by Eva Hudson
Ingrid fell back against the wooden chair. “And people think it was me?” She rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “Guess it’s easy to blame the dead girl.”
Jen settled the bill and Ingrid left Biddy’s first, in case anyone was following her. She walked briskly away from the café until, several minutes later, Jen’s Range Rover slowed. Satisfied she wasn’t being tailed, Ingrid jumped in and they headed back to London, taking a route that avoided the freeway.
When they passed through a small town Ingrid asked Jen to park.
“Have you seen someone?” Jen asked. “Are we, like, being followed?”
“No, but I need you to go in there.” She nodded in the direction of a convenience store, its strip lights casting a blueish glow on the damp sidewalk. “Have you got cash?”
“Not much, but there’s an ATM across the street. What’s going on, Agent Skyberg?”
Ingrid explained. They needed a way of communicating without anyone knowing. The best way to do that was to buy two cheap cell phones with cash.
“I should leave the office more often,” Jen said when she got out of the car. “Way more exciting than the things you normally get me to do.”
Ingrid watched Jen cross the street and use the ATM. Her eyes followed her to the store to make sure no one was following. Ingrid hated putting Jen in danger. If anything happened to her, she would never forgive herself. Pearl earrings were hardly a sufficient token of gratitude, but Ingrid was damn well going to find the right pair.
Jen re-emerged clutching a paper bag. Back in the car, Jen handed over a phone and her charge card. “Figured you could use this.”
Ingrid looked at the black plastic rectangle and read the name in embossed silver letters: Jack Tucker. “This is your fiancé’s?”
“Don’t worry, he never checks the statement. That’s totally my job. The PIN is the last four digits.”
Ingrid considered it for a moment. The chances of the Beatles linking the usage of Jack’s credit card to her activity were seriously small. “Obviously you can claim it all back on expenses.”
“You could probably use this car too.”
Ingrid knew Jen’s fiancé earned good money and came from a wealthy family, but surely he’d miss a brand-new Range Rover?
“I can always tell him it’s getting repaired. He totes would never know.”
“Thanks, but I don’t think it’ll be necessary. Can you arrange for the Prius at the hotel to be collected though?” Ingrid got the key out of her pocket and placed it in the cup holder in the armrest between them.
“No problemo.”
“And you can make sure everything in the glove box is squirreled away?”
“Sure thing.”
They went through the protocol for using the burner phones. “The key thing is to keep it turned off as much as possible. Only turn it on when you’re several hundred yards away from your own phone,” Ingrid said.
“But what if it’s an emergency?”
“I’ll send a carrier pigeon.”
They approached the outskirts of London, and when they reached a landmark Ingrid was familiar with, she asked Jen to let her out.
“Here?”
“Yep. Anywhere it’s safe to pull over.”
They were on a four-lane highway with parking restrictions. Jen checked her rearview mirror and indicated, immediately eliciting a blast from someone’s car horn. She corrected and kept driving.
“There’s no rush. Just somewhere near here.”
“What’s around here?”
Ingrid thought about telling her. “It’s probably best if you don’t know.”
A few hundred yards further along, Jen nosed the Range Rover into the curb.
“You sure about this?”
“Yep.”
“Well, I guess I can keep tabs on you with the credit card.”
“And don’t forget to switch the phone on once a day.”
“Got it.” Jen smiled. “This is kinda fun.”
“Apart from the bit where people want to kill me.”
“Yep, apart from that bit.”
The two friends embraced, and Ingrid stepped out into the London drizzle, strangely elated by the fact no one knew where she was going or what she had planned.
22
Ingrid had never been there on foot before, and she’d certainly never started from the Uxbridge Road, but she eventually found her way to Magdalen Avenue. She stood outside number ninety-six for several minutes reassuring herself it was empty. When she had dug into her pocket to give Jen the key to the rental car, she had also felt another set of keys attached to a small plastic dog called T-Rex.
Ingrid had never understood why, as a single man, Marshall had rented a house in the suburb of Ealing. A sleek, city-center bachelor pad would have been much more his style, but she could picture him calculating the price per square foot and multiplying by a factor related to the number of Tube lines or proximity to Heathrow. Whatever his reasoning, he had ended up living on a tree-lined road surrounded by neighbors with trampolines in the gardens and booster seats in their station wagons.
Ingrid had hung around long enough for the busybodies to notice. She couldn’t delay any longer. The front yard was only a few feet deep and in a couple of strides she was standing under Marshall’s porch, activating the automatic light. She turned the key in the lock and opened the door, pushing aside a pile of mail.
The smell hit her immediately. Three weeks beforehand, she had left the house with Carolyn to make the awful journey home with Marshall’s body. It was understandable they had forgotten to put the trash out. The same mistake in summer would have seen the place infested with flies.
Marshall’s place was a typical Victorian row house. It had what a realtor would describe as ‘good proportions’ and ‘original features’. Ingrid closed the door behind her, stepped over the mail, and walked down the dark hallway toward the kitchen at the rear of the property. To her left was the stairway leading up to the bedrooms, and to her right was the living room where she and Carolyn had sat in numb silence in the hours after Marshall’s death. A wave of sadness hit Ingrid with such force she had to place a steadying hand against the wall.
She reached the kitchen and tried not to inhale. She removed the trash can liner and put it out in the back yard. Leaving it out front might attract unwanted attention from neighbors. Ingrid didn’t want anyone to know she was there.
It was so cold in the house that her breath misted as she checked the cabinets for food. Regimented boxes of rice, packs of buckwheat noodles, and spice jars filled the shelves. Marshall had loved Asian cuisine and had been a half-decent cook, obsessing over where to get the best salmon for sushi or shiitake mushrooms for gyoza. His culinary flair had been one of the better things about living with him, though it always left Ingrid with a stack of dirty dishes. In another cabinet, Ingrid found fitness supplements, vitamin pills, protein powders and herbal tinctures.
“You thought you’d outlive us all, didn’t you?”
Behind the next door she discovered neat rows of canned beans and tomatoes. It was as if he had been prepping for the apocalypse. Or a ‘no deal’ Brexit.
Ingrid closed the refrigerator as quickly as she had opened it.
There was a pool of brown liquid where a lettuce used to be and the milk had gone rancid. The embassy must have assumed that Carolyn would have taken care of the house. Ingrid hoped no one remembered to do anything about it anytime soon. With any luck she could hide out at Marshall’s for as long as it took. The deep freeze revealed plastic containers of labeled leftovers. She selected the one that read katsu salmon and put it in the microwave.
She wandered the house, eating straight from the Tupperware. They had left the drapes drawn, thinking it would be better for security at night while the place was empty. Ingrid figured that meant she could risk putting on a side lamp in the living room without anyone noticing number ninety-six had a new occupant.
It was like looking at a crim
e scene. A surge of grief shuddered through her body as she thought about all the places where Marshall’s DNA could still be harvested. There would be a blond hair on the back of the couch, skin cells on the X-box console and traces of his sweat on the unwashed sheets.
Nobody really dies anymore.
Ingrid let out an involuntary sound, somewhere between a howl and moan, and sank into an armchair. She put down her dinner; her appetite suddenly gone. Grief had slammed into her like a truck. For the first time, she experienced the permanence of Marshall’s death, and the irrevocable nature of the loss shimmered at the edge of her thoughts. For several minutes, grief subsumed her as she mourned a man she had both loved and loathed.
Footsteps on the sidewalk wrenched her out of the fog. Fear flooded her body. She zoomed back to the rough hand over her mouth, and the smell of gasoline in the van. The memory of the building site, the terror of the undergrowth; her limbs trembled.
The footsteps stopped. Ingrid’s ribcage tightened. She scanned the room, checking escape routes, assessing hiding places. Shouting. A woman’s voice. An argument about… Someone was cheating. Someone else was ending it. It didn’t matter; they hadn’t come for her and she let go of the tension. She slumped against the chair and inhaled deeply, the desperate air stabbing her lungs.
The screaming went on for many minutes. Ingrid didn’t want to intervene, and she certainly wanted to avoid having to give a statement to the police, but if someone was threatening violence, she needed to be able to assess the situation. She climbed the stairs and entered Marshall’s bedroom at the front of the house. She pulled back enough of the drapes to get a view of the street.
A woman stood in the doorway of the property opposite, screaming at two people on the sidewalk. She threw something at them. It looked like a PlayStation and Ingrid followed its trajectory as it rattled along the road. It tumbled to a stop beside a motorcycle parked under a streetlamp. A Harley.
Marshall’s Harley.
Devastated anew, Ingrid let the drapes fall shut. She turned and, in the darkness, saw something flash in the corner of the room. A green, glowing light. Marshall’s modem.
“Dear God, Marshall, I could kiss you.” She smiled. “And believe me, I never thought I would say that again.”
In the gloom, she made out the rectangle of his monitor. Beneath his desk was the tower of his computer. She switched on his lamp.
“You’re kidding me.”
Next to the keyboard was Marshall’s iPhone. As if in a fever, Ingrid opened a drawer for the charger. She held her breath as she plugged it in. She waited for the empty battery symbol to appear. It dinged and came to life, swirling heat across her skin.
This was too good to be true.
She turned on Marshall’s computer. It emitted a cymbal sound followed by a series of clicks and whirrs. The monitor was still dark, though. She groped its underside for the on button. Either her heart had stopped or her breathing had. Her face felt numb. Her chest was tight. Then the screen illuminated and Ingrid collapsed into Marshall’s chair. Her head fell into her hands. Her shoulders heaved with relief, but when she raised her gaze disappointment sucked a moan out of her lips. A cursor blinked in the empty password field.
It had been too good to be true.
There had been a time when Ingrid and Marshall had known each other’s passwords. She cringed to remember they had even shared a Hotmail account at one point. She hadn’t given it too much consideration when he’d set it up, but came to suspect it was one of the ways he had exerted control over her as their relationship deteriorated.
She stared at the cursor. Ingrid placed her fingers on the keyboard. It was worth a try, wasn’t it? She typed in his old password: un_GU355A8L3. He’d thought it was very clever.
The egg timer spun and Ingrid swallowed to lubricate her parched mouth.
The screen flickered.
She was in.
23
Marshall’s computer was arranged as neatly as his hair. No stray documents, just tidy rows of labeled folders. Photos. House. Finance. Family. Rocco. Marshall had named all of his bikes Rocco. She’d never known why.
The internet connection was slow, but she logged into the embassy servers remotely and checked her emails. Her breath misted into a blueish fog in front of the bright screen. Still nothing on the ANPR hits. Still no response on her request to see Marcus Williams’s phone records. Nor had anyone higher up the food chain authorized the unfreezing of her undercover diary. Ingrid was about to send an email to the Legat’s secretary to ask him to do just that, but remembered she was meant to be dead. However, the Bureau could still be useful in other ways.
In cases where the FBI needed plausible deniability, they occasionally employed private security firms. That meant someone in DC would have compiled an extensive dossier on the Beatles’ employer. She navigated her way to the right database and found detailed assessments of the biggest operators in the private security industry. Top of the list was Fortnum Security, the organization that employed her friend Nick Angelis, if ‘friend’ was the right word for someone who frequently infuriated her. Ingrid made a mental note to call him. The last time she’d seen Nick, he’d looked uncharacteristically unwell.
Ingrid shivered. It was cold. She opened a chest of drawers in search of a sweater and some thick socks. A memory surfaced of the apartment she’d shared with Marshall in DC when she’d often worn his clothes. They had been good together once.
She glanced back at the screen filled with reports and spreadsheets. It was going to be a long night. She would need fortification. She returned downstairs to see what liquor Marshall had in his retro cocktail cabinet. He claimed to have found it for twenty pounds at Greenwich market, but it had probably come from a vintage boutique in Ladbroke Grove for ten times as much. Aperol. Vermouth. Cassis. Angostura bitters. Triple sec. Maybe Marshall entertained more than she’d realized. However, he had also been the sort of man who would practice making cocktails in case he got the chance to impress a boss or a woman he brought home. She pictured him making a perfect whisky sour, adding the lemon peel twist, and then drinking it alone. As far as she knew, Marshall hadn’t made any friends outside the embassy since he’d been in London. In fact, apart from old school friends, she’d never known him to socialize with anyone who wasn’t good for his career. She poured herself a tequila—a large one—and headed back upstairs.
She pressed the home button on Marshall’s iPhone as it charged. It required his fingerprint or a four-digit code to unlock. She took another gulp, hoping the alcohol would burn away the memory of being forced to unlock her own phone in the back of the van. The blaze of the tequila stung her eyes.
How many attempts did she have at guessing his four-digit code? Three? Ten? Marshall’s birthday would be too obvious. His mom’s birthday? His lucky number had been 21. She tried 2121, and the screen shook, telling her to try again. She had to think carefully before another attempt. She couldn’t blow it. A familiar number like Marshall’s was unlikely to trigger the interest of anyone monitoring the Criminal Division’s phones. But a new number, especially an unregistered number like the burner in her jacket pocket, would immediately raise a red flag.
Ingrid put down the iPhone and returned to Marshall’s computer. She scanned the list of the Bureau’s approved private security firms. Based on its reliance on Mossad agents, she was satisfied her hunch about Red Box was correct. She opened a browser and visited the firm’s corporate website.
It was sleek and minimalist. A red box in the middle of the screen spun, increasing with each rotation until it filled the browser. A corporate slogan appeared: Your ally in a hostile world. The ‘about us’ section talked of veterans from the world’s elite intelligence units offering ‘solutions’ to business and litigation challenges. Never had the words elite, solutions and challenges been more sinister. She clicked on the personnel link. None of the men—and they were, without exception, all male—were the agents who had abducted her, but sever
al of them all wore the same signet ring.
Ingrid needed to find a link between Marcus Williams and Red Box. The most obvious tie was his father, Roy. A Google search offered a link to a report by a journalist based in the Ukraine. It was too long to read, so she did a File/Find command for Roy Williams’s name. He was listed as an investor in a failed bank. Ingrid scrolled around, scanning for salient details, until something made her stop. A photo. Above a caption that read ‘Red Box executive Arnie Goldfarb’ was the smiling face of one of the Beatles. He had more hair in the photo, but it was definitely John. Goldie. That’s what George had called him.
Now she knew his name, Ingrid compiled her own dossier on Goldfarb. His online presence was discreet, but combined with the Bureau’s intel, she found enough information to be confident of a link between his resumé and Roy Williams’s business interests. Further digging revealed a string of unfortunate accidents—food poisoning, brake failure, anaphylaxis––that had befallen those who had obstructed Red Box’s operations. Throwing Steve off a balcony fitted a pattern.
Fueled by the tequila, Ingrid compiled a mental a list of the things she needed to put Marcus Williams on the stand for killing Matthew Harding. If she could prove that, the entire Williams edifice crumbled.
Number one. The real CCTV footage. Ingrid wasn’t hopeful—it would almost certainly have been destroyed––but there was a chance the embassy used a shadow server where the actual footage might be found. She also needed to get the footage of her leaving the parking lot analyzed. A small shift in the light, or a millisecond missing from the log, would prove it was doctored.
Number two. The ANPR data. Clearly, Ingrid wasn’t going to get anywhere requesting the hits on her own license plate, but if she applied for data from the vehicle that left the embassy immediately before she was supposed to have left, the cameras might have picked up Williams riding her bike in the distance. She started composing an email to Jen, asking for all the traffic camera footage from around the embassy, but stopped herself. An email from a dead woman was a very bad idea. And given how far Red Box’s tentacles had already reached, it was possible such a request would alert someone on their payroll. Given they had tried to kill her, Ingrid was not going to put herself or Jen in danger. Ingrid needed another way of making DS Hayes believe Marcus Williams was in the saddle. It was time to call her for a favor.
