The Girl Who Ran

by Nikki Owen

  But it doesn’t happen. The intelligence officers do not leave and the woman does not show up. I check the time. Two more minutes have passed and yet no one appears. The seconds tick by, counting up to the hour, to the time on the note. My pulse raises, pumping blood so hard round my body that I can feel my chest vibrate at the force of my heart beating against my cavity wall. I am scared. And yet, I am unsure why. The image of Patricia, bound, bloody, floats in my head. I squeeze shut my eyes, try to remember what I can from before I arrived here and get small fragments: a helicopter, the device in Patricia’s phone, Chris alone on the ground surrounded by towering mountains of snow and ice. Her betrayal. Is that true, that she is the enemy, my enemy? Do people deceive someone so they can make good? Or is truth a whisper on the wind that can be blown away?

  People in the Project facility move on time, a clockwork machine of military precision. Concern floods me. Have I made an error? Is this note a test I am to fail? If so, what are the consequences?

  I turn. I smooth the crease in my shirt, calculate the trajectory of my steps back so I can slip away unnoticed to my regular, routine station when, without warning, a gloved hand is slapped to my mouth.

  I am dragged away out of sight.

  Secure location, Whitehall, London.

  Time remaining to Project re-initiation: 0 hours and 29 minutes

  I am shown out of a black car with shaded windows into an underground car park with armed guards at the entrance. A damp blanket of air throws itself on me and I pull at my sleeves, count under my breath and ensure I make eye contact with no one.

  Patricia is dragged to the side and made to halt. I cannot bear to watch. The air has a chill to it, a cold sting, but not of snow and sun as in the Alps where the atmosphere was fresh and clean. Here the sky that peeks through is thick and grey, and the air smells of damp concrete after a rain storm.

  ‘Dr Martinez,’ a man says, greeting me now as the vehicle that transported us from a nearby private air strip pulls away. ‘We’re so glad you could join us. The Home Secretary is waiting for you. This way, please.’

  ‘Doc!’

  I feel a sharp slap of sadness, of hurt and confusion as I look at Patricia. She is being held with wrists cuffed by an officer dressed in a black combat jacket with a grey jumper and no tie. I waver. Through the flight, Patricia repeated over and over again her innocence, until ordered by the soldiers to be quiet, but since then the tracker has been through a sophisticated surveillance analysis system and, without a doubt, the device that was inside Patricia’s cell phone belongs to the Project and her fingerprints were discovered on it, the activation of it triggered from her and her alone. I have checked and rechecked it myself, and the intelligence analysts who dissected the device also confirmed that it is not a piece of apparatus that exists within MI5. I have been assured that MI5 currently do not know of my whereabouts in the UK on order of the Home Secretary.

  ‘Dr Martinez,’ the man urges, ‘we have to go I’m afraid.’

  But Patricia cries out again. I tell the officer to stand aside, to permit me to speak to Patricia without being overwhelmed by any new bodily scents or proximity to a stranger. A shaft of cold air whips round me.

  ‘Doc, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘What are you sorry for?’

  Her eyes are red and swollen from almost constant crying, and I find I have the greatest urge to reach out and touch her face, but something holds me back. What? Uncertainty? Or worse? Shame?

  ‘I’m sorry I put us in danger,’ she says after a moment.

  I drop my head as the words tumble from her mouth, because, in truth, I am so tired with it all now, so very near the end. Tears spring in my eyes, trespassing across my cheeks. ‘You have been lying to me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes! Yes. The evidence is there.’ I wipe my face, feeling dizzy, lost. I am a feather in the wind, a petal broken from its stem. ‘You said you were my friend.’

  ‘I am!’

  It’s too much for me to process. I close my eyes and try to shut it all out. For a long time throughout my life, I have been on my own, yet when I met Patricia, I thought I’d found someone I could trust, finally someone who accepted me for being me, but life isn’t always that easy, is it? Life is hard. Life smacks you in the face, kicks you down and just when you are getting up, it kicks you again, harder, over and over, until your face is in the dirt. Only the strong rise once more, time and time again, the determined, those for whom the drive inside propels them forward when all around them stumble and crawl. But how long can you keep picking yourself back up when there’s no hope of the kicking ever stopping? At what point do you say ‘enough to it all’ and give in to the inevitable?

  ‘I have to go,’ I say.

  ‘Doc, no, no don’t do it. You can’t trust them.’

  That’s when I see red, confused at my friend and yet, for the first time in a while, thinking with total clarity. ‘You told me to come here. Do you remember? It was on the train. All along you told me to come here and to see Balthus’s wife. You said it was the correct thing to do, and now you are saying I cannot trust them. Who can I not trust? MI5? The Project? The CIA? You?’ I move in. ‘You?’

  ‘Doc…’

  ‘The truth is none of us can trust anyone. That is what you have now shown me with your deception. That is what I now know. You had the tracker. Your fingerprints were on it. Your activation. The code was linked to it. No one else had your phone.’

  ‘Chris did!’ she cries. ‘Chris had my phone!’

  ‘Stop!’ I yell.

  My voice echoes around the deserted car park as the tears roll down Patricia’s face, and I feel a stab of anger inside me mixed with guilt, with doubt, love and with utter, desperate confusion.

  ‘They all died,’ I say after a moment, my voice low, my whole body feeling suddenly drained of energy, as if I have been walking through a desert with no water for a very long time and now I am on my knees. ‘They all died because of me. I have an opportunity to make that better. The email worked. Chris confirmed it at Weisshorn.’

  ‘But Doc, we don’t know he’s safe. And… what if it was him? What… what if Chris planted the tracker? I’m telling you – he had my phone.’

  ‘I, too, had your phone,’ I say, but even as I speak, a seed of doubt springs up in my mind.

  ‘He had access to my phone if he wanted it,’ Patricia says now, quicker, more urgent. ‘And he’s a hacker, for god’s sake. He went to prison.’

  ‘All three of us have been to prison.’

  The man from before hovers nearby. Patricia falls silent, spits out a mixture of snot and tears, the fluids landing on the ground, staining the light grey concrete a cloud of black. I think of Chris stranded back in the Alps. Could he have done something without me knowing? He was in prison when Balthus was governor – how well did Balthus really know him? My brain flicks through every picture it has taken of him, every sentence recorded, every scene documented. But then I think of the tavern – Patricia had her cell phone in the Swiss tavern when she went to the bar.

  After a moment, I look up, every muscle in my body drained. ‘It has been you all along.’ The words limp out of me. ‘I do not know how I did not see it before.’

  ‘Doc, no. It’s not what you think. I’ve only ever been helping you.’

  ‘You used your phone when you were not supposed to.’

  ‘I… I was texting my sister!’

  ‘Texting your sister does not compute.’

  ‘Oh, Doc, please,’ Patricia says. She stands there stiff for a moment, until, finally, her shoulders fall. ‘My sister isn’t well,’ she says after a few seconds. The air hangs around us, heavy, damp. ‘She has cancer now, just like my mam… just like mam did.’

  ‘Cancer? So you were texting your sister, why – to check on her?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She lifts her head back up, gulps. ‘She says she’s only got three weeks or so to live. I… I contacted her on… on Facebook. My family – they left
a message.’ Tears stain her cheeks and when I look at her hands, her fingers are scrunched into tight balls. Upset, sad – are these the emotions my friend is feeling right now? I am tired. I am too tired to determine what it all means.

  ‘What type of cancer does your sister have?’

  ‘Huh? Oh, er, breast. She has breast cancer.’

  Alarm bells. ‘What stage?’

  ‘Hey?’

  I move in. The armed man moves with me. ‘What stage of breast cancer does she have?’

  ‘Oh, um, stage one, I think.’

  I remain now very still as bit by bit, the lie that Patricia has woven begins to unravel. ‘Her diagnosis and prognosis do not match. You texted her when we agreed we would not do that due to security. You have used Facebook to contact family. You… you do not even like your family. The book at the train station was given to you by a woman who works for the Project. And it is a possibility that you left the book on the ground at Lake Geneva so the Project could know where we had been.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘You never told me about your sister. People share things, other people. You like to talk. Yet you did not talk about this.’

  ‘I didn’t want to… It was something I could deal with alone.’

  ‘Lies. Lies, lies. You do not like your family.’ I rub my scalp. ‘All along you have wanted me alone, away from Chris. You did not want me to go into that hospital, but why? So the Project could find me out in the open? Only they did not get their chance and now all the connections make sense.’

  ‘Doc, Doc, stop it. Stop it, please.’ She smears snot from her face. ‘I haven’t… You’re making links, Doc, and I get that, I do – it’s just the way your brain works – but they’re links that aren’t connected. They’re assumptions, and… and you don’t like assumptions, Doc. Can’t you see that? I didn’t put the tracker into my phone. I have nothing to do with it.’

  But my brain fires out from my mouth exactly what it thinks, no social filter available, my feelings hurt, scorched, red hot from flames. ‘You texted. You were on Facebook.’ I start to reel off the facts, precise, logical. ‘You said yourself your sister does not like you. You killed your mother. That is why they do not like you, your family, because you killed their mother.’

  Tears flow freely down Patricia’s cheeks, cuffed hands unable to wipe them away. ‘Doc, stop it. You’re being mean now. You know I… You know I didn’t kill my mam.’

  ‘You did.’ The urge to state the exact situation is strong and I don’t know how to cloak the details any other way as other people do, dressing the truth in lies to save feelings. Anger washes right through me. ‘It was euthanasia, it is still a killing. You served time in prison for it.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she sobs, ‘next to you. And that’s why we’re friends, because we understand each other.’

  She tries to step towards me, but the officer holds her back. ‘No.’ She shakes her head over and over. ‘No. No. Doc, you can’t do this to me.’ She heaves in a gulp of oxygen. ‘Balthus – Balthus was married to the Home Secretary, Doc. Married. He put you in touch with Chris – ask… ask yourself why.’

  I slap my head a little. Facts. I need to stay with facts. Data. Control. ‘Balthus was… was a good man.’

  ‘I know, but, Doc I’m not lying!’

  ‘Yes, you are,’ slides in a new voice.

  A woman dressed in a tailored navy skirt suit with a cream blouse of cotton thread and silk, strides into the courtyard just ahead of the car park where a large black door now hangs half open to a stone and metal bunker inside. She strides over to us, heels clicking on concrete and straight away I smell rose, musk, juniper and sharp red berries. Her freckled face is instantly recognisable, not from someone I have met in person, but have seen through the confines of a screen in data beamed between one country and another.

  She extends her hand, long, French-manicured fingers of translucent skin, skin that shines in the low level light of the bulbs above, her hair the colour of flames.

  ‘Hello, Ms Martinez. I’m Harriet Alexander, the UK Home Secretary. So pleased to finally meet you.’

  Chapter 27

  Secure location, Whitehall, London.

  Time remaining to Project re-initiation: 0 hours and 23 minutes

  Harriet Alexander stands in front of us, just as we saw her on the tablet screen in the Swiss tavern.

  I look at her outstretched hand, but do not take it, instead trying hard, in this closed-in space, to recall how to be socially polite. ‘Hello. My official title is Doctor, not Ms. Your name Harriet means “ruler of the home”. It is a Teutonic name.’

  She smiles with perfect straight white teeth. No eye creases. ‘Of course. Of course. Doctor – do forgive me.’ She swivels round to Patricia. ‘And this is Patricia O’Hanlon, isn’t it?’ Each word, when she speaks, sounds like plush velvet, like thick cream over a rich, dense dessert.

  Patricia bites her lip, but says nothing. The officer steps forward and grips her arm.

  Ms Alexander turns to me. ‘You met this woman in prison, Maria – may I call you Maria?’

  ‘That is my name.’

  A short nod. ‘Thank you. Am I right in believing that you met Ms O’Hanlon in the prison my husband… ran?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She drops her stare to Patricia. ‘It is wrong to deceive, Ms O’Hanlon – you are aware of that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ Harriet Alexander nods to an aide in a grey suit and tie who has appeared at her side. He hands her a pink cardboard file and she opens it.

  ‘You said to Ms… to Dr Martinez that you were from a large family and that you murdered your mother as an act of kindness, is that correct?’

  ‘What is this? Doc?’

  But I say nothing. Confusion seeps through me, conflict. I am torn between the face of my friend, between Chris, Balthus and the truth, set on proving the decades of lies by people close to me, by governments who were supposed to protect its citizens and uphold its most sacred principles. My throat feels dry and the car park ceiling is low, the air damp against my skin. It’s all too close and I don’t like it, it aggravates me, clouds my cognitive thought. I tap my finger very slightly on my thigh.

  ‘You see, Ms O’Hanlon,’ the Home Secretary continues, ‘you are a liar.’

  ‘No!’ She shakes her head, the officer still holding her. ‘No!’

  I open my mouth to respond, then hesitate as ahead a close protection guard with a blue pin in his lapel touches his ear, a small breeze whistling along the cold concrete causing his jacket to flap up; a handle of a gun rests by his hip.

  The Home Secretary turns to me. ‘We have been able to run a thorough check on this woman, Dr Martinez – Maria. She is not who she says she is.’ She shakes her head. ‘I’m so sorry you have to find out like this. But you see, I… found letters from… from Balthus.’ She performs a tiny gulp then nods to her aide, and he produces from a file three small A5 pages scribed with green ink.

  ‘We have uncovered these.’ She pinches the pages with her porcelain fingers. ‘Balthus… he wrote about you when, well, it must have been when you were at your home in Salamanca.’

  An alert inside me fires. ‘How do you know about my villa in Salamanca?’

  ‘Oh, forgive me. Yes, of course. Please, do not be alarmed – I know you have been through so much. Since your email with the files on this Project Callidus organisation, the investigation has already begun.’

  ‘It has?’ Elation, hope spring up inside. ‘It has begun?’ I want to turn to Patricia and whoop, look at Chris and watch him grin and call me Google, but then I realise that can’t happen now. That everything has changed. I blink at the damp, thick concrete and feel a strange weight inside me, a boulder in my stomach.

  Harriet Alexander tips her head now with just one slight angle of her face. ‘I think you’ll agree with me, Maria, when I say the investigation is of huge importance to the nation, to… to me. But of course, we had to
know whom we were dealing with. We had to know all about you and so we accessed… well, we accessed highly secure data and the process of investigation into the entire Project network has begun.’

  ‘Doc, don’t listen to her.’

  My eye flits to Patricia as I wrestle with my thoughts. ‘This is what you wanted. You wanted me here. You wanted me to be with the government, for an investigation to begin. Why should I now not listen to her?’

  ‘Because… because I thought we could trust her, but Doc, look at me.’ She tries to hold her arms up, but the officer restrains her. ‘They have hold of me, literally, and they are telling lies about me. Loads of lies! What I told you about me, about my family – Doc, it’s all true. And now they are trying to twist it all. Why am I the only one that can see that she’s a lying fucking bitch!’

  The officer yanks Patricia tighter; the government aide whips up his head. Along the low ceiling of the car park, a small, brown bird flies in, trapped, then flitters away searching for an exit.

  Harriet Alexander regards Patricia for a second, then, turning to me, inhales one, neat breath. ‘He talked about you a lot, you know, Balthus, in his notes that we found. Of course, he never said to me where you were or indeed who you really were.’ She stops, wipes an eye with her fifth finger. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just learning of your… relationship to my husband. It is still all new. But of course now’— she clears her throat—‘now he’s dead.’

  I shift on my feet, unsure what to say. ‘When dealing with grief it is important to express your emotions in a productive and tangible way.’

  She gives the tiniest of sniffs then smiles, but still there are no eye creases. ‘He said you were one of a kind.’ She consults the letters. ‘Where is it…? Ah, yes, here.’ She points to the page with a manicured fingernail. ‘He said he was worried about you because of your relationship with Ms O’Hanlon. Because, and I quote’— she reads straight from the page— ‘because Patricia O’Hanlon didn’t kill her mother with kindness, but murdered her brutally to gain an inheritance that wasn’t hers.’ She looks up, still quoting. ‘And I suspect Ms O’Hanlon has been working for the Project all along.’