Delivering Caliban

by Tim Stevens

For years, as far back as she could remember, Nina had worn guilt like a straitjacket, and she hadn’t understood why. Perhaps part of it was an irrational, child-like guilt at having failed to keep her mother alive, against the power of the storm. But for the first time now she recognised that most it was guilt about being alone; about keeping people at a distance, even those who were trying to help and understand her. And about resisting the impulse, sometimes almost overwhelming, to reach out to her father, to penetrate the incomprehensible wall he’d built between himself and the child he’d left behind.

  The guilt loosened itself palpably, and it was as though her very chest was expanding, drawing in air hungrily as if it had been starved. From having been fused to her seta, she now felt as though she was about to float outwards, filling the confines of the car and spilling beyond.

  The sense of liberation was terrifying.

  Pope glanced across at her, caught her eye. He nodded, and in that nod she saw an understanding she’d never known anybody to manage to convey in words.

  We’re the same.

  They’d each lost their fathers, and in each case there’d been complexities in the relationship that hadn’t been resolved. The difference was that Pope wouldn’t get a second chance with his father. Nina would with hers, in a twisted way. And Pope was offering her that chance.

  The flood of feeling – unidentifiable, intense – threatened to choke her.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she said.

  ‘New York City.’

  Twenty-Seven

  Sussex County, New Jersey

  Monday 20 May, 11.45 pm

  ‘It gets us so far, but no more,’ said Purkiss.

  The four of them were alone in the diner. Berg had called the owner from the back room and said that they might be there a while, that he should go home and come back in the morning. For all his surly demeanour he looked surprisingly cheerful.

  ‘Uncle Sam’s dime,’ he said, and left.

  Kendrick was cooking something behind the counter, the sizzling from the hotplate almost difficult to hear over. Berg and Nakamura lounged in their chairs, the laptop open but in sleep mode on the table. Purkiss paced.

  He often found recapitulation useful as it produced multiple slightly different drafts of a story, one or more of which might yield new insights. So he began again.

  ‘Pope’s father is under cover in the US, investigating something to do with interrogation techniques, around the same time a group within the CIA is conducting unauthorised trials of an interrogation-related drug in collaboration with Holtzmann Solar. The possibilities are: Pope senior infiltrated the cell within the CIA, or Holtzmann Solar itself.’

  ‘Or,’ said Nakamura, ‘he set things up so he was one of the trial subjects.’

  ‘Good point,’ said Purkiss. ‘We’ve no way of knowing at the moment which it was. My man in London is trying to get some more details about Pope senior’s last mission, but he’s probably not going to find out much more. Next, Pope’s body is fished out of the Caribbean in the wake of the hurricane.’

  Berg had looked up both Hurricane Mitch and the reports of the plane wreck. The FBI files had a record of it: the remains of a Cessna piston-engined light aircraft had been found by the Guatemalan coastguard during the cleaning-up operations following the hurricane. Three bodies had been recovered: two suspected Honduran and one British national. The British man had been positively identified by SIS as Geoffrey Pope, a supposed former employee, though a file note mentioned that it was likely he was still in their pay at the time of his death. Purkiss recognised the tactic. When an agent was found dead, it was routine for the Service to deny that he was still active.

  ‘We know Pope junior was given a few effects that were found with his father’s body, but there’s no record of his reaction to the death, or of any attempts on his part to look into the circumstances. Darius was only seventeen years old at the time, of course, and still at school. More than fourteen years pass, and Darius gets through university and joins the Service. Has a solid, unflashy career.’

  ‘Biding his time, maybe,’ said Berg.

  ‘Quite possibly. Then, one day, starts hunting down and killing CIA operatives, three so far, all of whom Crosby implicated in the Holtzmann Solar drug trials.’

  He took a moment to channel his thoughts. ‘Two possibilities. Either he’s mopping up on someone’s behalf, eliminating all traces of the trials including those who took part in the affair. In which case, at whose instigation? Was his father crooked, helping to conduct the trials, and did he somehow issue instructions to Darius to continue his work after his death and clean up afterwards? Or is somebody else pulling Pope’s strings now? The same person who sent these rogue CIA men after me and to kill Crosby?

  ‘The other possibility is that Pope senior was genuinely investigating the Caliban operation and managed to get word to his son about what was going on. Darius is now avenging his father, or at least vindicating him, by conducting reprisals against the people involved.’

  Berg rocked forward off the back legs of her chair and stood up, stretching in frustration. ‘Either way, Purkiss, like you say this all takes us only so far. We don’t know where Pope is, who his next target is, or even if there’s going to be a next target.’

  ‘No.’ But there was something they were missing, something that held a clue. Purkiss was sure of it.

  *

  Kendrick came over carrying two trays laden with plates. An enormous dish held eggs, bacon, sausages and four steaks, almost afloat in a swamp of grease.

  ‘What the hell’s this?’ said Nakamura.

  ‘Soldier’s food.’ Kendrick began tucking in. ‘Help yourselves.’

  ‘Heart attack city.’

  Kendrick said, his mouth full: ‘I thought you Yanks were supposed to be always stuffing your faces.’

  ‘You’re a forces guy?’ Nakamura said.

  ‘Yeah. Second Parachute Division. Two Para.’

  Nakamura bobbed his eyebrows. ‘Yeah, those guys were all right. Where’d you serve?’

  ‘Iraq, autumn 2003 to 2006. Basra mainly.’

  ‘No kidding. I was with the First Marine Division. March ’03.’

  Kendrick put down his fork. ‘You were there at the beginning? Part of the invasion force?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Kendrick’s eyes were alight. He shifted his chair closer.

  Standing near Purkiss, Berg said: ‘Boys and their games.’

  Purkiss watched a group of late-night revellers career close to the wide front window of the diner and peer in before reeling away.

  He said, ‘Hurricane Mitch. When exactly did it strike?’

  ‘It hit hard from October twenty-ninth till November third.’ She’d memorised the data from her search earlier.

  ‘Pope senior was found dead in the aftermath. Crosby said Caliban was terminated at the end of 1998, before Thanksgiving. Is that what ended the trials? The hurricane? Did it do some damage to the infrastructure of the project?’

  She watched his face, thinking about it. Then shrugged. ‘Long shot, Purkiss.’

  ‘If I’m right, there’s a link to Central America. Somehow.’

  ‘Like I say, a long shot. The hurricane wrecked several countries. Honduras got the worst of it, but Guatemala and Nicaragua were also hit. Even Florida, though it had reduced to a tropical storm by then.’

  ‘Holtzmann Solar don’t have facilities in the region? A laboratory, a factory?’

  ‘No. But it doesn’t mean anything. Illegal activity like this, Nazi-style drug experiments… they’d be conducting it far away from the public eye.’

  A phone rang, a thin warbling that startled them. Purkiss felt the sound coming from his pocket and fished the tiny clam-shaped device out. No caller ID.

  He’d taken it off the body of one of the men who’d attacked them at Crosby’s cabin, the man who’d crawled up to the wall and almost shot Kendrick. Purkiss thought the man looked like the leader of the group
.

  He opened the phone. ‘Yeah.’ He could manage a flat, Mid-Western accent.

  ‘McCammon? It’s Druze.’ A man’s voice, low and rasping. ‘Where’re you?’

  Purkiss switched to speakerphone. Kendrick and Nakamura got up and came over.

  ‘Crosby’s place, mopping up. It’s done,’ said Purkiss.

  Silence for a beat. Purkiss wondered if he’d blown it. He said, ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Harlan and King with you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They left here a couple hours ago. Supposed to call in by now. I tried calling them. No answer on either of their cells.’

  ‘Where were they heading?’

  ‘The girl took a Greyhound to Washington. They were following.’

  ‘Problems your end?’ It was a broad enough question that Purkiss hoped it wouldn’t arouse suspicion.

  ‘Kind of. She got away. Couple of her asshole friends got killed. Civilians.’

  ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘Where – Charlottesville, still. Hold on. Who is this?’

  Purkiss killed the call.

  Berg said, ‘Jesus. You took the phone from one of those guys back at –’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you nuts? They might be tracking it with GPS as we speak.’

  ‘But it’s given us a way in.’

  *

  While Kendrick took the phone apart, crushing the memory card underfoot, Purkiss and the two agents crowded round Berg’s laptop.

  Berg found it in an instant: a local online Charlottesville newspaper carried the breaking news of a fatal double shooting in the city. Two people in their twenties, names withheld for the time being. The police were appealing for a Ms Nina Ramirez to come forward as they believed she might have vital information about the killings.

  Nakamura had his cell phone out. He dialled the Charlottesville PD’s number on the screen.

  ‘Yeah. This is Special Agent Daniel Nakamura of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’m calling about the shootings in your jurisdiction tonight.’

  He spoke quickly, giving his shield number and then mostly listening. Afterwards he put the phone away.

  ‘Two kids, a boy and a girl, shot dead around six this evening. Signs of forced entry. Hell, the front door of their apartment was kicked off of its hinges. Another young woman was seen by neighbours jumping out the window. Later these two beat cops get approached by this frightened girl who tells them the names and address of the two murdered kids, then runs off. The cops find the bodies, and there are photos in albums of someone who looks like the girl that ran away, labelled Nina. The dead woman’s got an address book and the cops find an address for Nina Ramirez. They visit her apartment but she’s not there.’

  ‘Because she’s on a Greyhound to Washington,’ said Berg.

  Nakamura said, ‘Yeah, but get this. While they’re tossing Ramirez’s place, they answer a call for her from some guy who sounds like he’s a friend but would like to be more than. Calls himself Thomas Beaumont. The cops tell him to stay put, they’ll pick him up and question him, but he disappears. The cop who spoke to him on the phone said he sounded a little odd. Like he was trying on a voice, an accent, that didn’t suit him.’

  Purkiss saw it in Berg’s eyes, and Nakamura’s. Pope?

  Berg turned back to the laptop. Nakamura had asked the cop he’d spoken to for Ramirez’s address and any other information they had on her, and it came through as an email with attachments.

  The picture, the one that was being posted on flyers throughout Charlottesville, was a head shot of an unsmiling young woman with shoulder-length black hair, facing the camera full on. Her features were fine, Hispanic; her eyes huge and at the same time wary. Haunted, even.

  ‘Nina Consuela Ramirez,’ read Berg. ‘Age 26. US citizen, resident of Charlottesville, Virginia, since 1998. Father, unknown. Mother Carmen Maria Ramirez, deceased. Honduran by birth.’

  ‘Honduran,’ said Purkiss. ‘There’s the link.’

  Twenty-Eight

  Interstate 95

  Tuesday 21 May, 1.05 am

  Pope was aware of the risks, but believed progress was impossible, in this situation as in life, without them.

  Apart from the obvious risks of letting her sit with a loaded gun in the glove compartment in front of her, within easy reach, and allowing her out to use the service station restroom where she might have either run away or been recognised by the boy behind the counter if he’d heard anything about the fugitive from Charlottesville, there’d been an enormous risk in telling her all he had: about her father, about himself. But it had to be. The plan was dependent on understanding on the part of everyone involved. Pope had needed Taylor and Jablonsky to understand, just before he’d shot them; he’d needed, and achieved, Grosvenor’s comprehension just before he’d tipped her out of the window.

  So Nina Ramirez needed to understand; and above all, Z had to.

  *

  He’d wanted to see his father’s body, but they hadn’t let him. It was barely a body any more, he supposed, after several days in the sea, subject to the predations of the water and the weather and the fish.

  He was seventeen, and hadn’t seen or spoken to his father since a curt phone call on his fifteenth birthday. He lived with his mother, who as far as he knew hadn’t spoken to his father since their divorce when Darius was twelve. She delivered the news flatly, on a Tuesday afternoon after school. Your father’s dead. His plane crashed. I’m sorry.

  He’d heard that bereavement could trigger anger, even hate, when the relationship with the deceased had been difficult or non-existent. He waited for the anger for a year. For fourteen years. It still hadn’t come. All he was aware of was a silent, frightening blankness.

  A week after the news of his father’s death he checked his email. Not his regular account, but the secret, web-based one nobody but he knew about. Or so he thought. There, like a communication from the spirit world transmitted not through a medium but via the modernity of electronics, was a single message from his father. The message was dated twenty-first of October, two weeks before his father’s body was found.

  Hello, son, it began. Happy birthday.

  It wasn’t his birthday and wouldn’t be for another three months. There followed four paragraphs of utter banality, an expanded version of the things people wrote on postcards. Weather’s fine here, wherever here was. Miss you and hope to see you soon was how it ended.

  Darius read the message repeatedly, printing it out and poring over it at school, during homework, late into the night. The breeziness, the sickly platitudes, were unlike anything he’d ever heard come out of his father’s mouth in his presence.

  It was then he began to take an interest in cryptography.

  *

  He broke the code sixteen months and five days after he first read the email, and for the briefest moment the blankness inside was displaced by a rush of such euphoria it was like a drug high.

  It was a difficult one, deliberately so because it had been used to outwit professionals. Yet he, Darius Pope, his father’s son, had cracked it all on his own.

  His father’s son…

  The message, denuded of its camouflage, read:

  Darius, this is of vital importance. Ring the number below. Ask for Llewellyn. Tell him about this message and give him these co-ordinates: 17˚ 24’38”N 83˚ 55’19”W. There’s a compound with a basement, the only one on the island. Under one of the flagstones at the bottom of the steps is a mini-disc in an oilskin bag. This must be found and played. Your father.

  The phone number followed.

  After the euphoria ebbed, Darius felt let down. The message was almost ludicrously cloak-and-dagger. Was it some kind of joke? A warped way for his father to amuse himself at his son’s expense?

  Then he remembered there’d been no clue that the original email had been in code. He’d been expected not only to break the code, but to recognise it as such in the first place. His father had tr
usted him that far.

  Darius was aware his father worked for the diplomatic service, and was aware too that this was often thin cover for unofficial, clandestine activities. But he’d never until now fully confronted the notion that his father was a spy.

  He didn’t know who Llewellyn was. Probably his father’s handler or control or whatever they called it. He never found out, because he never rang the number. Instead, Darius Pope saved his money and, in the university summer holidays of 2001, he travelled alone to the Caribbean.

  The island – islet, really – was a bulge of scrubby rock little more than a mile wide and three miles long. He reached it by sailing boat, having come to an arrangement with a local yachtsman who ferried him there and back. Pope was on the island for a little over six hours, but in that time he saw no other living thing apart from the gulls that wheeled overhead.

  There was no compound, only the wreckage of one. Timber and stone lay strewn about as though a city had been hit by a nuclear blast. Eventually Pope found the steps to the basement of what he’d later come to learn was called the Box.

  It took him three hours to clear the rubble enough for him to reach the floor of the basement, by which time the salt sweat burned his eyes and his forearms streamed with blood from his ravaged hands. Finding the right flagstone and prising it up took a further hour.

  He found the bag, the mini-disc intact inside it.

  Not until two days later, when he was back home and almost unconscious with fatigue, did he listen to the recording.

  *

  25th October

  It’s unlikely I’ll get another chance to dictate anything once the storm’s hit. It reached hurricane status yesterday off Jamaica. Portentous though it sounds, this will be my final entry.

  We evacuate this evening. Apart from me, only a few of the locals, Taylor and W himself are left. Jablonsky and Grosvenor left by plane last night.

  Taylor knows about me. He barely hides it. And from the way Jablonsky and Grosvenor behaved towards me before they left, I think they know too. Which means Z must. Still, though, he behaves affably towards me.