by Victoria Fox
Janika shook her head, unable to meet her boss’s eye. She couldn’t bear his disappointment. For too long they had been unable to contact the source: it was as if their man had vanished into thin air. Voldan contained his anger, but she saw it in his twitching thumb, and in the tortured moans he emitted in his sleep.
Janika knew in her heart that Voldan’s plan had worked: those people were long gone. But he needed evidence and he would not be content until he got it.
‘Do you think he’s come to harm?’ asked Janika.
‘A man like that doesn’t know how,’ bleated Voldan. He spat the straw away and it flicked back, forcing him to spit again. Janika hurried to remove it.
‘What should we do?’ she wheedled.
‘We wait. He will return. And when he does, you know what you must do. Nobody ignores Voldan Cane. He who dares will pay a terrible price.’
79
Day 45
The rain stopped. It happened suddenly, the sky-flood turning off like a tap and the grey clouds parting to a chorus of burnished rays. In a matter of hours the ground was gasping again, as if the rains had never been. Everything smelled different, crucial and living. The air was so fresh it stung the throat.
Sunlight on the water refracted like fish scales; thin gold bands that trembled and danced on the surface. Angela kept to her depth, the dark shade of sea beyond the lagoon synonymous now with fear: of sharks, of the deep, of the unknown.
She swam underwater in brave, large strokes, her arms scooping through the green. Her hands belonged to someone else, the liquid distorting their shape, and the extreme brown of her tan was magnified. Only the silver ring that Noah had given her marked the skin as Angela’s, tarnished though it was by sweat and sun.
Shoals of fish dashed in her vision, some bigger, the size of her forearm, in lurid yellows and blues. A starfish splayed lazy, and the brittle, pimpled shell of an urchin was half obscured in the powdery sand. She dived to collect a gleaming shell and a mousse-pink pincer twitched from one side.
Holding her breath was a skill. She had always been good at it, practising in the Boston pool with Orlando and Luca when she was a girl. Angela liked to count the seconds she was under, and found that now she could reach a full minute before her lungs began to strain. It was peaceful. Her favourite place was a channel between two rocks, where she could grab hold of a hollow in the stone and hold on, keeping her body down. She would close her eyes and think of nothing.
Sometimes, she would enter a waking dream.
She dreamed that when she surfaced she would be at her father’s house, on a summer’s afternoon. Not the world she had left behind, exactly—an altered version. Noah would be there. He would never have left … Right back to that summer when she was fifteen, she unpicked the threads and wove anew. Donald would have lived. She and Noah would have married. They might even have had a family of their own.
This was one of her mother’s garden parties, and Angela was swimming, and if she concentrated hard she could hear the muffled hum of conversation above—Isabella, there she was, in a green sundress, and her nonna. The barbecue infused the air with perfumed, bitter smoke. A ball game unfolded, spiked by cries of victory, and the laughter of children, someone’s children, maybe hers.
On rare days, good days, the fantasy was real. Angela would stare into the water, visibility lost after just a few feet so that the deeper distance was an obscured, murky veil out of which she could summon Noah. She dreamed that he jumped into the pool. There was no splash, no clue to give him away.
She willed him to come.
That summer, before the fall-out, they had gone to the lake. Noah had driven her in his friend’s car. It had been late in the day, one of those clear, wide-sky days that seemed to last for ever, and the sunset was orange, a burned, warm amber.
Noah stripped off his T-shirt and dived from the pier.
‘Come on! Come in! It’s beautiful!
‘I can’t!’ she said, laughing. ‘Look away!’
He did as he was told, turning from her, his hands over his eyes to make sure. The back of his neck was glittering. His hair was golden, dripping on his skin.
She thought, then: Remember this. This is a moment. Remember it.
She peeled her top over her head, then her jeans, taking her sandals off first so she could drag them inside out. She tripped while she did it, putting out a hand to steady herself on the branch of a tree, and with her hands covering her chest, even though she still wore a bra, she ran to the end of the pier and leaped off.
‘It’s freezing!’
The cold was like being tickled. She had never felt so urgent. The lake appeared black in the fading sun, inviting and frightening. Firs encircled it, their private enclave, amid which the shining red of the car was their lifeline back to the real world. It seemed to Angela that everything else might just as well have evaporated; this was their universe now, the two of them.
She floated on her back, her breasts surging at the surface, the bra now see-through but she wasn’t embarrassed. She was sick of comparing herself with the girls Noah may or may not have slept with, wondering if he liked her and, if so, how much. For now it was enough to be with him, her ears deafened by the thick lake, as the hot peach sun melted behind the sweet-scented spikes.
He pulled her under. They didn’t kiss but the elusion of his lips only compounded her longing. He entwined his limbs with hers, swirling in the cold, alone apart from the teenage adrenalin of skin on skin, where parts fitted, the loops and dips and grooves of another person, a person with whom she yearned to lock those pieces in place. She could feel the hairs on Noah’s arms, and the hard bulk of his chest. There was nothing to see, it was ink, and she felt for him, every inch a new discovery. She touched something solid. She knew what it was. She had seen Orlando’s stand up once, inside his tennis shorts when he was seventeen and Martha Pravershall joined the doubles match.
Noah’s was thick and warm. She wanted to hold onto it but she didn’t know what to do, or if she should, or what would happen if she did.
They sprang to the surface and the sun was all but gone. In the blossoming dark Noah was a silhouette, drops of water on his top lip and lashes. Angela thought how obvious it all was, how plain and how pure, once the fooling around was taken away. Instinct.
She would never be satisfied until Noah Lawson met the ache in her stomach, the warm thing she had found underwater, and quenched it, and set it free.
‘You’re cold,’ he said.
She didn’t argue. She didn’t say anything. She wanted to tell him she had never been warmer. Something had melted and it would never be cold again.
The moment flew away and he began to swim, and when he reached the pier he held his arms out. She clung to them longer than was necessary and they dressed in silence, aware that a line had been breached, and, beyond it, who knew. On the drive home, he held her hand—nothing more, not even when he said goodbye.
Survival kicked in and she released her grip on the rocks. Angela had considered ways to quash this, this pesky reflex for life, because wouldn’t it be easier to stay down here with her fantasies, living elsewhere in the cool, quiet deep? She didn’t want to return to shore, just as she hadn’t wanted to return to the pier that day. She wanted to stay in the water, if for nothing else than to see what happened.
In being removed from him, she understood now what she should have done.
She should have chosen Noah.
She should always have chosen him. She should have chosen him over Dino, over the business, over Donald’s wishes. She should have chosen him over her dumb pride. She should have chosen him when she was fifteen and her father discovered them, and talked to him and heard him out and tried to understand. When they had rekindled their relationship years later but she’d never got rid of the hurt. When Noah had made love to her at the FNYC launch and she had bundled him out the door. When the suggestion of marriage had been aired. When she had met Dino. When she had told him the
truth at the Gold Court Theatre and the flame had gone out in his eyes. She should have chosen Noah. Every time she should have chosen him.
It was too late now. There was no going back. She would never see him again.
There was fire again on the beach, a bundle of smouldering sticks. Eve was tending to it, the half-hearted resurgence of a rescue hope. Angela had been counting the days with stones. Over a month they had been here.
Tawny was gone. Who next? Maybe she would be lucky and it would be her.
At night, alone with her thoughts, Angela prayed that when it happened, it would happen quickly. Death didn’t frighten her, but dying did.
The sun beat down. The earth turned on, oblivious and giantly indifferent.
She swam back in.
80
Patience was both agonising and necessary. Noah hung back and counted to his moment. He wasn’t about to risk it now.
The coordinates had led him here. He had been tracking the man, moving from rock to rock in pursuit of the ripening scent and shadowing his target from afar.
Now he would follow him to the final frontier—whatever or wherever that was.
The man loaded a fishing boat, climbed in and gunned the engine, which after a guttural start began to chug. He stooped to roll and spark a cigarette, an act that was deftly completed in twenty seconds. Noah knew the man’s habits. He had observed him long enough.
The man blew out smoke. He scratched the back of his neck, a nervous tic of increasing regularity, and unsurprising given the messages that had come in. VC was not happy. The cell phone had received two more communications, equally brief and cryptic: You know what this means, read the first. Then: It’s over for you.
After that, the contact had dried up.
As usual, upon grinding out his smoke, the man knelt to check his supplies. Noah seized his chance. He slipped from the leaf-shield and down to the water, where, unseen, he ducked into the stern of the boat.
A khaki tarpaulin was heaped in a nest—the ready-made cover he had anticipated—and Noah crawled beneath, managing to conceal himself.
It was hot under here. The tarpaulin blistered after hours cooking in the sun, thick as the skin on an overdone baked potato. It smelled funny, of must and cloves. Parts were ridged where the salt water had dried, stiff and crumpled as a dried chamois cloth. Noah did not know how long he could stay down.
He fingered the switchblade in his waistband, flinching as he did against the pain in his side. Only when the boat began to move and Noah’s eyes adjusted to the dim could he see the reason for the hefty tarpaulin—and it put his own blade to shame. A flash in the dark and his elbow struck against it: a box of weapons, knives and guns, ropes and, holy fuck, a crossbow.
Stay calm. Think of the facts.
This man was hunting the crash site. Why bring this arsenal if all he expected to find was a bunch of bodies?
Fear evaporated. Noah was consumed by hope; a rush that wasn’t born of desperation or denial, it was real, valid, firm enough to hold on to.
Angela.
Noah understood what this man intended to do.
But not if he got there first.
Time passed. He did not know how much. If only for a glimpse of sky or sea, a crack in the tarpaulin through which he could breathe. The cloying heat held him in a vacant state, tolerable if he remained absolutely still, a kind of half-consciousness. Noah could feel the shuddering engine, punctuated by the slop beneath his left ear, where a pocket of water seeped in.
His head throbbed with thirst.
He had seen the man stack a box of water and he imagined the bottles, became possessed by their proximity. He counted the number of cigarettes lit, could smell the smoke beneath his cover. Typically the man sparked up every ten or fifteen minutes: by that logic they had been on the water two hours.
He envisaged the map, all the islands in this great azure expanse, and their tiny boat dropped somewhere in the middle. Their destination was drawing closer.
Noah licked his lip in the hope a bead of moisture might swim across his tongue. The movement drenched him in sweat and before he could stop himself he shifted position, revealing a sliver of light, through which he could detect the man’s boots, heavy and black. He dared widen the aperture, drinking in new air. The man was sitting on the rim of the boat. He sucked dry a bottle of water and chucked the plastic onto the deck, where it rolled towards Noah, tantalisingly close but not close enough. Silver droplets shivered on the bottleneck.
He had to choose his moment. Wait until the man’s back was turned, his attention drawn, his defences down—because, despite the man’s extensive armoury, Noah had the best missile of all: ambush.
The man dropped his cigarette. He swore, and bent to retrieve it.
Now.
Noah sprang, quick as a cobra. The man was startled. He reeled backwards, his mouth an O of surprise.
He was quick to recover, but it was already too late. Noah propelled him onto the deck. He punched him hard, again and again, scarlet blood spilling, teeth cracking, a series of brutal pummels to the jaw. The boat tipped.
Noah was slammed. Stumbling, he put his hands out to break his fall and landed against the tarpaulin. The men rolled and writhed, hands round each other’s necks, locked in combat. The man grinned, engaged now in the sport, and grabbed him and flipped him round so that Noah’s head was thrust directly above the churning motor. Lethal blades whirred inches from his throat, chopping slices of air, juddering closer, and a knee descended on his back and forced him down. Noah pushed, blood raging, filling his head with grit and fury. No. Not yet.
He grabbed the edge of the boat, coarse with sand; the wood caked and cracked. His knuckles were white, holding him up, staying him from certain execution.
Instinct saved him. His other fist remembered. It dived to his waistband and wrapped around the handle of his blade. Pulling it out, in the same motion he blasted back against his assailant and launched them both into the air. Winded, the man bent double. He looked up, met Noah’s weapon, realised his own were trapped behind his adversary and his face leached of colour. The knife glinted in the tropical sun as the men circled each other.
Noah tasted blood.
The man pounced but Noah switched his dagger and then it happened: he felt it flick into the man’s soft, yielding gut.
The man choked, a splurge of red gushing from his mouth.
Soundlessly, holding Noah’s shoulders, eyes wide with fear and shock, he crumpled to the deck.
Noah killed the engine.
The boat sighed and slowed.
Above, a bird cawed.
It didn’t take much to push the man over the side. His body plopped into the water, face to the sky, amid a cloud of leaking crimson.
Noah drank two bottles of water and re-started the motor.
81
San Francisco
In a coffee shop on 7th Street, Leith Friedman unplugged his computer, removed the buds from his ears and wiped his glasses on his T-shirt.
It was no good. He couldn’t focus, and he couldn’t work. He had not slept in forty-eight hours and his appetite was shot to shit. Things were falling apart.
‘Can I get you anything else?’ asked a smiling waitress. He had been nursing the same cup of coffee all afternoon. ‘No, thanks.’
‘Shout if you need me.’ She winked.
The wink made Leith paranoid. Did she know him? Over the years Leith had taken pains to be the invisible one: let Jacob do the talking and the deal-breaking; let him be the face. Not any more.
Leith felt sick.
He had never wanted in with the Russians in the first place. Now Jacob had gone and bitten it, it was him who was left to pick up the pieces.
He had told him no. He had said it was too much of a risk. Had Jacob listened? Had he hell.
Selfishly, the first thought that had occurred to Leith in the hangover of the crash wasn’t how much he would mourn his business ally, rather it was how in Holy Mother�
��s name he was going to extricate himself from the MoveFriends surveillance deal. Jacob had been the one who pushed for these advances, pushed until he got his way, and Leith realised now he was gone that the car they had piloted had lost its engine. Leith was cowering in the back seat, just like always, just as he had three years ago before Jacob deigned to pull over and pick him up. The years of commerce might have taught him code, but they hadn’t taught him courage.
Heads in the coffee shop turned. Eyes swept across him. The heat of their examination made him sweat. Leith was ever more detectable as the Challenger coverage limped on. As Jacob Lyle’s professional partner, he had been approached for myriad interviews to discuss his loss. Leith had declined them all. Recently he had begun fantasising about being sixteen again, returning to his childhood home in Maine and sitting upstairs playing computer games in a darkened room all day long. That was the real Leith, not this one. The Maine kid was an ordinary, scrawny virgin, and Leith liked him. He preferred him. This Leith was an asshole. He was a man who sold his soul for money—to the Russian government.
Leith slotted his tablet into his satchel and pulled on his sweater, flicking up the hood.
Behind the bar, his waitress cashed up. The screen was on, playing out its usual carousel: a smiling Angela Silvers at her father’s side; Tawny Lascelles on the Paris runway; a weedy Kevin Chase performing for his fans; and Jacob, that cocksure friend who had maddened Leith but also saved him, shaking hands with the president. It had become the default picture-track to summer 2014. Not a day passed when those missing faces did not appear.
Of course he had gone to call it off with the Russians, as much as Leith’s limp approach to proceedings ever could. That made it sound so incidental, like cancelling a movie date, but five seconds in their company told him they were not backing down.
There was nobody else to help, nobody in whom they had confided.
We’re on our own, Jacob had said, just a matter of weeks ago as he had brandished his glass for a toast, a lover of life and luck, just the way I like it.
