Lethal Profit

by Alex Blackmore

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of going back.’

  ‘Back to what?’

  ‘Addiction is a frightening place, Eva. It completely changes you. I have done things when I was high, or wanting to get high, that I would never have done without that influence in my life.’

  Eva remembered Leon confessing at his flat that he had met Jackson in rehab.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You don’t. You couldn’t, nobody can until they have felt the urgency and shame that comes with that kind of need. The things you do. Sometimes, I… ’ His voice tailed off.

  Eva didn’t know what to say. She hardly knew this man and she wasn’t even particularly good at dealing with the problems of people she knew really well. Her solution for her own issues had been to never talk about them; then it was easier to believe they didn’t exist.

  Outside the car the sky had darkened and fat drops of rain started to fall lethargically, landing against the windscreen with heavy thuds.

  ‘I know that you know about Sophie.’

  Eva looked over at him in surprise. ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘I have been monitoring your internet usage. I know that you contacted her.’

  ‘How the hell have you been doing that?’

  ‘Several days ago, I broke into your hotel room and put a device into your laptop. It was important I knew. Now I think you need to meet her.’

  ‘So what, we’re going back to Paris now?’

  Leon nodded.

  They sat in silence for several minutes before Leon spoke. ‘I am sorry about the laptop – I needed to know whether I could trust you.’

  ‘And you know that now, do you? Because I sure as hell don’t feel like I can trust you.’

  They both sat in silence and stared at the road ahead. Then Leon spoke quietly. ‘I don’t think either of us really has a choice.’

  As far as Rob Gorben was concerned no-one needed to know about the exploding box of algae. When all the other containers were empty he had simply unloaded the algae himself into a tough industrial sack and taken it to the local dump. After that, he had instructed that the covers be taken off the ponds – a huge job in itself, given the size of the raceways – then, with the tents taken down and the ponds open to the air, his job was complete. Rob was relieved not to be a permanent caretaker to this kind of project. He hadn’t been instructed to hand anything over to anyone, so it wasn’t clear to him who would be managing it going forward. But at least it wasn’t him. As an engineer with a specialism in structures for algae growth and development, he knew unplanned algae spread was an annoyance at the best of times. He had no desire to be the one on the receiving end of all the complaints from the locals who found their fish ponds were clogged with plants spread by the spores carried on the wind. God only knew how the company proposed to deal with that kind of problem.

  He’d checked several times that they wanted open ponds when he’d had the initial briefings. Since the site was near the centre of a city, what about the local waterways and supply reservoirs?, he’d said. No, he had been told, the raceway ponds were specifically required and without any covering. The company representative, ‘Mr Smith’, had even refused to divulge the genetically altered code of the algae, despite Rob’s insistence that it would assist his designs. When he’d taken a sample of the plant to try and work it out himself, he found that, bizarrely, he couldn’t confirm the genetic make-up because it seemed to keep changing. It was as if the plant itself was disguising it. Which was, of course, impossible. But his protests had fallen on deaf ears. All he was told was that the algae were genetically engineered for two purposes: firstly, to produce a massively high yield of algae for a new type of health supplement; and secondly, to be entirely resilient to anything and everything either man or nature could throw at them.

  THIRTEEN

  IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE THEY WERE nearing the outskirts of Paris again. Eva had been silently watching the sun rise, deep in thought, but suddenly she sensed a tensing across the car. She looked at Leon who was staring into the rear-view mirror. He switched his gaze to the wing mirror, took a sudden left turn and looked again. They had turned off the main road now and were driving through a small, picturesque town with an old church and the customary smattering of boulangerie and tabac. The rain had stopped but the streets were still slick with wetness from the earlier showers.

  ‘We’re being followed.’

  Eva felt the hairs on the back of her neck begin to rise.

  ‘It’s a black car. They have been three lengths behind us for around five kilometres but when we left the main road they turned too.’

  Eva twisted in her seat and looked behind her as the nose of a large black, very conspicuous off-road vehicle appeared around the last bend they had traversed and then came into full view behind them. The windows were ominously blacked out.

  ‘We’re going to have to lose them before we meet Sophie.’

  Despite talks of a safe house, Leon seemed now to be utterly set on getting Eva into a room – or rather a church – with Sophie. They were to meet at the Sacré Coeur in the Montmartre area of Paris, somewhere that Eva had never been.

  He glanced over at her body and Eva realised he was looking to see if she was wearing her seatbelt.

  ‘Hold on,’ he said and suddenly the car took a turn down a small bumpy track that Eva couldn’t even have seen if she’d been looking for it. Eva’s hands flailed for something to hold on to as the battered old car flew around the dirt road, the suspension handling the curves remarkably efficiently. With another violent lurch they reached the end of the track and suddenly they were driving over a field of bright yellow rapeseed, the wheels of the car sticking slightly in the damp earth. Eva glanced behind. The black car had turned down the track too and it was gaining on them.

  ‘Leon, they’re nearly behind us.’

  Leon didn’t react.

  ‘Do you know where you’re going?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Do you think we can lose them in this car?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Eva wished she had the same faith as Leon, but the Citroen was an old model, not made for off-roading. The car took another swing to the left and they were suddenly careering downhill through some low-lying vegetation towards what looked like a river. A slow-moving but substantial enough river. A river that did not seem to have a bridge…

  Eva gritted her teeth as the car suddenly reached the end of the foliage. She tightened her fingers around her seatbelt and waited for the splash as they hit the water but, instead, the car flew right over.

  Eva opened her eyes as she heard the wheels bumping over the rough surface of a broad plank bridge. She saw Leon glance over at her. All at once her mobile phone began to ring and the first gunshot rang out behind them.

  Back in his bedroom in his three-storey detached house in Surrey, Rob Gorben was struggling to breathe. He gazed around the room, decorated so tastefully by his wife Marnie, and representing the collective fifteen years and three children that made up their life together. Light was streaming in through the open window and a crisp breeze lifted the ends of the gauze curtains Marnie had hung to keep out prying neighbours. Not everyone in this wealthy neighbourhood had been happy to find a Dutch man and a black woman arriving on their exclusive suburban street back then.

  Rob had woken that morning and struggled to keep his eyelids open, as if, he told his wife, he had lost control of the muscles. Marnie had laughed at him, kissed him and called him lazy then gone downstairs to wake the kids and make some coffee. Even now he could smell the bitter richness of the Ethiopian blend they both loved so much drifting up the stairs.

  ‘Rob, breakfast is ready!’

  Her call travelled up the stairs and Rob Gorben’s brain sent a message to his mouth to respond. Before the message reached his mouth it faded away – under his skin, antibodies produced by his own immune system were blocking his neuroreceptors and so he remained motionless on the bed.
He moved his eyes to the left and, through almost completely lowered lids, he could just about see his Blackberry lying on the floor where it had fallen after his hands had suddenly become numb and unresponsive. He had been sending an email, his last for the job, instructing that the algae be deposited into the raceway ponds at all of the fifty-six locations around the UK. Oh, how he wished he had not used the last of his energy to press send, but to call for help instead! But the paralysis had been quick and he had not been expecting it. He tried to open his mouth to shout to his wife, tried to move his hands and feet but he lay motionless, helpless as a baby, his throat steadily constricting, crushing his voice box.

  Sunlight continued to flow in through the open window and the sounds of the early morning school run went on as usual downstairs. Rob’s breathing became laboured, as if his lungs had shrunk to a tenth of their normal size, leaving him no space in which to draw a breath. He tried again and again but his gasps went unsatisfied as his lungs gradually filled up with the fibrotic tissue being produced in response to the foreign bodies in his system. Finally, the muscular walls of his now-useless lungs gave way and slowly, his eyes opening wide for his final breath, staring at the ceiling, he died. Behind his motionless head the curtains continued to flutter in the breeze.

  ‘We have to be at the Sacré Coeur in an hour,’ said Leon, checking his watch and forcing the car up the bank on the other side of the river as the engine started to scream.

  Eva looked at him, eyes wide, then ducked down in her seat as more gunshots pinged off the car’s bodywork. She glanced at the incoming call on her own phone, recognised the number as Valerie’s and chose to ‘ignore’ it. She almost dropped the phone as the car’s rear windscreen was shattered in a hail of bullets.

  ‘We have to lose them before we get into Paris,’ shouted Leon above the noise of the car.

  Again Eva didn’t respond. She heard words forming in her head but all she could do at that moment was cling to the seatbelt and grit her teeth.

  Leon looked at her again, then put his foot to the floor and took the car up a gear as another bullet hit the top of the wing mirror on Eva’s side. He floored the accelerator as the car tore across another field and then through a small gap in a hedgerow as Eva hunched further down in her seat. How many gears did this car have?

  As the little Citroen bounced onto the solid tarmac of the main road on the other side of the hedge, Eva risked another glance behind her in the wing mirror. The black car had managed to negotiate the exit in the foliage they had come through and was still behind, but seemed to be slowing down. As she watched, the car backed off completely so that it was now following at some distance, apparently not trying to get any closer. The shooter Eva had seen leaning out of the window had pulled himself back inside. She suddenly realised that he had been sitting in what appeared to be the driver’s seat. That was weird. A right-hand drive car? She tried to see whether the plates were English but the car was now too far behind.

  Eva turned back to the front and exhaled, not knowing how long she had been holding her breath. She looked at Leon but he ignored her. There were so many questions flying around in her head about what had just happened, but she sensed he had no answers. She switched her gaze stared to the road ahead. They were out of the fields now, back onto a main road and Paris was fast approaching. She thought about what she was about to do at the Sacré Coeur. It wasn’t exactly a scenario calculated to allay anxiety, but it was necessary. She had come to the conclusion that the only way to survive this situation was to end it. To do that she needed to know what it was that Jackson had known and apparently the only person who could tell her that was Sophie.

  ‘Presumably you are going to come to the Sacré Coeur?’

  ‘Yes,’ Leon replied.

  ‘Why don’t you meet her, why does it have to be me?’

  ‘She said it had to be you.’

  Leon looked at her doubtfully across the car but Eva ignored him. It was a logical question: Leon had already proved he was far better equipped to defend himself than she was.

  ‘Where exactly do I meet her?’

  ‘She has your phone number so she can communicate with you that way.’

  ‘Right. Do you have a gun with you?’ she asked Leon casually.

  He hesitated. Just for a moment, but it was a definite hesitation. ‘No.’

  Eva looked straight ahead. He’s lying.

  The old familiar tension descended on the car again. They both sat in silence and stared at the road ahead as suburban Paris began to surround them. Rough blocks of flats ran along both sides of the road with a restaurant, bar or small shop at irregular distances.

  ‘Are we on time?’

  ‘Yes, no more than half an hour away.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s still early. The Sacré Coeur is in Montmartre, which is at the northern end of Paris. Once we are through the suburbs we will reach the Périphérique. Once we are on that road it is a steady, circular traffic flow around the outside of Paris. We need to get off at Porte de Clignancourt and then we are less than fifteen minutes from our destination.’

  His voice had taken on an oddly robotic tone. Once again he seemed to have changed, Jekyll-and-Hyde-like, from one personality to another. Any trust Eva had felt in Leon earlier in the night began to evaporate. Why had she allowed their interests to become intertwined? He was a manic paranoid and his methods were completely illogical. But then had he ever really given her any choice other than to go along with him…

  Not for the first time she wondered how much of the situation she was in was of Leon’s design.

  ‘What do we do about them?’ she said, indicating the huge car behind them, still following at a distance on the public road.

  ‘Leave them to me.’

  Eva didn’t want to think about what he was planning to do and she knew he wouldn’t tell her even if she asked. She held on to her seatbelt with both hands and stared out of the window of the stationary car. They were waiting at a level-crossing for a train to pass. The barrier was down, the lights red, the warning sounding and in the distance Eva could hear the rumble of the high-speed train as it came thundering towards the spot where they were waiting. Behind them, the black car was just slowing in order to come to a stop at the crossing. It seemed strange to Eva that the attack had stopped as soon as they were back on the public highway but, at the same time, it made perfect sense if the driver was also the shooter. It was one thing to fire a gun in a field, but quite another to be attempting to handle traffic lights and crossings with one hand and a weapon with the other. Besides, the more attention they attracted, the less likely they would get away with whatever they were trying to do. And so the two cars waited in line. In the queue behind the black car was a family station-wagon full of children, and behind that two small Peugeots.

  As Eva was about to reach for her bag, the car suddenly lurched forward. She stared at the situation in front of her. The lights had not changed, they were still red, but Leon was driving the car around the barrier, right across the tracks at the lowered gate on the other side. Coming the other way, to their right, at speed, was the train.

  Before Eva even had time to scream, the train let out a huge blare of its horn, Leon jammed his foot down even harder on the accelerator and the front of their car smashed through the barrier on the other side of the track. As one of the back wheels seemed to hesitate over the metal rail, Eva held her breath, shut her eyes and – for the first time in her life – prayed. She waited for the collision but it never came. Or, at least, not to their car. Opening her eyes she heard an almighty crash and the sound of splintering glass and metal and, turning in her seat, she saw a brief flash of the black car as it was swept along in front of the train, which was still travelling at full speed.

  They arrived in Montmartre at 10.05am and Leon parked the Citroen in a quiet side street. As she got out, Eva took a good look at the car that had just survived the ordeal with them. It was covered in mud, there were pieces of fern hanging from
the doors and the back windscreen was gaping where the bullets had shattered the glass. It looked a mess but it wasn’t any of these details that caused Eva to hesitate. It was the tyres. As Leon busied himself trying to tape some newspaper over the back window and clean the blood of the man at the petrol station from the passenger door, Eva bent down and took a closer look. The tyres were huge. Although she had limited knowledge of cars and their component parts, she was sure that she had never seen one of these iconic little cars with tyres like this. Not only were they enormous, looking completely out of place on the little roadster, but they were the thick, studded type that Eva had never seen on a normal car before. The tyres looked like they belonged on a seriously heavy duty off-road vehicle.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  She looked up to see Leon staring down at her, annoyance written all over his face. He was pulling on a new shirt to replace the jumper he had been wearing that was now soaked with blood from the attack at the petrol station.

  She stood up. ‘I was just wondering how this little car managed all that off-roading.’

  Leon looked at her then walked around to the driver’s side, threw the dirty jumper inside and slammed the door hard. ‘We should go.’

  The sinking feeling she had felt in the car started working its way down Eva’s spine. Something wasn’t right. There was something about Leon that wasn’t right.

  She felt the phone in her bag vibrate with the receipt of a text message: ‘Meet me at the Altar of The Virgin, third row, fourth seat in. Ten minutes’.

  ‘It’s Sophie,’ Eva said, reading the location in the text out loud and then replacing the phone in her bag. ‘We have ten minutes.’

  ‘This way.’

  Leon started off away from the car at a swift pace and Eva had to run slightly to catch up with him. They were walking through a residential area that seemed unnaturally quiet to Eva. The sound of their footsteps echoed around the walls of the houses, many of which were built at strange angles as a result of the uphill slant to the road. Each house was of a different design to its neighbour, there was no cohesion or uniformity. The street they were walking up was gradually getting steeper and Eva’s lungs were starting to burn. She drew level with Leon.