The Distance: A Thriller

by Helen Giltrow

  I say, “There’s limited visitor access—”

  “More than that.”

  More than that? “A staff ID? Something that will get you in as a guard—”

  “More than that,” he says, and he looks at me …

  “As an inmate?”

  And then away again.

  So it’s a job. An anticlimax with a whiplash sting of irony: a job, it’s just a job, for which he needs an ID. Guards work in teams, to strict rotas; civilian staff are heavily protected. Only inmates can move freely in that place. He has to pass for an inmate, for what he’s planning to do—

  A sudden sense of dread.

  “It can’t be done,” I say.

  He glances at me. “You sure?”

  End this now, just end it. “We don’t have an in with the operating company, and we can’t hack prison system records. Too well defended. Believe me, it’s been tried.”

  He says, “By people who wanted to get out. Not in.”

  I just shake my head.

  A silence between us, as if there’s something else to say. At last I break it. “Is that everything?” A fractional nod. “Well, then: if you need me again, use this.”

  I hand him a card with no name, just a phone number. He reads it once, twice, and passes it back. We’re done. Two years, and this is all we have to say to each other.

  I push the card back into my coat pocket. “I’d better be going.”

  He doesn’t say good-bye.

  The car—not the Merc Charlotte Alton’s used for the last year but a Ford with shell-company plates—is parked a street away. Robbie’s on watch beside it, arms folded across his barrel chest, breath smoking in the cold air, heavy grizzled head cocked, alert to every sound.

  A year since I last called him, since I last asked him to do anything like this, but he’s worked for the network right from the beginning, and he knows the rules: he opens the door for me without a word or a look.

  I slide into the passenger seat, and there it is, that brief smothered pang, You should have stayed, you should have said something, you should have asked …

  I close it down. Close down, too, the image of Johanssen standing there in the shadows, listening as the car pulls away. For all I know, he’s gone already.

  We take the usual precautions. It’s gone 4:00 a.m. when I get back to Docklands.

  The building I live in overlooks an arm of the West India Dock, on the north side of Canary Wharf. Once they unloaded cargoes of sugar here, but all that’s left of the industrial past is a pair of monumental cranes on the wharf, the dock itself—a shivering oblong of water that has to be skimmed periodically for cigarette butts and takeaway paper cups—and a run of low brick warehouses converted into bars for the tourists and the office workers. Everything else is new, and my building is among the newest. It caters to the nervous rich: overscaled rooms, heavy on security, cross-webbed with CCTV. It’s possible to hermetically seal the place from the outside world; I don’t get surprise visitors. Even at this hour there’s a uniformed guard on patrol out front and, inside, a night porter on duty behind a bank of switches and monitors. We nod to each other as I cross the lobby to the lift.

  From the forty-first floor the views are glittering—the offices of Docklands, the riverside warehouse conversions of Limehouse Reach, the curve of the Thames and the skyline of the City of London—but tonight when I look out, I barely notice them.

  Did Fielding track him down in some obscure corner of the world? Something’s turned up, son. Right up your street. Or did he just decide to come back and discovered this waiting for him? A job inside a prison. Looks impossible.

  That sense of dread again: of course he’ll try to do it.

  I walk into the small room I use as an office. Switch on the computer, plug in a hard drive. Enter passwords, run decryption, and open a file I haven’t touched in a year.

  The first click brings up a set of five colored rings, one inside the other—outer security, inner security, the first wall, a narrow no-man’s-land, and then the second wall—all formed around a dark, blank heart. I click on the central blank, and a numbered grid appears. Place a cursor on one of the squares and click again, and that square expands to fill the screen with detail: roads and buildings, a canteen, a vocational training block, a football pitch. Click again, and a delicate tracery of sewage pipes and electricity cables runs beneath the streets like veins under skin. Again, and icons scatter themselves across the plan: a random punctuation of little blue diamonds, green dots, yellow squares. Some are command centers or observation posts; some represent cameras and listening devices. Others we simply can’t decipher.

  We started gathering data on the Program, assembling this map, when the place was still in the planning stage. And ever since it opened its gates, people have come for the map. Except they don’t come to me anymore, they come to Craigie; and it’s not really the map they want, it’s an answer to the question, Is there a way out of there?

  The answer, as it has been since the Program opened, is no.

  But that’s not what Simon Johanssen is asking for. He wants something else.

  And still I don’t phone Craigie, although I know I should. I phone Fielding.

  I phone using a line that no one will be able to trace. The person who picks up the phone just grunts, but it’s him.

  “Hello, Fielding.”

  A pause that stretches out to ten long seconds. Then—

  “Karla.” One word, but Tony Fielding manages to load it with a heavy freight of superiority and contempt. He’s never liked me—he prefers his women younger, and grateful. I’m a cold bitch, aren’t I? In a way that’s liberating.

  Fielding says, “Well, here we are again,” and his voice is like rust. Still smoking, then. “I take it you had a visit,” and he sounds smug.

  “Why are you letting him do this?”

  He snorts. “Why not? You worried he’s out of practice? I think he’ll pick it up again soon enough—”

  “A job in the Program.”

  Fielding says, “Look, he wants to work. I’ve already told him it’s impossible. But that’s what he does, isn’t it? The fucking impossible. Put money on it, Karla, he’s going to do it. Question is, are you?”

  End this. End it now. The same argument trotted out again, deadpan. “You know the system in there. We can’t hack it.”

  “Sure about that, Karla? Well, your choice. There’s other people who can set this up. They’ll get him in there. ’Course, they’re not as careful as you, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

  The words are out before I’ve time to think. “You can’t put him in there—”

  “Watch me.”

  “John Quillan runs the Program.”

  But Fielding says, “Does he, Karla? Good old John Quillan. I’ll make sure Johanssen knows.”

  When he’s gone, I walk back into the main room of my apartment, go to the window, and look down: the black water of the dock ripples back at me.

  Walk away. Just walk away. You don’t live the old life now. You’re not Karla anymore, and you owe Simon Johanssen nothing …

  But I can’t walk away.

  You like to think you make your own decisions. You like to think that it’s all conscious, planned. But sometimes the decisions are made for you, and you only find out when it’s much too late. Sometimes the borders are invisible; you cross them in the dark.

  Before Johanssen told me about the job. Before I even walked into that warehouse—

  That moment in the opera house, when I looked up and saw him: the future was set then.

  Somewhere in the Program’s security there is a loophole, and I will find it and use it to put him in there. Because if I don’t, someone else will, and they won’t watch his back.

  John Quillan—professional criminal, gangster, murderer—runs the Program.

  John Quillan wants him dead.

  DAY 2: THURSDAY

  JOHANSSEN

  Three thirteen a.m., Thursday. A
North London street in what they call an up-and-coming area, bars and estate agents slowly replacing the old pound shops and cheap clothing stores. A taxi took him part of the way here, and a night bus, but now he’s on foot: the usual drills.

  A sniper’s habit reduces the world to distances.

  Three meters to his left: a teenage couple huddles at a bus stop, their breath clouding the air around them. Eight meters right, a drunk zigzags down the opposite pavement, immune to the cold, then pauses with one hand against a wall and doubles. Johanssen keeps moving. Six paces take the man out of his field of vision. There’s the sound of vomiting, and above his head a CCTV camera swivels impassively to catch the action.

  No one is watching him.

  He’s seen her again. He’s spoken to her. Now he’s carrying that memory through the yellowish dark almost as if it’s an object in his hands, with weight and shape. Sometimes it’s fragile, precious—the light in her hair, the turn of her head—but never for long: he crosses a street, passes a row of houses, and it changes into something sharp or corrosive, like the look in her eye the second after she saw him.

  He got it wrong, didn’t he? He thought it would be different, but he got it wrong.

  He cuts down a side road, turns right, and walks until he comes to the first of the tall Victorian terraces. Less than five minutes from here the streets are crowded with metal skips piled high with builders’ refuse, but the tide of gentrification hasn’t reached this one yet: there are too many buzzers on the entryphone panels, too many rubbish bins and broken bicycles and old sofas in front gardens, and the basement flat’s front door opens to a familiar smell of damp.

  Inside, the living room curtains are open, and the outside security light is on: beyond the glass doors the shadows of a plastic garden chair and a dead rosebush are knife sharp. He closes the curtains and opens the doors to the bathroom and bedroom, switching lights on, checking windows, looking for any sign of disturbance. There’s nothing.

  He sits down in the only comfortable chair, the one that faces the TV, and thinks again of Karla in the opera house bar: Karla, in her green dress, her head tilted to one side, listening to the fat man, pretending not to be bored, the moment before she looked up and saw him.

  And there it is, the same fist clench in his guts, as raw and immediate as ever.

  And nothing’s changed.

  Eight years ago. First meeting, if you can call it that: him in a chair with a bright light in his face, and her just a voice behind the light, saying, “I can make you safe.” Is that all it took, those words? Delivered at the point when he’d screwed up everything—proved the army right, lost his nerve, watched a man die screaming—when he was sleeping rough, shaving in public toilets, scavenging food waste from supermarket bins, avoiding daylight; scared to walk down a street in case John Quillan’s people spotted him and did to him what they’d done to the others—when carrying on living was no more than a reflex and a product of his training—

  I can make you safe.

  And she did: took every reference point in his past existence and wiped it off the map—wiped him clean—then pasted on a new ID, gave him an airline ticket, told him to run and not come back.

  Except he came back, though only when the men who knew what he did the night Terry Cunliffe died were all behind bars or dead. Came back because it was the only way to put that night behind him: working for Fielding, all the difficult jobs, and every one of them clean and tight and tidy, no raw edges or loose ends or mess, no hesitation either—every job proof that he could hack it after all, that Spec Ops were wrong, that Cunliffe was a one-off, a bad night that caught him off guard, nothing to get worked up about. That the man who went to pieces wasn’t him.

  For every job, he went to her for information.

  One day she stepped out from behind that light.

  And one day she gave him one of those rare, swift almost-smiles of hers, and for a moment anything seemed possible; but then she turned away.

  You couldn’t hack it. You couldn’t hack it, Spec Ops knew, then Cunliffe proved them right. And one look at you eight years ago, and she saw all of it. And she won’t forget.

  Until one day the only thing left to do was walk away. He had no idea then that it would take so long to come back. But he couldn’t return while she was still in his bloodstream, like a drug—while he still thought of her the way he did; still dreamed of her. So six months passed, then twelve, then eighteen. And slowly she ebbed out of his system, until his dreams were of all the old things: a man at a desk, a rooftop at night, that farmhouse. That was when he knew he should come back.

  The first thing he did, once he was sure it was safe, was try to reach her.

  The old phone number was answered by a man, a Scot whose voice he didn’t recognize. He hung up without speaking. She wasn’t at the old address either. But he still had an old code for a meeting, a place and a time. All he had to do was find her.

  And now he’s seen her. And it was all right, wasn’t it? He kept it professional.

  That’s right, you keep telling yourself that. Asking her all those questions when you already knew the answers, as if she wouldn’t notice. Talking just to keep her there. Stalling on that last big question, scared the answer would be no and the moment she said it there’d be nothing else to say.

  What did he think? That he’d come back and things would somehow be different? That he’d feel nothing?

  Or that she’d be pleased?

  She never even asked him where he’d been.

  So what does that leave him with now? The job? A hit in the Program?

  Even she can’t get him in there.

  Night has tipped over into morning before he sleeps, and tonight he dreams one of the old dreams again. Though it is less of a dream, more of a memory:

  He’s in an office, standing to attention in front of a desk. Behind the desk a man in uniform sits, his hands clasped on top of a paper file.

  “This is no reflection on your abilities,” the man says, and at that point he wakes with the familiar deadweight in his stomach, the taste of failure in his mouth.

  His mobile’s ringing. He picks up—“Hello?”—and Karla says, “I think I can find a way,” and something inside him twists just at the sound of her voice.

  “One thing,” she says, and he can guess what’s coming. “John Quillan runs the Program.”

  “He doesn’t know who I am.”

  There’s a short silence from Karla, then she says, “I’ll get back to you.”

  “Well?” Fielding says. He’s angry—tight shouldered in his expensive cashmere coat, his fists clenched beneath the cuffs, his seventy-year-old face all crags and lines. It’s as if he’s come here for answers, except there aren’t any. “Well?” he says again, then: “Fuck you.”

  Johanssen digs his hands into his jacket pockets. It’s a cold pale day. They’re on a scrap of riverbank east of Woolwich. In front of them the Thames slides by, fast and gray: the tide’s turned. At their backs there’s a hoarding with a picture of neon-lit glass towers and, behind that, a building site. Cranes pivot against the sky. It’s an exposed place: nothing to stop the wind slicing upriver, and too much sky.

  “This is a joke,” Fielding says. The old routine. “This is a fucking joke.”

  Johanssen says, “I’m just checking it out. I go in, I look around, I come out. Forty-eight hours. That’s all.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Fielding says. “John Quillan runs the Program.” As if he didn’t know right from the start, from the moment he first outlined the job, smoking his cigar in the dark of a Soho back room, his smile oozing smugness: You’ll love this one, this one’s fucking mission impossible, the client’s out of their tiny mind. Johanssen looks away.

  But Fielding’s stare is still locked on him. “And what? You think there’s some statute of limitations operating in there? Or Quillan’s got amnesia, has he? After what happened to Terry Cunliffe, you think he’ll have forgotten?”

&nb
sp; “He doesn’t know who I am,” Johanssen says, then, “If it’s not safe I pull out.”

  Fielding says, “Safe? ’Course it’s not fucking safe. And how d’you think you’re going to pull out? It’s a prison, a fucking prison—you can’t just walk away.”

  A pair of gulls comes screaming overhead, and on the building site something mechanical judders into life behind the hoarding, belching diesel fumes.

  Fielding mutters, “We should be using inside talent. Place is full of murderers, let one of them do it. Find a guy who’s just been sentenced, get to him before he goes in—someone with kids on the outside—we lift one, we make it clear how far we’re prepared to go.”

  The thought sickens him, but it’s irrelevant anyway. It isn’t going to happen. “I’m doing it,” Johanssen says.

  Of course he is. He’s never failed a job. And still Fielding comes up with this stuff, reminding him how difficult it is, pretending to try to talk him out of it, because that’s what makes him want it, isn’t it? One day he’ll say, You can stop now. I’m already committed. He hasn’t, yet.

  “And Karla? Can she get you in there?”

  “She’s looking into it.”

  If Fielding’s pleased, he doesn’t want to show it; he turns his head away.

  On the other side of the site a pile driver rams supports into the mud. Through a gap in the hoarding they watch.

  At last Johanssen says, “Have you got it?”

  But Fielding hasn’t finished yet. He says, “Why should I give it to you? You should be sitting this one out. This is the one you can’t deliver, and you know it. Everyone’s got a limit, son. Even you. But you don’t want to hear that, do you?”

  The pile driver cuts out.

  “Have you got it?” Johanssen says again.

  Fielding reaches into his coat, pulls out an envelope, pushes it into Johanssen’s hand. “What is it with you?” he asks bitterly. “What the fuck is it?” Then he says, as if it disgusts him, as if it goes against everything that’s right and proper, “It’s not even like you want the money.”

  The envelope is plain, brown, unmarked. Johanssen doesn’t open it.