by Karen Guyler
“Eva, right?” She nodded at the guy who opened it. “You’re with me today. Iago, yeah, trust me, I’ve heard it all before, I know Othello was the black dude. In case you can’t tell, my mum wasn’t a Shakespearean buff. She wanted a good old English name for me, but it all got a bit lost in translation, Iago’s Welsh, in case you were wondering. Take a seat.”
He waved an arm that was thicker, more muscled, than her thigh under his navy blue jumper. “You won’t have worked on this kind of system before, state-of-the-art.” He emphasised each of the words as though he’d invented it. Maybe he had.
“It looks impressive.”
She sank onto the chair, looking from one to the other of the screens wallpapering the wall behind the long office desk. Nothing on any of them was distinctive enough to hint at where the cityscapes in various degrees of daylight and different weather were. Its official name might be the Surveillance Division, but the Post-It note had it more accurately.
“Where do you want to go for me to show you how this baby works? World’s your oyster.”
And Lily, the pearl in it somewhere. Eva could watch all available feeds for the rest of her life and still never find her. She didn’t even have a starting point. That Addison’s jet hadn’t landed at their first fuel stop on the way to India was fuelling her slow-burning panic.
It might help to focus on something else. “Is it possible to watch remote areas?”
“Sure, if we have a bird above it.”
“How about thirty odd miles south west of Seitu township in Ethiopia?”
“That’s pretty specific but no probs, let’s see what we’ve got round there.”
“Could you see what you had there a week or so ago?”
“Time travel?” Iago rubbed his hands together, pulled up his sleeves with a flourish. “Now you’re cooking.”
He explained each step as he zoomed in and tracked around the remote area away from the township. He fed the co-ordinates of the water supply Every Drop had tapped into his computer program and waited for the archive to pull up recent footage.
“How long do you keep it?”
“I’ve got an algorithm. It calculates the likelihood of ongoing interest based on activity in the area, current and developing threats.”
“That’s impressive.”
He ran his hands over the wall to wall desk at which they were sitting. “Yeah, she’s pretty sweet.” He peered at his desktop. “You might not think so, nothing for that place in the archive.”
“Could you try one more?”
After an elevated threat level in the broader area earlier in the year, the algorithm had saved some footage of the water source used for Tirupudur. While the archive sorted and retrieved, Iago showed Eva how to work on her brief, but it was hard to focus on finding Aleksandr Oblov’s wife with the time lapse backward journey in India playing out beside her. Sometimes in night vision, sometimes in bleached-out equatorial sunlight, every frame showed an area desert-like in its activity.
Eva set up an alert through the London hospital network for Kathy and Aleksandr Oblov. Tracing the footage of him being taken ill backwards and expanding the search to cover the entire street, the most suspicious person Eva could see anywhere near him was his bodyguard. He was huge, mean-looking, a man you’d cross the road to avoid, not inflame by going after his boss.
Kathy Oblov was a ghost, an anomaly with no social media presence, barely any online footprint that Eva could find. No sightings of her or her husband since his collapse in the system trawl so far. No call to emergency services or the police to respond to a sudden death at their home address, so he must at least still be alive.
“How’s it going?” Iago asked after a while.
“I’m not finding anything on Kathy Oblov. If she’s had enough plastic surgery, would facial recognition still be able to find her?”
“If she’s different on enough of the right points on her face, it could be like looking for a new person. You’re thinking that’s why?”
“It’s the hobby of a lot of oligarch’s wives.”
“I’m glad I’m happy kicking a ball around. It’s a good shout, I can run some permutations through a couple of channels. Grab a coffee, it’ll take a while.”
But Eva didn’t understand what he was saying to her. The archived screen stole her entire attention. She froze the image. Twilight where Every Drop’s contractors had tamed the underground freedom of groundwater into the network of pipes that carried life to Tirupudur, time-stamped the day the first reports of sickness came through.
She leapt up. “I have to go out, I’ll be right back.”
‘Right back’ must have morphed to ‘she’s taking a long time’ to ‘where the hell is she’ by the time Dario joined her.
“You might want something stronger.” He nodded at her ginger beer on the table between them.
“I was thinking the same for you.” The largest coffee the wine bar did was only a couple of mouthfuls, so she’d ordered him two.
“I feel like we should have met under the clock at the station or on a park bench with identical briefcases.” He placed a memory stick beside her drink. “I downloaded it yesterday.”
“Getting psychic in your old age?”
“Vaishali was promoted yesterday to acting CEO.” Eva nearly choked on her drink. “With ownership of the accounts.”
“Do you still have oversight?”
He shook his head, downed one of the coffees. “That’s why I downloaded everything yesterday.”
“What about Letitia?”
“She’s doing Vaishali’s job.”
“Our accountant is doing social media and donations?” The bottles of wine artily arranged in cabinets behind the bar looked enticing. “On whose say so?”
“Stuart did the ‘development chats’.” Dario hooked air quotes around his sarcasm. “With the full weight of the Board.” He shotted the other coffee. “Apparently. He also vetoed the idea of water purifiers. Not allowed to source any, not needed is his excuse.”
Not needed? Cost was driving that decision, people’s lives being expendable again. Eva’s hand closed around the memory stick. She had no proof of his thinking, but what it contained might show it. “Thanks for this, I’m sorry to put you in this position, but this is why.” She gave him her print out, finished her drink while he ran the magnifier on his phone over the black-and-white image.
“One person.”
She nodded, not maintenance. It could only be what it looked like, the single figure near the beginning of the pipe network with some kind of upside down container, the thin end pointing into the water stream.
Dario looked as if she’d accused him of being the person in the image. “Sabotage, why? We’re only doing good there.”
Eva sighed. “I know, you know, our competitors know, at least I thought we were all on the same page.” Tiny doubts were solidifying in her mind. She pocketed the memory stick, hoping it would prove her wrong.
“I’ll let you know what I find.” She gave Dario the switchboard number of Gordon’s unit. “Call me if you need me.”
40
“Got that ping.” Iago’s welcome back to the surveillance room could have been him quoting from an obscure Shakespearean work for all the sense he made to Eva.
She corralled her whirlwind thoughts to focus on him. “Ping?”
“Yeah, the Oblov’s car. Involved in a crash near The Shard. They’ve been taken to St Thomas’ A and E, both still breathing.”
“What happened?”
“Just got the heads up about it. Let’s have a look see.” Iago wielded his mouse and one screen responded. A police car blocked off the road feeding the crash site.
“That must be theirs.” Iago paused over the black Range Rover crashed into a traffic light pole that was losing its fight to stay vertical.
“I’ll go and question them.”
“You going off again, forfeit is doughnuts, proper sugar, pack of six, raspberry jam, none of
that custard crap.”
“Deal, where’s Nora’s office?”
“You don’t have access.”
“Is security this tight at Vauxhall Cross now?”
He shrugged. “Barely get over there, we have everything here and I’m not senior enough to warrant summonsing over.” He grinned at her. “Thank God. What do you need?”
“To give her something.”
“You want me to?”
Eva shook her head. “I can knock.”
“Come,” Iago led her to the top floor and bellowed through the closed door opposite Gordon’s. “Nora, you up for a visitor?”
After a few seconds, Nora appeared in her doorway. “You saved me from myself, I ignored my last ‘get up and move around’ alert, want to join me for a cup of tea? Stairs are always good for my step count.”
“I can walk down with you, but I’ve got to get to St Thomas’. Iago found the Oblovs, admitted after an accident.” Eva’s question was hard to ask, but she had to. Rip the plaster off, faster was always less painful. “Do you know any good forensic accountants?”
Nora raised her eyebrows. “That’s a non sequitur.” But she nodded. “We have a couple of bodies who do accounting, they can forensically audit.”
“It’s private, I mean, not to do with what I’m doing here.” Eva made herself say it. “I want Every Drop’s accounts audited.”
“Leave it with me, I’ll see what I can do.”
Eva held out the memory stick Dario had given her. “Accounts as at yesterday.”
“You’re sure about this?”
She nodded. “You shouldn’t find anything suspect in there but I have to be know.” She took a breath, went with a deep unacknowledged hunch. “Can you cross reference any payments without a clear audit trail to Stuart Worthington?”
“Your Chairman? Of course.”
“Doughnuts.” Iago reminded her as she passed him going down the last flight of stairs to the exit.
“Six, proper sugar, raspberry jam, no custard crap, got it.”
Eva’s limited pass worked better at opening doors outside St George’s Grove, she was okayed to go straight to the ward where Kathy Oblov was.
The woman in the hospital bed appeared to be sleeping. The bedclothes rose in a rectangular protrusion above her left leg, they’d placed her hands on the blanket by her sides.
“Kathy Oblov, there you are.”
She leant closer, scrutinising Kathy’s face. Very heart-shaped now, a smaller nose, a few abrasions marred her perfect skin, so smooth and taut it was amazing her chiselled cheekbones didn’t cut right through it. The points of reference on this Kathy Oblov were all different to what Eva had been searching for, no wonder she hadn’t found her.
That perfume? Eva leant closer, her nose almost touching Kathy’s skin. Where? She breathed it in again, sweet, then smelt it once more, bitter. Eva closed her eyes, too strong. She sat back and let the answer find her. Was she sure? She hadn’t even noticed it then, not really, but now, oh God.
Eva limped to the nurses’ station. “I need a doctor for Kathy Oblov. She’s been poisoned. She needs an antidote immediately. Where’s her husband? He’ll need the same.”
“We’ll have to wait for her doctor.”
There was no time. “Can you call them? I can explain it.”
“They’ll be doing rounds soon.”
“She’ll be dead soon. Was she unconscious when she was admitted?”
“She’s been in an accident, big trauma. We’ll wait for the doctor.”
Eva left the ward searching for that most elusive of things, a public pay phone. Her reverse charge call was accepted right away.
“Gordon, it’s Eva. I’m at St Thomas’, Kathy and Aleksandr Oblov were in a car crash. She’s been poisoned, and probably he has too. I thought nothing of it when I said goodbye to Eric, but he had the same bittersweet smell on him. It’s got to be the same poison. The nurse won’t listen that she needs an antidote.”
“We’re still unsure what killed Eric. You’re sure about this?”
“I am.”
“I’ll call the hospital director.”
“Do you want me to stay here with them?”
“If either of them are up to talking, an idea of what happened would be helpful. Good catch.”
Not really. She hadn’t understood it when she’d hugged Eric goodbye. It had been right there for her to pick up, but she’d been so obsessed with getting back to the office she hadn’t given it any thought.
Heavy steps, beyond her injury, took her back to Kathy’s ward. The hospital director moved fast. A flurry of activity just a few minutes later pushed her outside the curtain, yanked closed around Kathy’s bed.
Eva waited at the mercy of her guilt. And overlaying every breath, every thought, two syllables, Lily. Until a level of urgency, of snapped instructions and the running in of a nurse with a crash cart brought Eva slamming back into her present and Kathy Oblov’s struggle for life. Eva didn’t need any medical knowledge to understand she was losing.
There was an inevitability about it, the hurried but calm workings of the team, one step then another to keep their patient with them. A desperate last-ditch attempt until Eva heard the pronouncement.
“I’m calling it. Time of death, 11:52. Thank you, everyone.”
“Can you tell me how Aleksandr Oblov is, Kathy’s husband?” Eva caught a doctor rushing out of the cubicle.
“Are you family?”
Eva dropped her voice. “I’m a consultant working with MI6.”
The doctor tightened her ponytail, checked her watch. “So I understand from the hospital director.”
“We believe both Mr and Mrs Oblov have been targeted.”
“I can take you to him.” She logged in at a mobile PC station. “Can you tell me what you find out about the poison?” She held out her swipe card so Eva could read Dr Asha Chakrabarti. Her photo showed her long black hair down, her beaming smile a long way from the tired frown she now wore. “It’s my field, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Like what? Please, we need to catch the people responsible. Kathy isn’t the first to die. Anything you can tell me could make the difference to us stopping it happening to anyone else.”
She nodded, took a second to compose her thoughts. “Mrs Oblov was stable but poorly before we administered hydroxocobalamin, it’s effective in treating cyanide poisoning, and the smell from her pores led us to believe that’s what it was. But from the way she went downhill, I believe the antidote triggered her body’s collapse.”
41
Dr Chakrabarti tapped at the door to a private room and went straight in. Eva followed. Aleksandr Oblov lay in the bed, a mirror image to his wife, minus the broken leg. A large man on the other side of the room cut off his phone call and rose from his seat, tense, his hand reaching towards his suit jacket. Dr Chakrabarti held her badge out for his inspection, used to his overprotectiveness already. Eva recognised him from the CCTV footage as Oblov’s bodyguard.
“I’m a friend.” Eva said when he turned his gaze on her. “I’ve just been with Kathy.”
“I don’t know you.”
“I’m a new friend.” Eva dredged up the rusty words, hoping he was as Russian as his boss.
“From Russia?”
She shook her head. “I’m really sorry to say that Kathy died.”
He nodded, more a digesting of what the new order would be going forward than anything else.
Dr Chakrabarti gestured at the bed, “I just need to check something.”
She bent over Oblov and sniffed the skin of his face, his breath, his neck. “Is it the same?” She asked.
Eva copied her. “It’s not as strong. He could have had less, or been dosed after his wife, but, yes, it’s the same.”
Dr Chakrabarti considered for a moment. “It’s very hard to just not treat him but, having seen what just happened, I’m not going to, at least not right now.”
“You must trea
t him.” The bodyguard straightened up in full-on intimidation mode.
“He hasn’t been poisoned,” Eva floundered, what was the Russian word for primed? “He’s been given something that makes it seem as if he has, but the antidote will kill him. It’s what killed Kathy.”
“How do you know this?”
“It killed a friend of mine.”
“I’m going to advise Mr Oblov’s medical doctor of the—I don’t even know what this is. We need to figure out if we need to try to flush it out or let nature take its course.” The doctor murmured to herself, rationalising. “A nurse will be in to take bloods.” Back to normal practice, her voice was firmer. She looked at the bodyguard. “Are you staying with the patient?” He nodded. “I’m going to update his notes, but don’t let anyone give him anything until they clear it with me.” She held her pass out for him to read her name again until he nodded and she left.
“I’m not wired, not armed. You can check.” Eva held her arms out to her side. Treat this as though he were an airport official rather than a man who could put her through the wall.
His hands patted her down, no lingering, just searching out weapons, a quick sweep with the little finger sides of his palms between her breasts, down her midriff. Not his first rodeo. He stepped back from her. “Who wanted your friend dead?”
Eva shook her head, the burden becoming heavier each time she thought about it. “Not my friend, me.” Then a sideways hunch, the only connection in this was her but through her, Charles. “Does the name Charles Buchanan mean anything to you?”
“Why?”
“He’s my husband, he’s being targeted by the same people.”
“Who?”
“They call themselves The Society.”
The bodyguard was silent, utterly unreadable. Eva had run out of ideas, another warning to not let the doctors give Oblov the antidote was all she could do.
As she reached the door, the bodyguard stopped her. “A man I didn’t know came to see Mr Oblov recently. There was difficult talk about money and a debt. The man talked about Charles being involved, it could have been your husband. Mr Oblov agreed to help.” He looked at his boss, back at Eva. “If The Society is involved, I need reinforcements.”
