The Girl Who Ran. Nikki Owen

at this facility for your Project re-initiation?’

      I hesitate. Images sometimes come at night, blurred events, faces, but nothing yet definable or real. ‘No.’

      ‘And so when you see this’— he slides the laptop to me and clicks to a page — ‘what do you think about?’

      I read it fast, photographing the data to the memory banks within ten seconds. Facts. The file contains spool upon spool of facts about me. Dates, times, images all collected by my handlers over the years, undercover Project handlers at school, university, work who watched me grow up and who took me, with the help of my adoptive mother, Ines, to train me on missions, then drug me with Versed to make me forget what I had done. There are facts about my time in prison for a murder I did not commit, a murder I was set up for by the Project to get me out of the way while the NSA scandal blew up. Details on my adoptive family, how Ines killed my real father, Balthus, and shot my adoptive brother, Ramon, after pretending it was he who had given me to the Project. Facts about how I killed Ines at her Madrid apartment to protect my then friends, Patricia and Chris, the whole scene covered up by the Project, dressed up as a gangland drug killing. There are pictures of each person I have known, intelligence on them, and I resist the urge to reach out and touch the image of their nearly forgotten faces; at this black site facility we are taught that the Project is our only friend.

      I look to Black Eyes. ‘When I look at this data I think about the killings.’

      ‘Done by you or by others?’

      ‘Both.’

      ‘You have killed several people, Maria – how does that make you feel?’

      I hesitate. Feelings, for me, are the hardest questions to answer.

      ‘You see, Maria,’ Black Eyes says now, ‘you are vulnerable, or at least, you have been vulnerable to outside influences, and it affects you from time to time, as I suspect it’s doing now. But that is why I am here. You must learn to lock it away, shut such trivialities from your mind, forget your past, forge your future. Ines gave you to us from Balthus and Isabella, your real mother, so you could be someone better.’

      ‘Ines gave me to you so she could have cancer drugs from the Project in return,’ I say, struggling to keep a worm of emotion from rising in me. ‘Ines lied to all of us and was working with the Project all along. Ines… Ines helped to kill my Papa.’

      ‘He is not your Papa,’ he suddenly snaps. ‘He is Alarico. He was your adoptive father.’

      My eyes flicker to Papa’s image on the computer: warm smiles, creased eyes. ‘I… I miss him.’

      I drop my head, feeling an acute sense of failure. I have tried to forget my family, my friends; I have come a long way and it has been hard, too hard sometimes. I glance around the room, at the walls and the window, deeply sad yet resigned, my feet weary and heavy, and the thought arrives that this here now, with Black Eyes, with the Project, is the only option I have left. The only option now. I am on my own. Everyone has deserted me. Gone or dead, I don’t know – it always varies, but one thing throughout it all has been consistent: the Project. It’s all I have left. I have tried, in the past, to fight them, have actively railed against them, but for what? What good has it done? What good does it do to fight for what you believe in when all you are is a wounded soldier in a losing battle? Is it not better to lay down your arms and surrender? To try and at least see down the barrel from their point of view? Here, with the Project now, with Black Eyes every day, I can see now that it offers me something of what I need: a routine. And maybe this is where I was meant to be all along, a place where a daily routine is standard, surrounded by people like me, working, perhaps, for a greater good. I can learn, maybe. I can attempt to understand what it is they are really trying to do and possibly then acceptance of it all will be easier. You can’t control everything and sometimes there comes a moment when you must accept that this is the way your days are meant to be. This is, all along, who you were meant to be.

      Black Eyes lets out a long sigh and shuts the laptop. He glances to the picture frame on the desk. ‘The past is hard to deal with sometimes.’ He lingers on the image for a second then looks back to me. ‘And, Maria, a lot has happened to you. But, what you have to remember is that it’s the future that truly shapes us, if only we let it.’

      I listen to him and as I do, the Project’s phrase, the one bolted to the corridor walls, enters my head, clear and true. ‘Order and routine are everything,’ I find myself chanting.

      Then we say, together: ‘The Project is our only friend.’

      A smile spreads on his face and reaches his eyes then, clearing his throat, he flicks a page. ‘Now’— he taps a file with photographs— ‘to pressing matters. You know these two people, correct?’

      He presents me with two images. I take a sharp breath.

      ‘This,’ he says, pointing to one, ‘is Patricia O’Hanlon – your cell mate at Goldmouth prison when you were incarcerated for the murder of the Catholic priest before your acquittal.’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘And you were good friends, close, yes? Your first real friend, would you say?’

      I swallow, nervous. Why is he asking me this? ‘Yes.’

      His finger traces Patricia’s swan neck, her shaven head and blue saucer eyes, and as he does, I feel uncomfortable, concerned, but I don’t know why. ‘And this,’ he says now, ‘is Chris Johnson. We have a lot of data on him. Convicted American hackers tend to pique our interest. I believe it was Balthus that originally put you two in touch?’

      ‘Yes,’ I say, my throat oddly dry. ‘I met Chris at his villa in Montserrat, near Barcelona. I went there after MI5 found me at Salamanca villa. Chris was in prison for hacking a USA government database. Balthus was Chris’s prison governor before he was in charge of Goldmouth.’

      Black Eyes moves the file nearer to me and my vision catches Chris’s familiar deep brown eyes, his uncut hair flopping to sharp cheeks and stubbled chin, and somewhere inside me, I feel an indefinable pull towards him, and towards the faces on the pages, an urge to scoop them to my chest and hold them tight.

      ‘Maria?’

      I whip my head up in fright at his sudden voice. ‘Yes?’

      ‘The Project is your only friend.’

      His eyes reduce to small slits, one second passing in the silence, two. He looks from the faces in the file to me, then back again in a seesaw pendulum of time. I shiver, not knowing what to do, worried, scared even at how strongly I felt just now when I saw the faces of my friends, yet shocked at how much I want to please Black Eyes, please the Project, do whatever I can for them, find a place where I belong, accept that this is where I am to live my life.

      After ten seconds pass without a word, Black Eyes scrapes back his chair and, striding to the glass mirror on the far side, he turns and faces me.

      ‘Maria, I have something to show you.’

      He steps back and presses a buzzer. I watch, a nervous swell inside me licking the shores of my brain as the mirror of the window begins to move and a grey blind behind starts to rise. It reaches the top, clicking to a halt but still I cannot see fully what is beyond, when another snap sounds and this time a light switches on from the other side. A brightness floods the room and I have to blink over and over as it assaults my eyes, my hand shielding them. I have to resist the strong compulsion to duck and curl as, slowly, I finally see what was causing the moaning earlier.

      ‘Doc! Doc!’ the familiar Irish lilt of a voice shouts out.

      I manage to stand and step forward, as what emerges in front of me, limb by limb, bone by bone, is a beaten, bruised and tied-up body.

      When I find my voice, only one word comes out. ‘Patricia.’

Chapter 2