“When Ryan Jackson goes back to California.” For a moment Craigie sounds bitterly impressed.
“It’ll be like he never left.”
“And Jackson has no U.K. criminal associates?”
I shake my head. “Not as far as I can see. Though I’ll keep looking.”
“He’ll need a chaperone.” Then something clicks behind his eyes. “Whitman. You phoned him before you came here. That’s why you were late.”
Mike Whitman’s an intelligence contractor, a tall dyspeptic American with a faint Alabama twang to his accent and thirty years’ experience working the U.S. system—fifteen of them behind a CIA desk. He knows me as Laura Pressinger, has done for years; he’s not entirely sure who Laura’s people are—she doesn’t go in for business cards—but they’re definitely intelligence community. She’s legit. But occasionally she needs help from someone with a U.S. passport, an inside knowledge of U.S. intelligence, and a willingness to look the other way.
Whitman inhabits a gray world where anything can be fixed with the right contacts and plausible paperwork and where some form of double-dealing is standard business practice. Add to that a late first marriage eight months ago to a beautiful French girl and a move to Paris—at her insistence—and Whitman’s cut off from the contractor honey-pots of Washington and Langley. He has money worries. He wants the work. When I told him what I wanted, he said drily, “You’re still doing that James Bond shit, Laura,” and I replied, “You’d be disappointed if I didn’t,” and he laughed, but not like he meant it.
He’s catching the Eurostar from Gare du Nord today.
“If anyone can make this look good, it’s Whitman,” I say.
“And Washington?” Craigie asks. “U.S. Department of Justice playing along with this? One phone call is all it will take—”
“We can give Johanssen enough paperwork in the U.K. system to go through on the nod. It’ll be on all the right desks by Monday. This sort of thing, everyone just wants to make sure their arses are covered. And they will be. Johanssen turns up with an escort, and they’ll be expecting him.”
“Three weeks, you said. Where did that come from?” The smart question, as ever.
“It’s all we need.”
He says, “Or that’s how long you reckon you’ve got before someone calls Washington. And does Johanssen know the risks? If anyone looks hard at this—or if anyone does make that call to Washington while he’s in there—”
“Of course I’ll tell him.”
“But he’ll do it anyway, won’t he?” He shakes his head. Then, more quietly, he says, “It’s a hit in a prison, Karla,” and I know exactly what he means. It could be a trap.
“Fielding’s checked out the client. And Fielding’s a shit, but I trust him not to risk his best asset. I checked the Met, too—” Craigie’s features twitch. I’ve been in touch with my old police contacts and he doesn’t like it. I forge ahead regardless. “If someone in Organized Crime’s running a sting operation to catch a hit man, no one’s heard a whisper. In any case, does this look like a sting to you? You don’t make traps this difficult to walk into.”
“And you? What about the risks to you?”
“There is no risk to me.”
“Karla, a year ago we agreed—”
I know what we agreed. “It’s one job,” I say firmly, “nothing else. Just one.”
For a moment Craigie’s silent, looking down at the floor. He says quietly, “You can’t be part of this.”
“I already am. He came to me. He’s my responsibility.”
“Why, Karla? What makes him so special?”
But I don’t have an answer.
I think he’s done, but at the door—briefcase in one gloved hand, the other on the door handle—he pauses and looks back, and his pale narrow face is tight with disapproval.
“Think carefully about Simon Johanssen,” he says. “Isn’t he unreliable?”
I know why he says it. But every job Johanssen’s ever done has been clean. Except for the first. Except for Terry Cunliffe.
Terry Cunliffe: forties, a little overweight, round faced, permanently cheerful. A decent guy. He worked for John Quillan, small time, and maybe four or five times a year he came to me, his master’s emissary for minor trades—a request for information or something to sell. He wasn’t tough, and he wasn’t brave, but he suffered the indignities of our security procedures with gentle good humor. I liked him. I liked him a lot, though I never let him see my face.
Terry was a nobody until John Quillan went to war with Charlie Ross, and Terry became a target.
And Simon Johanssen was a nobody, too—an ex-squaddie on the streets—until Charlie Ross recruited him and sent him after Terry, though he was only there to make up the numbers, in case there was trouble.
The trouble didn’t materialize. Terry was alone.
They put him in a car and drove him to a remote farmhouse. After that, things ran out of control. Before the night was over Terry was dead. Not the clean way, though; not the bullet-to-the-head way.
By the time Johanssen got to me, events had taken a predictable course. The three other men who’d escorted Terry to the farmhouse were dead, too—two in a quarry, one in a burned-out car on a country lane—killed on the orders of Terry’s boss, John Quillan. All three had been tortured before they died.
Johanssen would be next.
He didn’t know that I knew Terry. He’d simply come to me to disappear. He had no reason to lie; no reason to know that when I said, Complete disclosure is vital, I was bracing myself to hear about the last, horrific hours of a man I knew and liked. But I had to know. Knowing what happened would justify what was to come. The moment when I told him, I’m sorry, we can’t help you. The moment when we put him back out there, unprotected, and turned away while Quillan’s people closed in.
Complete disclosure is vital. Of course, I thought I knew it all already. It turned out I was wrong.
We made him disappear. We went through his life, piece by piece: his National Insurance number, National Health number, tax reference code—every place he’d ever lived, every school he’d ever attended, every job he’d ever done. We took his passport, his bank details, his credit cards, his driver’s license. And we wiped him from the record.
Craigie didn’t understand what we were doing. Ironic, since he found the clue, when we were stripping out the last of the physical evidence, deleting every little scrap of Simon Johanssen’s past: an MoD memo referring to a set of psychological test results, from the very end of that Special Ops training. The memo itself was in opaque military jargon, but in the margin someone had scribbled Unreliable.
Craigie saw that word and thought, This man’s a psycho, ticking like a bomb. But Craigie wasn’t in the room that night. He didn’t hear the story. He doesn’t know that there are other kinds of unreliable, and Johanssen’s one of them.
It doesn’t make him any less dangerous; some would argue it makes him more so. I understood that at that time. Still, I had to let him live.
I deleted Simon Johanssen’s past, then sent a message to the squat where he was holed up. In less than fifteen minutes he’d gone, as if he’d never been there. Within twenty-four hours he was out of the country, on a fake ID that he would abandon shortly afterward in Tunis. And that was the end of it; that’s what I thought.
I didn’t know that he’d be coming back; and coming back a different man.
At 9:54 on Saturday night, my safe phone rings.
Robbie’s East End accent: “He’s on his way. With you in six.” He sounds peeved: it beats him how anyone manages to get so close without being spotted.
At ten on the dot Johanssen arrives at my apartment. I hesitated before giving him the address, but he had it already. Of course he did.
Tonight he has the scrubbed carbolic cleanness of a man who doesn’t spend time on how he looks, but that’s an illusion. He’s studied hard to make himself a blank canvas, edit out any element of his appearance that might s
nag on the memory, and now his anonymity is perfect. He could be anyone.
And before twenty-four hours is up he’ll be someone else again: wearing different clothes, shackled to a different past, answering to a different name.
So few people can do what he’s about to do. Most can’t cope with the discipline of it all, the loss of contact with their own lives. They become restless, and then they start to break the rules, out of carelessness or frustration. But not men like him: for them, the shift from one life to the next is nothing more than taking off one jacket and putting on another.
Some of this is the result of sheer willpower. But some of it is down to isolation. He cut all ties with his family years ago. He has few associates, and no close friends. He sleeps alone.
Perhaps that’s what makes it so easy for him: because he has so little life to miss.
“You’re going in as a man called Ryan Jackson, British born but a U.S. resident, and down for life in Victorville penitentiary, California: murder, two counts. We’re going to borrow his ID.” I push a paper file across the coffee table to where Johanssen sits. Immediately he starts to flick through it. It contains everything I’ve managed to glean about Jackson’s life. There are even photos of the girlfriend, as she was when she first met Jackson, and then afterward, as the police found her. The wounds are shocking; but he just blinks three times, rapidly, then turns the page without a word. He’s seen it all before.
“Your escort is an American contractor called Whitman. He knows you’re not Jackson. That’s all he does know. He doesn’t know why you’re going in, and he won’t ask. How long do you need for reconnaissance?”
Johanssen doesn’t glance up from the file. “Forty-eight hours.”
“All right. When forty-eight hours are up, Whitman will get you pulled out for a little chat. At that point you get to choose: stay out or go back in.”
“How long have we got, all told?”
“From first entry to final exit? I reckon three weeks, after which he pulls you out of there permanently. Is three weeks enough?”
He gives the ghost of a shrug; it’ll have to do.
“And in that time we need to keep you as low profile as possible. If anyone gets restless, starts asking questions, we’ll get you out but there’s always a danger with these—”
“I know,” he says.
“Whitman will also give you a number you can reach him on, anytime, day or night. If you have a problem, call him saying you’re ready to talk and he’ll get you lifted.”
“There won’t be a problem,” he says.
I push a second file toward him. “The Program,” I say. “Run by a private security concern and ruled by John Quillan.” I lean forward in my seat, willing him to meet my gaze. “He’ll wonder who you are.”
He doesn’t look up. “I’m Ryan Jackson,” he says. As if that’s an end to it.
Of course: only Charlie Ross could ID him, and Charlie Ross is dead.
He begins to read, and while he reads I watch him.
He doesn’t seem to resent my scrutiny, though he must be aware of it. But he’s a sniper, with a sniper’s overdeveloped ability to focus, and right now he’s directing it toward the man he’s about to become and the place he’s about to go. Once in a while he leans back and closes his eyes, reviewing the information, replaying it to himself. Sometimes his hands move fractionally as he does so, and the scars on his knuckles shine in the light.
Another empty room, same set of lights. Simon Johanssen again, but two years later. Terry Cunliffe’s horrific death reduced to the scar tissue of memory. John Quillan and Charlie Ross both behind bars, unlikely to get out.
Johanssen had a different name this time; he worked for Fielding, and he wanted information. We’d brought him in with all the usual precautions: black plates on the van, a hood over his head. This time we kept the hood on.
I stood before his chair and said, “Remember me?”
For ten seconds he didn’t move. Then he said, “I never got your name last time.”
“Karla,” I said. “You can call me Karla.”
“A spy’s name,” he said.
“George Smiley’s nemesis.” I hadn’t pictured him reading Le Carré.
“Who?” he said.
“Nothing. So,” I said, “you want information.”
It was for a hit.
That was where we began again, though for another two years after that we only ever met in empty rooms, with the light between us: me in shadow and invisible, him in the glare and blind—but always quiet, patient, reticent, polite, sitting very still under those lights, only ever asking the necessary questions; never pushing at the boundaries of our relationship, never presuming anything.
Four years ago I let him see my face.
He specializes in the difficult jobs, the technical ones, the ones requiring care and patience, with a high degree of risk; his record is unbroken. And he has rules, though it took me time to work them out. He doesn’t talk about them.
Some like to watch the aftermath. They sit through the customary four-second frozen silence in order to see the horror unfolding on the onlookers’ faces, the mouths stretching into screams; see them clutching at one another as they flail for cover. He isn’t one of them.
Some accept that collateral damage—a bystander down, a little extra blood on the pavement—is an occupational hazard. He isn’t one of them either.
And some will loose off a second bullet into the chaos, even though the job’s over. Just for fun. Their treat. To him, they are sick. He is careful with the lives of others.
His targets never know and never suffer, even the ones who might deserve to: the gangster with a taste for torture, the woman who traffics children into the sex trade, the pedophile who’s walked free on a technicality. That’s the narrow focus of Johanssen’s morality: not whether they die—someone else has decided that—but how.
Does this make him a good man or a hypocrite? I’m not sure. I live in a world where there are few good people. Perhaps I have no frame of reference.
Craigie’s baffled by him still. He’s said it more than once: Any sane person would have had screaming nightmares after what happened to Cunliffe. Simon Johanssen just got better at what he did.
He’s right: in six years Johanssen’s only ever been efficient, methodical, professional, each hit clean and perfect.
But still I can’t help wondering if the man who fled that farmhouse after Terry Cunliffe died—the man the army branded unreliable—is sitting before me now.
He just won’t let me see it.
He has a version of the Program map in front of him—there are landmarks he must memorize, refuges he may need if this goes wrong—and he’s scanning it for details when I say, “If you have a problem, get to a phone. Call Whitman. He’ll get you lifted as soon as possible. But there are restrictions. The patrols?”
Without taking his eyes off the map he says, “Snatch Land Rovers, three-man crews, armed.”
“Officially they circulate day and night. But at night the Program goes into a sort of lockdown. Gates are closed. Patrols go back to their secure bases and on the whole they stay there.” I lean forward. “You have a problem, get out by six. Because after that, you’re in there until morning.”
Johanssen nods, still doesn’t look up from his map.
“As for the target: we’re still awaiting access to inmate records. We may get in within the next few days, we may not, so there’s a chance you’ll go in without knowing—”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m just checking it out.”
“Fielding say what she did?”
“Just something bad.”
“That’s all?”
He shrugs.
Not murder, though. We would have found her. She would have made the news, would have left a dirty smear across the media and the Internet. The women always do. But I’ve searched through trial reports and wanted lists and even the specialist true-crime websites, and there’s no sign of her.
“I can’t find her,” I say.
He doesn’t reply.
“Johanssen, identifying her is due diligence …”
For the first time he looks up at me. His eyes—a bleak North Sea gray in this light, though I know they are blue—are very clear.
“I’m just checking it out,” he says.
It’s after three on Sunday morning when he leaves. As soon as he’s gone I walk into my office and begin to destroy the files. I’ve discreetly tapped into my building’s security camera network, and so the live CCTV feed on the office screen picks up Johanssen as he crosses the ground-floor lobby, nodding to the night porter. He walks out through the front doors and into the night: an anonymous figure in a dark coat. Mr. Nobody. You wouldn’t look twice.
I go back to the main window expecting to see his dark shape crossing the walkways, but he’s already vanished.
The phone rings. Robbie. “Tail him?” he asks.
I say, “Don’t bother.”
Someone wants a woman dead; wants it badly enough to pay through the nose for it. They’ve read the reports on the Internet—read about the Program’s sports facilities and training opportunities, its small-business initiatives and its restaurant—and believed every word. Now they want the punishment to fit the crime, whatever it was … I’ve put away her picture, but still it seems to float in the air before me: the young woman with a smile you can’t get past. Yet again I’m back at that imaginary front page, that screaming headline. What’s she done? And why can’t I find her?
The phone rings a second time. Craigie, this time, on a secure landline. He doesn’t talk on mobiles: risk, again. For half a second I wonder if Robbie’s not the only one who’s been watching—if Craigie’s had my building under surveillance, too, has seen Johanssen leaving, and now he’s going to have one last try at wrenching control of this from me.
The Distance: A Thriller Page 4