“I’m not your son, sir. I’m an officer in her Majesty’s Armed Forces and an elite SAS operative. I will defend my country and my family, and you can be sure as fuck that I’m going to defend my girl’s right to live free and happy. After the shit she’s been through, she deserves her life back, and I’m going to give it to her. I’ve seen you plastered all over the news, taking credit for a fight you won without ever having risked your own life or picked up a weapon. At the moment, you’re the man of the hour. The Russians get to Sarah, you’ll be the man who killed the society princess who gave up everything for her country. The media will crucify you, and that’s before I get my turn. Putting Sarah in witness protection is in your best interest, not hers. So, if it’s all the same with you, fuck you and the horse you rode in on,” I said, calmly pushing back my chair.
“You’re blowing this out of all proportion. My call was the right one. Nobody died and the terrorist threat is gone. I did the right thing. We’re fighting a war against terror, and the freedom of one woman against the lives of countless others is an acceptable casualty. People will understand that, even if you don’t,” he reasoned.
“There’s no such thing as an acceptable casualty, sir. When the life and freedom of any innocent becomes expendable, you’ve already lost the war.”
“You’re making a mistake, Tom, and I’m afraid I can’t allow this. MI5 should be on their way to her now. They’ll explain that Agheenco is at large, and if she agrees to witness protection, they’ll have her moved within the hour.”
“And what about my mother? Or are you planning on putting her in witness protection as well?” I asked sarcastically.
“Once Sarah leaves, I’ll pay her a visit and inform her that you were wrongly identified on scene and that misinformation was communicated to me. I’ll apologise for the misunderstanding and will explain that you’re fine and on your way home,” he said. “And you will do or say nothing to the contrary, or I’ll have you brought up on charges of treason for breaching the Official Secrets Act. I’m holding you for twenty-four hours. After that, as long as I have your assurances that you will say nothing, you may leave.”
“Do it. Have me arrested and thrown in the glass house! Let’s see how long it takes my mother to go to the national press and every media outlet under the sun, shouting from the rooftops about what you’ve done. I’m sure she’ll paint a fairly graphic picture of how she grieved and how badly her heart was affected from the stress, all because you misidentified a dead soldier. She loves the spotlight. Craves it really. I won’t need to say a word. The minute you leave, she’ll be tweeting Oprah. I hear that clip of me getting shot’s already gone viral. A national hero, isn’t that what they’re calling me?” I replied.
Vanity was his sin, and it worked in my favour. A trial by media was his worst nightmare, and it was a weapon I’d gladly wield at his table if it got me out of here and back with the only two women I’d ever loved. He thought for a moment. The squeaky-wheeled cogs of his mind moving behind his eyes, as I imagined him running through his options. He wasn’t a soldier. He was a politian. A chess player. Moving us all around the board as he played his own game.
“Go,” he replied. “Give her the choice about whether to take witness protection when they come calling. But if she dies, that’s on you, and if I’m implicated in any way, I will fucking bury you,” he warned. But I had no time for his hollow, childish threats. I had phone calls to make and speed limits to break. If I had to move Heaven and Earth, there was no fucking way MI5 was taking my girl.
Sarah
For hours the house had been battered as a storm raged outside. The reflection staring back at me through the darkened glass was hollowed out. A shadow of her former self, now that part of her soul was missing. I barely recognised the girl looking back at me. In a matter of hours, grief had stripped away all semblance of joy and hope. What was left was merely a physical manifestation of misery and despair. I’d gone through the motions of showering and drying my hair. Had dragged on some clean jeans and a sweater so that I could face the visiting officer if they turned up today. But that small act, that tiny semblance of normality left me exhausted, and all I wanted to do was change into my pyjamas, crawl back into bed, and wallow in a pool of my own desolation.
The sharp knock at the door made me jump. Barely a second or two passed before it sounded again, and I imagined that the doorbell to the right of the entrance wasn’t nearly loud enough to convey the exasperation of person next to it. My steps grew heavy the closer I walked, knowing how real everything would become as soon as we started talking about funeral arrangements. The knocker sounded again, spiking my temper. The visiting officer was definitely going to get a piece of my mind about their distinct lack of patience and sensitivity. But the subject of my ire was not who I thought it would be.
“Hello, Aunt Elizabeth,” I said. The sour-faced old boot looked like she’d been sucking lemons the whole way down, but I supposed that a foray into the countryside and away from her usual cosmopolitan scene in London was probably her idea of hell. “What are you doing here?” It didn’t occur to me to ask how she was, or how she knew where to find me.
“Your presence is needed in London. There’s a problem with the company, and whilst packing your bag and disappearing to the countryside with absolute no notice to anyone as to where you’ve gone might have seemed like a great idea in that moronic little brain of yours, some of us actually care about this business.”
“I care. I just…,” I muttered, unable to explain what had happened, as though talking about it aloud would give Tom’s death a finality I couldn’t take back.
“All you were asked to do is show up and have your picture taken, but even that seems to be above you. Now get your coat please. We have a crisis to sort out, and I’ve already wasted far too much time driving down here. Something I wouldn’t need to do I might add, if you turned on your phone once in a while,” she complained.
“I’m afraid I can’t go with you. I’m sorry if I haven’t performed as well in the role of social butterfly as you wanted me to, but I did the best I could, and despite what you think, I don’t want to see the company fail, but somebody I care about needs me right now and I won’t abandon her, even for the company.”
She wore that same look of rage she’d favoured when I was a child who’d made any kind of suggestion that wasn’t aligned with her agenda.
“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. Get your coat and get in the car now,” she demanded. The lingering tendrils of guilt that followed me over the way I’d left, floated away on the wind as she ordered me to do her bidding.
“I’m sure that tone of voice worked when I was a little girl, but I’m not seven any more, Aunt Elizabeth. If something has happened with the company, you’re welcome to come in and talk to me about it, and I’ll do what I can from here. But leaving at the moment is just out of the question. What you decide to do with that is up to you, but that’s my final word,” I said, wearily but firmly.
If she continued glaring at me with that scowl and hateful look in her eyes, I was going to slam the door in her face, even if the company was falling apart. The livelihood of the people who worked for us was the only thing keeping me civil.
“You always were an insolent little bitch. When I said I wasn’t asking, I meant it,” she said and, reaching into her pocket, pulled out a small gun. It looked real enough, but I had no idea whether it actually was. What I did understand was just how much she wanted to use it. Like she’d given free rein to her true feelings, her hate for me was palpable.
“If you’re going to use that thing on me, fine. But I’m not going with you,” I replied adamantly. Perhaps if Tom were there, I would’ve fought a little harder, but the idea of dying didn’t seem a daunting a prospect anymore. And it was infinitely preferable to giving an inch to that vindictive bitch.
“Oh, this isn’t for you, you stupid cow. There’s a bullet in here with the old woman’s name on it. Now, you ei
ther come quietly or I’ll introduce her to it, up close and personal,” she warned. She looked so unhinged, that I complied immediately. Pulling my boots on and reaching for my jacket, just as Nan rounded the doorway.
“What’s going on?” Nan said in confusion. Looking back, I could see that Elizabeth had stuffed the gun back into her pocket, but we both knew it was there.
“Nan, this is my Aunt Elizabeth. Apparently, there’s been a terrible crisis with the company and she needs me back in London to sort it out. Will you be all right if I go? It should only take me a few hours to sort it out,” I said.
From Elizabeth’s behaviour, there was a distinct possibility that I would never see Nan again, but I told her whatever I thought she needed to hear in order to get Elizabeth away from her. Ensuring Nan’s safety was my only priority.
“Couldn’t it wait?” Nan pleaded, in a way that was so uncharacteristic for her. “Just a day or two?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I really need to do this. If Tom calls while I’m gone, will you let him know that I’m fine, and I’ll be home as soon as I can.” Nan’s eyes widened in surprise as she mulled over my words. I willed her not to say anything, praying that Elizabeth didn’t know that Tom was dead and hoping she’d understand that I was giving her an SOS. Throwing my arms around her, I hugged her hard and relished in the fact that she held me as tightly as I did her.
“Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?” she pleaded, and I hoped that we were speaking the same code.
“No, there’s nothing. Just pass on the message to Tom,” I replied.
“It’s nice to meet you, but we really do need to go,” Elizabeth said curtly. I heard the warning in her tone and let Nan go.
I no longer thought of her as my aunt. Any accident of nature that made us blood relatives was a tragedy best left forgotten as far as I was concerned.
“Take care of yourself,” I said as I left.
“You too,” she replied, and then, with a small sigh of relief that she was safe, I shut the door behind me.
“Get in the car,” Elizabeth ordered. “You’re driving.” She indicated to a nice, but fairly innocuous black Audi Saloon. The black paint and tinted windows gave it a touch of the ominous.
“Where are we going?” I asked, sliding behind the driver’s seat.
“London.”
I started the engine, and she pulled up the address in the sat nav. Once we were far enough away from the house that I could breathe, I focused on a solid plan for getting myself out of this mess and getting back to Nan.
“Whatever stupid plan you’re concocting, just forget about it. You don’t think I make threats I can’t go through with, do you? There’s a gun aimed at the house right now. If my guy doesn’t hear from me when he’s supposed to, if anything happens to me, she’ll get a bullet between the eyes. And your bullet won’t be far behind. So try and muster up a little maturity and do as you’re told for once.”
“Why are you doing this?” I cried.
“You really don’t get it, do you? You still think I brought you back to save the company. I built that fucking company! Years of weak, clueless men chipped away at my legacy until there was nothing left. I watched my own father make bad decision after bad decision, praying all the while that he didn’t destroy it before it was my turn. And then what did he do? In his final act of fucking ignorance and idiocrasy, he left his shares to my brother, and I got five percent. Five measly fucking percent! I’m the one who worked her arse off to get a first class honours degree in business. While other teenagers were having fun at parties, drinking and living it up, I was interning at shipping houses. Studying how things worked, calculating how to make the business better, stronger. And do you know what your dad studied?” she screamed, not pausing to let me answer.
Of course I knew what degree Dad had chosen. It was how my parents had met. They’d fallen in love with each other over a love of art.
“History of Fine Art! All he was interested in was your mother, and when he had you brats, I felt it all slipping through my fingers. Being born a male was the only thing he ever had to do to get those shares. Old money for old men. Keeping it in the male line until there’s no more left to give. Of course, your mother wanted nothing to do with any of it. The business, the family, London. The ungrateful bitch even convinced him to move to that god awful hellhole up north. But even then, my brother wouldn’t sign over the shares. Wanted you and John to inherit the family business he said. A business that selfish bastard did nothing for, and to add insult to injury, he was breaking the line of male succession for you. For the first time in the history of Tatem Shipping, the company would go to a woman. And not the one who’d worked for it, or earned it, who wanted it so badly she sacrificed any chance at a husband or family of her own! No, it was going to a woman who looked on the empire with the same scorn and derision that her bitch of a mother had. I was never going to let that travesty happen.”
“Oh my God. You knew about the Russians, didn’t you?” I said, my body shaking as the pieces of the puzzle all started to come together.
“And the penny finally drops,” she replied sarcastically. “I didn’t just know about the Russians, I invited them through the door. I’ve been around the shipping elite my entire life. I saw how things were going. A single shipment here, a backhander there. When we joined the European Union, that’s when the gangs became more organised, and I knew then we had a huge opportunity to change the tide of the company’s fortune. To claw back everything my ancestors had thrown away.”
“Then why involve Dad? Why bring him and John back into the family fold? When Mum died, if you’d just left him alone, he would have signed over the shares, I’m sure of it. He was broken up, vulnerable, but left alone he would have raised us,” I argued, devastated at the injustice of having to lose both parents for her greed.
“Because I needed him. The Russians were old school. From a different world. A different machine. They were even more misogynistic than my forefathers had been. No matter how attractive the offering from Tatem Shipping, they never would have gone for it with a woman at the helm. Typical that they’d rather a tired, weak-willed man to a strong, powerful woman. But, whether they appreciated my worth was inconsequential. All they cared about was the puppet. Nobody ever looks to see who’s pulling the strings. So I gave them what they wanted, and they made the deal,” she explained. She was psychotic, her moods swinging wildly from fury to a gleeful sense of pride at the cleverness of her own machinations.
“Then why have Dad and John killed? What did they ever do to you?” I asked. There was no love lost between myself and my brother, but I would always mourn for the little boy he’d been before she got her hooks into him. My big brother.
“Poor John. He’s my only regret in all of this. I’d like to think he was the nearest I ever had to having a child of my own. Fair skin, fair hair, all of my genetics and none of your mother’s I’m happy to say. That boy thought I hung the moon. After your bitch of a mother died, he followed me around like a puppy. Went to university, then business school, absorbing anything he could about the industry like a sponge. He was my protégé. When I introduced him to the Russian involvement in the business, he didn’t bat an eyelid, even worked to keep your father in line. That was, of course, until the day the news aired the story of a shipping container at Dover carrying the bodies of thirty-four women. The container wasn’t registered to us, but John had his suspicions. He confronted me, and I confirmed that they were true. He told me that he was appalled at what we were involved in. I called him naive, said he had lacked forward planning and a vision for the future. It was an unhappy revelation that we were both disappointed in each other. Still, we could have lived with it. Buried our differences as it were and carried on regardless. But he couldn’t let the container thing go. Said he wouldn’t be party to trafficking women and children. I told him, that when you cross the line, you never look back. Because how far you crossed it doesn’t matter. Once it�
�s done, there’s no going back.”
“He disagreed with you, and you killed him for it. You killed them both.”
“He signed his own death warrant I’m afraid,” she said, almost wistfully. “Your father had no real idea just how deeply the Russian deal was imbedded into our business. He’d convinced himself, probably to appease his own conscience, that we were smuggling cigarettes and alcohol to avoid tax. When John confronted him with irrefutable proof that we were trafficking weapons and women as well, he told Vasili he was pulling out of the deal. By then they were already dead, with or without my nod.”
“You gave the nod to have them killed? You let them die?” I asked, struggling to believe that it was true, that she could be so calculating and callous to her brother and the man she thought of as a son.
“I made a choice! To get in the lifeboat instead of going down with the ship! By then Vasili had mellowed. Over time he understood the power I wielded and who was really in control of the company, so he came to see me first. I think, secretly, he admires me. My tenacity, my single-minded focus, my drive to protect the business at all costs. Perhaps I remind him a little of himself,” she mused.
“Yeah, you’re both insane,” I muttered.
She slapped me so hard, that my ear was ringing, and I swerved as I struggled to get control of the car, much to the irritation of the other motorists who beeped loudly to communicate their frustration.
“You could’ve killed us both!” I screamed when I’d righted the vehicle.
“I should’ve done that a long time ago. The minute you opened that smart mouth of yours, I should’ve smacked it. But if I had, I don’t think I’d have ever have stopped,” she told me.
My knuckles were white from clenching the wheel so hard. Slowly, I focused on relaxing them to get the blood flowing back. I kept quiet as I drove steadily down the motorway. My cheek still stung, but I focused more on containing the urge to elbow that manipulative bitch in the face rather than on my pain. With every toxic, poisonous word that spilled from her mouth, I found my anger building. The knowledge that all of my pain and loss could be traced back to one person filled me with an all-consuming rage. I’d been sure that Agheenco was the worst kind of scum, but if he showed any loyalty to his family, he was a prince compared to the soulless monster that sat next to me. I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that she’d keep doing it long after I was gone. There was too much money in the suffering of others for her to stop. She’d cram human lives into containers like baked beans in a tin if she could. Label them up and sell them cheap. Only the knowledge that there was a gun to Nan’s head stopped me from driving the car into a concrete barrier. I’d kill us both if that was what it took to end the cycle of misery. But to save the lives of countless innocents, I’d have to sacrifice one. Nan’s soul against the measure of hundreds, and I couldn’t do it. For miles I anguished over the decision, and then eventually it was too late.
City Under Siege Page 24
