Power Games (40 page)

The discovery laid them bare. Words were pretend blades, tools on which to sharpen their anger. When those ran dry, they would reach for the real thing.

Dusk crept in. Across a high purple sky swam a screen of light clouds, the first they had seen. It was too much to
hope for rain, but still they did. The horizon appeared thicker than normal, and more defined. There was change in the air.

Celeste was gathering firewood. A breeze skittered across her arms. So unused was she to the sensation that she clasped it, thinking it an insect or the wings of a bird.

She looked out to sea. A churn of pink slashed in the distance, a new palette. The leaves on the palms began to quiver. As she stepped through the tree line, she heard a woman crying. Tawny was behind the rock, arms round her knees and her toes in a trembling gutter of water. Her hair was lank and dull. Bites riddled her legs.

‘What do you want?’ She heard Celeste approach and furiously wiped her eyes. ‘Go away. Just leave me alone.’ Celeste put the wood on the sand. Tentatively, she rested a hand on Tawny’s shoulder, but the model recoiled from her touch.

‘Fuck off, I said!’

‘You can’t go on like this.’

‘Like what?’

‘Being the outcast.’

‘I can do what I want.’ Tawny sniffed, then added, ‘What choice do I have? Nobody wants me around. Everybody hates me.’

‘We don’t hate you.’

‘Liar!’ Tawny’s tear-streaked face popped up at her like a jack-in-the-box. Her blue eyes were puffy and bloated. ‘You hate me more than anyone.’

‘No, I don’t.’

Tawny snorted.

Celeste sat down next to her. ‘You can’t survive on your own,’ she said.

‘I’m better off on my own. I always have been. I started
my life alone and I’ll end it alone. When it comes to it, people don’t care. You have to rely on yourself.’

‘That’s what I thought, too—but I was wrong.’

‘But you found Jacob, you mean?’

‘Finding out like we did,’ Celeste said, ‘it was bad. It was for you, too. But what Kevin said is right—’

‘Kevin’s a freak.’

‘But what he said is right. We’re here now. How the fire started doesn’t change anything—we still need to live and we still need to get out of here.’

Celeste saw something in the model’s eyes: a kind of longing.

‘D’you know what it’s like to be hated?’

‘Yes.’

‘You can’t. Not like this. All my life I’ve been adored.’

Celeste watched this broken woman and thought of the night they had first met, of Tawny’s sniffed dismissal, and all the times she had seen the supermodel since, at some glamorous runway show or Hollywood premiere, and had wanted to be just like her.

‘I feel so lonely,’ said Tawny. ‘And so …’ she sobbed, ‘so
grotesque
!’

‘You’re not grotesque.’

‘I am compared with you. At least, that’s what Jacob thinks.’

Tawny turned to face her. Her expression was alive with curiosity and she was beautiful with it, a new kind of beauty to the one she sold, childlike and open.

White froth washed up on the beach, harsh and spitting. Tawny leaned in and kissed her. Her lips crushed against Celeste’s, her warm tongue slipping into her mouth, linking with hers and gently exploring. Pleasure shot through Celeste, primal and reflex, and she pulled back. For so long she had
lusted after Jacob, a hot, nagging desire, and the shock of intimacy was intoxicating. Reckless.

Tawny took Celeste’s hand and drew it to her breast. Celeste cupped the soft shape, concealed beneath a layer of cotton. She knew she had to pull away, yet her mind wasn’t computing. The stiffened bud fascinated her, so like her own. She wanted to know if other parts of Tawny were just like her own, but that was crazy.

‘We both want this,’ whispered Tawny.

Celeste couldn’t deny it. She did. Kissing a woman, the idea of being with a woman, it didn’t freak her out like it might have. Every part of her screamed to be with someone, the warmth of another human body, limbs entwined, parts interlinked, hands clasped and mouths locked. With Carl it had never been like that. Carl did not make love to her: he fucked her and then he went to sleep. Cold sheets in a cold room.

Here, the sand was hot.

‘I can’t.’

Tawny pulled her down. Celeste tried to resist, but her resistance was only half-hearted, and when Tawny grabbed her hand and fed it between her legs she let herself be guided. Tawny seemed to open up and spill on to her, her back arched and her mouth open. Celeste’s mouth opened too, in amazement.

She drew back as if she’d been scalded. ‘I can’t,’ she fumbled. ‘I’m sorry.’

Tawny began to cry.

‘Please don’t,’ said Celeste. ‘It’s not you, it’s—’

‘Sure it is. It’s always me.’

And before she could stop her, Tawny got up and ran off into the dark. Celeste watched her go, confused and helpless, as the first spots of rain began to fall.

73

Day 33

T
he deluge lasted for days. Rain battered and sliced through the choking heat. What had begun as a faint, barely believed patter had built to a relentless, longed-for downpour. They had danced on the beach, arms raised to the sky in praise of its gift, bathing in the water as it ran down their necks and arms and legs. The drops fell plump, plopping onto leaves and dripping off their ends. They collected it to drink, siphoning off the liquid and sipping at the petal points of great waxy teardrops.

Tawny was in the trees. The rain came so hard that it pooled with her sobs and it became impossible to tell the difference between the two. Here, in the forest, her misery ran free. She slumped against a tree, directionless in her mania and sadness.

Against the rules, she ventured into the jungle alone, tripping through slushy ground that days before had been hard enough to crack. Mud splashed up her legs and caked between her toes. Her ankle caught on a shoot and she tumbled into the dirt, landing on her knees and putting her fists out to break her fall. On all fours she was rendered a creature
from the deep, tendrils of sodden hair stuck to her cheeks, drips pouring off her nose and chin. She carried on that way, sloshing through the soaked, sticky earth and tangled, wet roots. Wildlife retreated. The sound of the rain was thunderous, drumming on the canopy and coursing through the trees, each leaf a steel pan that threw back sound. What scant clothes she wore were soaked to the skin.

She came to the pool, hauled herself over the rim and peered into the water.

The surface was pockmarked, drops bouncing and splashing, but she could just make out her shivering reflection. Gone was the appearance she had built a career on. Gone was the woman she had seen in that hospital mirror a lifetime ago, whose beauty promised the future she had always longed for. Gone was the supermodel pronounced Loveliest in the World. Gone was the girl whose appeal had secured hundreds of clients at the Rams.

Even Celeste had turned her away.

Who was the fairest of them all?

Not her, not any more. Kevin was the only one who had paid her that kind of attention and he was a man-child. Tawny had lost her powers. The usual ways she had of making people fall for her—men, always men, who collapsed at her shrine in devotion—had deserted her. She put a hand to her matted hair and bawled.

‘Tawny?’

The sound of her name took her by surprise.

Desolate, she raised her head.

Eve was in the water.

Tawny peered through the thick rain at the other woman’s gently rounded belly, the expression of concern that the reporter wore, and couldn’t decide which was the more astonishing. She was yet to make a decision when her eyes were
drawn to a nearby rock, two of them, close to Eve: a pair of dark nodules breaking the surface.

Rocks themselves were nothing to observe, but there was something unusual about these ones, something
organic.
Tawny just had time to question why before the rocks sank in a silent stroke and then she understood. Terror filled her head.

‘Eve,’ she said. ‘Get out.’

But Eve couldn’t hear above the sound of the rain. ‘What?’

‘Get out of the water. Now.’

Then Eve saw.

Her scream was disembodied. Feral. Her arms flailed. Her legs kicked. Tawny reached for her, grasping at fingers only to feel them slip away as Eve scrambled to the side, delirious with dread and horror, and Tawny pulled as hard as she could, the pregnant woman sliding back down the bank, the water frothing and churning, their hands clasped and then ripped apart and Eve’s cry like nothing she had heard in her life.

‘Help me!’ Eve rasped, as her feet fought for solid ground and the mud kept giving way. Tawny could see the whites of her eyes. She could smell her fear.

The animal was right behind her. Tawny saw its shell hunker beneath the water, silently moving in, drawn by the agitation as Eve clutched her shoulders, almost dragging her over and begging not to be let go.

‘Help me! HELP ME!’

Tawny gripped her arm, above her elbow, and from deep within accessed a final shard of strength that delivered Eve from the water. In an upsurge Eve was brought to shore, staggering and stumbling into the trees.

In that instant Tawny turned back and the dark lake broke. All she saw was the inside of its mouth: teeth, jagged and copious, Jurassic and brutal; and the smooth cream leather of its tongue, like the upholstery in an ex-boyfriend’s Porsche.

The crocodile cracked its jaws, a sharp, dead-wood blow like two oak doors banging together. Tawny’s throat was bloated beyond the ability to scream and she reeled back, blank with fright, thinking she had got away, when the monster crawled out of the water, massive and lumbering, its armoured skin glistening, and began tossing its head, wrestling a chew toy and thrashing from side to side.

Only that was no chew toy …

Tawny felt no pain. She looked down and saw her bloody chest, one of her tits all but swiped clean, but she felt no pain. Shock, horror, white terror—and a limp, foreign, burbling moan that travelled up her oesophagus and escaped through her lips as she realised what the crocodile was holding in its mouth.

She thought:
I’ll never be able to do swimwear again.

Her eyes rolled back in her head and she passed out.

Unconscious, Tawny Lascelles was at least spared the horror of her death. The crocodile advanced towards her, its giant muscular tail swishing in the driving rain.

74

I
t was a week before Noah got his hook—but what a hook it was.

By now the search was packing up. News was travelling home of its disintegration. Funerals for those on board would finally be the acceptable course.

‘Go home, get some rest,’ was the advice he was given.

They didn’t believe his story. Nobody did, not even the hospital. There was no record of the man who had attacked him. Noah barely remembered the order of events and he couldn’t supply a motive: all he knew was that the assassin had struck to win. There was no proof, no weapon. Noah saw their scepticism—too many weeks in the sun, the disorientating effects of grief and shock, an obsession that had spun out of control—and realised he was alone. They thought he was crazy for doing this in the first place, and here was the logical next step. Noah Lawson had got drunk and almost killed himself.

Only, he hadn’t.

He would not go home. He would not rest. If ever he needed a reason to carry on, this was it. The man knew something Noah didn’t.

Angela was alive.

He didn’t dare think it, and yet there it was, a tiny, glowing light.

The attack came to him in bursts of clarity. Noah went to the beach, searching for clues, trying to re-live it.

Kneeling, he touched something hard. At first he thought it was a rock, before reaching to remove its square, smooth edges. It was a familiar shape, incongruous amid the desolate landscape, and he brought the cell phone up and swept it clean, golden grains around the plastic rim and a smear across the screen.

He switched it on. The display lit up.

Noah searched its folders: texts, call logs, email. Probably one of the search team’s.

It was blank.

He was about to turn it off when the ringtone sounded, a clean, clear bell.

A message came in. It read:

News?

Noah frowned. The message was from two initials: VC.
It was followed by a second:

I do not like to be kept waiting.

And this by another, the third containing a jumble of numbers and another question mark. Noah waited for more, but none came.

All three messages had been sent a fortnight ago—about the time, Noah guessed, of the assault. His mind raced. The man had struck him here …

It wasn’t impossible. The man would have departed, only later realising his mistake, but by then it was too late to come back. He’d had to press on.

Where to?

Noah looked at the numbers again.

Who or what was VC?

The C troubled him.

Cane Enterprises.

Noah recalled the government’s inquiries into the outfit. Cane Enterprises had appeared authentic. Both Kevin’s manager and Mitch’s PR had enjoyed contact in the run-up, but after the crash the website had folded and none of the team could be found. There was no record. The IP address could not be traced. Investigating authorities decided that to unleash conspiracy suspicions on the press was a bad idea, and, instead, in the interests of buying time, fed one-liners to the media on the organisation’s behalf: ‘
We are deeply aggrieved by this distressing turn of events
’, or ‘
Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of those lost
.’

Nobody had got close to the truth. Was this it?

Was this VC?

It was the only clue Noah had found. He might not get another.

He pocketed the phone. Mountains climbed to a pink and grey sky. The ocean was dark, and rain clouds were starting to gather.

It was a theory, and all action began with theory: the man who attacked him knew the cargo still lived, and at Cane’s behest had come to finish the job.