Two Women (21 page)

Burcher again broke the impasse. ‘There is a great deal of annoyance.'

‘Of which – in which – I am in no way involved. Nor is the firm, only by title, which has no relevance any more.'

‘I'll make the argument,' promised Burcher.

Could he make his own argument, Carver asked himself. And followed with the other questions. Was he brave enough? Strong enough? Did he have incrimination enough? ‘I need the guarantee.'

‘I need the missing documentation,' declared Burcher, flatly.

‘I know that.'

‘Everything,'
insisted the lawyer.

‘Everything,' agreed Carver.

‘Have you told anyone? Your wife, for instance?'

Carver wasn't sure how much longer he could hold on. Minutes. No more than minutes. He moved one hand to cover the other. His skin was tingling, sensitive to the touch: unreal. It was all unreal, so totally disorientating. Forcing the steadiness into his voice, he said: ‘Of course not! Tell his daughter what her father had done!'

‘What about Alice Belling?'

Carver later thought – although never admitting it – that if he had not been sitting he might actually have had difficulty in remaining upright, staggered at least, at the numbing awareness of how completely he was trapped. It would be ridiculous to pretend – to question. ‘Absolutely and most definitely not.'

‘I want you to understand, Mr Carver, my clients' determination to recover what is rightfully theirs.'

He had to end it soon! Very soon! ‘I hope you understand my equal determination for separation between us.'

‘I'd be better able to discuss that with my clients if I left today with what they want.'

Carver indulged himself – tried to recover – with a hint of derision. ‘Do you honestly imagine that it would be here?'

‘I'd certainly imagine that you have safes here. A security vault.'

Not imagine, thought Carver. He'd know. Know from a bewildered, terrified, tortured Janice Snow. ‘What you want is divided between bank safe-deposit boxes. And the banks are now closed.'

‘I've talked about mistakes, Mr Carver. Too many totally unnecessary mistakes.'

‘Which I've heard.'

‘I hope you have, Mr Carver. Sincerely hope you have. You already appear to have a complicated personal life: it's not one to complicate further. This is a situation to be ended.'

‘As is our connection,' persisted Carver. ‘I've given you my guarantee. I look forward to yours.'

‘I want it all by tomorrow,' demanded the man, letting the artificial politeness slip for the first time.

Carver's only need – a physically aching need – was to end this confrontation: end it and escape. ‘Where can I reach you?'

‘You can't. I'll reach you here, tomorrow. Noon.'

‘You're coming here at noon?'

‘I didn't say that. I said I'd reach you here, at noon.'

‘I'll be waiting.'

‘We both will.'

It was three hours before Carver got to Princes Street, almost one of them spent practically unmoving – initially slumped – in his chair in the darkened office, recovering. He was exhausted by the encounter and further drained, more so mentally than physically, by analysing it all and what he had to do as a result of it.

He'd telephoned, warning her, and when he entered her apartment Alice said: ‘Jesus!'

‘I know,' he stopped her. ‘Shit on a stick.'

‘Not even close.' She poured her prepared drinks, spilling some in her own nervousness, and said: ‘So it was bad?'

Carver stared into the Martini. ‘That's the funny thing. It didn't seem so, when it was happening. It was only afterwards, thinking about it all. Listening.'

‘Tell me.'

He did, rehearsed, word-perfect, and Alice put her drink aside, head bowed. She didn't immediately speak when he finished and Carver didn't try to prompt her, his mind once more analyzing what he'd said, trying to think of what he might have overlooked or misinterpreted, finding nothing. There was, though, still the denouement.

Alice said: ‘He knew about me?
They
know about me?'

‘By name. Involved with me. He didn't associate you with the hacking.'

Alice hadn't once personally answered her telephone since the Space for Space manager's recognition of her voice, tensed for the man to call back after tracing her number by dialling the 69 ‘last-call' identification code. He hadn't. Her line had gone five times that day, twice Carver trying to find her – the last time warning of his arrival – and twice with editorial queries on articles she'd written. The fifth caller had ominously disconnected, without leaving any message. She'd been too frightened to dial 69 herself, to learn who the caller was. ‘What
did
he say?'

‘That they knew the intrusion originated from here, from Manhattan.'

‘That all?'

‘That they were going to find out who it was. Which we know they can't, because you didn't leave any identification, did you?'

Alice was on the point of telling him, but decided against it. ‘What about you and I?'

‘The threat was there, as it was in everything else he said.' It was the moment to tell her, to reassure her. ‘In fact, he said far too much.'

Alice retrieved her drink, frowning across at him. ‘What do you mean?'

‘I recorded everything. We've had the wired-in system for years, for client interviews.' He smiled. ‘I pressed the button and got it all: I've even made a copy, before I came here tonight. And we've got his name: or at least the name he's using. He might even be the conduit through whom George dealt. Combined with everything else, it's the dynamite that'll blow them away.'

Alice smiled back. ‘And there's going to be a meeting tomorrow?'

‘He's contacting me at noon, to arrange a place.'

‘Which makes it perfect. He tells you, you tell the Bureau and they pick him up, with the evidence, when he makes the meeting.'

Carver looked at her for several moments before saying: ‘No.'

‘What do you mean, no?'

‘That way I lose it all, the firm, us, Jane. We've talked about it.'

Alice put her drink aside again to come over to where Carver was sitting. She knelt at his feet and took his glass from him, so that she could take both his hands in hers. She said: ‘No, John.' Then, spacing the words: ‘No! No! No! We've also talked about how they're too big for us to fight. They killed George and they killed Janice and they'll kill you …'

‘Not when they hear the tape. And I tell them I've got a copy of it as well as duplicates of everything else.'

‘John, you can't frighten
them
!'

‘I'm not trying to frighten them. I'm not going to threaten them. All I want is severance. This is my insurance. Our insurance.'

Alice felt a sweep of helplessness: of not knowing what to say, what to do. And then, abruptly, she did know. ‘I want you to promise me something. I want to know where you're going to meet this man Burcher.'

‘Why?'

‘I want to know where you're going to be. That you're going to be safe. Make it somewhere open, the park maybe, with people all around you. Not an enclosed office or an apartment. Or a car where they can take you anywhere they want.'

‘All right.'

‘Mean it!'

‘I mean it.' The demand had been reversed, Carver realized.

‘Can you stay?'

‘Not with Jane the way she is.'

‘Call me then, when the arrangements are fixed.'

‘OK.'

‘I love you.'

‘I love you, too. It's all going to work out fine.'

‘I know,' said Alice. And believed she did.

Stanley Burcher's irritation was soon subdued by his inherent objectivity. He knew what he was going to do and wished he didn't have to use the Delioci Family to achieve it but his brief, final involvement with them wouldn't give them any continuing rights.

Fifteen

W
hat sleep she managed was fitful, half-awareness briefly broken by horror dreams of men hitting and beating and torturing people, of trying to run or escape: once it was John very clearly in her mind and another time it was herself and it was so real, so painful, that Alice woke crying out at the hurt. She felt physically sick when she finally, properly, awoke, and then she
was
sick, needing to run to the bathroom, and as she retched she decided that it was scarcely surprising, knowing – but even more frighteningly, not knowing – what she was that day going to start. The nausea wasn't helped by her having finished off the Martini pitcher without bothering to eat after Carver had left the previous night. She couldn't remember eating lunch, either. She forced herself now to eat toast she didn't want and drink coffee that she did, to take a headache pill.

What
was
she going to start that day? Too much yet to comprehend or imagine. Total, devastating upheaval, the most devastating of all, destroying her life with John. And it would be destroyed, Alice forced herself to admit. What was actually involved in entering the Witness Protection Programme was another thing she couldn't anticipate, apart from being given an entirely new identity, possibly in an entirely new country, but she didn't believe there would be any chance of retaining contact with John. More importantly, she didn't believe he would want to be with her, know her, because what she was going to do would end the firm of George W. Northcote International, and with it most likely John's marriage to Jane, from the humiliating exposure that would result. Alice accepted – although it was the last thing in the world she wanted to accept – that he'd hate her, for making all that happen. Despise her, for wrecking – desolating – all their lives.

But at least they would
have
lives. Not be crushed or defaced or throttled. And maybe, even, he would have Jane. The humiliation of knowing what her father had been and done would not be public, in front of all her friends, because she wouldn't be able to have those friends any more. If she and John could make their peace they could still have each other after all.

What of her peace? Alice asked herself. The most unknown of all the unknowns. She guessed it would take a long time, if she ever found it at all. So was she prepared to take the first, irrevocable step upon the journey on which she was about to embark? No, not if there had been any other choice. If there had been the slenderest of straws she would have grabbed, not just clutched at it. But there wasn't. There were already two tortured bodies to attest to that. She'd make a third, she supposed, although mentally agonized, not physically broken. She hoped. It still wasn't fixed yet. Nothing whatsoever was fixed: not in place as logically, sequentially, as it was in her mind. It could actually still go wrong, even when it was fixed. Not go sequentially at all, like it did in movies. She had to ensure everything was right, first time. There'd be no chance – no action replay, take two, take three, rewind – for it to be got right, as it had to be got right. Alice was terrified. Physically, mentally, in every way possible, absolutely terrified.

Which she couldn't be. If she let herself be motivated solely by fear – another way of saying unthinking panic – it wouldn't be right first time. Disaster would implode upon disaster. She would have liked a stiffening drink, even with the orange pinkness of dawn still smearing the faraway horizon of New Jersey, but the thought brought her again too close to retching and she put the unthinkable thought aside, because it was unthinkable. Booze wouldn't help. The reverse. The only thing – the only person – who could help her was herself, keeping in their strict and proper order in her mind what she had to do and how she had to do it. Another intrusive, irrational thought came to her and she thrust that aside, not because it was unthinkable but because it was dangerous and the last thing she could risk was any more danger than she already knew she faced.

Alice carried her coffee from the kitchen to her office to get the telephone number of the FBI's Manhattan field office on Broadway's Federal Plaza from the telephone directory and used a street map to trace a zig-zag route back and forth across the city. She was unsure whether it would be quicker – better to keep her on schedule – to use the subway rather than risk buses on gridlocked streets, and decided she had an easy choice of alternatives if above ground proved more difficult than below. It might, actually, make sense to dodge up and down.
They
knew she'd hacked from Manhattan. Were looking for her here. They knew her name was Alice. So did the over-friendly manager of the cybercafe, who might have got her number from the call-back service even if he hadn't used it yet. But who would volunteer it soon enough – scream it over and over again – under whatever torture he was subjected to. She couldn't wait until the protection programme to disappear. She had to do it now. That realization prompted another, which she at once recognized was going to tighten up her schedule because she'd decided she had to be back in Princes Street by eleven thirty that morning, but it was a precaution she most definitely had to take. She was pleased it had occurred to her now, in time, and not as an afterthought when it might have been too late. She checked her balance and calculated that even leaving sufficient for her regular payments to be met she had slightly over $17,000 if she withdrew from her savings as well as her checking account. Her branch was downtown, which would increase the dangerous, unnecessary temptation. Once more she put it to one side.

Alice sat for a long time upon her remade bed, knowing she had to make herself invisible as, according to John, the quiet-talking Stanley Burcher made himself invisible. She chose scuffed gym shoes, jeans, a white T-shirt and a kagoul with an all-encompassing hood. She posed in front of the closet mirror – raising and lowering the hood several times – to satisfy herself that with it raised she became a wallpaper person. She finished the effect with dark glasses and was even more satisfied. She decided the necessary satchel completed the impression of an indeterminately aged student.