“He told you about the tank.”
“He told me. It’s possible to get it opened up. Fake work ticket, and a story about a safety inspection: we say there’s toxic fumes inside, hopefully no one will lift the lid to take a look before they seal it up again.” I pause. “But if she’s in with John Quillan and she disappears, he’ll start looking. Someone’ll remember opening up that tank.”
“I’ll be gone by then,” he says. And he’s right. It won’t be his problem.
“Client came up with this, didn’t they?” He nods. Of course. It’s not Fielding’s style, this much detail; had to be the client. “Fielding told me they’re civilian, but for a civilian they know a lot about the Program. Contacts inside? But they’re using you.”
“She’s Quillan’s tame doctor,” he says. “No one inside will touch her.”
“Even so …” I don’t need to outline the risks, if the client’s got eyes inside. They could have people watching the location. They could have people waiting when Johanssen arrives. A paid killer isn’t always considered a valued employee, once the job’s done. “What does Fielding say about all this?”
He looks down. “Fielding says I should pull out.”
Doesn’t he always? Playing up the risks, raising the stakes, knowing that with every move he’s reeling Johanssen in—that the harder he makes the job appear, the harder it is for Johanssen to walk away.
“And if you don’t do it, who does?”
“Guy with a knife.”
A nice image to plant in Johanssen’s head; set the ghost of Terry Cunliffe walking again. You bastard, Fielding.
“But a guy with a knife couldn’t get near her?” He shakes his head. “Could you?”
“I’ve got a job in the clinic where she works.” He looks away. “There was a guy they brought in, hurt.” He shrugs, leaves me to fill in the details. He’s got the training: Spec Ops saw to that.
So he’s got close to her. “And you think you can get her to go with you to this place? With Ryan Jackson’s record? She going to take a walk with a man like him?”
“I told them I went down for double murder. A shooting. That’s all they know.”
And they looked at him and thought: Gangland hits. He won’t tell them the truth, not if he can help it. Because he needs her trust.
So what do we have? An inmate without a record in the Program. A murder covered up. A civilian client who wants her not just dead but obliterated, so she never comes to light; someone who knows more than any civilian should about the Program …
Someone who’s dictating how the hit should go. Who could be watching the moment it happens—
“You want me to check out the client? See if they’re safe?”
“Fielding won’t give me a name,” he says.
Bloody Fielding and his policy of anonymity. And stalking him won’t get us anywhere. He’s been in this business too long. We could have him followed every day for a year, we could hack every e-mail and tape every call; still there’d be a meeting we didn’t see, a phone call we never heard. In any case, the whole thing’s already set up: from now on, his contact with the client will be minimal.
“All right then, what about the victim?”
“He said the death was messy. Client was in a state talking about it.”
“And they’re going to all these lengths to get her killed … It’s personal for them. Victim’s family, then, or someone close.” They’ve seen justice give them the slip once, and they won’t let it happen again. That would explain the demand to hide the body, too: they know if she’s found, the trail could come back to them.
And that gives us our break.
“What if I can get the client’s name? If we can ID her and find her victim, we’ll know who they are. If they look anything less than solid, you pull out.”
There’s a stillness in Johanssen’s features that says, I don’t pull out.
But he’s thinking of all the other jobs. This one’s different.
“In any case,” I say, “you’ve got less than three weeks. That’s all we can give you.”
He says, “That will be enough,” and I know I’m dismissed.
But as I turn to leave he says softly, “Karla?” and I stop and look back. The gloom has softened his injuries: in the dim light he seems unchanged, undamaged.
“There’s been a cleanup … What if there’s nothing left for you to find?”
“There’s always something,” I tell him.
For a moment he’s silent, thinking; then he says, “She knows what this is all about.”
“Will she tell you?”
He doesn’t answer, and after a few seconds I know he isn’t going to, and I turn and go.
Whitman’s still waiting on the other side of the fire door, playing his torch beam through the rubbish.
He says, “We’re putting him back in there, aren’t we.” He’s not stupid. “I thought there was a problem?”
“Apparently not.”
I’m back at my apartment in time to see Johanssen on the surveillance feeds, picking his way across the strip of rubble that separates the perimeter from the buildings. It’s dark now, and the floodlights seem to strip the flesh from his face, giving his features the intensity of a skull’s.
Four minutes later, flipping between cameras, I lose him.
In the end I give up and switch to another camera. Brick wall, graffiti, broken panes. The workshop.
Say he can get her out of that compound. Say he can take her across the Program, unhindered, undetected. He’s going to bring her here.
Cate, her name is Cate, she was a doctor once …
Hours later I’m still at my desk and staring at my computer screen.
In front of me are the faces of women. I’m scrolling through identities, searching for her—for a closed-off half-smiling blonde, for a fragment of memory. I haven’t found her yet.
Was her hair different when I saw her before? Longer? Darker? Tied back, pinned up? I don’t know. Forget the suit, too, forget its connotations of wealth and taste, it’s just a costume—but no, somehow the suit is right, it goes with the guarded smile, it’s part of her armor.
The faces keep coming: faces from passports, from security records, from employment files. Most of the subjects have taken to heart the instruction not to smile. Harsh lighting has bleached out skin tone and warmth: even with makeup their faces look scrubbed, plain, exposed.
She isn’t among them.
I’ve been sitting in the wrong position for too long. My feet are cold, and there’s a pain in my right shoulder, and the finger resting on the mouse button has frozen. When I try to move, my joints respond sluggishly; everything needs to be coaxed or bullied into action. I push my chair back, stretch my fingers and my spine, walk out of the side office to the big south window. Lights reflect off the oily ripple of the dock, but beneath the surface there’s something dark, indistinct, vaguely menacing … I count taxis on the approach roads in an effort to empty my head, but all the time back it comes again, the memory of that hard-edged smile. I know her.
I turn away from the window, go back to my desk. Another database, another batch of photos. These are all victims, women with bruises and black eyes and broken teeth, whose emptiness is more than a trick of the lighting. No one had to tell them not to smile … But she isn’t one of them either. I’ve seen this woman before, and she was never a victim.
I close down that database. Go into the Internet. Adjust my search parameters. And—
Match.
I’m so fugged with caffeine and sleeplessness that for a moment I’m convinced this is my own confusion at work here, my tired brain playing a trick on me.
Her face stares back at me: clever, guarded, smiling that closed smile beneath a year-old headline pasted into a blog. I have found her.
I read the coverage once, twice, and again.
Whatever I was expecting, it wasn’t this.
DAY 11: SATURDAY–DAY 12: SUNDAY
&nb
sp; JOHANSSEN
He reenters the Program.
A check on his ID against the record from last week. The strip search. Dressing again. The nod from Whitman, and the walk under escort to the sentry booth—“Place your hand on the panel and look into the screen.” The metal gate sliding open; through it and into the big room beyond (still empty) and then on through the next door. A pause on the edge of the rubble, five seconds only, enough to take one breath and let it out—white floodlights and hard black shadows and cold air—then Go. Go now.
Across the waste ground to the command-post tower and into the first street. Thirty meters, and he’s picked up a tail. His pulse quickens. Quillan’s? Brice’s? No way of knowing.
On past the houses, the half-abandoned shopping center, the pub with the sound of hammering. Threading through the dark streets, from one puddle of streetlight to the next. The tail’s still there, the voice in his head whispering, Behind you. Left just before the central guard base—six o’clock, the shutter rattling down as it seals itself in for the night. At the wall the entry gates are closing, the authorities turning the Program over to itself.
Shadows shift behind glass. Somewhere close a door bangs, someone calls out, and up ahead running feet recede into distance. He keeps moving. Skirting the council blocks on their west side—steering clear of doorways, taking corners wide, straining for the first premonition of ambush, the line of men strung out across the street with Brice at their exact center, brandishing his bolt cutters.
When the council estate ends he takes the first right, and there it is, up ahead: the electrified wire, the knot of men at the gate. They’ve spotted him: one head turns, then another. Someone splits from the group and sprints toward one of the buildings. Who’s he gone to warn? Quillan or Brice? Closer and he tries to make out the faces, looking for Brice’s crew—the one with the yellow teeth, the skinny dark one—
He reaches the gate. Four strangers stare at him.
Ask for Cate? But it was Quillan who stood and watched him leave. Only Quillan can let him come back.
Quillan’s in his usual armchair. On the table beside him is a tray with the remains of a meal, cauliflower cheese and a glass of orange squash. Invalid food. The TV’s showing a wildlife documentary: iridescent butterflies flood the screen. Quillan isn’t watching it. Instead he’s staring at Johanssen.
“Well,” he says at last. “I think you owe us an explanation, Mr. Jackson.”
“The Americans,” he says. “They wanted to talk to me.”
“Oh yes, keen for you to shop your former associates. And did you?”
“No.”
Quillan corrects him: “Not yet. And now you’re back.”
“I still want to work for you.”
A ticking silence. Quillan’s look is cold, assessing.
And then he smiles, as if the calculation he’s been doing in his own head has solved itself to his satisfaction; but the smile fades quickly, and all he says is, “What are you waiting for?”
Johanssen crosses the compound yard to the clinic building. In through the main doors, through the room full of chairs (a man already seated there, a bloodied bandage around one hand) and into the clinic itself. Four faces turn: Cate, Riley, Vinnie, Drill.
Riley says, “You’re just in time.” Cate looks away.
And here they come. Broken fingers, chest pains, burns. A young Asian with slash wounds to his chest and arms, refusing anesthetic, taking his pain seriously. A man who’s been stabbed in the shoulder: it takes two of them, Johanssen and the blank-faced boy Drill, to pin him down while Cate fastens the straps. He screams a lot—high-pitched screams that are nothing to do with pain—until the sedative takes effect.
Johanssen does what he’s told when he’s told, finds stuff to do when he’s not. He fetches things, holds things, straps patients down. Administers painkillers, splints a limb, cleans and dresses a wound. Helps Vinnie wash down the room they use as a mortuary, blocks a punch aimed at Riley’s head. Ignores the buzz of tiredness, and the aches. He knows he’s being tested.
From time to time he catches Cate or Riley or Vinnie watching him, and always the look is the same. They’re wondering about him.
Drill watches too, but what he’s thinking is anyone’s guess.
The armored ambulances arrive, under escort, shortly after 8:00 a.m.
After they’ve loaded and left he queues for a shower, then eats with Riley and Vinnie. There’s no sign of Cate, just a dirty plate in the kitchen sink. Drill eats at his bunk. Vinnie tells them about his dog again; he’ll be out soon. Johanssen washes his plate, then Riley walks him across the yard, to meet a man who sells him a phone card for probably twice the going rate.
Johanssen uses the pay phone in the waiting room. He calls on one of the safe lines: the number will be untraceable.
He dials, bracing himself for the impact of Karla’s voice, but the line connects to an automated message on an answering machine.
He keeps it brief. He’s fine, he’ll be all right, this is the number he can be reached on. “Tell Dad,” he says. He hangs up.
Ryan Jackson has a father. They haven’t spoken in years, but it’ll wash.
He walks back into the clinic.
She’s on a stool at a counter, with surgical hardware—clamps and forceps, scissors, saws, scalpels and retractors, and something hooked that he doesn’t know the name of—spread out in front of her on a long blue paper strip. When he comes in she doesn’t look up. Her hand strays across the sheet; she reaches for a scalpel, holds it up. The blade winks in the light.
“So,” she says flatly, “you came back.”
“I want to be useful,” he says.
“You said.” She puts the scalpel down again, very precisely, on the blue paper sheet. “Not worried what Brice has got planned for you? He’s not known for his patience.”
“He’ll want an audience.”
“Yes, he will, won’t he.”
She picks up a clamp and puts it down again. The conversation’s over.
He goes upstairs to the bunk room. His own bunk is as he left it. He undresses quickly and crawls under the blankets.
Fielding said, This one deserves it.
Somehow he must get her to trust him, talk to him, make him safe …
He doesn’t know where to begin.
He’s still lying awake when Cate’s footsteps pad up the stairs, past the door, and on up to the floor above. Her door opens, then closes. A few minutes later the sound of scratching starts: slow, careful. This time it lasts only a few seconds.
He’s dozing when the cry comes from above: a ripped, ragged sound, there and gone again.
He’s on his feet, out of the bunk room and across the kitchen when a low voice behind him says, “Leave it.”
Riley’s standing by the partition.
“She gets nightmares,” he says. “Just leave it.”
Johanssen goes back to his bunk and lies awake, watching the dust motes turning in the light that seeps around the makeshift blackouts.
She doesn’t cry out again.
DAY 12: SUNDAY–DAY 13: MONDAY
KARLA
I called him at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday. Anyone else might fumble the phone, blurred with sleep at that time of night. Not him.
“Karla,” he said. Pin sharp as ever, and with that dangerous confidence in his voice that always puts me on edge. As if the call wasn’t a surprise to him at all. As if with one word, Detective Inspector Joseph Ellis had already got me just where he wanted me.
“Don’t tell me,” he said, “four thirty in the morning and you want a favor. Funny, could have sworn it was my turn to ask. And don’t you leave this sort of thing to your boyfriend now?” He meant Craigie.
“This one’s personal. Just for me. And it’s urgent. It’s a file.”
“Sorry, our business hours are—”
I said, “It’s Missing Persons.”
A pause on the line. That wasn’t what he was expecting.
&nbs
p; At last he said, “So what’s in it for me?”
The place is a tire workshop in Harringay, North London.
The owner, a Turkish Cypriot in his fifties, arrives at seven thirty on Sunday morning to open up and finds a Ford Mondeo parked on his forecourt and me in the driver’s seat. He looks at the Mondeo’s tires seriously—they’re borderline legal—and says yes, he can help me, but he’s only here early to catch up on paperwork; for tires, I’ll have to wait until his men arrive. There are chairs in the workshop’s front office, and a coffee machine, but instead he suggests that I wait in the back room: it will be warmer there. He shows me through the garage—the biting cold deadening the smell of rubber and oil—to a small room with a few tatty armchairs, a TV, a week’s worth of discarded tabloids, an elderly electric heater that he switches on, and a collection of calendars in a style I thought had gone out decades ago.
And that’s where I stay, for more than two hours, until Joe Ellis arrives, clutching a tan-colored plastic cup from the coffee machine and with a leather document case tucked under his arm.
He’s young for a DI, only twenty-nine years old. Not tall, but with a whiplash sharpness about him, a lean aggression, that his meticulous appearance (smart-casual, designer stuff) does nothing to diminish. He looks like a man who’ll fight dirty if it means he wins, though to my knowledge his collars have always been the real thing: he’s never set anyone up. Where and how he gets his tip-offs is another matter, though.
He was already a detective sergeant when we first met three years ago, already on the way up: “looking to progress further,” as he put it. And progress he has, thanks to his wealth of “useful” contacts, his high conviction rate. I am one of those contacts. But he operates on a two-way street, and the tip-offs I give him are part of a much bigger trade. He’s bought his meteoric rise with inside information on Met operations.
I have records of that: careful proof of every little deal. Move against me, and he not only loses his best source, his best chance of fast-tracking it all the way to the top; he ends up in prison. That’s one reason I’m prepared to meet him face-to-face, even though it means he can ID me as Charlotte Alton. He knows what I can do to him, and he knows I won’t hesitate.
The Distance: A Thriller Page 13