Zero kill, p.7
Zero Kill, page 7
‘That would be a good idea, I suppose,’ said Howard, bristling at her tone. ‘Let’s go and see them.’
As they walked back to the car, he asked her, ‘Do either of them like Tolstoy?’
At a gesture from Greta, the dogs moved away from the car and Elsa woke the kids.
‘Harley and India, these are your grandparents.’
Greta raised an eyebrow. ‘Those are regarded as acceptable names in this day and age, are they?’
The kids were tired and bewildered, but seemed to take the new people, and their strange new surroundings, in their stride.
‘You’re going to stay with them here for a couple of days.’
Elsa waited for the inevitable flood of questions, but none came. Standing in the yard, Harley and India evaluated Howard and Greta, and Howard and Greta considered them in return.
‘Are we on holiday already?’ India asked Elsa.
Howard told them, ‘There are rules you’ll have to obey while you’re guests in our house. We run a very tight ship here.’
‘Do you have a swimming pool?’ asked India.
‘We have a septic tank.’
‘Do you have a PlayStation?’ said Harley.
Howard and Greta narrowed their eyes. ‘We don’t know what that is.’
‘Can we watch television?’
‘We don’t have a television, or computer, or smartphone,’ Greta told the children, who looked shocked. ‘Because of the low-frequency transmissions. It’s how the general population is enslaved by the lies and propaganda of the controlling liberal elite.’
Elsa bit her lip.
‘Do you have any jigsaws or games?’ asked India.
‘Do you play chess?’
The kids shook their heads, but they’d heard of it.
‘Chess is a fine game.’ Howard’s chin jutted as he warmed to his theme. ‘It will teach you about life, and survival. About how to anticipate the moves of your opponent. How to turn solid defence into devastating attack and mercilessly crush your adversary.’ Howard clenched a fist for emphasis. ‘Lessons that will stand you in good stead in life.’
‘Can I pet your dogs?’ asked Harley.
‘You may,’ Howard said. He gestured at the dogs, which stepped forward to allow themselves to be stroked.
‘What are they called?’
‘Churchill and Montgomery,’ said Howard.
‘They’re very friendly,’ said Harley.
‘At a single word from me, they would rip your throats out.’
‘Howard!’ snapped Elsa.
India pointed into the field. ‘Are those horses?’
‘Yes,’ said Greta.
‘Do they have names?’
‘Yes,’ said Greta.
There was an awkward silence while everyone looked at the grazing horses, and Howard said finally, ‘Would you like to meet them?’
The kids followed him across the muddy field towards the animals.
‘I’m going to have to go,’ said Elsa.
‘We’ll cope,’ said Greta.
She didn’t want to leave Harley and India without saying goodbye, but knew that they would only get upset, as she was now. A quick getaway, a clean break, while they were looking at the horses, was the best thing. But the reality of the situation hit her – it may be the last time she ever saw them. Elsa clenched her teeth, determined not to shed tears in the presence of her mother, who would regard her emotion as weak and shameful. It shouldn’t matter, she shouldn’t give a shit about what Greta and Howard thought, but she also needed to stay focused.
‘Thanks for this,’ Elsa mumbled. Throwing the kids’ bags onto the packed mud of the yard, she climbed behind the wheel of Dougie’s car. When she slammed the door, Greta Zero rapped on the window, and Elsa lowered it.
‘Make sure you come back,’ Greta said sharply, and Elsa thought she sensed something almost like concern in her mother’s tone. But then the old woman added, ‘We don’t want them here too long.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Elsa told her, and started the engine.
10
Zoe Castle’s mum was insistent. ‘Stand up.’
‘I’m not going to do that, Mum.’ Zoe rolled her eyes, indignant, and stood.
‘Now give us a twirl.’ On the other side of the world, her mother’s face loomed close to the screen as Zoe dutifully turned 360 in front of the laptop’s judgmental lens. ‘Oh, love, you’ve really let yourself go.’
Zoe took a steadying breath to stop herself slamming shut the lid of her laptop.
It was true she had put on quite a bit of weight, mostly around the tummy and hips. She was a middle-aged woman who worked in an intense environment and who kept emergency biscuits in the top drawer, but her mum never missed an opportunity to get in a little dig. It wasn’t Zoe’s fault she didn’t have the slim body shape and fierce metabolism of her sisters. She wished she had never got up early for this Zoom call.
‘Take yourself out for a jog, is my advice.’
Zoe worked hard at her part-time job, and also volunteered a couple of mornings for the local foodbank, so she liked to spend as much time as possible at the weekends with Jim and Charlie. She enjoyed cooking and baking – nobody got happy eating a salad, after all – and frankly didn’t fancy huffing and puffing around the park for the sake of losing a couple of kilos. Where exercise was concerned, taking the dog for a walk was about as far as she got. She didn’t need to validate herself by trying to be someone she wasn’t. Besides, Jim liked her curves.
Zoe was trying to think of a good excuse to end the call – they’d been chatting for an hour before the conversation turned inevitably to her weight, and she wasn’t in the mood to listen to her mother’s dietary advice, or her usual monologue about the healthy lifestyle she enjoyed since emigrating to Melbourne – when her mobile rang.
While her mum was talking, she picked it up. ‘Hello?’
‘Zoe Castle?’
‘Speaking.’
‘You need to come in,’ the voice told her.
Because there was no caller ID, it took her a moment to realize it was someone from work. She heard frantic chatter in the background. Zoe’s reduced hours could be unpredictable, that was the nature of the job, but she didn’t usually work Fridays – and a call at daybreak was unprecedented.
‘There’s a car outside your house.’
She went to the window to see a black SUV with tinted windows parked opposite. Zoe wondered whether someone in HR had made a mistake. It wasn’t like she was full-time any more, and besides, she had never been senior enough to have a car sent for her. On the rare occasions she was called in to work at short notice, she had been expected to make her own way there. But she knew better than to ask questions over the phone.
‘Give me five minutes,’ she said.
‘You have two,’ said the voice, and the line went dead.
At the laptop, Zoe told her mum that she had to go and promised to call her again next week. Closed the lid with a click. In the hallway, she pulled on her shoes and picked up her bag.
‘Jim,’ she called upstairs. ‘I have to go to work.’
Her husband came to the top of the landing, wearing a T-shirt and pyjama bottoms, his hair mussed up from sleep. ‘How long will you be?’
She shrugged. Search me.
Moments later, she was being driven from her home in Acton into the centre of London. There was no file to read in the back of the car, no tablet, nothing to explain what was happening, and the driver made no attempt to speak.
Zoe had worked as an analyst at SIS, the British foreign intelligence service also known as MI6, full-time for sixteen years, part-time for four, and nothing like this had ever happened. Worried she had somehow fouled up, she bit her nails and gazed out of the window, watching the joggers, dog walkers and cyclists, the people heading to work or to pick up breakfast, as the early morning came to life.
When she was finally dropped off at the SIS Building at Vauxhall Cross on the Albert Embankment and walked into reception, there was nobody to meet her, so she took the lift up to the office on the fifth floor where she hot-desked, and waited. When nobody came to find her, she made a coffee in the kitchen.
There was constant activity in the corridor. The lifts kept disgorging important people, who hurried towards the conference room in a tense huddle of assistants and analysts. Sipping her coffee, Zoe watched government ministers, section chiefs, judges, scientists and senior members of the security establishment stride past.
Accompanying one senior spook was one of the lead intelligence officers at SIS, Nigel Plowright. A man with round wire glasses, floppy hair and a pinched face, he was so thin and insubstantial in his creased suit and tie, and wore such a harried expression, that he looked like he was being taken to the back of the bike sheds to be given a good kicking.
Plowright glanced at Zoe as he hurried past. She had never worked with him, never even spoken to him – about which she was glad, because his reputation wasn’t the best – but she saw a flicker of recognition in his eyes.
The minutes she sat there, catching up on some work, online shopping at ASOS, arranging a home delivery from Tesco, turned into an hour, and then two. Finally, during her umpteenth game of Candy Crush on her phone, Zoe heard footsteps come back down the corridor. Plowright opened the door of the office and impatiently crooked a finger. Follow me. Zoe jumped to her feet.
‘All we need you to do is answer a few questions.’ He strode quickly towards the conference room. ‘As succinctly as you can.’
‘I don’t know what this is about,’ Zoe said, trying to keep up. ‘Nobody’s explained anything.’
‘You don’t need to know what it’s about, all you need to do is answer the questions asked of you.’ Plowright reached the conference room door and gripped the handle. He looked her up and down, taking in her scruffy blouse, faded denim skirt and old ballet pumps, and she sensed he didn’t much like what he saw. ‘Don’t offer any observations that aren’t solicited, and never refer to anybody in the room by name.’
The door swung open and an intelligence officer pushed past. Zoe glimpsed a dark room full of people, heard vigorous discussion.
‘What’s happening?’ she asked Plowright, desperate for answers.
‘What’s happening?’ he replied tersely. ‘An enormous clusterfuck of unimaginable proportions, that’s what’s happening.’
Zoe followed him into the room where a long conference table was lined with people, and the walls illuminated by video screens. Many of the men and women squeezed around the table she knew from the intelligence service and government: civil service mandarins, judges, ministers, medical advisors. Backlit by the electronic light from the screens, ghoulish shadows dropped down their faces. On the screens were dignitaries who presumably couldn’t get to the meeting in person. Plowright pointed to a chair inside the door and Zoe sat, listening to the urgent conversation.
A senior spook at the far end of the table peered over the top of his bifocals at a tablet as he spoke. ‘GCHQ has picked up ominous chatter suggesting that numerous agents from our counterpart agencies are en route to London. We’re trying to reach out to our friends to assure them the situation is under control, but it appears they’re taking measures, nonetheless.’
‘Taking measures, that’s a good way of putting it.’ A distinguished-looking man midway along the table snorted mirthlessly. ‘You’re telling us the city is going to be crawling with assassins.’
The spook whipped off his glasses and tossed them on files in front of him.
‘And it’s also safe to presume that a number of hostile parties, Moscow and Beijing among them, will attempt to take advantage of the situation and intercept Miss Zero and whisk her out of the country at the earliest opportunity.’ Zoe tensed at the mention of the name. ‘I don’t need to remind any of you ladies and gentlemen of the gravity of the situation should that happen.’
On a screen, a government minister sat on a sunny veranda, a beach of blistering white sand behind him. ‘Washington doesn’t have faith that we can handle the situation?’
A woman Zoe recognized as a strategic security officer shook her head. ‘Can you blame them? The situation is unprecedented. It’s been nearly seven hours since the attempt on Elsa Zero’s life and we’re still struggling to get a handle on everything. The entire global intelligence community appears to be one step ahead of us. All our usual channels have let us down.’
Plowright walked over to the distinguished-looking man and whispered into his ear, and the man glanced over at Zoe. He cleared his throat sharply, as if to say, let’s stop the conversation.
‘I understand that Zoe Castle here is an intelligence officer who has worked closely with Zero on a number of highly classified operations.’ The man looked at her expectantly. ‘Can you tell us more about her, Mrs Castle?’
Zoe sat gawping, but when Plowright glared, she stood quickly.
‘I’m not a…’ Everyone looked at her closely and she blushed. ‘I’m not an intelligence officer, I’m just a data analyst.’
The man asked, ‘We’ve been misinformed?’
She blinked at Plowright, who stepped quickly from the wall.
‘I’m afraid Mrs Castle is the only person who has had personal contact with Zero that we can find this morning,’ he said. ‘Zero’s other contacts within the department have all dispersed in the intervening years, and we’ve had trouble locating them at such short notice. I regret to say our databases need overhauling.’
There was a tense silence in the room. The strategic security lady said, ‘Well, you’re here now. What can you tell us about Elsa Zero?’
Zoe wracked her brains, not wanting to stammer or stumble in front of the packed room of very important people. ‘I, uh, worked with Elsa… with Zero on two or three occasions, but it was a long time ago, this was in twenty—’
‘Do you have any idea why SIS would contract a private security agency to engage in clandestine operations on foreign soil?’ On a screen, a man sitting in a library of leather-bound books and dark wood glared into the camera. ‘People with seemingly no loyalty to this country?’
‘Mrs Castle is a data analyst, Henry,’ said the spook lady with an exasperated sigh. ‘I don’t believe the question is within her purview. Please, Mrs Castle, tell us about Zero. She was a deep cover agent?’
‘Deep cover, yes. She specialized in incursions.’
‘What does that mean, exactly?’
‘Elsa Zero was employed to access forbidden domains – high-security offices, homes, compounds, vaults – either covertly or by force.’
The distinguished man frowned. ‘To do what?’
‘Whatever we wanted her to do,’ interrupted Plowright.
‘I only worked with her on a couple of simple surveillance operations, more than a decade ago now, so my memory may not be the best,’ said Zoe. ‘But I remember she was extraordinarily good at her job.’
‘We are all abundantly aware of her skills, Mrs Castle,’ said the distinguished-looking man. ‘But what was she like as a person?’
Zoe was surprised by the question. ‘Like many operatives, she was a difficult person to get to know. She was guarded… perhaps not the easiest person to get on with. I found her impatient, headstrong, confident in her skill set. She was very guarded, and could be curt and dismissive – but deep cover agents are secretive by nature and not the most sociable of people.’
‘Did you work with RedQueen on a black-ops incursion…’ The minister looked up from a file. ‘… Code-named Pilot Fish?’
From the way a number of people stiffened, Zoe guessed he’d said something that wasn’t intended for her ears. ‘I don’t—’
‘I’m afraid Mrs Castle doesn’t have the necessary clearance where the most classified missions are concerned,’ Plowright said quickly. ‘She’s worked mostly on low-level operations.’
‘Then why is she here?’ Behind the minister, a flamingo flew across the surf. ‘She clearly can’t provide vital tactical knowledge or psychological insights that will help us find the woman.’
‘Is there anything, anything at all, that you think may be of any help to us, Mrs Castle?’ asked the strategic lady.
Zoe squirmed, trying to think of something to tell them.
‘It was a long time ago, and as I say, she was never very talkative, but…’ Something occurred to her, the only thing she had. ‘I remember I had to rush home one day because my son was ill. She asked me questions about him, and my home life, it was the only time she showed any interest at all in me, and I got the impression she was… envious.’
The senior spook clasped his hands. ‘About what?’
‘That I had a family, a home.’
Nobody in the room seemed much impressed with her observation.
‘Did you like her?’ asked an older man at the other end of the room, and the way he looked at her – with a sharp, questioning intelligence – made Zoe think he was some kind of judge. ‘Elsa Zero?’
‘Yes, despite everything, I think I did.’ She couldn’t help but ask, ‘Is she… in trouble?’
‘What is her weakness, do you think?’ asked the spook lady.
‘That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?’ said the minister. ‘We get her children, we get her.’
‘Thank you, Zoe, for coming in at such short notice,’ said the distinguished gentleman quickly. ‘I’m sure you understand that everything you heard in this room must be kept strictly confidential.’
It was clear the meeting wouldn’t continue until she left, but Zoe hesitated at the door, and turned to the assembled faces. ‘If Elsa’s in trouble, I’d like to help bring her in.’
There was an embarrassed silence, and then the judge said, ‘I’m sure someone will organize a car to get you home.’
Plowright bundled her out of the door, hissing, ‘What did I tell you? Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.’
‘Tell me what’s going on,’ Zoe said, trying to keep up as he led her towards the lift.
He barked with bitter laughter. ‘I’m afraid it’s way above your pay grade.’
‘She’s running, isn’t she?’
