Chameleon. Mark Burnell
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shot doesn’t make him guilty. It makes him unlucky. Or careless. Having said that, I wouldn’t have fancied being in his position after he was arrested …’
‘Petra’s name was linked to other murders in the region. What about Pavel Bulatovic?’
‘No.’
Stephanie remembered the details clearly, though. The federal defence minister of Yugoslavia had been eating at the Rad restaurant in Belgrade, an establishment that looked onto a football pitch. The gunman had fired his Kalashnikov through the window in three concentrated bursts, cutting across the room in a diagonal, before using the pitch as his escape route. Following so soon after Arkan, Stephanie had wondered whether both assassinations had been ordered by the same individual.
‘What about Darko Asanin?’
She’d heard the name, a former Belgrade criminal. ‘No.’
‘Anybody else I should know about from that part of the world?’
Stephanie smiled coldly. ‘Arkan isn’t enough for you?’
I can’t face the Underground. It’s a foetid evening. Businessmen sweat into their shapeless suits. I walk beneath Hungerford Bridge, along Victoria Embankment, past the Ministry of Defence, towards Westminster Bridge. Gradually, the noise of the traffic, of the aircraft overhead, of the multitude around me, begins to recede. In my mind, it grows darker, cooler. The open spaces restrict themselves to four walls until I’m in a cramped room in a small hotel. There is a narrow bed with a thin mattress, a single wooden chair between a cupboard and a chest of drawers.
I’m lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. I’m cold but I’m perspiring. I look as though I’m saying something but there’s nothing to hear. I don’t notice when I urinate, soaking the lumpy mattress. I only move when I know I’m going to vomit. But I react too slowly. I fall to my knees and throw up onto the floor. My back arches as I retch, and when it’s over I collapse onto my side and roll myself into a ball. I don’t know how long I stay there.
January 20th, 2000, Bilbao. Five days since Belgrade, five days since Arkan. Three days since I arrived in Bilbao and checked into this black hole. I was only supposed to be here for thirty-six hours. The arrangements were not complicated: pick up the package at the post office, use the new identity to travel to Rabat and then discard it, spend a week relaxing in Morocco as Delphine Lafont – the identity I used to enter Morocco ten days ago – and then return to Paris, as scheduled. Simple, clinical, perfect. Pure Petra.
At first, there was an overwhelming lethargy. My muscles turned to lead, my blood cooled. I imagined it congealing, turning black. With it came a sense of dread. Creeping up on me, smothering me. For two and a half years, I had functioned without fear. In my pursuit of mechanical perfection, I turned anxiety into caution, pain into penalty. I wanted to feel nothing, no matter what I did. And whatever I did, I wanted to do it with ruthless efficiency. I thought I’d eliminated doubt and chance from Petra Reuter’s life.
Now, lying on the floor, drenched in sweat, my head a sandstorm of emotion, I know that I’ve snapped. For two days, I’ve been unable to eat or drink. My body has rejected everything I’ve put into it. My body and also my mind. I can see that in some ways I’m rejecting myself. Seen from another perspective, however, I’m rejecting an intruder.
Later, I told myself that this was the moment I chose to stop being Petra Reuter. But the truth is, my body had already made that decision for me. Two and a half years of Petra had poisoned me.
She didn’t recognize the room, which now belonged to the Thurman Mining Company. Through the window, she saw the monumental Adelphi Building on the other side of Robert Street. One wall of the office was covered by two huge maps, one of Brazil, the other of Mongolia. Small areas on each had been staked out in blue, black and red ink. Lists of hectares had been pinned next to selected areas. On the desk, a paper Brazilian flag sat in a mug that had Ordem e Progresso stencilled around it. There were framed photographs on the wall beside the window; miners in hard hats at the mouth of a mine, men in short-sleeved shirts in front of a wasteland of felled forest, the horizon smudged brown by smoke.
The door opened. A skinny man in khaki combat trousers and a blue Nike T-shirt entered. His light brown hair was clipped short. He wore glasses, the grey frames with a matt finish, the lenses with a tint.
‘Hey, Steph. Sorry to keep you waiting.’ Stephanie stiffened; the familiarity of strangers had always had that effect upon her. His accent sounded mildly Lancastrian. He offered a hand. ‘Martin Palmer.’
She didn’t think he looked any older than she did, which – with the exception of Rosie Chaudhuri – made him the youngest person she had seen at Magenta House. Palmer had a grey nylon satchel slung over his left shoulder. He took it off and sat in the swivel chair behind the desk, relegating her to the plastic seat opposite. He produced a pad of paper and a pencil, and then apologized for not being able to offer her coffee.
She said, ‘I’ve never seen you before.’
He looked coy. ‘I’m new.’ He offered her a conspiratorial smile that she didn’t reciprocate. ‘I’ve got a few questions I need to ask you. It’s just routine.’
‘What kind of questions?’
‘Personal, mostly. If that’s all right?’
‘What are you, a psychologist?’
‘Something like that.’
‘You look nervous.’
‘Well, I’m not.’
‘I didn’t say you were nervous. I said you looked it.’
Now, he looked embarrassed. ‘Do you mind if we start?’
The balance shifted, Stephanie shrugged. ‘Sure. What do you want to ask me?’
‘Well … let’s see. You’ve been coming in here for … what is it? Three weeks?’
‘And two days.’
‘For debriefing?’
‘That’s not what I’d call it.’
A soldier had once told Stephanie that debriefing was therapy. That it helped him to come to terms with the things he’d had to do – and the things he’d had to see – during active undercover service. Each mission had always been followed by intense analysis; what went wrong, what went right, the lessons for the future. Some of the scrutiny was technical, some of it personal. By the end of the process, he’d always felt mentally exhausted but, crucially, he’d also felt that no element had been overlooked, that every aspect had been examined and rationalized in the minutest detail. And that no matter how draining the experience, it had left him better equipped to cope with his memories.
Stephanie understood what he’d meant but did not feel the same way. As the soldier had pointed out, to succeed as therapy, it was important to place one’s trust in those conducting the sessions. Over three weeks, the more Alexander probed, the more violated she’d felt, and the more she’d reacted against it. From sullen silence to outright hostility, she’d felt unable to stop herself.
Palmer jotted something onto the pad. ‘What are you doing away from here?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘In the evenings, for instance.’
‘I just stay in the flat. I buy something to eat on the way home, cook it, watch TV, read a book.’
‘You haven’t gone out at all?’
Only once, during the second week, after a long day lying to Alexander about a contract she’d taken in New York. She’d felt she needed a drink so she’d stopped at a bar on St Martin’s Lane. She’d picked a small table by the door and watched the pavement traffic for half an hour, letting alcohol soften the ache. The place had been busy, the after-work crowd unwinding; groups