Everything he’s saying reinforces the decision I’m about to make regarding Neva. No, we can’t trust anyone at MI5 or MI6. This much is becoming clear. Even so, can I trust Neva?
‘Any sightings of the van since?’ I ask.
‘None. But we’re still working on it.’
‘I’m coming into the office,’ I say.
‘Best to stay where you are for now,’ Ray says. ‘I’ve sent extra detail to make sure you’re safe.’
I try to argue but Ray won’t listen. He hangs up and I find myself staring at the phone.
True to her word and on the dot, Neva calls me back on the other phone. As I see her anonymous number flashing up on the screen I make up my mind: I’m going to give her one final chance.
‘Ray just called me,’ I say. ‘They’ve taken Mia.’
‘I wasn’t expecting them to act so soon,’ Neva says, ‘I’m sorry, Michael.’
‘What does Annalise want with her?’
Neva sighs again. ‘I don’t know. I’ve been wracking my brains wondering what this is all about. But I knew she would take her. She’ll want the child too.’
‘Ray’s sending extra detail to protect me. I need to get out of here before they arrive or I’ll be in lockdown. Will you meet me?’ I ask and I feel a rush of relief: I’ve made the right choice in putting the past behind us. At least for now. How I’ll deal with it later I’m not sure.
‘You know I will,’ she says. ‘But what are you planning to do?’
‘We go after Mia. And we take down Annalise at the same time. Are you with me Neva? Because now’s the time that you really need to take sides.’
‘I’ve always been on your side,’ she says and I feel that jolt again inside me, that firm belief in her. She’s not lying.
‘Do you know how to find Annalise?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘Then we go after her directly,’ I say.
‘Michael, I have to tell you something. When Granger said I was Angie…’ Neva says.
‘I don’t care. All that matters is saving Mia,’ I say.
I want to trust Neva, even though I shouldn’t. I know better than to put myself in her hands, but Ray’s revelations have made her my only conceivable ally. After all, who can I trust at MI5 and MI6? Anyone could be behind Mia’s kidnap. Even Ray.
‘I care. Because I don’t think I was Angie. But the truth is, I don’t know. The Network messed with my head for years. I have no idea if they also have trigger words that can turn me back into their puppet again,’ she says, her voice breaking.
I hear her anguish and fear. It must have been hard for her to admit this to me. That in the end she doesn’t know if she can even trust herself. I know how she feels. Our whole world is nothing but doubt and paranoia. Even so, I hear absolute truth in her voice. I understand more than anyone where she is right now. How awful it is to think you have control and yet someone can come along and take it from you with just a few words.
‘Have you remembered something that might make you think this is the case?’ I ask her now, my voice soft.
‘No. But I’ve been trying to. If there’s something there, it’s buried very deep inside me.’
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Look, I have to figure out a way to sneak out of here… then I’ll call you to meet. But if you’re going to betray me, know this Neva. I’ll kill you.’
‘That’s fair. But Michael, if I turn, and I’m not the person you knew, I’d be grateful if you would put me out of my misery. I don’t want to belong to anyone but myself. I can’t be their pawn anymore. And if I did that to Angela Carter. If I put that poor woman in that car, trussed up and left to die like that, then I don’t deserve to live. I don’t know how I could forgive myself for turning her child over to them.’
Then she tells me exactly how to escape the safe house, right under the noses of my bodyguards and I learn just how easy it was for her to find me and surely too, for the Network to do the same. I have a momentary wobble, a second of questioning her motives. But I push it aside. If she’s working for them I’ll soon find out, and since I’m confident that we’ve broken all of my conditioning, maybe I too will play a double game. Anything to get me closer to saving Mia. As much as I hate what the Network did to me, I can’t help feeling grateful for my knowledge now of them. They may be one step ahead of us, but soon I’ll take that lead from them. I feel the assassin in me rearing again, eager for the deliverance of a cold, but revenge-filled, death.
When I hang up the phone from Neva, I pull some clothes on. Then I load my Glock and stow several cartridges in the pockets of my jeans. After that I place the Glock in my belt holster, covering it with a casual zip-up black jacket.
As Neva suggested, I go out into the back garden, and without pause, climb over the fence into the garden backing up onto the safe house. As the security detail aren’t worried about my movements, no one comes to stop me. It’s almost too easy and does give me momentary pause that someone other than Neva will be waiting for me.
I walk around to the front of the neighbouring house and head down the road. I have the burner phone with me so that Neva can contact me, but not my regular phone as I don’t want Ray to be able to trace me. Any minute he’ll open the email I sent him, telling him that I’m going after Mia and he isn’t to try to find me.
I wait at the agreed meeting point but I’m nervous that the security detail will realize I’m gone and come looking for me. So it’s a relief when Neva pulls up at the kerb in an innocuous Ford Focus.
I get in the passenger seat, trembling at the nearness of her. Neva drives off as soon as I close the door, and before I can fasten my seat belt.
I stare ahead at the road, trying not to look at her, because just a glimpse has been enough to remind me that I still want her.
‘Check out that bag by your feet,’ she says. I look down into the footwell and see a plastic bag. I pick it up and open it. Inside are passports, and clothing.
‘We’ll ditch your clothes,’ she says. ‘Change everything. I know how tricky Ray Martin can be with trackers.’
We approach Euston station and Neva parks the car in a nearby street on double yellow lines. Then she takes my hand and we walk across the road and into the station. She glances at me as her skin touches mine, as though she feels the same desperate rush of electricity coursing through her hand as I do through mine.
Taking the carrier bag with me, I go into the men’s toilets and change. I leave the bag full of my old clothing in the toilets. I even ditch my wallet, after removing cash and cards from it, just in case.
Neva is waiting for me outside when I come out of the gents. Even without make-up she’s breath-taking. I have a flash of Cassandra/Sinead/Lizzie/Nicole/Hilary… faces distorted and crying as they died. Their resemblance to Neva makes me feel sick. Should I tell her about the deaths? Will she know who the killer is?
‘You got rid of everything?’ she says.
I nod.
Pushing the faces of the dead women away from my mind, I need to focus on now, and Neva is here, safe. Even if a killer is on the lookout for her. Telling her perhaps will just distract us from what we have to do.
‘I’ve booked us a flight to Toulouse early tomorrow,’ she says.
‘What’s in Toulouse?’ I ask.
‘Hopefully some answers for us both,’ she says.
‘I have to find Mia,’ I say. ‘That was the deal.’
‘I know. And I promise we will. Come on,’ she says.
‘Where to now?’ I ask.
‘My hotel. We have to lay low. I guarantee MI5 will be looking for you,’ she says.
I follow her down towards the tube station. My mind is full of doubts and worries. Now I’m free of my security detail I’m raring to get to the bottom of what’s going on. I’m anxious to learn what has become of Mia. And more important – to learn if I can I trust Neva. This whole protection thing has been holding me back from getting to the truth.
Neva’s nearness i
s making me feel unstable and the illusion of control is rapidly slipping away as I put myself more into her hands. Foolish or not, I have no choice but to follow the path I’ve chosen. Wherever it leads. I have to find my sister and, if I can, destroy the heart of the Network once and for all. And to do that, I have to risk everything, and that includes Neva as well as myself.
Chapter Forty-Two
Beth
‘I need everyone on task. Beth, search the street cameras near the safe house. Elsa, I want you manning the phone in case Michael calls. He left his phone at the house, and ditched the burner I gave him a while back so there’s no way of tracing him by that means. I just hope he hasn’t done anything foolish,’ Ray says.
‘What will you be doing?’ asks Elsa.
Beth gives Elsa a sharp look, surprised that she feels she can question Ray, but Ray doesn’t get annoyed with her despite the fact that he’s in such a bad mood.
‘I have a meeting with Erik Steward,’ Ray says. ‘I’m going to find out how he knew where Mia and Ben had been relocated.’
Beth opens her access portals as Ray leaves for his meeting and begins to look at the footage around Michael’s safe house. A place that now can’t be used again because too many people know where it is.
‘Do you think Steward is involved?’ asks Elsa.
Beth shrugs, she’s never seen Ray so pissed off. He’d told her about the black van, and it appears the vehicle was missing from storage which implies that someone in MI6 is playing a double game. That same person may well be the one who bugged Archive’s offices. The thought of having a spy among them doesn’t please Beth anymore than it does Ray. She’d rather trust her colleagues but now they are all looking at each other and wondering who deceived them.
As the newbie in the group, Elsa is looking particularly suspicious to Beth too. For this reason, and until she’s proven to be innocent, Beth is reluctant to confide anything Ray has told her.
Beth is feeling uneasy about a lot of people right now. She frowns as she scans the images on the camera footage as she tries not to think about Elliot. He was at her house more than his own apartment these days and they’d even begun to talk about making this a permanent move when Elliot’s tenancy agreement is up for renewal.
‘It seems insane to have two homes, when clearly we are getting on so well together,’ Elliot had said.
Beth agreed it was practical. Though now she wonders what her mother will say about her moving someone into her home, so soon after her divorce.
Recently, she’d got back into a routine of seeing her boys again and they were staying overnight on occasion. With the security detail on hand, and no further attempts made to take her, Beth was starting to feel much safer again. And she missed the boys. On those nights, she told Elliot he can’t come over, it gave her time to think and she wasn’t sure the timing was right for them to meet her new boyfriend just yet. Especially with all of the upheaval of going to live permanently with their dad, Callum.
Beth finds herself zoning out from the camera footage and so she pauses it, while her mind wanders. She’s worried about Michael, and suspects that he has taken off with Neva. Any idiot could see that he was completely gone on the girl. No one gets that haunted look in their eyes unless betrayed and truly hurt by someone they care about. He’d been used. Beth understands it and she wonders now if Elliot is using her in the same way too.
There are just too many moments that Beth finds herself questioning. Like last night after she and Elliot made love. Beth had feigned sleep and Elliot got up and went downstairs. She’d heard his voice, muted but still drifting upstairs as he spoke to someone. Whoever it was, the receiver of his late-night calls was expecting him to ring.
As she’d done previously, Beth crept to the top of the stairs and tried to listen. But Elliot’s voice was too soft for her make out more than a few words. The impression she got was that Elliot was reporting to someone. And that person might well be at the Network. Or maybe he was working for MI6 on the side, reporting to Steward what Archive were doing. That would fit in with Ray’s suspicions that Steward was behind the bugging of their offices and that there was a mole, not in Archive, but in MI6.
But Elliot isn’t the only one Beth has suspicions about.
Leon Tchaikovsky’s sudden ‘promotion’ into MI6 had made her suspicious. Even though she and Mike hadn’t discussed it, they both knew Leon was a bit of a slacker. He always left her and Mike to do the work, and sometimes had taken credit for Beth’s successes, though he’d never tried that with Michael. Beth often thought that Ray must have been aware that Leon was cruising in the job. Sometimes heads of departments got together and discussed colleagues: the office grapevine often came up with gossip of that sort. Affairs in house, mis-usage of MI5 and MI6 resources. Steward had to have known that Leon was deadweight in Archive. It’s why Beth knew that Leon hadn’t earned any such promotion with his track record. Steward owed no loyalty to Leon, not unless he’d done him a huge favour. So why give him a job?
Now she thought about it, Leon had been acting weird before his departure. When he left, Beth had put it down to the fact that he had been schmoozing with Steward and knew he was being promoted. But maybe he’d been working for Steward all along?
Even so, Beth can’t make random accusations. She needs to find out more before she accuses anyone of anything, especially Leon.
Right now, with the paranoia in the Archive ramped right up, anyone could be the traitor. And sometimes it is those closest to you that you have to watch.
Now, Beth explores her feelings for Elliot as she sits and stares at her computer screen. She loves him, but she’ll give him up in a heartbeat if she discovers he is a spy. Damn. She will even shoot him. But she hopes her suspicions are nothing more than her fears of commitment.
Beth tries to reconcile her thoughts in the light of day. What does she really have to worry about with Elliot? She considers again what she’d heard him saying on those few occasions he’d made late night calls. He was talking about the murder case. He hadn’t said anything about Archive that she’d heard. Or anything that could really be seen as illegal, if she was honest. But why did his behaviour make her wary?
He could be getting advice on the case from another colleague, she reasons. Maybe to back up his own theories. There are so many excuses she can make to justify his behaviour… Except there aren’t really. Not when it comes down to it. Beth knows that Elliot isn’t getting advice from another expert. If he was, he’d call them during the daytime.
No matter how much benefit of the doubt she gives him, there’s only two real questions that she can’t answer. Why are the calls always at night? Why are they always when he believes Beth is asleep and can’t hear him?
Even if she can convince herself that Elliot is just working late, then why hide it from her? It’s conspicuous. And Beth, as a Security Agent, is trained to observe atypical behaviour. It all comes down to getting proof of wrongdoing. And she doesn’t have any. All she has is this gut feeling that something is wrong. And Beth has always been big on fact and not on suspicion.
Beth restarts the camera footage and forces herself to concentrate on the images on the screen. She manages this for a few moments before the idea of how to put her mind at rest comes into her head. I can clone his phone, she thinks.
She catches herself. To do this without the proper warrant would be illegal. But did whoever had been spying on them even consider the legality of their position?
I’m a spy, she thinks. I’m trusted when there’s judicious doubt. And this is reasonable, isn’t it? Beth goes through the pros and cons of doing something like this. MI5, under other circumstances, would probably investigate and spy on any new boyfriend she has. Elliot’s position in MI5 almost negates this. Unless there is a reason to suspect him of something. And Beth can truly say there is.
It might prove I’m imagining things and I can put all these thoughts away, she thinks, trying to justify it.
After
concluding this is the way to go on a professional and personal level, Beth leaves Elsa in the office and goes downstairs to Equipment Acquisitions. She knows what she needs and she rehearses her lie all the way down in the lift.
When she returns to the office, she has an innocuous-looking device that resembles a pen drive in her pocket and a spare iPhone, the same model as Elliot’s.
If there’s nothing unusual on Elliot’s phone, Beth will return the erased cloning device and the phone back to Acquisitions. But if there is something wrong, she’ll own up to her use of MI5 equipment to Ray and take the consequences. If Elliot is their mole, Ray will only praise her for her initiative anyway.
‘You okay?’ asks Elsa, studying her from her desk on the other side of the room.
‘Yes,’ Beth says. ‘Needed a bit of fresh air. Watching this footage does your head in.’
‘Right,’ says Elsa.
With her personal situation organized, Beth goes back to the footage with better concentration. Almost immediately she sees Michael coming out onto the street that runs parallel with the one from the safe house. She tracks him to the end of the road. Then she sees a pale-blue Ford Focus pull up next to him.
Beth tries to zoom in on the driver but the camera angle is wrong and the picture is too grainy.
She takes some snaps of the car. Picks up the registration and puts it in her computer to search for ownership on DVLA records. The search soon reveals the car was stolen and then recovered near Euston station that morning. So, no leads through the owner.
‘Elsa? Can you help me please?’ she says.
‘What do you need?’ Elsa asks.
‘Check out the footage around Euston station around 9:30am this morning. See if you can spot Michael and find out if he’s alone.’
Elsa looks at Beth for a long moment and then nods. She turns to her computer and logs on to the camera systems. She scoots down the alphabetical list until she finds Euston station. Then she flicks through various cameras and views looking for the time she wants.
Kill a Spy Page 20
