The Society by Karen Guyler (best ebook reader android txt) 📕

her address, her work. He hadn’t been able to let her go all the way. But, careful, he mustn’t make her bolt. “I need to speak with you. It’s urgent.”

“You’re speaking right now.”

“Not on the phone. I’ll be at the all-night-café in Armstrong Street.” He pressed down the peeling corner of one of the stickers plastered on the back wall of the phone box. It popped up again. “You still take your coffee black, twist of sugar?”

“No sugar these days.”

“You might be grateful for it. Please, Nancy, it’s red important.”

To him, the silence between them didn’t feel awkward, rather the recoupling of a shared past, two shared pasts. Was it the same for her?

“Red important?” No panic, a simple clarification.

“Yes.”

The café’s florescent lighting was a beacon in the empty street, Charles’ footsteps the soundtrack to this ungodly hour as he walked towards it. The sparse traffic hum from the closest arterial road barely intruded there. No other sound to worry about. He opened the café door and stepped into the warmth, welcomed by the smell of bacon and coffee as though it was already breakfast time. A group of taxi drivers occupied the safest table, backs to the end wall, their cabs parked outside in a factory production line.

Under the guise of using the gents, he checked out the exit, a door past the toilets, no enclosed courtyard. Good. Funny how he thought he’d forgotten all that.

“Just tea?” the lad behind the counter looked like Charles had told him why he was there when he ordered. “Our bacon butties are legend, yeah.”

“Too right, Rajiv, I could go for another one.” The taxi drivers started a chorus of ‘and me’.

Too noticeable not to after that. “Then I’ll have one too, thank you. And a black coffee.” He’d be optimistic.

He took a seat and waited, staring at the TV screen, the silent BBC News 24 with the yellow subtitles turned on. The odd sentence transcription could have been a good distraction, the gobbledygook that appeared on the screen funny even on another day.

And then nothing was funny. The assassination of Hunter Malone has been claimed by a group called The Society. The ticker tape dropped the bombshell on him with as much concern as it had proclaimed that The Met Office forecast this would be the coldest October for a decade.

Charles had never heard of them before Tony instructed them, and now they were everywhere. Why would they assassinate Hunter? He wasn’t anywhere in the picture for failing to pay them. Unless—they guaranteed a remove to their clients, the one thing Jed would insist upon. People didn’t change. Plausible deniability had been the guiding principle of his entire life.

Tony, so sure you’d hit upon the perfect solution by hiring a hit on the President while he’d ordered the same on us. He would have appreciated that irony.

Duncan, because he would have responded to Charles’ red important messages if he had just gone away out of his own choice, Hunter, now Tony, they were getting closer. Hurry, Nancy.

His bacon sandwich was crumbs on the plate, the dregs of his tea long cold, and he’d moved to the safest seat when the bell on the door tinkled.

His insides somersaulted, the last seven years evaporated, and Nancy was there, sitting opposite him.

“You look good.” Glorious, beautiful, the years apart wore well on her.

She shook her head, short, sharp, fast, like she was shaking water out of her hair. He’d forgotten she did that. “You don’t get to say that.” She peered at the cold coffee. “So confident I’d come?”

“I hoped. Rajiv, could I have another tea and coffee?”

“First name terms already?”

“The bacon butties are legend.” Charles whispered.

“You want a bacon butty with that, lady? They’re legend, yeah.”

“Just coffee, thanks.” Her smile creased into more wrinkles now, framing her eyes, at both sides of her mouth, lighting up her blue eyes.

“How ‘bout you, guvnor, annuva?”

“Just the tea, thank you.”

Nancy pulled off her bobble hat, she’d caught her black curls back in a ponytail, slipped her coat off onto the back of the wooden chair. A forest green jumper underneath, her favourite colour. “Why am I here?”

Charles’ new passport in his shirt pocket pressed against his chest. Come with me, let’s run away together. The words she’d wanted him to say seven years ago were right there. He couldn’t hold them in. They whispered into the no-man’s-land between their lives. Dynamite.

She let go of her coffee mug, reached for her coat. “You’re seven years too late.”

Charles held a hand out, hovering over the table. “I’m sorry, I didn’t come here for that.”

He’d meant to woo her, wean himself from Eva, and still he had things to action, to complete, but his heart galloped ahead of his logical mind. Why shouldn’t the time be now?

“That’s not your red important.” Her eyebrows arched a warning that it had better not be.

“No, no, I mean it, with every fibre of my being, but I understand I have to earn your trust. I will ask you again, but for now I came to warn you. You’ve seen the news?”

She stayed in the chair, reaching for her coffee again. “Hunter.”

He nodded, “Hunter killed, who could have got close enough to do that?”

“It wasn’t the Russians?”

“Duncan hasn’t been seen for almost a month.”

She nodded, digested, waited. What he’d told her so far didn’t add up to red. So he dropped his bombshell. “Tony died from a heart attack.”

The significance of that alarmed her. “Could it be an actual heart attack?”

Charles shook his head. What the news had shown him altered everything. He dropped his voice, “We need to get out, it’s urgent. I’ve been working to a plan, it’s nearly complete. I wouldn’t have told you yet, not until it’s ready, but,” he spread his hands, “I’m not in control of the timetable now. What I can reassure you of is that I have a way for us to be safe and financially secure so we can disappear beyond his reach.”

Nancy sipped her