Delivering Caliban

by Tim Stevens

  Nina dropped through the cool evening air for an astonishingly brief moment before the shocking impact with the walkway drove pain through her ankles and her knees and up through her back and neck. She tipped forward, the violin on her back her baby, needing protection no matter what the cost to herself, and came to rest, with her face pressed against the concrete. She felt nothing; no heart hammering in her chest, no breath sawing in her throat.

  So this was death.

  She twisted her head round and peered up.

  High above her, God gazed down. A bald man with white, flashing eyes.

  Reborn, resurrected, Nina scrambled into a stooped, loping posture like an ape’s, every bone and muscle screaming defiance at her.

  She began to run.

  Eight

  Hamburg

  Sunday 19 May, 6.20 pm

  ‘You’ll find everything you need in here.’

  Bracknell, the agent in the Service’s Hamburg station assigned to help Purkiss, had taken an instant dislike to him. He was used to the reaction, but the hostility wasn’t normally quite as undisguised as this. She barely made eye contact, ignored his proffered hand, and after leading him in silence to the tiny office they’d provided for him, slapped a memory stick down beside the antediluvian desktop computer.

  After she’d left – no tea or coffee was offered – Purkiss set to work. The stick contained details of all Pope’s operations during his time in Hamburg. As Gifford had said, Pope had been in the city two years and his work had involved humdrum if essential stuff: analysis of immigration patterns, the forging of connections with local agencies such as the police, the occasional background check on up-and-coming local political figures. No liaison, officially or otherwise, with the city’s CIA presence, as far as Purkiss could tell.

  Vale had also arranged for the Hamburg station to provide whatever was known about the local CIA structure and personnel, and this too was on the memory stick. It proved even less useful than the material about Pope. Neither Jablonsky’s nor Taylor’s names came up, and there was no suggestion of any overlap between known Company operations in the city and those Pope had been involved in, even peripherally.

  Two hours later Purkiss stood and stretched, feeling weighed down by frustration. There was nothing there he could work with. Nothing that gave any indication as to why Pope might have been surveilling two CIA operatives in Amsterdam, and have shot them dead. The information could as easily have been sent to Purkiss in Amsterdam, but he’d come to Hamburg because of the possibility that Pope had returned here.

  He walked the cramped corridors, knocking on a few doors until he found Bracknell hunched over her own computer. She looked even surlier than before. Purkiss realised it was after eight in the evening, that she was probably supposed to be off duty.

  ‘Couple of questions.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Did you know Pope yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s your impression of him? Thumbnail sketch.’

  For the first time she looked Purkiss in the eye. ‘He’s a hard worker. A charmer, yes, but deeper than that. Committed. Passionate, even. Wasted here.’

  He turned you down, but you still hold out hope, Purkiss thought. He said: ‘Bent?’

  Anger flared in her eyes. It was more interesting than the dislike. ‘No more than the rest of us. Less so, probably.’

  ‘All right. Thanks.’ He tossed her the memory stick.

  To his back she said, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing. The effect people like you have on morale. Hounding us. Persecuting us.’

  ‘You don’t know what Pope’s done.’

  ‘And you can’t tell me.’

  ‘No.’

  *

  Purkiss had booked a room at a hotel on Stephansplatz near the city centre. He ate a light supper, then stretched on the bed, going over the events of the day methodically, laying them out in his head for his mind to work with while he slept.

  He’d never been an insomniac, and still wasn’t, but in recent months early nights had been a bad idea because the hour before sleep would be filled inevitably with brooding. Tonight was no exception. Claire’s death used to fill the crevices of his mind; now it was Claire’s betrayal as well. How much of their life together had been a lie? It was a question that could never be answered. Vale had once said to him that self-delusion was one of the few things that enabled people to cope, or words to that effect. Purkiss, a sceptic by inclination and education, found himself increasingly craving certainty in his life.

  And then there was Abby. She’d been one of his two closest friends, even though as far as he could remember she’d never addressed him by his first name. Salt of the earth, and she’d been cut to pieces – murdered – during a hostage exchange at the base of a tower in Tallinn. Purkiss had let her down.

  Claire, dead, and perhaps he could have saved her from herself. Abby, dead because of his blindness. Even Elle Klavan, who wasn’t dead but whose life and loyalties had been shaken loose because of Purkiss. It seemed women suffered when he came into their lives.

  That way lay self-pity, the most corrosive and pointless state of all. Purkiss set a metronome in his head and watched the banal precision of its mechanism until sleep took him.

  *

  Purkiss flailed at the bedside table until he realised the buzzing was coming not from an alarm but from his phone. He peered at the time display before answering. Just after six in the morning. He’d slept nearly eight hours.

  Vale said: ‘There’s been another killing. A Company man. Pope’s hoodwinked us.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘New York City.’

  Nine

  Langley, Virginia

  Monday 20 May, 7.40 am

  Ray Giordano was a lapsed Catholic, but not so lapsed that days like this couldn’t make him long for the comfort of ritual, of simple shared certainties.

  He sat at his desk and used his electric razor to shave the tops of his cheeks – his beard would grow right up under his eyes if he didn’t – and stared at the image on the monitor. The sack had been moved aside from the head for the purpose of the photograph. ‘Head’ was too generous a word. It was a face attached to a bag of slop.

  Naomi and Kenny came in bearing coffee and doughnuts. Kenny had pulled the night shift but was still here; Naomi had come in early. Giordano swivelled the monitor round for them to look. Kenny had already seen it – he’d been on duty when the call came in – but he gritted his teeth nonetheless. Naomi swallowed hard.

  ‘Jesus, boss.’

  She must have heard it from Kenny already, but Giordano said: ‘Sylvia Grosvenor. Pitched from the ninth storey of an apartment block in midtown Manhattan at a little after eight p.m. last night. She hit the sidewalk headfirst, as you can probably see. In true New York style, nobody saw anything.’

  Giordano took a sip of his coffee. It could have stripped varnish off a door. ‘The Manhattan boys have found nothing in Grosvenor’s apartment, though the door was forced. The CCTV was disabled on that floor. Doorman swears nobody unfamiliar got by him, and the cameras in the lobby bear out what he says. They reckon whoever did it may have gotten in from the basement through the service elevator.’

  He grabbed the box of doughnuts and took a bite. From his desk, Adrienne’s photo reproached him.

  ‘The New York people are over this like flies, but it’s been passed on to us. It links in with the Amsterdam hits. No question.’

  Kenny and Naomi glanced at one another, shuffled. Giordano waved them into the chairs across his desk and pushed the doughnut box over. ‘What?’

  Kenny: ‘You said, “No question”.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Naomi said, ‘Different MO. Different, uh, country, boss. On the same day.’

  Giordano swigged more of the foul brew. ‘Different time zones. Plenty of opportunity to get from Europe to the East Coast and carry out all three kills.’ He half-hid a belch, sat up in his groaning chair. ‘Look
, guys. You’ve heard the saying. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. That’s exactly what we’ve got here. Three active Company operatives taken down in quick succession. It’s the same group. Or the same guy.’

  *

  The Director had come in person. Giordano knew he’d been scheduled to meet a senator at the time, and that the meeting had had either to be cut short or cancelled. Giordano knew too what this would have cost the Director, in terms of both political brownie points and pride. He’d arrived at Giordano’s office rather than summoning Giordano to his, which was unheard of. Behind the Director, Grace, Giordano’s PA, had hovered, cool and professional and quaking, before Giordano waved her away.

  After briefing Giordano – it was little he didn’t already know about the Jablonsky and Taylor killings, which he’d heard about an hour earlier – the Director said: ‘It’s your baby, Ray. No fanfare. Keep it quiet. But whatever you need, you’ve got. Manpower, money, intel. No restrictions.’

  It had to be kept quiet because the murders of two Company agents was such big news it would send tremors through the organisation that would have a serious effect on its stability and morale, worldwide. Unless the news could be preempted by a scoop of some kind, a breakthrough in the tracking down of the perpetrator. Giordano knew this, as he knew that the Director was aware Giordano was four years off retirement and wouldn’t want to screw this up and risk his pension being snatched away from under his nose at this late stage.

  So Giordano had taken charge of the investigation, setting his bloodhounds Naomi and Kenny on the trail, good kids both.

  That was yesterday morning. Last night the New York killing had upped the ante.

  *

  ‘And there’s still nothing on the cameras outside Jablonsky’s place.’

  Naomi had been trawling, pumping her Amsterdam sources for all they were worth. Jablonsky had surveillance rigged up outside his apartment. He’d been a suspect once in a Company sting operation, suspected of dealing hard drugs in the city, and although he’d been cleared both officially and unofficially, the cameras had been left in place. But the local Company crew had found them to be out of working order when they’d checked, so there’d been no record of anybody entering or leaving Jablonsky’s apartment. Taylor had had no such surveillance on him.

  Giordano finished his coffee and set to work on the last doughnut. ‘Okay. Kenny, you run a search on Grosvenor. Find out what her current operational status was, what she’s been involved in over the last ten years. Cross reference it with the other two.’ He knew Kenny knew this stuff. He was saying it just to cover the fact that he had nothing else to suggest at the moment.

  He stood. ‘Naomi. Come with me.’

  *

  In the corridor he put a hand on her back.

  ‘Kenny’s good, but you’re better. I need you to be a backstop. Double-check his work without letting him know.’

  She sighed. ‘Boss, that’s not right.’

  ‘It is and it isn’t. It’s not right because you’re friends. But I can’t afford anything to be missed here, so it damn well is right in the scheme of things.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She went back to his office to rejoin Kenny. Giordano took a walk down the corridors, following a route he’d trodden hundreds of times over the years through the Langley labyrinth. It helped him think.

  *

  Adrienne had been on his case to retire early. They’d been married just twelve years – a second marriage for each of them – and she’d been frank about it from the outset, that she wasn’t looking to share her husband with his job like the last time and wanted the bulk of their time together to be spent in happy, adventurous retirement. She herself was a Pentagon systems analyst, good at what she did but with a firm sense of her life’s priorities.

  It was a myth, he knew: the one last job that made your legacy for you. You stood or fell by your overall record in the Company over many years, and his was pretty good: the successes outweighed the screwups at least five to one, which was decent odds. And yet... a calamitous error right at the end of your career was something that was likely to linger in people’s minds, if not those of the top brass then at least the rank and file. It was bad for morale; it told the younger recruits that the older ones weren’t perhaps the gods and legends they’d come to believe in. That in the upper ranks of the Company there were people who weren’t perfect.

  So he needed to get this right, if not for himself then for the future of the Company. No pressure, then.

  Ten

  New York City

  Monday 20 May, 9.50 am

  The train was more crowded than the one he’d taken in Amsterdam, and grimier; but it suited Pope’s purposes.

  He liked trains, preferred to travel using them instead of planes or even cars wherever possible. They allowed you a degree of mobility in times of crisis and they could be stopped suddenly when needed. They allowed you to think, in a way that wasn’t possible when driving. By the time the Amtrak carriage pulled out of Penn Station Pope was deep in thought.

  The Grosvenor hit had been harder than he’d expected, but had still gone more or less according to plan. Pope had studied the layout of the apartment block several weeks beforehand, noting potential access points and discarding them immediately: the roof, the front door (obviously), even the windows of the lower floors. Entry through the service elevator hadn’t been difficult. Nobody took notice of a man in overalls and a cap.

  The hard part had been Grosvenor herself. She was in her fifties, mahogany-tanned and hard as leather, and she’d reacted quickly when Pope had kicked the door open into her, bolting across the room for both her phone and her gun - she kept the two close together, something Pope noted with professional approval despite himself. Pope used a vase as a projectile, not hitting Grosvenor hard but causing her to lose her momentum and providing enough of a distraction that Pope was able to reach her before she could get the safety off her pistol. From then it had been more straightforward: a headlock, fingers against the carotids to subdue without killing or bringing on unconsciousness, and then the march across to the window.

  Before Pope tipped Grosvenor out he removed his cap and stared hard at her face. The second he saw the understanding - the recognition, even - he heaved, sending the woman headfirst and flailing into the cold evening sky. He didn’t look down, just closed the window once more and made his exit.

  Three hours and he’d be at Union Station, Washington, D.C. The first leg of the journey would be over. Pope let his eyes rest open a crack, as was his habit, and ran another part of the document through his memory.

  *

  27 July

  I once asked Z about the name, Caliban. Had he given the operation the title? Yes, he’d chosen it himself. In that case I was puzzled, I said. Caliban represented the base, primal aspects of the human character, those untamed by civilisation and culture. Wouldn’t the title be better suited to trials of an aggression-enhancing product of some kind?

  Z’s reply was interesting. He said years of experience had taught him that truth-telling was one of the most basic, animal features of the human psyche. It was only with increasing civilisation and socialisation that we learned deceit, subterfuge. Caliban, the operation, was about releasing the honesty within its subjects.

  It made me want go back and reread The Tempest, to see if Shakespeare had considered this.

  The next round of trials took place today. The numbers were greater this time. Twelve subjects in all. According to Z, fully half of them were volunteers; though as always I wondered just how voluntary the participation of a convicted felon in a clinical trial could be.

  I watched four of the experiments. Grosvenor conducted them all, and seemed utterly drained by the end. Interrogation can be hard work. With three of the subjects she achieved results, the men breaking down within an hour, sometimes sooner, and confessing to deeds that were verifiable.

  Only one of the subjects died that
day. Z proclaimed himself satisfied with progress.

  There was, after all, no great rush.

  19 August

  I have been here three months now. Twice a week a ship arrives carrying supplies; otherwise the Caribbean around us is as hot and blue and empty as might be expected. It’s a comfortable if unspectacular existence. My evenings are spent talking to Z and to the doctors involved, or researching in the compound’s small but well-appointed library. Some of what I need is available on the Internet, but access is restricted for security reasons so I dare not use it too recklessly.

  Taylor suspects me, I think. He has taken an unusual interest in my work, more than is warranted. Once I looked up from my desk in the library to find him in the doorway, watching me silently.

  One day I’ll set this journal down on paper, either through dictation or by typing it myself. For the moment, it must remain in my head, filed away day by day in the only place prying eyes can’t possibly see it.

  15 September

  How many more deaths can I allow? Today there were six, on the worst day since the trial began. Six out of eight subjects. A seventy-five per cent mortality rate. Unacceptable by anybody’s standards, even those of the product’s designers and creators.