The Stephanie Fitzpatrick series

Seven fifteen. Masson entered the kitchen from the terrace, as he sometimes did, and stopped. On the floor, there was smashed crockery, shattered glass, cutlery. The wooden chair that had been next to the fridge was broken. Not just a slat here or a leg there, but destroyed.

He shouted her name but got no response.

In the sitting room, books had been torn from their shelves and hurled about the room. A turquoise china vase lay in pieces in the cast-iron grate. He ran upstairs to the bedroom; untouched, she wasn’t in it. Back in the kitchen, he noticed blood for the first time. A trail of glossy drops led through the back door and vanished into the coarse grass outside. He looked up and saw her sitting beneath an olive tree, legs dangling over a stone ledge.

‘Stephanie!’

She’d been ready to leave before Alexander had reached the road. But she hadn’t. She’d hesitated. Now, she found she couldn’t remember quite why. An hour had passed. Her mind had drifted. She’d been perversely calm. Later, she’d walked among the vines, and among the lemon trees on the steep bank that rose to the east. Sometime during the afternoon, though, the psychological anaesthetic had begun to fade. First there was sorrow, then incandescent fury.

‘Your hand,’ panted Masson, as he reached her and dropped to her side, ‘what happened to your hand?’

Both hands were in her lap. The left was lacerated over the back and across the knuckles. Sharp fragments protruded from dark sticky cuts.

‘What happened?’

She had no sequential recollection of the passage from late afternoon into early evening. The black rucksack was by the front door. She couldn’t remember putting it there but she did know that Franka Müller’s passport and Deutschmarks were tucked into a side pocket.

‘Should I call the police?’

She shook her head.

He began to protest but stopped himself. ‘You need to see a doctor.’

She saw herself spinning like a dancer. A whirlwind of fury, striking out at anything, her vision blurred by tears of frustration and rage. She wasn’t sure what she’d hit but the pain had been cathartic. As she knew it would be.

They turned off the main road, Masson’s Fiat creaking over the winding track. The headlights flickered on the vines, bugs dancing in weak yellow light. Neither had spoken since leaving Salernes. There were four stitches in the back of Stephanie’s left hand. The smaller cuts and grazes had been picked clean and disinfected. She’d declined the offer of painkillers.

They entered the kitchen. Masson’s eyes were drawn to the one thing he’d missed earlier: the gun by the sink. Stephanie watched him pick up the SIG and turn it over in his hands. She saw anxiety creep across his face.

‘Is this yours?’

She could see that he desperately wanted the answer to be no. ‘Yes.’

‘What are you doing with a piece of hardware like this, Stephanie?’

‘Don’t ask.’

‘I am asking. Just like I’m asking what happened here.’

‘I can give you answers, if you want. But they’ll be lies.’

‘You owe me more than this.’

‘I don’t owe you anything,’ she snapped. ‘No commitments, remember?’

‘Don’t you think this is different?’

‘I think we all have our secrets, Laurent. Pieces of the past that are better left in the past.’ She let him consider that for a few seconds. ‘What do you think?’

He turned away from her. ‘I think I’ll start to clear up some of this mess.’

She reached out and put her good hand on his arm. ‘Not now. It can wait.’

They ate bread and cheese. Masson opened a bottle of wine. They sat at the table on the terrace listening to the chorus of cicadas. When they’d finished, he cleared away their plates and returned with coffee and a dusty bottle of Armagnac. She said she didn’t want any. He said it was medicinal, so she relented and he poured an inch into a dirty tumbler.

When she’d decided not to run, she hadn’t had a reason. It had simply been instinct. Now, she saw why. Alexander had been unarmed. Subconsciously, that fact had registered. No gun, no accomplices, no protection at all. Under the circumstances, an incredible risk. She could have killed him in a moment. He would have had no chance at all. Hindsight prompted the question: why?

Masson poured a glass for himself. ‘Look, about before. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay. But if you do, you can trust me.’

‘I know.’ She gathered her tumbler in both hands and stared at her stitches. ‘Someone came to see me today.’

‘Who?’

‘A man from my past.’

‘What did he want?’

‘A bit of my future.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know yet.’

Masson avoided eye contact and made a show of picking at a thread on the seam of his trousers. ‘That gun … I mean, if you’re in some kind of trouble … if you need help, there are people I used to know who …’

‘I know.’

He looked up at her. ‘You know what?’

‘Why you’re a mechanic.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I know you like cars, Laurent. You like them a lot.’

They sat in silence for a minute before Masson spoke again. ‘Anyway, like I was saying, I know some people who –’

‘It won’t make a difference.’

‘Well, if you change your mind …’

‘Thanks.’

He lit a cigarette. ‘The people in those photographs in the kitchen. Who are they?’

Stephanie shrugged. ‘Just a family I used to know.’

The struggle lasted through Tuesday and Wednesday. She barely slept, barely ate. Sometimes she panicked, sometimes she was almost catatonic. All her arguments seemed circular; her new life was worth fighting for, worth revisiting the past for, except nothing was worth that, nothing except the chance to leave it behind permanently.

On Wednesday, she spent the whole day in the hills, beneath a fierce sun, among the jagged rocks and thorny bushes. She could run, she knew that. And perhaps she’d stay ahead of Magenta House but for how long? If she stopped, they’d find her again. She saw now that it would only be a matter of time. And even if they didn’t find her, the possibility would linger. No matter how hard she tried to pretend it hadn’t, the threat had always been there.

More than anything, she wanted to stop running. The life she’d created for herself at the farmhouse had taught her that, if nothing else. Ultimately, she didn’t know where she was destined to settle. But that didn’t matter. It was the act that was important, not the location. To abandon the dream was to let Alexander win. That had been the insurance against the risk he’d taken in approaching her unarmed. He hadn’t offered his word as a guarantee because he knew she’d reject it – there could never be trust between them – but perhaps the risk had been a gesture of good faith.

By dusk, her feet were blistered, her skin burnt, her mind scorched.

The pretence was over, the memories resurrected. That night, she couldn’t sleep. Repulsion, fear and anger kept her awake. Later, at dawn, there were moments when she almost convinced herself that it wouldn’t be too bad. It’s just one job. But she knew that wasn’t true. Eighteen months of a real life had seen to that. No amount of effort would ever reclaim the edge she’d once had. Despite everything, that made her happy because it made her human.

Magenta House. An organization that doesn’t exist, run by people who don’t exist. An ironic consequence of the modern era. In a time of greater openness, somebody still has to get into the sewer to deal with the rats.

I don’t know how many assassins Magenta House operates – four or five, I should think, perhaps six – but I do know that I was unique among them. They were simply trained in the art of assassination. I was trained for more. Operating under the alias Petra Reuter – a German student turned activist turned mercenary terrorist – I was taught to infiltrate, seduce, lie, eavesdrop, steal, kill. I learnt how to withstand pain and how to inflict it.

It’s been four years since I vanished and I’ve been running ever since, first as Petra, then as me. Even now, after more than a full year living here, I’m still on the run. Alexander’s terms represent an opportunity to stop.

On paper, it’s an easy choice. One job buys any future I want. But I’ve changed since I stopped being Petra. I think I’m becoming the person Stephanie Patrick should have been. And that’s the problem. She might be difficult and selfish – she might be a complete bitch – but she’s not an assassin. Not like Petra, who was never anything else.

I find myself thinking about people like Jean-Marc Houtens, Li Ching Xai, John Peltor, Zvonimir Vujovic, Esteban Garcia. Like Petra Reuter, they are names without faces. I wonder what they’re doing at this precise moment, wherever in the world they are. Petra’s was never a large profession. Sure, you can find a killer on a street corner in the run-down district of any city. You can even find self-styled assassins relatively easily; in the Balkans, or the Middle East, you can’t move for enthusiastic amateurs. But those of us who formed the elite numbered no more than a dozen. Our backgrounds were diverse but we were united by the quality of our manufacture.

I used to imagine meeting other members of the club. I pictured us around a table in a restaurant, trading industry secrets, putting faces to names, assessing the competition. I’d hear gossip from time to time. Usually from Stern, the information broker, who’d offer a morsel in the hope that I would pay for something juicier. For instance, I know that former US Marine John Peltor was responsible for the Kuala Lumpur car-bomb that killed the Indonesian ambassador last year. And that Li Ching Xai was the one who murdered Alfred Reed, founder of the Reed Media Group, in Mumbai in May 1999. A five-hundred-yard head shot in a stiff crosswind, according to Stern.

When I was Petra Reuter, none of the concerns of Stephanie Patrick affected me. Nor did any of the issues surrounding my profession. I didn’t worry about morality. I worried about efficiency. I didn’t worry about the target. If I was offered the contract, he or she was already dead because if I didn’t accept the work, somebody else would. When I looked through a telescopic sight, or into the eyes of the victim, I never saw a person. I never thought about the money, either; that came later. Instead, I was always thinking … would any of the others have done this better than me?

As any female in a predominantly male profession knows, you have to be better than the men just to be equal with them.

Thursday morning. Stephanie watched the sun come up from the terrace. It was chilly for a while. Later, Masson appeared, a cup of coffee in his hand, stubble on his jaw.

‘So, you’re going, then?’

‘You saw the bag?’

‘I saw what you’re leaving behind.’

‘Meaning?’

‘The clothes you’ve left in the cupboard – well, I wouldn’t take them either.’

‘They wouldn’t fit you.’

‘You’d be surprised what I can get into.’

‘The image in my mind is not a pretty one.’

He grinned, then said, ‘Look, are you sure you know what you’re doing?’

‘To be honest, not really. But I know what will happen if I don’t go and that’s something I can’t face. The last year and a bit has been really good for me but before that, well …’

‘What?’

She sighed deeply. ‘For a long time, it was a bad time.’

‘You’re not the only one,’ he said, in a tone that was sympathetic rather than confrontational.

‘I know.’

‘What did you do?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Stephanie …’

‘Just like I don’t want to know about your convictions for auto-theft.’

For a moment, he was stunned. Then he shook his head. ‘You knew?’

‘Not until the other day. But that’s the world I was in. I knew things I never wanted to know. Saw things I wish I could forget. For months, then years, I drifted from one bad hotel to another, from one country to the next, and the things I did … they were …’

She faltered and he put his hands on her shoulders. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

Looking at Masson, she felt helpless. ‘Laurent, I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘I should have said something.’

‘No. I don’t think so. We’ve had a good time, just the way it’s been.’

She couldn’t bring herself to look into his eyes. ‘True.’

‘I always knew it wouldn’t be forever with you. That was part of the attraction.’

‘Thanks very much.’

‘You know what I mean.’

She nodded. ‘I am planning on coming back, though. If I can …’

He took her right hand in his. ‘Let’s not talk about it. Let’s sit here and drink coffee in the sun. We can pretend you’re going away and that you’ll be back for the weekend. I’ll cook something special for you. We’ll make love, drink too much wine. And we’ll do the same thing the day after, the week after … and before you know it, summer will be gone and it’ll be autumn.’

3

Stephanie had never imagined that the sight of Brentford would trigger any kind of emotion within her. But there it was, a tightening in the chest. She pressed her face to the window as the aircraft ducked out of the clouds. Terraced streets, crumbling tower blocks, storage depots. Her first sight of London in four years and she hadn’t missed it at all. What she felt was not some misplaced sense of nostalgia. It was anxiety.

She took the Underground into London, changed from the Piccadilly Line to the District Line at Gloucester Road, rising to the street at Embankment. It was hot and humid, the sky a dirty grey smudge. Tourists swarmed around hot-dog stands, the smell of fried onions corrupting the air. Across the Thames, the Millennium Wheel turned slowly. Stephanie slung her rucksack over her shoulder and entered Victoria Embankment Gardens. Through a veil of leaves, she saw Magenta House; a network of company offices housed within the single shell of two separate buildings. The main entrance was on the corner of Robert Street and Adelphi Terrace, where she recognized the thing she liked most about Magenta House: the brass plaque by the front door. Worn smooth by years of inclement weather and pollution, the engraved lettering was still legible. L.L. Herring & Sons, Ltd, Numismatists, Since 1789. She glanced up at the old security camera above the door. On the intercom next to the plaque, she pressed the button marked Adelphi Travel.

The voice was terse and tinny. ‘Yes?’

‘I’m here to see Alexander.’

‘Alexander who?’

‘Very funny.’

‘I think you must have the wrong –’

‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. It’s been four years.’

‘I’m sorry, madam, but –’

‘And you can drop the “madam” thing.’

‘There’s no one of that name –’

‘Just tell him Stephanie Patrick is here.’

Inside, the reception area was as she remembered it. On the wall to her right, there was a polished wooden board listing the names of companies. Some existed, others didn’t, and the relationship between them and Magenta House was as complex as the maze of corridors and staircases within the building. She remembered a few – Galbraith Shipping (UK), Truro Pacific – and saw others that were new: Galileo Resources, WB Armstrong Investments, Panatex Ltd. A bored-looking woman sat in front of a ten-year-old computer terminal, playing Hearts, smoking. Middle-aged beneath a crumbling mask of make-up, she was designer-shabby. Just like the security camera over the front door, the worn carpet and the faded blue-and-grey striped wallpaper. Each was a brick in the façade behind which Magenta House hid. Stephanie knew there were miniature security cameras concealed within the lights over the paintings, that the quaint front door was actually grenade-proof, that the weary harridan had a fully-loaded Glock attached to the underside of the table.

She spoke out of one corner of her mouth, the cigarette wedged in the other. ‘Down the hall, take the stairs and –’

‘I know the way.’

Margaret Hornby, Alexander’s secretary, was not at her desk. Stephanie opened the door and saw him standing by the window.

‘Don’t you believe in knocking?’

‘I don’t believe in anything. Not any more.’

‘You’re too old to play the teenage rebel, Stephanie.’

‘But too young to retire?’

She didn’t think anything had changed; the shelves crammed with leather-bound books along opposite walls, the Chesterfield sofa, the parquet floor and the Persian carpet, the antique Italian globe in the corner. She remembered how disappointed she’d been to learn that it wasn’t a tasteless drinks trolley.

‘What happened to your hand?’ asked Alexander.

‘I cut myself flossing.’

He let it pass and moved away from the window. Curiously, on home ground, he seemed more cautious.

‘You’ve made the right decision, you know.’

‘It had to happen some time.’

He slid an envelope across his desk. She picked it up and felt keys inside. There was an address on the front. Alexander said, ‘This is where you’ll stay. It’s a furnished rental. We start on Monday morning at nine. That gives you the weekend to get settled.’

Stephanie smiled without a trace of humour or warmth. ‘That’s going to take more than a weekend. That’s going to take years.’

The two-bedroom flat was on the top floor of a five-storey Victorian red-brick building on Bulstrode Street, just off Marylebone High Street. The communal entrance hall was dust and junk mail. The staircase grew narrower and darker with each floor. The locks on the front door had been changed. Inside, the air was still and stale. Stephanie dumped her rucksack in the hall and opened windows in a futile attempt to encourage a cleansing breeze.

The floors were sea-grass, except in the kitchen and bathroom, which were tiled. The walls were all painted off-white and the windows had blinds, not curtains. She ran a tap in the bathroom; there was hot water. In the kitchen, the stainless steel fridge was cool but empty. She looked through the cupboards. Nothing except a jar of Marmite and half a bag of long-grain rice. The main bedroom had a low double bed, a mattress as hard as concrete, and a pristine white duvet.

In the sitting room, there was a TV in one corner, a black leather sofa, a table with a top that was a large disc of etched glass. There were paperbacks on the shelves, CDs in a rack, framed black-and-white prints of pouting models down one wall. Definitely a man’s flat, Stephanie decided, but a real man? There were some framed snapshots on the mantelpiece above the Victorian fireplace. She picked one up; a shot of a pretty girl with long, light brown hair. She was smiling. Stephanie turned it over, released the clip and opened the back. The cosy, family photo had been culled from a glossy brochure. She examined the paperbacks. Not a single crease along a single spine.

Stephanie recognized the signs; the clumsy, artificial human touches that only served to underline the place’s cold sterility. Pure Magenta House.

After the rank heat of a Monday morning rush hour on the Underground, the cool air conditioning of the subterranean conference room was welcome. The walls and carpet were the same dark grey as her T-shirt. There were sixteen screens set into the wall on her left, in a four-by-four arrangement. At the centre of the room, there was an oval cherry table with ten chairs around it, black leather over graphite frames.

‘Hey, Stephanie.’

Stephanie turned round. Rosie Chaudhuri was standing in the doorway. She was slimmer than four years ago and it made her look younger. She wore a tight dark red knee-length skirt and a black silk shirt. Her lustrous black hair was gathered into a thick ponytail.

‘Rosie.’

‘I’m sorry to see you again.’

‘Me too.’

They smiled at each other.

‘Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea? A ticket out of here?’

‘Sounds good.’

‘You look well.’

‘So do you.’

When Alexander entered the room, Rosie left, taking the warmth with her. He sat at one end of the table, Stephanie sat at the other. There was no small talk. He pressed a button on a silver remote control and a single picture appeared over four screens; a black-and-white portrait of a dour-looking man with a long face, a craggy brow and thinning hair swept over the scalp from one ear to the other.

‘This is James Marshall. A former SIS employee who came to work for us and then retired early.’ Alexander shifted awkwardly. ‘Unfortunately, he developed a drink problem that … well, it got out of hand and affected his reliability.’

‘I can’t imagine how that could’ve happened working here.’

‘In the past, he’d proved to be an effective field operator. Which partly explains why, out of some misguided notion of loyalty, we continued to employ Marshall on an informal, part-time basis. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement; he got a little extra cash to supplement his disgraceful pension, we got someone we could rely upon for the odd job that was better handled by an outsider. Which was why, in April, I chose Marshall to run an errand for me in Paris. It seemed perfect since he chose to live in Paris after leaving us.’

Marshall’s face was replaced by some footage from a security camera. Run in slow motion, it showed a man moving through a customs hall before being beckoned by officials. The footage then froze to focus on him; tall, with sandy hair slanting across the forehead down towards the left eye. The next images were stills; head-and-shoulder shots from the front and side.

‘Hans Klepper, a Dutch career criminal based in Amsterdam, heroin his speciality, all of it through Indonesia, the routes secured by influential friends bribed in Jakarta. The video footage we’ve just seen was taken at Heathrow on December the sixteenth last year, as Klepper stepped off a flight from Baku. Acting on an SIS tip-off from Moscow, but originating in Novosibirsk, customs officials intercepted Klepper, who was travelling on a false Belgian passport. Being well aware of Klepper’s reputation, they expected to find him carrying heroin. Instead, they found Plutonium-239. Seventeen hundred and fifty grams of it with a purity of ninety-four per cent. Do you know why that’s significant?’

Stephanie shook her head.

‘Anything above ninety-three per cent purity is weapons-grade. What’s more, you only need about eight kilos of it to make a nuclear weapon. Klepper was carrying the Plutonium-239 in protective canisters inside two suitcases. He was also carrying quantities of Lithium-6, which enhances bomb yields, even though it’s not radioactive itself.’

‘What’s a heroin dealer doing with nuclear material?’

‘The obvious question.’

‘What was Klepper’s answer?’

‘He didn’t have one. He died.’

Stephanie raised an eyebrow. ‘There and then?’

‘Within an hour.’

‘How?’

‘Heart attack.’

She glanced at the stills. Klepper looked as though he was in his late thirties or early forties. ‘Heart attack?’

Alexander nodded. ‘Artificially induced. Klepper would’ve known that once his case was marked for examination he was in trouble. He’d have known that in the custody suite he’d be stripped and searched. The postmortem revealed a pin-prick on his left wrist. An examination of his clothes and effects revealed a Mont Blanc pen that had been adapted to act as a syringe, attached to a cartridge of chemically doctored Alfentanil. The pen acted as a delivery device, like those gadgets used by diabetics. As a weapon, it was not unlike the umbrella tip used on Georgy Markov, the Bulgarian dissident, here in London in September 1978.’

The slow-motion footage resumed. Klepper approached an examination bench, hauled both cases onto it and handed his passport to an official. Then he reached inside his jacket pocket and took out his Mont Blanc pen. The most mundane action imaginable. He appeared to adjust the pen, holding it with one hand, twisting with the other. He was looking the officials in the eye, giving silent answers to their silent questions. They never noticed the jab. Discreet but firm, he never flinched.