Two Women (42 page)

Alice couldn't think, find the words. Only one.
‘NO!'

‘Yes,' said Jane, even-voiced, completely sure of herself. ‘If I tell the FBI about Trojan Horses and England – which you haven't done – you'll face murder charges there. Or some indictment, it doesn't matter what. That's as well as the kidnapping when I swear a deposition how you tricked me into leaving the apartment with you. Fed me more drugs to keep me at the cabin … threatened to kill me for not giving John a divorce so that he could marry you …'

‘No!' protested Alice again, although it was a moan, not a shout. ‘You can't do this. You can't hate me this much.'

‘Yes I can. And I do,' said Jane again. ‘I got snatched in Morristown, where your car was found and where you told Gene Hanlan you'd come from, to get here. How'd you imagine the Mafia knew I was there? And here's another question, the real kicker. How high would you put your chances of getting into the Witness Protection Programme with all that coming down on you? I don't think you'd stand a chance in hell, do you?'

‘If I get killed the baby dies too.'

‘Right,' agreed Jane, easily. ‘Think of it as the judgement of Solomon.'

‘I won't let you,' said Alice, weakly.

‘I know you won't have a termination. You won't destroy John's baby yourself. And let's be realistic. It'll be born, before all the Grand Jury hearings and court appearances are over. And go for adoption. This way the adoption is already properly and legally fixed – we're surrounded by lawyers – and you get to live. I don't tell Hanlan about England but I
do
tell him I came with you willingly from the apartment: that I truly believe you saved my life and that I wouldn't have known about safe-deposit boxes – known about anything – if you hadn't told me. I'll even insist you get into the protection programme. We just got split up in Morristown and I'm as glad as I can be that you didn't get picked up like I did, looking for you …'

‘You're leaving me with nothing!' said Alice, baldly.

‘You
left
me with nothing. Took everything.
You
expect pity from
me
!'

‘I won't do it.'

‘Of course you will. Your way the baby either dies, with you. Or goes into an orphanage, to an unknown life. My way the baby lives and is loved and wants for nothing. And you live.' Jane smiled. ‘It's more than the judgement of Solomon. It's the perfect resolution.' She pushed her chair back. ‘I'll deny all of this, of course, if you try and fight me, legally. No one will believe you, against me, the amount of trouble you're in.'

‘How do I know you'll love the baby?'

‘It's John's. What I inherit from him. Of course I'll love the baby. Treat him as my own. Which he will be.'

‘He?' challenged Alice.

‘It's going to be a boy,' said Jane, positively.

It was one of the bodyguards, the one who had broken his ankle, who collapsed almost at once under questioning that night, as Barbara Donnelly had predicted, although she hadn't expected it to happen so quickly. Guaranteed entry into the protection programme, a regular pension and paid accommodation ensured he identified the Genovese Family and Charlie Petrie as its
consigliere
. He also named the Cavalcante Family and Tony Caputo as its
consigliere
and the man who'd personally snatched Jane outside the Morris-town mall: they'd had inside information, he didn't know from whom. Hanlan thought he knew and said to Barbara: ‘That nails Alice.'

By nine o'clock that night Caputo had been seized in a known Mafia-favoured restaurant by a Task Force from the FBI's Trenton field office.

Caputo smirked and said: ‘I don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Who
you're talking about.'

The Trenton agent-in-charge said: ‘You will, when you see her in court. Like she's going to see and identify you in court, as the kidnapper. Is there the death penalty in New Jersey, for kidnapping? You know, I really can't remember. Maybe your lawyer will remember. You're going to need a lot of legal advice, Tony. All the help you can get.'

Gene Hanlan hadn't expected such an early and certainly not such a sensational breakthrough, any more than Barbara: unlike her, he hadn't expected any confession at all. Although it kept Jane pivotal to the investigation and eventual prosecution, it took the immediate concentration away from her, and took Hanlan on to the conveniently retained FBI plane to Washington and the J. Edgar Hoover building for a conference that included the Director himself. It was Hanlan's assessment of the career potential of what he found himself in charge of that caused him that night to utilize every safe house and apartment available in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens to accommodate, under permanent armed guard, not only Alice and Jane but their lawyers, as well. He also installed armed protection upon the Northcote building, Citibank and East 62nd Street.

As he left Federal Plaza he told Barbara Donnelly: ‘We got the chance to nuke the New York Mafias.'

‘If they don't nuke us first,' cautioned the detective lieutenant.

Alone in the sterile Manhattan apartment assigned to her, tauntingly just two blocks from Princes Street, Alice Belling lay weeping on a cold bed, properly experiencing for the first time what life was going to be like in a protection programme.

Thirty-One

J
ane had always been instinctively aware of power and authority: of possessing it through her father. Now it emerged to be no longer subconscious and certainly no longer inherent but hers in her own right. So sure of herself did Jane feel – after Alice's legal surrender of John's unborn child – she refused to let Peter Mitchell, the trial lawyer whose fame had further escalated the overnight media sensation, accompany her into the Citibank vaults.

‘Why?' he demanded, although without emotion, because Peter Mitchell never allowed anything he felt to show in how he spoke or looked, no matter how irritated, as he was now. He was a silver-haired, urbane man who calculated representing Jane Carver was worth $1,000,000, for which she'd receive every conceivable legal guidance. For $1,000,000 Jane Carver could be as demanding as she chose.

Jane didn't know why, just that after so much and so long – in drama, not in time – she wanted to be by herself, quite alone, when she finally saw what it had all been about. Careless of the inadequacy, she said: ‘Because that's how I want it to be.'

She had obviously agreed, though, to his going with her to Citibank, along with Gene Hanlan and Barbara Donnelly amid the permanent FBI guard which, despite acknowledging their necessity, at this early stage still made her feel more amused than grateful. Part of that protection was to arrange the deposit-box examination at night, after the bank was officially closed, with no one inside apart from vetted officials and bank security and uniformed and plainclothes police inside as well as at every exit and with every kerbside approach cordoned off.

The bank president himself, escorted by his three most senior vice presidents, awaited them. The man, silver-haired like Mitchell, assured the trial lawyer there was an office available for him privately to examine whatever there was in the security vault. There was no surprise from any of the bank officials to Jane's announcement that she was making the initial examination alone. One of the senior vice presidents accompanied her and the securities manager. No one spoke as they descended. After the duplicate-key opening the vice president asked if there was anything else she needed and Jane said no: she'd ring when she wanted the door to be unlocked.

Jane remained for several moments before the numbered box, its narrow rectangular door ajar, looking too small, too insufficient, to have caused so much. She reached out positively with her newly realized command, although aware as she did so that her hands were shaking. The box slid out easily, but was heavy from its contents when she finally lifted it free, and she had to grab it and use two hands to get it to the table. So tightly was it packed that the lid came up by itself when she unclasped it. The printouts she recognized from what Alice had duplicated at the cabin were uppermost, neatly folded in what appeared to be some order, and beneath them were what Jane supposed to be accountancy spreadsheets. There were names she recognized from what Alice had told her, Mulder Inc. and Innsflow, and addresses throughout the United States, but the calculations meant nothing. Nor did the other figures on other spreadsheets, in handwriting she recognized to be John's.

It was beneath them that the other documentation lay, written words she could read and understand, even though they were legal. And photographs, ten in all, of her laughing father with a laughing woman whose name was Anna, from the annotations on the backs in her father's handwriting, with dates and places, Madrid and Capri. There were names, too, on the birth certificate. The mother's name was Anna Simpson. The father's was George Northcote and the child, a girl, was named Jane Northcote. So it was on the adoption papers – the sort of adoption papers to which Alice had that day attested and sworn – and here for the first time appeared the name Muriel Northcote, as well as Jane legally getting the Northcote surname.

Jane wasn't aware she was crying, not until she felt the wetness, but didn't bother to wipe her eyes or her nose, wanting to cry unchecked at the sadness, but most of all – most bitterly – at the matching irony. Nothing left, she thought. Nothing that she'd believed and trusted and loved …' –
wanted
to believe and trust and love – was left. Everything she had known, everything by which she'd felt secure and safe, was untrue, lies built on lies, deceit upon deceit. She had John's surrogate baby but she wasn't continuing the bloodline she'd cheated and lied to preserve. And it was too late now to undo what she'd turned herself into a monster to achieve.

Jane wiped her face, finally, and repacked the box with the photographs and the legal documents of her birth and formal adoption and put it back into the safe-deposit slot before ringing the bell for the security official and his duplicate key.

As she got back into the elevator, clutching everything referring to the five Mafia companies, Jane wondered how the person she'd believed to be – and loved as – her mother had felt about the laughing, beautiful Anna Simpson. That question inevitably prompted another. How or what did she feel about Alice Belling? Angry at the deception and humiliation, perhaps. Disbelief, at the idea that the woman had never represented a danger to her marriage. But not hatred, which she'd expected – waited – to feel. What then? Sadness, Jane decided. Sadness about too much to examine every reason for it. Too late to undo, she thought again. There was one thing – one further sadness – she could prevent, Jane realized. She wouldn't keep the birth certificate and adoption papers of John's baby where one day his son might find them. Nothing could be left for John's son to discover that his father hadn't been the most perfect man, which was how she planned always to describe him.

When Jane handed what she'd collected to Peter Mitchell the lawyer said: ‘I've got your word this is it? All there is?'

‘Yes,' said Jane. ‘There's nothing left.'

But there was, Jane corrected herself at once. She was going to have John's baby.

A Biography of Brian Freemantle

Brian Freemantle (b. 1936) is one of Britain's most prolific and accomplished authors of spy fiction. His novels have sold more than ten million copies worldwide, and have been optioned for numerous film and television adaptations.

Born in Southampton, on the southern coast of England, Freemantle began his career as a journalist. In 1975, as the foreign editor at the
Daily Mail
, he made headlines during the American evacuation of Saigon: As the North Vietnamese closed in on the city, Freemantle became worried about the future of the city's orphans. He lobbied his superiors at the paper to take action, and they agreed to fund an evacuation for the children. In three days, Freemantle organized a thirty-six-hour helicopter airlift for ninety-nine children, who were transported to Britain. In a flash of dramatic inspiration, he changed nearly one hundred lives—and sold a bundle of newspapers.

Although he began writing espionage fiction in the late 1960s, he first won fame in 1977, with
Charlie M
. That book introduced the world to Charlie Muffin—a disheveled spy with a skill set more bureaucratic than Bond-like. The novel, which drew favorable comparisons to the work of John Le Carré, was a hit, and Freemantle began writing sequels. The sixth in the series,
The Blind Run
, was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel. To date, Freemantle has penned fourteen titles in the Charlie Muffin series, the most recent of which is
Red Star Rising
(2010), which brought back the popular spy after a nine-year absence.

In addition to the stories of Charlie Muffin, Freemantle has written more than two dozen standalone novels, many of them under pseudonyms including Jonathan Evans and Andrea Hart. Freemantle's other series include two books about Sebastian Holmes, an illegitimate son of Sherlock Holmes, and the four Cowley and Danilov books, which were written in the years after the end of the Cold War and follow an odd pair of detectives—an FBI operative and the head of Russia's organized crime bureau.

Freemantle lives and works in London, England.