Lethal Profit

by Alex Blackmore

  ‘How much further is it?’

  ‘Five minutes.’

  His tone had become clipped and terse and he was walking very quickly, as if intentionally trying to get away from her. If this behaviour was the result of anxiety, he was making no effort to control it.

  She looked at him; he glanced over at her. ‘We are nearly there.’

  They reached the top of the hill and Eva was surprised to find herself standing opposite a windmill that was built into one of the houses on an otherwise normal-looking street. As they continued walking, the streets started to fill up. Tourists of every nationality thronged around them, having caricatures painted by street artists, filling up on hot chocolate or coffee and spending all their hard-earned money on pink plastic Eiffel Towers and snow globes containing a miniature model of the Sacré Coeur. Eva glanced up and saw the white domes and curved structures of the cathedral, towering over them. Even on such a dull day it looked bright and beautiful, the intricate carving and smooth workmanship as impressive from ground level.

  ‘This way,’ said Leon attracting her attention. He led her around a small side street and they emerged at the front of the cathedral, to their left a large bank of stairs leading up to the entrance and to their right a breathtaking view out over the whole of Paris.

  Leon turned, stopped suddenly and Eva came up short, almost colliding with his chest. Their faces were uncomfortably close.

  ‘I will be standing a short distance away in front and to your right,’ said Leon not moving. Eva took several paces back from him as he continued. ‘If you feel like you are in trouble or you need some help you will start to cough. Make sure you put your hand right over your mouth so I can see because I won’t be able to hear you.’

  It didn’t sound like the most amazing plan but it was, at least, a plan.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You must make sure you get as much from her as you can and then get out, she may be being followed, which will compromise us both. If she gives you any information don’t lose it, if she tells you anything, you must focus your mind entirely and not let any other thoughts enter it, as you must remember everything you are told.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Eva, not enjoying being patronised.

  They set off up the steps together, with Eva fighting a strong flight reflex. Inside, the cathedral was dark and warm and smelled comfortingly of wood polish and old fabric. It was also packed with people, despite the early hour. As they walked through the entrance there were people queuing to light candles on a candle tree or stopping to pick up paper information leaflets about the cathedral. To their left was a large tourist party, all listening intently to a tour guide speaking very quietly in German. They squeezed in between the tourists and the candle-lighters and started on the circular, carpeted walkway that wound around the building.

  ‘It’s smaller than I expected inside.’

  Leon ignored her. ‘That’s the Altar,’ he said, indicating an alcove housing a statue of the Virgin Mary, eyes cast upwards, hands clasped in prayer. All around her were candles, smaller religious icons, human heads bent in supplication and in front were rows of chairs. Eva glanced around her and wondered whether Sophie was already there and watching them. Perhaps she wasn’t the only one.

  ‘I will wait over there.’ Again Leon indicated an area to the right of the chairs with another head movement. ‘Communicate as we discussed if you feel you are in trouble.’

  ‘OK, fine. Wait…’ Eva’s voice faded away as she turned to Leon and realised he had already gone.

  FOURTEEN

  EVA FORCED HERSELF TO PUT ONE foot in front of the other. A sort of woodenness was threatening to overtake her limbs. She glanced at her surroundings and wondered whether she was under surveillance by parties other than Leon. Briefly, she considered using this as a chance to extricate herself from the situation, but the reality was that the only option was to do what they had agreed. Sophie knew how and why the papers from the sports bag had come into Jackson’s possession – and possibly how and why he died – and Sophie was here somewhere. As she approached the row of chairs in front of the altar Eva realised there was already someone sitting in the place she had been told to take. She stood motionless. Was this the person she was meant to meet? It was a blonde woman but her hair wasn’t the natural-looking blonde she had seen on Sophie’s social networking profile but a white, platinum blonde and much longer. Eva checked the text message again: third row, fourth seat in. This was definitely the right seat. She moved out of the way of a couple walking in the direction of a pyramid of candles in front of the altar and glanced to the right of the rows of seats where she spotted Leon. He looked directly at her for several seconds and then bowed his head as if in prayer. Eva turned back to the row of seats. The fourth seat was now empty.

  Starting as if she had been poked in the back, Eva slipped past the seated worshippers until she was at the end of the third row. She counted the seats as she walked along the row – just to be sure – and carefully sat down in the fourth one. There she remained completely still, waiting. After several minutes the rigid position she was sitting in became incredibly uncomfortable and she forced herself to release some of the tension and relax her shoulders. She looked around the building at all the people milling past.

  Leon was now standing next to a huge stone pillar, apparently reading one of the paper information leaflets that hung in wooden boxes all around the cathedral. Occasionally, he would look from the leaflet to the ceiling, across the room or straight at Eva, each time appearing simply to be taking in whatever he was reading about. He looked pretty much like any other tourist.

  Suddenly someone sat down in the seat next to her.

  ‘Don’t look at me.’

  Immediately, Eva tensed up.

  ‘You are Eva?’

  A woman’s voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  They sat in silence for several seconds and it was all Eva could do not to turn around and get a good look at who was sitting next to her. ‘And you are Sophie.’

  ‘… Yes.’

  Eva turned her head very slightly towards where the woman was sitting. Out of the corner of her eye she could see thin legs clad in dark blue denim, a pair of plain, expensive-looking brown brogues and the sleeves of a thick, dark coat. Sophie had her hands in her lap, thin fingers intertwined and squeezed together, alarmingly white where she was gripping herself with tension.

  ‘You are in danger, Eva.’

  ‘I know,’ Eva replied. Sophie was almost gouging the flesh from her hands and there was a note of such anxiety in her voice that Eva could feel her own carefully controlled heartbeat begin to rise again.

  ‘I am so sorry that you have ended up in this position, I know that Jackson would never have wanted that.’

  At the mention of her brother’s name, Eva turned to face Sophie. She couldn’t help it. She was met by a pair of wide, warm blue eyes, a thin face with highly defined cheekbones, framed by that short, light blond hair. She was wearing a dark fur hat jammed down on her head and small diamond earrings, one in each ear. Unexpectedly, Sophie smiled. ‘You look a little like him.’

  The two women stared at each other for several seconds before a wariness seemed to gradually filter back behind Sophie’s eyes.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ said Eva, taking the lead.

  ‘I met your brother in a bar,’ Sophie said, cutting straight to the chase. ‘Nothing happened but we were both drunk; we talked for several hours. Unfortunately, I became quite attached to him.’

  Eva nodded and then broke Sophie's gaze, for some reason feeling slightly embarrassed at prying into her brother’s life in this way.

  ‘After that night I tried to contact him and get him to meet up with me again. It was more forward than I was used to being but I felt there was such a connection I just couldn’t ignore it.’

  ‘Did he respond?’

  ‘Yes. But he was a good man your brother, he was faithful to his girlfriend.’

  S
ophie sighed. ‘Unfortunately, I did not let it go and I pursued him. I am 35 years old, Eva, I am unmarried and I have no children. I feel a huge pressure to not be alone any more. At my age, when someone comes along that you feel something like that for, you don’t let him go without a fight.’

  ‘Even if he wasn’t yours to fight for in the first place?’

  Sophie held Eva with a steady gaze. ‘I know I did the wrong thing. I was overcome by the fear of being alone. It was stupid. Oh, you have no idea how much I regret pursuing your brother now.’

  She looked like she might cry. Eva knew that there was no time for that. ‘Tell me what happened next.’

  ‘I was trying to find a way to get your brother to see me again and then I came across an email at work. It concerned a project in the Sudan and I knew your brother was passionately committed to his work there. I sent it to him.’

  ‘Where is it you work?’ Eva didn’t want to give away what she knew. Not yet.

  ‘A company called Bioavancement S.a.r.l. I am – I was – a PA to one of the Directors.’

  Eva remembered Sophie’s name printed across all the documents from Jackson’s sports bag – her position explained why she would have had access to all that information. ‘What did the email say?’

  ‘It was a confidential email, I should never have sent it.’

  ‘But what did it say?’

  ‘Bioavancement S.a.r.l. had set up a laboratory in the Sudan.’

  ‘That’s an odd location for a lab.’

  ‘Not really. Bioavancement S.a.r.l. is an enormously private company – so in a way, the Sudan was perfect – vast, lawless in places, and plenty of scope for bribing the local law enforcers. Most of us who worked at Bioavancement S.a.r.l. had no idea what they really did, other than that it was pharmaceutical research.’

  ‘Did you know?’

  ‘Not initially, no. I was a PA so anything I came into contact with was communication from the man I worked for to others within the business. It all seemed harmless – I later realised much of it was in code.’

  Eva thought of the batch of emails she had discovered in Jackson’s sports bag that had seemed out of place in his stash. The discussion of weekend plans and meeting schedules must have been using the code Sophie was talking about. She wanted to ask what the code was but Sophie was already speaking again.

  ‘I forwarded that initial email to Jackson – about the laboratory. I hardly read it first, I was just so desperate to make contact,’ Sophie continued. ‘But later, when I had sent it on I realised that it was uncoded. They were discussing this secret laboratory in barely concealed terms and with some considerable urgency.’

  ‘What were they saying?’

  ‘There had been some kind of leak. An outbreak of something in the local area resulting from their tests. It was the second time it had happened – first in 2009/10 – and they were really scared about what would happen if it went public. People had died so there was an urgent need to contain reporting of it. I thought that perhaps Jackson could take it to a journalist and gain some leverage. I didn’t care about being fired, I hated my job.’

  ‘And you hoped he would want to see you again.’

  Sophie nodded. ‘Yes. And he did want to see me again. But of course it wasn’t actually me he wanted to see, it was because of my connection to his work.’ She sighed heavily. ‘Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there, that first email wasn’t enough. After that he wanted more and more information. He started making connections between events in the Sudan and Bioavancement S.a.r.l. – and then in other locations. He wanted me to help him expose them.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Of course. I printed off reams and reams of emails for him and I stole so much information. But when we found out what they were really doing, we got so much more than we bargained for.’

  ‘In what way?’ Eva shifted nervously in her seat and glanced over Sophie’s shoulder. She was beginning to feel like a sitting duck. She looked over at Leon’s position. He wasn’t there. ‘Is Jackson’s death linked to the Sudan issue?’

  ‘No. That email led us to details of a land purchase in Paraguay, then another that concerned a group of people in Paris the company was using for… for something else.’ She suddenly turned to Eva, eyes wide. ‘It’s all about profit, Eva, a lethal profit.’

  What? Eva was starting to feel even more confused. ‘A lethal profit…’ She repeated.

  ‘Yes, I… ’ Sophie’s voice faded away and she looked at the floor. Eva glanced over at her. She must have been pretty once but now her skin was drawn tight across her bones like a thin, sallow mask; her lips were marked with cuts as if she had been constantly biting them and there were dark, sunken hollows underneath her eyes that seemed to be the result of months of lack of sleep. She kept looking around her fearfully and Eva noticed that where she had been pinching one hand with the other she had drawn blood.

  ‘Sophie?’

  Sophie looked up at Eva, her face calm but her eyes wide and distrustful. Although she was obviously intent on attempting to keep up an outward appearance of stability and control, Eva sensed desperation, as if at any moment the anxiety Sophie had been holding at bay might rise up and completely overwhelm her. Such naked fear sent a tremor down Eva’s spine.

  Finally, Sophie spoke in a hushed voice, unable to hold Eva’s gaze. ‘I don’t know, Eva, I don’t know if this is something real or… or perhaps I am going insane!’ She laughed unsteadily.

  Eva didn’t reply.

  ‘The only thing that makes me know it’s all real is that people who possess this information, who try to do something about it, end up dead.’

  ‘Can you give me any more details?’ Eva asked gently.

  ‘What we found was just the tip of the iceberg.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The repercussions of what they are about to do, it goes so much further. That’s why I had to get Leon to bring you to me. I thought Jackson must have told you everything if you had come to Paris. We must stop them, Eva – no one knows who they are, no one can even see them!’

  ‘No, he… Who? Bioavancement S.a.r.l.? I don’t understand Sophie.’ Eva was beginning to get frustrated. She needed cold hard facts not this emotional outpouring.

  Sophie ignored the questions and began to search in the small leather bag she held on her lap. She found what she was looking for and closed her hands around it. ‘Don’t look at me. I need to give you something. For your own safety no one must see.’

  Eva turned to face forwards again and stared ahead.

  ‘It’s a memory stick. It doesn’t contain everything, but once you have read it you will understand and I… ’

  Suddenly, with a slight shudder, Sophie fell quiet and Eva wondered if she was crying. She didn’t know whether to turn around and offer help or to continue to face the front as she had been instructed to do.

  She sat and waited for several seconds. ‘Sophie?’ she asked, still facing away from her. There was no response and for a horrible moment Eva thought Sophie had asked her to face forward and had made her escape. But she could still sense Sophie’s body next to her and besides that made no sense. Why mention the memory stick and then make a run for it without actually handing it over?

  She softly nudged her right leg against Sophie’s leg to make sure she was still there. She could see out of the corner of her eye the same pair of trousers. ‘Sophie,’ she hissed, ‘what are you doing?’

  There was no response. She nudged the leg again, hard this time. It fell back towards her like a dead weight. Eva turned. Sophie was staring straight ahead, unmoving. Her eyes were open but unblinking. Eva looked closer. Suddenly she saw it. In the centre of Sophie’s forehead, just below the bottom of her hat was a single bullet hole.

  It took every ounce of composure Eva had not to scream. She glanced around her, looking for a smoking gun but of course there was no-one. Fighting the urge to panic, she sat frozen to her seat. She looked over at the spot where Leo
n had been reading the information leaflet. In his place was an old woman attempting to light a small candle with shaky hands, a look of rapt concentration on her face. Eva’s gaze moved quickly to the right and left of the old woman. Where the hell was Leon? She considered giving the signal Leon had instructed her to use and put her hand right over her mouth, but in the end she made no noise. The last thing she needed was to draw attention to herself. Whoever had fired the fatal shot at Sophie probably had the very same gun trained on her head right now. Realising the danger she was in, Eva quickly ducked down so that her head was below the level of the person in front and sat crouched on the floor trying to regulate her breathing, fiddling with the prayer book slotted into the back of the seat in front.

  She looked quickly back at Sophie. The hole in her forehead was starting to ooze the tiniest trickle of blood, which was soaking into the fabric of her hat. At any moment it would start running down her face. Oh God, poor woman, Eva thought. Then she remembered the memory stick. She looked down at Sophie’s left hand and saw that it was curled around the stick, the fingers still locked tight to the inside of her palm. She had to get that memory stick. There was no way she could leave without it. Eva began gently pulling at Sophie’s clenched fingers. Anger welled up in her throat at the same time as sickness at what she was doing, but she fought it down and carried on tugging and pulling at Sophie’s poor, scarred hands. Eva couldn’t stop a small gasp escaping as she began to think she could feel the sights of the gun trained on her head right at that moment. ‘Oh God,’ she muttered quietly, wrenching at Sophie’s hands which seemed to have become like stone. A surge of panic gripped Eva and finally, almost ripping Sophie’s fingers from their sockets, she managed to open her hands. Inside was a small black memory stick. Eva grabbed it, stuffed it into her pocket, picked up her bag and got ready to move.