by Anni Taylor
I needed to talk to my girls. If I didn’t do it now, there might not be another chance. I wanted to make sure they knew why I’d gone.
Locating a public phone, I called home.
Verity answered quickly.
“It’s Gray. I’m sorry, but I had to go.”
“Gray! You’ve got a nerve. What did you—?”
“I’m looking for your daughter.”
“You’re looking for Eveline? Where are you?”
“I’m a long way from there. Can I talk to Willow and Lilly, please?”
“They’re in the yard, playing.”
“Are they okay? How’s Lilly?”
“I don’t need to tell you you’re in serious trouble, do I?”
“I know. I know that.”
She went silent for a moment. Then, “You took my grocery money, Gray.” She was fooling herself calling it her grocery money.
“I’ll pay you back. Every cent.”
“Look, it’s all right. I don’t need it.” Her voice had changed, gone down a few notches in harshness. She sounded almost friendlier, if that was possible for Verity. “Gray, if you will, I’m a little confused with Lilly’s treatment routine. Could you explain the steps to me again?”
“I’m sorry as hell about leaving all that with you. You’d be better off getting that info direct from the doc again—”
“Okay, but right now do you remember what to do with the postural drainage? Lilly’s here patiently waiting for me to start. She’s such a good girl.”
I frowned. “You just said the girls were out playing.”
I exhaled hard as I realised what she was doing. The police were there with her. Right now. They had the phone tapped, and they were indicating to Verity to keep the conversation going. And she knew I’d stay on the line if it was about Lilly’s treatment.
“Tell them I love them,” I breathed, and hung up.
I doubted the police had even needed me to stay on the phone to find out where I was. They could find out locations instantly these days, couldn’t they? And a public phone was a fixed line—the location could be pinpointed. Maybe they wanted Verity to keep me talking in the hope I’d give away information about what I was planning to do. No wonder she’d called her cash-in-hand income her grocery money with the police there listening.
Okay, so the police now knew exactly where I was. I had to keep moving. And I had to look different, somehow.
I stalked the streets, searching for a pharmacy. Luckily, the French word was close to the English: pharmacie. I bought some brown hair dye then headed away to find a pub with a restroom.
Passing up the more popular pubs, I came across one that was looking a bit empty, apart from a few backpackers and elderly men. That was what I needed. I picked out a beer from the menu—a Gavroche. I swilled the fruity, malty beer in my mouth while waiting for the restroom to be vacated. I watched as an old guy stumbled out, slurring a song, and wandered back to the bar.
I made my way to the restroom and sat inside a stall. I doused my hair with the dye. It stank, but it was supposed to work within a few minutes. There wasn’t much ventilation in the tiny space. With my eyes watering and a chemical taste in my throat, I washed the dye out in the restroom sink, first rinsing out the sour, beer-shot vomit of the drunk who’d just been in here.
My hands on the sink, I raised my head to study myself.
Dark-haired me looked a lot different to blonde-haired me. I looked older, more serious. Even a little bit criminal. Maybe the events of the past few days had made me look that way, or maybe my mind was playing tricks on me. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but still, I was on the run from the police.
I straightened, forcing a friendlier expression.
Moving close to the mirror, I scrutinized my dye job. I had a few dark dye stains smeared around my hairline. I scrubbed the stains and my head the best I could with the soap and then rinsed it again.
Replacing the baseball cap, I walked out, stopping to ask a table of backpackers if they knew where any internet cafés were. They pointed me in the direction of a library. I jogged along the canal and towards the street they’d indicated.
I passed a newsstand with turnstile racks of postcards and greeting cards out in front. I bought a detailed map of Greece. I caught sight of a news item on the front page of a newspaper. The story was in French, but I recognised my face easily enough. Below the picture of me were images of Evie’s blackened car and the rope and knife. The only word I understood was Interpol. And I could guess that this meant there was now a warrant out for my arrest. No doubt, police had found my fingerprints on things that proved that I’d been at the scene of Evie’s burned-out car. The police already had my fingerprints from my misdemeanours as a teenager.
Taking my change, I quickly headed away, adjusting my cap to sit lower on my forehead.
Anyone reading that story would think I was dangerous, someone who’d murdered his own wife and was on the run in Europe. I recalled Constance’s response to me in our last conversation. Had she seen a story like this and started to believe I killed Evie? The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced. Every time I’d seen a news story, I’d believed it without question. Now I knew that the other side of the story might not be so clear-cut.
After a few turns and backtracking, I found the library.
Sitting at a library computer, I typed in the word Yeqon.
That brought up a chaotic assortment about angels being sent to earth, Yeqon being one of them. But he wasn’t a good angel.
This wasn’t helping.
Next, I tried searching for the historical society. They had chapters in a list of different countries. No specific locations or contact details. A pretty secretive society that certainly wasn’t welcoming to new members.
But Rosemary the investigator had been able to find out a bit more about them and so could I.
I needed to reverse engineer this. Set off a pinball and see how many targets it could hit. And then zero in on each of those targets. At my job, I’d often had to reverse engineer code. And sometimes I had to search for the needle in the haystack that was screwing up the code. When code when wrong, you had to go back and find out if the program was terminally screwed or if there was just a comma in the wrong place. A wrong comma could destroy everything.
I used the internet’s Wayback Machine and other snapshots of web pages that were dead and buried. Were there any old pages of the historical society I could find here?
There wasn’t much. I found an old Geocities website with no text but a few photographs, taken from a distance. The pictures immediately struck me as odd. They weren’t snaps of a meeting. These were more like surveillance photos. Multiple pics snapped of a group of people walking and close-ups of faces—all blurry. Who’d put up this website? Maybe the person had tried and failed to capture the interest of the police, and in desperation they’d put the information out there online, like a beacon. But this was fourteen years ago. And there was no context to any of it.
I paid the library extra for access to a Photoshop module and started working on reversing the blur of the photographs. Motion blur could be fixed if all the information was still in the picture. You could get it back to a pretty sharp image. Verity had once been shocked when I’d fixed a couple of blurred photographs that had been the last ones taken of her son, Ben, making them clean and sharp. It’d been the only time I’d ever seen her cry.
I was in luck. Within minutes, I had the pictures fixed. Maybe the person who took the shots was nervous as hell they’d be discovered by the society, and they’d forgotten to keep the camera steady.
Now I had much clearer faces and images to work with.
I frowned, looking closer as I blew one of the group photos up large. Three of the people were wearing a type of robe. Freemasons, maybe?
I zeroed in on the person closest to the foreground. A woman. She wasn’t facing the camera, but maybe that was good. Because there was a symbol on the back of the
robe.
What was that?
I isolated the symbol and sharpened it with the Photoshop tools. It was basically a ladder stretching diagonally across a hexagon. Monks were climbing the ladder, winged angels and demons surrounding. The symbol looked ancient.
Next, I scrutinised the faces. I didn’t recognise the Wilson Carlisle character that Constance had told me about. Maybe he looked radically different fourteen years ago.
I copied each face in turn and kept it in a separate folder. I’m coming for each one of you, I whispered under my breath. I’m going to find out why you people were at that meeting.
I returned to the picture of the symbol and tried an internet image search on it.
I sat back, stunned, as similar images came straight up.
The other images had a name. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. A religious symbol dating way back. Twelfth century. Monks ascending heaven on the thirty rungs of the ladder, each rung a different stage of the journey.
Okay, so these people were a religious group? That ruled out the Freemasons. So what I had so far was an ancient religious group hiding behind a historical-society shopfront. That sounded nuts. If these people were traffickers, they weren’t like any traffickers I’d heard about. They were a cult.
Constance’s investigator had been right. This group were religious nuts. Religious nuts with bad vices and criminal dealings.
This symbol was a little different to the ones on my screen, but I needed an expert to take a look and tell me what it all meant. A priest? The only church I’d ever heard about in Paris was the Notre Dame—the church everyone had heard of. But I couldn’t afford to spend the time in the hope that a priest would agree to see me or that they’d know anything about the symbol, especially if it was as old as it seemed.
I had to get to Greece and figure it all out there. Besides, the Australian police knew I was in France, and I needed not to be here anymore.
Putting the photocopies away carefully in my bag, I exited the library.
How did I get to Greece now that Interpol were involved? I didn’t have a clue.
49. CONSTANCE
I STEPPED FROM THE COOL AIRPORT AT Athens, only to be soaked through with sweat within minutes. Sweat trickled between my breasts, pooled in my navel and then seeped along the waistband of my shorts.
I stood under the broad sunlight, not wanting to know what the back half of my clothing looked like.
Summer in Greece was stupidly hotter than summer in England. I pictured Rosemary. Rosemary wouldn’t have let any of this slow her down.
I’d looked up the names of people working against people trafficking, and now, somehow, I had to track them down.
People pressed in on me from all sides—businesspeople and families excited to be starting their summer holiday. Walking up to a line of yellow taxis, I directed the driver to take me into the city. He asked me for a location, and I couldn’t tell him. I hadn’t planned that far ahead. All I knew was that I didn’t want to head straight to my hotel. Wilson Carlisle knew who I was, and if he was trying to find Gray, then he might have people keeping an eye on me, too. The driver suggested the Acropolis Museum, and I nodded. Going the tourist route might throw them off-track and cause them to discount me as a danger to them. At the same time, I knew I couldn’t win at this game. They had the advantage in every way. I just had to hope they had little interest in me.
A welcome cool enveloped me as I entered the museum. I wandered among the artworks, stopping to grab a cold drink and a bite to eat at one of their cafés.
I stepped through a display named the Archaic Gallery. All white, with soaring ceilings. Marble statues stood on rectangular stands among thick round columns. The statues were clothed and unclothed, dismembered and with missing parts, and had me sweating anew. These relics of an ancient world were all so other in contrast to the world I inhabited. Too vast and too strange.
I leaned against a stone column, letting a wave of nausea pass through me. I needed to take my anti-anxiety pills. This was all too much, and I needed to find a centre of calm. For Kara’s sake.
Deep inside my bag, my phone tinkled. It wasn’t the ringtone of my regular phone. It was the private phone. I’d forgotten to throw it away. I answered tentatively, wondering if the police or a stranger had somehow gotten hold of this number.
“Constance?” came the voice.
“Gray?” I breathed, then gathered myself, trying to sound like I wasn’t astonished to hear from him. “What’s been happening?”
“I’ve been doing a bit of hitchhiking, that’s what.”
“Listen, I’m sorry about how I was last time we spoke. I—”
“Don’t sweat it.”
“I feel bad. I shouldn’t have just left you high and dry. I’m just . . . incredibly stressed. And I—”
“You thought I hurt my wife.”
“No . . .”
“Where are you now?”
“Greece. I’m in Greece.”
“Why did you decide to go to Greece? You said the police wanted you to stay in London.” His voice, in that peculiar Australian way, sounded both serious and casual at the same time.
“I know. They still do. But I had to keep looking for Kara.”
“So, where are you right now?”
“The Acropolis Museum, Athens.”
“Alone?”
“Yes. Why—?”
“I’ll see you there. In about twenty.”
“You what?”
“Twenty minutes. Outside the entrance to the museum.”
“You’re in Athens?” I spoke that louder than I meant to.
“Yes. But Constance . . . if you call the police or if I see anyone or anything suspicious, you won’t see me at all.”
I couldn’t blame him for being cautious, not after our last conversation. “Gray, trust me, it’s just me here. There won’t be anyone else.”
“I hope so. I’ll be there soon.”
He hung up. The distrust in his voice was my fault, and it was up to me now to repair the damage and show him that I was on his side.
50. EVIE
RAIN POURED DOWN ON THE GARDEN.
I ached to take my breakfast and eat it outside, but I’d have been washed away in the downpour. A thick, melancholy light was trapped within the monastery halls and rooms—acid grey and unrelenting, tinting everything and everyone with its dull poison.
The projected images of the fifth challenge still stained my thoughts. It seemed to me that the images flashing too fast to register in the last section of film were even worse than what I’d seen.
Duncan had lost his place in the program afterwards, and he’d been sent home. I didn’t judge him as harshly in retrospect. He’d done the best he could with what he understood of the world. Poppy had been unable to stop crying after the challenge. She’d hugged me and said she couldn’t take any more. She wanted out. The mentors had allowed her to take the place of someone else who was supposed to be eliminated. We promised to keep in contact after the program was over. And then she left. Poppy had always been too sensitive for these challenges, especially so soon after the death of her boyfriend. It felt empty here without her.
Just one more challenge. Then I’d be leaving this place far behind.
I wasn’t certain how I’d remember the monastery. There were so many hollow spaces and unseen parts. Two people had died. I still couldn’t grasp it all and make it fit together. Perhaps that would be the final challenge—to understand my time here and the monastery itself.
As I took my plate of soup and bread from the kitchen into the refectory, I took a quick glance around at the small group of people sitting at the table and felt a keen sense of loss. This was what was supposed to happen, and I should have been overjoyed to be among the second-last group. But I wanted everyone here making it through to the end, especially Saul.
Another missing face was Kara’s. She hadn’t given me the chance to know her, but I hoped she’d head home now and go back to c
ollege.
The others at the table gave me a nod as I sat down. We were the last eight participants: Richard, Cormack, Mei, Louelle, Thomas, Yolanda, Hop and myself. Two would be eliminated. Then we’d have the final six.
We ate in silence for most of the meal. The soup was good, but after a minute or so, it seemed to me to be saturated with the same grey hue as the rest of the monastery, the taste turning bitter. I couldn’t finish it.
“Well, here we are.” Cormack pushed his empty plate away.
“The home run.” Richard sipped a noisy spoonful of soup. “We all go home in brand new beautiful skins. We’re butterflies.” He slitted his eyes at Hop in a comical way. “All except for Hop, who told me on the first morning that he has no intention of changing his degenerate ways.”
Hop grinned self-consciously, but then his smile slipped. “I’ve kind of figured out a few things about myself since then.”
“During challenge four?” I asked gently.
“Yes, the mirror,” Hop replied. “I saw my future, and I didn’t like it. When I go back home, I’m going to be a new man.”
“That challenge was bad for me,” said Mei. “I saw the faces of the men who used to come into my room every day and night. I was nine when I was abducted and made to work as a prostitute. The mirror made me understand that as a child, I felt like I took the spirit of those men deep inside me and that I became just as ugly.”
Louelle and I reached out to Mei, hugging either side of her.
Yolanda bowed her head, suddenly crying. “I don’t want to go back to being who I was. But what if I’m just no good at being anyone else?”
Richard winked. “Chin up, buttercup. When I become a pilot for real, you can become my co-pilot. Imagine that, huh? Pilot Yolanda, stepping off a light plane in Saudi Arabia, tossing her beautiful hair around in the breeze. And none of the rich sheiks can say a darn thing about it. Because she’s about to fly their asses somewhere.”
