A Risk Worth Taking

Creep. As Samira followed the fence line, a rhino-sized cow jerked its head up and eyed her, freezing, as if she wouldn’t notice it if it didn’t move. One by one its sisters followed until half a dozen black-lashed brown eyes tracked her progress. “Va tutto bene,” she said, quiet and warm. “Non aver paura.” Right—because Tuscan cows were more likely to understand It’s all right, don’t be scared in Italian? The rhino’s head twitched and a smaller cow sprang sideways, but for a change they didn’t bolt en masse. Maybe they were getting used to her. Which had to be Fate’s way of warning her it was time to move on.

* * *

WELL AFTER DARK, Samira jerked awake. The A-Team theme tune was squeaking out of her phone. She swiped it off, her chest tight. Definitely engine noise, but low. She swallowed. A car in the night was unusual but not unheard of.

Another alarm. The A-Team again. A second car on the road. She silenced it, shot out of bed, slipped on her waiting boots and coat and grabbed her backpack. Two cars on her little road at this hour? One hell of a coinciden—

The alarm shrilled again, followed immediately by the MacGyver tune. Shit. Three vehicles, one already on the driveway. Working on feel, she pulled up the bedcover, restored the pillows, scattered cushions over top and let herself out of the cottage, as she’d practiced a dozen times, keeping out of scope of her sensor lights. MacGyver started over. Multiple engines purred. Modern, expensive cars—two on the driveway now.

By the next repeat of MacGyver, she was ankle deep in pasture, cows scattering before her. The cold whipped her bare legs. Her heart thumped with the shock of being slingshot out of warmth and sleep. With fumbling fingers, she set the phone to vibrate, blinking fast to force her eyes to adjust. Damn, she should have practiced her evacuation at night. The first engine muted. A car door clicked open. Her breath skittered as she stumbled uphill, looking over her shoulder. Her security lights burst on, flooding the courtyard and driveway, and setting her phone shaking again. A big black SUV had pulled up in the turning bay, headlights doused. Four darkly clad figures silently fanned out, their arms locked straight and pointed downward. Handguns. An identical vehicle pulled up alongside, leaving one more engine approaching. More people spilled out. Her phone kept vibrating. Or was that just her hand?

A crack, a smash—wood, and glass. Hooves thundered, shaking the earth, the cows’ glow-in-the-dark flanks flashing past. Hell, they wouldn’t stampede her, would they? Between their flying bodies she made out the figures of two men down at the French doors, looking like they were pulling up from a shoulder charge. White-blond hair gleamed from one guy’s head. He braced for another go. She upped her pace but her foot shot into a hole. Her ankle buckled, pain flashing through it, and she sprawled onto the grass, her cry muffled by a crash as the door gave. She pushed herself up and tested the ankle. Just a strain. Cold dew coated her leg. Focus on what’s right in front. Small steps. If she didn’t capitalize on her scant head start, she was—what? Dead? Despite her efforts to make the cottage look deserted and as pristine as if a cleaner had just left, the goons might feel her body heat in the small bedroom. If they pulled back the covers, they’d discover the sheets were warm...

Her chest pinched. The world tipped, and she planted her feet wide. No. Not now. She squeezed her eyes tight. Don’t do this to me, Brain. I know we’re in danger. Small steps, okay? One foot. Another foot. Another.

Fighting for every breath, she reached the fence to the olive grove, squeezed between the wires and scraped through the trees. Below, they’d switched on one set of headlights, aimed outward. Another set clicked on, directed into the field she’d just left. The cows bolted again.

Yep, use those lights, people. They’d be blind to anything outside the reach of the beams.

She pitched forward, groping in her coat pocket for the Fiat key. It rasped as it went in the lock. She eased the door open. The interior light flicked on. Shit. She scrabbled to disable it, panting. She threw the backpack on the passenger seat and her butt on the driver’s seat. Her hand shook as she jabbed the key at the ignition. Come on, come on. After a few wild misses, it slid in.

She froze. Oh God, she couldn’t start the car—they’d hear it. She covered her nose and mouth with both hands, which only amplified her struggling, squeaking breath. Her airways felt like they were narrowing. No. Why screw this up for yourself? Her assailants had to be fanning out. They’d find her in minutes. Her phone was still vibrating. She snatched it from her pocket and switched off the alarm. She was well alarmed.

She stilled, staring at the screen. She forced her trembling hands to navigate the unlock pattern. The Bluetooth signal was faint but it might be just enough. Lights zigzagged across her vision as she scrolled her playlist.

“I Knew You Were Waiting.”

“She Works Hard for the Money.”

“Because the Night.”

No, no, no, no.

Oh. She paused, scrolled back up a few tracks. Yes.

Swiping quickly, she hooked into the cottage speakers, slid them to full volume and pressed Play. From downhill, a snare drum hammered. She tapped along on the steering wheel—eight quick counts—and shakily started the engine as the drum and bass guitar joined, followed by the rhythm.

She automatically went for the headlights, stopping herself a second short of stupidity, and navigated out of the rutted driveway and onto the road, eyes open so wide they hurt. Joan Jett launched into her lyrics, echoed by half a dozen ghostly Joans glancing off the surrounding hills, half a second off the beat. The connection would cut out at the end of the track. Two minutes and fifty-five seconds. One song. One chance.

“I Love Rock ’n’ Roll,” the hillsides sang.

“So do I, Joan,” Samira muttered. “But now what do we do?”

After a couple of minutes of driving, the tinny phone speaker kicked in, as the next song on the playlist uploaded. Out of range. The cottage would have silenced. Advantage over. Was it enough? She was in the next valley, so the car sound would be difficult to pinpoint. No movement or lights in the rear-vision mirror, and her preplanned escape route had enough twists and turns they couldn’t easily track her. First chance she got, she’d contact Tess, nail down a new plan.

“Time Has Come Today,” squeaked out of the phone.

Indeed. Time to come out of hiding and end this, whether she liked it or not—and she definitely did not. But Hyland had just made her decision for her.

“Yes, Joan,” Samira said, swinging into a side road. “The time has come.”

CHAPTER TWO

London

IT WASN’T PARANOIA. Samira was being followed. A tall, brittle man with crisp blond hair fading to white. Jeans, a brown leather jacket, a burgundy overnight bag. The guy who’d shoulder-charged the French doors the night before last?

In Paris that morning he’d been one of the few other patrons at the café two blocks from the Gare du Nord, apparently engrossed in the weekend Le Monde. At the station, she’d bought her ticket to London minutes before the cutoff for the 8:13 a.m. train—but as she’d crossed the concourse she’d glanced back to see him scurrying into the Eurostar ticket office. If he had time to read the newspaper and drink a café latte, why wait until the last moment? She should have kept walking, waited for the next train, aborted the whole lunatic mission. Midway through the Channel tunnel, he’d strolled into her carriage and slipped into a vacant aisle seat three rows behind. He’d hung back as the train emptied at St Pancras and lingered among the seats, tapping on a phone. She’d ducked into the bathroom, willing him to disappear, hissing to her sunken-eyed mirror image that she was being irrational. More than one man in Europe had white-blond hair. When she emerged, he was still there.

Now he was trailing her down the travellator to border control. Coincidence? She dragged her tongue over her teeth. She didn’t do coincidences anymore.

She looked around for a clock. Tess and Flynn should be waiting at Pancras Square near the station, after landing at Heathrow overnight, as they’d hurriedly planned. Very soon, if the passport worked, Samira could sponge off their confidence. Just having people to talk to would be a novelty, if she was even capable of carrying a conversation.

After the hushed voices and hum of the train, the station boomed with white noise that filled the air like a gas, curving up to its soaring glass dome and sweeping back down. Pearly light hung in the air. As she pulled up at the back of the immigration queue, she adjusted the plastic shopping bag on her shoulder. Inside, the polystyrene-wrapped champagne bottles whispered and clunked. Somewhere among the thick-coated passengers a newborn baby yelled, long beyond the reach of comfort, its shuddering mews swelling, ebbing, swelling, ebbing. Her blood pressure was playing that song, too.

She tightened her scarf and pulled her necklace over top of it, fingering the small gold cross. The queue was moving slower than she’d bargained for. There blew the theory that fooling UK border control at the Gare du Nord was enough, that the check at this end would be cursory. She shuffled to her right. Ahead, at a counter hung with a sagging string of red tinsel, a blue-shirted officer studied a passenger’s passport and ticket. Did they suspect something or were these checks standard? She’d only ever entered Britain with her parents, through diplomatic checkpoints.

Not that she always got a free pass into the United States, either, despite her green card. Carrying alcohol was a ruse Latif had adopted for their many flights in and out of JFK, when foreign students with names and faces like his had begun to draw suspicion.

They see the whiskey and figure you’re not some extremist jihadist, he’d once said at duty-free, picking up a bottle of Jim Beam he’d later donated to Charlotte.

She’d laughed. Or they conclude it’s an elaborate ruse to make you look less like a jihadist and pin you down for a cavity search.

She’d called him paranoid.

She shut her eyes tight until the burn eased. Not paranoid enough, in the end. Really, she needed to stop reliving their every conversation. And if she wasn’t doing that, she was having imaginary new ones. Sometimes imaginary arguments, sometimes aloud, pausing for his answers as they ran through her head. Day by day his image faded but his voice still curled through her.

Great, so she had two voices in her head—Latif’s and Jamie’s. Way too much time alone.

She pulled down the edge of the champagne bag to better reveal its contents. Doubling down on the paranoia because today it was her friend—and racial profiling wasn’t.

On the pretense of cricking her neck, which really did need a crick after a night sleeping in her car, she glanced over her shoulder. The blond man was two people behind. She swallowed past a prickly lump in her throat. Subterfuge was way beyond her comfort zone. Sure, she’d done shady things—hacked into secure systems, cracked passwords, unleashed harmless viruses—but only from behind a keyboard and monitor and only to prove she could or to test her clients’ systems. It was Latif who’d got off on this spy stuff, Latif who’d dragged her into this world of shadows, Latif who’d got killed and left her to finish this.

She spun her backpack to her front and removed the passport. Her hand trembled. Pretending to be engrossed in fiddling with a zip, she shuffled forward with the crowd.

Here she was in strolling distance of Regent’s Park but not yet officially in the country. No-man’s-land. In front, a toddler peeped over his mother’s shoulder, eyeing Samira through thick black curls. She gave what she hoped was an indulgent smile. The tot ducked. After a few seconds he peeped one hazel eye up. She winked and the boy buried his face, wrapping fat arms around his mother’s neck. The game continued until they moved off—and didn’t do a thing to settle Samira’s nerves. From somewhere the newborn was still wailing. Samira’s breath was getting shorter. Her chest stung.

Not now. Not ever but not now. But when did a panic attack ever come at a convenient time? She forced a deep inhalation.

“Next!” An officer beckoned Samira—young, light brown hair tied back, expression set to don’t-fuck-with-me. “Ticket and passport.”

The woman flattened Samira’s passport at the photo page, wincing. “This is a very old passport. Not machine-readable.”

Heat rolled up Samira’s face. “Yes, I need to get a new one soon.” She’d checked it was legally valid for entry, despite its looming expiry date. The forger had sworn that everything about the passport was legit except the photo, which had been swapped for hers, and that it hadn’t been reported stolen. Its owner had sold it to him and he’d repurposed it for Samira—for a gagging price.

The woman made a ticking noise. “What is the purpose of your visit?”

“A wedding, of a university friend.” Samira had been confidently faking an Italian accent all morning but suddenly she felt like a bad actor.

“Where is this wedding?”

“In Cornwall.”

“Where in Cornwall?”

Samira frowned. “Ah, it’s in...” She riffled through her backpack and pulled out a gilt-edged invitation on heavy matte card, created yesterday at a self-serve print shop on the outskirts of Paris. “Mousehole?” She held out the card, deliberately mispronouncing the town’s name. According to the forger, the passport’s former owner—real owner—had never visited Britain.

The woman smirked. “Mow-zul. Wait here.” She left her post, with Samira’s documents. Damn. Why?

Behind Samira, a man groaned. One thing she wished she hadn’t double-checked: using a fake passport at the border could get her ten years in prison or—once they figured out her real identity—deportation, probably to Ethiopia, though she’d spent only a few years of her life there. Either way, assassins would be waiting. And questions would be asked of her parents. The Ivy League–educated daughter of career diplomats busted for identity fraud? She pulled a water bottle from her bag and worked a sip down her throat. Maybe she should have taken the risk with her real passport.

No. It could have taken weeks to get a visa, raising too many flags in too many systems and giving her enemies ample notice to arrange a welcoming party. And she’d already lost time with the postcard delay. This plan was imperfect but it was the best she had. In risk versus risk, risk had won out.

The woman approached a man in the same blue uniform, who was surveying the queue with his arms crossed. He bent his head to one side to catch her words, his pale forehead creasing. Both faces turned to Samira. Here we go. She forced her expression to neutral, channeling the psychology journal article she’d read online yesterday. “The Physical Manifestations of Guilt.” She’d converted it into a list of takeaways and memorized them—because she was that much of a geek—then set fire to her list in a Dumpster in a deserted alley, followed by every page of her evidence. Tess had a copy, for what it was (not) worth.

Look unconcerned but not wide-eyed. Not flustered but not cocky. And, most challenging of all: don’t try too hard.

The man sauntered toward Samira, unfolding his arms. A master of the neutral face she’d practiced in her car mirror. Her vision swam until he looked like he’d turned to jelly and was dancing. She tightened her hand around the liquor bag, as if that’d keep her upright. Hold it together. She’d made it this far. Now it was either freedom and a chance at reclaiming her life, or prison. Or worse.

“Good morning, ma’am. If you wouldn’t mind coming with me a minute...” He spoke quietly, stepping aside to let her by as if it were the gentlemanly thing to do.

They can’t see the nerves in your belly, so don’t let them show in your face.

He led her to a high metal table and leaned an elbow back on it, as if settling in for a leisurely chat-up at a bar. Deliberately keeping this low-key, for now?

“Dove vive, Signorina...” He peered at the passport, clicking and unclicking a cheap ballpoint. “...Moretti?” he asked. A confident Italian speaker but not a native one.

“Certaldo,” she replied. “In una piccola città vicino Firenze.” Bravo, Samira. Six weeks in Tuscany had been just long enough to take her Italian from rough back to smooth, though it might not fool a real Italiano.

“I know it,” he said. “È una bellissima città.” Click. Unclick. Click. Unclick.

“Si,” she said, forcing a proud smile. “The most beautiful place in Italy.”

“Big call.” Click. Unclick. “Che lavoro fa?”

“I have my own web design company.” She reached for her side pocket, where she’d slipped her freshly printed fake business cards—and froze. Not yet. Be accommodating but not too forthcoming. She’d loaded herself with layers of deception, to be revealed gradually and only as necessary.

Click. Unclick. Click. Unclick.

She’d even found a genuine wedding she could claim to be attending, harvesting the details from a bride’s blog. Everyday people put too much on the web—people who thought they had nothing to hide, who thought the world had only benign intentions. People who weren’t being hunted by one of the world’s most powerful people.

Not if I catch you first, Senator.

The officer pulled out a cell phone, held it where they could both see it and typed into the browser her fake name and “web design.” Her breath stalled.

“This one?” he asked, pointing to the top hit.

She nodded, not trusting her voice. The SEO had worked but any second he’d notice the search had netted suspiciously few results—because the site was less than twenty-four hours old.

He clicked the link and the site loaded. “It’s in English.”

“Awo.” She bit her lip. She’d used the Ethiopian word for yes. Old habits... “Pardon me,” she said, patting her upper chest, as if she’d hiccuped. “Si, that version is. Most of my clients are in English-speaking countries. I also have an Italian site.” She pointed to the green, white and red flag icon in a corner of the home page. She’d be almost disappointed if he didn’t open it, after the effort it’d taken to translate.

He studied her as if he could see right through to her Ethiopian DNA sequence. “How much do you charge for a simple e-commerce site?”

“Scusi, signore?” Damn. She had no idea of the going rates.

“My wife and I are thinking about setting up an online...” The other officer signaled him and he raised a pointer finger—one minute. The ambient noise crescendoed, as though it’d been silenced for their conversation and someone had just pressed the unmute button. “Never mind.” He handed back Samira’s documents. “When you return to Certaldo I suggest you update your passport. You’d be surprised how much ID fraud we’re seeing these days. Desperate people out there.” He swept a hand toward the thinning queue. “Hence the extra checks.”

He moved on to his next target, leaving Samira’s “Grazie” hanging—and her way clear to the exit. She zipped the documents into her bag and let her chest fill. It’d gone almost concave. She walked—not too fast—boots clicking on the floor, heartbeat thumping along in her ears in double time.

There was something to be said for paranoia. But her delay had given the blond man time to clear the checkpoint. Leaning on a white column ahead, bag at his feet, he swiped at his phone. He caught her eye and quickly looked away. Too quickly? Dear God. She skirted behind a tribe of tracksuit-clad teenagers—some lanky, overgrown sports team—and strode toward the border control exit. The border itself, technically. Once she left the station, once she found Tess, her nerves would settle. She took note of the area’s security cameras then angled herself away, bunching her hair around her face. She pulled a beanie from her bag and tugged it down to her eyebrows. Facial recognition software wasn’t as easily fooled as human eyes. She slipped on the Audrey Hepburn–style sunglasses she’d picked up in Paris.

Tension fell from her shoulders as she emerged into a soaring atrium—an arcade, with shimmering glass shopfronts over Victorian brick arches. A massive Christmas tree circled up to the dome, so laden with ornaments she could almost hear it groan. She adjusted her backpack. Her shoulders were beginning to ache under its weight, coupled with the champagne. She’d used precious euros to buy a dress, coat and heels at a Parisian outlet store, suitable for a fall wedding, and had gift wrapped some of her spare tech gear. It seemed absurd now to have spent all that money. Or maybe the knowledge that she had proof to back up her ruse had warded off the panic attack. Either way, what was done was done. Very soon, she and Tess would be toasting their breakthrough with the champagne.

She walked faster. Every step got her closer to Tess, Charlotte’s flat and the evidence. A sign ahead pointed to the overland trains. Wait—that wasn’t the right exit. She needed to find the pedestrian tunnel linking St Pancras to the square Tess was waiting in. This was the opposite direction. She stopped and looked around as if she were waiting for someone, picturing the station map she’d studied online. Discordant piano chords plinked out a toe-curling tune. Which way was she supposed to have turned out of border control? The blond guy emerged from the crowd, looked up at the signs and headed toward a taxi rank, without a glance her way.

She closed her eyes a second. She never used to be paranoid. She used to trust that the world was a good place, that nothing bad would happen to a thoroughly ordinary woman. She used to have complete faith in the digital age, in its promise to connect cultures and minds, blur borders between the developing and developed worlds, make information and education accessible for all. She clicked her tongue. At some point the limitless possibilities had become limitless threats. Emails, phone calls, databases, servers, web searches...nothing was private, nothing was truly secure, everything could be traced and hacked in an ever-accelerating spiral of cat and mouse between the security analysts and the hackers—in her case, sometimes one and the same person. Once, she’d been contracted to infiltrate a system she’d previously been hired to secure, and that remained the only one that’d eluded her. She still didn’t know whether to be proud of that or embarrassed.

She blew out a breath. One step at a time. First, find the tunnel. After hours enclosed in a capsule, the thought of fresh air and freedom tugged her toward daylight like a magnet was clamped to her chest. Freedom would come when this was done. Freedom from danger and—just maybe, just a little—freedom from grief and guilt?

A large man in a navy suit pushed past. She snapped out a hand to catch the champagne, and patted her bag’s zip pocket, checking for the outline of her wallet—the fictional Italian signorina’s wallet, rounded out by a fake driver’s license and fake credit card, and the remainder of Samira’s real euros. Getting pickpocketed would be a disaster.

Ignoring her clenching stomach muscles, she followed the signs toward the far end of the long station, white columns marching along beside her. The blond guy couldn’t be the one from the cottage. Her enemy couldn’t know she was here. Nothing would go wrong. She’d passed the biggest challenge—getting into Britain. Maybe the evidence would be damning enough that she wouldn’t need to testify. She could wait out the storm at a cozy flat in an English seaside village where she didn’t see a threat in every shaking leaf or heavy footfall. Then maybe she’d be able to breathe without forcing every inhalation. Since Latif’s death, her every breath had seemed like a conscious effort, as if it were her instinct to die, not live. She’d had the sense she was viewing the world from afar, hardly feeling the ground under her feet.