The Distance: A Thriller

by Helen Giltrow

  “What did they do?” he asks.

  Fielding just says, “Something bad.”

  He waits until he’s got the front door locked, the curtains tightly drawn, before he opens the envelope.

  It contains a single sheet: a photograph run out from a cheap domestic color printer, on office paper. For a long time he just stares at it. Then he puts it back into the envelope. Within twenty minutes it will be out of his hands.

  The image sits in his mind, whole and perfect.

  For some reason he wasn’t expecting a woman.

  DAY 2: THURSDAY–DAY 5: SUNDAY

  KARLA

  I have a dinner party to go to on Thursday night—or Charlotte Alton does, though tonight she’s less-than-sparkling company. The envelope’s waiting for me when I get back to my apartment just gone eleven: the night porter catches my eye as I cross the lobby and holds it out to me.

  Two glasses of wine evaporate from my bloodstream in the time it takes to ride the lift up to my floor. As soon as I’m through the front door I rip the seal and pull out the sheet of paper.

  She’s maybe thirty, slim, with hair the color of pale butter, and in the photo she’s wearing a high-buttoned gray suit. It has an expensive look, and so does her hair: she could be a corporate lawyer, well bred, locked down. Her smile is like armor.

  I swear I know that face.

  There’s no accompanying name, no background details; just the picture.

  What did she do, this closed-down rich girl? Why does someone want her dead?

  But it’s simple: she’s a convicted criminal, like everyone else in the Program, and at some point her face has been splashed across tabloids and TV screens. Less than a second and my imagination’s assembled a front page: alongside the photo the word MONSTER! stands out in eighty-point capitals.

  Revenge hit, it has to be … Payback for some gangland betrayal? Or victim’s family. One or the other. Odd that Fielding hasn’t given a name, though. We should have more than this.

  Hands on the keyboard. Our dialogue, stripped of its origins, bounces through proxy servers on three continents. My lack of jargon marks me as an outsider, but I don’t let it bother me these days, and if it bothers Finn, Finn never says.

 

  The answer comes back almost instantly.

 

  I read surprise into that. Over the last year Finn, like many in my network, has become used to dealing with Craigie.

 

  We can’t hack the system, but we don’t need to. All we need is a copy of the data.

  A pause. Finn is thinking about this, or the servers are running slow.

 

 

  Finn’s standard response. It used to annoy me. But it’s not like it is in the movies: this could take days, weeks … Finn has no idea. I’ll let you know is as much as I’m ever going to get.

  I sever the connection and sit back in my chair.

  I spoke to Fielding again this afternoon, pushed for details about the client, but they’re nameless too: Fielding has rules about anonymity. “They’ve come with references” is all he’ll say this time—someone else, someone he’s done business with and trusts, has vouched for them; again he won’t say who. Then he asked me if I knew how I was going to get Johanssen into the Program, and I stonewalled right back at him; said I was working on it. Trust is a two-way street, and we’re not on it. In fact I’ve spent my day locating the man who’ll be my key to this, though he’ll never know. The prime candidate’s image is staring from my screen right now. Later I will go back through his life, hunting for any reason to rule him out, but for now I’m content to leave him there, though he committed crimes I don’t want to contemplate … I think back to the woman in Johanssen’s picture. MONSTER. They’d make a lovely couple.

  Just then the digital clock in the office blinks from 23:59 to 00:00. Today is Friday.

  It’s time I talked to Craigie.

  I never meant to get into this life. Some things just happen.

  I got involved with Thomas Drew before I knew what he was, or what he did; you can do that when you’re twenty-three, and innocent. He had a clever mind, smooth hands, the liquid gaze of a charlatan, and a self-belief I’ve never seen in anyone else, before or since. We met at a party in Kensington; two hours later we were in bed.

  A week passed before I asked him what he did. The sign outside his office just read DREW. “Investigations,” he said, and smiled.

  A month after I came to work for him—routine surveillance, basic IT, answering the phone—I realized what he was really doing: the network he was building, and its clientele.

  A year later, and I knew it better than he did.

  He had an accountant: Alex Craigie. Thirty going on fifty, dark suited, tight lipped. I always assumed he didn’t like me much. My ally was Robbie: a Staffordshire bull terrier of a man, solidly built, genetically loyal, dangerous in a scrap. He’d been a foot soldier with one of the old East End crime families but gave that life up when his wife died, leaving him with a seven-year-old son to raise. He was Drew’s man for driving and surveillance, occasionally muscle. He and I once kissed in a car during a surveillance op, in those very early days; it was for entirely professional reasons, but when I want to embarrass him, I still remind him of that.

  Then one day we couldn’t find Drew anywhere. Information he’d supplied for a bank job had turned out bad, two men were dead—shot by police—and a notable London gangster was on his way to discuss the consequences.

  Drew had fled.

  Robbie told me to get out of there. I sent him home to his son. I expected Craigie to vanish, too—slide a bundle of financials into his briefcase and walk away—but to his credit, when I decided to hold my ground, he stayed.

  We have not always agreed, then or since; but a year ago, when I decided it was time to trust someone else with the day-to-day running of the network—minimize risk, get myself a life—there was only Craigie. He knows my sources, he pays my suppliers, he insulates me from my clients. He ensures my invisibility, keeps my hands clean, keeps me safe. Keeps me away from people like Simon Johanssen. That’s the theory, anyway.

  It’s dark at the back of the warehouse when I arrive on Friday, but I know my way. I know every one of our locations; I scouted them all myself. So I enter almost soundlessly, past the man on watch—just a faint creak from the door, the softest shuffle of a footstep. Still Craigie turns and frowns. When he sees me his narrow face angles a little to one side—curiosity, calculation?—but he says nothing. Right now it’s someone else’s turn for questions.

  In front of us and separated from us by a bank of bright lights pointing straight at him, a tall man in his early sixties sits, head down, elbows on knees, hands hanging limp. He’s slim, his gray hair well cut, his clothes casually expensive. Handsome in a hawkish kind of way; in a TV drama he’d play the upright patriarch, the aging general leading his men into one last battle. But this place and everything it took to get here—the hood, the van, the searches—have eroded his dignity: his face is pouchy and lined, and he’s sweating. Through the pricey aftershave I can smell his despair.

  “I resigned,” he says. “I simply felt that it was time to move on.” But his voice quavers.

  “You resigned, Mr. Hamilton? You weren’t asked to step aside while something nasty was brushed under the carpet?” Craigie’s kept his son-of-the-manse demeanor along with his East Kilbride accent. At times like these I can believe there’s not one chip of pity buried in his flinty soul. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  The man says nothing. He must realize this is part of the price to be paid. But Craigie isn’t doing it out of cruelty. Disclosure: we always insist on disclosure. We have to be sure of what we’re dealing with.

  Craigie says, “Let’s run over the story, shall we? You stepped down from your position with no wrong
doing, no blame attached, not a stain on your record, and a nice pension to boot. You have no dirty secrets, and no one’s blackmailing you. Yet you’ve come here offering a lot of money in return for a new life. People only do that when they’re running, Mr. Hamilton. The question is, what are you running from?” He pauses. “Well?”

  I don’t even hear the answer.

  Eight years ago I was in another warehouse, just like this one, but the man in the chair with the light in his face was Simon Johanssen.

  Clean shaven, brown hair. Dressed casually, in grays and blacks. Tidy, too: you wouldn’t have guessed that he’d been living rough. Trace evidence that he’d been in a fight—scabbed knuckles, fading bruises to his face—but none of the bulky bravado of the self-proclaimed hard man. Nothing flashy or distinctive either. Mr. Nobody. You wouldn’t look twice.

  He’d been hooded, searched, thrown into the back of an unmarked van with untraceable plates, and driven across London. He had a price on his head. He should have been sweating, and he wasn’t.

  “You have to tell us everything,” I’d said. “Complete disclosure is vital.”

  Except that I didn’t need him to tell me what he was running from. I already knew. Everyone knew.

  Of course, I’d read his file.

  Born in Salford, on a working-class street. Father a Swedish ex-sailor who liked to drink and use his fists—there were drunk-and-disorderly arrests, “domestic incidents” at the damp little house he grew up in, before his mother decided she’d had enough. (He was six when she left, but she didn’t take him with her.) Then the patchy school attendance, the poor grades. There should have been a record of juvenile crime, too—minor theft, that sort of thing—but even back then he was smart enough never to get caught.

  And after that, the army records. Squaddie, then sniper. Service in the Middle East. Commendations for courage under fire. The army saved him, didn’t it? Gave him family, structure, discipline, self-respect. Showed him what he could become, if he wanted it badly enough. And he wanted it.

  It ended with selection for “additional training.” The euphemism for some branch of Special Ops, tucked into a dark corner between British intelligence and the Ministry of Defence: people disappear into it, and they don’t always come out. But Johanssen did. Five months away from his unit—a scatter of codes in his file—and then he returned to standard combat duties. No mention of why; he said he didn’t know.

  Soon after he returned to his unit, he quit.

  The records ended there. Nothing on the months he spent adrift. Nothing on the drink with a friend of a friend in a London pub. Nothing on his recruitment into the gangster Charlie Ross’s private army. And nothing on the first job Johanssen was sent on, in the company of three others: to abduct a man called Terry Cunliffe and send a message to his boss.

  When I asked Johanssen what happened, all he said was “It went wrong.” But for the first time since they’d taken the hood off him, I saw a flicker of emotion, something in his eyes and mouth, something that might have been shame.

  It wasn’t enough; not to make up for what happened to Terry Cunliffe. I looked at him and thought, You’re going to die.

  “Fraud,” Craigie says, and he shakes his head. He doesn’t believe a word of it.

  We’ve moved into a small room with the windows boarded: it holds two uncomfortable chairs and a desk. Hamilton’s gone, hooded and hustled out of sight. I can make out faint clinks and scrapes and rattles as someone takes down the lights.

  “So who is he?” I ask.

  “William Arthur Hamilton. Worked for Hopeland, the medical giant. He was the contracts man. Director of collaborative ventures. Four million flu jabs? Government quarantine facility for biowarfare casualties? You went to him. Lots of offshore work and private contracts, but Whitehall jobs, too.” Craigie’s mouth is tight and humorless.

  “Plenty of room for fraud there.”

  Craigie gives another neat decisive shake of the head. “There’s more to it than that. He’s not just been lining his own pockets, taking aid money for vaccines that never existed. He’s too scared.” He smiles, a brief, sardonic smile. “Maybe he’s been accepting bribes from some nasty little regime to ship something he wasn’t supposed to. Maybe he didn’t deliver. Whatever he’s done, he thinks they’re coming after him. Or why demand the safe house?”

  “He’s not keen to share.”

  “He’ll change his mind. Give me a week, and we’ll have it out of him.” Craigie has a ruthless streak: in his dark suit and coat he looks like a small-town undertaker, but he’s a predator. But then his hard black eyes latch on to me. “You know I’d have preferred it if you hadn’t come.”

  We meet once a week, every Friday without fail, to run through the latest developments in the business. Usually the meeting takes place at my apartment, Craigie with a briefcase of bogus financial paperwork to back up the story that he’s some sort of financial adviser to me. But once in a while I ask to sit in on an interview. Just to keep my hand in? Or out of boredom? I don’t know. Charlotte Alton is my real name, the name I was born with. But for a long time she was just a cover, and even now, for all my efforts, I’m still not convinced she’s real. She lives only just enough to maintain her own fiction. She moves among people who accept her at face value and wouldn’t dream of asking personal questions. She is a pleasant companion, an easy conversationalist; she can be relied upon to support charitable causes and can be seated next to awkward dinner guests. But if she were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, how many people would notice?

  I stepped back from the running of the network to build myself a normal life. A year on, and I don’t have one yet. So sometimes I come to stand at the back of the room—hidden behind the lights, saying nothing. Still Craigie doesn’t like it.

  “You’re doing a fine job,” I say.

  “But you wanted to make sure.”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “And you don’t know Hamilton.”

  It’s true, Hamilton could easily be one of Charlotte Alton’s tribe—we might have rubbed shoulders in a theater or a concert hall. He’s the type: affluent, well connected … But he’s a stranger. I shake my head. “It’s just a site visit.”

  Craigie purses his lips. “Your coming here exposes you to—”

  “If it’s safe enough for you, it’s safe enough for me.”

  Craigie’s look tells me that’s not how he sees it. That look’s like a little jab at me. But isn’t this what I pay him for? To be cautious and conservative and risk averse. To pay as much attention to the details as I would myself. It still irritates.

  I swallow it. We have business to discuss.

  “So what have you got for me?” I ask, and we begin.

  An approach from a Russian group: well capitalized, but their internal security seems based largely on excessive and bloody violence; we’ll turn them away. A new Japanese intelligence source that looks secure: Craigie will check him out. An upgraded firewall at a European bank, but we have a contact in the software developers. And on, and on … Craigie’s narrow face creases with concentration as he pulls the facts out of his memory: potential clients, potential sources, potential threats. He’s trained himself never to make notes.

  It’s only when we’re done—when Craigie stands and dusts down his coat—that I say, “You remember Simon Johanssen.”

  His expression says it all. Of course he does.

  “He’s been in touch,” I say.

  Instantly his gaze sharpens. “With you? How did he contact you?”

  Calmly, as if it’s nothing that need trouble us: “The opera house. Last night.”

  “He approached you? In public?”

  “We were careful. No one saw.”

  “But he knew to find you there.” And then, more quietly, almost to himself, “This was always going to happen—”

  He breaks off. He’s said enough. Already the old argument’s filling the air between us. On everyone who’s seen
my face, everyone who can identify me, we hold incriminating information, and we make sure they know it. All except Johanssen.

  Finally he asks, “So what did he want?”

  “The usual. An ID for a job.” I pause. “It’s in the Program.”

  Craigie gapes.

  “He asked if I could get him in there. As an inmate, temporarily.”

  “You said no.”

  “I said I’d look into it.”

  “He’d need an inmate ID. It can’t be done.”

  I let the moment play out. “It can’t,” he says again. So I tell him.

  Ryan Jackson is thirty-five, though he looks older in the photo I’ve got. He was born in Britain, but moved to the United States at the age of twenty-seven—drawn to LA for all the wrong reasons. He shacked up with a local girl, a waitress, and for a while succeeded in evading the attention of U.S. immigration. Succeeded, that is, until the girl got sick of him and dumped him for another guy; at which point he went to her home, shot the guy, sawed off his head, placed the corpse in a chair with its back to the door and then waited for the girl to turn up. She let herself in and crossed to the chair, with no idea of what was waiting for her.

  Afterward he shot her, too. It took her six hours to die; he sat watching throughout. He later told police she’d had it coming.

  When they asked about the boyfriend, he just shrugged.

  He must have had a good lawyer; California has the death penalty, but he’s serving a life sentence in the penitentiary in Victorville.

  Ryan Jackson is scum of the lowest order. But he’s in the right age range, he’s the right height, and his physical resemblance to Johanssen is close enough.

  Craigie’s shaking his head. “And he comes to the Program why?” he demands. “Visiting friends?”

  “Our story will be that he’s got links to U.S. organized crime. He’s got information. Which he’s offered to share on condition he gets a transfer out of the U.S. and into the Program. The U.S. authorities will ask for U.K. cooperation on this; their man in the Program for three weeks to see if he’ll crack. But officially in that time he remains a U.S. prisoner, a U.S. responsibility, who’s entered the Program of his own free will. Effectively he’s a volunteer. So he never shows up on the Program inmate system. Ryan Jackson gives us the complete story: why Johanssen has to go in there, why he has to keep in touch with us while he’s in there, why he walks out at the end.”