What I Tell You In the Dark (31 page)

‘It is not yet your moment to speak,' I tell her instead. I cannot afford to show weakness in front of Abaddon, who has emerged from the alcohol's temporary subdual into an embittered and dangerously confrontational state. He is breathing, more than breathing, growling at the end of the table, head down, eyes raised up.

‘Little lamb,' he says, ‘bleating, bleating.'

‘For God's sake, man …' Nicholas's voice has faded to almost nothing. ‘You'll get us all killed.'

Abaddon does not look at him. He keeps his eyes firmly on me. ‘You are all but dead anyway,' he tells him. ‘Return to your stupor.'

‘Pay no attention to this creature,' I say, evenly, in control. ‘It is too late for him to find a true path. But,' I look at each of them in turn, ‘it is not too late for you.'

Only Stella meets my eyes, the others stay hidden within themselves, refusing to come out.

As gently as I can I coax Gregory into position across the table from Stella. ‘If your hands are going to tremble like that,' I say to him, ‘then perhaps you should rest your elbows on the table. I'm going to need a steady shot.'

Abaddon opens his mouth but before he has had a chance to speak I shout, ‘Enough from you!' making everyone but him flinch in alarm.

He smiles and settles back into his chair. ‘Carry on,' he says, sweeping out his arm in front of him.

Stella turns to him very slowly, one eye still on me. ‘Mr Saint-Clair,' she says with all the dislike that three words can bear, ‘this man has a gun and it is pointed at me. I would be grateful if you would please –'

‘Harpy.' He closes his eyes and his voice drifts off with him, ‘You know not of what you speak …'

This is good, better than good. He is unable to disguise his contempt for them, just as I predicted. When people cannot be bent to his will, they are redundant husks to him. His vitriol is well-served to my purpose, it blackens his own cause. He cannot influence these people because he feels nothing for them.

Only from love can progress be formed.

I realise I have said these last words. It doesn't matter.

‘Stella, it's time. I'm going to need you to answer some questions. But please don't look at me when you're speaking, look at Gregory here – look at the camera.' She seems unsure what to say. ‘If you answer my questions with honesty in your heart, then you will be free to go. Okay?'

Still she says nothing.

‘The truth,' I summarise for her, ‘shall set you free. All of you,' I add for the benefit of the others. ‘That's the only thing you need to think about.'

‘Now Gregory, are you ready to do this?'

He valiantly says that he is.

‘Good. Just make sure you get her squarely in the frame. Then, when we're done, I'm going to need you to save the recording in as small a file as possible. It has to be less than two gigs. So just bear that in mind.'

He nods.

‘I'm assuming that phone is picking up the Wi-Fi here?'

He checks. Again he nods.

‘I'm going to need some actual words from you, Gregory. Is it connected? Can you do what I ask?'

He looks a little tearful.

‘Sorry, I didn't mean to snap at you.' This being an odd thing to say when you're pointing a gun at someone, I change that too. Lowering my hand to my side, I ask him, ‘So how's it looking? Reception any good?'

‘Reception's fine,' he mumbles. ‘It's the high-speed connection Fleur was telling you about.' (
In a simpler, happier time
his expression seems to say – although my memory of him from earlier on is that he was singularly unhappy, in a complicated sort of way, so go figure.)

‘Okay, that's good. Good lad.' It can't be easy, all this, when you're used to sulking about in a boutique hotel all day.

‘Right then.' I place my non-gun hand on his shoulder. ‘Count her in, Greg.'

And bless him, he does it like a proper media wannabe. The ‘three' and the ‘two' he says out loud but the ‘one' he just mouths, and holds up a skinny finger, which he then points at her in a
And we're live
… sort of way.

‘So then, Stella,' I say, being a little theatrical myself, ‘would you like to tell the viewers at home exactly what you know about InviraCorp's offshore investments?' I smile at her. ‘And please – don't spare any details.'

And to my surprise, she gets right into it. She answers all of my questions thoroughly and without a fuss. Inevitably, perhaps, we are forced to pause the recording a few times while I deal with Abaddon's interruptions and attempts to distract her. On the final occasion, I actually have to walk across the room so I am right next to him, with the gun touching his head.
I tell him, for the last time, to be quiet. His head shakes slowly from side to side, the short hairs at his temple scratch against the muzzle.

‘Make me,' he says.

Even before the words have left his mouth I can feel myself starting to panic. Something in the set of his body tells me he has sniffed me out. He knows I couldn't use this gun, not on him, not on anyone. And for an awful moment I think perhaps he has realised it is empty, or worse, is about to snatch it from me. So I panic. Before I've realised what is happening, I've raised my hand above my head and cracked the butt of the gun down on his cheek. It sends him sprawling off the side of his chair.

I've never hit anyone before and I find myself paralysed in the moments after, the gun dangling loosely at my side. Adrenaline is emptying out of me like water down a plughole. But he is in no state to take advantage, he is kneeling on the floor with his face in his hands. A smear of blood at the side of his cupped palm turns my stomach and brings me sharply back to my senses.

When I return to my station opposite Stella, my outstretched arm is shaking so badly I have to hold it at the elbow. But no one else appears to mind what has happened. They almost seem relieved that Abaddon has been put to the ground and is now hunched there, at the foot of the table, like a dog. In a strange way, his presence was becoming more chaotic than my own. Order has been restored.

And when Stella resumes it is with an even greater clarity. Each phrase is turned to crisp perfection, no words are wasted. Previously, under the intensity of Abaddon's stare, she had taken to diluting her narrative with
it is possible that
or
it would appear that
, but now each revelation is couched directly –
we know, we have been aware for some time
. She uses a matter-of-fact, sometimes even rueful tone. She has a good instinct for knowing
what people want to hear and she is now delivering it without impediment.

She explains how InviraCorp's assets are settled into the Jersey trust, how shares in unknown companies are used to keep people from seeing the Vatican's finances coiled deep inside there – the serpent in the woodpile. From time to time, I feed her extra information that I have acquired myself – names, account numbers, that sort of thing. She does not resist.

She even manages to bring an almost lightsome touch to her delivery, stripping it of the po-faced ambiguity that has become the hallmark of her trade. It feels real. So much so that I begin to wonder, as she rests her hands on the table in front of her, and says, simply, cleanly,
That's it, that's all I know
, whether in fact this darkness had not been festering inside her too. Perhaps there has been some measure of relief in having it extracted like this, brutally and suddenly. A non-elective procedure beyond her control.

‘Good job,' I tell her. ‘Now, I'm sorry to say, comes the painful part. You,' I say to Alex, ‘are going to tell Gregory here how to access Abelwood's Twitter account.'

‘I knew it,' says Stella, slumping forward in her seat.

‘I need the bathroom,' says Alex, wriggling around in his.

‘No one leaves the room,' I tell him.

‘It can't wait.'

His lack of substance is particularly repellent in this moment, in the wake of Stella's bravura performance. For him I have no respect, no pity. I say some of this as I'm walking.

‘Just do what I ask,' I conclude, more confidentially, as I arrive at his side.

Gregory is staring at us in the slow-witted way that some children stare at equations on blackboards.

‘You do know how to upload video to Twitter, Gregory?' I ask, perhaps not as kindly as I could. It's Abaddon, he is
unnerving me. He is back in his chair and has resumed his hostile staring. There is blood smeared on his face.

Gregory looks a bit flustered but he manages to nod, kind of.

‘Of course you do,' I say to him, more gently. ‘It's easy. Anyway, this one,' I give Alex a chummy shake of the shoulder, ‘will help you. Right?' Alex groans and holds his stomach.

‘None of you,' I say to the rest of them as an aside while Alex continues to groan, ‘are here without reason. You have each, quite deliberately, rooted yourselves in a God-shaped hole,' I remind them (because, by the look of them, they need reminding). ‘I shall now leave you to ponder that, without speaking or moving please – except for you,' I look charitably at Alex. ‘You may use the bin over there for whatever it is you need to do.'

He doesn't wait to be told twice. He hurries over there, drops on all fours and retches over the wastepaper basket like a cat.

‘Better?' I ask as he staggers back to his seat. ‘Good. Now will you please get over there and help Gregory with what he needs to do.'

The next few steps need to be closely choreographed. First, Alex must be persuaded to let me change the administrator password for his company's Twitter account.

‘Why?' he asks me even though he knows the answer.

‘Because we wouldn't want the little scamps back at your office tearing down my messages the moment they appear.' I look at Stella, ‘Would we?'

She smiles thinly. Abaddon contemplates her with weary malevolence. Like all the old school types, he is a committed misogynist. From Eve onwards, as far as they're concerned, the story can be told with weak, capitulating women at its centre. It is just one more reason to despise him.

‘I can't,' Alex tells me.

Encouraged by this show of resistance, Abaddon finds his tongue again.

‘You're right, Alex.' He is trying to show some solidarity, like they're all in this together, but as ever, he cannot quite manage to iron out the disdain from his voice. ‘If you allow this to be published, which is what you would be doing, you would be committing a crime,' he tells him.

But in the end the wordless adjudication of my Glock wins the argument and Alex declares to Stella that he has no choice. He says nothing to Abaddon, who I am pleased to see is now almost on the verge of ranting. He is bandying around phrases like
corporate accountability
.

‘It's okay,' Stella tells him, ‘just let him do it. The first priority is that no one gets hurt.' She then turns to Abaddon and says, ‘I am not quite sure what any of this has to do with you, Mr Saint-Clair. These are our clients and our responsibility.'

From the look on his face, Abaddon appears to be ruing the passing of an era, a Golden Age he would no doubt consider it, when he was able to simply murder people who had the temerity to question his jurisdiction.

Alex inputs a long sequence of letters and numbers into the password field and hands the phone back to Gregory.

‘Now get on and upload this video,' I tell him. And because Abaddon is looking at the device with something approaching intent, I add, ‘Come over here, behind me, and do it.'

I speak amiably to Stella while this is going on. I even see fit to lower my gun and take a seat. The other two, silent for all this time, also look as though they may emerge from their trauma, perhaps even say something. And from the rise and fall of his jacket, I would say that Nicholas, who is now lying on his side, is resting comfortably. A kind of peace has descended on us.

I explain to her why it was necessary to make her the revelator of this conspiracy. I share with her my observation that the whistleblowers, the corporate heretics of the digital age, have a single flaw in common: they make themselves the focus of the
story. It eclipses the issue at hand, the very message they were trying to impart. In the end, we hear only about them, how mad they were, how bad, how demented.

‘But,' I look at them all, ‘what if the truth were to come from the culprits themselves? What if the perpetrators could be made to confess? That,' I say, ‘was my vision of a modern miracle.'

I am about to say more. I am about to tell them that all of these photos and videos and tweets that are uploaded second by second to the internet are the substance of a history that is being written and documented in real time. This huge sprawling composite is a picture of life on earth, and emerging from this picture every so often are certain key moments, moments that can alter the course of history (I can't help but think of my own words spoken on the Mount, or my private grief, also caught in the amber of history). This, right now, I want to tell them, is just such a moment. But there's no time for ceremony. Gregory has finished the task at hand and is standing quietly at my side, waiting to be noticed.

‘Okay, good,' I tell him when I've had a look. ‘Now would you please send it out to everyone? I would do it myself but …' I'm making reference to the fact that I have had to stand and move back across the room towards Abaddon, who was looking a moment ago like he might be thinking of putting a last-minute stop to all this.

‘By the way,' I say, eyes glued to Abaddon, ‘how many followers do you have?'

‘Nearly ten thousand,' Alex tells me miserably.

‘And how many of them are journalists?'

‘Hundreds.'

I smile, thinking of Natalie. Stella sighs.

‘Right then, Greg, type this, if you'd be so kind: He that hath ears to hear, comma, let him hear. Got that? Good, now attach the video and …' I have arrived next to Abaddon ‘… send.'