“I don’t see a dilemma at all,” she replied.
“No?” Burke answered. “Well then, let’s add up what we do know, shall we?”
Burke grabbed his index finger and looked at the ceiling for a moment before he began. I thought it a bit dramatic and amateurish, but I have since learned there is nothing amateur about Alan Burke.
“An old man in Belgium has a bit of a contretemps with a Welsh girl on holiday called Aline Marie Lloyd, but he drops very suddenly dead when no less than thirty-seven blood vessels in his brain burst simultaneously and for no apparent reason.”
She didn’t move and her expression remained unchanged as Burke went on.
“Six years later, a pair of mildly insane lads with too much drink and too few brain cells assault the very same Aline Lloyd at a bus stop in Scotland, only to find themselves at death’s door with injuries Glasgow’s best doctors cannot explain. The chances…well, it’s got to be more than any of the oddsmakers at the derby would take, doesn’t it?”
I know Aline didn’t need help, but the words poured out before I could stop them.
“We’ve been through this before, Mr. Burke, and nothing changes: Aline hasn’t committed a crime and there’s nothing you can charge her with, so…”
“I do apologize, Mr. Morgan,” he interrupted quickly, “but you’ve mistaken our purpose. We are not policemen, you see, so any idea of arrest is not our goal.”
“Then why are you here?” I demanded. “Renard tried to muscle her and he was wrong. Now, you and your men are doing the same thing but you have no case! Just leave her alone and go home; there’s nothing more to see.”
The room was silent and still she showed no emotion or even interest. It was beautiful, in a horrible-sounding way, but watching her in that moment made me appreciate the nature of one who controls so much yet resists deploying it. If armed with her abilities, plagued by my own fears and short temper, I might’ve given Burke and his bodyguards a tiny glimpse, but she simply waited. He waited, too, but soon the calm returned and with it, his final pitch.
“Renard wanted somebody to explain why a lifelong friend died. That was all he needed, but when he looked closer—with the help of a contact at Interpol, I might add—he found something much deeper, didn’t he?”
Aline raised her eyebrows in the way we do to signal little or no interest, but Burke didn’t miss a beat.
“What did you say to him, Miss Lloyd; what did you see when you were prying about inside his thoughts? He moved away recently to the south of France, we’re told, but nothing can remove the terror he takes with him.”
I looked at her when it became clear Burke knew enough to zero in on her powerful abilities.
“I’m not sure there’s anything more I can do, Mr. Burke,” she said evenly.
“Yes, I see,” Burke said with that idiotic, upside-down smile he wears while thinking in silence, “and that is a pity, isn’t it? We rather hoped you could shed some light on two unique and separate events you were directly involved with, one of which resulted in a fatality.”
He glanced at her one last time, motioning for the others to follow, but he paused for a moment and said in a low, even voice, “It’s no good, you know. All this evasive pretense is little more than delaying the inevitable.”
“The inevitable?” I asked quickly.
“Our operation looks into the things that are widely held to be impossible, Mr. Morgan. As you can surely imagine the importance of dialogue cannot be overstated. We would rather keep this as only a conversation, so I do hope Aline will reconsider.”
“Maybe I missed something, but did that line about dialogue just turn into a threat, Mr. Burke?” I replied.
His smile evaporated quickly, and I wondered if I found the limit of his patience.
“The work must be done, Mr. Morgan, by collegial discussion if possible, but our responsibility to the people of the United Kingdom may require a more purposeful approach.”
“Ah,” I said with a nod, “I thought so.”
Aline was silent as Burke strolled slowly from the office, stopping near the counter to fasten the snaps on his coat where Margaret waited with a customer.
“You have my card,” he said, nodding and smiling. “If you’d like to think about it and ring us later, we shall keep a line open for you, hmm?”
We watched them go, and I think Aline’s relief was confined to the unlikelihood Margaret or the floor girls heard any of it. She returned to the office to grab a sales brochure from the new cleaning firm, and then she asked if I’d like to walk along the waterfront and take some air. We turned right and then right again, but she stopped in the cool afternoon breeze coming in off the ocean and smiled at me. I remember shaking my head in wonder at how coolly she waited after so harrowing an experience, but the only frayed nerves were clearly mine.
“That little bastard Renard,” I said, snarling involuntarily. “He sent copies to this guy Hurd, whoever he is, long before he came up here.”
“Yes,” Aline replied, “and they obviously had a word with Mr. Burke.”
“Who are these assholes?” I asked. “MI5 or something?”
“I don’t think so,” she answered. “I could feel Burke’s thoughts and he was honest about one thing—they’re not policemen. His associates may have been at one point, but I think they were military because the little one standing with Burke reacted very powerfully when I mentioned Halliwell.”
“You heard his thoughts, too?”
“They were impossible to miss.”
I smiled and looked away for a moment as the concept gelled in my mind, and a clue emerged I wouldn’t have considered before. If the cops in Llangollen had been kept deliberately at a distance, then Burke’s hidden agency was not worried about spies or terrorists.
“Have you heard of the other two—Hurd and Halliwell?” I asked.
“Not until I could hear their names in Burke’s thoughts,” she answered. “We can search government websites tonight, but I would be very surprised to see either of them appear.”
“How does this connect to Renard?” I wondered.
“We’re missing something,” Aline replied. “Burke’s thoughts weren’t clear enough to reveal more than Halliwell’s position as a soldier.”
“Is Hurd military, too?”
She shook her head and said, “I couldn’t hear anything beyond his name.”
Renard’s pile of documents had clearly won the attention of somebody with considerable authority, and once more Aline was under scrutiny. We stood at a tenuous place where the past wormed its way into the present with questions she was unwilling to answer, at least for unknown officials who live in secret worlds. The tenacious old detective took a head-on approach when he went to Aline’s farm, and regardless of what he knew (or thought he knew), Renard was still grossly overmatched. Burke, on the other hand, enjoyed the full weight of the government and frightening him off was unlikely in the extreme.
ALINE REFUSED TO reconsider, and Burke seemed to disappear as quickly as he and his men arrived. I called Jeremy to ask his police officer friend, but all he had was the sudden meeting at their station with people from Special Branch and nothing more. It was a reasonable conclusion Burke returned to London for a while, but we both knew that condition was temporary.
On a hunch I decided to dig a little and see if there was help available in other places. Aline was away in Chester for the day helping Margaret get her sister settled into a new flat, so I opened my old contacts notebook.
The scrawled names and numbers represented colleagues from my first days at the NTSB, but others were friends of friends I had run across on occasion, and one of them—a retired SEAL named Andy Leach—spent time as a military liaison between the Navy and a handful of NATO military units. He was attached for a brief time to a Special Air Service group carrying out pre-op raids in the hours before the first Gulf War; if anyone could make inquiries to identify a member of Britain’s celebrated commando unit at the
least, and possibly Hurd as well, he would be my choice.
When he answered, I learned Andy was in Gainesville teaching NROTC students at the University of Florida. We went through the usual catch-up process, exchanging stories about those with whom we had shared experiences, but the conversation worked its way around to the reason for my call and Andy’s hushed question about the nature of my search. “Is this in the open,” he asked, “or down in the weeds?” When I said it was best kept between us, the news didn’t faze him and he simply replied, “No problem, Evan; I just needed to know how to work it.”
“I’m trying to get an identification on three guys,” I began. “Two are Brits—possibly inside Special Branch—and a retired Belgian police inspector.”
“Names?”
“Hurd; maybe connected to MI5, plus another called Halliwell. No first names, but we believe Halliwell is a soldier. The detective’s name is Andre Renard.”
“Wait,” Andy said at once. “Are you talking about Stuart Halliwell?”
“No idea,” I replied. “All we have is the last name.”
“I don’t know if he’s the same guy you’re looking for,” he continued, “but we had a liaison officer named Stuart Halliwell with my unit during Gulf One—an SAS guy. It was an exchange deal; I went with his squad for a while and he came with us after that. I lost track of him when we rotated back to San Diego, but last I heard he was living in Munich, coordinating covert stuff between SAS and the German Police’s elite GSG 9 anti-terrorism guys about ten years ago.”
“Could be him,” I said as Andy continued.
“I still have a few eyes and ears inside the Pentagon and one at State; I’ll see if they have anything on this guy Hurd and the Belgian. Give me a few minutes and I’ll call you back; some of these folks are a little hard to track down.”
I didn’t tell him where I was and he wouldn’t want to know anyway. When he called back an hour later, I reached for a pen and pad to keep notes.
“Okay,” he began, “my contact at State has a Gregory Hurd on the roster of Brits she deals with sometimes,” Andy began. “Officially he’s listed as ‘special advisor to the Director General for Roads,’ but that turned out to be a ghost entry.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“When she looked him up in a general personnel registry, there’s no such position and his name doesn’t appear anywhere in that department’s directory.”
“Is there any way to cross-reference against other British government agencies?” I asked.
“I didn’t have to,” he replied. “My contact asked around to some of her guys while I checked with mine at the Pentagon, and Hurd’s name showed on some internal documentation with an address in Westminster.”
“Does that give us anything useful?”
“Gregory Hurd is Whitehall, Evan; he’s way the hell up a hidden food chain connected to their version of the Defense Department. No one knows exactly where, but it’s obvious he’s a heavy hitter who doesn’t have shit to do with the roads.”
I was jotting down Andy’s words furiously as the blurred picture began to clear.
“This is good stuff, and I’m on the right track, but how about Andre Renard—anything on him?”
“Nope,” he replied. “My contact at State had nothing, and one of her archive guys at the Pentagon asked around, but the only thing he had that was even close is a civilian contractor working for Dassault Systèmes at a Belgian Air Force base named Valerie Renard—a woman in her thirties. Sorry, Evan, but that’s all I could find.”
“It’s a lot more than I had an hour ago,” I replied. “And thanks, Andy; this answers a lot of questions.”
We promised to keep in touch, knowing it was little more than polite obligation, but I had learned a few things about the utility of access to a network of professionals, and I was determined that if Andy ever called me one day, I would do whatever it took to reciprocate.
WHEN ALINE RETURNED from her trip to Chester, I told her the details of my conversation with Andy Leach.
“There are people from my past I wanted to speak with—ex-military, most of them—to see if they could help me find out about Hurd and Halliwell but also Renard to show us how he got inside the British government.”
“And?”
“My friend knew a Stuart Halliwell from way back; said he was SAS, too. I don’t know for sure if that Halliwell is the same individual in Burke’s mind, but the coincidence was too obvious to ignore.”
“And Hurd?”
“That’s where it gets weird,” I replied. “Government org charts show a Gregory Hurd as some sort of advisor to the UK’s Transportation Department, or whatever it’s really called, but that’s an elaborate cover story; Hurd is deep inside the British Defense apparatus.”
“A bureaucrat,” she said.
“Yes, but they couldn’t find anything on Renard or his connection to Hurd. If you didn’t get anything from Burke’s thoughts, I don’t know what else we can do.”
Aline sat back and looked up to the ceiling. I thought she was only pondering the question but her expression changed and showed what I can only describe as resignation. I saw it and asked if she was all right.
“I can’t promise anything,” she said with an obvious note of caution, “but there may be a way.”
“Okay, so how do we do that?” I asked, not realizing what it meant to her, and she hesitated as though the answer lived in a place she wanted to avoid.
“You remember why I went to Belgium when I was younger?”
“A road trip to see about a job, right?”
“Partially, yes, but I went there to visit a friend called Marion Van Den Broeck. We were at university together, but she took a job at a firm in Brugge and we kept in touch…well, until the incident with Claude Dumont.”
“Did something change?”
“Yes, but it wasn’t Marion’s fault. I couldn’t go back there, and she thought it was something she did, but…”
“But you couldn’t explain any of it and for a lot of reasons.”
“Exactly. We lost contact for a long time but reconnected a few years ago when she got engaged. It’s better now, and she’s come up to visit a couple of times, but whenever she invited me down to Brugge I always found an excuse not to go.”
“And now?”
“Marion and her husband moved to Brussels last year. I’ve been meaning to go see her, but then you arrived suddenly so I’ve had…other things to do.”
“You should plan a road trip—there’s nothing in Brussels to bother you, right?”
“No, but the reason I bring it up is because Marion works for the Belgian government now; she’s a manager in their Treasury Department.”
“Should that mean something?” I asked. “Sorry, but I don’t get how that moves us any closer.”
Aline sat forward and looked straight at me.
“She has access to a lot of confidential information, Evan.”
“I’m sure she does, but…”
“Multiple systems connect one department with another, at least at her level, and that includes law enforcement personnel. There has to be something inside one of them that can tell us about Andre Renard.”
The picture became clear in the expression she wore, obliging Aline to burden a friend with tasks that could be construed as unethical at best and even criminal if taken too far.
“She doesn’t know anything about the Claude Dumont incident, does she?”
“No.”
“I’m guessing the same thing holds true on your abilities—about what you can do?”
“You’re the only one who knows about that, Evan.”
“Well, me and Renard—maybe Burke, too,” I replied with a grin. “I think he got enough of a peek at that mind reading thing you pulled at your shop.”
“I suppose so,” she replied, but her tone had changed and she spoke at a near whisper.
“I’m sorry, Aline,” I offered immediately. “I shouldn’t have
put it like that.”
She smiled and took my hand.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I should be able to approach Marion without going into much detail.”
“What happens if she asks the wrong sorts of questions?”
“Let’s take this one step at a time,” she answered.
“When did you plan on contacting her?”
“Right now.”
Aline dialed and when Marion answered, they spent twenty minutes catching up and finding again one of the places where friends go to firm up their bonds and reassure each other time’s passage hasn’t changed things between them. It was interesting to hear and the honest, genuine voice of one so different from any other was surprising. I don’t know why I thought of it in that way, but the secrets hiding inside make Aline different, even if no one else can know.
At last, the moment of opportunity was revealed when Marion told Aline about her position at the Belgian Treasury and with it a clear understanding of her authority. Aline waited through the descriptions of what Marion did, talking shop the way kindred professionals do, and primarily to avoid the perception she had called only to enlist Marion’s help. I suppose that was true, but reconnecting with a friend made Aline’s ultimate goal something that could wait a while.
At last she mentioned a frustrated search for a Belgian national, and when Marion offered to help find Renard, Aline nodded at me silently to signal the process was beginning. The first-pass inspection revealed more than one Andre Renard, but armed with enough information to provide differentiators, Marion said she would probably have something within a day or two, and they hung up after promises to meet up in Brussels.
We knew a rundown on Renard might solve the riddle and reveal a pathway through to Gregory Hurd, but the essential information still eluded us from my conversations with Andy Leach. There was no longer any doubt as to Burke’s influence and power, but with Halliwell’s addition, the intelligence angle had taken a darker, more menacing turn: Special Branch or otherwise, an ex-SAS commando’s involvement made it clear the British government had given Burke a significant level of discretionary authority and with it an ability to move unfettered.
The Seventh Life of Aline Lloyd Page 22