Cate’s mouth is thin and tight. “Get out now.”
Brice’s smile doesn’t fracture, but his eyes go blank. “I’m here to see fair play. Check with Quillan.”
“Get out.” She takes a step forward. The needle in her hand lances the air.
Yellow Teeth says, “Fuck off, bitch—”
Quillan’s men shift again, but Brice raises his hand. “No need for that,” he says, and behind him the door bangs open.
A man’s body lolls lifelessly between three handlers. His clothes are heavy with blood, almost black with it; where they drag him he leaves a tarry smear on the floor.
Brice’s brow furrows briefly. “That looks bad,” he says, and he turns his smile on Johanssen again. “Your turn.”
He grabs pressure dressings, a drip set, a squidgy pack of plasma substitute. They’ve dumped the man on a trolley. His head rolls. Johanssen pulls the man’s tongue clear, checks his pulse. It barely whispers.
Behind him Cate’s voice, low and fast: “He’s not doing this alone.”
“Mr. Quillan’s terms,” Brice says placidly.
Expose the wound. He cuts the man’s clothes away. The abdomen’s been slashed open, showing the yellow lip of fat, the blue glisten of organs drowning in red.
Yellow Teeth giggles, high and sick. “Look at that—”
Johanssen snatches a plastic bottle of disinfectant, hoses out the cavity, once, twice. Hunts the source of the bleeding. There. The wound surges. He pushes gloved fingers against it. Now clamp it.
With his free hand he gropes for the clamp, misses—it clatters to the floor.
Brice murmurs, “It’s only his fingers, Cate.”
He blinks the sweat out of his eyes, reaches for another clamp. Blood’s pulsing out under his fingertips. Behind him Yellow Teeth sniggers. “Gonna die,” he sings softly, and then: “Chop chop.”
No.
Forget them all, there’s no one else in the room—no Cate, no Brice—and nothing beyond it, no yard, no bolt cutters, just him and the man on the trolley with his guts open. Come on, you bastard, don’t die on me.
Again. This time the clamp holds. Immediately the flood of red eases. He backs it up with a pressure dressing, taped hastily in place.
Now get a line in. He grabs the needle, exposes the man’s forearm. The flesh is pale and slack. He digs with the needle, probing. Once, and then again, and then again. Nothing. The veins have collapsed. Come on. And there—flashback, the telltale glimpse of blood in the tube. He slides a cannula over the needle into the vein, pulls the needle out, plugs the drip set into the outer end of the cannula, attaches the first liter of plasma substitute to the drip line.
Ventilate him.
Cate says sharply, “You’ve done enough, step aside,” but Johanssen doesn’t look up.
Mask. Bag.
Someone moves behind him. Yellow Teeth says, “Oh yeah?” and Riley hisses, “You fucking touch her—”
Johanssen places the mask over the man’s nose and mouth. Cate’s hand slides over his, holding it in place. “Enough,” she says, “you’ve done enough.” A glance at the blank-eyed boy. “Drill? Ventilate him.”
Johanssen steps back.
Yellow Teeth mutters, “Fucking bitch,” but Quillan’s men are moving in, and there’s a scalpel in Riley’s knotted fist. “Fancy some of that, do you?” he hisses. “Do you?”
Brice hasn’t moved.
He is still smiling: smiling like a man at a cocktail party. Only a tiny twitch in the corner of one eye betrays him.
Then he turns and strolls out of there, as if he paused to watch events unfold and now he’s lost interest.
Yellow Teeth backs away behind him: he can’t take his eyes off Riley and the scalpel. “Cunt,” he bawls at Cate before he plunges for the doors. She’s working on the man on the trolley. She doesn’t even blink.
Riley drops the scalpel onto a bench and shouts, “Vinnie!” and Vinnie scuttles forward with his mop and makes a wet red smear across the tiles.
Johanssen’s eyes are stinging with sweat. When he goes to wipe his forearm across his face, his own skin is slick with blood.
As soon as the man is stable Cate stalks out through a side door. After a moment Johanssen follows.
Beyond the door, a small room houses two decrepit metal cots, an old ventilator, and a thicket of drip stands. Cate’s sitting on one of the cots, eating a biscuit.
She looks up at him as he comes in, then reaches into the breast pocket of her shirt and pulls out a little packet of biscuits, just three in a sealed cellophane wrapper, the kind they leave next to the coffee at business presentations. She holds it out to him. There’s an identical one open in her lap. “Fucking take it,” she says.
He takes the packet from her without touching her fingers, opens it, and begins to eat.
“So how do you know this stuff?” she asks after a minute.
There’s nothing in Ryan Jackson’s personal history that would have given him medical training so he shrugs.
Her head comes up. Her stare is like a punch. “Brice set that up. That man was cut to order. You were supposed to fail.”
“But I didn’t.”
“And now you want to stay,” she says. “Why? Don’t tell me you just want to help, don’t tell me you want to say thank you—”
“I know what I’m doing,” he says. “I’m not here for the buzz, and I’m not here to prove myself. I can be useful.”
“Useful.” It comes out sick with disbelief.
“I won’t let you down,” he says.
She’s finished her biscuits. She screws up the cellophane wrapper, watches it uncurl in the palm of her hand, pushes it into her hip pocket. Her face is a small cold mask. Her eyes are brutal.
“All right,” she says, “this is how it works. Anyone who turns up at the compound gates between the hours of six p.m. and eight a.m. we assess. Walking wounded, we patch up, critical cases we resuscitate and stabilize. If we can. Nothing fancy, just keep them alive until the gates open. Then get them out, eat, sleep, start all over again. There’s no AIDS here. They’re screened for it on entry. But not hepatitis, so you have to watch out when they spit. Oh, and sometimes they hide weapons in their clothes. But you knew that, didn’t you?”
“They’re not searched at the gate?”
“Of course they are. You don’t rely on that. You don’t leave anything sharp where someone can grab it. You don’t turn your back on anyone who isn’t restrained. You never assume they’re out cold, and you never assume they’re going to stay that way.”
“So I can work here?”
“I think you’ll find it isn’t up to me.”
“You stopped him,” he says. “Brice. In the yard, with Jimmy. What did you do?”
“Appealed to Quillan’s sense of fair play.”
“You had a blade.” The dirt of the yard against his cheek, Jimmy wide eyed, watching him, the cold of the bolt cutters on his skin, and that sudden bright hard flash at the corner of his vision, Do not fucking make me, Brice.
She says, “I’m five foot four. I don’t weigh much. I have only two advantages in a fight. Surprise. And knowing exactly where to cut.” She leans into his face. “So what’s your advantage?”
He shrugs, and in the next room a door bangs and Riley starts shouting.
“Do better than that,” she says. “Because Brice isn’t finished with you. This won’t go away until you do.” She rises to her feet.
“Don’t you want to know what I’m in for?”
“Double murder, in the States. Quillan told me.”
“It was a shooting.”
“The easy way. Feel good about it afterward?”
Ryan Jackson told police the girl had had it coming. He says nothing.
“I think we’re done here.” She’s heading for the door.
He says, “And you? What are you in for?”
She looks back at him, a look that’s all hard edges, razor wire, and spikes.
She says, “I killed someone.”
When he follows her out into the clinic, Riley has just finished strapping a man down on a trolley. The man’s eyes are wide with terror. His face is a mess of blood. Just then the boy bends over him with surgical tweezers and begins to pick shards of glass out of the cuts.
Close by, Vinnie is mopping up: the air holds the ammonial tang of piss.
I killed someone. He’s not surprised at all.
Quillan blinks, a slow reptilian blink. He says, “So you passed.”
It’s eight fifteen in the morning, a kids’ show on the TV: happy, brightly colored figures, bouncy music. The night shift’s over, but its smell seems to cling to Johanssen’s clothes: the smell of blood and piss and shit and disinfectant, vomit, cigarettes, sweat, raw alcohol, decay, and, once, when the door opened, the smell of cooking, wafting in from somewhere else. He’s very tired, and he aches as if he’s been kicked and kicked again.
Quillan says, “You can stay.”
The TV shows a field of singing daisies, yellow and white against grass that’s a chemical green.
“And Brice?” Johanssen asks.
“I’ll do what I can.” But his voice is bland, and his eyes have switched back to the TV. After a second he angles his head toward the door: Now go. Johanssen rises, but as he reaches the door Quillan says, “The business with Jimmy. Brice made a mistake. Tell me what it was.”
Brice in the little yard, teeth bared, eyes fixed on Jimmy, waiting for the fun to start … “Brice enjoys his work too much,” Johanssen says.
“So he does. And your mistake? What mistake did you make, Mr. Jackson?”
Johanssen’s still groping for an answer when Quillan smiles. “You let him live.”
Back at the clinic the armored ambulances have come and gone, taking the night’s consignment to the Emergency Medical Center beyond the wall. The others are clearing up. Riley catches his eye, jerks his head toward the stairs. “Come on,” he says.
Johanssen follows him up to the first floor. Through a door and into a kitchen—a couple of electric rings, a sink unit, a table and chairs, a grubby white fridge. On the other side of the kitchen another doorway leads into a darkened room.
Riley reaches into his shirt pocket for a cigarette that’s been smoked almost down to the filter, lights it, and draws on it sharply, greedy for nicotine. He leans back against the counter, blows out a stream of smoke. Takes his time. His eyes don’t leave Johanssen.
“So,” he says, “America.”
“California.”
“Lifer?” He nods. “But you done a deal to come here.”
“They want me to talk.”
“So what is this? A tryout? See if you like it? See if it’s worth snitching for?” Riley says. “Meantime we’re stuck with a complete fucking stranger … We got to count the scalpels morning and night, in case you decide to take one to bed? Am I going to wake up with my throat cut?”
“It was a shooting,” Johanssen says.
Riley takes a last drag on the cigarette and grinds it out on a dirty plate. “Well, thank fuck for that,” he says.
Riley walks through the open doorway and clicks on a light. It’s a narrow bunk room: four metal-framed beds sit end on, two on either side of a central gangway, each bed boxed in, head and foot, with plywood screens for the minimum of privacy. At the foot of the first bed on the left, someone’s covered the screen with photos of a dog, an overweight Rottweiler cross whose eyes are glazed blue or red by the flash. Dog in a garden. Dog on a beach. Dog with a kid’s party hat sliding off its head, its pink tongue dripping slobber … The bed on the right is surrounded by clippings from wank mags: girls with pneumatic breasts and collagened lips pout at Johanssen and touch themselves.
On to the next pair of beds. The one on the right has only three objects taped to its screen: a piece of bright turquoise plastic, the feathered wing of a small bird, and something metallic that glints in the light.
The opposite bed is unmade, the bedding in a roll at its foot, nothing on the plywood screen but a few scraps of tape.
Johanssen unrolls the bedding. Behind him Riley says casually, “Watch your stuff. Place is full of thieves.”
He eats with Riley and Vinnie. Vinnie asks Johanssen a few questions—personal stuff, is he married, does he have kids? Vinnie talks a lot about his dog. He says he’ll be out soon.
Riley asks about Victorville and California.
The boy—they call him Drill—eats alone, sitting on his bunk, the one opposite Johanssen’s, and talks to no one. He’s already under his blanket when Johanssen lies down to sleep later that morning, but his eyes are open, and he watches Johanssen, unblinking.
Johanssen must have dozed, because he dreams.
We will make you run.
Another dream that’s also a memory. Three months into Spec Ops training, when failure was still unthinkable, and only other people got kicked off the course.
He is on a rooftop. It’s night.
He’s lost count of the times he’s been scared beyond belief, but now the fear is beginning to slick off him, as if he’s developed some sort of protective layer, or maybe he’s just learned to accommodate it: it’s become something to be tolerated, respected, befriended even. It’s part of his life.
Tonight the exploit’s a pursuit. He has to get from A to B. They—and he doesn’t know who they are, or how many—have to catch him.
Streetlights below, skeins of traffic, the sweet kick of adrenaline.
He is on a rooftop, and he is running.
The sound wakes him. Not in the bunk room, but overhead.
Someone’s scratching at the wall. After less than a minute it stops.
There are scratches in the plasterwork of Cate’s room: clusters of five, some neat, some wild and jagged.
Cate is keeping score.
He wakes again when the clinic’s outer door bangs open. Shouts, footsteps—this time they hit the stairs. Already he’s on his feet, adrenaline slicing through the pain. Something in his head is screaming at him to run, but there’s nowhere to run to.
Through the bunk-room door they come. Three men—he knows their faces from the yard. Riley’s on his feet too now—“What the fuck?” They just push past and grab him, and this time he can’t fight it.
Down the stairs, barefoot, half naked—grunting with pain as they haul him along. Through the door at the bottom, into the clinic—Brice, are they taking him to Brice? His hands clench, fingers curling tight on a reflex, uncontrollably. Straight through the next door into the room full of chairs—
Quillan’s waiting, huddled in his coat.
The men stop, and Johanssen stops, too, sagging between them, gasping for breath.
“Seems you’re needed elsewhere, Mr. Jackson,” Quillan says.
He inclines his head, and the men haul Johanssen through the next pair of doors and out into the compound yard and daylight, the cold tarmac biting into the soles of his feet, toward the fence and the gate. Behind him Riley’s still shouting, and a woman’s voice: Cate, it must be Cate.
In the road beyond the fence an armored van is waiting, engine idling in a cloud of diesel exhaust, rear doors open. The two armed guards beside it watch, impassive, as he’s dragged toward them.
The compound gate swings open. They pass through. The men holding him push him into the back of the van—he slams into the floor, the breath knocked out of him, the pain searing across his ribs again—the door bangs shut, the engine surges, and they’re away.
He stays on the floor of the van. The vibrations of the engine and the road rattle his skull.
Finally it stops. The doors open. They help him out. And there’s Whitman, gaunt in the pale daylight, the outer wall with its glint of wire looming behind him. When he sees Johanssen’s face he says, “Looks like we broke up the party just in time.” It takes Johanssen seconds to realize he’s talking about the bruises.
Then Whitman turns to the guards who surround them; the dough-fac
ed administrator’s there, too, shivering in his shirtsleeves. “Thanks, guys. He got lucky.”
But he doesn’t feel lucky. He feels like he’s just been through a test from Spec Ops training, something tough and brutal, and has seen the end in sight and then been told he’s not allowed to reach it.
DAY 10: FRIDAY
KARLA
I’m standing in my office, hugging myself. He’s out. He’s safe.
I was in the main room with Craigie, in the middle of our routine Friday meeting, when the call came, and I excused myself, walked into the office, and picked up the phone with no sense of hope whatsoever. Three days—more than three—since Johanssen vanished. Perhaps I’d finally given up.
In my ear, Whitman said, “They’ve found him. They’re bringing him out now,” and for a moment everything stopped.
“Alive?”
“Yeah, he’s alive,” he said.
“Injuries?”
“He was in some sort of compound in there, in the hands of a guy called Quillan … He’s been beaten.”
Something spasmed in my chest, but I kept my voice even. “Fine. Thanks for letting me know. I need to speak to him.”
Whitman hesitated, then he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
Quillan. I was right. It brings no satisfaction. But we got to him. We got to him in time.
Craigie’s still in the main room, with his cup of tea. We are in the middle of our agenda. The Russians have gone, but they’ll be back. The Japanese contact is being developed, the banking software people have agreed to a fee, the ex–Pharma boss Hamilton is tucked away in a safe house, still insistent that his life is in danger, still reluctant to disclose the details of the fraud he claims to have committed. We are watching the flat in Ealing that belonged to my old intelligence contact Laidlaw; if this new man Powell knows about it, he hasn’t bothered to visit. A client isn’t paying their bill: at what point do we apply pressure?
In a minute I’ll go back in there, and Craigie will look up, and say, Any news? And when he does I want to be clear and focused and professional.
The Distance: A Thriller Page 11