Born to Run (4 page)

T
HE WESTERLY WIND hurled fragments of London’s distant Big Ben’s chimes up to the 14th floor. Lucky snapped off his cell phone and
looking outside said, “Hey, I can see MI6 from up here.”

Jax was thrown, and not just by Lucky’s American twang, tight, like a crab was pinching his lips. “No w-way can you see it,” Jax spluttered, realising too late that
contradicting this guy was not smart, even if he knew for a fact that MI6 was behind several bends as the river threaded west, so you couldn’t possibly see it from up here, not at night, not
even in daylight.

“Sure you can,” said Diana abruptly, any pretence of her own fake English accent discarded. “I’ll show you.” She twisted Jax’s arm with a grip Lucky would be
proud of. “What a view,” she said, manoeuvring Jax over the floor lip onto the windy terrace. “Best view in London,” she added, but oddly she seemed to be looking down the
Thames in the opposite direction.

“Who are you g-guys?” Jax flared, trying to twist out of Diana’s grip.

She maintained her grasp and smiled.

“Wh-who are you, d-dammit?” If only he could get Diana to release her hold he could get the hell away from them.

Diana edged him closer to the railing. “We’re y-your f-friends,” she smirked.

To Jax, Diana suddenly appeared like a swooping hawk to a chicken the moment before the talons crush its neck. His heart was pumping faster than the supercomputers he’d done most of his
simulation work on. With his free hand he took out of his pocket the remote control the nightwatchman had given him and pressed it so all the lights on the floor came blaring on full, including the
bright spots above their heads on the deck, and he prayed someone in one of the other buildings would notice.

“Gimme that,” screeched Diana who snatched the remote away from him. After checking her fingerpads were still fastened, she pointed it in various directions but it made no
difference. She hadn’t seen the switch on the back that Jax had flicked to the lock position. “Fix this, you Aussie fuck,” she said, shoving it back at him. “We
haven’t got all night.” To make her point, she kneed him in his groin.

Hunched over, Jax slid the switch to unlock and flicked all the lights off at once but, while Diana and Lucky’s eyes were adjusting to the instant blackout, he tossed the remote over the
railing and made a dash for the fire stairs.

It would have been easy for Jax to hop over the half-inch drainage lip at the terrace doors even in the dark, if only he had remembered it was there, but he tripped over his shoelace and
sprawled out face-down onto the cold concrete floor inside. While he was scrabbling to his feet, Lucky picked him up by his belt and hoisted him back outside, with Jax kicking and punching the air.
Then, in one long parabolic sweep, he hurled Jax over the railing.

“Let ’er rip,” was all Jax could hear in the hot wind-rush.

Diana and Lucky peered over… two hundred feet straight down.

Jax’s eyes did all the screaming for him.

With his torch, Lucky lit Diana’s steps back to Jax’s laptop. “Got his disk?” she asked Lucky, and checked her finger pads again. After his affirmative, she deleted the
copy on Jax’s hard-drive, careful to empty it out of the computer’s trash can as well. Then out of her back pocket, she slid out a DVD and slotted it into Jax’s drive, running the
clean-up program off it so no cleverdick could recreate on the laptop what she’d just deleted.

As Jax plunged, the sweeping copper entrance awning loomed up at him at a sickening speed, and he slammed into it with a force that fortunately he could no longer feel. It bounced his body
face-forward over the canopy’s edge into the air, in a belly-flop dive that skewered him with a sickening
thook
onto the bronze spike of Robbie Burns’ quill. The twenty-five-foot
sculpture of Scotland’s most famous poet had been installed on-site only the day before and, even though Jax should have been working, he had watched almost the whole show. Now he was part of
it.

While the clean-up disk was running, Diana came back out onto the terrace to check on Jax. She couldn’t tell, but felt sure his blood and other bodily fluids were inking their way down
Burns’ pen, writing their own ending.

DIANA had a couple more tasks before she was finished. She switched off Jax’s wifi connection and located the clock on the laptop’s system. Once she reset the
computer’s time backwards to 4 AM, she clicked open the second file on her DVD.

She scrolled through Jax’s suicide note one last time: it was sad… pathetic. It was perfect even with the Australian English spelling, yet she hadn’t met him when she’d
composed it. After she block-copied the text onto the computer’s clipboard and closed the original, she created a brand-new document, one that would forever record its time of creation
as… she checked the screen’s corner… 4:03 AM. She pasted the copied text into the new document, saved it on his computer, and ejected her DVD slipping it safely back into her
pants. As her thumb withdrew from her pocket, the button scraped at the protective pad almost peeling it off, but she felt the glue unsticking and tamped it back down.

She checked the computer’s automated properties for the suicide note to double-check her time trick had worked… It had. “Created at 4:03 AM.”

Leaving the laptop on the floor with the suicide note open, she called to Lucky, “It’s go time.” From out on the terrace where he was relishing his handiwork, he came inside
and, as they started across the room to the elevator, a crease of annoyance smeared across Diana’s forehead. “Damn,” she said, and sprang back to the laptop to set its clock back
to the right time, and reconnect its wifi.

BURSTING out of the revolving entranceway, what hit her was how light the breeze was down here. And the silence. The wind had petered out; at least down here on the ground it
had.

Lucky’s legs were shorter than hers, so she easily strode ahead to the statue of Robbie Burns.

“I hope Jax liked poetry,” Lucky said from behind her.

Diana’s lips curled a little. “So the pen
is
mightier than the sword,” she said, and began to hum
Auld Lang Syne.

She unzipped her side pocket and took out her phone and a small grey box. She was about to jam them together when Lucky interrupted her.

“It’s only midnight on the east coast,” he said.

She didn’t respond and kept walking, and humming. No matter what the time was, she knew that their leader, code-named Isis, expected a report on the mission.

Diana bent her head as she passed under the monumental sculpture, careful to avoid the drops of Jax’s fluids still dripping, and without lifting her eyes. She stepped over Jax’s
jam-jar glasses, rammed the scrambler/voice masker onto her phone and keyed in the dialling shortcut.

While she called, Lucky stopped to check his work, enjoying the composition of Jax skewered through the stomach and flopped limp, like a frankfurt suspended on the tip of a knife. Lucky licked
his lips. Wet work made him hungry.

A reflection sparked up from Jax’s lenses on the ground and Lucky crushed them beneath his steel-capped boot.

Diana heard the crunch and, with the phone at her ear, turned toward him. “Idiot,” she fumed.

“What did you say?” said a brusque female voice on the line, sounding a lot like actress and singer Bette Midler.

“Nothing, er, Isis,” said Diana into the mouthpiece. “Hey, nice voice you got there. Maybe you should croon your way into the White House.”

Isis was weary of Diana’s jokes about the voice-masking software they used to change a speaker’s voice randomly using a stock menu of celebrities. “Your report?”

“Mission accomplished,” she said, words that would be as premature as they’d been for a former president. The line went dead. Even with scrambling, Isis didn’t prolong
calls longer than necessary.

The duo strode along Thames Path, heading east on the riverbank, steering clear of the battery of security cameras at the Canary Wharf River Dock. Though the sun was doing its best to rise, the
waterway was still dull and leaden apart from the glow of the single white anchor light coming from the boat mid-river.

Diana keyed another number into her phone. “Now,” was all she said before flipping it closed.

E
LIA CACOZ CHECKED her watch and adjusted her hair elastic. The TV current affairs researcher pulled back her hair so tight that the smooth, shiny
blackness emphasised the Asian hints she’d inherited from her grandmother as well as the smudges under her eyes.

“You’re working late, Mr Mandrake,” she said, seated at her desk as Mike Mandrake walked up behind her. She still couldn’t believe he wore a suit when he wasn’t
on-air. No one in LA did that. She was in a simple black T and black skirt. But Mandrake was from Washington, the new front-of-camera talking head who’d just joined the line-up on
Close-up
, the network’s national Sunday-night political program.

It was 9 PM, and Elia had only half-eaten the tuna sandwich that dribbled mayonnaise on her desk. With hours of work still on her plate for this fly-in show-pony, she took civility off her menu.
She knew she should have bitten her lip but she steamrolled on. “No Hollywood starlets for dinner tonight?”

In her two years in this business, Elia had observed many strange things, the latest being this guy, Mandrake. Those who said they knew better, i.e. her bosses, claimed Mandrake’s
glittering newspaper credentials were perfect for
Close-up
. The network president’s all-staff email had almost shimmered out of her screen: how Mike Mandrake was a Pulitzer
Prize-winner; how Mike had covered Washington in-depth for fifteen years; how Mike’s both-sides-of-the-street stints at
The New York Times
and
The Wall Street Journal
, as well
as
Newsweek
and
The Washington Post
gave him an unparalleled breadth of experience; and how, while this was his first TV gig, he was a natural for the medium.

“A natural?” she’d squealed at the water cooler. “With his pseudo beard and chintzy smile? With a head like his,” she told anyone who’d listen, “the
only electronic media he’s a natural for is radio.”

She seethed about Mandrake, and as soon as she could phone her boyfriend Simon without anyone eavesdropping in the open-plan, she gave him the picture. “When the arrogant shit got
here,” she whined, “he tilted his chair back, slapped his faux mountain boots onto the desk and lectured how his trip here to LA was real hush-hush. That he’s doing some,”
she made air quotes with the fingers of her free hand, “deep, deep background on Isabel Diaz.” Elia knew this would grab Simon’s interest since like many former runaway kids he
owed a great personal debt to the candidate.

Mandrake’s segment would be on air in a couple of weeks, she told him, but it wasn’t going to be the usual gloss, or dross. “He’s chasing some new angle.”

“Is it that Karim Ahmed terrorist thing?” Simon asked.

“Can’t say,” said Elia, pissed off that Mandrake hadn’t admitted her inside the tiny circle of those in the know.

In the team meeting earlier, Mandrake had held up a printout of the latest nationwide voter approval chart, clocking Isabel Diaz at an extraordinary 70 percent. “At that level, a Diaz
White House looks a certainty, but you can never tell what might jump out of the woodwork,” he winked.

Yet he wouldn’t disclose even a glimmer of his focus to her, instead selecting individual team members, Elia being one, for seemingly unconnected tasks.

But now, with only the two of them left, and with him leering over her shoulder as though he was checking whether she was wasting time on net porn, Elia’s fuse finally blew.
“What’s your damn angle?” she demanded, swivelling her chair around, her penetrating eyes only inches from his.

Mike’s face flushed almost as red as his tie. She suspected it was because the loner was finding this teamwork thing tough going. But the truth was he had been running on bluster. He
hadn’t found his angle, not yet. All he had was an idea, and a lead. It was a great lead, but only that, so far. He stiffened his back and swung his head around, double-checking that they
were alone. “It’s the truth about Diaz… about her parents.”

Elia’s face screwed up as if she’d sucked on a lemon and, though it was too late, she grabbed her tuna and mayo sandwich as cover. This guy won’t last, she told herself as she
took a bite. And if he did, well, her backpack was already stuffed with written job offers from FOX and Sports TV, the latter job reporting on her real passion, baseball.

Here goes nothing, she decided, glancing at her bag for security and swallowing quickly, “Hello-o-o!” Elia knew she was risking her job but, as her dad used to say, if you
don’t make a splash, you don’t get wet. “What more does the world need to know about that doped-out lard-factory George Hicks? Or his wife, what was her name… Annette?
Yeah, Annette… Anyway, she died years ago.”

What was Mike Mandrake thinking? For a Pulitzer winner, Elia thought he was acting like a pretty big schmuck.

“Not her diner parents,” he said, his eyes flicking nervously around the floor. “Her
real
parents.”