Killing Eva

by Alex Blackmore

  He had, of course, visited Berlin many times but never so conspicuously. Usually, his MO was staying below the radar, being as inconspicuous as possible, but this time there was no point. They knew he was there, he knew they knew and, from the information he had, there was little sense in trying to conceal his movements or where he was going. Stand up and fight – face them. Finally. He was glad that was the path chosen, it suited him far better than being on the run.

  ‘Mitte, please,’ he said as he entered one of the cream-coloured taxis waiting in line at the airport.

  The driver nodded at him in the mirror and pulled the car out into the lanes to take them into the city. It was dark outside and the cover of the velvety blackness always gave him more comfort than the bright, harsh, revealing light of day.

  He had chosen to fly into Berlin Tegel as he was familiar with the strange, circular airport and, without luggage, he had known he could go from his seat to the taxi in less than 15 minutes. Normally, he hated the exposed nature of these small airports, where anonymity was virtually impossible, but on this occasion he had been grateful for it. Now, as he sat in the back of the air conditioned taxi, watching the lights of the city flash past, he felt the flaws in all his planning pinching at the edges of his consciousness. He knew that, for all his predicting, foresight and rigid organisation, there was one unpredictable factor in all of this – Eva.

  He had never been able to read her. Whether because she followed her instincts rather than doing what she should do, or was just very good at keeping her real feelings concealed, he didn’t know. Either way, she had taken him by surprise more times than he cared to admit – even without meaning to – and, as she had neither formal training, nor apparently any intention to mislead him, that made her mercurial to deal with.

  It was that instinct. He thought hard as the cab took him from leafy suburban streets and further into the heart of the city. For most people, instinct had become a dumbed-down reaction, something that was subject to guilt and fear, to the manipulation of advertisers and personal drive for wealth and personal status. Few people could hear their inner voice these days – or few cared to listen. This made them powerless, easy to read and simple to manipulate.

  But not Eva. Somehow, Eva was fully plugged into her instinct – or most of the time at least. And that meant she could read people and situations almost as well as he could. Luckily for him, she didn’t know this and she occasionally hesitated.

  He wondered whether it was the life she had led – such adversity and so much to deal with from such a young age. Not for Eva the mind-numbing ties of an early marriage, the security of a predictable childhood, a regular job, a life that made her feel safe. She had existed outside many of society’s structures from what he could see and yet, as a result, she seemed to know herself better. As the taxi pulled up to the address he had given the driver he realised that it made him feel emotion – which was unusual for him – sadness perhaps, that there was a chance that the events she was caught up in, that he had involved her in, could mean that she might never get the chance to live that potential. And that he might have to be the one to take it away.

  Eva quietly closed the door of her hotel room and thumped against it. Immediately, she gasped in pain. More tears sprung to her eyes. She felt desperate. The last 48 hours had been too much. She almost couldn’t take it. How could anyone handle so much?

  At the back of her mind, she heard a calm, logical voice ‘you need to go to a hospital.’ But she couldn’t think straight and she didn’t want to leave the safety of her room. Not now. Not yet.

  She staggered over to the mini bar and, using her left hand, pulled open the faux oak wood panel disguising it and then the door behind. She reached for a miniature bottle of Jack Daniels, one of the only spirits other than brandy that she could drink straight, and twisted the tiny cap off with her teeth.

  The liquid was cold. She felt it pour smoothly down her throat and then its cool warmth spread through her chest and into her gut. She threw the bottle into the bin and reached for the miniature gin, repeating the same movements in the space of seconds. The gin was not pleasant and she choked slightly as the sour liquor made its way into her body. But the effects were welcome. A slight dulling of the pain in her shoulder. An easing of the anxiety in her mind. She let the miniature gin bottle drop to the bed and took three deep breaths. Her mind was racing. Her nerve endings felt as if they were on fire, adrenaline seared through her system. At the back of her mind she knew that these reactions were not all her.

  She walked over to the door. Checked it once again. Then she searched the room. She packed her suitcase. Methodical movements, doing. The only way she knew to calm herself down. Other than running. And she could not leave the hotel again in darkness. Not now.

  Finally, as the mist of emotion settled into an alcohol induced calm, she tried to think back to the S-Bahn and work out what had happened to her. There was no way she had fallen, none whatsoever. She had felt something hit her in the back, between the shoulder blades, and something – presumably someone – pushing her towards the train tracks. What puzzled Eva was that there must have been witnesses. There must have been cameras on the station, it was all very public – and yet, from what she could make out, everyone at the station was as confused as she was. They all seemed to think she had jumped. Then there was the fact that pushing someone in front of a train wasn’t exactly a subtle way to kill. Definitely not as efficient as a quick shot to the back of the head in one of the many dark and lonely spots in this city. Plus, she wondered whether the train would even have killed her – did they travel that fast?

  Instinctively, it felt to Eva like a warning rather than an attempt on her life. Maybe it was even an attempt at disabling her, slowing her down. But why? And who? She had come to Berlin on an innocent business trip, entirely unconnected to other events that had begun to happen to her – the phone calls from Jackson, seeing that poor man being kidnapped outside her house – so why should everything suddenly be coming to a head in Berlin?

  She remembered the piece of paper she had been given in Berghain and spotted it on the floor. It was now writing side down on the carpet. She stared at the small white shape and, as she did so, her eyes seemed to unfocus and then focus on it again. She looked harder and realised that, with the paper this way up, there was something marked on it she hadn’t noticed before. On the back was a symbol, one that made her heart begin to beat faster again. It was hand drawn but it was definitely the same symbol she had seen throughout everything that had happened to her in Paris. It was an acorn.

  It took Eva several minutes to recover from the shock of seeing the acorn on the back of the paper. It had been drawn in a very light green colour, so as to be almost invisible, and certainly not obvious from looking at the words on the other side. As soon as she saw it, her mind cleared of everything else. It was surely a connection between what was happening now and what had happened before. To Eva, acorn meant ACORN – the Association for the Control of Regenerative Networking – whose logo had appeared on everything from the antidote vaccines in the basement in Paraguay, to a building she had visited in France – in fact, the building at the same address as that of ‘kolychak’, the bank her research had turned up only days before. There were connections forming. Lots of them. Eva’s mind hesitated over the credibility of the connections, she began to wonder whether she shouldn’t be more suspicious.

  Then her phone rang. Sam. She ended the call. Instantly, the phone rang again, its harsh tone sounding loud in the room, as if it could be heard in the corridor beyond.

  There was a sharp knock at the door. Eva froze. She silenced the phone. She took several steps towards the door, and looked for a spy hole, but there wasn’t one.

  ‘I can see your feet, Eva.’

  Sam’s voice! Eva took a step back, puzzled. He was in Berlin? She turned to the mirror and tried to disguise the effects of the tears she had s
hed and the injuries she had suffered. She reached for the paper with the acorn on it and shoved it into her pocket. Cautiously, she opened the door. It was definitely Sam, who walked in brusquely, immediately spotting the empty miniatures and shaking his head disapprovingly. But he did not have the air of the Sam she knew.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, in surprise.

  ‘Well, that’s a nice way to greet your boyfriend.’ His voice had a hard undertone she had never previously heard directed at her.

  She closed the door. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?’

  He seemed to be looking around the hotel room.

  ‘You’d probably have taken off somewhere if you knew I was on my way. Wouldn’t you?’ He fixed her with a hard stare.

  ‘Have you come all this way to say that?’

  ‘You were supposed to come home yesterday.’

  ‘I decided to stay on.’

  ‘Do you know how irresponsible it is not to show up back at the office? That interview has a deadline, people are worried about you.’

  ‘The deadline is five weeks away, Sam, it’s not exactly a stop-press piece. And we both know there isn’t anyone in that office who would be genuinely worried about me, they’re just colleagues.’

  He stopped looking around the room and turned to face her. ‘I was worried about you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You haven’t responded to my messages and you haven’t been in touch. I thought you were having some kind of breakdown.’

  ‘Why on earth would you think that?’

  He hesitated for the first time since he had confidently stormed into the room.

  ‘I know you,’ he said softly, apparently deciding to change his approach, ‘you’re vulnerable, things have happened. I just didn’t want to think of you here, dealing with stuff alone.’

  He took a step towards Eva and reached for one of her hands. She didn’t move.

  He was lying. She could feel he was lying. His words were designed to make her believe he was right – that she was vulnerable and needed his help. It was the equivalent of telling her she was overreacting, over emotional; it was intended to have a crippling effect on her ability to discern what was actually happening.

  She did not sense any genuine affection from him, perhaps she never had. But what other reason could there be for his showing up here like this? She had to be careful not to become too suspicious of the motives of absolutely everyone, despite everything that had happened. She could easily end up on the wrong side of crazy.

  ‘I just want to take care of you, Eva. I know things haven’t been easy but I think, sometimes, you see life much more negatively than you need to. I can help, I can be there for you.’

  Eva looked at him. The aesthetically perfect face, the apparent warmth streaming from his eyes, the hands held out towards her.

  She felt nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  In a large white cube of a house, high up in the Hollywood Hills, a memory stick was delivered via fast courier. A woman in pale denims took it and signed for it – she had been expecting the delivery. The sun was just setting over the west coast of America but still she made herself a large coffee. If this was what she had been told to expect she would not be sleeping tonight. Her work for such clients was not something she chose to share with anyone. It was not entirely legal – not so much what they asked of her, which was purely analysis – but what was revealed to her in the process. She worked in finance, she specialised in financial mechanisms, control and complex structuring. But these days it was not just legal, visible organisations that needed to understand how to make, and hold, money.

  Yes, this work was lucrative. No, it didn’t trouble her that she didn’t know who it was for. She did it for a combination of the income and the insight. It was never ordinary. Like all her clients, the focus was on liquidity and control, but what was fascinating about this particular work stream was the disregard for law and regulation – and the need to circumvent it. That was very liberating although it could never be approached entirely without caution. Sometimes she wondered what these brains could do if employed legally rather than in a criminal capacity but she knew the answer was simple: they would do much less.

  As the sun began to set, she took a seat at the breakfast bar in the kitchen. She sipped from the freshly made coffee and, for a second, listened to the sounds of her husband preparing the children for bed.

  Then she opened the laptop reserved specially for this work – it was physically and electronically locked away, inaccessible to anyone but her with a password impossible to guess at and identification that only she could provide.

  She opened the small padded packet and retrieved the memory stick inside. It was blue and looked scratched, as if it had already seen much use. She opened the envelope but there was nothing else – no note, no instructions. That meant she would simply be required to report back on the usual: viability, potential and risk.

  She inserted the stick into the machine and watched as it began to start up. It contained a single folder with a single document. At the end of the document was a link to a private cloud storage facility, as well as a username and password. But she did not require those at present.

  She started at the top of the document and worked her way down – it was five pages long.

  At page three, her eyes widened in surprise.

  At page four, she exclaimed out loud.

  At page five, she realised she would have to read the entire document again.

  Her coffee went slowly cold.

  FIFTEEN

  After Sam had gone, Eva sat on the bed, head in her hands. She had not been able to invite him into her room. He made her feel claustrophobic. Everything that had happened to her since she arrived – the mugging, the Scopolamine, the S-Bahn – she needed to start making connections. But Sam’s presence was odd. And annoying.

  She exhaled heavily.

  There were times when she felt she was never going to get there – with life. Other people managed 9-5 jobs, a daily routine, a degree of predictability. Apparently she would do anything to avoid that – even look for trouble. She couldn’t live like that forever. Her train of thought was interrupted by a soft knock at the door. Sam again?

  She moved quietly to the door and, this time, took care to stand far enough away so her feet could not be seen.

  She stood, silently, her heart beating hard in her chest.

  She cursed the lack of a spy hole.

  On the other side of the door, there was no movement. Eva tried to lean in and listen against the hard wood but could hear nothing.

  After she had stood for several minutes waiting for something to happen, Eva walked back to the bed and sat. She was just retrieving her phone, to plug it into the charger, when she heard the unmistakable sound of a keycard opening the room door.

  She froze.

  Her heart began to pound.

  There was a mechanical click, followed by two high pitched beeps, and then Eva heard the handle being pushed cautiously down.

  She sat rigidly on the bed.

  That wasn’t Sam.

  The way her room was designed meant that, in between the door and her bed, was a thin strip of wall housing the wardrobe, a safe and some shelves, as well as a mirror on each side. Because of this wall, there was no way she could see what was happening on the other side of it.

  She listened hard and heard a quiet swish as the door was pushed open.

  Shit.

  Her heart rate was at a painful level. Her chest felt tight. Did the hotel have a turn down service? She thought quickly. She’d heard no ‘housekeeping!’.

  No, this did not feel right.

  She looked around for a weapon. The glass water bottle on the desk at the end of the bed was her only choice. It might be enough of a distraction that she could run. She too
k a silent step towards it and picked it up as she heard the room door quietly shut. She positioned herself at the end of the wall separating the bed from the door; she held her breath. The only advantage she had was the element of surprise. When she saw a shadow fall across the carpet to the edge of the wardrobe, she hit out with the bottle. It made contact with something and was then dashed from her hands, bouncing off the edge of the desk but not smashing.

  But Eva couldn’t see it anymore as she had been turned, forced face down into the muddy brown bedclothes and was being pinned there by a firm grip. She cried out as the pain of the injury sustained earlier, combined with the position she was being held in, became almost unbearable. Her vision began to swim.

  She stayed still, breathing hard, aware of a pair of hard thighs pressed against the back of her own, hands holding her wrist tight to the small of her back and sharp fingernails digging into her opposite shoulder, keeping the top half of her body pressed against the bed.

  ‘Are you going to behave?’

  It was a woman’s voice.

  That was a surprise. Eva hesitated. She might once have thought a woman assailant meant a better chance – but, in her recent experience, it did not.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked, her voice audibly shaking.

  ‘I’m someone who doesn’t take kindly to being attacked with a fucking glass bottle.’

  Eva tried to shake her hands free. ‘You broke into my room, what do you expect?’

  ‘You didn’t answer the door.’

  ‘AND?’

  ‘And so I broke into your room.’

  Eva listened to the voice, husky and strong. She was fairly certain it wasn’t one she had heard before.

  ‘What do you want?’

  There was hesitation, then the grip on Eva’s wrist and back was released. Slowly, cautiously, she straightened up and turned to face the woman. For some reason she felt embarrassed, inadequate, in a way she knew she wouldn’t have done if she had just been physically overwhelmed by a man. For several seconds, they stood opposite each other, tension tangible between them.