The door opens and Marian appears with the two men at her back. She startles when she sees me. “Why is Tessa here?” she asks the men.
When they don’t answer, she flies at them. They manage to step back into the hall in time, and she shouts, then starts to throw herself against the door. She is, I realize, trying to break it down. Eventually she turns to me, panting. “Tessa—”
“It’s all right, Marian. It’s not your fault.”
“Where’s Finn?”
“He’s safe.”
She sits on the mattress facing mine. She has on her wool jumper, and her hair is held back in a gold clasp. “Are you hurt?” she asks. “Did they hurt you?”
“No. Who are they? Do you know them?”
“Not well,” she says. The bouncer’s name is Aidan, and the older one is Donal. “They’re waiting for someone to interview us. I don’t know how long that will be, it could be a few days.”
“Have you signaled for help?” I ask, nodding at the tracker in her filling.
“Yes.”
“Then it’s fine. Eamonn will send in a team.”
“They should have come by now,” she says.
Maybe they’re already here. Officers might be in the woods at this moment, they might have the house surrounded.
Marian moves around the room, studying the baseboards, the ceiling, the window, and the metal grate soldered to its frame. On the ceiling is a brass fixture, but they’ve removed the light bulb.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“I told you about this place,” she says. “This is the farmhouse.”
The wooden table in the kitchen is where she built bombs. The tiled counter is where she stood, after being hunched over a device for hours, and stretched her back, and made tea.
In the summer, she tells me, she often swam in the river behind the house. The river is frozen now, but in summer the water is warm, flowing slowly between grasses and overshot wildflowers. She’d paddle past dragonflies and kingfishers, with only her head above the surface.
Marian is telling me this as a sort of punishment for herself, she’s allowing me to hate her, or that version of her, a terrorist swimming naked in the river behind the house where I might now be killed.
But I can’t be angry with her. I don’t have the energy, not while I’m trying to work out how to escape.
When the room grows dark, we lie down on the two single mattresses on the floor. The men dragged the mattresses up to this room. I want to know where I was while they prepared this room for us, how long I’ve been walking around with this place waiting for me.
The sheets are new, the fabric stiff from never having been washed. One of the men went into a shop and picked them out. I picture him standing in front of a shelf, considering the different options, knowing what they would be used for. The ones he chose are sky blue.
Marian has fallen asleep. Outside, the moon is bright enough to stain the sky around it green. On the other side of the clearing, wintry trees stretch away for miles. No lights. No pylons. I wonder how long we’d have to walk to reach the nearest house.
Somewhere, people are trying to find us. The detective will have told my mam that I’ve been taken. I remember her one evening last week saying, “Do you and Finn want to take a walk with me?” and me saying, “Not tonight, mam, I can’t, I’m so tired from work.”
I regretted it then, too. I pictured her going for a walk on her own, or staying at home on the sofa, carefully reading a catalogue, folding down the pages. I should have said yes.
I lie on the mattress and consider the different rooms in the house, the different ways a raid might play out. Our guards have automatic rifles. If there is a raid, we might die.
Though the operators MI5 sends in will be experienced. The Special Forces specialize in hostage rescue, their officers have two years of instruction before even deploying. They might have run hundreds of simulations in a house like this, with the same number of hostages and terrorists. They will know how to enter the rooms. We aren’t in a fortified compound, we’re in a farmhouse in South Armagh. I wish there were a way for me to talk to them, to tell them where we are in the house, to receive instructions.
I try to picture us being hurried outside by officers after a siege, but can’t. If there is a raid, we might never leave this room.
At some point in the night, I move to the floor. I have an image of the two of us lying on the mattresses, our blood soaking into the sky-blue sheets, so I kneel on the floor, like if I can change one part of the image, it won’t happen.
I end up on Marian’s mattress eventually, and fall asleep with her arm tucked around me.
At dawn, a man steps inside the room, holding a chair. It takes me a moment to recognize him. His faded red hair is brushed to the side, and he has on a tweed blazer over a blue shirt. He sets the chair on the floor and sits down facing us.
“Seamus,” says Marian with relief. “You need to help us.”
“Well,” he says. “That will depend on how this goes.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I need both of you to answer some questions.”
“You’re not on internal security.”
“I am, actually,” he says, and Marian’s face sags.
“Fine,” she says. “You and I will talk, but Tessa shouldn’t be here.”
“Oh, I disagree,” he says, rubbing the knuckles of his long hands. “We’ve a bit of a problem.” He rests his ankle on his knee and clasps his hands on his lap. “A sniper was meant to assassinate the justice minister during her speech, but someone warned her. We think you told Tessa, and she told Rebecca Main.”
“This is the first I’m hearing of any of this, Seamus. You know we weren’t involved in that operation.”
“No, but someone told you about it. I have their word.”
“Who?”
Seamus turns his attention to me. “You’ve been quiet, Tessa.”
“Because this is mad.”
“But you’ve met Rebecca Main, haven’t you? She was a guest on your program.”
“Politicians come in every week. Do you think I’m friends with all of them?”
“Do you have a personal phone number for Rebecca?”
“No.”
Seamus reaches down to brush some dust from his shoe. “Do you know how many of these interviews I’ve done?” he says. “Can I tell you something? Innocent people get restless. They move around. And neither of you has shifted an inch since I came in.”
Marian laughs. “Is this a witchcraft trial? There’s a river back there, do you want to go see if we sink?”
Seamus points at me. “I already know Tessa has lied to us.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You told your neighbor to call the police.”
I nod. “You don’t get to threaten my son.”
“But, you see, now I know that you’re a liar.”
“No, I’m his mother. And you can fuck right off.”
“Watch yourself,” he says.
“Which speech?” asks Marian.
“Sorry?”
“At which speech were you planning to assassinate the justice minister?”
“The one in Portrush on Friday.”
Marian frowns. “We’re on cease-fire.”
“Well, not all of us agree,” says Seamus. “We never voted on a cease-fire.”
“So who ordered the assassination?” she asks. “Anyone from the army council? No? You lads just took it upon yourselves.”
“We’re not here about me, love. How did you contact Rebecca Main, Tessa?” he asks.
“I didn’t.”
Marian loosens her hair from the clasp and runs her hand through it. She smooths the hem of her jumper. “Seamus,” she says. “You’re right.”
The room draws together. Seamus turns, pained, to Marian. She says, “I’m an informer. I’ve been working with a nice man from the government so idiots like you don’t get in the way of the talks. You’re in our road. Everyone at the top knows it. You’re terrified of a cease-fire, aren’t you? Because what the fuck is a poor show like you going to do when this ends?”
His face burns red. Marian holds out her hand, looks at her nails. “Thanks for the books, though. I’ll be keeping them.”
I sit rigid, watching him stare at Marian. He’s about to lose his head. Which would be good. Better to have him shouting and raving than calm, controlling the situation. If he loses himself, we might have a chance.
Seamus doesn’t stand up, or throw his chair at her, though he looks like he wants to. Instead he points at me. “And Tessa?”
“Nothing to do with it. She doesn’t have the nerve, to be honest. You know that well enough yourself, that’s why you never gave her more than scouting. You know she’s not like me.” Marian smiles at him. “Do you remember coming round for coffee, years ago? You chose me yourself, and now here we are. Funny old world.”
“How long?” he asks through his teeth.
“God, you must be dying to know. Did the Brits choose me even before you did?”
Seamus waits across the room, a concentrated mass of fury, his eyes glittering.
“I don’t mind telling you. I’ll explain when they recruited me, and what I’ve told them, and which operations I sabotaged and which failed on their own. You’ve spent years trying to figure out why some of them didn’t come off. Let Tessa leave, and I’ll tell you.”
Seamus turns to me with a vague expression, like he forgot I was in the room. He doesn’t care about me. All of his attention is on Marian, on the girl he chose seven years ago, and what she has done. He wants to know the extent of her betrayal, to assess the level of rot in his unit. He has known me for a few weeks. Marian has been his life.
He’s in danger, too, if Marian has told the government about him. He will want to know about his own exposure. How many years he has been marked by them, when he’d thought he was anonymous.
Seamus looks at me, waiting, and every inch of my body stands to attention. Finn’s face blooms in front of me. If I nod, he will let me go home to my son.
“She’s lying,” I hear myself say, even as my whole being rushes toward Finn. “Marian’s not a tout. She’s just saying what she thinks you want to hear so you’ll let me go.”
Marian says, “I’m not lying. It’s over, Seamus. Let her leave.”
Seamus jogs his foot up and down on his knee, then purses his mouth in thought. “No,” he says, finally. “Tessa’s guilty, too, look how scared she is.”
Marian crosses the room and kneels in front of his chair. She’s going to beg him, I think, but instead she rises up and drives the metal point of her hair clasp into the side of his neck.
Blood sprays the air. Seamus lets out a sound, like a bark. As he falls forward, Marian catches his weight and lowers him to the floor. A glossy curve of blood spills toward me. It reaches the mattress and then starts to climb, wicked up by the sky-blue sheets.
I look at Seamus’s face above the shining mess of his throat. I look at the slack set of his mouth, the soft pouches under his eyes, his pale, sandy lashes. A few minutes ago, he was blinking, breathing, talking.
Marian is washed in his blood. It’s smeared on her chest, her throat, her hands. The ends of her hair are dripping. She must have used a lot of force, to push the clasp in that far. I look at her and my head swims. Her stained chest rises with her breath.
Marian kneels beside him and slides her hand under his back. She pats down his legs, then rocks onto her heels. “Oh, god,” she says, which means there’s no gun. The guards will be back soon. They will open the door and see the wet floor and wall.
“What have you done?” I ask.
“They had plastic sheeting in the hall,” she says. “He was going to kill us.”
I notice dots of blood on my own shirt, and my mind crawls. “Take off your shoes,” says Marian, unlacing her own. I shake my head. “Come on, Tessa. We need to go.”
A roll of plastic sheeting is outside our door. She was right. Seamus was going to kill us, and then wrap our bodies in it.
No other doors lead off the hall. We stand together at the top of the stairs, listening. The house is quiet. The guards might be smoking outside. I follow Marian down the stairs, holding my breath, unable to hear how much noise we’re making over the pounding in my ears.
Marian leans forward to look toward the kitchen, then waves me ahead of her. The front door is maybe ten feet away. We’re almost there, I’m reaching out my hand for the doorknob, when I hear a floorboard creak. The bouncer is standing motionless in the dining room. His eyes widen when he sees us, and the blood splashed on our clothes.
The two of us freeze. We draw together, standing side by side, near enough for me to feel the warmth from her clothes and hair. A taut wire runs between us, pulling with every twitch of movement. The side of my body prickles, the hairs standing on my arm.
“Aidan,” says a man’s voice, and then the other guard rounds the corner into the room. “Oh, fuck.”
“Listen to me,” says Marian softly. “There’s a brick of Semtex in the closet. Unwrap the foil and place it on top of the boiler before you leave. The explosion will look like an accident.”
The air between us hums. I don’t know what she’s doing, why she thinks they’ll obey her. Marian says, “You’re going to say that Seamus and both of us were inside during the explosion. You’re going to say that we died.”
Slowly the bouncer reaches behind his back for his gun. He holds it at his side, looking back and forth between us. There is a row of icicles hanging from the window ledge. I notice them, and a lemon scent in the air.
Nothing she can say will convince him. The waste of it stuns me, when we’ve come this close. Finn. Finn, Finn, Finn. I won’t get to find out what he will be like. He’ll be lovely, I know that. A sound breaks from my throat.
“No one will thank you for killing us,” she says. “When this is over, people like us won’t be rewarded.”
Sunlight slides down the icicles. Aidan steps toward us, and I feel Marian flinch. He says, “Run.”