‘If it concerns your professionalism, then it’s my business.’
‘We made a deal after New York. I gave you my word. Since then I’ve never given you any reason to worry.’
‘Your private life is a worry.’
‘Grow up.’
‘One of us should, certainly. You don’t just place yourself in jeopardy, Stephanie. You place everyone who comes into contact with you in jeopardy. That includes Hamilton.’
‘Leave him out of it.’
‘I’d love to. Really, I would. But your behaviour won’t allow me to.’
‘I’ve taken precautions.’
‘Not good enough.’
‘You have no idea whether they’re good enough.’
‘Perhaps,’ he conceded. ‘But what I do know is this: one slip is all it’ll take.’
The first time I met Alexander he held the power of life and death over me. He saved me, then turned me into the woman I am today. Before him I was a drug-addict, a prostitute, a grim statistic waiting to happen. He could have hastened the predictable end. But he didn’t. Instead he let his people loose on me. Now you can drop me anywhere in the world and, like a cockroach, I’ll thrive, no matter how harsh the environment. I am any woman I need to be at any given moment, fluent in four foreign languages and able to scale a building like a spider. I can kill a man with a credit card … and not by shopping. I’m more than a woman, I’m a machine, and the man who made it happen – Alexander – is the man I detest most in this world.
The feeling is mutual. He can’t abide me, despite the fact that I am probably his greatest technical achievement and his single most potent asset. Like magnets, we repel but are also drawn together. The deal we made after New York ensured that. At the time I could have walked away from Magenta House. Nothing would have given me greater pleasure. But I chose not to.
His name was Konstantin Komarov, and I was completely in love with him. Even though I am now with Mark, there is a part of me that is lost to Kostya and always will be. A complicated man, certainly. A man with a past, most definitely. But where Magenta House saw a threat, I saw a future. Alexander had promised to set me free after New York and was true to his word. But Kostya was a Magenta House target. I pleaded with Alexander to let him live even though I knew it was pointless. In the end I had only one thing to offer him. So we struck a deal.
A truly Faustian pact it was, too. I returned to Magenta House and Alexander suspended the order on Komarov. As long as I remain here, he’s alive. The moment I leave, he dies. It’s hard to imagine anything more perverse: I kill people to keep alive the man I used to love.
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