Mark Burnell - Gemini

I haven’t seen him since we kissed goodbye at JFK in New York. That was the final condition that Alexander insisted upon: I could save him but I couldn’t be with him. I’ve thought about this so many times since then and have always come to the same conclusion: there was no good reason for this condition. I believe Alexander imposed it upon me simply to prevent me from being happy. In that, at least, he’s failed. Kostya is alive, somewhere out there, and I’m in love again.

Mark has no idea about any of this. He’s in love with a woman named Stephanie Schneider, a freelance photo-journalist, who is secretive about her past and whose work takes her to some of the world’s riskier regions.

When we were falling for each other, I had no idea how complicated this arrangement would become. When Alexander first discovered that I was seeing someone – as opposed to just having casual sex, which would have been fine – he was furious and ordered me to drop Mark.

‘How do you know about this?’ I’d countered.

His initial silence was confirmation of a suspicion that he tried to justify. ‘Everyone here is subject to periodic security review. You know that.’

‘Even you?’

‘You can’t play this game, Stephanie.’

‘It’s not a game.’

‘All the more reason to call it off, then.’

‘Forget it.’

Eventually Alexander relented, even though he was right. A relationship is completely incompatible with my profession. To make it work I had to create an artificial environment for it. At first I was complacent; a few lies here, a few half-truths there, I thought. And since lying was never a problem for me, I imagined it would be relatively simple.

Now I have two lives. I am Petra Reuter and I am Stephanie Schneider, with Stephanie Patrick stranded in limbo somewhere between them. I have my flat. This is the only interface between the two versions of me. It’s Stephanie’s flat – it contains all the paraphernalia of her life – but it’s where Petra goes to and from. I think of it as an airlock. There are two environments, one on either side, and the airlock allows me to acclimatize from one to the other.

My relationship with Alexander is a balancing act that is constantly tested. Here was a battle he couldn’t win, so, for the sake of the war, he withdrew. He even contributed to the cover. My assignments as a photo-journalist come through Frontier News, an agency that specializes in sending freelancers to the kind of trouble-spots where no one offers you insurance. The company was established ten years ago by three former soldiers. Two of them are dead; the first was beheaded by Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the second was shot by Chechen rebels in Georgia. Alexander knew the third and put me in touch. Which is not to say he’s happy about it. He’s like a father who hands his daughter a pack of condoms because the idea of her repellent boyfriend getting her pregnant is even more revolting to him than the idea of them having sex.

I know it’s crazy to see Mark, but Alexander should consider the alternative. Mark gives me stability. Through him I’ve made friends; normal people living normal lives coloured by normal concerns. They have become an emotional cushion that makes it easier for me to continue to do what I do for Alexander at Magenta House.

Last night, after too many drinks at the Cunninghams’ house in Clapham, we played the Kevin Bacon game. This is a movie version of the Six Degrees of Separation theory, which suggests you can connect any two people in the world in six moves. It occurs to me that there could easily be a Stephanie Patrick game. I can play Six Degrees of Separation without ever having to leave my own skin.

After a four-hour debriefing Stephanie went to her own flat, a third-floor walk-up on Maclise Road with a view of the rear of the Olympia exhibition centre. There was mail on the floor, dust in the air, nothing in the fridge. She opened several windows but there was no breeze to counter the humid heat. Then she checked the sensors: two micro-cameras, one in the living room, one in the bedroom, connected to an exterior base-unit that sent a coded message to her desktop. The cameras were activated by movement, the sensors detecting changes in air temperature and density. She’d bought the equipment from Ali Metin, a Turk who owned a computer shop on the Tottenham Court Road. According to her monitor, neither camera had been triggered. There were no images.

Later she took the dirty clothes from the leather holdall to the launderette next to the Coral betting shop on Blythe Road. Back at the flat she made green tea, put on a CD she’d borrowed from Mark – Is This It? by The Strokes – and sorted through her post. Circulars and bills, mostly. There were two statements: one from HSBC, the other from Visa, both in Stephanie Schneider’s name. The current account showed two credits from Frontier News for stories filed during the previous three months. The savings account held just less than fifteen thousand pounds. In a box-file beside her desktop computer, there were receipts for hotels she’d never visited, flights she’d never caught.

The flat was run down: a bucket beneath the sink in the bathroom because the pipes leaked, patches of damp on the kitchen ceiling, rotten window-frames. Stephanie never attempted to address these problems. On the contrary. She left dirty plates in the sink, unironed clothes on her bed, used clothes on the floor. There were papers across the table in the living room, books on the carpet, camera equipment in the kitchen.

By inclination, Stephanie was organized and tidy. Stephanie Schneider, however, was by her own admission a ‘domestic slut’, which had the intended benefit of discouraging Mark from spending time at her flat. As the portal connecting her two worlds, it was the one place where she felt uneasy with him. Consequently they spent all their time at his flat. Occasionally this was an issue he attempted to address by suggesting she move into Queen’s Gate Mews.

‘It’s not that I don’t want to live with you, Mark. It’s just that I don’t want to give up my own place.’

‘But we don’t spend any time over there. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘It doesn’t make financial sense. But it makes a different kind of sense. Besides, what about all my stuff? You’ve hardly got enough space for your stuff.’

‘We could convert the garage downstairs.’

‘It’s full.’

‘Only of old climbing gear. I could put that into storage. Or sell it. Or throw it out. Then you could have an office. Or we could sell both flats and get somewhere bigger.’

Which was exactly what one half of her wanted. But the other half wouldn’t permit it. Not yet. Conversations like this offered Stephanie glimpses of a possible post-Petra world, and she’d found them far more seductive than she’d ever imagined.

The evening made way for night. They drank wine and watched a DVD, content not to speak. Later, a little drunk, they made love. Afterwards, damp with perspiration, Mark found the cut on the top of her head.

‘Is it sore?’

‘A little.’

He ran a finger over her bruised ribs, and along parallel grazes over her right shoulder. ‘Do you want to tell me?’

‘We went off the road. Coming back from the Fergana Valley.’

It was impossible to tell what he was thinking. ‘Anyone else hurt?’

‘The driver cut his head quite badly. I had to drive the rest of the way. I think he must have fallen asleep. It was about three in the morning.’

As slick as glycerine. Even now Petra could still surprise Stephanie. She watched Mark get up. He had a climber’s physique. There was no bulk to his strength; his power lay in sinews and suppleness. Naked, he disappeared into the kitchen. He walked as he climbed, moving like liquid, his feet sometimes seeming barely to touch the ground. A smaller man, Komarov’s physique had been equally lean but his had been fashioned by the years lost to the brutal prisons of the Russian Far East.