The John Milton Series Boxset 2

by Mark Dawson

  “Yeah,” the detective said, “and I’d like to fuck Scarlett Johansson, except that ain’t gonna happen.”

  Dubois already had his cellphone out of his pocket by the time he was in his car again. He thumbed through the contacts until he found the number for Melvin Fryatt. He pressed call and put the phone to his ear.

  #

  JACKSON DUBOIS arranged to meet Fryatt and Crossland in the Lower Ninth. They were waiting for him on Surekote Road. The road had been abandoned, with vegetation reaching up high into the air. The tumbledown houses that were still standing had been claimed by nature, and the empty lots where shacks had been washed away thronged with substantial growth. Dubois rolled up behind their car and killed the engine. He could see them both inside. He wound down the window and sampled the atmosphere. He could hear the bass of a distant boom box, the buzz of the city, the chirping of the nocturnal wildlife that had claimed the street for its own. There was no one else around.

  That was good.

  The two of them got out of their car. Melvin came up to him. The white guy, Chad, pimp rolled behind him.

  Dubois stayed in his car. The two of them came up to the open window.

  “Just you,” Dubois said, pointing to Melvin.

  “Say what?” Chad protested.

  “Say get the fuck back into the car, you fucking junkie.”

  Chad looked as if he was going to protest, but Melvin turned back to him and said something that Dubois couldn’t hear. He shrugged, his expression morose, and did as he was told.

  “Get in, Melvin.”

  He came around the car and got into the passenger seat.

  “What happened?”

  “She got away.”

  “I know that, Melvin. I saw that. What I want to know is how it happened.”

  “I don’t know, man. We hit the car, but I guess we didn’t get it good enough. We came out to finish her off, but the car drove off. I put a couple of rounds into it, but, well, you know…”

  “It was a simple thing to do, Melvin. Very simple.”

  “We tried, man. I don’t know what else I can say.”

  “You know what? It doesn’t matter.”

  “You’re not mad about it?”

  “I’m not happy, but mistakes happen. This time, I’ll let it ride. There won’t be a next time, though. You hear me?”

  “Sure, boss. Thanks. No more fuck-ups, I got it.”

  “There’s something else you can help me with, and then we’re done.”

  Dubois took out the printout of the photograph that Travis Peacock had given him and laid it on the dash.

  “The man who attacked you. Is this him?”

  Melvin squinted at it, his brow clenching into an angry frown. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s him. That’s the motherfucker. Dude was driving the car today, too. Who is he?”

  “Do you think he’d recognise you if he saw you again?”

  “Probably,” Melvin said. “Dude was talking to us, like you and me are talking, right before he hit me upside of my head.”

  Dubois took the photograph. “Thank you, Melvin.”

  “That it?”

  “That’s all I needed to know. We’re done here. I’ll be in touch.”

  Melvin shrugged, knowing better than to outstay his welcome, pushed the door all the way open, and stepped out. He closed the door, rapped his knuckles against the roof, and slouched back to his car.

  Dubois corkscrewed in his seat and reached down into the footwell between the back and front seats. He picked up the shotgun that he had laid down carefully before setting off that evening, opened the door and, the gun held loosely before him, walked briskly to the other car. It was gloomy, the street lit by the glimmer of the moon overhead, and it was only when Melvin started his engine and flicked on his headlamps that he and Chad could see that they had just a few seconds left to live.

  Dubois raised the combat shotgun. It was a semi-automatic, tubular magazine-fed weapon chambered for twelve-gauge cartridges, and allowed the shooter to apply a rapid rate of fire over a large area. It was also very accurate for a weapon with a reputation for being indiscriminate. The choke barrel was about the same diameter as a dime and, up to ten feet away, the pattern of the buckshot wouldn’t stray outside the edges of a six-inch circle. Dubois fired it from the waist. The first shot shattered the windshield, hitting Melvin. The second spread drilled Chad. The third and fourth shots were, in all likelihood, superfluous. But since Dubois had not gotten to be as successful as he was by being lackadaisical, he fired them both anyway.

  When he had finished, the windshield was completely gone and the two men had been blown to pieces.

  He stepped up to the car to make doubly sure, returned to his vehicle, put the shotgun in the trunk, and took out a five-gallon gas can that he had filled at the Shell station he had passed earlier. He went back to the car, unscrewed the cap and upended the can, sloshing the pungent liquid over the upholstery and both bodies. He emptied it completely, took a packet of matches from his pocket and, tearing one off, lit it and flicked it into the interior. The flames took hold immediately, curling up to the roof and spewing thick black smoke out of the open windshield.

  Dubois waited for a moment to make sure that the fire had taken hold and then went back to his Jaguar. He started the engine, put the car into drive, and drove away.

  Chapter Thirty

  ZIGGY PENN’S apartment block was in the heart of Tokyo’s exclusive Yoyogi district. The enormous city was not a particularly green place and, because Yoyogi was near to one of the largest municipal parks, it had become one of the more expensive places to live. It was sandwiched between the busy Shinjuku and Shibuya neighbourhoods, but the price of living there meant that it was quieter than both.

  Ziggy limped back from the convenience store, two polythene shopping bags clasped in each hand. One bag held two litre bottles of diet Coke, practically the only thing that Ziggy drank. The other had four tubes of Pringles. It was six in the morning, and Ziggy had been up all night. That was the way that he usually worked, starting his daily endeavours when other people were going home for the day. He looked around as he approached the entrance to the block and watched the suited salarymen emerge from the lobbies of blocks similar to his own, slouching to the subway and the commute into their dreary, uniform offices. He didn’t envy them. Ziggy had worked a regular job, once, and it hadn’t suited his temperament. Working for himself like this, being his own boss, earning when he needed to earn and relaxing when he didn’t…that was the way to live.

  Ziggy would normally have been finishing for the day, white noise spilling out of the high-end Bose stereo in an attempt to shut down his questing, sprawling intelligence so that he could have his regular ten hours of sleep. Today was going to be a little different. Ziggy was going to work, too. There were things that he needed to do before he set off for the airport and the flight to New Orleans that he was already second-guessing. It was a fourteen-hour trip, with a short stopover in Dallas. He needed to get a ticket. He would sleep when he was in the air.

  The block was twenty storeys high, a grid of identical windows reaching up to the top floor. There was a communal area on the roof that offered a decent view of the city, and you could see for miles when the smog allowed. The apartment was fine for his purposes. The leases were short, six months or a year, and there were enough well-heeled international students so that his Western appearance did not mark him out as particularly unusual.

  Anonymity was important for Ziggy. There were international agencies that would have been very interested to find his location. Six months earlier, a consortium of multinational law enforcement experts had conducted dawn raids on the properties of a number of Ziggy’s online acquaintances. The forums that he had frequented, previously hidden on the dark web, had been smashed. That sent those who had escaped the round-up into chat rooms and fora that were insecure, riddled with grasses and snitches and undercover police waiting to entrap the unwary.

&n
bsp; Ziggy was careful. He was not driven by the same anti-establishment zeal as some of the others, and he was too lazy to organise himself to profit from the crimes to the extent that some of the others had managed. Some of them had earned millions of dollars, transferring their ill-gotten gains into Bitcoin wallets that the authorities would never be able to recover. Ziggy was happy to skim just enough to live. Many of his comrades had gloried in the notoriety with which they had clothed their avatars. Ziggy just wanted to stay out of the way. It was that, he knew, that had meant he had escaped the dragnet.

  He took the elevator to the nineteenth floor, hobbling past the door to his apartment and then turning back at the end of the corridor, making sure that he had not been followed. He stopped at the door and listened, decided that he couldn’t hear anything, slid the key into the lock, opened the door, and went inside. It was a one-bedroom place, not too big. There was a kitchen-diner, a small bathroom and a balcony that looked down onto Yoyogi Park. The apartment was stiflingly hot, thanks to the heat that was pumped out by the servers and laptops that were crowded into the small space. Ziggy had initially run the air-conditioning on a constant basis, but the electricity bill had been so high that he had worried that it would bring him unwanted attention. Now, he tended to work in his underwear, with the windows open and a couple of oscillating fans switched on. It was still hot, but it was bearable.

  He took off his shirt and trousers. He glanced down at the lattice of scars on his leg and thought, again, of what had happened in New Orleans. He didn’t remember all of it. There was the operation, the pursuit into the Lower Ninth and then nothing. He had woken up days later, in a hospital bed, his leg in bits and waiting to be reconstructed. The blanks had been filled in later. Control had said nothing, and so he had waited for Milton to file his report and then hacked the server to take a copy for himself. It didn’t help him to remember, but it made it very plain to whom he owed his life.

  He stepped over the nest of cables and wires to his main computer. He took out one of the bottles of Coke, unscrewed it and slugged down a quarter in a thirsty series of gulps. He dropped down onto the floor, leant his back against the wall, put the Macbook on his lap and woke up the screen. There was a large parabolic antenna on the balcony, aimed out at the neighbouring block. Ziggy had taken the apartment on the highest floor possible. Wireless security was getting better all the time, but it was still child’s play for him to crack. He ran a homebrew application that found all the wireless routers using the older 802.11b standard, sifted those for routers that still had their encryption switched off thanks to the factory default, and then jumped onto the one that had the strongest signal and the fastest connection.

  Ziggy was careful. If his hacking was discovered, the police would only be able to trace it back to the patsy whose connection he had just hijacked. He jumped across to the server in the convenience store that he had just visited. He had realised that the PC was acting as the back-end system for the point-of-sale terminal. It collected the day’s credit card transactions and sent them in a single batch every night to the credit card processor. Ziggy quickly isolated the day’s batch, stored as a plaintext file, with the full magstripe of every card that had been swiped. He skimmed through the dump, found the first Western name—Anthony Shakespeare—and then jumped across to the website for Delta.

  In five minutes, he had purchased a ticket to New Orleans. In another five, he had ordered a false British passport in the name of Mr. Shakespeare, hacked into the Uber website and summoned a taxi to come and pick him up.

  He shut down the computers, turned off the fans, went into his bedroom and packed his case.

  #

  ZIGGY WHEELED his suitcase to the desk and waited for the attendant to finish serving the customer before him. The woman ahead of him was cavilling at the cost of a flight to New York and trying to persuade the girl to upgrade her to business. She wasn’t getting anywhere.

  He stepped up to the desk. “Can you get a move on?”

  The woman turned her head and glanced at him. Her first reaction, indignation, was quickly replaced with a combination of fright and odium. Ziggy knew why. He was dressed without any real concern about how he looked, he was unshaven, his face covered in a patchy ginger beard, and the word FUCK was displayed prominently across his T-shirt.

  “Be patient. I was here first. Wait your turn.”

  Ziggy thought about John Milton. It had been a shock to be contacted by him. He had only been seconded to Group Fifteen for a short while, but it had been obvious even then that Number Six was becoming something of a legend. The Group was organised so that personal connections were kept to an absolute minimum, and it wasn’t a place where institutional gossip was possible. But even with that in mind, Milton’s reputation was something that everyone was aware of. Ziggy had been excited to have been paired with him on the Irish assignment, and it had been that excitement and his stupid desire to impress him that had led him to set off in pursuit of Maguire.

  A second attendant slid into the chair at the desk next to the occupied one, and she beckoned Ziggy over to her. She looked pristine in her British Airways uniform, trim and petite and pretty, and Ziggy gave her his best smile. The one she returned was perfunctory. “Do you have a reservation, sir?”

  “I do.”

  He read out the booking reference and waited as she typed it into her computer. If she was surprised at the booking that was displayed, she mastered it quickly.

  “Mr. Shakespeare,” she said, reading off the screen. “Good morning, sir. One first-class ticket to New Orleans.”

  The woman at the desk alongside must have overheard the attendant. When she turned to look at him, her expression of opprobrium had changed to one of incredulity.

  The check-in attendant printed off his flight voucher and gave him directions to the first-class lounge.

  The woman was still gawping at him as he picked up the carry-on bag with his laptop and other kit inside and left the desk.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  THE ORIGINAL Café du Monde had been a New Orleans landmark for one hundred and fifty years. It was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, only closing on Christmas Day and whenever the occasional hurricane drifted too close to the city. It was a coffee shop that specialised in dark roasted coffee and chicory, beignets, and fresh-squeezed OJ.

  Milton walked up and down the street, surveilling the area, until he was satisfied that there was nothing amiss. There was no reason to think that he was observed, but certainty—or as near to it as he could manage—had always been well worth the effort in his business.

  Ziggy Penn looked different from the last time that Milton had seen him. He was skinnier, his skin was even more pallid, and there were dark circles around his eyes that suggested a lack of sleep. He was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt that revealed sleeves of tattoos that Milton did not remember. There were patchy ginger whiskers on his cheeks, chin and throat, and his little nose and asymmetrical eyes gave his face a striking, misshapen quality.

  Milton sat down opposite him.

  “Hello, Ziggy.”

  He was trying hard to look cool, but he couldn’t hide the same approbation that Milton remembered from before. Ziggy was going to try to impress him again. Milton had thought it stupid then, and he thought it doubly stupid now. Ziggy was not the first analyst Milton had worked with who had considered his grubby profession something to aspire to, as if the glamorous books of Fleming were a reality rather than naïve and childish make-believe.

  Milton knew the truth. He was a killer. He didn’t deserve acclaim. He deserved disgust.

  “Number Six.”

  “Not any more. Just Milton now.”

  “Never thought I’d see you again.”

  “Well, there you go. You never know what’s around the corner, do you?”

  “You were careful? Not followed?”

  “Please, Ziggy. What do you think?”

  “I have to be careful. There are people w
ho would love to know where I am.”

  “Why? What have you done?”

  “You first, Milton. What have you done? I heard you got out.”

  Milton had no idea what Ziggy did or did not know about what had happened to him, but he had little wish to rehash it beyond what was necessary. In order to ensure that the subject was adequately dealt with so that there was no need to revisit it later, he provided a brief account. He told him about his flight from the UK after his attempt to leave Group Fifteen and described his journey through South America and the southwest of the United States. He skipped over his sojourns in Ciudad Juárez and San Francisco and then, since it would be of more relevance to Ziggy, he went into a little more depth about what had happened during his mission to Russia to rescue Pope and what had subsequently happened with Beatrix Rose and Control. Ziggy listened, agog, and by the time that Milton had finished, they had both finished their coffees and ordered refills.

  “I heard you tried to leave,” Ziggy said. “That couldn’t have gone well.”

  “Not particularly,” Milton said with dour understatement. “Control tried to have me killed.”

  “And?”

  “He’s dead now. I don’t have to be quite so careful.”

  The waiter came to their table. The coffee was served black or au lait, mixed half and half with hot milk. Milton ordered his black, Ziggy went for milk, and they ordered beignets, the square French-style doughnuts that were lavishly covered with powdered sugar.

  “So that’s me,” Milton said. “What about you?”

  “How much do you know?”

  Milton didn’t know much. He hadn’t seen Ziggy since the Jayhawk had winched him off the roof of the Bartholomews’ flooded house. He knew that Ziggy had been airlifted straight to the airport, his condition stabilised, and then transferred on board a private jet back to London. But that was it. None of that was unusual. Operatives and analysts had nothing to do with one another outside the parameters of a mission. Milton had not even thought to ask about Ziggy, especially once Control had confirmed that he had survived his injuries. Milton remembered that debrief better than many of the others: the tense atmosphere in his office, the barely suppressed anger, the irritation after Milton had enquired about Ziggy, as if the fact of his survival was an annoyance, as if it would have been better if he had died, punishment for making an already aborted mission even worse than it already was.