When The Devil Stays

Chapter Three: Geneva Doesn't Forgive Mistakes

The flight to Geneva was two hours and fourteen minutes long.

Anna knew this because she had looked it up on her phone three times during the taxi ride to the secondary terminal, refreshing the same page as though the duration might change if she checked it enough. It didn't. Two hours and fourteen minutes in a pressurised cabin with a man she didn't trust, flying toward a city she hadn't planned on visiting, carrying evidence that at least three powerful people wanted back badly enough to post a watcher at Heathrow.

She had made worse decisions. She was struggling to remember when.

The aircraft was small - a private charter, twelve seats, half of them empty. Jojo had said nothing when she'd raised an eyebrow at the plane. He'd simply gestured for her to board, and she had, because the alternative was standing on the tarmac looking stubborn, and she'd left stubborn behind somewhere around Gate 14.

She took a window seat. He sat across the narrow aisle. For the first twenty minutes, neither of them spoke. The plane climbed through grey London cloud and came out the other side into hard blue winter sunlight, and Anna pressed her forehead against the cold oval of the window and thought, very carefully, about everything she knew and everything she didn't.

What she knew: there was forty million pounds of dirty money sitting in a ledger she'd photographed on her phone before she'd handed the files back to Marcus's assistant. What she didn't know: who Jojo Smith actually worked for, why he'd been watching her specifically, and whether the contact in Geneva was real or a very elegant trap.

What she felt: wired; exhausted, and deeply, inconveniently aware of the man three feet across the aisle who hadn't looked at her once since take-off and somehow still managed to occupy the entire atmosphere of the cabin.

She turned from the window.

"Tell me about Geneva," she said.

He looked up from the folder open on the tray table in front of him. She'd been watching him read for the last ten minutes – not the content, she couldn't see that from here, but the way he read. Still. Focused. The way he did everything, she was beginning to think.

"What do you want to know?" he said.

"The contact. Who is she? Who is he? Who are they?"

"Her name is Claudine Martel," Jojo said. He closed the folder. "She runs an investigative law practice out of the old town. She's handled four cases in the last decade that involved financial crime at this level - three went to prosecution, one was settled. She's been approached twice by people trying to buy her silence. Both times she declined and reported the approach to the relevant authority."

"She sounds too good to be true," Anna said.

"She sounds exactly as good as her record," Jojo replied. "Which is what a record is for."

Anna looked at him. He looked back. Neither of them blinked for a moment that lasted slightly too long to be comfortable.

"Fine," she said. "Claudine Martel. And she knows we're coming?"

"She knows I'm coming. She doesn't know about you yet."

"Why not?"

"Because forty-eight hours ago I didn't know you'd agree to come."

"I haven't agreed to anything," Anna said. "I'm on a plane. That's all."

The corner of Jojo's mouth moved in that way it had - the almost-smile, the one that suggested he found her considerably more entertaining than he intended to let on.

"That's all," he agreed, turning back to his folder.

She watched him for a moment. He didn't look up. She turned back to the window and watched Europe pass below them - flat and grey and enormous - and tried not to think about the fact that she had no luggage, no change of clothes, no plan beyond the next few hours, and no one in the world who currently knew where she was.

That last thought sat heavier than the rest.

"I need to call my sister," she said.

"Not yet."

She turned sharply. "Excuse me?"

He looked up then, and his expression was measured and serious in a way that made her want to argue less than she otherwise would have.

"Your phone," he said. "They'll have flagged your number by now. Any call you make from it can be traced and - more importantly - your sister's number becomes a known associate. They'll sit on her line. Use her address as a pressure point."

The word pressure point settled in Anna's chest like a stone dropping into still water.

"She doesn't know anything," Anna said. "She's got nothing to do with any of this."

"I know that," Jojo said. "They won't care."

A beat.

"When we land," he continued, his voice dropping just slightly - not softer, exactly, but quieter, like he was choosing his words with more care than usual, "I'll get you a clean phone. You can call her from that. Tell her you're safe. Don't tell her where."

"And is that true?" Anna asked. "Am I safe?"

He held her gaze.

"Right now," he said, "yes."

"That's a very qualified answer."

"It's an honest one."

She looked at him for a long moment. Outside, the clouds had come back - thick and white and impenetrable, the Alps somewhere underneath them - and the cabin light had shifted to something warmer and more enclosed. It made the space between them feel smaller than it was. It made him look, she noticed with irritation, even more exactly like the kind of man you should not trust with anything that mattered.

Which was its own kind of problem.

"Jojo," she said.

"Yes."

"I'm going to ask you something, and I want you to think before you answer, because I will know if you're lying."

He waited.

"The MP", she said. "The one in the Hale account. Is this personal for you? Is that why you took this case?"

Something moved in his face. Not much - a tightening around the jaw, a slight shift in the quality of his attention, like a door that had been open a c***k closing by exactly one inch.

He was quiet for long enough that she thought he wasn't going to answer.

"My father," he said finally, "spent eleven years working for a logistics company that was used as a shell by the Hale Group to move money through West Africa. When the company was investigated, the Hale Group dissolved it overnight. Fourteen hundred people lost their jobs. My father lost his pension. He'd been there nine years. "A pause. "He died two years later. He was fifty-eight."

The cabin was very quiet.

"Jojo-"

"I'm not telling you that for sympathy," he said, and his voice was entirely level. "I'm telling you because you asked me an honest question, and you deserved an honest answer. And because you should know that I have a reason to see this through that has nothing to do with my firm's interests." He looked at her directly. "Which means you can trust that I won't walk away from this. Whatever happens."

Anna didn't say anything for a moment. She was good at reading people - it was, again, what she did for a living. You sat across a table from a CFO who was lying, and you watched the gap between what the numbers said and what the face said, and you learned to read both.

Jojo Smith's face and Jojo Smith's numbers matched.

"I'm sorry about your father," she said quietly.

"Thank you," he said. Just that. Nothing more.

He opened his folder again. She turned back to the window. The clouds had broken below them, and she could see the first white edges of the Alps - jagged and enormous and indifferent, the way mountains always were - and something in the sight of them made her feel, for the first time since yesterday morning, that she was not completely out of her depth.

Only mostly.