Kindred Intentions (12 page)

She tried to shoo him away, but he seized her
chin and pushed her against the wall. Her head hit it, causing an intense stab,
but Amelia didn’t dare whisper a single word. She could feel the cold and the
moisture of the concrete passing through her clothes and reaching her skin. But
Mike’s eyes before her were even icier. She couldn’t make out how much truth
was in his menaces. Every time she thought he exaggerated intentionally to
frighten her, but then he did it again and the doubt was instilled in her
again. What terrified her more was that she couldn’t read him.

Then he kissed her. She tried to push him
away, but in vain. At last she found herself surrendering, as she perceived a
sudden surge of excitement. But in that very moment he withdrew.

He scrutinised her, amused. “As I said.”

He’d just wanted to show he was right. It was
another way to confirm his superiority. “I’ve understood you, you know? You’re
a manipulator. You behave like this to keep control over me.”

He shook his head a bit. “You’re wrong, I’m
just schizophrenic.” He smiled. “I have no ulterior motive.”

Amelia decided not to mind those words. She
preferred her theory. “It isn’t true. The truth is that you like me, too.”

He let her go. “That’s obvious, otherwise
you’d be dead by now.”

6

The manhole opened with a faint squeak and the
fresh night breeze filled the well, reaching Amelia at the bottom of the
ladder. She observed Mike looking out, then climbing the last rungs and
exiting. He’d told her to wait, but when he disappeared from her sight, she was
caught by anxiety and started climbing, too.

She had almost reached the top, when his face
peeked out from the manhole and looked at her with a scolding air. She expected
another malicious remark, which involved her being in a hurry or stupid or, for
a change, a bitch, but he said nothing. He offered her a hand and she grabbed
it, letting him help her ascend.

She looked around, disoriented. She was in the
middle of the wood again, in the dark, surrounded by menacing shapes. An insect
flew near her, drawing her gaze up. There was something in the air. The smell
of burnt wood. Now she could make out a glare over the tree tops.

She heard the squeak again and turned to Mike,
as he was covering the entry of the tunnel with some foliage. What did it
matter hiding it now? The hunting lodge was destroyed, he wouldn’t use it
anymore. But she decided not to make any remark.

Once he’d finished his work, he straightened
up and, perhaps attracted by that light, started looking in the direction of
the fire.

“Someone will call the fire fighters; they’ll
trace it back to you.” Amelia surprised herself as she caught a certain amount
of apprehension in her voice. Once back home, she would be forced to tell
everything to her colleagues, including Mike’s identity, so it didn’t make any
difference whether they would trace him back. But should she really do that?
She was in debt to this man. She found herself imagining alternate versions of
the facts she could report to her chief. Bullshit. None would hold up.

“The lodge wasn’t exactly mine. The person to
whom it was assigned doesn’t exist.” He straightened his shirt and turned to
the opposite side.

“And anyway your name isn’t exactly Mike
Connor, right?” How silly of her. She didn’t know his identity. Whatever she
reported, it couldn’t harm him.

She realised that he’d moved away to a few
steps behind her and was showing no sign of stopping. She reached him with a
brief sprint. She was about to ask where they were going, when he stopped. She
followed suit and then it occurred to her that a big off-road vehicle was in
front of them. The car that Yasir had left near the tunnel. Amelia smiled. Was
it really over?

Mike reached the driver’s side and she headed
for the passenger’s one, almost jumping for joy. He opened the door, letting
the overhead light turn on, and sat at the steering wheel, pulling the door
closed. The car was unlocked. And maybe the key was inside. She opened her door
too, and looked in.

He took out his rucksack and put it in the
backseat. “Well? In or out.” He was staring at her now. “Just hurry.”

She decided not to reply. She sat down and
closed her door. She cast a last curious glance at the rucksack, before the
light turned off. She heard the engine start. Ah, she hadn’t noticed where the
key had been. But who cared in the end? “Do you maybe have some water in your
Mary Poppins’s bag?” she asked, pointing out the backseat.

“You’ll find one in the storage pocket of your
door.” Huh, she would’ve rather had a look inside that rucksack. She didn’t
know why, but she was intrigued by the fact that he never separated himself
from it. Maybe she would’ve found some more clues to unravel the mystery
hovering around him.

The car started moving forward, slowly, with its
headlights off. Amelia gave up and reached out in search of the bottle. She was
really dying of thirst. Who knew in which compartment of the car she would
scrape up an aspirin? She probed the left part of her head with her hand,
pressing against her eye and temple.

“Give me a hand, check behind and around us,
and tell me if you see any light.”

She felt the cylindrical shape of a little
plastic bottle. She took it out, opened it, and drank a sip.

“Do you understand?”

She almost choked herself as she tried to
reply. “Yes …” She coughed. “Okay.” A jerk made her hit her head against the
window. “Ouch.” Exactly where it hurt.

“Fasten your seat belt.” Mike’s indulgent tone
reminded her of her mother.

Why the heck had she made that comparison?

She put the water back and obeyed. Oh, well,
she knew. Her mother had the bad habit of telling her what to do. And in the
end, she was always right. Now Amelia felt awkward just like it had happened
every time she’d been given an order by her mother.

“As soon as the fact you’re alive becomes
public, they’ll find out I didn’t die there. And they’ll resume looking for
me.” It was one of his observations. He was expressing it with indifference, it
didn’t seem like it worried him.

But Amelia was surprised. She was just
reflecting on the fact that the police could get to him, but the real problem
wasn’t the police. Whoever wanted him dead wouldn’t stop until they were
certain they had got rid of him. “I could say I escaped, alone, before the
lodge exploded.” That was the solution she was looking for. After all she’d
been kidnapped, she was a victim. They would believe her. “You’d gain some
time. It’ll take a while before the bodies are identified.” However a new idea
was taking shape in her mind.

Mike sighed. “If you start lying, then you’ll
be forced to keep doing it. You just risk endangering all that you’ve achieved
in your life. What for? I’ll get by, as always.”

“What if I leave everything? What if I don’t
go back at all?” The thought of making a clean sweep of her existence, for the
second time, enticed her. She’d struggled to shake off the past, but she hadn’t
really succeeded. It had kept tormenting her.

“You aren’t cut out to live like a ghost,” he
stated.

“I could learn. You could teach me!” Oh God,
had she just proposed to him that he took her with him? He would insult her
now. She turned to the window, hoping that he would decide to ignore her last
comment.

All that she heard was a whisper, followed by
a long silence. “You have to hold on to your life, since you have one.”

“My life sucks.” That sentence had exited her
mouth without control. Her life sucked; after her son’s death any attempt to
straighten it out again had been useless.

But that statement was welcomed with a
sarcastic laugh. “
Your
life sucks? You don’t know what you’re talking
about.”

Yeah, perhaps he was right. This wasn’t the
right moment to judge her own life. She was exhausted, physically and
psychologically. Yet the thought that the adventure was coming to an end caused
her a deep sadness. She felt she was on the verge of missing an opportunity.

“Once I had a different name. I was someone
different.”

For a split second Amelia thought she’d dreamt
those words, but then she realised they were coming from Mike. She turned to
him, interested. However, he kept looking through the windscreen, as he was
driving in the darkness. She tried to follow the line of his sight. How could
he orient himself in this place? “And who were you?” she asked, instead.

He barely raised the corners of his mouth.
“When you asked me whether I was an MI6 spy, you weren’t so far off.”

Was he really confiding in her? Amelia held
her breath.

Mike slowed down as he took a bend in the
country lane they were travelling along. “I used to be a CIA operative agent.”

“Are you American?!” Not that she had any
particular talent in recognising the nationality of people, but that revelation
was completely unexpected. “You don’t have an American accent.” What a stupid
thing to say.

Mike chuckled. “Us spies, we’re quite good
with accents.”

Indeed, she’d said something stupid. Actually,
she’d just taken for granted that he was English. She’d always had the bad
habit of taking things for granted. “And what happened then? How did you come
here?”

“I died in
Afghanistan
.”

Eh?

“My beloved country supposed I was dead.”
Bitterness veiled his voice. “When you start with this job, you know it can
happen. I was captured and tortured during a mission.”

Recalling his scars sent a shudder right
through Amelia’s spine. However, he was talking about it in a detached fashion,
as if it was something he hadn’t really lived through. But those signs on his
body demonstrated the opposite.

“Sometimes over there, you must take the
initiative, and it happens that a great deal can go wrong. And then you’re
alone.”

“Didn’t they try to find you?” Another stupid
thing to say, but she didn’t like to keep silent. She was feeling such pity for
him. Who knew what he had gone through over there. He’d had to see, no, feel
the real horror on his own skin. Now she wasn’t surprised anymore about his
coldness when he took a life with his own hands, or about the fickle way he
behaved.

“Apparently, they didn’t try enough.” He
sighed. “At a certain point I implored any God who existed out there to let me
die,” he continued, in a low voice. “And I believed I was dead. When I woke up
my legs and arms were broken, and I had a gunshot wound in my chest.”

Instinctively Amelia tightened her hands
together and moved them closer to her body.

“Yasir found me in an abandoned encampment.
His family took care of me. They lived in an isolated area on the mountains. I
don’t even know how I ended up there. I spent many months with them, had
started to appreciate their simple life, had toyed with the idea of staying
there forever.” He smiled in the half-light.

The sky outside had become less dark. The
first lights of dawn were making their way through the fronds.

“Yasir had a sister, Jala. I was a bit in love
with her.” His smile became even larger. She could glimpse again the charming
man who had made her fall head over heels. But something suggested to Amelia
that the story didn’t have a happy ending. A moment after, his gaze clouded
over, but he said nothing.

“What happened?” She could figure it out, but
felt a morbid desire to learn the details.

“We’d been away the entire morning. When we
returned to the farm, we found it on fire. His wife, his two children, and his
sister had been trapped inside.”

“Oh my God …”

“We never knew what had happened exactly, but
…” His voice broke; he hesitated. Amelia thought she’d seen a teardrop on his
face. Mike brushed it with his fingers, in a nervous gesture. “I think it was
because of my presence. It had made someone curious, the wrong people.”

She reached out to him and placed a hand on
his shoulder. She would’ve liked to say something to console him, for instance
that it wasn’t his fault, but that would be just more nonsense. Probably he was
right. Anyway nothing that she could say would be of help to him. But a
pleasant warmth had ignited in her chest. He had confided that story to her
spontaneously. He certainly didn’t tell it to just anyone he met. She felt
privileged, close to him. She would’ve liked to ask him how they had come to
London
, to do what they did, but it didn’t
matter in the end.

She felt her fingers being touched. Mike had
released the steering wheel with one hand and placed it on hers, for a moment,
slowing down a bit. Then he returned to concentrate on the road.

A glare on the side mirror drew Amelia’s
attention. She turned to look back and her safety belt ended on her neck, as
usual.

“What’s up?”

“I think I’ve seen a light.” She had managed
to move the safety belt under her shoulder. Now she was searching in all
directions. The sky had become an even lighter blue. It was possible to
distinguish it from the woods, which were becoming sparser. It had to be
covered, because she couldn’t see any stars. There was no moon. But she hadn’t
dreamt that glare; well, maybe.

The engine’s sound became louder. Mike was
opening his window and checking the rear-view mirrors at the same time.

“Can you hear it, too?” Amelia asked. There
was another noise out there, a humming, actually a set of distant hums.

“Motorbikes, at least two.”

“What do we do?”

“The light is increasing, they will see us.”
He hadn’t answered her question, but from the expression on Mike’s face, she
understood that he was formulating a plan. “They have more flexibility than
us.”

Amelia pulled out her gun from her belt, even
if she wasn’t sure how to use it in that situation.

“Here they come.”

She turned again and saw them: three lights.
“Fuck.” They were coming closer.

Mike turned on the headlights and stepped on
the accelerator. His window started closing.

Amelia felt herself being pushed against her
seat, but since she was sideways on, her cheek hit the headrest and her neck
bent more than it should. “Fuck,” she reiterated. She grabbed the holder over
her door, but at each recoil due to the bumpy terrain, at high speed, her body
was pushed in all directions and the belt seemed to penetrate her flesh.