Jenny was sitting outside the journalist’s new hotel in a blue Fiat as the phone call came in. She groaned. Another hectoring from Charlie Waits, no doubt – the control-freakery emanating from that man’s office knew no bounds. But when she looked at the caller ID it felt like a wet cloth had torn inside her chest.
It simply said: Home.
Jenny had visited her mother nightly during her time in Istanbul. Mum was always back to full health, but the dreams would typically be underscored by some prosaic difficulty she was facing. Last night it was a surprise birthday party for Dad. There were too many guests, not enough places for them all to hide.
“Daddy?”
“Jenny. Oh, Jen.”
Her world tilted. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”
“It’s not the worst,” he said quickly. “But I’m afraid your mother’s very poorly. Her condition deteriorated overnight. Quite markedly.”
Jenny said nothing, forcing him to continue.
“Just after midnight she went into convulsions,” he said. “Then it was breathing difficulties. By the time I arrived she was hooked up to a machine to keep her lungs working.”
“I can’t believe this is happening, Dad.”
Jenny forced herself not to cry. She hadn’t since Marc had left her – and the memory of that breakdown still made her prickle with embarrassment. It finally came at the supermarket checkout, a full fortnight after he had dropped the bombshell. The weekly shop was so much cheaper without all his meat and booze in the trolley, and with only one person packing the damn items had come down the conveyor twice as fast as she could bag them. That was when it hit her she was alone – and possibly always would be.
Why was she thinking of this now?
“They’ve got her in an artificial coma,” her father said. “So she’s not in any pain, love.”
Of course. Loneliness. When all this came to its logical conclusion the number of people on her side no matter what was down to one.
“Dad, do I need to come home right away? To see her.”
“No, don’t be silly.” His voice was thick. “It’s not come to that yet. The doctors say there’s no imminent danger of … the worst. She’s peaceful for now.”
“And is this a permanent state of affairs?”
“Oh love, we just don’t know. But it looks bleak, darling. I’m so sorry.”
To her own disgust Jenny’s instinctive thought was for herself. A fear reflex, generated like the jerk of a leg struck below the kneecap.
What if I’m a carrier too?
For the second time that day she realized she was digging her fingernail into her palm.
“When will you be back, love? I know your work is really important and everything. But perhaps if you spoke to her while she’s sleeping, like I’ve been doing – she’d know you were there.”
Jenny could picture him at that moment: a balding, delicately featured man in late middle age. Slightly stooped, almost certainly wearing his dressing gown. He’d be in the armchair by the piano with a carafe of coffee, one hand on the cat perhaps, his forefinger tracing circles of worry on the top of her head. The dratted cat would be purring away without a care in the world.
“I’ll be coming back soon, Dad,” Jenny promised, hating herself.
When she hung up it felt as if the world was projected around her on screens and none of it was real.
Her phone buzzed: it was the transcript of Jake’s latest conversation with his news editor. Amazingly, the journalists still weren’t taking proper precautions on the phone. She pulled herself together. Duty calls. Jenny read the dispatch without interest at first. She had studied hundreds of Jake’s communications by then, most trivial. But as she read this transcript she shifted in her seat.
What if the guys in the Mercedes weren’t the ones who shot the agent? What if they were MI6 too?
At once her mind went to another conversation – when she’d pulled Waits out of his jolly to tell him of the discovery in the cistern.
Oh, all the major embassies have a couple of smooth operators I’m authorized to call on in absolute emergencies.
For the first time Jenny thought the unthinkable: maybe her handler was responsible for an attempt on the life of two British citizens. That still left the question of who killed Medcalf. She read on, and another line jumped out at her that rang so true her skin seemed to shrink around her body.
I’m not trying to say this fortune-telling stuff actually works. But can we completely rule out that MI6 thinks that it works?
Could Jenny rule out that Waits thought the Book of Thunder was a functional instruction manual for predicting the future? Patently she could not. It was, now she considered it, only slightly less plausible than his line about wanting to unsettle Britain’s enemies. Before she could develop the thought her phone rang again. It was de Clerk in Vauxhall.
“You’re not gonna like this,” he said. “Chung just paid for two tickets to Addis Ababa on her credit card. They’re flying in three hours.”
The cradle of humanity beckoned.