Killing Eva (9 page)

‘Infrastructure contracts?' The questioning continued.

‘Ahead of schedule. All key utilities and public service provision.'

‘And the shares?'

‘We already have volume to wield a controlling interest in most.'

‘Do you know, I really hate the vagueness of “most”?'

He did know that.

‘We have a controlling interest in 85 per cent,' came the amended response. For the first time, the older man looked satisfied. ‘This is good,' he said quietly.

TWELVE

The sun was
burning the bare skin on his forearms. He could feel the stinging sensation of cooking flesh as he lay motionless on the ground. He opened his eyes and tried to push himself into a sitting position. Dust rose from the dry earth with the movement; he began choking on it. His arms gave way and he fell back to the ground.

As he lay on his back, Leon became aware of being watched. He turned his head to the right.

Dead eyes glared back at him.

The other man lay motionless.

Momentarily, Leon wondered whether he was actually dead but there was no way he could have survived the knife wound, a cut made sharply under his ribs, splitting the flesh and piercing his heart.

As Leon's eyes focused, he saw a dark area around the body where the blood had seeped into the sand. He looked again at the face opposite.

It was not Jackson.

A dull pain in his ankle interrupted the thought process. Gradually, the pain grew less dull, growing in intensity. He gritted his teeth as the sensation seemed to radiate throughout his body, waves of warm agony almost too much to bear.

After several seconds, adrenaline gave him just enough strength to drag himself upright and he could see the bloody mess of flesh just below the ankle bone. The other man had tried to slash the tendons in his ankle but the knife had cut millimetres to the left. It was a piece of luck, nothing more. But it had allowed him to live. Leon pulled the leg of his combats back for a better view; the flesh was crawling with insects. He could feel their fast-moving bodies, consuming his rotting flesh; realisation dawned: danger. Infection. Frantically, he began to clear the wound of seething movement. How long had they been feasting on his broken skin?

His movements were laboured. He must have at least one broken rib, he thought, and there would surely be more damage visible once he got behind an X-ray machine.

With enormous effort, he cleaned the wound as best he could, wrapping it in a strip torn from his shirt to protect it. Then he was on his bare feet, looking around. His head was spinning, his eyes unfocused. The fear that he was beyond help, that death might be imminent, washed over him. He had to get help. He had to get help.

He felt his pockets but they were empty. He looked around him.

There was nothing other than the man who lay dead, his face a mess of angry purple bruising where Leon had been unable to hold back his anger. Quickly, Leon limped over to the deceased and searched his pockets. He took the knife and searched for a phone but there was none. He did, however, find a bulging money clip, an Omega Seamaster watch and a tiny remote control, single button, of the kind that would open a garage door. Other than that, there was nothing but a single black business card – ‘Veritas'. He took it too and, once again, felt an urgency to move.

He glanced around.

The landscape felt African to him. Perhaps north African.

It was arid, dusty and dry and the sun was incredibly strong. It was high in the sky, so he must have been lying there all morning.

He turned his face to the sun and began limping towards it. There was no way of knowing where he was, or which was the best direction to take, but he must begin to move, to make decisions and, hopefully, find help along the way. If he did not, he would die.

He did not want to die.

Before, it had felt inevitable but now… after what he had seen. No.

Every step brought sharp pain in his right ankle and severe discomfort each time the bandage touched raw flesh underneath.

As he tried to force clarity through the pain radiating from all over his body, he realised he could see on the horizon the dark outlines of buildings. He began to move faster, dragging the injured leg that would not move quickly enough.

He had to get help.

Slowly but surely, the horizon loomed closer. He was approaching a settlement. It looked small and remote but there would be a mobile phone. There was always a mobile phone.

When she awoke that evening, Eva could remember almost nothing of what had happened to her since she left the club the night before. She was lying in bed fully dressed but when she started to undress she found she was wearing a pair of long black socks underneath her jeans. She stared at herself in the mirror. She looked like a character from a porn film. The socks finished at her thighs, although one had rolled down when she removed her jeans. The look was at odds with the rest of her underwear.

They are not mine.

Her heartbeat began to flutter. She didn't own a pair of socks like this.

She sat, fell back onto the bed. Her head began to swim.

Who had put them on her? Who did they belong to?

Confusion and disbelief began to whisper and then scream in her ears. What had happened to her? Why didn't she know? Automatically, she raised her hands to cradle her head, to try and trigger some memory. But there was nothing there. There was just nothing there.

As she lowered her hands, she noticed she had bright red marks around her wrists. She gazed at them and began to rub them. The flesh was sore, it had been cut in places.

She looked from the black socks to her wrists and back again.

It was like a nightmare. If she could just remember.

‘Remember,' she said to herself, rocking slightly forward, ‘
remember!
'

But her mind was just a dense grey fog.

She began clawing at the black socks, tearing them from her legs. She bundled them up and threw them into the bin, then ran to the door of her hotel and checked it. It was not locked from the inside.

She stumbled backwards.

Could someone really have broken in and done this to her? Could she somehow have done this to herself? Eva had had more than her share of painfully embarrassed awakenings after a drunken night out but this was something else. This was more than drunk texting abusive messages to an ex or throwing up in the street. She had never blacked out like this before.

She forced herself to calm down by sitting on the bed and taking deep breaths for several minutes. Then she checked the rest of the room to make sure there was no one still there. She indulged all her wildest worries and looked for hidden cameras, condom wrappers, any sign that she might not have been in there alone. She checked her bag for her phone and wallet, both were still there. What on earth had happened to her?

She was half-inclined to call Andre and ask him whether he had seen her leave but one thing she did remember was that, by the time she left the club, he was nowhere to be seen. But that was all she could remember. Almost at that exact point, her memories stopped.

Slowly, she stood up and headed for the shower, trying not to allow rising waves of anxiety to take hold. Had she taken something? Had she been spiked?

She had felt absolutely fine when she left the club. Perhaps a little drunk – drunk enough to think it was a good idea to set off into the city on her own to find a taxi in an area she didn't know – but she hadn't felt drugged or high, which was something she should have been able to identify. Eva began running the shower and clouds of steam billowed into the bathroom. She turned the heat right up and stepped under the scalding stream of water. She began scrubbing furiously at her skin. She wanted to be outside it. Why had this happened to her?

Panic continued to pluck at her mind.

Again, she had to physically force herself to slow down her breathing and her thoughts. She did not feel as if she had been raped. She would know.

She began to breathe normally.

She turned the heat down on the shower.

She stopped scrubbing at her skin, closed her eyes for several seconds and reached for the shampoo.

That's right, she thought to herself, if something like that had happened, I would feel it. There would be damage – bruising at least. Wouldn't there?

She looked down at her thighs and felt the flesh around her middle and back, but nothing hurt. In fact, other than her wrists, she didn't even feel she had been touched.

Try to make sense of this, she told herself, don't fall into fear and become overwhelmed. But her mind felt clouded.

She began to force herself to think backwards. The last thing she remembered was the moment Andre had disappeared. Or was it? No, she knew she had left the club and she knew she had been on her own trying to find a taxi. So, what had happened between that point and this? Eva tipped her head back and allowed the warm water to soak her hair. Another memory began to surface. Two people – a couple – walking towards her in the dark, and the woman…

Eva stopped shampooing her hair. She remembered the strange movement the woman had made with her hand, lifting it to her mouth, opening her palm and apparently blowing something at Eva. That was odd.

But it was also a clue. More of a clue than she'd had several seconds ago.

Eva felt her mind begin to settle; the ground returned to beneath her feet. She had something to go on, she could take some action.

Nevertheless, she was still shaking.

She quickly finished her shower, wrapped towels around her trembling body and cocooned her hair then walked back to the bed. There, she took her laptop and typed ‘drug you blow in someone's face' into Google.

She hadn't, of course, expected anything to come up, but there were pages and pages on it.

The results made her heart beat faster. Numerous links discussing a VICE documentary about a drug called ‘scopolamine' – the ‘world's scariest drug'. It could be administered by being blown into someone's face. It was a drug that rendered someone incapable of exercising free will. Victims became docile and helped the perpetrators of the crime being carried out against them. Women had been drugged and gang raped or rented out as prostitutes, tourists relieved of all their cash at ATMs.

The drug came from Colombia, but most of the information the search engine generated suggested it was already quite widespread across Europe, so there was every chance there would be some here in Berlin.

But why use it? And why her?

Eva curled up on the bed. She looked at her phone and saw all the texts and missed calls from Sam and others wondering why she had not come home that day. When she got out of the shower, she'd noticed a note from reception telling her she would be charged for another night after apparently failing to hear all the polite knocks on the door. That was fine. She wanted to stay exactly where she was. Until she worked out what had happened to her, she didn't feel she could go anywhere.

Several hours later, Eva began to experience flashbacks to a basement space and the distinct impression she had been tied to a bed, maybe even handcuffed. She looked at the black socks she had retrieved from the bin and then spread out on the bed opposite. They were cheap, bad quality and, clearly, only for one purpose. The fact she had been dressed in them, and fastened to something, was terrifying. But she had a choice about how to react to this now and she could not help herself if she fell apart. She still didn't feel as if she'd had sex with anyone, and she knew she would feel it if that was what had happened. But could she really be sure… the uncertainty brought the panic back. She quietened both. No, she could not be sure but she had to be practical. She was alive; apparently uninjured. Concerns about anything having been transmitted to her could be allayed with tests. And besides, there was little she could do about that right now. What she really needed to establish was why this had happened and whether she was still in any further danger. She wished she could remember something else – anything – but from what she had read about scopolamine that was unlikely to happen. Ever.

She used the internet on her phone to search for scopolamine and Berlin. There was nothing reported on any of the digital news sites but several forums popped up with entries from local Berliners afraid of the arrival of this new and scary drug.

Some were in German but, of the English entries, she was particularly interested in posts on a forum offering support to those who felt they had been spiked – there were several people convinced they had been a victim of the drug. They were always women, they were around the same age as she was, and they were usually walking home at night, although none was in the area she had been in, most seemed to be further east.

More worrying were posts from people who seemed to be searching for a woman who had gone missing in the same circumstances, in the same area. For them, there were even fewer answers than she had, Eva realised.

He had borrowed a phone from a teenage boy at the settlement – who seemed to have nothing to his name other than that devise and whose eyes had almost bulged out of his head at the sight of the bills in the money clip. Thanks to the dated piece of technology, Leon had made enough calls to get himself out. He sat in a state-of-the-art medical room as his injuries were noted and categorised, checked and treated. They had offered him strong pain meds but he knew he couldn't afford to be even slightly off his game and, besides, that always seemed to trigger a relapse in his drinking. He had to reach Berlin and he had to return to the job he had been doing when he had been taken – that was even more important now. The man he had seen had been real enough, his bruises were a testament to that. But his face… it just didn't make sense. None of it made sense.

Eva was screaming when she woke and the thundering on her hotel door added to the terror she felt in the darkened room. She struggled to clear the sleep from her head as the banging on the door continued and it took several seconds to realise the voice was asking – in English – whether she was alright. She gulped down several breaths of air and quickly reached for the light. Under the sheets she was dressed so she walked quickly to the door, looked through the spy hole and, seeing a man in a jacket with a name tag, pulled open the door.

‘Are you ok, Miss Scott?'

‘Yes, I'm sorry.'

‘It's just that we had a call from one of the other residents. They said it sounded as if you were being attacked.'