Killing Eva Read online

  ‘Well, I know less about this business than you,’ he appeared to concede.

  The older man nodded and continued to smoke.

  ‘But it seems to me she is a loose end. Her presence at Waterloo Station – was it really a coincidence, given her history?’

  The smoke in the room was thick now, hanging blue and fragrant in the warm morning air.

  Neither of the men spoke for some time, as the effect of the younger man’s words began to sink in.

  Suddenly, the subject was changed. ‘What have you planned for the man?’ asked the elder, still working his way through the cigar.

  A noticeable ripple of excitement travelled through the younger man and he moved quickly to sit opposite the desk.

  ‘I’d like to eliminate him. Now that she,’ he gestured at Eva’s worried face, ‘has surfaced, I think the threat – whilst minimal – is enough to warrant it.’

  ‘But are they even connected anymore?’

  ‘Why take the chance?’

  ‘And her?’

  ‘Maybe we should let Joseph Smith decide.’

  For the second time that day, Eva found herself running. Only this time it was to escape. After leaving work early she’d gone home and curled up in bed. But by the evening she had allowed herself to believe her own lie about feeling ill and decided to walk to a late night chemist for some painkillers; no amount of water had been able to soothe the now continuous thumping inside her skull. It was almost 10pm, it was a Wednesday – the streets were wet with rain but empty of the usual crowds of revellers who would populate this area from tomorrow through to the end of the weekend. But as she left the chemist and crossed the road to make the ten minute journey back to the flat, the hair had begun to stand up on the back of her neck. A figure seemed to be shadowing her, stopping when she stopped, running when she ran, sticking to her like glue. It was impossible to tell whether it was male or female. She considered turning around and shouting a challenge but the streets were completely empty and the chances of anyone coming out of their home to help her were slim to none. She crossed the wide road in front of the station, walked by the glass canopy where she had bought her coffee that morning and jogged quickly up the small hill that led home. She felt her shadow follow, she even heard the footsteps. They weren’t trying to hide.

  Eva could hear her heartbeat thudding heavily in her ears. She was exhausted and drained, as if recalling past events had somehow opened up everything she had stored away after another very similar experience all those months ago. She drew another breath down into her lungs and forced herself to remain focused. In Paris, she had ended up bouncing off Leon’s car bonnet after she had convinced herself she was being pursued and reacted like a frightened animal. This time, she would behave differently. She didn’t like to make the same mistakes twice.

  At the top of the hill, the road curved to the right and Eva quickly made her way down the turning that would take her back to her own flat. Unexpectedly, she turned left, slipping inside the narrow alleyway between two shops. She flattened herself against the wall. Her breath was fighting to escape in large, anxious bursts but she forced herself to be controlled. Sure enough, seconds later the shadowy figure slipped past the alleyway. From the brief glimpse that she had Eva recognised it was a man. But he was wearing a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up and a dark woollen hat covered most of his hair and the forehead of his profiled face. Eva waited several seconds for him to pass and keep walking and then stuck her head out of the alleyway.

  What she saw made her heart skip a beat.

  The man was standing just a couple of metres away under the darkness of a street lamp with no bulb. He was still, looking directly towards the alley in which she stood, the shadow of his hood creating a dark, faceless pool from which she knew two eyes were focused in her direction.

  Eva stood frozen to the spot. Her heart was hammering frantically. The man didn’t move. It was a surreal scene worthy of the finest Hollywood horror.

  What was he going to do? Eva glanced around at her options – go further up the alley and become trapped, run at him and risk finding herself a stabbing statistic or run away from him and wait for him to chase her; wait to feel strong hands close around her neck and choke the life from her. Just like Paris.

  Suddenly, voices broke the silence of the wet, cold streets. Drunken male and female voices heading towards where they were. The hooded man reacted briefly, glancing in the direction of the noise, and then slowly, almost unnaturally slowly, his head rotated back towards Eva. She still could not see any of his features. He looked almost as if he had none. Eva was frightened.

  Then, without warning, the man turned and walked in the opposite direction, his hands in his pockets. Eva watched him go. The gaggle of Wednesday night revellers hustled past the alley, obscuring her vision of the departing man. None of them noticed the lone woman who had retreated, shaking, into the shadows. When they had moved on, she scanned the street for several minutes but could see nothing at all.

  Her flat was just minutes from where she was standing. She could move, or she could remain cornered in that cold alleyway. She started to run. When she reached her front door, she drove the key home and flung open the door. It squeaked on its hinges. She leaped inside and felt for the handle behind her. A gust of wind blew in her face and, suddenly, she felt as if she was being pushed back, the door wrenched from her grasp. She felt a scream settle in her throat as she expected to see that empty hood appear around the door. The gust of wind died away. Quietly, Eva closed the door.

  Once she had downed a glass of brandy to steady her nerves, Eva sat on her Swedish designed sofa and tried to stop shaking. The entire experience of the last hour was unpleasant, but what had shaken her most was that the man had done nothing. Perhaps he had been interrupted by those kids, but she wasn’t sure. He had not tried to mug her, he had not tried to hurt her, he was apparently not trying to commit an opportunistic crime but just to intimidate. That meant there was another reason for his presence. Once again, Eva felt things slipping from her grasp. The steady, normal life she had constructed for herself over the past year seemed to be going up in smoke. Something was happening, she could feel it. Something she had no control over.

  Her mind flicked back to the dying man at Waterloo Station earlier in the week. That seemed to be the point at which things had started to change.

  She poured herself another drink and leaned back into the sofa. Then she stood up, walked to the kitchen and flicked the heating switch on the boiler before returning to the sofa and her drink. She tried to remember the man’s face but it was difficult. She thought of his battered hat lying on the floor and felt sadness that someone in such a state could still do something as quaintly well mannered and old fashioned as wear a hat.

  Where had he come from?

  Again, Eva heard the word that he had said to her as he died, ‘kolychak’. She realised she had said it out loud.

  She leaned over and opened the notes app on her phone and typed it into the lined yellow page. She stared at it. It meant nothing to her. But it had meant something – at the time. Or had she imagined that in the drama of the moment.

  She stood up, walked over to a vintage chest of drawers and pulled it open, the pale wood so smooth under her touch, contrasting with the clean modernist lines of the sofa. It was a contrived ‘look’ but she quite liked it. She retrieved a piece of paper and a black pen and wrote the word, first in large capital letters and then in standard sized text. She propped the sheet of paper on the arm of the sofa next to her and continued to stare. She was sure she knew that word. She had heard it before. But where had she heard it and what did it mean?

  When she finally persuaded herself to go to bed an hour later, she took her laptop with her. She had bolted, locked and chained her front door, checked every window and even picked up an empty wine bottle and a kitchen knife, a small arsenal of weapons, ‘
just in case’. And she could use them, she knew that now – she had killed two people in Paris.

  In the warm light of the cosy bedroom, she began to search the internet for the word ‘kolychak’. She passed the term through several search engines but soon felt her mind begin to slow. The brandy was relaxing her body and she now realised how very tired she was. She looked at the screen but couldn’t read what was on it. She closed the computer and shut her eyes.

  Stefano Cirza stared in horror at the man in front of him, who held a metal claw at his throat. At the end of another late night in the lab, a feeling had crept over him that he wasn’t alone. It was the same instinct he’d had several nights previously. When he had finally seen the stocky black man standing silently watching him, it had dawned on him he had indeed not been alone that night either. In fact, ever since that night he’d instinctively felt someone was in his life, silently watching, and now this man had let himself in with a code known only to Stefano and his research assistant – who had been on an extended holiday for the past three weeks.

  When the eyes of the two men had met, neither had moved for several seconds. But then, before Stefano could summon security, the metal claw was at his throat.

  ‘W-what do you want?’ he stuttered, every nerve ending on the back of his skull alight.

  ‘I am sure you already know.’ The accent was most definitely African but, other than that, Stefano could not tell.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name is Joseph Smith.’

  With a sinking feeling, Stefano realised that the ease with which the man had revealed his name did not indicate a positive outcome. One in which Stefano was left breathing.

  He felt the metal implement begin to graze his skin and he wondered why the man didn’t just carry a gun. Why bother with the theatrics of such a cruel thing?

  ‘What is that?’ he asked, nodding as far as he could without the metal piercing his skin. Perhaps he could appeal to the man’s better nature, make a connection with him.

  ‘Bagh nakh. Tiger claws. They are from India.’

  Stefano started to speak again but the other man interrupted. ‘No,’ he said and took a step back, removing the tiger claw from Stefano’s throat.

  Stefano tried to calm his heart but he knew what was coming.

  Smith stepped forward and drove the metal implement through Stefano’s thigh, slashing it down so that it was possible to hear the tearing of skin and muscle as it was ripped from the bone.

  He covered Stefano’s mouth to stifle the scream. ‘If you give me what I need I will slash your throat so you die quickly. If you don’t I will butcher your body so that you feel every single cut.’

  Stefano clutched at his thigh, the blood was running warm and sticky through his hands. His eyes met those of his aggressor once again.

  ‘I want to live!’ It was a cry that bubbled up from Stefano’s very core. He did not want this choice. It wasn’t any choice at all.

  There wasn’t even a flicker of empathy in those black eyes. ‘You cannot. Now make your decision.’

  Shaking, Stefano closed his eyes. That it should come to this. Had his ex-business partner died at the hands of this man too – was that why he had disappeared? When he opened his eyes again, there was an acceptance of sorts. He was not a coward and he would die with as much dignity as he could. The pain in his leg from the first cut was bitter and he knew he could not take that over and over again.

  He began slowly to lift a chain from around his neck. On it hung a small metal box. His entire body was shaking almost uncontrollably. The other man steadied his hands. Stefano opened the box and handed over a boxy key. He tried to speak but Joseph Smith was too fast.

  FOUR

  When she opened her eyes, she felt she was dead straight away. There was a lightness to her limbs and a heaviness in her heart that told her she hadn’t managed to escape this time with her life. She didn’t live in fiction; she wasn’t superhuman and her dreams of being something more had all been snatched away.

  And then the pain started.

  First, a gnawing sensation in her stomach that grew in intensity like a rising decibel and suddenly was so loud that she felt as if her entire body might split in two. She was bent double, screaming now.

  Agony.

  She couldn’t end the pain, she knew that. There was no way to stop this anguish that had sliced through her and opened her up from stomach to heart. She would be stuck, forever – screaming.

  Eva awoke with a start. She was sweating heavily. She reacted instantly to the darkened room and lurched for the light switch, knocking a book and a bottle of water on to the floor as she did so.

  She pushed herself upwards against the headboard and ran a hand through damp hair.

  The room around her was entirely still; outside the windows, a velvety darkness enveloped the peaceful sleepers of London.

  She realised she was shivering, reached for a white robe that lay on the chair next to the bed and pulled it over her shoulders.

  Her first nightmare in more than six months.

  Eva had the distinct impression her dream had a vaguely religious undertone, that she had somehow dreamed herself into a state of purgatory.

  She leaned back against the pillows and sighed out loud. While no one else had held her accountable for those two deaths in Paris, she seemed unable to allow herself to forget them. She was her own worst enemy, judge and jury.

  One had been a fight to the death – if Eva hadn’t fired that fatal shot, she would have been killed, without a doubt. As for the other, it was an unknown assassin wielding a needle filled with the virus that would have killed her exactly as it killed him if she hadn’t pushed the plunger home into his flesh. He had died quickly and she had never forgotten the look on his face as his organs collapsed and the virus took control of his body, reprogramming his own immune system to kill.

  ‘I had no choice,’ she said out loud. Her voice sounded uncharacteristically weak and strained.

  I’m actually going crazy.

  She dismissed the thought, threw back the bedcovers, pulled the robe around her and belted it tightly. The air in the flat was cold and she could see her breath as she walked through her bedroom, along the boards of the hall floor and into the large open plan living room and kitchen. She had specifically chosen a flat with a minimalist feel – clutter did not work for her. She stood at the kitchen island and waited for the kettle to boil. For some reason, she felt as if she was not the only person in that room. It was almost as if she was waiting for someone – or something – to speak. But no one did. Nothing moved.

  Eva turned back to the stainless steel kitchen area and retrieved her favourite mug from one of the cupboards; a heavy, insulated piece of stoneware designed to keep tea warm for ‘up to an hour’. The clock on the kitchen wall read 5am. It was virtually morning. She gave up on the idea of going back to sleep, of entering that purgatory place again, and made herself tea with two strong caffeinated teabags. Milk, no sugar. Grabbing an apple from the fruit bowl, she made her way back into the bedroom.

  As she walked through the darkened hallway, all the hairs stood up on the back of her neck.

  Eva walked faster, quickly closing the bedroom door behind her.

  When she reached the bed, she put the tea down on the bedside table before taking a large bite of the apple. For a moment she contemplated wedging a piece of furniture against the door but decided the fearful little girl apparently inhabiting her imagination did not need any encouragement.

  She climbed back into bed and pulled the still warm covers over her chilled skin.

  After a few sips of tea and the rest of the apple, Eva reached for her laptop and opened it. Instantly, it jumped to life, showing her the search engine she had been using the night before to look for information on ‘kolychak’.

  She stared at the screen.

&n
bsp; There were two hits at the top of the list she was pretty sure had not been there the night before. Nothing relevant had appeared last night, she was almost 100 per cent sure of that.

  But there was something there now.

  Eva’s stomach flipped.

  She navigated her way onto the first page.

  The headline read: ‘This country remains committed as a party to the Geneva Protocol, and a party to and depository government of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.’

  The rest of the page appeared to be written in the Cyrillic alphabet but she could clearly see the world ‘kolychak’ in English lettering, halfway down the screen. She stared at the page. It looked like a photocopy of a document, a pdf. It had an official stamp on the right hand side at the top and had been signed at the bottom – two signatories – and another stamp, this time so small and round that it was impossible to see what shape the ink was meant to convey.

  Eva opened a second window and searched for ‘Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention’. She was taken to a page that revealed the full name of the convention: the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction. It had been signed simultaneously in Moscow, Washington and London on 10 April 1972 and entered into force on 26 March 1975. She read on.

  ‘The Convention bans the development, production, stockpiling, acquisition and retention of microbial or other biological agents or toxins, in types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes. It also bans weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict. The actual use of biological weapons is prohibited by the 1925 Geneva Protocol and Article VIII of the BTWC recognizes that nothing contained in the Convention shall be construed as a derogation from the obligations contained in the Geneva Protocol.’