The Society Karen Guyler (best books to read .TXT) 📖

you get him too? They knocked him out in the hangar. He needs medical treatment.” She looked around as though he might have materialised next to her.

“The guys only got you, Eva.”

“Someone needs to check on him.”

“Finish your whisky, give yourself five minutes. We’re all playing catch up here.”

 Eva downed it, a longer shudder rippling through her that made Nora laugh. “Still not a fan?”

Eva tried to smile back. “I’ll stick to G&T.”

“Tell me about the plane, we might be able to get it grounded when it stops to refuel.”

“It belongs to Addison Clark, maybe to the Clarke Foundation, rather than him. Luke Fox was with us, the guy knocked out in the hangar. He’s been working with Addison. Flight crew, I’m not sure how many were on the flight deck, one steward. Charles had some ridiculous idea that it was too dangerous to take a commercial flight, that there’d be a border alert for us. He got us fake passports.”

“Since when does your husband practise tradecraft?”

Eva spread her hands, steadier now. “I have no idea. It seems that I don’t know him at all. He has secrets I can’t even guess at.”

Nora laid a hand on Eva’s arm, her bright red nails stark against the black of Eva’s fleece. She squeezed in an ‘I’m here for you’ way. “We all have secrets.”

But Eva’s weren’t going to get them killed. “How did you know where I was?”

“If I told you, I’d have to kill you.” Nora smiled at the age-old joke, underlining that, as at home as she felt right then, Eva was an outsider. “What’s the plane’s destination?”

“Chennai, India. Three stops on the way.

“How’s our guest?” Gordon filled the doorway of the meeting room.

Eva tried a smile. “As good as you’d expect.”

“We’ll get our best people on it, we’ll find them.”

Eva nodded. She was lucky, she had access to resources that would help find Lily. In the meantime she could punish herself with the worst imaginings or she could give back.

“Use me while I’m here. You’ve got me as a captive audience, let me do something. I can free up someone else so they can find my daughter.”

Gordon smiled as he slapped a folder down between them and sat opposite her.

“Am I so predictable?”

“Not quite, bit longer and Nora would have won our bet. She thought it’d take another hour before you offered.” There was something comforting about being around people who knew you better than you knew yourself. “There’s been another high-profile incident today, Aleksandr Oblov, collapsed in a London street.”

“The Russians are killing off their own?”

“He’s not dead, as far as we can gather, but we’re not in the loop on it. This is Five’s territory. Oblov’s bodyguard took him home and there’s been no reports of emergency services attending the property, we assume he’s there, recovering.” Gordon slid a piece of paper towards her, his fingers holding it face down. “Eric wanted to ask you about this, still time to walk away.”

Eva made a spiral motion with her right index finger, and he turned it over. She emptied her mind, pulling on her analyst’s training. Lose the preconceptions, the bias. What could she see in the copied photo? A row of shop fronts, a high street. Three Union Jacks fluttered to the right, obscuring some shop names.

“You have a magnifying glass?”

Nora produced one, watching while Eva ran it up and down the picture in regimented rows, taking in the thatched cottages, yellow hatched markings on the road that led to an out of shot school. A perfect English village.

The contents of the shop windows told her what they were, a butcher’s, bakery, post office, outside of which was a red pillar box, neighbouring a pub. The Red Lion, the most common pub name in Britain, it could have been anywhere in the country. A row of little cottages marched off the edge of the page.

It looked a nice place, a safe place, far away from assassins. Eva shut down the panicking spiral in her mind. What was she seeing?

Gordon passed her another photo, a small garage with two petrol pumps, a hairdresser and corner shop in that one. A building that could only be a village hall ran off the page on the right. The flags waved to the left, the other side of the street.

A man and woman walked along the pavement, but the image’s resolution wasn’t good enough to make out their faces.

Gordon handed her another page, the middle portion of the one she already held blown up beyond confusion. The surprise of a much younger Charles linked arm in arm with a dark-haired woman stabbed at Eva, their smiles hurting. It was her.

Focus, be professional. What did she see? Charles visiting the woman in her home village? She peered at his face through the magnifying glass. He looked so young; it had to be before his PhD, before he went to Uni even. He knew Nancy before he ever met her. She didn’t want to think about that.

“Any idea when it was taken?”

Gordon shook his head.

It was simple enough maths.

“Charles looks about 18, so it’s around the millennium. But it’s not. . .” she peered at the photo again, minutely inspecting their clothes, the things in the shop windows. They didn’t quite fit. “Where is it?”

“There were no satellite co-ordinates in what Eric dredged out of the archives.” Nora said.

She moved the photo to the side, unable to not ask. “Who’s the woman?” Trying for nonchalance.

Gordon spun the file round for her to see a closer shot, Nancy Seymour, the caption said.

“I saw her last night, she was killed right in front of me.” Eva touched her neck.

“Do you know why?” Nora asked.

“Charles has been. . .I thought he was being paranoid.” Knowing everything might help them find him and Lily so Eva asked. “Have you heard of The Society?”

“What’s that?” Gordon asked.

“A group of assassins after Charles.”

“Why?”

Eva blew out a breath. He’d told her half-truths, started sentences, but never finished them. She