Nikki Owen - The Girl Who Ran (The Project Trilogy)

Patricia shuffles from foot to foot. ‘Shall we peg it? This is fecking MI5. Shit.’

I trace the outline of the officers. They may have been trained, like me, to prepare, wait, engage. Is that what they are doing now? If I were them, what would I do next?

‘Doc? Doc, I think we should move.’

‘Holy fuck,’ Chris says.

I look to him. He is staring at his phone. ‘What is it?’

‘I’ve just…’ A shake of the head. ‘No way. It’s—’

‘They’re coming!’

We look up at where Patricia is staring. The second man, the one with the slightly narrower shoulders, is touching his ear, scanning to his right and moving slowly forwards. I track his eye line, wincing at the sharp clatter of some tray that is dropped in the distance, my assaulted brain just about keeping it together. What is he looking at, the man? What can he see?

I force my brain to focus, think clearly. Maybe Chris is right – maybe the flight attendants know who we are and have been informed to keep us back and make us wait.

I turn to Chris and Patricia. ‘We must go.’

Chris points to his phone. ‘You have to see this email.’

‘Not now. We must leave first.’

We all turn, ready to duck from sight and out of the airport, my mind already fast forwarding to a next plan to hide, when the flight attendant calls to us with a bright white smile beaming on his face.

‘Hello? I’m so sorry about the short delay.’ We hesitate. He gestures over to us. ‘If you’d just stand to the side and allow our late wheelchair passenger through, who we were waiting for, then you can board. Apologies for the inconvenience.’

We look to each other, the three of us, our chests visibly deflating, eyes blinking in what? Shock? Relief? I cannot tell, but we watch a wheelchair board the ramp and, with one nod of the attendant, we follow it fast through the final doors that lead to the plane ahead.

Outside, the Madrid air hits me. Aviator fuel, warm concrete, the roar of jet engines, all of it colliding in my head. I grind my teeth and blink at the blue sky that swirls through clouds spun with cotton. I stay close to Patricia.

As we reach the door of our Zurich-bound plane, Chris stops me.

‘I got an email.’ He swallows, catching his breath. ‘That’s what I was trying to tell you before.’

My heart rate shoots. Alarm bells sound. ‘From who?’

An attendant smiles. ‘Welcome to the flight. Boarding passes, please.’

I thrust her my pass, ignore her and turn to Chris. The woman frowns.

‘Who is the email from?’

Chris pauses then, lowering his voice, he tells me what I didn’t expect to hear.

‘It’s a reply from the UK Home Secretary – from Balthus’s wife.’

Deep cover Project facility .

Present day

I’m not certain how I feel when I see Patricia held and behind the screen. Shock? Fear? Nothing? I am too scared to answer.

Stepping forward, I observe my former friend as if she were a specimen in a lab. On her head are fresh red lacerations. Deep bruises strangle her neck. Her body is clothed in a dirty grey t-shirt, ripped trousers hanging from her legs that lie crumpled at odd angles. She raises her eyes and calls out my name, but the officer kicks her in the stomach and her middle folds in, body collapsing flat to the floor. I want to slap my hand to my mouth, but something tells me that would be a bad thing to do right now.

‘What do you see, Maria?’ Black Eyes says, a crackle of something indefinable stepping across his voice.

‘Patricia,’ I say, quick, as steady as I can.

‘This O’Hanlon woman – she is not your family.’

‘No,’ I respond, ‘she is not.’ Patricia is looking at me with big eyes, but when before they were blue and clear and shining, now her eyes seem dulled and bloodshot.

He regards me, holding my face with his sight and I so desperately want to tap my finger, my foot, anything to help my mind deal with the intensity of the attention.

‘You had two fathers,’ Black Eyes says, ‘adopted, biological. Now both dead.’

A heartbeat. ‘Yes.’ My sight remains locked on Patricia.

He folds his arms across his chest, watching the scene behind the screen. The officer is hauling Patricia up, but her body must be weak, because her rib-caged torso keeps buckling, her legs bending, feet toppling.

‘I lost my father, too,’ Black Eyes says, sight on the screen. ‘I was fourteen. He was in the SAS.’

Beyond the window, Patricia whimpers. We observe, Black Eyes and I, riding for a moment in a slow seesaw of sound left, right, left, right.

‘Why is she here?’ I dare myself to ask.

‘She is here because she is the enemy. You do understand, don’t you, that after everything that’s happened, she is no longer your friend?’

Friend. I roll the word in my mouth, feel it, test it out. For a long time, I never really understood what having one meant.

‘You made the only choice you could, Maria, by being here. Here is where you belong. Patricia O’Hanlon is the enemy because she does not agree with the aims and objectives of the Project. She does not agree with you being here. Yet this?’ He stretches out his arms to the room. ‘This is where you belong.’

‘This is where I belong,’ I say, the words marching out of my mouth of their own accord.

‘That’s right. And you don’t need people like Patricia O’Hanlon when the Project is our only friend.’

He reaches forward and presses a button. The grey blind rolls down slowly, one centimetre at a time, but the movement of it must jolt Patricia awake as, suddenly, she raises her head, staggering up a little. She begins screaming.

‘Doc! Doc! Help me!’ She wobbles forwards. ‘Don’t listen to them, Doc! They’re lying! They’re all lying! They’re going to—’

The officer hits Patricia on the skull with the butt of his gun and she crumples, falling unconscious to the tiles. Without thinking, I slap my palms to the screen, startled, as before me the officer starts dragging Patricia’s clubbed-seal body out of the room.

‘Where are they taking her?’ I ask fast, pressing my face into the glass trying to see round the corner. ‘She needs help.’ I turn to Black Eyes. ‘Why did he do that? Why?’

I gulp in air, as to the side of me Black Eyes rolls back his shoulders, snapping the bones that puncture his spine one by one. He regards me as I stare at the screen as the blind descends, then he steps to his desk and picks up the photograph that sits on it.

‘When people we love die, it is often hard for us to cope with. Would you agree?’

I blink, the image of Patricia still fresh and raw in my head, not fully comprehending what is happening or why. Black Eyes holds the frame in his fingers closer to his face and as he does, I find myself staring at the picture of the two people in it, my brain prodded by some odd curiosity, a vague, foggy notion that they look familiar. Both female, the oldest appears to be in her thirties: slim, caramel skin, hair in long black cascades down a suited back, wide collar, wire-rimmed spectacles clutching high cheekbones and resting against thick branches of brows. Beside her is a girl, young, at estimate under ten years old, the same hair as the older woman, same features, just softer, plumper, the sharpness to her cheeks not yet defined, still hidden under an infantile cushion of baby milk and bread.

‘Who are they?’ I ask before I can stop myself.

He does not respond, seeming, at first, as if he will not say anything at all, but then he sniffs, takes a breath and traces one thin finger over the printed faces. ‘They are – were – my family.’ He swallows; the pointed triangle of his Adam’s apple juts out, then sinks in. ‘They passed away a long time ago.’