“My name’s Jim. I’m from Connecticut originally. What’s your business here?”
“I assume you know that.”
“Oh,” he said, leaning back and pausing. He looked at me harder now.
“Oh,” he said again in a more knowing way. “Are you looking for work?”
“Why are you saying these things?”
He just sat and looked at me.
Eventually he said, “Maybe we could get a drink later. Get to know each other a bit better. We’re gonna make you pay for what you did to our friends, you bitch.”
“What?”
“I said I’m happy to pay to be friends. I’m rich.”
You clever bastard.
“Excuse me,” I said and jiggled my mobile at him.
“Sure, do what you have to do. I’m in Room 305.” But already I’d left him.
I walked down a pebble-dashed corridor with jewellery cabinets, away from the lifts, towards a dining room. There must be toilets, I thought, but there weren’t. Two girls were stripping blue tablecloths from long tables. I sat for a moment, shaking, and pretended to check something on my mobile. I forced myself to think in an ordered way.
Had to find Toby again – should never have left him. I called his number. It rang, then there was that longer tone that indicates a switch to another extension. A woman’s voice answered.
“Who am I speaking to?” I said and, absurdly, thought I should have said “to whom”.
“This is the British Consulate in Jerusalem.”
“I thought I’d phoned Toby Naismith’s extension.”
“Toby Naismith doesn’t work here any more.”
I paused to absorb this information.
“When did he leave?”
“Oh,” she said, “I’m not sure. Would you like me to put you through to that department?”
“No. Yes. Please.”
Another pause. Another, younger woman.
“Is Toby there?” I tried to sound everyday and sing-song. Like an aerobics teacher, maybe.
“Who’s speaking?”
“It’s Nat.” What the hell.
“From?” Damn, she was good. Or maybe she hadn’t been briefed. How very British.
“Connecticut,” I said.
“Toby Naismith doesn’t work here any more.”
“Oh?” Pleasantly, as if we hadn’t been in touch for a while. “When did he finish?”
“Ooh, I couldn’t say.”
“And where did he go?”
“I don’t have that information. You’d need to speak to his department. Can I put you through?”
“No, not to worry, thank you.”
There are revelations you can’t approach because of their scale, we were taught at college. You simply concentrate on how they “form” you. It’s a type of obedience, I suppose. The Yank sent to rattle me in the lobby, who pretended he thought I was a whore. Toby wasn’t working at the consulate. These were not to be examined or questioned. What they did to me was what was important.
Breathing was coming hard again and my hairline cooled with sweat. The beast was returning and it was going to be a bad one. I stood and one of the waitresses moved as if to help me. No no.
I made the lift and my room before my arm shook too much to handle the key card. And I lay on the bed. Maybe this time I would die, maybe this time my heart would stop. My knee was moving up and down and I couldn’t bear the repetition. I stood and considered the window again. So easy and it would be over.
I was clutching at the window handle, whether to get air into me or me into the air I’ll never know, when I heard the lock on my door lift with a clunk. I turned and moved into the short passage before the door.
“Who is it?”
But the question was lost in the crash of the door bursting open. Something, someone dark and huge, swung me and pinned me to the cupboard door. I wilted in the embrace. I was done. It’s finished. Take me.
Another huge figure passed into the room and I heard a shouted single word. What was that language? My head was too fevered to process it.
A man’s face withdrew from next to mine. Slavic features. Dark, kind eyes.
“Sorry,” he whispered and smiled slightly.
His colleague was closing the window, a semi-automatic weapon slung at his waist. The man who had been holding me had one too. I was shaking properly now.
But there was a third person, to my right, standing in the door. Leaning on a stick.
It was Sarah Curse.
16
High ceilings to stare up into, with dewdrop pargeting. Cream and gold upholstery with silk throws. Double doors topped with marble, Moorish ogees. Embroidered wall drapes of Ottoman warriors. Pale brown marbled floors with Persian rugs. French windows to a terrace, with the longest net curtains I’d ever seen, furling like smoke in warm night air.
I was in an enormous velvet recliner, where I’d slept for I don’t know how long. Sarah was beside me, holding a straw from a cool yoghurt-tasting drink to my lips.
I’d stopped shaking.
Sarah was stroking my hair from my forehead with her other hand. A smart, wiry young man stood behind her.
“I’m so sorry, Nat. I never in a million years meant this to happen.”
I shifted slightly in my sit-up lounger and felt the tug of a cannula on my forearm. There was a clear bag hanging from a metal stand next to me. Sarah followed my eyes.
“It’s saline,” she said. “We’re flushing you out.”
“What was it?”
“We don’t know yet. The toxicologist can find out. But from your reaction, Alexei reckons it was maybe a bastard cousin of phenothiazine, maybe mixed with opiate. Massive delusions, hallucinations, altered reality. Most people die when they think they can fly.”
The young man looked up. This was Dr Alexei.
“What a junkie I’ve become,” I said, and closed my eyes again. I thought of the American guy in the lobby, probably telling his mates about the mad chick he’d met. “Did you pay my hotel bill?” And I heard her
