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CHAPTER 40

THE TINNY SOUND of “I’m a Barbie Girl” blasted through the wall behind Luke’s head, and he woke with a start. Was that Mack? If so, she had terrible taste in music.

The din stopped, and he leaned back on the pillow, but it started up again seconds later.

When Barbie wailed about being wrapped up in plastic for the third time, he gave up and swung his legs out of bed. The clock on the wall told him he’d had five hours sleep—that would have to do.

When he found Mack in the kitchen, her hair was wet, and she’d twisted it up into a knot on top of her head. Even without a scrap of make-up on, she put most other women to shame.

“Coffee?” she asked, and without waiting for an answer, she poured him a cup.

“Cheers. I’m already awake, though, thanks to Barbie.”

“It’s awful, isn’t it?” Mack admitted sheepishly. “But I’m so bad at getting up in the mornings, I set my ringtone to a song I really hate so I’ll answer it to make it stop.”

“I suppose that makes sense.”

“I sleep through almost anything. That’s why I have the control room call me until I get out of bed, or I’d stay there all day.”

Hang on—Blackwood ran a state-of-the-art, multi-million-pound control room, staffed with highly trained operatives, and Mack was using it as an alarm clock? Cute.

Then again, Mack really didn’t look like a morning person, judging by the way she was stumbling around the kitchen. Luke figured he’d better lend a hand.

“Do you want me to make you some breakfast?” He wasn’t an expert in the kitchen, but he could butter toast and scramble an egg.

She looked at her watch, a Tag Heuer on a slim, gold band. It complemented her eyes. “I’ve only got time for a bowl of cereal. The car will be here in five minutes to take me to my meeting.” She rummaged around in a cupboard and pulled out four different kinds of muesli. “Ugh, it’s all horrible.”

Luke picked up one of the boxes and turned it over. “Toasted quinoa, chia seeds, and dried goji berries?”

“It’s Emmy’s nutritionist. He throws the good stuff out. I’ll stick with the coffee.”

“Maybe I’ll have toast.”

Luke opened the fridge, but when he picked up the seventeen-grain wholemeal brick inside, he changed his mind. Mack was right; coffee was definitely the way to go. It might help him to lose a few pounds, anyway.

Mack poured a gallon of milk into her own coffee then gulped it back and shoved the cup in the dishwasher. “Gotta dash.” She gave him a little wave before disappearing out the door.

Left in the house by himself, Luke took the opportunity to have a quick look around. When he’d been here before, exploring had been the last thing on his mind, and he’d only seen a small fraction of the rooms. As he wandered the corridors, he soon found Albany House was even bigger than he first thought.

He saw few personal touches outside the bedrooms. No notes stuck on the fridge. No shoes lined up in the hallway. No books on the coffee table in the lounge. His thoughts turned to the house’s owner. Emmy had proved to be an enigma. Who was she, really?

He’d only find out one way, and that was by finding her. After one more cup of coffee, he returned to the control room, ready to work. Mack had set him up as a user the previous day, albeit not with full access rights, so when he commanded the systems to turn on, they did.

The monitors spanning the wall showed live feeds of similar rooms the world over. He read the captions at the bottom. Paris. London. Los Angeles. Berlin. And Richmond. Luke groaned as he spotted Nick seated at a desk, head down as he stared at a sheaf of papers.

Should Luke just ignore him? Tempting, but sooner or later they’d have to speak. Might as well get it over with.

“Good morning,” he said. Could Nick hear?

Nothing. He clicked on a speaker icon and tried again. This time Nick looked up.

“Morning, Luke. Nate mentioned you’d come in. It’s been a few weeks, hasn’t it? How are you doing? And Tia?”

How indeed? The truth was, Luke had avoided the subject. He didn’t want to think about the kidnapper or the shadow that man had cast over his life and Tia’s. The police liaison officer had called the other day to say they’d transferred the man to Broadmoor, which was probably the best place for him.

“I’m just trying to get back to normal.”

Or as normal as things could be with Emmy involved. And now Mack. Her luscious face filled his mind again, and it took a second for him to realise Nick was speaking to him.

“Sorry, what was that?”

“I asked if Mack gave you a briefing?”

“Yes, she explained the situation. She wanted a hand getting into the Syrian military networks.”

“We all appreciate any help you can give. Emmy seemed to think you were good at looking into places you shouldn’t be.”

“That’s one way to put it, I suppose. I’m planning to carry on where Mack and I left off last night, unless there’s anything else you’d rather I do?” Luke erred on the side of politeness. After all, who knew what Emmy had told Nick about him? Maybe she’d played them both.

“No, you get on with that. We’ve found no sign of Emmy after her phone cut out. Nate’s been analysing satellite feeds while Mack’s team’s been searching through internet traffic. Dan’s acting as liaison with various intelligence agencies, and I’m planning a possible rescue mission with Logan and Jed. Plus we’ve got another seventy or so staff supporting us.”

“That’s a lot of people.”

“Yeah, well, it’s Emmy, isn’t it? Just give one of us a shout if you find anything, no matter how insignificant it might seem. We’ve got the manpower to run down every lead.”

“Will do.”

Luke worked steadily, but the translation took too long. After persevering for a couple of hours, he stopped and re-jigged some of the language algorithms in his search program. It may have taken him ninety minutes, but when he settled back into the hunt, he found it worked much faster.

He left the chatter from the Richmond control room on in the background. Staff bustled back and forth, a hive of quiet efficiency. Despite the obvious tension, there were no raised voices, no tempers flaring. He couldn’t help being impressed by the organisation.

At one point, he heard some of the men discussing Emmy’s mental state. Nate and Nick were involved, as well as Logan and a guy with shoulder-length dirty blond hair and a large, greenish bruise spreading across his cheek. From his leg, encased in plaster and propped up on the desk, Luke assumed that was Jed.

“So, how was she doing?” Nate asked. “She admitted before she left that she still wasn’t herself but insisted she’d be fine.”

Luke felt a little guilty for eavesdropping, but curiosity got the better of him, so he turned the volume up.

“That was the strange thing,” Logan said. “When we got to Syria, the old Emmy came back. There was none of that hesitancy or lack of confidence she’d been showing since Black died. She knew exactly what she was doing.”

Jed confirmed that. “She took charge, got on with things. Even when she saw Phil, she did what she had to, no hesitation. It was vintage Emmy. I saw no issues with her performance at all.”

“How do you think she’d hold up if she got captured?” Nate asked him.

“Not sure. Nick?”

“She definitely wasn’t right a few weeks back. Whether she sorted her head out enough between then and now to withstand the nightmare they put Phil through, I don’t know.”

“When did she last do a hostage drill?” Jed asked.

“With Black and Alex about three months before Black died,” Nick said. “A full drill—four days. Sleep deprivation, starvation, stress positions, messing with her senses, torture, the lot. Alex was waterboarding her when I saw them. And Black put her in a picquet before that. She was doing fine, but she’d never have broken with Black there anyway.”

“The question is, how would she do with him out of the picture?” Nate asked.

“Not sure. I’ll have a chat with Alex and get his take on things.”

When the men stopped talking, Luke ran an internet search to find out what a picquet was. He’d seen waterboarding on the news, and he thought that was horrific until the results for picquet popped up.

It had taken him several goes to get the right spelling, but when he did, he wished he hadn’t. The gruesome mediaeval device involved tying one hand high above the victim’s head, either by the wrist or by the thumb. They balanced on their opposite foot atop a rounded spike, not sharp enough to draw blood but definitely pointy enough to hurt. When the pain in the victim’s hand got too much to bear, they’d transfer their weight to the foot until that too became unbearable. This shifting of weight continued until the victim confessed or died from the pain.

And Black had put his wife in one? Luke had no words. Only a monster could contemplate that. A sadist.

Until that point, Luke had felt many things for Emmy, but pity wasn’t one of them. Now he felt a twinge of sadness as he thought of how she’d been treated, and guilt that he’d added to her problems.

This latest news spurred him on, leaving him more determined than ever to get to the bottom of what happened to her.