Sarah wouldn’t feel right leaving without word, so she’d informed her editor in chief about her brief absence. A journalistic coup, at the last minute, an exclusive worth investigating, would justify her trip.
“In that case, take Simon with you,” the editor ordered her, and she hadn’t been able to argue against it. Perhaps another time, more calmly, she could have persuaded him not to send Simon, without questioning his competence, but her mind was occupied with more urgent problems.
“What are we going to do in your house?” Simon was curious and impressed by the speed the taxi was making through the streets of London, despite the late afternoon hour.
“I’m going to look for some investigative files,” Sarah explained. “And afterwards you’re free to go,” she concluded.
It was worth trying, but she was certain Simon was not going to follow such a suggestion.
“My orders are to go with you. Don’t think you can get rid of me so easily,” Simon replied like a man. Bravo, young man.
“I give you your orders. Have you forgotten?” she returned.
“With all due respect, I always follow your orders, but these have been given to me personally by the editor in chief,” he argued, pointing up as if he were speaking about God Himself. “What do I tell him if I show up for work and he asks about you?” Simon scored a point. “ ‘Ah, sir, she excused me.’ Do I tell him that?”
“Okay, okay.” Sarah gave up. Better to go along for the moment and see about later. She would never forgive herself if something happened to him because of her. “Pay attention to what I’m going to tell you. Do whatever I tell you to do. Do you understand?”
Simon looked at her, his feelings hurt. “That’s a little insulting, but you can count on me. I won’t make problems. We’re a team.” He smiled.
A little flash of temper, there
, Sarah thought with irritation.
“And now, can you tell me where we’re going?” Simon asked curiously.
“We’re going to my house, as you know,” she replied dryly.
“Yes, and after that?”
Sarah still hadn’t planned that part. The phrase
Leave London
pounded in her mind like a pneumatic drill, but leave for where? Where could she go? There were a lot of choices. London was connected to the world by land, water, and air. That was not the problem. But where? An international flight to the States, for example. Would that be a safe place temporarily? Or should she stay in Europe close to her father with more flexibility and independence to move? She hadn’t been given any other instruction than to get away as fast as possible without looking back. They were following her. Don’t let yourself be caught. And later? It would be best to stay close, she decided. Besides, her last experience on the other side of the Atlantic was so traumatic, it seemed better to face the dangers of this side.
“After that, the train to Paris,” she announced.
“Paris?” Simon repeated with his face glowing. “I’ve never been to Paris. That’s fabulous.”
“Simon, this is work, not vacation,” she warned. “What are you doing?” Sarah asked as she saw him frantically dialing his cell phone.
“I’m sending a message to my sweetheart. You know how it is. Do you have a boyfriend?” Maybe now he would find out something about his boss. Unexpectedly. He was curious how everything changed in seconds; perhaps this business trip would end up bringing them together and change the conventional work relationship into a nice friendship.
“We’ve arrived,” Sarah informed him, ignoring his question. Her house was situated at the end of the street, and she wouldn’t give any more information about it to protect her privacy. It was important that episodes like that on Belgrave Road were not repeated, for her own mental health. She needed room to breathe.
After they paid off the taxi, Simon and Sarah crossed the street, and she opened her purse, looking for the key to the solid white door. She thought of a trip to Paris in the Eurostar, the high-velocity train that crossed the Channel tunnel and arrived in two hours and thirty-seven minutes. The last time she made this trip she went with him, her savior, with an immense weight on her conscience, forced by destiny, like now. They’d left behind a scene of destruction, it was true, a sea of tears, of broken homes, projects canceled or postponed, separated lives, on the last trip on Eurostar to the City of Lights. No, this time was very different. There were no deaths or wounds, at least that she knew about, only a warning and an order to get out of there. She’d see what happened next.
Sarah found the toy donkey on her key ring and fit the key in the lock just as a shadow darkened the whiteness of the solid wooden door. She looked behind her and saw a London bus stopped in front, letting passengers with normal lives get off and on. If only she could be the same. Instead she had to remember things like the place she put the dossier that JC, or someone working for him, more probably, had left in her room on the seventh floor of the Grand Hotel Palatino in Rome.
“Sarah Monteiro?” she heard a voice say in her ear. It wasn’t Simon. She looked at a man dressed in a black suit with a scar on his face from his right eye to his upper lip. He looked like a typical bad guy from pulp fiction. She felt panic, among her other feelings, but to her surprise, she managed to control it enough not to let it show.
“Who wants to know?” she asked, showing no nervous trembling in her vocal cords.
“My name’s Simon Templar,” he replied succinctly. “I need you to come with me.” One more thing to deal with. He gripped her arm as he showed his identification, a card inside the wallet with his photograph, a few years younger, with his affiliation printed underneath. SIS. Secret Intelligence Services.
“Why?” Sarah asked, flushing. Her nervousness gave her chills. Was this really happening?
“Affairs of state. I can’t tell you more,” he concluded, showing some irritation. The State with a capital S is above everything. Faith, race, profession, personal life, nothing matters when it concerns the State. You can’t question it. You just comply.
The agent, Simon Templar, whose name seemed to have come out of some 1960s television series, took Sarah’s arm, like a prison guard, alert for any unforeseen or illicit action.
“I don’t need a guide. I know how to walk, thank you,” Sarah told him, freeing her arm and looking confidently at the agent.
They walked to a black car with official markings, somewhat reassuring for Sarah.
“Sarah,” the other Simon called, running to join her. Her assistant had been in shock, not reacting, but soon had recovered his quick thinking. “What do you need me to do?”
“Ah . . . I don’t know how long this is going to delay us, so . . .” She thought hard. “Go in my house and in the bookcase in the hall look for a wooden box with a bottle of vintage wine, Oporto 1976. Behind it is a dossier. Take it with you and wait for me to contact you,” Sarah concluded, getting into the backseat of the vehicle.
“Will do, Sarah,” he calmed her. “Anything you need . . . anything.”
The government car took off fast, its interior hidden by tinted glass. Simon, a well-trained employee, approached the solid white door. The key was still in the lock. In the unexpected confusion, Sarah had forgotten to take it out. The refrain of Michael Jackson’s “Bad” began to sound on Simon’s phone. He didn’t let it reach the third verse.
“Hello, my love,” he greeted his lover. “You’ll never believe what just happened. I’m right in the middle of things. . . . I’ll tell you later.” He listened to the voice of love on the other end of the imaginary line. “We’re going, I mean, we were going . . . we still have to go, as soon as she’s free.” More conversation. “Free is just a figure of speech. As soon as she’s ready . . . I’ll tell you more . . . Now? Now I am going in her house.”
In order to explain why two seconds later Simon was lying on the ground between the sidewalk and the asphalt with the door broken in half on top of him, it is necessary to use a slow-motion camera, since two seconds have been enough to separate the last words from all the rest that follow. And, if two seconds seem very little, they’re more than enough for the key to turn in the lock of the solid white door, for the door to hit him, forced by an explosion from inside, and throw him several feet through the air, striking his ribs against a double-decker bus that was pulling away. He’d crushed the vehicle’s body in a little without breaking the windows. The explosion had taken care of that, not only in the bus, but in a radius of hundreds of yards. Almost all the cars and houses had seen their windows disintegrate into thousands of pieces, thrown in all directions. Simon was on the ground with his feet on the sidewalk and his head in the street, next to the bus, showing no signs of life. He didn’t notice the flames erupting from Sarah’s house and reaching the ones next door. Incoherent cries resounded through the street. They recalled older and more recent attacks on the lives of normal people. Lives ended, without appeal or grievance, without pity.
Simon opened his eyes for a moment, blood running over his face and body, splinters of glass, wood, and ashes on top of him. The boards that were the door had split over him. His unfocused eyes tried to see, but couldn’t make out anything. Where was he? Was he dead? Was he entering heaven? He felt no pain. He sensed shapes moving closer. A second, a millisecond, and something in his own mind, a fleeting focus on one of the shapes, provoked a smile before he lost consciousness, murmuring.
“My love, my love.”
It was curious how everything could change in seconds.
Chapter 17
H
aving just passed through the automatic glass doors of the entrance, let us continue ahead to the elevators. Except for Sunday, it’s very crowded all week. Since today’s Thursday, we can understand the movement, at first sight chaotic, of all those who work here, on every side, in the elevator, going up the stairs, walking up and down the maze of hallways, everyone with a plastic identification tag hanging on jacket, shirt, or low-cut blouse. Each person is an important piece, a part of the whole system. Once in the elevator, we press 3. Once there we come across a long hallway, take a right and cover a hundred yards, more or less, where we come upon a pair of aluminum doors. They’re closed, but open with a push. Twenty or thirty yards down, where the hallway makes a sharp ninety-degree turn at the corner of the building, is another pair of aluminum doors with a burnished plaque engraved with the word “Pathology.”
Inside are three stainless steel gurneys, as well as a number of monitors, utensils, and cabinets. A whole wall is covered with steel and eighteen square doors, uniformly arranged, three rows of six covering the length and height of the wall. These are refrigerated chambers that hold bodies that left this world under doubtful circumstances. We are speaking of the autopsy room of the Nederlands Forensisch Instituut, the place where the dead await their final judgment.
Here we see the three Americans enter, Geoffrey Barnes, Jerome Staughton, and Thompson. They’ve come to view the bodies of the two English fornicators and Solomon Keys, and they don’t have much time.
Unlike conventional morgues, rooms vary in temperature between fifteen and twenty degrees centigrade below zero in order to totally interrupt decomposition, preserving as much forensic data as possible. In hospital and funeral morgues the intention is not to stop decomposition, but slow it down, so they keep the rooms between two and four degrees centigrade above zero. These are two different ways of preserving the departed long enough to say all there is to say about the causes of their death, before sending them to their last resting place, wherever that may be.
A man in a white gown, a coroner, according to his name tag, was cleaning one of the tables with a fine hose shooting out liquid antiseptic, preparing for a new autopsy, free from any old germs contaminating the new tests. He looked at the three big men who’d just come in while he washed the blood into the adjacent drains. How many corpses have passed under his scalpel today to suffer the ultimate incision, the most invasive of all, which will relate everything, the vices and virtues without omission or lies or half-truths, in black-and-white, in the entrails, the arteries, the veins, and other organs whether vital or not? After observing everything, annotating, noting, measuring, disconnecting inside and out, he would close the skin together again and sew it up, depending on the particular results, with or without all or some of the organs put back inside. A former life was now filed away in one of the refrigerated compartments awaiting the funeral, cremation, identification, or claim by the family. Everything society has to show ended up in these chambers: happy families struck down by an accident, victims of crimes of passion who miscalculated the risk of a spur-of-the-moment affair, John Does, and criminals who saw their deals turn bad. Whatever a human being is capable of doing to his fellow man, his family, his friend, neighbor, or stranger because an argument got out of control, or even for profit.
“Are you Dr. Davids?” Barnes asked impatiently, in English obviously.
“Yes, I am,” the other answered in the same language, continuing his routine.
“Lieutenant Balkenende gave us permission to come in,” Barnes continued. “We want to see three bodies.”
“Ik wil ook veel dingen,”
the other said in his own language. I also want many things. “Wait a minute, please.”
“Wij willen deze dode drie zien, nu,”
Barnes demanded irritably, shaking a paper in his hand. We want to see these three bodies, now. He was not truly multilingual, but an understanding of basic phrases in the most important European languages like Spanish, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Portuguese, and Russian was required for his appointment to a position in Europe. “And don’t make me grab you by the neck and shove you into one of these compartments,” he concluded in English.
“Amerikaanen,”
the doctor let slip between his teeth, grabbing the paper out of Geoffrey Barnes’s hand.
Always arrogant
.