But I won’t wait for him to phone. The next move is mine.
Outside the bar, the breeze tugs at my coat. A taxi’s passing, and I’ve flagged it down, when he says suddenly, “The Royal Opera House—we weren’t introduced, you wouldn’t remember.” Then, softly, almost wistfully, “At Götterdämmerung you wore green. Good night, Ms. Alton.”
He goes to the opera. I knew that already. And he has some clever trick of recall, a memory for faces, and he only said that in the hope I’d feel singled out, noticed, special.
But he was there the night Johanssen came back. Just coincidence, but it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like an omen, and it’s left me cold.
As soon as I’m in the cab, I dial Robbie’s mobile.
“Everything okay?” I ask.
“Fuck it, there was diesel on the road—”
“I’m fine.”
“And him—fucking idiot.” He won’t say more. I have to wait until I’m back at my apartment and logged into the CCTV record for the street outside the gallery to find out what happened.
Mark Devlin and the girl turn their heads. The white van that’s just swerved past me rights its course, heading toward them. It’s accelerating when Mark Devlin steps off the pavement into its path, and raises his hand.
The van swerves again, late. Rocks, left and right, but doesn’t stop. At the next junction it brakes sharply, dipping on its rear suspension, and turns out of sight.
Devlin stands in the road, his expression locked, neutral, frozen: shocked by what he’s just done on instinct. You could have been killed. Out of bravado? A belief he’s indestructible? I can’t tell. Then he blinks as if he’s just come out of a trance, turns his head to where I must be lying—
My phone rings: one of the safe lines used for business. I pick up on the second ring.
“Karla?” It’s Craigie. Of course: only Craigie would ring at this hour. Has something tipped him off to what happened this evening? But he doesn’t sound stern. He sounds disconcerted.
“Laidlaw’s bolt-hole—the flat in Ealing? They’ve found it.”
The building’s a squared-off modern block in pinkish seventies brick, on the corner of a quiet tree-lined street. There are two dozen buttons beside the entryphone. At 7:21 on Wednesday morning, as I pull up nearby, a girl in dark trousers and a good coat is holding the front door while a young man in jeans and work boots places a large black bag in the back of an unmarked van. The man has strong hands: he could be a carpenter. The girl might pass for grieving family, but she isn’t, and anyway she’s too composed, too focused. They’re both here to work. The bag they’ve just put in the car will be a basic SOCO kit: they’ve dusted the place for prints. They want to know who came here. Though I suspect that only Laidlaw did—that this was a private refuge, shared with no one. In any case there won’t be traces. Laidlaw may have looked like he’d dressed in the dark, but he served his apprenticeship in the Cold War, when a casual lapse could get someone killed. I’ll bet the place is clean.
My bag is on the passenger seat. I rummage in it, pull out a phone, hit a key, start talking. The girl has registered me. She looks long enough at the car’s number plate to memorize it. The young man slams the back doors of the van, and they both go back inside. Still I keep my head down, look preoccupied. Chances are I’m being watched.
Craigie didn’t want me to come. “We have the place under observation,” he said. “You don’t need to be there. What would you gain?”
But Craigie doesn’t have my track record with these people. With criminals, yes, and with sources; but not with the intelligence community. This is one job I can’t delegate, one operation I must see for myself. Are they casual or serious? Are they tidying up, ticking the boxes, or is there more to it than that? I have to know.
And I’m more than prepared for this. Once I did it all the time. Now, sitting behind the wheel of my anonymous car, talking to no one on the phone, I still get that tick of excitement. You miss the old life, don’t you?
In any case, Lucas Powell won’t be here in person. I’ve read his file. He’s not an ops man, he doesn’t do fieldwork: he’s sent foot soldiers. For hours they’ll have been lifting carpets, emptying cupboards, shaking out food packets, delving into the cistern. Any minute now the floorboards will be coming up.
They’re looking for Knox. Looking for me.
They won’t find me, though.
Unless they’ve guessed I’d come?
I turn my head away; my one-sided phone call becomes heated.
Some criminals are drawn to the investigations of their crimes, aren’t they? They loiter among the crowds by the police tape; they chat to officers. They may be friendly and helpful—may offer useful local knowledge—or they may simply watch. But some compulsion drives them: they have to be there.
So has Lucas Powell put me into that category? Sitting here, do I fit some profiler’s pattern? Has he predicted I’d come?
I press a key, drop the phone onto the passenger seat. Time to go. I’m reaching for the car’s ignition when the front door opens and out they come again.
No. The young woman’s there, but this time someone else is with her, a man who must have been inside the building all along.
Tall—comfortably over six feet—and slim. Black skin, high cheekbones, good posture, good suit, good shoes. Powell.
He’s carrying a sealed cardboard crate.
My breath catches. I force my gaze away and grab the phone from the passenger seat.
Talk. Talk and don’t look up.
What’s he doing here?
Lucas Powell: the security services’ Hercules, fresh out of DC and cleaning up the shit. Doing it himself, too: not just sitting behind a desk and waiting for them to bring it to him but coming out here, watching as they dust the flat—
Removing something.
But there should be nothing here to find—the place should be clean, we counted on its being clean. Laidlaw was old school. His sort didn’t make notes.
They’ve gone to a different vehicle, a big dark-blue Volvo. Powell rests the crate he carries on the car’s roof, reaches for his keys, and as he does so his stare sweeps toward me.
Start the engine. Don’t look up. Just drive.
As I pull away from the curb I force my eyes dead ahead. Even so I’m conscious of how Powell’s head turns toward my vehicle. And all the way down the road—long after he’s lost to sight between the ranks of parked cars—I daren’t look in the mirrors, as if just one glance might betray me.
Craigie was right. You’ve made yourself a prize, and Lucas Powell’s out to win it.
And if he wants to do business?
I controlled every aspect of my relationship with Laidlaw. He never knew who I was or where my information came from. He couldn’t even contact me. And he settled for that. Ultimately all that mattered was that the intel was good.
Powell will be different. He isn’t a man to take things on trust. He’ll want to verify his source. He’ll want to know who I am, and however good the intel is, he won’t stop searching until he’s found me.
DAY 15: WEDNESDAY
JOHANSSEN
Wednesday morning. It’s the end of his fourth night in the clinic. He’s on his bunk. Broad daylight outside, but only the faintest chinks of light escape around the blackouts, and the noises in the bunk room are night noises: soft snores and Vinnie muttering in his sleep. He doesn’t know whether Drill’s awake and he doesn’t look.
He sits up, reaches for his clothes. Pads the length of the room, past the others, into the kitchen, where he dresses.
On the stairs he pauses, listening for movement in Cate’s room, but there’s nothing.
He puts on his boots in the clinic—the cut on his back itchy under the dressing—and goes out through the waiting room into the daylight.
Crossing the yard he gets the prickling sense of being watched from Quillan’s building, but he doesn’t turn to look.
Through the gate. He head
s right, past the council blocks, aware of the exact moment when the tail slots into place.
He leads them through the Program streets, opening doors and wandering into buildings and out again, pausing at a corner so the tail must stop, too, and then moving on, heading down alleys and doubling back so their paths almost cross—stopping to look up at a window, a roofline, into a tight little yard tucked between buildings, so that there is no pattern to anything he does.
And once or twice he’d swear there’s a second tail, someone moving parallel to the first but not with them; but he never sees them.
Brice’s crew again? But Brice will be doing the rounds with his ID card, thrusting his picture under people’s noses. Who is he then?
He won’t find anything. Charlie Ross is dead.
The news of the attack broke last night. Riley had sent him out to the storeroom to get more gloves, and when he came back he knew, just from their faces: frightened curiosity from Vinnie, knowingness from Riley, speculation from Drill—Drill must have heard about the wound; he’d have liked to watch the knife go in. Only Cate’s face was blank.
At last he works his way around to the workshop on Houghton Street. As he crosses the margin of rubble that separates the building from the surrounding streets, two men stop at the edge of the cleared ground, observing him. He looks beyond them, for another face: the second tail. He doesn’t see it.
The door he opens leads into a poky warren of small damp rooms. Through them, and he’s in what must have been the main machine hall. There’s a camera here somewhere. He’ll be watched. By Karla? And who else? A large metal-framed window’s had every pane smashed out of it: broken glass crunches underfoot. Above his head, a beam spans the width of the structure: a pulley hangs from it, strung with chains. In a circular cutout in the brickwork, a fan creaks and sighs. Caged safety lights have been fixed up on the walls, linked by rubber-sheathed all-weather cabling. The bulbs glow faintly in the gray daylight. The surveillance camera’s high up in a corner. He steps back out of its line of sight. It doesn’t move to follow him.
He’ll have to deal with that.
In the middle of the floor there’s a metal plate, three feet by five; he kicks it idly but it doesn’t shift, crouches briefly—five seconds only, any more would be too much—then straightens and moves on. The bolts are dirty and beginning to rust; no one’s touched them for months.
To one side there’s a smaller second workshop. A few sick-looking pigeons are roosting in there: as he walks in they rise with a clatter of wings and wheel away overhead, out through ragged gaps in the roof. Two prefab offices are stacked one on top of the other: they’re beginning to collapse in on themselves, the angles out of true, the walls folding like the walls in a house of cards.
He goes back to the main hall, and there she is.
She’s muffled up in a big coat, by the door. She’s watching him.
The second tail: not Brice’s crew, but her. She’s good; better than he’d have expected.
She tilts her head. Her gaze travels up, across the scarred walls, following the chains to the crossbeam and the creaking fan, then down again.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
“Just … looking.”
She doesn’t say anything to that. She wraps her arms around herself—she must be cold, despite the coat—and walks out into the next chamber, where the prefab offices sit. He doesn’t follow. There are faint sounds, a scrape, something shifting, then she comes back.
“Quillan’s men still outside?” he asks.
She nods, chin up, appraising him.
“I made two,” he says.
“It’s usually two. They were wondering if they should come in. I told them not to.”
“No one follows you?”
“Why should they? I’m Quillan’s doctor. Who’s going to touch me?”
She looks up again, at the walls, the chain, the creaking fan. She’s still standing like that, head tilted back, when she says, “Why did Brice want your ID card?” And when he doesn’t answer: “Don’t you know? Brice thinks you’re lying. Doesn’t believe your story.” She drops her gaze, stares straight at him. “Want to know why?”
He shrugs.
“Yes you do. Quillan enjoys excellent cooperation with the authorities. He asked them about you. Who you were. What kind of man you are.” A pause. “They told him what you did.”
Is he blown? How much do they know now? He blanks his expression, says nothing.
“She was your girlfriend, wasn’t she? The woman.” Her face is still, masklike. Her eyes glitter. Then, savagely: “Did you love her? Because Quillan said she took a long time to die. Well? Are you going to tell me it’s not true?”
He shakes his head. “No.”
“And the man?”
“I know what I did.”
She stands there, staring at him, moving her head a little to one side, then back again, as if she’s trying to sense him across ten feet of distance.
Then she says, “But you’re not like that now,” and she says it as if she doesn’t understand.
He says nothing.
“What changed you? You repented? Got God? Or you’re not Ryan Jackson at all; though if you’re not, it’s one fuck of a cover story to pick.”
She gives him one more look, then turns away and walks the length of the workshop, the soles of her shoes crunching on the broken glass. When she reaches the cover on top of the tank she stops and touches the edge of it, lightly, with her toe; then steps over it.
At the far wall she turns back, arms still locked around her, but something has shifted in her face.
“You still think about them,” she says. “Is that why you can’t sleep? Is that why you walk around like this?”
“No.”
“So what’s keeping you awake then?” Her voice hardens. “That burn on your shoulder, the electric iron, that’s a childhood scar. Who did that? Mum’s boyfriend? Dad?”
She’s still digging, still trying to make him snap, but that particular pain’s been out of its box so many times he can look at it now without flinching. “Dad,” he says. “He drank.”
Ryan Jackson’s father drank, too, according to Karla’s file. Though Jackson has different scars.
“You drink?” she demands.
“No.”
“But you did then. When you—” She stops; and for a handful of seconds after that she looks at him, just looks, and he lets her.
At last she says, “It isn’t in you, is it? You don’t carry it around. You’ve forgiven yourself, then.”
“No. I just—I just do the best I can. Try to do it right.”
“Do what?”
“Everything.”
“And it works for you, does it? Doing it right. That makes it—better?”
Another of those long slow cold looks, but then her mouth curls—irony, contempt? “Is that what I’m doing?” she says. There’s a biting edge to her voice. “Is that what you think the clinic’s about? Doing it right, doing good? It’s what I do, it passes the time.”
“You were a doctor,” he says.
She makes a small soft hah noise. “Oh yes. And you know what? Every life I saved was proof of how clever I was, how I could beat the system. And I was good, all right. Better than good. I was on another level: up there, making decisions … It was hard and it was technical and I loved it. And my patients might as well have been another species.”
She stops. Up above the fan groans and rattles. Somewhere outside an engine drones, a snatch on patrol.
She says, “I’m going now.”
But she turns back at the doorway. “About Brice.”
Johanssen says, “He’s just looking for an excuse.”
“And if he looks hard enough he’ll find one, won’t he?” Suddenly she says, “Do you hate him?”
“Should I?”
“After what he tried to do to you? And what he’ll still do, the first chance he gets—”
“Brice doesn’
t kill,” he says.
“What he does will be worse.”
For a moment she holds his gaze. Then she’s gone, the sound of her footsteps across the rubble fading out to nothing.
He stands very still in the workshop, listening to the creak of the fan.
Quillan’s spoken to the authorities. And Quillan knows the man before him isn’t acting like Ryan Jackson should act. But he can live with the discrepancy for now, because he has other plans.
Brice is a sick fuck … You give him something to focus on. He’s just the latest in a long line. How far does it stretch back? As far as Charlie Ross?
But Brice doesn’t kill, and Charlie Ross is dead.
Sully, the man’s name was. If he had a first name, Johanssen never heard it. An army mate, a Scouser who Johanssen had served with in Iraq and who was to die at a checkpoint in Helmand, put them in touch. They met in a pub in Elephant and Castle. Sully worked in security, was looking for a bit of extra muscle for a job. A few questions, then he said, “All right if we go for a drive? Someone you need to meet.”
The M4 out of London, then the A404. Dark by then, and raining softly, the windscreen wipers squeaking against the glass, Sully snatching glances at him all the way.
Through Marlow, all middle-class middle-England quaintness, redbrick and tiled roofs, a spindly church spire. Across a suspension bridge and out the other end. The buildings ran out, and the ground rose. A turn into a private road—narrow, edged with big houses overlooking the river on the left: a white place like a miniaturized castle, and a vast black-and-white timbered house.
They stopped in front of a pale house with gables. Ten o’clock on a late-summer evening: traffic noise from the main road and a train passing somewhere nearby and a bird still singing.
A woman opened the door to them. She looked at Sully. “He said you were coming.” Not at Johanssen. He might have been invisible.
Sully led him across the hall to a long room, and there they waited, in silence, staring out at the damp summer night beyond French windows, the steps going down to the lawn and the river running by, Johanssen listening to muffled creaks, voices elsewhere—and then footsteps, several men coming closer—a murmur of conversation, Yes, very good—but when the door opened only one of them came in: sixties and tall, six-six or six-seven, in slacks and a business shirt, a gold watch on his wrist, the faint smile of a man who knows that whatever joke he tells, everyone around him will laugh.
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