PRIME MINISTER: Barry, the barn door is wide open and the horses have well and truly bolted. I need to know what happens to this sensitive data if these remaining Minders aren’t located and brought back to safety.
MoD: There is a chance some aspect of this information will be lost for ever.
PRIME MINISTER: How much is ‘some aspect of it’?
MoD: Worst case scenario – eighty per cent. Best case – around forty per cent.
PRIME MINISTER: Let me get this clear in my head – there are no backups, no hard copies saved anywhere else and no more DNA sitting in a bloody petri dish waiting to be implanted into somebody else?
DR SANDRA WHITE: Not in our laboratories, no.
WILLIAM HARRIS: A part of me can’t help wondering if this might be a blessing in disguise. It’s a brand-new world we are living in and these are difficult times. Would it really do us that much damage if the worst parts of our history were erased?
MoD: I think it would, yes.
PRIME MINISTER: Which is why when I first learned this plan was being developed behind my back I said it was a ridiculous, dangerous idea. I cannot convey to you all how furious I am for allowing myself to be talked into it. So how are we going to get the remaining Minders back?
WILLIAM HARRIS: The message boards formerly used to communicate recalls are compromised so it’s unsafe to return to them. And Karczewski took his files detailing the participants with him to the grave. However, on the retrieval of his body and repatriation home, his killers weren’t aware that he too was a carrier of data.
PRIME MINISTER: I’ve read the autopsy report and there was no mention of this.
WILLIAM HARRIS: Parts of it were redacted. Whoever murdered him had no reason to believe he stored information inside him, so the wound to his head was designed to send a message to us and the Minders. He actually stored the names and photographic images of all the Minders in a chip embedded in his calf muscle.
PRIME MINISTER: How do we replace them?
WILLIAM HARRIS: There is an approach we would like to suggest, but it is a radical one and an adapted version of what we were to do if any of the Minders went rogue. But it will require misdirecting the whole of the British public.
Chapter 74
FLICK, ALDEBURGH, SUFFOLK
Flick lay on her bed in a room cloaked in silence.
The window usually remained slightly ajar on the nights she spent at the B&B, enough for her to fall asleep against the distant backdrop of waves lapping against the shore. Tonight, it was firmly shut tight. Her make-believe life was over.
Not only was someone trying to kill her but she was pregnant by a man with a questionable moral compass. How could she have gotten him so horribly wrong?
Flick’s reaction to Elijah’s exploitation of Christopher’s murder victims mirrored the aftermath of her discovery of him as her DNA Match – she retreated behind closed doors. This time, she locked herself inside the B&B to buy herself some thinking time.
‘I have a stomach bug,’ she’d warned Grace. ‘If it’s contagious I’d best keep away from you and the other guests.’
By choosing not to confront Elijah about his paintings earlier that day, she had denied him the opportunity to explain. But whatever his justification was for them, it would make no difference because she had already made up her mind. Someone who benefited financially from murder victims was not someone she wanted to raise achild with. Elijah wasn’t the man she had built him up to be, and perhaps she must shoulder some of the blame for that. Her expectations had been too high. Very soon, she would be out of his life and searching for a new location to do it alone.
Her fabricated illness coincided with Elijah’s last-minute additions to his exhibition. He’d been working long hours at his home and at the nearby disused church he leased. It gave her time and space to make plans.
Unable to sleep, Flick made her way into the darkness of Grace’s garden and placed all her belongings, aside from one outfit hanging in her wardrobe, into the incinerator. With the press of a button, it was engulfed by flames. She looked up and into the distance and spotted the neon crucifix attached to the church steeple. It was illuminated which meant Elijah was still there, working through the night.
Back in her room, she spied the pencil portrait he had drawn of her on the evening they’d first met at the pub. She screwed it up and dropped it on the chest of drawers.
She checked the time – it was 2.30 a.m. Around eighteen hours remained before she was to leave everything behind and her next adventure could begin.
Chapter 75
CHARLIE, MANCHESTER
Charlie glanced around the bar of the Chinatown pub as he anxiously awaited the arrival of his DNA Match.
The time was approaching 2 p.m. and from his table at the rear of the room, he counted a dozen or so customers using it as a remote office, working on laptops and sipping from reusable coffee cups. Although he foresaw no obvious threats to his safety, it didn’t help him to relax.
