Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination Read online

  “That will be all, Jesus,” said Feramo, taking the wheel—at which Jesus walked to the back of the boat and simply stepped over the side, holding himself straight, as if he was going to walk back on the water.

  Feramo turned to check that she was seated safely on the passenger seat and gently steered the boat in a wide curve through the millpond of the bay and off around the headland.

  “I am so sorry I have left you alone all day,” he said.

  “Oh, don’t worry. I slept really late too. Did you have a hangover?”

  As she spoke, she was trying to gauge his mood, looking for anything she could use to manipulate him and get away.

  “No, it was not a hangover,” he snapped. “I felt as if I had been poisoned. My stomach was churning like the innards of an ape, and I suffered a headache of such terrifying ferocity it was as if there was a metal brace grinding into my skull.”

  “Er, Pierre. That’s what we doctors call a hangover.”

  “Do not be ridiculous. That cannot be.”

  “Why not?”

  “If that was a hangover,” he said imperiously, “no one who has experienced it would ever drink alcohol again.”

  She turned her face away to hide her grin. She felt like a wife whose husband insists he knows exactly where he’s going, when he’s going completely the wrong way. It made her feel stronger. He was just a man. She had two choices now. She could concentrate on getting more information, or she could concentrate on getting away. But simple psychology suggested that the more information she extracted, the less chance she had of getting away.

  “I need to leave,” she blurted.

  “That is not possible,” he said, without taking his eyes off the horizon.

  “Stop, stop,” she said, allowing a note of hysteria to rise in her voice. “I need to leave.”

  Suddenly she knew exactly what she was going to do. She was going to cry. Under normal circumstances she would never dream of sinking so low, but (a) this was a very unorthodox situation, (b) she didn’t want to die and (c) she had a feeling that the one thing Feramo wouldn’t be able to handle was a crying woman.

  She thought back to her ill-fated locust story in the Sudan, when she had attempted to cover the starving animals instead. A minder from the Sudanese Ministry of Information had flatly refused to let her into the zoo until she accidentally started crying with frustration, at which point he caved in, flung open the gate and insisted on giving her a full tour, as if she were a three-year-old on a birthday treat. Those tears had been an accident. The problem had been that in Khartoum Zoo there weren’t any toilets. In general Olivia worked on the principle that she would never deliberately use tears to get her own way, and if they overwhelmed her by accident she would make sure she got to the loo before anyone saw.

  Now, though, she was planning to use tears in cold blood. It was a matter of life, death and global security. But, then, did the end justify the means? Once you had violated a principle, where would it end? One minute you were crying in order to manipulate a man; the next you would be killing hippies.

  Oh, fuck it, she thought and burst into tears.

  Pierre Feramo stared at her in alarm. She sobbed and gurgled. He cut the engine. She cried more loudly. He recoiled, looking around for assistance as if under attack from laser-guided Scuds.

  “Olivia, Olivia, stop, please. I beg of you, do not cry.”

  “Then let me go home,” she said through paroxysms of tears. “LET ME GO HOME.”

  “Olivia . . .” he began and tailed off, staring at her helplessly. He didn’t seem to have the capacity simply to comfort someone.

  “I can’t bear it. I can’t bear to be trapped.” And then, in a burst of inspiration, she declared passionately, “I need to be free, like the falcon.” She sneaked a look under her eyelashes to see what effect she was having. “Please let me go, Pierre. Let me be free.”

  He was agitated. His nostrils flared slightly, his mouth turned downwards at the edges. He reminded her more than ever of bin Laden.

  “Go where?” he said. “You do not enjoy my hospitality? We have not made you comfortable here?” She sensed the danger in his voice—jangling raw nerves and imagined slights on every side.

  “I need to come to you freely,” she said, softening, moving closer to him. “I need to come by choice.”

  She broke down again, this time for real. “I don’t feel safe here, Pierre. I’m tired, so many weird things have happened: the ship blowing up, Drew’s head being bitten off—I just don’t feel safe. I need to go home.”

  “You cannot travel now. The world is not safe. You must stay here safe with me, saqr, until I have trained you always to return.”

  “If you want me to return, then you must set me free. Free, to soar like the eagle,” she said, then wondered if she had overdone it with the whole bird thing.

  He turned away, his mouth working.

  “Very well, saqr, very well. I shall set you free and test you once again. But you must go quickly. You must leave today.”

  * * *

  Feramo took her to Roatán airport himself in the white speedboat. He cut the engine as they were still a way offshore to say good-bye.

  “I have enjoyed having you as my guest, Olivia,” he said, touching her cheek tenderly. “I myself will be leaving for the Sudan within a few days. I will telephone you in London and arrange for you to join me and I will show you the life of the Bedouin.”

  Olivia nodded mutely. She had given him the wrong number.

  “And then, saqr, you will begin to understand me better. And you will no longer want to leave.” He looked at her in a burning, insane manner. She thought he might try to kiss her, but instead he did the strangest thing. He took her index finger, thrust it into his mouth, and sucked on it, wildly, obsessively, as if it were a teat and he was a starving piglet.

  38

  As the Roatán-Miami flight became airborne, Olivia could not quite believe either what had happened, or that she had got away. She felt as if she had been under attack from a wild animal, burglar or violent storm, which suddenly, for no apparent reason, had gone away. It was not reassuring. She tried to tell herself that it was all her doing, that it was her brilliant psychological manipulation of Feramo which had won her her freedom. But she knew it wasn’t. It was just luck, and luck could change.

  There was one thing of which she was certain: she had been given a warning and a reprieve. She had moved too close to the flame and, fortunately, had escaped only slightly singed. Now it was time to go home and play safe.

  Her confidence improved in direct proportion to her distance from Honduras. Falcon, my arse, she told herself as she boarded the Miami-to-London flight with thirty seconds to spare. As the plane started its descent over Sussex, she was overcome with tearful relief. She looked down over rolling green hills, damp earth and chestnut trees, cows, lichen-covered churches, half-timbered houses, wiped a tear from her cheek and told herself she was safe.

  But as she came through passport control and saw soldiers with guns, she remembered that you were never safe. People clustered around the television screens on the way through to the baggage hall. There had been another terror alert a few hours previously. The London Underground was closed. As she entered Customs, the doors to the Arrivals area opened and she saw the excited faces of waiting people and found herself irrationally hoping that someone would be waiting for her, someone’s face breaking into a smile, hurrying up to get her case and take her home; or at the very least that there would be someone with a card saying OLIVIAJEWELS and the name of a minicab company. Pull yourself together, she said to herself. You don’t want to be taken home to cook supper in Worksop, do you? But, actually, someone was waiting for her. She was pulled over at Customs, strip-searched, handcuffed and taken to the interrogation center in Terminal Four.

  Two hours later she was still there, her spy equipment spread out on the table before her: spyglass, spy ring, miniature camera, bug detector, pepper-spray pen. Her
laptop had been taken away for examination. She felt as though she had gone over the story three hundred times. “I’m a freelance journalist. I work for Elan magazine and the Sunday Times, sometimes. I went to Honduras to cover the cheap diving.”

  The officials’ questions about Feramo made her nervous. How did they know? Had the Embassy tipped them off? HM Customs were barking up completely the wrong tree anyway. They thought he was trafficking drugs and that she was his accomplice.

  “Did he give you his number?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can we take it?”

  “Won’t that put me under threat?”

  “We’ll make sure it won’t. Did you give him your number?”

  “Nearly. I changed a couple of digits.”

  “We’ll need that number as well. The one you gave him. You’re ex-directory, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Why did you continue to follow him? Are you in love with him?”

  She started to tell them about her terrorism theories, but she sensed she was dealing with the wrong people. They weren’t taking her seriously. They were HM Customs and Excise. They were looking for drugs.

  “I want to speak to someone from MI6,” she said. “I need a terrorism person. I need a lawyer.”

  Finally, the door opened and a tall figure swept in in a flurry of perfume, hair and covetable clothes. The woman sat at the desk, bent her head, took hold of her hair and threw it back so it cascaded over her shoulders in a glossy black curtain.

  “So, Olivia, we meet again. Or should I call you Rachel?”

  It took Olivia a second to realize that she recognized the woman and another second to realize where from.

  “Hmm,” said Olivia. “I wonder what I should call you?”

  39 LONDON

  “I’m going to ask you again,” said Suraya in an annoying primary-schoolteacher tone. “And this time I want the right answer.” She was as astonishingly beautiful as ever, but had lost her West Coast drawl and replaced it with a posh girls’ boarding-school English.

  Olivia’s initial reaction to the revelation that Suraya was an undercover spy was to think, That woman could never be a spy because no one would ever tell her anything because she’s also an Undercover Bitch. But then she remembered how stupid men could be when women were beautiful.

  “I’ve told everyone about three hundred times. I’m freelance. I sometimes work for Elan magazine and the Sunday Times, when they’re not pissed off with me about something.”

  “Born in Worksop.” Suraya started reading bossily from her file. “Witnessed parents and younger brother killed on a pedestrian crossing aged fourteen.”

  Olivia winced: horrible, cruel cowbag.

  “Left school before A levels. Changed her name to Olivia Joules. Started investing using parents’ life insurance aged eighteen. Extensive travel. Small apartment in Primrose Hill. Freelance journalist, principally style and travel—ambitions to cover hard news. Plays piano, speaks fluent French, passable Spanish and German, some Arabic. Changes her appearance and hair color with regularity. Frequent visits to the States and various European cities. Other visits to India, Morocco, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and the Sudan.” She paused, then added, “Currently unattached. So who are you working for?”

  “Who are you working for?” snapped Olivia.

  “MI6,” Suraya Exoceted back.

  “Did you put the bug in my bedroom in the Standard?”

  Suraya tossed her hair disparagingly and started reading from the file again. “Rachel Pixley, writing under the name Olivia Joules, is considered by Sunday Times editorial staff to have an overactive imagination.” She closed the file and looked up with a nasty smile. “So that explains the toys, yes?” she said, gesturing dismissively at the spy equipment. “Jane Bond delusions.”

  Olivia felt like hitting her on the head with a shoe. How dare she insult her spy gear?

  Breathe, breathe, calm, Olivia told herself. Do not stoop to the horrid witch’s level.

  “So, tell me,” said Suraya. “Did you enjoy sleeping with him?”

  Olivia looked down for a moment, recovering her composure. It was fine, it was absolutely fine. Olivia’s theory was that you could divide women into two types: those who were on the Girls’ Team, and Undercover Bitches. If a woman was on the Girls’ Team, she could be as beautiful, intelligent, rich, famous, sexy, successful and as popular as fuck, and you’d still like her. Women on the Girls’ Team had solidarity. They were conspiratorial and brought all their fuck-ups to the table for everyone to enjoy. Undercover Bitches were competitive: they showed off, tried to put others down to make themselves look good, lacked humor and a sense of their own ridiculousness, said things which sounded okay on the surface but were actually designed to make you feel really bad, couldn’t bear it when they weren’t getting enough attention, and they flicked their hair. Men didn’t get all this. They thought women took against each other because they were jealous. Quite tragic, really.

  “Well?” said Suraya with a supercilious smile. “Did you, or didn’t you?”

  Olivia felt like yelling, “Oh, go fuck yourself, you ridiculous cowbag,” but managed to stop herself by digging her thumb into her palm.

  “I’m afraid the closest I got was to see him in his swimming trunks,” said Olivia.

  “Oh really? And?”

  “They were quite baggy,” said Olivia sweetly. “So sorry to disappoint, but I can’t tell you much more. I’m sure you found all the information you needed from your own research. Why the interest, anyway?”

  “That’s for us to know and you to tell us more about,” she said, as if Olivia were a seven-year-old child. “Now, I suggest you start by telling me why exactly you were following him.”

  Calm, calm, breathe, don’t go mental, Olivia told herself. Look on the bright side. The fact that MI6 has arrived initially in the shape of this horrible posh boarding school, hair-flicking, Undercover Bitch is neither here nor there. They are taking you seriously. Sooner or later, someone will lower his newspaper in a railway carriage, invite you for tea and biscuits in Pimlico, and pop the question.

  “I suppose you think staring into space like that is a clever technique,” said Suraya, stifling a yawn. “Actually it’s very childish.”

  “Did you spend a very long time learning how to interrogate people?” asked Olivia. “Did they tell you the best way to win people over was to really get on their nerves?”

  Suraya froze for a moment, eyes closed, palms spread before her, breathing through her nose.

  “Okay, okay, freeze frame,” she said. “Rewind, yah? Let’s start again.” She held out her hand. “Pax?”

  “What?” said Olivia.

  “You know: pax, yah? Latin for peace?”

  “Oh! Yah, yah. I mean sometimes I, like, dream in Latin.”

  “So look,” said Suraya, still keeping up the crisp English tone, “let’s come clean here. We’ve been looking at Feramo and his people for drugs. You know, Miami, Honduras, LA. It looked like a pretty obvious connection. As it turns out from our investigations, Feramo is as clean as a whistle—an international playboy with an eye for girls with not much between the ears.”

  “You do yourself down.”

  “What?” said Suraya. “Anyway, you’ve mentioned a couple of times your suspicions about terrorism. We’d like you to tell us what that’s based on.”

  But Olivia wasn’t going to tell her what that was based on, or not all of it, anyway. She would wait until she was interrogated by someone she could at least stand.

  “Well, first of all, I didn’t believe he was French,” she said. “I thought he was an Arab.”

  “Because?”

  “His accent. And then, when the OceansApart blew up, I guess I, unfairly perhaps, put together some rather far-fetched clues to connect him to it. And then when I found out about the diving connection, I thought, ooh, maybe they’d used divers to blow up the ship. Silly, really, but there we are.”
r />   Now, Olivia thought, if she had been doing the investigation, her next question would have been, “And what do you think now?”

  Instead, a tiny curl of satisfaction lifted the corner of Suraya’s mouth. “I see,” she said and got to her feet, picking up Olivia’s file. She was wearing a very cool, short, seventies-style skirt with saddle stitching which looked like Prada, and a super-thin silk-knit sweater in an elegant shade of khaki.

  “Excuse me one moment,” Suraya said with a smile and slipped out of the room, taking the file with her. Olivia could just make out the word Gucci woven into the knit at the back of the sweater. They must pay them a lot in MI6, she thought.

  She sat looking round the room, imagining that Suraya had gone to talk to her superior. Any second now, she would return with an elderly M-like figure, who would lean forward and murmur, “Welcome to MI6, Agent Joules. Now off you go to Gucci for the kit.”

  The door opened, and Suraya reappeared. “We’re going to let you go,” she said with a brisk finality, sitting down.

  Olivia sank down in her seat, crestfallen. “I’ll need these back, and my laptop,” she said, starting to gather her spy things together.

  “We’ll be retaining these for a few days,” said Suraya, putting out her hand to stop her.

  “What about my laptop?”

  “That too, I’m afraid. You’ll have it back shortly.”

  “But I need it to work on.”

  “You can pick up a replacement and a copy of your hard drive on the way out. We’ll contact you in a few days when we’re ready to return the machine. In the meantime, Rachel”—Suraya had clearly picked up some pretty serious role-model stuff from the headmistress of her posh school—“I’m sure you are aware of the importance of not mentioning this to anyone. No harm done, but in future remember it’s an extremely silly idea to get involved with any sort of drugs issues. You got off lightly this time, but in future there might be more serious consequences.”

  “What?” Olivia spluttered. “It was the British Embassy people in La Ceiba who told me it was safe to go to Popayan. They said it would be all right to hang out at Feramo’s hotel.”