Killing Eva (17 page)

Genuine fear clouded his eyes and the older man could smell a loss of bladder control.

In a way, it surprised him. Someone as apparently hard as Paul should have been able to retain composure under pressure. But he was also emotional, too emotional, so apparently all he could do was react.

The older man leaned in close to the reddening face opposite him.

‘Why are you unable to take this seriously?' he hissed.

There was no let-up in the pressure of the fingers on the throat.

‘Perhaps you just don't care? Perhaps you have an agenda of your own you are not being entirely honest about?'

A flicker of something crossed Paul's face. Was it a cringe? The choking mouth tried to work itself into words, as if Paul believed he could talk himself out of what was happening to him, whether by threat or persuasion.

As he watched this gurning, the older man recognised his advantage. And, with surprise, he realised just how afraid he was of losing it. He had the distinct impression it would be the equivalent of removing his shoe from the head of a venomous snake when he let go.

He leaned in again, his voice low, threatening, his other hand itching to reach for the paper knife he kept in his desk drawer. But he couldn't, he knew that. It was another complication they simply didn't need.

‘
Anything
could disrupt this, Paul,' he continued, talking to delay the moment he would no longer hold this man's life in his hands. ‘It is delicate; balanced on a knife-edge. Decades of blood and sweat have been dedicated to establishing this degree of control, to maintaining it, to growing it. People have died for this. Do you understand how many lives and how many deaths you disrespect with this recklessness of yours?'

He stared into the bulging eyes opposite. Paul appeared to be trying to nod. He realised the young man was about to pass out and, instinctively, released his grasp.

He felt the power seep from his skin.

Paul recoiled out of the grabbing zone, filled his lungs and staggered sideways, knocking from the large desk a round whisky glass, which spun and then smashed against the door.

That would no doubt attract the attention of the staff.

The older man straightened his tie and took his seat. He sat and waited for Paul to do the same. He did not experience the usual rush of power. He felt nervous. It was as if he had just crossed a line he could not step back over. And nothing more had been uncovered about Paul. He felt exposed and an unaccustomed chill of terror caused the skin on the back of his hands to pucker.

When he realised what was required of him, Paul tried to sit in the chair, missed as he lost his balance and tried once again. This time, he made it.

The older man realised the voice he could hear talking was his own. Why was he continuing to speak, he wondered – to maintain the upper hand, to enforce his position? Perhaps if he simply carried on talking he would be safe.

That was doubtful. The deed was done.

‘There can be no more failure, no more misjudgement. Do you understand that?'

He knew he was trying to establish his authority. It felt like the act of a desperate man. And yet, on the surface, he was in control.

‘Well,' he said angrily, ‘do you?'

A painful nod. No eye contact. Apparent submission.

Perhaps this was all that was required to enforce the hierarchy, hoped the older man, his heartbeat thudding hard against the inside of his chest.

He sat back in his chair; some of the terror subsided. He had seen genuine fear on the other man's face.

Hadn't he?

Eva could hear a chorus of birds. The light around her began to filter through her eyelids, which felt stuck together. She tried to open her eyes but, for some reason, the muscles in her eyelids wouldn't respond. She lay still and continued to listen but there were no sounds other than the birds. Which in itself was strange. A rush of fear swept over her when she realised she didn't know where she was or how she arrived there. As conscious feeling began to flow through her body, she ached. Horribly. All over. Certain points on her limbs burned as if the skin had been pierced. She started to run her palms over her arms and, sure enough, felt welts where the skin had been cut and blood had crusted over the holes underneath.

Dimly, she made out the beeping of a heart monitor and registered various wires once again attached to her. She moved her torso slightly and felt a pull at her chest and at points in her arms. She registered how afraid this made her feel but she seemed unable to motivate herself to do anything about it.

She heard footsteps enter the room and lay still.

‘She's awake.'

‘How can you tell?'

‘Look at her heartbeat.'

‘Wh…'

‘Shhh.'

There was a silence of a couple of minutes, then the first person spoke again. A woman.

‘Eva, how are you doing?'

Adrenaline was starting to melt through the hangover from the cocktail of drugs in Eva's system. She was beginning to realise how uncomfortable she felt in a room with two people she didn't know, and she couldn't see.

‘I can't open my eyes,' she said, her voice husky, a croak of a sound.

‘Yes…' came the response.

‘Should we unglue them?'

‘Shhhh…'

Glue? Adrenaline spiked through Eva's system.
Glue
.

My eyelids have been glued together, thought Eva, trying to make sense of this new piece of knowledge. She lay still. She wanted to scream, to pull at her eyes to open them, or to demand – or even plead – that someone help her, but she didn't. She felt paralysed by the information she didn't have about her situation. But she was not sure how much longer she could remain calm.

A matter of minutes.

Movement began to happen in the room around her and she felt someone at the right hand side of her bed. The presence felt large, not a woman, and the smell was of cigarettes and something earthy, slightly damp. As the person breathed on her, she could smell what was last eaten. Anchovies.

She recoiled. Apparently, the lack of sight was making her sense of smell particularly acute.

Water was dripped on her eyes and she jumped as the first drop hit her eyelids.

‘Just relax. It's surgical glue, that's all.'

‘Why are my eyes glued shut?' She was trying really hard to be polite, to be reasonable, not to lose control.

But someone had glued her eyes shut. And she had no idea where she was.

There was no response. Just the feel of a cotton ball wiping at the lash line of her right eye. Eva jumped at the touch and shivered involuntarily. Vulnerable came nowhere near describing how she felt at that moment.

After several minutes of dabbing with the cotton wool ball, the person moved away and Eva was told to try and open her right eye. She played along, being the docile patient, keen not to anger whoever was helping her, at least until she knew more.

She opened her eyelids gingerly, not wanting to damage herself. She was given another soaked cotton wool ball and told to carefully clean away the glue whilst the person attended to her other eye. Finally, she was able to fully open her right eye. She wasn't prepared for what she saw.

TWENTY THREE

‘She's no longer
in Berlin.'

Irene swallowed. ‘Ok. Where is she?'

‘France.'

‘How the hell did that happen?'

She tried to reign in the emotion in her voice. She was too close to the edge.

‘In the back of a lorry. She has been unconscious for days – they packed her up like a piece of furniture and moved her.'

‘Still in the bed?'

‘Still in the bed.'

She almost felt as if she might laugh at that. Was she completely losing control?

‘And what about him?'

‘Dead. We think.'

‘Body?'

‘Of course not.'

‘Was it definitely Leon she saw in the house?'

She willed him to say yes.

‘We have no way of verifying that.'

Irene shook her head. This was becoming more and more precarious. She had known that once Leon realised she had lied that he would not stop. However, she could not have anticipated just how effective he would be, or how persistent. It was almost as if something or someone else was driving him.

‘Do you have any idea whether she is awake?'

‘No. I can't get close enough. They are located near a small village at the base of the Pyrenees, very close to the border with Spain.'

‘Name?'

‘Ceret.'

‘What can we do?'

‘Right now, very little. I'm assuming that, if they haven't killed her yet, there's a reason.'

She listened to the silence on the other end of the phone for several seconds.

‘Is there anything else?'

‘No.'

The connection was cut.

‘Valerie?'

Eva was staring, with her one open eye, at a dead woman.

Green eyes gazed straight back at her.

‘Valerie?' she asked again, in the same tone and intonation.

The woman opposite exchanged a look with the other person in the room.

Alarm registered in Eva's brain. A judgement had just been made. But what about?

She stared again at the face opposite, so very familiar

It looked like a woman who had been her brother Jackson's girlfriend at the time he disappeared. A woman who she – Eva – had shot dead in a Paris apartment, not so long ago.

She felt the room spin and shut her one open eye. There was no way Valerie could have survived that bullet. Absolutely no way.

Unless she was not human. Eva's nerve endings flared; she felt a sliver of fear ripple across her skin. What was Valerie, if she was not human? Eva could not dismiss the thought with cold, adult logic. For some reason her brain refused to quiet its panic. Valerie remained a terrifying ‘what if' in her mind.

And also in the room.

Eva tried to remember the moment of apparent death, back in Paris.

After Valerie had fallen, Eva had run, there had been no time to do anything else, no time to check whether she had actually died.

But, surely, there was no way Valerie had survived.

Leon had been there – they had fought and Valerie had, shortly before, thrown him through a glass table. He was injured so there had been some urgency to escape. No one had checked Valerie for a pulse.

Eva remembered the whispered conversation she had heard from another room before the shooting – which had revealed that Leon and Valerie had a history of working together. Leon was a mercenary. Up until then, Eva had believed her brother's former girlfriend to be a receptionist and superficial party girl. But, as it turned out, she was neither. Surprisingly, she appeared to be a mercenary just like Leon. And, clearly, also an impressively skilled actress.

Which meant she could easily have faked death.

As the adhesive on her left eye dissolved slowly, Eva felt an overwhelming anxiety rising up through layers of drug sedation. If that woman at the end of her bed was Valerie, she was in real danger.

A feeling of intense discomfort overtook her. How long had she been unconscious in this room? How long had she been vulnerable? What had happened to her in that time?

She could barely breathe at the thought of what might have taken place.

But why was she still alive?

She opened both her eyes.

From across the room, a pair of bright green irises burned into her own.

Eva couldn't move. She was pinned to the bed by the strength of the Valerie look-alike's unearthly stare. The woman was standing like a stone statue. And yet she had nothing behind her eyes; they seemed empty of anything – anger, malice, fear – there was no clue there. Nevertheless, she didn't look away.

In fact, she didn't even blink.

There was something bloodless about the action – perhaps even cruel. It was calculated, that much was obvious, but it was also almost scientific, as if it was a test.

Straight, auburn hair hung in a bob on either side of her face. Her cheekbones were sharp and eyebrows defined. Her skin was smooth, almost airbrushed, in appearance. She was frighteningly beautiful.

But there was something about the woman, whoever she was, that set Eva's nerves tingling. Something wasn't right with the way her face was put together, or perhaps it was that stare – intense, unwavering, predatory. As if she knew what was about to happen next.

Someone else was moving around the room, which Eva noticed appeared to be encased in a form of zipped-up plastic.

She broke the stare of the stranger and tried to pull from her eyelashes the clods of glue threatening to stick her eyelids back together. All the while, she could feel the woman's eyes drilling into the top of her head.

She looked up again. The eyes met hers. A wave of fear rose and fell through Eva's body. It just wasn't normal.

‘Stop staring at me,' she blurted out, slightly slurring her words.

Whoever else was in the room immediately stopped moving.

The woman opposite continued to stare.

‘I said,' Eva began to shout, ‘
stop staring at me
.'

Her voice faded away instantly, the last vowel hanging in the air.

Eva watched as a slow smile spread across the face of the woman opposite. The mouth began to curl at the corners, the cheek bones bunched, red lips pulled back to reveal sharp white teeth. Razor-sharp white teeth.

The woman continued to smile at Eva who, as she tried to move, realised she was tethered loosely to the bed. The woman was beginning to look demonic. Her face was distorting, taking on a devilish shape.

Eva scrambled for several minutes to free herself but she couldn't.

She instantly forgot that she was tied to the bed; she felt as if that stare held her in thrall, like a tractor beam.

Then they were both still.

Neither broke eye contact.

Eva felt the muscles in her jaw slacken. Her mouth was hanging open but there was little she could do.

She couldn't tear her gaze from the face opposite.

She felt as if it was growing in size. She thought she saw a drop of saliva fall from the woman's mouth. She licked her lips.

The green eyes gleamed.

Suddenly, the woman opposite took a step towards the bed.

Eva began to scream.