The Old Enemy by Henry Porter (read with me .TXT) 📕

far over that border, she thought, was the dismal forest where she had been held and tormented by the man calling himself Kirill. She found herself smiling at the memory of the preposterous little sadist in his hunting outfit.

They agreed it was best for them to get off the road. They took a forest track that led to a clearing where three trailers loaded with stripped tree trunks were parked. She steered behind one of the trailers so the Passat was hidden but she could still see the end of the track. She switched off the lights and reached for a bottle of water in the side pocket of her bag. Naji sank into his seat and rested his knees on the dashboard. He dozed, but she couldn’t sleep and watched vehicles flash past the turning in both directions more times than she could count.

Samson saw that the pulsing circle had stopped moving and texted, ‘Okay?’ but got no reply. He wasn’t going to start worrying yet. They would need to rest up.

Ulrike was looking at him absently. She was about to say something, but her head snapped up. ‘Verdammt! That’s the garden door. I told them to stay away!’ She moved to the conservatory and called out softly into the dark. A man’s voice answered her. ‘Mama, ich bin es – Rudi.’

She shook her head and waited. Rudi came in first and kissed his mother on both cheeks. A few seconds later, in came Zoe Freemantle. She took in Samson, nodded to him and moved into the centre of the conservatory.

‘So, we meet properly at last – Zoe Harland. I owe you an apology, Mr Samson.’

‘Harland?’

‘Robert Harland was my dad. My mother’s name was Freemantle. Didn’t Ulrike tell you?’

‘I was about to,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect you to come here. We had discussed that you were going to stay in the apartment for safety.’ She looked at her son. ‘Rudi, why did you come?’

He returned a rather hopeless look and said something in German that Samson didn’t catch, but he saw the apology in his eyes. His mother nodded and turned to Zoe. ‘You’d better explain everything.’

‘Please do,’ said Samson coolly, and sat down at a table, as it happened in the old Windsor-back chair that Harland had said was the only thing he’d kept from his life in Britain. But that turned out to be untrue. He had his spy mother’s cookbook as well as an English daughter, one that he’d been hired to babysit.

‘Are we smoking inside?’ asked Zoe. ‘Would you mind if I . . .?’ Ulrike handed her the ashtray and her cigarettes.

She lit up, inhaled and smiled at Rudi, who was returning with beer from the kitchen. ‘My father had an affair with a woman named Gillian, my mum. That was in 1990, when she was at the British embassy in Berlin. It was, shall we say, a very brief encounter. A fling. My mum was a career diplomat and she didn’t want to marry him, but they pretended for a while so she could keep her job and her baby – me. I think they may even have lied about getting married.’

Ulrike nodded.

‘Yes, they did lie, but who was to say otherwise? And after my birth, they went their separate ways and my mum was transferred to the embassy in Washington. She was talented, and they didn’t want to lose her, and I guess my dad put in enough appearances to make everyone feel comfortable. My mother married a man called Billy Freemantle and everything worked out. Dad paid for all my education and, when I was eighteen, we started meeting up and, later, he helped me with some problems.’ She glanced at Ulrike. ‘Like my mother, I’m an addict. I still smoke and drink, but I don’t do heroin.’

‘But you use cannabis,’ said Samson. ‘I was out at the cabin earlier.’

‘Oh, okay,’ she said, unfazed. ‘I think that was yours, Rudi.’ She gave him a soft punch to his arm. ‘I grew up in DC and New York, but mostly in Paris, where my mother and stepfather decided to live. He was an oil engineer with his own company. Retired early and devoted the rest of their lives to French society and getting plastered. They were socially grand, if you know what I mean, and had loads of money. They both died early. My mother’s heart stopped when she was in the ocean at Biarritz in August and Billy had followed by that Christmas. I was at university in Paris at the time, and it’s fair to say things got a little out of hand. But, hey, I completed my course, came top of the year and started a postgrad in experimental math. By that time I was using, and was screwing up in every way possible. But I got my masters. A couple of years later, Dad picked me up, got me into rehab and kept me kind of on the straight and narrow. That took two years, and he paid for it all because I’d been through all the money my mother left me. All of it!’ She looked at Ulrike. ‘Have I left anything out? Oh yes, my name is actually Zoe Harland, though I didn’t tell my father about the change. And Rudi and I are an item. We’ve worked on my father’s project for about eighteen months now, together with your Syrian friend and many others. I have the necessary skills, but Naji is at the superhuman level.’

Ulrike turned away and shook her head.

‘And, as you can see, Ulrike doesn’t approve. I guess it seems kind of incestuous that her stepdaughter is with her son. And she isn’t happy about my past.’ Neither Ulrike nor Rudi reacted. ‘That’s about everything,’ she said, with a small concluding bow.

‘And the apology?’ said Samson.

‘I told them at GreenState that you were stalking me, and I made out you were kind of a lech. Sorry. I know you had my back and that wasn’t