Power Games (42 page)

Others, too, had been invited to witness the spectacle at Veroli—those who could pay, who had a vested interest and were vowed to absolute secrecy. This was the greatest classified find since Roswell; the stuff Area 51 didn’t want them to know about. It was proof that extra-terrestrial life existed,
that it was here, that it had landed. Mitch wasn’t crazy. The rest of the world was.

‘You believe Rossetti, still? Even after it was proved a hoax?’

‘Nothing was proved,’ he said. ‘I don’t have to justify anything to you. Leave me alone.’

‘I’ll stay, if it’s all the same to you.’

They listened to the thrum of the rain.

Mitch said: ‘Even now, in the state we’re in, you can’t resist.’

‘What?’

‘Hurting people.’

‘I’m not hurting people. Not this time. I’m interested, that’s all.’

‘Interested enough to write it up the second you get home?’

‘I don’t think we’re going home.’

Mitch grit his teeth. ‘You are. I’m not. They’ll come when they’re ready.’

‘You’re certain.’

‘They came for Tawny. What more do you need?’

‘Why didn’t they come for you?’

‘Tawny was a warning.’

‘Of what?’

‘That they’re close.’

He heard her shift position. ‘What does your wife think?’ Eve asked.

Melinda’s name swam at him like a stranger’s. Mitch hadn’t thought of her in so long. Three syllables, an empty word to fit an empty woman.

‘Wouldn’t you like to know,’ he said.

‘I’m not as shallow as you think I am.’

‘Based on evidence, I find that hard to believe.’

‘I’m a journalist,’ Eve said. ‘It’s my job to expose people.’

‘It’s your job to report the truth.’

‘That’s the same thing.’

‘Is it? The truth is something you’ll never get your hands on. You see the Veroli stitch-up and you see your truth; I see mine in what doesn’t come to light.’

‘We aren’t so different, then.’

Mitch faced her. ‘Everyone on this island has secrets,’ he said. ‘What makes you immune? People build lies to protect themselves—not to injure, or cheat, whatever you might think. If you want a hook, I’ll give you one. I miss my wife. There. Satisfied? I miss the person she used to be. I miss the person I married and it eats me up every day, and I will never get her back even if we do get out of here because she’s already lost. I’ve got nothing to go back for. I don’t even want to be saved. Put that in your precious paper, see if I care.’

‘I do care. That’s why I came to find you.’

‘I’ll bet that was a real coup.’

‘Do you think anyone’s going to give a crap about your story, even if we do make it off this island? The story’s dead, Corrigan. Your name was never even attached.’

‘More fool them if they don’t see. The end is nigh.’

‘Now you sound like a maniac with a sandwich board.’

‘If that’s what you think I am.’

Eve picked up the straighteners.

‘You’re smart, Corrigan. How else would you be where you are? And I’m not immune, far from it. We all end up where we do because of our past, and mine—well, it happened. But being here and going through this, we’re all cut from the same, aren’t we? It doesn’t matter what labels you buy, how much money you have or how many records you sold, when the chips are down we’re all the same. We’re all flesh and we all bleed. What can I say? Bad spreads—but I
believe that good spreads too.’ She looked at her stomach. ‘I have to, don’t I?’

Ashamed, Eve fiddled with the charred tongs. ‘Every bad thing I ever wrote about Tawny, I hate myself for it.’

‘I know what my beliefs are,’ Mitch said, but the edge to his voice had gone.

‘That Tawny was taken by that thing you saw at Veroli …’

‘Yes. Or something like it.’

‘And our plane came down because of them?’

‘Yes.’

But Eve was only half listening. She pulled the straighteners closer and frowned at them. She was deeply focused, her eyes narrowed.

‘What is it?’ Mitch asked.

With a wrench she snapped them open, splitting them at their hinge. She fingered the plastic inside, coming to rest on something fixed in the pivot.

Her voice sounded weird. ‘And if you’re wrong?’

Mitch reached out. ‘What are you looking at?’

The cracked straighteners shook in Eve’s hand.

‘So much for your aliens, Corrigan,’ she said. ‘We’ve been set up.’

78

Szolsvár Castle, Gemenc Forest, Hungary

V
oldan Cane’s mechanical summons ricocheted through the castle vaults.

‘Janika!’

The maid came running. Mr Cane was propped up in his four-poster bed, a drink by his side, out of which a long straw protruded. His question was immediate: ‘Is there news?’

Janika shook her head, unable to meet her boss’s eye. She couldn’t bear his disappointment. For too long they had been unable to contact the source: it was as if their man had vanished into thin air. Voldan contained his anger, but she saw it in his twitching thumb, and in the tortured moans he emitted in his sleep.

Janika knew in her heart that Voldan’s plan had worked: those people were long gone. But he needed evidence and he would not be content until he got it.

‘Do you think he’s come to harm?’ asked Janika.

‘A man like that doesn’t know how,’ bleated Voldan. He spat the straw away and it flicked back, forcing him to spit again. Janika hurried to remove it.

‘What should we do?’ she wheedled.

‘We wait. He will return. And when he does, you know what you must do. Nobody ignores Voldan Cane. He who dares will pay a terrible price.’

79

Day 45

T
he rain stopped. It happened suddenly, the sky-flood turning off like a tap and the grey clouds parting to a chorus of burnished rays. In a matter of hours the ground was gasping again, as if the rains had never been. Everything smelled different, crucial and living. The air was so fresh it stung the throat.

Sunlight on the water refracted like fish scales; thin gold bands that trembled and danced on the surface. Angela kept to her depth, the dark shade of sea beyond the lagoon synonymous now with fear: of sharks, of the deep, of the unknown.

She swam underwater in brave, large strokes, her arms scooping through the green. Her hands belonged to someone else, the liquid distorting their shape, and the extreme brown of her tan was magnified. Only the silver ring that Noah had given her marked the skin as Angela’s, tarnished though it was by sweat and sun.

Shoals of fish dashed in her vision, some bigger, the size of her forearm, in lurid yellows and blues. A starfish splayed lazy, and the brittle, pimpled shell of an urchin was half obscured in the powdery sand. She dived to collect a gleaming shell and a mousse-pink pincer twitched from one side.

Holding her breath was a skill. She had always been good at it, practising in the Boston pool with Orlando and Luca when she was a girl. Angela liked to count the seconds she was under, and found that now she could reach a full minute before her lungs began to strain. It was peaceful. Her favourite place was a channel between two rocks, where she could grab hold of a hollow in the stone and hold on, keeping her body down. She would close her eyes and think of nothing.

Sometimes, she would enter a waking dream.

She dreamed that when she surfaced she would be at her father’s house, on a summer’s afternoon. Not the world she had left behind, exactly—an altered version. Noah would be there. He would never have left … Right back to that summer when she was fifteen, she unpicked the threads and wove anew. Donald would have lived. She and Noah would have married. They might even have had a family of their own.

This was one of her mother’s garden parties, and Angela was swimming, and if she concentrated hard she could hear the muffled hum of conversation above—Isabella, there she was, in a green sundress, and her
nonna.
The barbecue infused the air with perfumed, bitter smoke. A ball game unfolded, spiked by cries of victory, and the laughter of children, someone’s children, maybe hers.

On rare days, good days, the fantasy was real. Angela would stare into the water, visibility lost after just a few feet so that the deeper distance was an obscured, murky veil out of which she could summon Noah. She dreamed that he jumped into the pool. There was no splash, no clue to give him away.

She willed him to come.

That summer, before the fall-out, they had gone to the lake. Noah had driven her in his friend’s car. It had been late
in the day, one of those clear, wide-sky days that seemed to last for ever, and the sunset was orange, a burned, warm amber.

Noah stripped off his T-shirt and dived from the pier.

‘Come on! Come in! It’s beautiful!

‘I can’t!’ she said, laughing. ‘Look away!’

He did as he was told, turning from her, his hands over his eyes to make sure. The back of his neck was glittering. His hair was golden, dripping on his skin.

She thought, then: Remember this. This is a moment. Remember it.

She peeled her top over her head, then her jeans, taking her sandals off first so she could drag them inside out. She tripped while she did it, putting out a hand to steady herself on the branch of a tree, and with her hands covering her chest, even though she still wore a bra, she ran to the end of the pier and leaped off.

‘It’s freezing!’

The cold was like being tickled. She had never felt so urgent. The lake appeared black in the fading sun, inviting and frightening. Firs encircled it, their private enclave, amid which the shining red of the car was their lifeline back to the real world. It seemed to Angela that everything else might just as well have evaporated; this was their universe now, the two of them.

She floated on her back, her breasts surging at the surface, the bra now see-through but she wasn’t embarrassed. She was sick of comparing herself with the girls Noah may or may not have slept with, wondering if he liked her and, if so, how much. For now it was enough to be with him, her ears deafened by the thick lake, as the hot peach sun melted behind the sweet-scented spikes.

He pulled her under. They didn’t kiss but the elusion of his lips only compounded her longing. He entwined his limbs with hers, swirling in the cold, alone apart from the teenage adrenalin of skin on skin, where parts fitted, the loops and dips and grooves of another person, a person with whom she yearned to lock those pieces in place. She could feel the hairs on Noah’s arms, and the hard bulk of his chest. There was nothing to see, it was ink, and she felt for him, every inch a new discovery. She touched something solid. She knew what it was. She had seen Orlando’s stand up once, inside his tennis shorts when he was seventeen and Martha Pravershall joined the doubles match.

Noah’s was thick and warm. She wanted to hold onto it but she didn’t know what to do, or if she should, or what would happen if she did.

They sprang to the surface and the sun was all but gone. In the blossoming dark Noah was a silhouette, drops of water on his top lip and lashes. Angela thought how obvious it all was, how plain and how pure, once the fooling around was taken away. Instinct.

She would never be satisfied until Noah Lawson met the ache in her stomach, the warm thing she had found underwater, and quenched it, and set it free.

‘You’re cold,’ he said.

She didn’t argue. She didn’t say anything. She wanted to tell him she had never been warmer. Something had melted and it would never be cold again.

The moment flew away and he began to swim, and when he reached the pier he held his arms out. She clung to them longer than was necessary and they dressed in silence, aware that a line had been breached, and, beyond it, who knew. On the drive home, he held her hand—nothing more, not even when he said goodbye.

Survival kicked in and she released her grip on the rocks. Angela had considered ways to quash this, this pesky reflex for life, because wouldn’t it be easier to stay down here with her fantasies, living elsewhere in the cool, quiet deep? She didn’t want to return to shore, just as she hadn’t wanted to return to the pier that day. She wanted to stay in the water, if for nothing else than to see what happened.

In being removed from him, she understood now what she should have done.

She should have chosen Noah.

She should always have chosen him. She should have chosen him over Dino, over the business, over Donald’s wishes. She should have chosen him over her dumb pride. She should have chosen him when she was fifteen and her father discovered them, and talked to him and heard him out and tried to understand. When they had rekindled their relationship years later but she’d never got rid of the hurt. When Noah had made love to her at the FNYC launch and she had bundled him out the door. When the suggestion of marriage had been aired. When she had met Dino. When she had told him the truth at the Gold Court Theatre and the flame had gone out in his eyes. She should have chosen Noah. Every time she should have chosen him.

It was too late now. There was no going back. She would never see him again.

There was fire again on the beach, a bundle of smouldering sticks. Eve was tending to it, the half-hearted resurgence of a rescue hope. Angela had been counting the days with stones. Over a month they had been here.

Tawny was gone. Who next? Maybe she would be lucky and it would be her.

At night, alone with her thoughts, Angela prayed that when
it happened, it would happen quickly. Death didn’t frighten her, but dying did.

The sun beat down. The earth turned on, oblivious and giantly indifferent.

She swam back in.

80

P
atience was both agonising and necessary. Noah hung back and counted to his moment. He wasn’t about to risk it now.