Delivering Caliban

by Tim Stevens

  They had debated it feverishly on the hundred-mile journey back to the city. This time they’d taken one car, Nakamura’s Taurus. The local cops had arrived within minutes of Pope’s disappearance, and Berg had taken control, giving them a brief summary and leaving them to convert the area into a crime scene and to take the two men Berg had arrested, Druze and Laymon, into custody. She’d liaised with the local FBI office in Philadelphia and arranged for them to escort the two men back to Manhattan for questioning. Apart from their names, which the men had acknowledged when Kendrick had found their drivers’ licences on them, they’d refused to speak without legal representation. A check on their licences confirmed they were both CIA.

  Purkiss and Berg both agreed that New York was Pope’s likely destination. He’d appeared to be heading there before. It was possible, of course, that he intended to travel beyond the city and further north, but they had no way of knowing this. Pope had taken one of the cars belonging to the CIA men, but although

  The debate was over how much to report in and how much to withhold. Berg had been in favour of making a full disclosure, of telling her superiors everything she knew, including about Purkiss’s involvement.

  ‘This is too big for us,’ she said. ‘Multiple CIA agents operating illegally, a British spook running amuck, killing and kidnapping… it needs the whole Bureau behind it.’

  ‘They’ll sideline you,’ said Purkiss.

  ‘No they won’t.’

  ‘They certainly will. You’ll be deemed unfit to proceed further. You’ve fired your weapon multiple times, you’ve almost been killed just as often. You watched your partner being crushed to death.’

  She jerked her head round angrily, making the Taurus swerve. ‘Hey. No need to rub it in.’

  ‘I’m just trying to make a point. I know how organisations work. Yours, mine… they’re all the same. You’ll be thanked for bringing this serious matter to the bosses’ attention, they may even pardon you for going renegade earlier. But they’ll want to take it away from you and run it themselves.’

  From the back seat Kendrick said, ‘Like the bloody Army.’

  Berg said, ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘How much slack will your boss cut you? If you tell him you’ve got an informant, i.e. me, but can’t reveal my name without jeopardising the operation?’

  She rocked her head. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Then that’s the line you take. Tell him about Crosby, about Holtzmann Solar and the Caliban operation, about everything that’s happened. Tell him there’s an Englishman named Pope who’s kidnapped the Ramirez woman, though you don’t know why, which is the truth. Leave out the fact that Pope’s a British intelligence agent, that his father was one too, that Kendrick or I are involved.’

  ‘It’ll come out in the end.’

  ‘But it can’t come out now. If your Bureau learns there’s a British agent operating in a situation like this it’ll have repercussions that don’t bear thinking about. It’ll scupper our job, hinder us from finding Pope. Yes, eventually my role will become apparent, but it won’t matter so much if we’ve managed to stop Pope by then.’

  She drove in silence for a full minute, her thoughts visibly churning. Then: ‘All right. I must be out of my mind.’

  *

  Kendrick said, ‘Should’ve worked them over.’

  ‘What?’ Purkiss turned from the window.

  ‘Those two CIA pillocks. Back at the petrol station. We should’ve made them tell us what they knew. The coppers would have been none the wiser.’

  ‘Berg wouldn’t have allowed it.’

  ‘But you agree with me. You know I’m right, Purkiss.’

  Purkiss turned away again. It was clear, now, that the CIA faction, the one that included the men who’d tailed him in Hamburg as well as the ones who’d shot up Crosby’s place and now the ones from the service station, didn’t want the Ramirez woman dead. If they had, Pope wouldn’t have been able to use her as a shield the way he had; they would have simply gunned her down along with Pope. That meant Ramirez was important enough for both Pope and the CIA faction to want to keep her alive.

  And yes, Kendrick was right. The men they’d captured would have been able to tell them why. It was a theoretical point now, nothing more; they were in FBI custody and would lawyer up, as the Americans put it. The truth would come out, but probably too late to be of much practical use.

  Ignoring what he’d said to Kendrick, Purkiss began to pace. He ran through what he knew.

  Pope was here as a result of something his father had been involved in, something that had led to his father’s death, accidentally or otherwise. An illegal drug trial.

  The trial was being conducted with the active collaboration of a black ops cell within the CIA, and under its auspices.

  Pope had taken a woman captive and was taking pains to keep her alive.

  At the same time a CIA black ops cell was trying to retrieve her.

  Ramirez was key. And not only did Purkiss not know why, he’d also let her slip through his fingers. He’d let her be taken, just as he’d let Abby be taken, the second time permanently. And Claire...

  He stopped, clenched his fists so that his nails bit deep half moons into his palms, and counted backwards. When the anger had subsided he applied himself once more to the problem.

  Ramirez, who’d been a child of ten or eleven at the time of the Caliban operation, was connected with it. That meant she either held crucial knowledge about the project - highly unlikely - or she had some personal connection to somebody involved in it.

  He replayed what Berg had found out about her. US citizen by birth. Mother Honduran. Father unknown.

  It was a huge risk - Berg’s superiors might have taken her phone and be monitoring her calls - but he took out his own phone and dialled her number. She answered immediately. ‘Yeah, Purkiss.’

  ‘Can you talk?’

  ‘On my way to you. They might tail me so I’ll have to do a few evasive moves. I’ve got a reprieve. You’re my informant and your ID’s protected for now.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘And my balls are for the chop when this is over, or would be if I was a guy. What’s up?’

  ‘You bringing your laptop?’

  ‘Of course. Why?’

  He told her.

  *

  ‘There’s an alert out, not just for the five NYC boroughs but for all the northeastern states,’ said Berg. ‘TV stations, local and the networks. Several photos of Ramirez, though we’ve only got the one of Pope.’

  She’d brought coffee in paper cups for the three of them as well as a bag of doughnuts. Her face was drawn with fatigue, but her eyes burned. They sat around the laptop at one of the desks.

  ‘It’s worth trying, but it’s unlikely to yield anything useful,’ Purkiss said. ‘Pope knows he’s exposed now. He’ll either go to ground, or move so quickly we won’t know what he’s got planned till it’s over.’

  ‘You think it’s blackmail?’

  Purkiss drank coffee, felt the caffeine blaze its way through his body. ‘Of some kind, yes. Not money. If my idea’s right, that Ramirez’s unknown father is the person Pope’s after, then he’s probably using her to flush the man out.’

  ‘Which suggests this is a harder man to get to than the other ones, the ones Pope killed. Jablonsky and the rest.’

  ‘Right. Which in turn suggests it’s someone more senior. Somebody protected by a greater level of security. Perhaps based in Langley itself.’

  Berg had set several searches running on Nina Ramirez. Schooling records, family contacts, even her immunisation schedule. Anything that might shed light on her paternity.

  ‘Her birth certificate records her father as unknown,’ said Berg. ‘She’s a US citizen because she was born here. Her mother was a Honduran national. But every time I try searching for details about the mother, I get no records found. There’s nothing about her marriage, if she ever was married, or any other kids she might have had.’
<
br />   ‘They’ve been cleaned,’ Purkiss said. ‘Run through the daughter’s timeline.’

  Berg brought up a document. ‘Born March tenth, 1987, Richmond, Virginia. School there all the way through, with a period of disruption when she was eleven when her mom died in a car crash. There’s no death certificate on the mom, by the way. Lived with grandmother after that, as we know. Graduated high school 2005, then university at Charlottesville.’

  ‘The mother died in 1998.’

  ‘At the time Pope’s father was found dead. Yeah, I noticed that.’

  Purkiss said, ‘Is there any way you can identify CIA personnel from that period? Staff stationed in overseas countries?’

  Berg shook her head. ‘No. We keep tabs on Company staff here in the US, but their international data is tighter than a witch’s ass. I could ask my boss to go to the Director and make a direct appeal to the CIA, but it’ll take forever and the politics would be hard to get round.’

  ‘There’s a quicker way,’ said Purkiss.

  *

  Vale rang back after an hour, one in which the shifting shadows in the office made Purkiss acutely aware of how quickly time was passing. He’d given Vale the barest outline of events – he was in New York, Pope was possibly there too and had a hostage – because he wanted him to concentrate on the task he had for him.

  ‘Took a bit longer than I’d have liked,’ said Vale. ‘The records from the nineties haven’t all been fully converted to digital format yet and I had to get a couple of people to hunt down the files.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The intel the Service has on the CIA’s Central American staff and activities from that time is patchy. It’s not like the eighties when everything was kicking off in Nicaragua and El Salvador. But I did manage to get the personnel records for Honduras – there’s really only one lot of information, for the capital, Tegucigalpa. Will email it across.’

  It came through after a minute. Purkiss forwarded the file to Berg’s laptop. It was, as Vale had said, a personnel file for the CIA station in the Honduran capital for the years 1995 until 2005. There were dossiers attached for six or seven of the names.

  The head of station from 1995 to 1999 was one Philip B. Mayhew. Berg opened the dossier. Two indistinct photos accompanied a short biography.

  Mayhew was African American. ‘Not him,’ said Purkiss. Ramirez had appeared to be of mixed race, but lighter-skinned than would be likely if Mayhew were her father.

  The deputy head for the years 1996 to 1999 was a possibility. He stared back in a single black-and-white mugshot, perhaps a passport photo. In his late forties, clean-shaven but with the shadowed cheeks of a naturally hirsute man, solidly built. His name was Raymond Giordano.

  The rest on the list were lesser functionaries, field agents and support staff for the most part. Purkiss and Berg scanned through them; then Purkiss said, ‘Check the names.’

  Berg entered the complete list on her database and began the search.

  *

  ‘Some hits,’ she said. Purkiss had been stretching his arms and legs, trying to ease the pain in his shoulder, talking to Kendrick. He came over to the laptop.

  ‘Four of these people are based in Langley now,’ she said. ‘The boss, Mayhew, is in the Middle East.’

  ‘His deputy? Giordano?’

  ‘Langley.’ She brought up a window. ‘Deputy Director. No portfolio.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘The Bureau isn’t sure, but it’s suspected the CIA has a department dedicated to investigating enemy action against its own personnel, in the US and abroad. Whatever it is, Deputy Director’s a senior position. Giordano’s one of the big boys.’

  The accompanying picture was another mugshot but a more up-to-date one. Giordano had aged, put on weight, and grown a salt-and-pepper beard. With his face now partly obscured, his eyes were more distinctive. Purkiss had seen those eyes before: in the service station shop, staring at him as he tried to entice them away from Pope.

  ‘That’s him,’ he said. ‘That’s Ramirez’s father.’

  Thirty-Nine

  Manhattan, New York City

  Tuesday 21 May, 7.30 am

  Pope was saying something but Nina didn’t register a word.

  For the first time since lunchtime yesterday – was it really less than twenty-four hours ago that this had begun? – she craved music. Not to play it; just to hear it speak to her, to lie adrift in the river of it. Something pure, without bombast. Bach, maybe, or Beethoven’s late quartets.

  She couldn’t hear any, so she clutched her violin to her as a reminder of that world.

  They were on the outskirts of a park, somewhere. She didn’t think it was Central Park; it was too small for that, and she had a vague notion they were near the East River. She’d been to New York exactly three times in her life, once on a trip with her grandmother and twice to attend concerts with her group. She was fascinated and repelled by the city’s gargantuan size in equal measure, and had learned little of its geography.

  Vaguely she registered mild surprise at the number of people on the streets at this hour, a time when back in Charlottesville most people would still be in bed. She was incurious about where they were going, or why they had left the car they had reached the city in (the second, or perhaps third, car since the terrible time at the gas station) and were now on foot, Pope striding at her side, gently but firmly compelling her to keep pace with him.

  A homeless man strummed a guitar in a bus shelter. She slowed to listen, but before Pope could chide her along the man pulled out a cell phone to answer it and the moment was gone.

  She was incurious because she knew, finally, that she could trust Pope. The doubts that had pricked at her ever since she’d met him in such violent circumstances, and that had threatened to skewer her through when he’d first held her like a human shield and then when the other man, the one who’d come in through the back and had also sounded English, had enticed her away from Pope... these were gone like flute notes in the wind. Pope hadn’t let her down yet. He’d told Nina terrible things, things that most other people would have kept hidden from her... had kept hidden from her since she was a child. Things she’d suspected to be true. And despite the things she’d seen him do, which previously would have convinced her of a man’s wickedness, she knew he was, at heart, good. Good in a way nobody she’d ever met before was good, apart from her mother and grandmother. And even they’d concealed things from her, as she had now discovered.

  The clincher, the thing that finally convinced her of Pope’s honesty, was hearing her father’s voice. Pope had been driving them through some darkened town, in Jersey, she guessed, and had pulled over beside an old-fashioned call box. He’d indicated to her to climb out with him and she’d obeyed, then crowded close at his signal so that she could hear the voice on the other end of the line. Even after fifteen years there was no mistaking the gruff warmth, the weight of what she’d always thought of as kindness behind the tones.

  She didn’t say anything, half-expecting Pope to make her speak in order to convince her father that she was really there. But it was as if her father believed Pope, implicitly. When Pope said I have your daughter he winked at her, drawing the sting from the menace of the words.

  She’d never been able to find her father. Her grandmother had discouraged her from trying to make contact with him, and the tentative attempts she’d made as an adult to find out even where he was living had come to nothing. Yet Pope, in her life for less than twelve hours, had not only located her father but had allowed her to hear his voice.

  Somebody who could do that for her was to be trusted.

  *

  Abruptly Pope led her off the street and into the darkness of a covered public parking lot. Their footsteps echoed in the sudden cavernous space. Pope stopped at a light truck, grey in the gloom. He fished out a set of keys and unlocked the passenger door.

  ‘Our new wheels, for the moment.’

  Nina climbed in, pro
pping the violin case at her feet as she’d done in the last three or four or however many cars it was they’d used. This was, she noticed, the first one Pope had keys for other than the one he’d taken from the gas station. He was round the back of the van, working the doors there. Nina stared straight ahead. In a minute he climbed in beside her.

  The truck lumbered under the raised boom, feeling to Nina as if it was struggling to move under a heavy load.

  *

  They crawled through the canyons of the city, low orange morning sunlight splashing them in bursts before retreating again behind the bristling towers. How could anybody live here, she wondered. Loomed over at every turn. Landmarks she recognised came and went: the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, Grand Central Station.

  Pope navigated easily, deftly turning aside from congested streets down side routes, always giving the impression of driving with purpose. He turned right down a ramp that led to another boom, where he took a ticket from the dispenser. They rolled into another car park, this one subterranean beneath a tower whose peak was higher than Nina could imagine.

  The parking lot was around half full. Pope drove slowly between the columns, turning his head this way and that, occasionally dabbing the brake as if considering a bay, then moving on. Eventually he swung into one between two smaller cars and cut the engine.

  She waited until he’d helped her down, then walked alongside him past the barrier and back up the ramp into the light. Once more she twisted to look up at the building. Some kind of office skyscraper.

  ‘Are we going to meet my father?’ She hadn’t intended to say the words; they’d been plucked from her involuntarily.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pope. ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  Forty

  6.40 am