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

Charles Buchanan, nor Maxwell Peyton, were staying there, just summit attendees and their entourages.

Eva watched security move a couple on who were posing for their Instagram moment in front of them. She could feel the bite of the sun on her skin, its ferocity pressing on her un-hatted head, roasting her in her English winter clothes.

“Any ideas on where they might be?” Luke asked. Eva shrugged. “You’ll be no good to Lily with sunstroke. Let’s get a mint tea while you’re thinking.”

The mint tea was a brilliant idea, the baklava more so.

“Not strictly Moroccan, but sugar’s always good in a crisis.”

She didn’t need him to justify it. The sticky, nutty pastries were just what she needed.

She twirled the longest stalk of mint in her glass. Charles didn’t know anyone there, as far as she was aware, but she’d had no idea about his friendship, or whatever it was, with Louie Steinman, so maybe scratch that from her musing.

He could have chosen the world, why Marrakech? The G20 summit was the only thing happening there and not elsewhere. The phone call he made in the middle of the night just before he went to meet Nancy Seymour, ‘The White House Chief of Staff’s office’, how the woman had answered Eva’s redial.

She watched the mint, letting her gaze soften, unfocus, as though she was trying to decipher one of those magic eye pictures. Charles had sounded like he knew the President, what if he did? He’d told her he’d interned in the US during his studies. The way he’d said his fake name, Maxwell Peyton, that’s what had been odd about it, he’d said it in an American accent. And his being at the charm school, at least twice.

So he was American too, like the Professor, hiding as British. That could explain why she knew nothing about his family, why he didn’t share stories from his childhood, nothing to do with the poor memory for such trivia that he claimed. Then why he was here. . .

No, he wouldn’t, he wasn’t a bad person. The Sherlock Holmes quote nudged at her again.

She knew exactly why Marrakech.

52

The building looked wrong, out of place and time. Not even the streetlights softened the square concrete block, a cuckoo amongst much finer architectural influences, to make it anything other than ugly. It was the sort of Lego building Charles had constructed as a kid.

In his favour, the streets around the building were almost deserted, the pious returned home from prayers, no reason for the summit delegates and their entourages milling around the Hotel Adina to leave their six star surroundings.

Still, he let his feet drift to a stop on a street corner, make a slow turn as if he were checking for non-existent traffic. Paranoid, sure, but better safe than not. After all, Jed Carson was in the same city, breathing the same air.

Charles had been a fool. How short-sighted to have been happy for Jed when the president died and he, as VP, succeeded him. How stupid to have felt a sense of pride that his friend was about to become a legitimate President in his own right, if the polls were the crystal ball they claimed. Even more to not have realised they had sounded the death knell for everyone who’d helped Jed attain his ultimate power trip.

Charles pulled on the anger of his misplaced friendship and trust—at himself as much as at his now enemy—wrapping it around him. He tightened his backpack straps over his chest, drawing its contents closer to him. This was righteous, justified, this was the perfect karma. For Nancy.

He walked up to the building as though he belonged there. The card access panel looked curiously out of place, the twenty-first century reaching into an area of timelessness. Don’t let me down, CJ. Tensing against the likelihood it would refuse him, Charles pushed the door.

CJ hadn’t.

Charles closed it quietly behind him, waiting while his eyes adjusted to the gloomy interior. Low-level lighting showed him a boxy inside, a reflection of what he expected given the exterior view, and the perfect representation of the plans he’d found online. Maybe that meant he could trust all the information he’d found on this place.

He walked tiptoeing through a minefield carefully towards the danger area where the only person in the building should be.

Painted a godawful green, at his eyeline the door held a gift - a small square inset of wire toughened safety glass. Charles tensed against seeing someone looking out of it at him and peeped in.

A couple of TV screens to the right of the lone worker showed black and white images of the main corridor and the pump room. The guard wasn’t paying attention to any of the systems he was supposed to be monitoring, his cap was half across his face, his body leaning backwards in the chair, a newspaper dropped into his lap where his arm drooped over it.

Charles fingertip-padded at the door. As immovable as he’d hoped. Doubly thank you, CJ, triple at the end of the corridor when the pump room door gave him access. CJ always charged too much, but today Charles was happy to pay it.

Machinery noise welcomed him in. He wouldn’t need anything like the ten minutes CJ was giving him before he wiped the camera feeds and stopped jamming signals there.

Most of the underground infrastructure was just that, locked safely away from sabotage, interference and for the safety of the workers. But in each pumping station in the city a succession of hatches gave access to the water beneath his feet.

Charles snapped on the central overhead lights, plunging the machinery at the sides of the room into shadow. He pulled out a large container that could have passed as an odd thermos flask if there’d been anyone there to ask him.

Was he really going to do this?

What choice did he have? It came down to a simple equation, him or Jed Carson. The things they’d done had started innocently enough. Jed