Wilderness of Mirrors (31 page)

Turner didn’t bother with contradictions. “You cheated on him. I saw your smug smile in that filthy rag. Just like your goddamn mother, I thought.”

Sam’s heart filled too much of her. “You sent him that picture, didn’t you? Thought he’d be upset; only he wasn’t, was he?”

“He was a cuckold. Too stupid to believe the truth. He deserved to die.”

She considered knocking the gun from him then beating him to death with the blunt end of it.

He read her intentions with ease. “Don’t bother. You’re not good enough.”

Shards of light refracted against her memories, triggering impossible considerations and ideas. “You had the bomb set too, didn’t you?” Sam whispered. “Granddad usually drove me to school on Mondays because I had ballet lessons. Mum would take The Tube… ” A dry heave hit her hard.

Turner gathered the night’s stillness about him. Even the snowflakes paused in his space. His face showed nothing.

Sam pushed away the urge to vomit. “But you knew that. You expected that.” She was beyond freezing. “Does it make you sick inside knowing you killed your lover instead?”

A snowflake rested on the Glock’s nose.

Sam pressed on. “Is that why you had Marc killed? Did you want me to know how it felt?”

His lip twitched and a fleck of spit went white against the pink of his mouth. “You were supposed to be in that car.
You
. And you couldn’t even do that right.”

A part of her, underneath years and years of ‘chin-up, shoulders back’ stoicism, caved soft and rotten with the impact of his words.
I was a burden to Granddad. Tethered my uncles. Kept Mum from doing what she did best. I am a success only because of Uncle Loch’s influence and my brief fame in a career that had nothing whatsoever to do with talent. Even Marc thought of me as arm candy.

She tried to think past her fears. “Did you think she wouldn’t find out? That she would forget all of us?” The fears crept back.
Maybe she would have. Maybe Mum would have gone straight back to Moscow and become someone else.

A puff of uncertainty traveled through his cheeks. “I heard about it at work. Was waiting for her, for the news to hit, to be there for her. To comfort her.”

Sam watched him, horror building under the edges of her brittle skin. He had planned it all. This jovial, flower-bringing, godfather-type. He had passed in and out of her life countless times, chatted about the weather, kissed her forehead. And he had tried to detonate a bomb beneath her. It was then she remembered where she was. Remembered why she had climbed up in the first place.
Still, I have beaten him. Outsmarted him in the end.
It was a hollow victory.

“Only
they
came to tell
me
.” A note of disbelief jarred the pattern of his speech. “Bloody SIS and their pathetic guesses. It was easy enough to convince them the IRA was behind it. We already had Intel suggesting they were planning retaliation for the Bishopsgate article. I had had my man use confiscated materials in the bomb itself. Piece of piss, really.”

I would have died all those years ago. Would I have felt it? Felt the dreadful burning in my ears just before the rest of me was incinerated?
“Then you played the grieving boss and quit, only to hire yourself out to the highest bidder.”
I must make certain he cannot escape justice.

A ghost of Turner’s good-humored self stirred his features. “You’re not thinking big enough. You never have.”

“No?” Sam closed her eyes. She let her mind explore its old paths, the ones she had closed off so many ages ago. “I think you were always working for AG. And you got Mum to as well. She took payoffs from you. Sold you secrets. Became a traitor in your eyes.” She focused on him. “But what you didn’t know, is that she was on to you.”

“You don’t bluff well, Samantha.”

“I know.” She smiled sadly. “You see, I’ve read her notes.” His eyes shifted. “She had your number from the summer of 1980 on. Every piece of information, everything she sent you, she finessed. The best bits, the ones that really counted, she funneled to HQ through my father’s handler.”

Turner’s mouth worked against unspoken fury.

“Oh, she never referred to you by name. I only recently guessed.” When she watched Nigel from the street.
Was it only two days prior?
She had seen a man she barely knew drop into the role of an ineffectual businessman. He didn’t trust Turner a penny’s worth and had spent a grand total of 90 seconds with him. She’d had a lifetime to arrive at a similar conclusion.

“Whenever I had a problem with the kids at school, Mum would take my face in her hands and say, ‘Keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer.’ ” Heat returned to Sam’s hands. “And she kept you quite close, didn’t she, Turner?”

A muscle twitched along his eyelid. “You shouldn’t have told me that.”

“Why, because now you’re going to kill me?” Sam shrugged. “Go ahead. Tam’s dead. I’ve no one in my life. Do you really think I care?”
But I do. I would have liked to know Nigel longer. To have belonged with him and to him.

A grimace of pain and fury contorted his mouth and fists. “You know what I regret most? Do you?” He reached out and snatched the edge of her shirt, ripping it as he yanked her closer. “I regret having had that bastard Demidov run off the road. Every day I wish I’d found a way to do it myself. I’d have made it long and slow, and in the end, he’d have put the bomb under your mother’s car himself.”

Turner’s mouth descended fast and hard, his teeth vicious against her lip. He whispered something harsh along the sharp pitch of her cheek.

Tears smarted. Her mouth, still attuned to Nigel’s, tried to flee like a trapped wild thing. She tasted blood along with his saliva and choked. Turner was right about one thing, she wasn’t popped from the same mold as her parents; she simply loathed every bit of ‘The Game’.

His hand slid along her collarbone before taking the curve of her breast. She could feel the gun wedged against the boning of her bustier.

A grin flitted under the swell of her bruised lip.
You may hate it, Sam, but you’re better than anyone gives you credit for.

“What is that?” He pulled back.

For a moment, she thought he had felt her smile beneath his teeth.

Then, her eyes slid left along the path of his own.

Below them, a hideously marred face stared up. A skull-white pearl against a bed of night velvet.
Turner knows the devil
…

Then, she recognized the eyes of her countless birthday wishes.

And she whispered, loud enough only for Turner. “It’s the big picture.”

“C
an’t your weather make up its mind?” Vasily stared moodily out the darkened, snow-spattered window, not expecting an answer.

An apt metaphor for this moment,
Nigel decided
.
“Take the next right.” He pointed at a battered Vauxhall swinging down a secondary street. “After that red Astra.”

“Looks like a toaster on wheels.” Demidov sucked deeply on a cigar. “German-made,” he exhaled, “yet it’s got less appeal than that awful shit coming out of Korea.”

Sam, you got your eye for design from two sources. I wonder how Loch would feel.

Demidov took another deep draught.

It was hard work, his smoking. The edge of his lips refused to tighten fully around the Cuban circumference. But work was no match for a Devil-May-Care approach.

It brought to mind Brad, and to a degree Sam. Who was at this moment about as foreign to Nigel as she had once been native.

I thought I knew you this morning. How can you be both my enemy and savior?

Nigel looked past the stone-gated homes along Lichfield Road, until Victoria Gate, Nesfield’s Grade II architectural achievement, grew in substance.

He had only been to Kew twice. The first involved a nanny and pram. Proof of it lodged in an expensive and rarely opened album resting back at Barkley.

The second was accidental. He’d been rowing along the Thames with his Eton teammates, practicing for the Head of River. They’d passed the Kew Bridge when the aft of their training shell was clipped.

Darkness, March-cold and the sunken vessel forced them onto Kew grounds.

He didn’t remember much except for trees and a pub at the outskirts.

“You can park anywhere along the road here.” It was crowded. Sam would be hidden by the multitudes.

‘I have none left.’

‘What?’

‘Willpower.’

‘What do you need it for?’

‘For walking away from you.’

At least you tried, didn’t you, Sam.
Nigel stepped from the opened door.
I’ll bear it in mind.

It would make things hurt less.

He waited for the driver to return with tickets, recalling the small stub hidden beneath the photos back at Barkley. What had it cost then?

“You are coming.” Demidov rubbed his gloved hands. It covered his unease. “Only I think we both have something to discover tonight.”

They passed through the gates, Sergei and the driver falling in behind as the path closed. Demidov was a tall man, yet he used remarkably little space. Walking with him was not unpleasant, despite the tinny sounds of Waldteufel’s Skater’s Waltz echoing around them.

“Kirstin said our daughter had an awful ear for music.” He shrugged a pragmatic Russian shrug. “Not surprising given her own taste.” A pair of topaz eyes slid across the even space between them. “The Kinks.” He pronounced it like Kirstin might have taught him.

Nigel played along. “Not a very challenging set of chord progressions.” They were using English now.

Demidov held up the backside of his hand, thumb overlapping his smallest finger. “Three to be exact. Any wino could play it on his guitar.”

“En Vogue was far worse.” Nigel saw the quirky curve of Sam’s smile even now.

“Were they that bad?” she wondered as they lay on the Headmaster’s carpet. “I remember liking them.”

“Ghastly.” He felt her laugh and covered her mouth with his own.

Demidov’s hand dropped as they moved over to pass a stray child running back for his father.

“You’re right. Absolutely awful shit.” Vasily shook his badger-like head from side to side. “I wonder if she’s outgrown it, if Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky have a place on her playlists.”

Demidov hadn’t known his daughter lived. How would he know her to be deaf? “She has no playlists: Mendelssohn, Metallica or otherwise.”

Sergei answered a call and they paused while Demidov hunted around Nigel’s face for answers. He didn’t need to fill silence. They were of the same mind on many such notes.

“She’s deaf, Vasily. The blast that killed Kirstin smashed Sam’s eardrums to hell.”
But you hear everything anyway, Sam. You hear that damn dog of yours pant when his water’s empty. You hear the ache in my voice when I can’t live with Irina’s murder. You hear the steps of your father dancing with you at your wedding.

Somewhere Batushka laughed at the pronoun.
‘Sunlight. Women. God has a sense of humor.’

Our wedding?

“What is it?” Demidov was stoic again.

Sergei pulled a sound-blocking finger from his ear and pointed toward an unseen place. “They’re at some tree walk, that way. Your traitor’s gone up there after Sepp’s woman.”

Nigel didn’t need to have seen the exhibit to know exactly what Sergei was referring to. He’d had a map of the place in his head since they passed through the entrance. Escape routes. Hiding places. Hunting places. And that little pub, still close by. He knew them all, so he ran. Didn’t think they’d bother to shoot him for leading the way. Better to do it afterward. Which is what he would have done if their roles were reversed.

Sam was no more a traitor than he. Why had he let himself think otherwise?

She was simply an agent like him. Always a plan in her cunning head.

The pressure along his thigh was a groan just now. A grumbling veteran-of-an-injury reminding his slashed ribs that time heals all. He cranked his speed, flying around corners and people and anything keeping him from Sam.

Wellington Turner wouldn’t climb a stairwell willingly. His fitness was crafted of personal trainers and treadmills replete with BBC-blaring flat-screens. Not hard earned slogs.

Sam had lured him up there.

And you only bring someone up high so they have a long way to fall.

He tumbled when a patch of ice tried its level best to remind him forty was around the corner. His palm left blood and maybe some skin behind. Another bit of him falling away.
Christ, if he was a National Heritage site they’d post signs warning the public not to break off any more bits.

Behind him, Vasily was barely keeping up. The driver and Sergei long away, their shoes no match for the traction needed tonight.

And then, almost there, Nigel felt the invisible cord of someone’s gaze clothesline him. He had no gun on him, but the flat of his hand flew tight and hard with his turn. The tip of his fingers scored Brad’s throat, opening a raw trench that would have garroted his friend if he hadn’t known Nigel so well.

Milton materialized from the chokehold of vegetation. Quiet as a goddamned wraith and unperturbed as usual. Neither had made even the shadow of a sound during their brief encounter.

Brad shot a finger toward the bridge, distant but marginally visible.

Her Op; her rules.
It was spoken without words. Softly, he added, “She’s got him wedged between two cameras. HQ is pulling live feed.”

Brad had stopped them all far enough from Boots’s line of sight. Vasily reined in his speed, assuming Nigel’s own comfort with Brad’s presence. Milton’s Mediterranean eyes took in what Nigel’s had already done.

Vasily and Brad nodded at one another.

“I’ve got a score to settle with your man up there,” Vasily growled.

Brad shared his mobile’s screen with the Russian. Live feed from the conversation above flowed a river of text across his screen.

Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.