Borderline Read Online Free Page A

ears. The brown boot with its pointed heel was sticking straight up to the sky.
    ‘They were travelling in two vehicles, both Toyota Land Cruiser 100s, and there’s been no word of either vehicles or delegates since yesterday afternoon …’ The under-secretary of state fell silent.
    Annika stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘What does “disappeared” mean?’
    He started to speak but she interrupted him. ‘How … I mean, what does “there’s been no word” mean?’ She stood up. The chair toppled over behind her.
    Jimmy Halenius got to his feet too. His blue eyes were crackling. ‘The tracking equipment from one of the vehicles has been found just outside Liboi,’ he said, ‘with the delegation’s interpreter and one of the guards. They were both dead.’
    The room lurched and she grabbed the table for support. ‘This can’t be true,’ she said.
    ‘We haven’t had any information to suggest that anyone else in the group has been injured.’
    ‘It must be a mistake,’ she said. ‘Maybe they took the wrong turning. Are you sure they haven’t just got lost?’
    ‘It’s been over twenty-four hours now. We can dismiss the idea that they got lost.’
    ‘How did they die? The guard and the interpreter?’
    Halenius studied her for a few seconds. ‘They were shot in the head at close range.’
    She grabbed her bag, threw it on to the table and hunted through it for her mobiles, but couldn’t find one. She turned the bag out on the table. An orange rolled off and landed beneath the overhead projector. She picked up her private mobile with trembling fingers and dialled Thomas’s number, but pressed the wrong button and had to start again. The call went through, with a good deal of crackling and hissing, buzzing and clicking:
    ‘Hello, you’ve reached …’
    She dropped the phone on to the floor, where it landed next to her gloves and a notebook. Jimmy Halenius bent down and picked it up.
    ‘It isn’t true,’ she said, unsure if she’d spoken aloud. The under-secretary of state said something but she couldn’t make any sense of it: his lips were moving and he took hold of one of her arms. She pushed his hand away. They had met a few times but he knew nothing about her; he had no idea about the state of her relationship with Thomas.
    Anders Schyman leaned forward and said something as well; his eyelids looked swollen.
    ‘Leave me alone,’ she said, slightly too loudly, because everyone was staring at her. She gathered all her things back into her bag, apart from the notebook, which she really didn’t need – it was just her notes from the idiotic job at Ikea – then headed towards the door, the way out, escape.
    ‘Annika …’ Jimmy Halenius said, trying to stand in her way.
    She slapped him across the face. ‘This is your fault,’ she said.
    And then she left the Frog conference room.

Chapter 2
    The truck was lurching along slowly. There were no roads where we were going. The wheels bounced over lumps of rock and caught in holes. Plants scraped the chassis, branches brushed the truck’s covered sides, the engine roared and the gears shrieked. My tongue was swollen, and stuck to the roof of my mouth. We hadn’t had anything to drink since that morning. Hunger had subsided to a rumbling ache, and dizziness had taken over. I hoped that the others’ sense of smell had stopped working at the same time as mine – or, at least, that Catherine’s had.
    Sébastien Magurie, the Frenchman, had finally shut up. His nasal whining had made me wish they’d get rid of him as well. (No, no – what am I saying? I didn’t mean that. Definitely not. But I’d found him hard to deal with before this had happened. But enough about that.)
    On the other hand, I admired the Spaniard, Alvaro. He had kept his cool throughout, and hadn’t said anything unless he was spoken to. He was lying at the back of the truck, where the shaking and bouncing were worst, but hadn’t uttered a word of