In other circumstances Noriko would have shut him down immediately. She didn’t appreciate being stalked. But as soon as she heard the word ‘Petridis’, he had her undivided attention.
‘My condolences for your loss, Professor,’ Redmayne began, the moment Noriko sat down at their corner table at The Finch in Brooklyn. ‘From what we hear, your son Akiko was a fine young man.’
‘Thank you. He was.’
It was odd the way he used ‘we’ instead of ‘I’. He’d done the same thing last night on the phone. Noriko wondered who else he was speaking for.
‘Fifteen years ago, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s right.’ Despite herself she felt the tears welling in her eyes. It was so long since anyone had talked to her about Kiko. Hearing his name brought it all back.
‘But it feels like yesterday?’
‘Yes,’ Noriko cleared her throat. ‘It’s been hard to lay him to rest knowing his killers were never brought to justice. Worse than that, they were praised. Adored by the world.’ A muscle began to twitch in her jaw. She twisted her napkin violently between her fingers, as if it were a chicken and she were trying to wring its neck.
‘I understand, believe me,’ said Redmayne. ‘My Group – the organization I run – have been on to the Petridises for years. Decades. Oh, we tried to get the authorities to investigate. Governments, international agencies, local police forces. But no one took us seriously. In the end, we were forced to take matters into our own hands.’
Noriko listened, enthralled. ‘What do you mean “take matters into your own hands”?’ She paused for a moment, her clever mind racing to catch up as she answered her own question. ‘The helicopter crash?’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘That was you?’
Redmayne nodded. ‘That was us.’
As their food arrived, he described his ‘Group’ to Noriko, albeit in very vague, shadowy terms. From what she could tell they appeared to be some sort of secret, vigilante society – a slick, well-funded one, if Mark Redmayne’s credentials were anything to go by – targeting criminals that the police or politicians either couldn’t or wouldn’t bring to justice. Perhaps she should have listened in more detail, but her brain was still stuck on the Petridises. At long last she had met someone who not only believed her about Kiko and the destruction that Spyros and Athena had wrought, but who had actually done something about it! It was intoxicating.
‘I read your article. The one Newsweek wouldn’t run,’ Redmayne told her. ‘You were right about so much. I can feel your pain vibrating off the page.’
‘Yes. Those were dark times,’ admitted Noriko, too caught up in the moment to ask him how he’d found and read an article that had never been published. ‘After the crash, things were better for a while. I started to let go. But then …’
‘But then this. Right?’ Mark Redmayne slid a high-resolution copy of the picture of the drowned migrant boy across the table. The ‘L’ on his foot was clearly visible.
Noriko bit her lip and pinched the bridge of her nose, determined not to cry again.
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t imagine how painful it must have been for you to see that,’ said Redmayne.
Noriko looked away, at the busy street outside the window. ‘She’s alive,’ she whispered.
‘It would seem that way,’ Redmayne concurred.
‘How? How could she have survived that crash?’
‘We don’t know,’ he answered truthfully. ‘There’s a lot we don’t know at this point. But we intend to find out. And if Ath
ena Petridis is alive, we will bring her to justice. You have my word on that.’
Noriko looked up sharply. ‘Are you looking for justice? Or vengeance?’
‘Is there a difference?’ Redmayne cocked his head to one side. ‘We can call it vengeance, I suppose. Righteous vengeance.’
For a while both of them fell silent. After a full minute, Redmayne began to wonder whether he’d done enough. But then Professor Noriko Adachi turned to him and uttered the words he’d been waiting to hear.
‘I want to help, Mr Redmayne. Please – tell me more about your Group.’
Back in San Francisco, Ella’s anxiety was building. In reality she felt a lot less sanguine about losing her job at Biogen than she’d let on to her now ex-boss. Walking home to her tiny apartment on Fillmore Street after their interview, she struggled to contain a rising sense of panic. What now?
After a week spent in and out of doctors’ offices by day, getting second, third and fourth opinions after her collapse at the cabin (all depressingly the same – ‘there’s nothing physically wrong with you, Ms Praeger’; ‘there may be a psychological trigger’), and in her apartment by night, reading and re-reading all her father’s letters to her grandmother and herself, Ella was emotionally and physically exhausted.
True, her medical research job was boring, and Gary’s clumsy come-ons a daily irritant. And true, the money wasn’t great. But Ella’s job had provided routine and stability, something tangible to hold on to. She needed that now more than ever. The events of the last three weeks had thrown her for a total loop – Mimi’s death, going back to the ranch for the funeral, finding the letters, all on top of the intolerable situation with her headaches.