The Darkest Day

SIXTY-SEVEN

He used his keycard to unlock the door and said, ‘After you.’

She smiled and pushed it open and stepped into his suite. ‘Oh, very nice. I see you’re treating yourself well.’

He followed her inside. ‘Someone has to,’ Victor said. ‘What did you do with the case?’

‘I left it in the office of the non-proliferation department of the United Nations.’

‘You’re kidding,’ Victor said.

‘Probably.’ She winked and walked around the suite. ‘Well, I guess you deserve all this after you helped prevent a dirty bomb going off in the middle of New York City. You are something of a hero, even if that is only a byproduct of looking after yourself.’

Victor remained silent.

‘Showing some emotion won’t kill you, you know?’

‘I’ve stayed alive this long, so I must be doing something right.’

She raised her hand, as if holding a glass. ‘I’ll drink to that.’ She turned, looking. ‘Talking of which…’

She approached the sideboard where a bottle of dessert wine sat. ‘Shall we?’

He didn’t answer, but she didn’t wait for one. She tore off the seal and used her knife as a makeshift corkscrew. Not the easiest thing to do without corking the wine, but she did so with speed and deftness. Once again he was impressed with her dexterity. He watched the whole process because she did so facing him. He knew this was not arbitrary. She wanted him to see she wasn’t tampering with it and that she hadn’t already.

With the knife embedded within the cork, she set it down on the sideboard along with the wine bottle and fetched a couple of glasses from the kitchen. He was still standing in the same place when she returned. She smiled at him, friend to friend, and poured into each glass. Even from across the room, he could see she hadn’t corked the wine.

She took a glass in each hand and stepped towards him, still smiling. ‘Here.’

His hands remained by his hips.

He knew it had taken her but a second to understand, but she ignored it and persisted, the smile on her face warm and inviting.

When he made no further move to take a glass, she said, ‘Don’t be foolish.’

‘Foolish would be accepting a drink from a professional assassin who has tried to kill me once already.’

‘You saw me uncork the bottle. You saw me pour it.’

‘You allowed me to.’

Her eyebrows arched. ‘So you would have no need to worry.’

‘I never worry.’

‘Then drink the wine.’

He remained silent.

‘Is it because I fetched the glasses? You can pick whichever one you want.’

His lips stayed closed. He felt no awkwardness or pressure. He was good at waiting. If it came to it, he could wait until he collapsed from dehydration.

‘Fine,’ she breathed and drank a mouthful from one glass, and then a mouthful from the other.

She made a big play of swallowing and opened her mouth afterwards so he could see it was empty. Her teeth were white and perfect, her tongue smooth and pink.

‘Happy now?’

‘Deliriously so.’

She held out the glass in her left hand, so he took the one from her right. She laughed.

‘For a robot, you’re really quite fun.’

‘I know,’ he said and raised the glass.

‘Make sure we maintain eye contact or it’s seven years’ bad luck. Or is it seven years bad sex?’

‘Isn’t that the same thing?’

She smiled, her eyes mischievous, and for a moment he thought of someone else.

Raven said, ‘Salut.’

‘Cheers.’

They clinked glasses, holding eye contact, and sipped.

‘God, that’s delicious,’ Raven said, taking another, longer swallow. ‘I didn’t expect you to have such good taste.’

She swallowed another mouthful. Smiled at him. Victor took another sip. She returned to the bottle to top up her glass. ‘Another one?’

Victor brought the glass to his lips and let the wine he had been holding in his mouth flow back into the glass.

Raven’s dark eyes widened.

She looked at him, at the glass, at her own. He could almost feel her pulse spike from the adrenaline dumped into his bloodstream. He could almost hear the thump of her heart, as if his subconscious could detect the reverberations through the air.

Fear was the strongest of all the emotions.

All she could say was, ‘Why?’

He set the glass down. ‘I told you before, I only kill for two reasons. And no one hired me to kill you.’

‘I’m no threat to you.’

‘That’s right, because you’re going to die. You were never going to walk away from this and leave me out there. You’re like me. You don’t want a weak link in your armour any more than I do. Maybe you would have done it before we parted ways, or you would have tracked me down at some other point. But that whole show with the bottle was to make me trust you so I would leave myself vulnerable later. That’s when I knew for certain you still wanted to kill me. I’m guessing you would take me to bed and kill me when I’m at my most defenceless. You tried too hard to make me trust you. You should have listened when I said I don’t trust anyone.’

She looked at the knife on the sideboard, and again he felt as if he could sense the workings of her mind. She wanted to kill him in that most base of needs: revenge. For a beat he thought she would grab it and attack. But she looked away.

Like him, she was a survivor, first and before anything else. If she killed him now, she would die. While she lived, she still had a chance, so she looked away from the knife and said:

‘What do I need to do?’

‘There’s nothing you can do. Maybe if you hadn’t made the show with the bottle I would have told you not to drink the wine. But we’ll never know, will we?’

‘There has to be something.’ Not desperate. Determined.

‘I have no antidote. I didn’t poison you only to save you.’

‘Help me.’

‘Why?’

‘Because then I’ll owe you.’

‘The debt of a corpse is of no use to me.’

‘But if I live.’

‘You won’t. That’s the point.’

She shook her head. ‘There’s always a way. There’s always something. You poisoned me. So you know everything about the drug. You know how to stop it or slow it down.’

He did. He never used a weapon unless he understood how it worked.

‘Why?’ he asked again.

‘Because you’re a loner, and you know you’re a harder target that way, it also makes you vulnerable. One day you’ll need someone to back you up. There’s no one better to do that than me. Who else has proved themselves like that? You don’t trust anyone, but you know, when it comes to it, you can rely on me like you can rely on yourself. You’ll never have that again.’

She spoke like a sales person making a compelling pitch, demonstrating to the client why they needed the product or service. But she needed to sell it more than anyone working on commission because she was trying to stay alive.

‘Well?’ she said, unable to stand Victor’s silence any longer.

‘I’m thinking about it.’

‘Think faster, please.’

‘How do I know you’ll keep your word? You could be lying.’

Her eyes lit up, because she knew she had got to him. She had hooked the client, now she needed to reel him in, to reassure, to get rid of the buyer’s guilt before it impeded a sale.

‘You don’t,’ she said. ‘But we have the same principles. If our roles were reversed right now, would you be lying or would you honour your word?’

He said nothing, because it was a rhetorical question. They both knew the answer.

‘Eat,’ he said. ‘Eat as much as you can as fast as you can. Anything sweet. The more sugar the better. Drink as much soda as you can stomach. You need to spike your blood sugar. Insulin will slow the effects of the neurotoxin. Then get yourself to a hospital. You might buy yourself enough time to make it before the paralysis kicks in. If you haven’t got there by then, you’re done. After paralysis comes heart failure. At the hospital, you’re going to die. There is no antidote for the toxin. Your heart will stop. There is nothing you can do to prevent that. But if you’re strong enough, they’ll bring you back.’

‘I’m strong enough,’ she said, heading for the kitchen.

He opened the door to leave her to her fate, one way or the other.