“Laura …” Whitman says.
I know just from his voice. We’ve lost him.
“They checked out his accommodation,” Whitman says. “No sign.” Then, wounded, as if he thinks I might somehow—unjustly—hold him responsible: “They can’t keep tabs on everyone, the place is self-regulating, right? They’re watching the surveillance feeds for him. And they’ll search again tomorrow morning.”
Tomorrow is too late.
“Laura?” Whitman says, tentatively.
But he’s only going to ask what the problem is, and I can’t tell him.
“Tomorrow morning,” I say, and ring off.
My stomach’s sour with anxiety. Keep a lid on it. The army trained Johanssen as a sniper: he knows how to survive, undetected, within enemy territory for days. One night in the Program is nothing. Whatever has happened, wherever he is, of all the people you know he’s the best equipped to deal with it.
And the woman? The target who isn’t even in the records? What is that? Coincidence?
With anyone else—anyone else at all—my fears would have a different script, different images. Johanssen snatched off the street in a Land Rover. Or asked to step aside—This way, Mr. Jackson—as he went through the gates. I’d be putting out feelers—among the specialist departments of the Met, the intelligence services, even offshore agencies—for the first hint of a high-value prisoner undergoing interrogation. And wondering how far those five months of Spec Ops training would take him: standard police questioning won’t be an issue for him, but the same people who taught him to withstand interrogation could be involved in the process of breaking him now. How well did they do their job, all those years ago? How far have they refined their techniques since then? How good is he, how long will it take to break him, and how soon before they get to me?
But this isn’t anyone else: it’s Simon Johanssen, and he’s gone into the Program.
Four men in that farmhouse when Terry Cunliffe died. Quillan went after all of them. He caught only three. Johanssen he never found. Until now.
DAY 7: TUESDAY
JOHANSSEN
He’s on the floor, on his side, when the door opens. Hours could have passed, he’s not sure. A grunted instruction, and he’s yanked back onto his feet, still bound and hobbled, still with the hood over his head.
There’s a thick ache in the back of his skull, the copperish taste of blood in his mouth. His guts are raw.
They make him walk.
Out through the door. Darkness, and the pinprick glimmer of electric lights through the hood. It’s night. No point in trying to memorize the route, too many turns. Halts and starts, murmured conversation. They’re in no hurry. Sometimes he stumbles, but they keep him upright.
At last they stop. Somewhere close the damp air fizzes with an electrical charge. A metal gate unlatches and creaks open. They march him on, and the gate rattles shut.
Now they have him by the elbows, and they’re steering him forward fast. Another halt. Footsteps moving away. Up ahead, a door swinging softly on its hinges, open and closed. A wait of how long? Four, five minutes? He sways on his feet. Distant voices, a conversation just outside his range: he strains, but he can’t pick up any words. Then through a door, and the quality of air and sound changes: they’re inside now.
His boots rasp on concrete. He trips and falls forward; his shins crack on stair treads. Hands grab him, haul him up. A turn at the top. Another corridor, another door. They push him through.
Carpet muffles his footsteps. Different smells, too, clean homely smells, food and polish. The air’s warm. Faintly in the background, a TV mumbles.
He’s pushed down into a seat, and they pull the hood off.
He blinks in the light.
He’s in a neat, old-fashioned sitting room. Holy pictures on the wall: the Madonna in blue, one hand raised in blessing or appeal, and a teenage saint shot through with arrows, casting tragic eyes to heaven while his wounds open like tiny mouths and bleed. Below the pictures, a houseplant on a stand. A veneered mahogany cabinet: a concealed fluorescent strip lights up someone’s best china—dishes and soup tureens and gravy boats. Through an arch to one side is a kitchen: a brief glimpse of gleaming worktop, coffee mugs on a little wooden tree.
Across the sitting room a TV is playing with the volume turned low: a sitcom is showing, the dialogue a low blur of sound, punctuated by canned laughter.
A small, elderly man with skin like a corpse’s sits in an armchair, watching the TV.
But it was always going to be this, wasn’t it? Always.
A minute passes, and then John Quillan speaks.
“Welcome to the Program, Mr. Jackson.” His voice is quiet. He sounds bored. He hasn’t taken his eyes off the TV. “How do you like our little social experiment?”
The blond smiling man from outside the canteen has taken up a position behind Quillan’s chair. He watches Johanssen, head tilted to one side. He’s still smiling. Johanssen says nothing.
“Do you know who we are?” Quillan asks.
Something has closed his throat. He has to force the words out, one by one. “You’re—in—charge—here.”
For the first time Quillan turns his head to look at Johanssen. His eyes are pale blue and watery, the whites bloodshot as if he has trouble with them. “My name is John Quillan,” he says. “Does that mean anything to you?”
Three men dead, one in a quarry, two in a car, all tortured before they died. He can still remember their faces. “Yes.” His voice cracks.
Quillan’s mouth gives a little twitch of satisfaction.
“We are the law,” he says, as if Johanssen hasn’t spoken, “and you are on our territory. Under our jur-is-dic-tion. My job”—he leans forward—“is to keep order here.” He sits back again, as if he’s made a point. “Do you think that’s easy, Mr. Jackson?”
Johanssen says nothing. His guts squirm. Quillan turns his gaze to the TV again.
“Governing the violent, the addicted, the sick … You’ll understand the need to be firm. To make an example, where necessary.”
From the set the canned laughter crackles again, a rasping mechanical sound.
“So you’re from America,” he says, and he smiles at the TV, though his skin seems too tight for it, and the expression fades instantly.
“Victorville pen,” Johanssen says. A hard knot of something has formed below his lungs.
“Don’t know it.” Don’t want to. Quillan’s gaze swivels, locks back onto him. “What brings you here?”
“I asked for a transfer.”
“Ah, like football.” Quillan nods. “Thought your prospects would be better here?”
“I heard—I heard about this place—I thought—”
“You thought you’d have an easy life here, Mr. Jackson? What were you down for in Victorville pen?” The name spat out, like a bad taste.
He doesn’t know who I am.
“Life. Double murder.”
“But life means life in the States, doesn’t it? What would persuade them to agree to your request? The kindness of their hearts?” Quillan asks, reasonably, “What have you offered them, Mr. Jackson?”
He hasn’t lured you here, this isn’t revenge. He doesn’t know. The relief almost swamps him.
“They think I’ve got some information.”
“And have you?”
“They think I have.”
“Shop your friends for an easy life in the Program? It wouldn’t be the first time.” Then he says, “Or maybe it’s something else.”
Johanssen says, “All I want is—”
“To come here. To come here and keep your head down and your nose clean, just like everyone else. You know what my problem is? I don’t trust you, because I don’t know who you are.”
“My name is—”
“Ryan Jackson, so you say, serving life for double murder at Victorville penitentiary, but no one here’s ever been to Victorville penitentiary and no one can vouch for you.” He sits back in
his seat. “Are you a clever man, Mr. Jackson? I think you might be. But what’s a clever man doing, walking into a place like this with a story that he’s about to shop his friends? Why would he own up to that? Unless it’s just a cover—oh, did you expect to be taken on trust? That’s not how things work around here.”
“Talk to the screws, I came through reception this morning, they’ve got my file—”
“The screws?” For a second Quillan looks almost pleased. “Oh no,” he murmurs, “no, Mr. Jackson. We have a different way of checking our facts here.” His gaze switches back to the TV. “Mr. Brice.”
The interview is over. The smiling man steps forward.
The knot of hope in Johanssen’s guts turns to water.
Quillan says, “Mr. Brice will take care of things from here.”
They bundle Johanssen back along the corridor at a stumbling run, punching their way through fire doors.
Back to the stairs and down. Right, along a bare corridor, and then they open a door and throw him in.
It’s the room he’s been expecting all along. No furniture. Cement-block walls. One window small and high. The floor is sticky with dark stains.
The blond man, Brice, strolls in behind them. He looks down at Johanssen. Now his smile’s a smile of regret. “You realize what we have to do, don’t you?” he says gently.
Johanssen says nothing.
They force him onto his knees and turn him toward the wall.
Someone kicks him in the kidneys. He goes down. The second blow, to his guts, doubles him, gasping.
Brice bends over him. His gaze is focused, intent. “Are you a fast learner, Mr. Jackson?” As if he genuinely wants to know. “I hope so, for your sake.”
Johanssen says nothing.
Brice steps back, signals to the others. “If you would.”
They get on with it, fists and feet, picking up where they left off, but harder this time. Twenty seconds’ worth and they step back. He’s on the floor now, on his side, unable to rise. When Brice steps forward, the toes of his boots are inches from Johanssen’s eyes.
Brice crouches and reaches out a hand; delicately his fingertips brush Johanssen’s face. “You don’t understand,” he says, “none of this is necessary. Now, you can tell me: who are you really?”
Johanssen swallows, puts the words in order. You stick to your story, or you say nothing. “I told you—”
Brice straightens. “I’m sorry,” he says.
Johanssen blocks it all out then, shuts it down. He has to get to the other side of this, that’s all. He concentrates on that. There’s nothing else he can do.
After a while they go out, and he lies on his side, in the dirt, and practices breathing.
Somehow he sleeps, in fitful, broken snatches—it must be sleep because noises keep bringing him around, voices, doors banging.
Somewhere between sleep and waking, the face from the photo comes back to him: the woman in the gray suit, with a smile like a shutter coming down. He tries to blank it out, but up it floats again, like a drowned face rising through water.
Footsteps in the corridor outside jolt him awake in a sweat, his senses raw, guts lurching, every muscle screaming.
A lock rattles. A wedge of light: the door, opening.
Something clatters, at floor level. Something metallic.
He tries to gather himself. Any minute it will begin again. He has to be ready for it.
The light goes on, a single bulb, painfully bright. Brice is standing over him. He crouches down, tilts his head to one side.
“Thinking this was all a bit of a mistake, eh?” he says. The others are behind him.
Johanssen doesn’t move. Moving will only provoke them. He forces himself to go limp, swallowing the pain as they haul him upright again.
Another beating? But the one with the yellow teeth has a length of tubing and a funnel in his hands, and the metal thing on the floor is a bucket with something stinking in it.
He mustn’t fight it; he must stay relaxed. It’ll hurt less that way. But when they force his head back and his mouth open and jam the gag in place, raw instinct kicks in, and he fights against them, ignoring the screaming pains in his back, his shoulders, his ribs.
The tube goes down his throat.
When they’ve finished they take the bucket and the tube and the funnel, and they turn the light out. The door closes, and the darkness surges in again.
He lies there in his own vomit. The night stretches ahead of him like an endurance test.
DAY 7: TUESDAY
KARLA
I have phoned Fielding again. I had to. “Your man’s missing in the Program.”
A pause. A silence I can’t read. I forge ahead. “Give me a name for the client.”
“Fuck off, Karla.”
“Johanssen’s disappeared, and the target isn’t in there—”
“I spoke to the client. She’s in there.”
“She’s not.”
“She is—”
“Who are they?”
Another pause. He’s weighing up how much to tell me.
“Fielding, you said they came with references—”
Stonily: “No one who connects to John Quillan.”
“Which side of the line?”
“Civilian.” An ordinary citizen, then, a member of the public. Or claiming to be. “Karla, they’ve got grounds—”
I snatch at that. “What grounds? What did she do? Because it never made the news. A name, Fielding—”
“Dream on.” And then he says, “She’s in there. He’ll be fine. He’s always fine.”
Because of me, he’s always fine because of me, because I’ve made sure we always had the data, except now I haven’t.
And still I’m recounting to myself everything I’ve done to keep him safe, trying to draw some reassurance from that—We wiped his ID, we deleted everything. No one can say he isn’t Ryan Jackson, and Charlie Ross is dead—there is no way John Quillan knows who he is, no way that he can tie him to that farmhouse …
Pointless, telling myself that. If Quillan knows, then “how” is irrelevant. What matters is what happens next. What’s happening now.
At 8:00 p.m. the last of Finn’s inmate search results come in. There was, and is, no trace of the woman within the prison system.
And then, just gone 10:00 p.m., Finn gets into the list of volunteers working in the Program. There aren’t many. The woman isn’t among them.
Which only leaves clutching at straws.
Finn replies:
In my apartment the blinds are up. Electric lights illuminate the empty shells of the offices opposite. To the west, the sky above the City is a yellowish black.
Not in the Program list. Not in the prison system. Not a volunteer, not security, not staff. Where does that leave us?
I phone Craigie and tell him what’s happened. Immediately he says, “I’m coming over,” and I know he isn’t thinking of John Quillan. He’s thinking of that other scenario: the prepared security services trap, Johanssen being sweated in an interrogation suite, the slow collation of names … how much Johanssen knows about me, how he was able to contact me, how traceable I am.
He’s thinking: we still have time to wipe the files, destroy the hard drives, erase every last trace of Karla and of Charlotte Alton. If we have to.
And I can’t argue against it. The woman in the picture is not in the Program. Johanssen knows who I am, and he’s walked into a trap.
Suddenly, in a breath, in a heartbeat, less, in my head the scenario flips.
The woman in the picture—
When Craigie arrives, the first words he uses are “damage limitation.”
I know what he’s about to say: that I must leave, tonight, within the hour, and I must leave assuming that I’m never coming back. But I’m not leaving, for one reason and one reason alone.
If I were baiting a trap for Johanssen, I’d assume he would check it
out, and he’d be thorough.
I’d use a real prisoner.
DAY 8: WEDNESDAY
JOHANSSEN
He has no idea what time it is when the door opens. Someone flicks a switch: the light is a sickly fluid stain on his retina.
“Get up,” says a voice he doesn’t know.
But he’s weak with vomiting, and in the end they have to haul him to his feet.
It’s daylight outside. The sky is yellowish white, streaked with gray, like marble. They half walk, half drag him around the building and into a narrow yard hemmed in with blank walls, no cameras. A blind spot. Off the record.
The first thing he sees is Quillan. He’s sitting in a lightweight folding chair, wrapped in a big coat, like an invalid at a picnic. His eyes slide over Johanssen, dispassionately.
Brice is standing at Quillan’s shoulder, out of the older man’s line of sight. There’s a baseball bat propped up against the wall beside him. His smile is the smile of something higher up the food chain, too many teeth.
In Johanssen’s memory the tube goes down his throat, and he gags.
There are maybe a dozen others in the yard, Brice’s crew among them, and they’re all looking at him.
“Mr.… Jackson,” Quillan says.
Quillan has a red scarf tucked inside the collar of his overcoat: the color beats like a pulse in the winter light.
He has to focus. Stay in the present, pull it together.
“So it’s true,” Quillan says, “you’d shop your friends for a place in the Program,” and he gives one of his stretched smiles, as if the skin might split. “I like that. I like to know what a man’s priorities are. You’d do anything to stay, wouldn’t you?”
Anything. It’s not even a word when it comes out of his mouth, just a dry croak of sound. He swallows.
“Again, we need to put that to the test.” Quillan turns his head, speaks over his shoulder. “Brice?”
Brice steps forward, and his smile broadens. “Mr. Jackson,” he says. “I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. Jimmy?”
At the sound of his name, he comes forward: a bright-eyed, birdlike man in his forties. He has a nervous, eager smile, and there’s a weird neatness about him, as if he’s dressed for an interview: his thin dark hair carefully slicked down, his shirt buttoned up to the collar under a cheap jacket.
The Distance: A Thriller Page 8