,” Bianca’s voice began. Emilia looked over to Gardiner and Lago. All three remained silent.
“Gardiner, what’s your status update, please?” she repeated.
She still didn’t get her answer. “Lago, your location?” This time there was a pause before Bianca spoke again. “Where the hell is everyone?”
Emilia cleared her throat. “The agents you assigned to babysit me are otherwise engaged,” she said calmly, looking to both men again, smiling. Their expressions remained unmoved.
“What’s that supposed to mean? Where are they?”
“They’re here with me.”
“Then tell them to answer me.”
When Emilia failed to oblige, Bianca hesitated again, as if she was trying to read between the lines. She chose her words carefully. “What have you done, Emilia?”
Emilia moved her head back in the direction of Gardiner and Lago. She had swiped Gardiner’s weapon and used it on both of them. Gardiner was lifeless and slumped over a pew, blood no longer trickling from a bullet wound through his temple. Lago lay facedown on the concrete flagstones and displayed an exit wound just above his ear.
“They served their purpose and now I’m going to finish this alone,” said Emilia.
“Get their GPS locations . . .” she heard Bianca ordering someone. “She’s out of control. I warned you this would happen . . .”
“You’re wasting your time,” Emilia continued, looking at the broken tracking devices next to the bodies.
“Emilia, I need you to tell me where you are. We need to bring you in immediately. You cannot compromise this mission by going rogue, not when we’ve come so close to our goal.”
“I need to see this through to the end and on my terms so that I can be with my family again. I only have one chance left and she’ll be here any minute.”
“Emilia,” Bianca continued, and for the first time, Emilia sensed panic in her inflection. “We can help you. But first you must tell me where you are so that we can come and get you.”
Emilia removed her earpiece, let it fall to the floor, and crushed it underfoot. Then she took Gardiner’s gun from where it rested on the ledge and put a bullet through her phone.
She turned to look at where she had convinced the operatives to leave Elijah after they’d beaten him and dragged him from his home and into the back of their van. His arms were outstretched horizontally and his wrists and legs bound to a wooden crucifix. Another rope had been used to tie his neck to it and he was gagged with a cloth.
“It won’t be much longer now,” she said. “Soon we’ll all know who we are really supposed to be.”
CHAPTER 85
FLICK, ALDEBURGH, SUFFOLK
Flick leaned against a granite headstone and bent double, clutching her stomach and gasping for breath. Raindrops dripped from leaves on the oak tree standing tall above her, onto her cheeks and down her neck.
The sprint from Elijah’s house to the deconsecrated church of St. Paul took less than ten minutes. Fear and adrenaline drove her onward alongside a desperate hope that Elijah wasn’t another victim caught in the crossfire between her and the woman who wanted her dead. But pregnancy and the stress of the last twenty-four hours were physically weakening her, along with a painful stitch in her side that was spreading from her back to her stomach.
The illuminated neon cross attached to the church’s steeple shone like a lantern in a lighthouse, propelling and repelling her in equal measure. It warned of danger ahead yet beckoned her towards it.
She could just about see its dimly lit interior through the stained-glass windows. Squeezing the knife handle now firmly in her grip, she slipped on her glasses and approached the church’s large wooden doors. Flick tugged the metal rings until she was inside a pitch-black porch. In night-vision mode, her glasses helped her to find the handles to the next set of doors, and then . . . nothing. The battery ran out. She cursed them and discarded them to the floor.
It was the first time Flick had been inside Elijah’s second workspace. Unsecured wooden pews were scattered about and used as leaning posts to prop up full-sized canvases. Paint-splattered boards protected parts of the original flooring, and large sheets of cloth were nailed to walls and covered some windows. A bank of at least a dozen computer screens was lined up against a wall where she assumed Elijah and his team had perfected Flick’s holograms. The altar at the far end was only just visible; behind it, a crucifix.
A noise from that area caught her attention. The sound was human and a mix of a howl and a groan. Chills spread across the surface of her skin as she took a few cautious paces closer to it. Then, without warning, the effigy of Jesus on the cross came to life. She quickly retreated until, through the dim light, she realised there was someone attached to it.
“Elijah!” she cried out. But as she hurried towards him, the unmistakable sound of a safety catch being removed from a weapon stopped her in her tracks.
“Ordinary people probably wouldn’t know what this sound was, but you and I aren’t ordinary, are we?” a woman’s voice began.
She recognised it as belonging to the woman who had electrocuted and murdered Grace. The stitch jabbed Flick sharply. She didn’t reply or turn around to see who was holding her at gunpoint. When Elijah groaned again, weapon or no weapon, it was all Flick could do to stop herself from trying to free him. “Are you okay?” she directed towards him instead.
Emilia let out a humourless laugh. “Does he look okay? He’s strapped to a cross and slowly choking to death.”
As Flick turned to face her assailant, she held the hunting kni
fe behind her and out of sight. At the same time, the town’s annual fireworks display burst into life with a crack of thunder and bright purple lights, illuminating the woman. A bar across a window cast a shadow over her eyes, giving them a hollow appearance. But she recognised her nonetheless.
“I thought you . . .” began Flick.
“. . . were dead,” said Emilia. “Yes, I get that a lot. Drop your weapon.”
“I don’t have one.”
A much louder bang rang through the air and at first Flick thought it was another firework exploding. It was only when Elijah let out a muffled yell that she realised it was a gunshot. The woman had just fired a bullet into him.
“If you want to play a game of rock, paper, scissors, knife, and gun, then I think I might have the upper hand,” she continued. “Drop it.”
“Please, let him go,” Flick begged as the knife hit the flagstones. More fireworks exploded, casting the room in yellow and white streaks. “This is between you and me, Elijah has nothing to do with it.”
“Look at him up there on that cross. I’ve turned him into art, like he did to you with those holograms. Perhaps I could sell this to the Tate Modern and make my fortune? Have you ever been? I might have, but I can’t be sure.”
Flick’s stitch was growing ever more debilitating, and she fought hard not to bend over double. She didn’t want to let Emilia have any more of the upper hand than she already had. But still she felt no pain. “What do you want from us?” she asked.
“Not ‘us,’ only you. And you know the answer to that.”
Her captor looked ready to respond when something appeared to distract her. She turned her head sharply and moved the barrel of her weapon so that it pointed over Flick’s shoulder.
It meant that besides Elijah, there was someone else in the room with them.
