Revolution (19 page)

Sigby’s indignance vanished as a wave of self–loathing churned through his stomach. Megan turned away from Sigby and walked down the hall toward her own room.

Callum silently followed Megan away down the hall. Sophie watched them go, and then looked at Sigby with an expression of such utter disgust that the correspondent physically wilted beneath her gaze.

***

‘She’ll want to be left alone. I’m going to stay down the sergeant’s mess tonight.’

Callum had put on his jacket and closed the door of the room he shared with Megan.

‘She might want to talk,’ Sophie protested.

Callum snorted a brief laugh and turned away down the corridor. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

Sophie hesitated for several moments before gingerly knocking on Megan’s door. A feint voice sounded from within the room.

‘Go away. Drinking.’

Sophie smiled faintly. ‘I know, I want some too.’

There was a moment’s silence and then the door opened, Megan standing before her. Sophie waited expectantly and Megan finally backed away and let her into the room, closing the door after her.

‘You certainly have a way with people,’ Sophie said as she stood in the centre of the room.

‘Gentle touch,’ Megan replied. ‘From my mother’s side.’

She moved across to a table, where a bottle of Single Malt stood with two tumblers. She gestured demonstratively to them.

‘Care to share?’

‘Merci, madame.’

Megan poured Sophie a glass and one for herself before sitting in the crooked chair at the table. Sophie, cradling her tumbler, sat on the edge of the bed looking at her.

‘Bad day,’ Sophie observed quietly.

‘I’ve had better.’

‘Would you like to talk about it?’

‘I’d prefer to forget it.’

‘Things go away more easily if you talk them over.’

‘I find it prolongs the agony.’

‘You might think differently if you..,’

‘What do you want?’

Megan’s tone had changed dramatically, becoming hard–edged and cold like a blade. Sophie hesitated before speaking.

‘I just want to help.’

Megan focused on one of the candles flickering on a nearby shelf.

‘Doesn’t everybody.’

Sophie took another sip of her drink, watching Megan as she did so. Megan looked at her own drink for a moment before speaking.

‘What’s your real name, Sophie?’

A long silence hung in the room, during which Sophie did not move nor speak. When she finally did her voice was quiet, as though the spirit and verve within her had suddenly and unexpectedly been vanquished.

‘Sophie D’Aoust. It’s an old name, from the Picardie region of northern France, so I’m told. Vernoux was from my mother’s side, her maiden name.’

Megan nodded slowly, as though that explained everything. She took a sip of whisky and gasped as the liquor hit her throat.

‘So why do you use it, and why are you here?’

Sophie sighed softly.

‘My father, Pierre–Paul D’Aoust, was a farmer. He passed away two years ago. Our family is relatively wealthy, due to the ownership of a lot of land. I used to be proud of it, until I found out how he continued to make money even though the majority of our land lay fallow.’ She turned to look at Megan. ‘Did you know that if all of the fields of France were allowed to grow and distribute grain freely, there would not be a single person on earth who would be hungry?’

Megan shook her head, and Sophie went on, her expression pained.

‘The fields of France, or of any similarly sized European country, are easily capable of feeding every human being on this planet. Famines should not occur. Do you know why they do? Money. Farmers are actually paid
not
to grow things, to prevent grain mountains forming from excess growth. We don’t need the food, so farmers are subsidised by the government to not grow the food that could save millions of lives every year.’

‘You rebelled,’ Megan said with a faint smile.

‘More than that,’ Sophie said softly. ‘I had trained as a nurse after school, but I quit my job and joined activist movements. We did demonstration, protests, trying to get people to change their ways. It didn’t work, so some of our people decided to go further. They set fields on fire in southern France. One blaze got out of control, three people died, one of the victims himself an activist. Somehow word got out that I was the daughter of a farmer, the media got hold of the story, and before I knew it I was the poster–child of radical anarchistic groups.’

‘Ah,’ Megan murmured. ‘That’s why you hate journalists and reporters so much.’

‘They lied,’ Sophie said, ‘twisted everything. I just wanted to make a statement, but they made me out to be an accomplice to murder. It all got out of hand and before I knew it I’d left France for Italy.’ Sophie sighed again, hanging her head.

‘You can’t go home?’ Megan said.

‘No,’ Sophie replied. ‘I’d most likely be tried for manslaughter. Two other members of the protest group are serving time in prison for what they did. I was not a part of it but now it’s too late to defend myself. I’ve come to accept it.’

Megan nodded, shocked by what she had heard and yet somehow immune to stories of hardship and injustice. People suffered: that was a part of life, just like breathing.

‘The aid groups took you in though? They must have known who you really were?’

‘Maybe,’ Sophie said. ‘But they need all the help they can get. I applied under my assumed name, I had enough sympathetic friends to get the necessary references, and my desire to help others proved the rest. I worked in Uganda and Afghanistan before coming here.’

‘You’ve been to all of the finest places,’ Megan observed.

A silence fell in the room, each of them lost in their own memories until Sophie looked up at Megan.

‘Is it true, what Martin Sigby said?’ she asked.

Megan sighed heavily, and chuckled to herself at the absurdity of it all.

‘Which bit?’

Sophie shrugged, but kept watching in silence until Megan finally answered her question, staring into her drink as she did so.

‘All of it’s true, but all of it’s bullshit at the same time. People have a way of taking what they hear about others and twisting it to suit their own opinions. Martin Sigby dislikes me intensely, so he twists the stories to make them sound worse.’

‘Tell me what happened,’ Sophie said.

‘It’s not worth the telling.’

‘It is to me.’

Megan shook her head, looking away from Sophie and out of the window even though there was nothing to see but the inky blackness of another freezing night. Sophie put her glass down on the bedside table before speaking.

‘Since you came here I have taken risks for you, letting you ride with our convoys. I know that you do what you do for a good cause but I think you owe it to me to at least convince me that I am not aiding and abetting a psychopath.’

‘You really believe that I’m a nut–case?’ Megan asked.

‘No,’ Sophie replied. ‘That’s why I want to know the truth. Isn’t that what you said to Martin Sigby, that the truth was more important? You are a woman who seems to have many contradictions, Madame Mitchell. I just want to know who you are.’

Megan exhaled whisky fumes onto the cold air. She looked at Sophie for a long moment before whispering a name as though she were speaking of a ghost.

‘James.’

Sophie stared at her for a moment, not daring to move. ‘Is who?’

‘Was,’ Megan said, one half of her face starkly lit by the candles on the window sill and the other in deep shadow. ‘James Mitchell was my father, also a journalist who worked for GNN. He was the one who got me into all of this, told me stories when I was growing up about the world around me, made me feel like so much was happening all the time, that it was all so exciting. We worked freelance, travelling together to wherever the news was, with Callum as cameraman and Pete Beke, a South African, as our technician. You name it, we were there. Europe, America, the Clinton trial, Bosnia, Mogadishu, Somalia. We covered everything, got some of the best footage ever broadcast. Networks would queue up to buy our material.’

Sophie watched Megan as she spoke, not looking at her but staring into the moving shadows sprawled like slumbering demons around the walls.

‘We covered September 2001 in New York, took some of the major aftermath footage. It wasn’t pretty. We both recognised that the terror attacks were something new, that a change was coming, that a new war had begun. It wasn’t about terrorism but about control of a government over its people, about using the threat of terrorism to keep people afraid, which let governments surveil them more closely, pass laws giving the police unwarranted and unprecedented access to our lives.’ Megan sighed. ‘We decided to go to countries where corruption was worst, to show how things could become.’

‘Where did you go? Sophie asked in a whisper.

‘Mexico,’ Megan replied. ‘We’d uncovered a lot of reports from there of abductions, criminal syndicates that owned the police forces, a hostage–ransom industry, not to mention the trade in drugs coming from the forests of South America. We decided that it was worth investigating, and flew there to learn more.’

Megan took a deep breath, downing the rest of her glass before continuing.

‘We wrote several articles that made the international press, but I guess that somehow we dug too deep or pissed off too many people who were making too much money to see their dirty little industries exposed and shut down. My father disappeared from Mexico City.’

Sophie stopped watching Megan, her own mind imagining that hot, violent city and its dangerous streets as Megan went on.

‘I spent the next year searching for him. I used up all of our savings, sold everything we possessed, spent months scouring the jungles and the backstreets and hostels and villages for him. I printed thousands upon thousands of pictures of him and put them up all over the city.’ She shook her head. ‘I never heard a word, from anyone.’

Megan reached out for the bottle of whisky and poured herself another glass. Sophie waited patiently until she had swallowed another sip and went on.

‘Then, a year to the day after he had vanished, I woke up in my hotel room to find a parcel at my door. In it was my father’s head and hands.’

Sophie’s throat clenched shut and she squeezed her eyes tight as she tried to prevent the horrific images and emotions that Megan must have experienced from penetrating her thoughts.

‘When the money ran out I thought I’d just curl up and die, that there was no point in going on because there was nothing worth going on for. It was Amy O’Hara, the person we’re searching for now, who had helped me all along from Chicago. She told me that there was nothing more that I could do, nothing that I could offer or provide that would bring my father back. That if I didn’t leave Mexico I’d just destroy myself, if the drug cartels didn’t decide to murder me first.’

‘So I did. I worked a passage across the Pacific on a freighter out of Sau Paulo, wound my way across southern Australia and then up through the Malay Archipelago. I got as far as Singapore before the drinking cost more than I earned, and about there I hit rock–bottom. The thing about it was, I didn’t care, didn’t give a damn. I might just as well have been dead already.’

Megan fell silent as though caught in the web of her own traumatised memories, of months and years lost in a paralysis of grief. Sophie spoke softly in the half light.

‘What happened next?’

Megan roused herself, perhaps from being hypnotised by the simultaneously warming and numbing effect of the alcohol, perhaps because she actually wanted to stay in a state of torpor, away from the world outside.

‘Callum,’ she said, with a faint smile. ‘We’d stayed in touch until I’d reached Australia, where I lost my cell phone after a particularly heavy session in Melbourne. He knew that I was in the Malay because Pete Beke, the clever sod, was able to track some of my movements from expenses I’d put on my debit card, until it got blocked. Callum found me in Singapore.’

‘And he brought you back home,’ Sophie hazarded.

‘Far from it. He brought me the news that somebody was looking for me. It turned out that a wealthy landowner in Sumatra, one of these property billionaires, had lost his daughter to Malay pirates, of all things. They’re still pretty common out there. Ransoms had been demanded but nobody could find where she was being hidden. He’d heard about me after reading one of Amy O’Hara’s reports on Mexico in the New York Journal.’

‘He wanted you to search for his daughter?’ Sophie asked, intrigued.

Megan nodded.

‘I had nothing to lose and I had experience, so to speak, so Callum, Pete and I worked for the next three months to find her. It took a hell of a job and it was dangerous, really dangerous. Those pirates are savages, no doubt about it. But we found her and got her out.’ She shook her head again. ‘The stink of it was that the property magnate, her father, had been in league with these pirates all along, paying them to terrorise the local communities into moving out so that the magnate could buy the land cheap and build his resorts on it. When he failed to pay them one time, they took his daughter in revenge. In return, he refused to pay the ransom.’

Sophie shook her head in silence, and then she began to think about what Sigby had said about Megan’s money and looked up at her.

‘You blackmailed him,’ she whispered. ‘You sold out.’

‘I had nothing left and no faith in life any more,’ Megan replied. ‘I didn’t care. If we’d revealed what we knew about what this magnate had been up to, we could have brought him down completely. Under the law he would have been sent to jail for life, and no amount of money or connections would have saved him. We had his daughter and we could tell the police everything, so we gave him a choice. Pay us a healthy tax–free sum to make us happy and we’d forget it had happened, or else she could take his chances in the courts.’

Sophie watched Megan in the candlelight. ‘How much?’

Megan smiled, a mercenary, ghostly little smile without warmth.

‘Fifteen million, Sterling,’ she said softly. ‘Nothing to a man like him, everything to people like Callum, Pete and I. We split it evenly between us and then went our separate ways. Pete returned to South Africa, Callum to England to build his dream home, and I bought a boat and sailed it from Singapore to London. It’s moored outside my apartment near Tower Bridge. I named her
Icarus,
after the Greek story of a boy who flew too close to the sun and fell to his death, to remind me of what happened to my father. I take her out alone onto the ocean whenever I feel like I’ve had enough of people.’