Power Games (38 page)

Noah had known the man’s face, had seen it in a paper sometime. Who was he?

The Angela connection had thrown him. It had directed him off the scent and he hadn’t thought to associate the man with anyone else. But that was it.

Of course, that was it.

Tawny Lascelles.

Definitely the same man, Noah was sure. He had been Tawny’s boyfriend, for a time, in the weeks before the party disappeared. They had posed together, been snapped in the weeklies—some guy from Vegas.

What was he doing here?

Did he have something to do with the crash?

Why did he want to get rid of Noah?

Realisation struck. Suddenly, it was clear. The man knew, like he did, that the passengers on board that jet bound for Salimanta were still breathing.

Noah tore the bandage off. A bolt shot through his abdomen.

‘No,’ the nurse saw, ‘you mustn’t—’

They would have to kill him before they stopped him.

He could rest when he died for real. Right now, Noah was alive. And he had to find Angela before somebody else did.

67

Day 25

I
t was a day of the week but nobody knew its name. The sun beat down, spilling lava between the glades. The forest floor was arid; leaves turned to brittle crunch, while up above the canopy thronged with life. Monkeys sprang from branches, tagging each other and hanging from their tails, howling against their course of ropes and plummets.

They prayed for rain. The stream had dried up and the heat was unreal. Action was impossible at the height of the day and the group slumped beneath palm trees, torn between the temptation of the water and the threat of the blazing sun.

Jungle creatures, semi-naked, their hair grown and their skin turned brown; the line between their old world and the acceptance of this new, feral state was obliterated.

Mitch’s return seemed to have carried a curse—the sun brighter than ever, the sky closer, the heat hotter. Salt caked on their skin and around their mouths.

On the molten horizon they thought they saw a ship, a cruel mirage, or heard on the thermals the engine of a plane.

They were wrong. It was over.

They would be here until they died. Some wished for an
ending, something quick and painless; others still dreamed of home.

Thirst made them mad. They needed water.

The scorching day gave way to evening shadows. Tawny volunteered to set out to find a new source—anything but to be stuck with them.

Much to her dismay, Jacob insisted on coming with her.

They worked through the jungle, brandishing torches of fire, orange glow darting between the trees. Tawny didn’t speak to him. She couldn’t look at him. Celeste’s words swamped her mind, with every recollection growing larger and more horrible.

You’re ugly in your soul.

‘Slow down,’ Jacob called from behind. ‘Wait up.’

Tawny could leave him right here for all she cared, hope he got snatched and devoured by some awful creature. What had happened to the Jacob who had cornered her at the Rieux? Who had pursued her at the Tower Club and sent her flowers and jewellery and flooded her PA with messages? What had happened to that Jacob?

He had lost more than his sight when the plane came down. He had lost his fucking mind.

Jacob tripped and swore, but Tawny didn’t turn back. She would give him nothing. He and Celeste had been flirting ever since that shameful night. The way Jacob looked at her … No one had ever looked at Tawny like that. Sure, they lusted after her. They told her what a hot body she had and how much they wanted to nail her. But they never looked at her like she was the last woman on Earth, never looked into her soul—her
ugly
soul—and accepted and loved what was there.

Maybe she had never given herself a chance. Shedding
her old skin had meant absolute denial: a mystery siren with no past, no story, no family and no friends, and in a way it had been the making of her, the enhanced allure, the implied goldmine that had kept reporters like Eve Harley on her tail for so long. But at what cost?

In burying the bad things about Tawny Linden, she had also buried the good. All those loveable parts that the woman she was today would never know.

Tawny’s eyes filled with tears. Fleetingly she considered beginning an affair with Kevin—he was certainly the last viable option, what with Jacob losing his balls and old man Mitch’s crab breath—but there was no point. They would all be dead soon. And she would die alone … and ugly.

Jacob wouldn’t care even if she did bone Kevin. For the first time since her reinvention, Tawny was ordinary: she had no power and no secret. In Jacob’s eyes she was just a girl, nothing more, nothing else, and that scared her more than anything.

The further they went, the darker it became.

Tawny hated the dark. When it was light she could still think of those bursts of brilliance: the flash of the paparazzo’s camera, the spot-glow on the runway as she flaunted the look of the season, or the spark of a magazine shoot when all she had to wear was a plastic bikini and a slash of red lipstick.

When it was dark, bad thoughts crept in.

Perhaps she had died. Sometimes she persuaded herself that she had perished in that crash, they all had, and this was nothing but some limbo before their fates got decided. Who was there to say otherwise? They only had each other, and each was as deluded as the next. Who knew if her companions were even real? They could be figments of her addled
imagination, or some residual flicker from the life she had departed when she flew out of Jakarta that day.

A chill raced, quick-legged, up her spine.

But wait. That wasn’t a chill.

‘ARGHHHH!’

Frantically Tawny began slapping her back, tearing her vest off, her face a grimace of terror. ‘Get it off me, get it off me!’

‘What is it?’

Tawny panted, gasping, and pointed shakily at the undergrowth, to where a dark shape was picking its way languidly through the bramble.

Spider.

The word didn’t do it justice. This wasn’t a teeny-weeny creepy-crawly she sometimes found in the corner of her Jacuzzi bathroom (and even then she got the maid to remove it): this was a
monster.
She had seen pictures of spiders like this, heard tales of their existence, witnessed them starring in their own fucking horror movie, but had never thought she would encounter one for real. It was huge and brown and furry. Its body was the size of a tennis ball and its legs were twig-thick limbs, bent at the knee in that revolting upturned V shape, and sprung with coarse hair.

Its eyes were out on stalks.
Stalks!

Untroubled by Tawny’s screams, the spider navigated its way through the dry leaves and vanished from sight.

‘You’re OK,’ said Jacob, putting a hand on her back. ‘It’s gone.’

She shrugged him off.

‘Touch me again and I’ll fucking kill you.’

They walked on.

At last they came to a creek and filled the bottles. Jacob was so thirsty he scooped handfuls of water into his mouth, not caring if it made him sick. She hoped it did.

They loaded as many as they could carry. It would be enough to see them through until dawn, when the others would return for more.

Guided by the sound of the ocean, they decided to take a different route back. Jacob’s torch had gone out and Tawny led the way. She heard him stagger and didn’t hold up: it gave her pleasure to hear him struggle. Once, on a night like tonight, she would have seduced him. Had sex with him right here on the jungle floor. Instead he had chosen that scrawny doe-eyed flake. Tawny wondered if they’d had sex yet, if Jacob had been able to get it up for
her
, and died a little at the possibility.

Through a shield of foliage, they stepped into a clearing.

Moonlight flooded the glade, and in the centre was the tube of fuselage they had abandoned on the first day. It was pale and glowing. Eerie. A bird shot out of one of the windows and the front was crumpled where the cockpit should have been.

They stood for a while in silence, thinking of the captain and his first officer, buried over the mountain, and the flight attendant who was still at large. It seemed wrong to speak, disrespectful, as if this were more of a grave to those men than the one they had been given.

Eventually Jacob said: ‘I never saw this before.’ The last time he had laid eyes on this craft was in Jakarta, before they had boarded. ‘What do you think happened?’

‘We crashed, asshole.’

He stepped closer. ‘How? Why? Do we know?’

Tawny couldn’t be bothered to think of the reasons. It didn’t change anything. It was too late to go back and do it again. They were here and that was the end of it.

As Jacob explored the cabin she crouched, planting her torch in the ground. A heap of detritus was gathered along the wing. Curious, she advanced towards it: stuff that had been brought from the hold, useless and abandoned.

She rifled through it. Ash stained her fingers, death and dust.

Her grip fastened around something familiar. The shape was so accustomed, the memory so firm and so wonderful that she let out a sob.

‘Everything OK?’ came Jacob’s voice.

She did not want him to see. This was just for her.

Tawny wept as she fell across the residue of her beloved hair straighteners. There wasn’t much to them, melted plastic, not yellow any more but bone-white and grey, the cable twisted and the handle morphed and a great hole in the middle where they had softened completely. A relic in a deserted house: a trace of someone who used to exist.

Did she used to be so beautiful? Who was that girl?

‘TO THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL, WITH LOVE & ADMIRATION.’

Now it read: ‘T HE F IRE T F H M AL W V & DMIR TION.’

It seemed to Tawny a symbolic sort of horror.

68

S
he kept the straighteners from Jacob, securing them in the waistband of her shorts.

Some time later, they emerged onto the beach. Those still awake were relieved at the find. Kevin was sharpening a spear, his eyes reflecting the flames.

‘We need more meat,’ he said. ‘It’s better at night.’

But it wasn’t a question of needing—it was a question of wanting. Kevin had become consumed by the hunt, stalking the beasts and baiting them, from boldness to recklessness, as if the Great White wasn’t enough, and he could and would slay anything that crossed his path. His growth was in defiance of everything they endured, the wasting away, the weakness, and it could not be understood. He showed no signs of slowing. Day on day, week on week, he just got bigger.

Tawny held the treasure out to Angela.

‘What are they?’

‘My hair straighteners.’

‘Oh.’

Tawny had expected a more gratifying response, not so much for the object itself, but for the world it elicited. She had hoped it would serve as a reminder of who she was.
Despite how Celeste had ruined her, she was still one to be revered.

Eve joined them. ‘Where did you find them?’

‘In the wreck.’

The reporter took them. Tawny saw her scepticism—a woman like Eve didn’t care for such vanity. She would make a mockery of them, and in turn a mockery of Tawny. But Tawny was made up of these things: they were what defined her.

‘Careful—’ said Tawny.

Eve fingered the middle section, where the gas would have been. Its contours were molten, smooth as wax where the plastic had bent out of shape.

Eve looked at Angela. Something was exchanged.

‘What?’ Tawny said.

‘Was there a canister in here?’ said Eve.

Tawny shrugged. She had no idea how her straighteners worked. They got heated and they made her pretty—there was nothing more to say.

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

In the jungle, a vicious shriek burst out of the trees. She pictured Kevin, triumphant, his spear raised.

‘Tawny,’ said Eve, ‘these are what caught fire.’

The night fell away.

‘Oh no, Tawny,’ Angela whispered. ‘Oh no.’

69

Los Angeles

I
t had been two weeks since Sketch Falkner’s heinous reveal.

In that time Joan Chase had barely let a morsel pass her lips. She slept all day. She dosed up on Ambien, zonking herself out so she wouldn’t have to dream.

Every accusation she threw at herself: a barrage of loathing and shame. She was a terrible mother. She should have noticed. She should have stepped in. She should never have let Kevin get involved with Cut N Dry in the first place.

She should have
known
, because wasn’t that what moms did? All that time, Kevin had been suffering under a noxious regime, and she hadn’t had a clue.

If she had, they would have got Kevin away from the industry years ago. None of this would have happened. He would never have been on that fated jet.

Joan could not forgive the men who had done it. Sketch had committed an abominable crime: the worst betrayal of a boy who had looked up to and respected him; who had obeyed in ignorance of the machine that controlled his every move.

She hated Sketch. She would put ten Sketches on that
plane over her vulnerable son. Half son, half daughter, what was he?

She didn’t know.

Sketch tried to see her. He came to the house, pleading at the door, but she did not let him in. He left messages on her voicemail, begging and wheedling:

‘You won’t tell the police, will you, Joanie?’

‘Answer my calls, I’m going out of my mind.’

‘Please can I see you? Let me explain …’

There was nothing to explain. Sketch had done all the explaining he needed to, and nothing he could say or do in the aftermath could possibly lessen the blow.

Joan ignored his attempts with stoicism. She hoped he was in distress. She hoped the Cut N Dry execs were in hell.

However bad they were feeling, it couldn’t be a drop in the ocean of her suffering.
The pills, one red, one blue …