An X-ray box comes toward the car from the ceiling and judders to a stop, like in a car wash.
“Driver, remove your right hand from the window. Put both hands on the wheel. Keep them in full view.”
Sweat gathers inside the palms of Kat’s hands. She closes her eyes to try to think. Could this be Yulya’s doing? She and Grachev knew she wanted to head down here. Grachev has the authority to put out a bulletin for Kat. She’s swept with a sudden sadness that it’s all come to nothing. Suzy, her dad, her mom are all gone. And for Kat, it ends at a grubby roadblock a long way from home.
“Keep your eyes open at all times and look at the scanner.”
A pause, then. “Be prepared to surrender your mobile phone.”
Kat’s eyes stay on the scanner, and the passenger door opens, with a new voice commanding her. “Keep your eyes on the scanner, and start the car.”
She doesn’t react. She recognizes who it is; the tone, the confidence of movement. He closes the door with a gentle click, buckles himself up, leans across her lap, and starts the engine. His breath smells of nicotine, his shirt of oil.
“Keep driving. They’ll flash red lights. The guards will wave you back. Go fast. Don’t smash, and don’t stop.”
Kat releases the hand brake, lets the engine go. A siren echoes around the concrete. She picks up speed, headlights on, or she’ll hit the sides. A red laser hits her in the eye. She squeezes the gas, accelerates around a sharp curve.
Kat swerves out, overtaking the truck in front of her. She glimpses the side mirror and sees a guard with weapon half raised, face creased with uncertainty. She’s around another curve, and she comes out into a stream of sunlight, blinding her.
Kat guns the engine. The transmission jumps down a gear and picks up the acceleration. There’s a barrier coming down. Kat gets under it into a two-lane highway stretching far ahead, grass embankments on both sides, thin traffic.
Mike Luxton pulls a cigarette from a pack in his pocket and points with it between his fingers. “Keep going, over a bridge. On the other side, two miles up, there’s a gas station. Pull up there.”
THIRTY-ONE
Tuesday, 3:22 p.m., BST
Luxton directs Kat to a parking lot. He unbuckles, opens his door, cups his hand against the wind, and lights the cigarette. Two parking spots over, she sees Liz by an SUV, pushing windblown hair out of her face.
The man who drove Liz is medium-built, wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches and a green polo shirt with a slate green scarf hung loose around his neck. A black Labrador, tongue hanging, sits in the back of his vehicle.
He spots Luxton, raises a hand in greeting, and comes over. Kat gets out, stretches, feels sun on her face.
“Tappler,” he says, “Simon Tappler. I’ve heard a lot about you. Sorry you’re with us in such difficult circumstances.” He doesn’t offer a handshake. Tappler has two fingers around the bowl of a pipe. He bends over, knocks the pipe against the heel of his shoe, and lets the burned tobacco drop to the ground.
“Biggest checkpoint I know of,” he says. “Rotten luck that today of all days, they’re pulling over rental cars. But you got them through, Mike. Well done.” His hand grips Luxton’s. “I’ll be over there with Liz,” Tappler says. “Come over when you’re ready.”
As Tappler walks back toward the SUV, Luxton takes a deep drag on his cigarette. “Like he says, well done.”
“Who’s this Tappler?” asks Kat.
“A helper. We’re waiting for someone else. Then we’ll join them.”
Kat walks away from the car to a bank of freshly mown grass. She sits on the grass, picks a daisy, pushes her thumbnail in the stem and lets green juice stain her skin. Luxton’s shadow falls over her and she looks up, hand over her eyes.
“What sort of helper?”
Luxton doesn’t answer. He sits next to her, his arms hanging loosely over drawn-up knees.
“How did you work the checkpoint?” says Kat.
“Money, power, local knowledge.” He takes the daisy from her.
“Here, let me do that.” He plucks another one and feeds the stem through the fingernail cut Kat’s made in the first one.
“No,” says Kat. “I mean exactly how did you get us through?”
“The people who man the checkpoint are corrupt,” he says flatly, his fingers linking up the two daisy stems. “I paid money. The person who’s coming to see us has authority in this part of England. It’ll be a one-off; we won’t be able to do it again.”
“You did it for you or for me?”
Luxton looks ahead, squinting, where rain’s sheeting down on a gray river in the distance, but above them the sky’s pure blue, without a cloud. “I did it for all of us.”
Kat leans back, lets the sun play on her face. “While we’re waiting for this other person,” she asks dreamily, eyes closed, “can you do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“Quit fucking around. Tell me who you are, who Liz is, what the fuck’s going on, what it has to do with Suzy, and if you know who killed her, tell me.”
Luxton lets her outburst hang. His shadow crosses her face again as he plucks another daisy stem. Kat opens her eyes, props her head up on her elbow, and changes tack. “Okay, here’s an easy one: How come you’re not doing the trapeze anymore?”
He stops for a beat. A smile flickers across his face. He feeds another daisy into the chain and lets out a small whistle.
“Yeah, good one,” he says. “My specialty was the triple trapeze. That’s when you have one artist at one end, one at the other, and I was flung between them and did a double somersault on the way. But to answer your question, I joined the army.”
A silver station wagon pulls into the parking space next to the SUV, where Liz is leaning on the hood. There’s something familiar about the man who gets out, but he’s too far away for Kat to recognize.
Luxton looks up and points. “Like I said, I was in the army. Now I work for him.”
Kat’s about to ask who, when Luxton says, “Liz was walking home late one night near our home in London, and you know how unsteady she is. A police car passes. When they question her, of course, she stutters. She’s nervous and she’s swaying. They accuse her of being doped out and put a restriction order on her, which they have the power to do without going to court or anything. It took a month to get it lifted, for us to prove that Liz isn’t a troublemaking drug addict.” He adds another daisy.
“When it happened, I was in Iraq, in the south in Basra with the army. I came back on leave. Liz was distraught. I couldn’t get any sense out of anyone, and I looked more into what was happening. Just about every week, the government was passing a new law of social control. They’d passed laws so that judges couldn’t overturn them. I hadn’t realized it before, because it hadn’t affected me, but more and more, we were living in a police state, and the government sold it to the public by intimidating the media and talking about the terror threat. That’s when I began to understand it.
“Like, in Iraq, we were doing a good job, trying to set up fair government, treating people equally, making the place safer. I could see why we were there. But alongside all that, a lot of people were getting very, very rich. Millions were being handed out for contracts without anyone checking what was happening to the money. One week, an American colonel came down from Baghdad and gave away twenty million dollars. Just like that. He made no checks that it would be spent properly, no checks on who he was giving it to, no checks that it wasn’t going into a back pocket or foreign bank account. Why should he? The war had begun a huge, new industry. A lot of people benefited, but it wasn’t about helping normal people. There was a whole other agenda. When I saw what they did to Liz, I checked more and found how much American and British companies were making from the security industry, iris scanners, ID cards, database exchange, and all that. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to know it’s wrong.”
He pulls a daisy through too roughly, and the stem breaks. “Shit
.”
The man who’s just arrived at the gas station has brought out documents and is looking through them on the hood of the car with Liz.
“But what’s the point of the government making an enemy of people like Liz?” asks Kat.
“In Liz’s case, it was because of her job. They need Liz because she’s good, but they also want her to know what they can do to her if she steps out of line.”
“But . . .” Kat hesitates. “Well, she told me how she met Suzy.”
“Yeah. But they went at her before any of that happened.”
Kat likes Mike Luxton, the way he strips down politics to simple human motivation. If things ever got back to normal, she could see herself falling into a relationship with him.
Luxton laces his boots with double knots and tucks the lace ends into the side of the leather. His lips are tight together, playing into the hint of a smile, his unshaven face just a little too close, but not hostile. Their eyes lock, then he shifts his gaze over toward Liz, who’s waving them over.
“Here.” Luxton hands Kat the daisy chain. “It’s from all of us.” He leans forward, puts it around her neck, and straightens it. She lets his hands brush her clothes. “You look good in it.”
“Thank you,” she says, fingers on the stems, feeling the dampness from their juice.
Luxton gets up, brushes his pants off, and offers a hand to Kat. She takes it while he helps her up, then lets it go.
“Now this is what’s going to happen next. You’re going over to meet my boss.”
“Who is he?”
“You met him with Max Grachev on Saturday night,” says Luxton. He lets go of her hand. “He’s Assistant Commissioner of Police Stephen Cranley.”
THIRTY-TWO
Tuesday, 3:43 p.m., BST
Kat stops dead. She looks behind her for a way out. Luxton, half a step ahead, reaches back to take her elbow. Kat moves away.
“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” she yells, tearing off the daisy chain.
She works out how far she’ll let him come toward her before striking him. She works out how she’ll take him, what she’s not going to tell him.
“You know who Max Grachev is? You know who runs that roadblock, which you got through so fucking easily?” She steps back, testing the unevenness of the ground.
Luxton’s looking at the grass. “If you promise not to interrupt,” he says evenly, “I will tell you. Like I said, first you will meet Stephen Cranley—again. He has something to tell you. It’s about your sister. He’s going to show you the documents that they’re looking at over there. When you’ve read them, we want you to call Bill Cage, then you and Liz are going to the place where Suzy was killed, because that’s where we need your help.”
As Luxton talks, Cranley is walking toward her, tall, elderly, but fit, his face lined around his eyes and chin. He’s wearing beige cords and a brown waterproof jacket. When he gets closer, his blue eyes seek hers, but not with hostility, not a man looking for an enemy.
Kat holds her expression. She plans to give nothing. Cranley holds out his hand. Kat doesn’t take it.
“I was a friend of your father’s,” he says.
“Yeah, well, Dad never mentioned you.”
“No, he wouldn’t have.”
“So how do I know?”
“Your father told me that Javier Laja once proposed to you,” he says.
“So?” she says, and leaves it like that, but inside she’s trembling. Cranley’s picked a story she’s told to only three people—all dead.
“You were a child in Rising Park in Lancaster overlooking the orphanage,” says Cranley.
Kat picks up. “And Javier said if I couldn’t find anyone else, he’d love to marry me. We were both about nine.”
Cranley runs a hand through his hair, sandy colored with a streak of gray. A speck of black ash blows onto Kat’s shoulder. She picks it off and sees fires burning stubble in a freshly harvested field.
“Okay,” she says, taking a step toward him. “What now?”
Cranley’s expression is half sad, half relieved. “I need to show you something. It’s not nice, but it’ll help what you’re trying to achieve.”
She walks with him to his station wagon, where he draws an envelope from his pocket.
“I want you to read this, Kat.” He points behind the SUV to where Luxton and Liz have dropped back. “I’ll be over there.”
Kat holds the sheets steady on the hood of the car. It’s the postmortem report on her mother.
The deceased is female, fifty-four, measuring five feet, seven inches and weighing one hundred and ten pounds. Definite ID of Helen Anne Polinski established through dental records. Visible distinctive marks include a mole on her nose. Clothing was in place and comprised blue denim jeans with leather belt, zippers and buttons fastened; blue Giordano shirt over bra, still fastened; Nike tennis shoes with socks, laces tied. Jewelry comprises ornamental pendant necklace, believed to be silver, gold wedding ring, and a large ornamental ring.
Examination shows single fracture of the upper thyroid horns, a fracture of a lower thyroid horn, and laryngeal soft tissue trauma. Macroscopic bleedings of the laryngeal muscles were also found.
Kat rushes her eyes along, looking for something fast and conclusive.
Defined and deep ligature marks are consistent with the nylon curtain cord found around the neck.
Kat flips over a page. She’s seeing nothing that she doesn’t know already.
She scans over to the next page.
. . . carotid arteries are compressed; jugular veins are normal, consistent with suffocation and heart failure from suicide by hanging.
“What am I looking for?” She looks over at Cranley. Liz comes instead.
“M-most women who commit suicide don’t hang themselves. Men do. And they shoot themselves. But women usually slash their wrists or take a drug overdose.”
Liz leans across, turns over to the last sheet in the file, which looks like a copy of the page Kat’s just read.
“This is the original death certificate,” she says. “Here.” She points to a line halfway down in the middle of a mass of medical jargon. “Sodium pentothal, pancuronium bromide, potassium chloride. All these were found in her blood.”
“My God.” Kat’s chest goes tight. The back of her neck prickles. They are exactly the drugs used for execution by lethal injection.
“Your mother was murdered.”
“But why?” she says faintly, barely a whisper.
“Suzy suspected it from the start. Your mother didn’t love your father enough to kill herself for him. She was killed in case John Polinski had told her what he knew.”
A single tear runs over Kat’s cheek, down onto her lip. She tastes the salt on her tongue.
“And that’s why . . .”
Liz nods.
Cranley joins them, but Kat turns her back and concentrates on a seagull flying behind a tractor in a field.
“The day you heard your father was killed, you went home to find your mother dead,” he says. “Suzy went from New York to the mortuary in Lancaster. It was chaotic because of who your father was and the conspiracy theories running around about his death. The next day, you were both involved in dealing with your mother’s apparent suicide. Suzy handled the paperwork. In the mortuary, she saw the original death certificate. When she was handed the false one, which said your mother killed herself, she understood exactly what was happening. Murder and cover-up meant that Suzy’s own life was in danger. She had to get out of the country. She didn’t know what to do about you. If you were with her, they might get both of you. But you weren’t involved in your father’s work, like Suzy was. You were young. If you stayed back home, she didn’t think they’d go after you.”
He walks around so that he’s in Kat’s field of view. Kat’s fists are clenched hard.
“Suzy came to England and changed her identity because her life was in danger,” says Cranley. “Your father and mother were mu
rdered, Kat. Suzy was determined to fight, but she wanted to keep you from running into any harm.”
Kat squeezes her eyes. She doesn’t want to see Cranley, see anything, no light, no shadows even, no kaleidoscopic swirls of color. She tries to breathe slowly, but hears her heartbeat louder and louder. If she loses control, she will shriek and thrash about. She holds on to the discipline until all she sees is calm black. She inhales deeply, exhales, and feels the knives inside her chest withdraw. Then she opens her eyes again.
“Thanks,” she says, “for letting me see that.”
She calls out to Luxton, “You got a phone?”
Cranley has one in his hand. She takes it, walks away, and faces the gas station. Cars are driving in and out. Drivers pump gas. Moms take kids to the bathroom.
She dials Cage, paces, keeps her eyes on the distant stubble fire in a far-off field, watches smoke drifting straight up, then curling suddenly as it catches in the wind.
“Rain’s coming,” she says to herself. The call’s on the fourth ring when it picks up.
“It’s me,” she says.
“You’ve met Cranley?”
“Yes. Does it mean we’re authorized again?”
“No.” His voice is soft and strained, and it’s not like Cage to show trouble. “Things have changed. The pissing contest’s over, and we lost.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You’re taking the fall for the embassy killings.”
“You said—”
“I know what I said. I’m sorry. It’s a federal double homicide rap with mandatory death penalty.”
“It was self-defense,” she says hurriedly.
“All of them,” says Cage. “The five inside.”
Kat says nothing.
“Stick with Cranley. Don’t go near Sayer. Don’t go near anything connected to the American government.”
THIRTY-THREE
The History Book Page 14