Power Games (51 page)

Melinda reached for him.

‘I prefer you like this,’ she said, stroking his head. ‘I never liked the wig.’

‘I thought you hated me bald.’

She kissed him. ‘Just one of the things we never said.’

He drew her close. Their kiss deepened.

‘No more lies,’ he smiled, ‘I promise.’

Taking her hand, Mitch led his wife indoors. He flicked off the light. They climbed the stairs, entwined, exploring each other after so long estranged.

Outside, the stars shone bright. A tiny light moved across the sky.

For a while, Jacob Lyle tried his old life on for size. The city still seduced him, she always would—the flashing lights, the dancing colours, the available women. He embraced the
media and got swept up in the ride; he returned to business and dated a string of beauties. But all of it left him cold.

The world was the same as when Jacob had left it—but he wasn’t.

He burned all his videotapes. He said sorry for every girl he had filmed and remembered the only one he hadn’t: Celeste.

She hadn’t joined him in the limelight; it wasn’t in her nature. Instead, she had gone back to Italy. He had not heard from her since. In LA they had said their farewells, awkward and rushed, wildly inadequate, but how else to express their feelings in front of the world’s press? Jacob had not said what he meant to. He had been whisked off by his entourage and had left her in his wake.

At the end of the year, he travelled to Europe. It was his fourth voyage over the Atlantic in as many weeks. Some were surprised that he still flew, but Jacob could not give in. It wasn’t the plane that had let them down, it was a psychopath called Voldan Cane—a villain still at large, number one on the world’s Most Wanted.

Cane was an evil, dangerous mastermind who deserved to be fried. If only they could find him.

And if it weren’t for the Russians, Cane’s vile plan could have succeeded. They would all have perished, if not by the island then by the hands of the tribe—that eerie, wordless encounter on the last day, mere seconds before the boats came in. All along, they hadn’t been alone. Jacob shivered when he thought of it.

He knew how lucky they had been. That was why, despite Leith Friedman’s best efforts, he could not renege on the MoveFriends sale.

‘A tracking device?’ Leith had baulked. ‘In your watch?’

It wasn’t so strange: a gift as collateral.

The world imagined the intervention to be a stroke of fortune. Fishermen had picked up Noah Lawson, and carried him in on their boat, a happy coincidence.

Funny what people would believe.

Jacob had never visited Venice before. Disembarking on the Piazza San Marco, his trench coat blowing about him, he set off across the famous square.

He felt for the tell-tale shape in his pocket, that small secret box with the diamond inside, and smiled. It spat with rain, and the air smelled fresh and living. He wondered if she would be in—maybe, maybe not, but if Jacob had to wait for her a month it made no odds. He would wait a year to ask this question.

Life was magic, and he was not about to waste another second.

Celeste Cavalieri took a series of backstreets to her Venice apartment, hurrying along rain-slicked alleys and through the hustling throng of tourists.

Not that people recognised her as much as they did the others, the household names. It was bizarre to see her group returned to their glittering pedestals: people, at the core of it, just people. People she had seen weeping, stranded in the sun, sweating and fighting, screaming for help. People she had shared that with.

She had no desire to become part of the media parade.

But while Celeste still hid from the world, she did not hide from herself.

The first thing she had done was to break it off with Carl. She had not done it for Jacob. She had done it for herself. She had done it for Sylvia, who would never have wanted this life for her friend. She had done it for her parents, who had taught her to be free. She had done it for all the people whose trust she had betrayed, those she had stolen from, because if she
was going to learn to do the right thing then she had to start on her own doorstep.

‘It’s over, Carl.’

He had gone to strike her: the only communication he knew. But Celeste wasn’t the weak, battered woman Carl had last seen. She had met the abyss and looked right in its core and she had survived.

It had made her strong. Stronger than him. Alert to the ambushes of the jungle, she had been quick. Seizing Carl’s fist, she had bent it to the small of his back and applied her knee to his groin. Carl had buckled, wheezing, vowing to finish her off once and for all.

Not this time.

When he came for her, she floored him. Celeste had lost weight but every muscle that remained, every sinew and every tendon, was geared towards action.

‘If you come near me again I will kill you. I swear it.’

The following day she collected every stolen item in her apartment, sorted them into parcels and returned them anonymously to every owner she could recall.

All those she couldn’t place, she donated to charity: tens of thousands of dollars, but a priceless exchange for her conscience. It was time to start afresh.

She hadn’t done that for Jacob, either.

But still she could not forget his name …

She knew they were from different worlds. Their time on Koloku had been a bizarre interlude before ordinary life resumed. He was a city-boy, a player. He wasn’t the bearded savage who had made love to her over the forest well. There, they were other people. Here, they were impossible. They had both known it the second they landed in America. Neither knew an avenue back to their intimacy.

It all seemed so strange now, as if it hadn’t really happened.
Koloku, the beach, the camp, the hunting, the fire, the secrets … Another time, another universe.

So why couldn’t she let him go?

Celeste rounded the corner to her street. Immediately, she slowed.

A figure was outside her door. Her first thought was that it was Carl—but no. She recognised this man’s shoulders, his height and the back of his head.

I know you.

He turned. For a second they just looked at each other.

The rain sliced across the abandoned courtyard, the cobbles slick and a thrum of water as it gushed from a broken drain. Celeste dropped her bags and ran to him.

After the rescue, a recovery mission was sent to Koloku.

Night and day an elite team trawled for Tawny Lascelles. Fans refused to accept the account: a crocodile was too much to bear. But when the remaining survivors reported the same in their statements, the terrible fate of the supermodel was realised once and for all.

Unwilling to let her memory fade, those left behind set up a charity in her name—the TLFF, or Tawny Lascelles Face Foundation—that funded those in need of reparative surgery. Tawny’s crusade to make all things beautiful lived on.

Three bodies, however, were located: the two pilots on the mountain, and the body of the female flight attendant. The team uncovered her in a concealed hollow close to the crash site. She had been thrown clear of the aircraft and had died on impact.

All were flown home and given a proper burial.

Only one remained unaccounted for. Kevin Chase.

Kevin had disappeared.

They scoured Koloku, not knowing what they were searching for. The survivors had not seen him since the fall-out, when Kevin had stormed from their camp and pledged to set up on his own. For a while, foul play was suspected. Were the others hiding something? Were they nursing a guilty conscience? But Joan, the boy’s mother, was unwilling to pursue an inquiry.

‘Don’t you want to know what happened?’ the media asked.

‘I know my son,’ said Joan. ‘He was never coming home.’

Neither did they discover the tribe Jacob Lyle had told them about. On the third day, a small rowing boat was located in a pile of reeds to the west of the island. Unknown to the survivors, and given the natives’ ability to evade detection all those weeks, it was suggested they had been coming and going from an adjacent rock.

Or did the boat belong to Kevin?

Was he dodging their search beam?

In the weeks that followed, and in the years to come, Kevin Chase would become one of the most talked-about and enthralling figures of the millennium. Shrouded in mystery, he grew into a mythical Kurtz-like figure, a fabled being on a far-flung landmass, as legendary as Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman or the Loch Ness Monster. People would photograph him on vacation, spot him in a forest or by a lake, swimming in the ocean or homeless on the streets of New York …

T-shirts were printed: I SAW KEVIN CHASE. KEVIN CHASE WAS HERE. KEVIN CHASE LIVES ON. KEVIN—I’LL NEVER STOP SEARCHING.

It gave whole new significance to the words ‘Little Chaser’.

Kevin became the new Elvis. The God of Pop—and for some, God Himself, or at the height of urban conspiracy some messenger from outer space, sent to spread the pop word. His lyrics were analysed in a new light. Could it be that ‘
Girl, I wanna take you out tonight, be your date tonight, be your fate tonight; girl, I wanna take you to my favourite place, buy you burger and fries, give you a tiny surprise
’ was code for some deeper philosophical equation?

For those more rational, Kevin had died. His body had drifted out to sea, or been demolished like Tawny’s. Either way, he was never found.

Meanwhile, Joan Chase’s career soared from strength to strength. With Cut N Dry unreservedly at her back, Joan became a pop sensation, a business queen and a mourning mother: a potent combination. She launched her own fragrance—’Missing You’—and her own pooch fashion range, aided and abetted by Trey the dachshund.

Some days Joan looked at Kevin’s photograph and wept for the son she had lost. She vowed that she would trade her success in a heartbeat, if it meant one more moment with him. Others, she did not think of him at all.

Eve Harley hauled her suitcase onto the bed and began packing. She had to make the most of these pockets of peace, savour each minute before the wailing demands resumed. She had gone past the point of tired, getting by on barely any sleep, and it was harder work than she had ever believed, but all the same she would not swop it for the world. Hope was the start of a new chapter.

After what she had been through, Eve could cope with anything. When she thought back now to the island, to Koloku, to the trauma of her giving birth, it was like it had happened to another person.

In a way, it had.

When she saw the others on TV, or heard their voices on the radio, she felt a necessary pull. They all felt it. It was an invisible tie that would for ever bind them in mutual understanding, for the experiences they shared could never be conveyed to or understood by another. Now, brought back, the context of home was both familiar and distant. As people, they were caught between two stages of existence: the one without boundaries, the group they had been on that island, dark and desperate and somehow free, and this one, who shopped online, who changed her baby’s nappies, who took cabs to meetings and who ate cereal for breakfast.

Eve stood at the wardrobe and surveyed her clothes.

She touched the fabrics. Clothes seemed arbitrary, almost illogical. Fabrics to cover the body, the strange shape of socks, knickers, gloves with their fingers cut out. It was the same everywhere. So much was unnecessary. What humans needed to survive was basic: water, shelter, food, and above all resilience. Yesterday she had been queuing in a Soho café and the woman in front of her had ordered a grande decaf caramel non-fat no-foam whipped cream macchiato. Eve had to leave.

Generally she avoided going down to the city. Like the others, save perhaps for Jacob, she had blanked the attention. As a new mother she carried added allure: they were desperate for her story, but she had no words in which to give it to them. Nothing could describe Koloku. Nothing could describe Hope’s birth. Nothing could describe what happened afterwards. So why try?

She had no need to share it, no desire to confess, and, contrary to what the doctors believed, she wasn’t suffering from pent-up frustration or an urge to repress.

Simply, she did not want to talk about it.

Nor did she wish to return to work, even when Hope was older.

Her editor had been in touch, almost every day at first, promising that her position was open whenever she felt ready. Eve couldn’t imagine ever feeling ready. When she looked around her at the journalists pleading for a comment, camping outside her door and ringing her phone off the hook so she had to change her number, she wondered that she had ever been one of them. She had thought she was putting the world to rights, but all she had been doing was wringing the scandal.

When it came to it, to a human being like Mitch Corrigan whom she had dealt with for so long as a case study, it was at best pointless and at worse damaging. Mitch was a husband and a father, beneath it all just a man, and he had been suffering.

Who was Eve to tear his world apart? Just as she had torn the world from Grigori Cane, unwittingly sealing her place aboard that thwarted Challenger jet.

She could never go back.

Besides, she had a new person to think about now.

Eve peeled items from her hangers and folded them into the bag. There was a snuffle on the baby monitor: Hope was stirring.

Eve smiled. Just minutes without her daughter and she couldn’t wait to see her again: her blue eyes opening, her delicate mouth and her tiny fat hands. She had known straight away what to call her. In the context of Hope’s birth, the choice had been obvious.

So, too, had the first thing she’d done when she got back.

Her baby in her arms, a week after the rescue, Eve had stepped into the visitors’ room at HM Prison Pentonville. Though she had not seen him in years, she recognised her
father straight away. The thing was, he seemed smaller. Terry Harley walked, stooped, towards the plastic chair like an old man, which, she supposed, these days he was. Gone was the tyrant who had used to climb her stairs, the giant all-seeing monster who had clawed through her nights and terrorised her days.