Tangle's Game by Stewart Hotston

Author:Stewart Hotston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thriller
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

CHAPTER TEN

THE DRIVE SAT in her fingers, a nodule of fear and power rendered into electronics. Tangle wouldn’t touch it; he stepped back from her until he ran up against the sink.

‘Why? Why send it to me?’ asked Amanda, holding it like a talisman whose power she didn’t know how to invoke.

‘Sit down, please.’

‘I’ll sit down when I want,’ she growled.

The smile was gone from his face, frozen muscles pulling tight against paling skin. ‘I’ve got nowhere else to go.’

‘Why send it to me?’ she asked again.

He grit his teeth. ‘You don’t get it. This was my fox hole, the place I found where no one would come looking. Yet here you are.’ He spread his hands out. ‘Where am I supposed to go now?’

‘Am I going to have to ask you a third time?’ she said slowly.

‘You’ve not fucking changed, have you?’ Amanda heard no anger in his voice, only despair.

‘You’re the one who fell out of my life, who destroyed everything,’ said Amanda and regretted it immediately; she heard her tone, the hysteria in her voice. She closed her eyes to calm down. When she opened them again, Tangle was looking at her, fear radiating from him.

She knew it wasn’t her fault, but Tangle would never work out how to navigate his way through this.

‘Shall we start again?’ she asked, the words tasting of lead in her mouth.

He said nothing, waited for her to continue.

‘I got the drive, got your letter. I found Ichi—who’s in London, by the way. I know what’s on here, Tangle, know what the GRU are doing. God, I was in Paris the day before the Front Nationale’s latest bombing. I was in Couer Defence; it could have been me. Now it seems it might not have been them, but a false flag operation by Russian agents, right along with the Algerian gunmen who attacked the synagogue in the old city.’ She put the drive on the table. His eyes followed her movement, watching the drive as if it might explode.

‘But why send it to me? I’m not the person who does this.’ She laughed, a sharp, cracking noise she couldn’t take back. ‘You can’t do this either.’ She didn’t accept that he could have changed enough. Once an addict, always an addict. ‘Why not find someone who could deal with it? You knew people who could have helped, when we were together.’ The words hurt her to say.

‘You tried that, right?’ he said, as if from a great distance.

She nodded. ‘I have, but honestly? I’ve been knocking on the doors of idiots with no more preparation than I have. Gatekeepers, designed to filter out the cranks. Guess what? When a single woman with no history or experience in this area walks in and says, “The Russians are coming,” she doesn’t make it through that filter.’

‘That’s not the point. You could have gone public; you must have put this together long enough ago that whistleblowing sites would have had time to verify and publish it by now.

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