Chapter 15
Oxana sits in the bedroom of the Hampstead flat, staring out of the window.
Eve’s phone number is still out of service.
In an hour a car will arrive to take her to Heathrow, from where she will fly to Athens.
She will stay the night in the city, then take a taxi to the port of Piraeus, where she will be met by a representative of the Yilmaz family, and taken aboard the Medusa.
She runs a last-minute check of her luggage.
She has a five-year-old British passport with EU stamps from fictional holidays in Spain and France, her Ruffley Royal graduation certificate, a driving licence, a credit card, a Boots loyalty card, and various other wallet items. All are in her own name and linked to a backstory which will withstand all but the most elaborate, high-tech vetting.
The phone she will take has been loaded with contacts and history to support this identity.
In her cabin case, neatly packed, is her Ruffley summer uniform, day and evening dresses from Zara, beach-wear from Marks and Spencer, and make-up basics in a Charlotte Tilbury organiser.
She’ll be travelling in a pastel sundress and a white pointelle cardigan.
She needs to look sensible, practical, and perhaps a little conservative for her age, which according to her passport is twenty-six.
Above all, she mustn’t give the faintest impression of sexual threat.
To be fired from the Yilmaz family’s employment on the whim of one of its female members or guests would be a disaster.
Oxana tries ringing Eve’s phone one last time, then takes her own phone to the bedroom and places it on a chest of drawers.
Her side of the bed is a mess; Eve’s – if it is still Eve’s – is neat and untouched.
Her phone rings within seconds of her putting it down.
It’s Johnny, to say that her car is downstairs, and that this is the last that she will hear from him until the job is completed.
He asks if she’s heard from Eve, and is silent for several heartbeats when she says that she hasn’t.
On the way to Heathrow Oxana mentally interviews her fictional self.
It’s a technique she’s found useful in the past. It helps her to come up with quick, natural-sounding answers when questioned, and the Yilmaz family will certainly question her.
The key to surviving this kind of interrogation, she knows, is constant redirection.
Fix on the least contentious aspect of the conversation – in this case, probably other people’s children – and don’t let go.
Be elaborately boring. Don’t get dragged into troubled waters.
In keeping with her assumed identity, she travels economy class on a budget airline.
On her right is a saturnine, exhausted-looking man, on her left a pale young woman with a pierced septum and blue hair.
The young woman is reading a paperback called The Book of Judith, whose cover pictures a nude woman with dark bangs, holding a double-handed sword.
‘That looks good,’ Oxana ventures.
The young woman regards her coldly. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘Forget it, suka. I’ll leave you alone.’
The plane takes off. Oxana sits in silence, gazing blankly at the seat-back in front of her.
I want to be the woman on the front of her book.
I want to cut that blue-haired bitch’s head off with that big-ass sword.
I want to pick up her severed head and drop it in the refuse trolley with the miniature gin bottles and the half-eaten dinners and the greasy plastic cutlery.
The stewardess will be annoyed, but she’ll understand that I’ve been provoked beyond endurance.
Eve’s right. This is a very dangerous job, and the most difficult part will be getting away with it.
Living to tell the tale, although I doubt this particular tale will ever be told.
It’s flattering that the Twelve have chosen me, but I’ve played enough chess to know that sometimes you have to sacrifice a major piece to further your ends.
Is this operation so important that they’re prepared to see me killed?
Did they come for me specially, knowing that I’ll go all the way, regardless of the risk?
Not to feel fear is a dangerous thing, Eve tells me.
It means that you can’t properly assess threat.
She’s right, but I’m glad that I don’t feel it.
I’ve seen fear in the eyes of others, and it’s an ugly, debilitating thing.
It reduces you. It paralyses you, and I’d rather be without it.
Eve raised the fear issue in the course of a conversation about what she delicately calls my ‘condition’.
She was arguing, in her gentle way, that together we were much more powerful than we were separately, because we each possessed what the other lacked.
My violence and her subtlety. My affectlessness and her sensitivity.
My fearlessness and her caution. She’s right, of course, as far as everyday life goes.
But in the world in which I operate, only the mad survive.
People don’t like that word these days, but I claim it. I fucking claim it. And I will survive.