When he turns into the street, the tail is ten seconds behind him.
A little snapshot of misery. A woman sobbing, a scuffle in the mouth of an alley, a man who glares at him as he passes—Johanssen switches his eyes away, ducking the confrontation. The ever-present smell of drains and shit.
Any second the tail will turn into the street. He reaches the point where Jimmy stopped and looks left.
It’s the worst block in the worst area. Weeds have sprouted in the concrete apron in front, and cracks run through the stained precast panels that make up the building’s outer skin, gaps opening up around the windows. The stench of drains is strongest here. A man with pasty white skin is slumped on the step by the main door, hollow eyed, empty.
Behind him, in the doorway, is a face.
One second, two at most. Johanssen doesn’t break stride.
Behind him, the tail turns into the street, and Charlie Ross steps back into the shadow of the doorway, but Johanssen can sense him watching, all the way down the street.
Do it now. Don’t wait. Do it now.
He cuts down a side street and then through an empty building, doubling back while the men following him are still running around trying to pin him down. Giving them the slip will attract suspicion, but it can’t be helped: no one must know about this.
He goes to ground until he’s sure the coast is clear, then slips across to the block where he saw Charlie Ross.
He is unarmed. It takes more speed and more focus, and you have to be closer, that’s all. Ross is a big man, but he’s aged and the Program’s taken its toll: as long as he’s alone, there won’t be a problem.
The broken man is still slumped in the doorway. When Johanssen steps over him he doesn’t flinch but he whimpers.
Inside, weak light filters through dirty windows. The stench intensifies.
Charlie Ross, the big man, in a place like this …
There were lilies in the hallway of the house in Marlow, an armful of them in a big vase, standing guard on a pillar: they glimmered over the woman’s shoulder as she opened the door, and crossing the polished floor he caught their sickly reek. He doesn’t know why, of all things, he remembers the lilies now.
Two men with dark closed faces stand in the gloom at the foot of the staircase, talking softly. One of them’s smoking, the glowing tip of his cigarette like a beacon. Their self-possession marks them out: they don’t live here. Are they Quillan’s? He doesn’t recognize them. They hand the cigarette between them, oblivious to him as he passes.
Quickly he climbs the two flights of stairs.
At the top the corridor stretches away left and right. The left-hand fire door is wedged open, the foot of it gouging itself into the floor: the frame has buckled. Beyond it, the corridor’s almost blocked by a barricade of wood and debris. He turns right simply because there is no barricade.
He goes door to door, without knocking. Behind the first, a thin old man wearing only a dirty shirt is lying motionless on a makeshift bed. The second door’s jammed shut from the other side: when he shoulders it open, six women—the youngest maybe twenty, the oldest in her fifties, all with used faces—are huddled around the walls, holding their breath.
Behind the third door, cockroaches scuttle across rotting food on plastic plates. No one else is home.
The fourth door is locked. He’s turned sideways ready to put his shoulder to it when shuffling footsteps approach, and the lock rattles. The door opens a crack.
In the half-inch gap is the eye of Charlie Ross.
“It’s you,” he says after a moment. “I thought you’d come.”
And you waited? You knew I’d come, you know why I’m here. Why didn’t you run?
The roof must have started to fail. The ceiling tiles are stained and peeling away, and damp is spreading down the walls. An old sofa sags in one corner of the room, piled with bedding. A radio emits a tinny scratch of sound in a corner. Ross turns it off.
“How long has it been?” he says.
“Eight years.”
“Eight years.” He pauses a couple of seconds, as if those years are passing in front of him, then he says, “I’d offer you a seat, but …” and he gestures around the room. Apart from the sofa, a small table, and a cardboard box, there’s no furniture.
Back in the house in Marlow he didn’t offer Johanssen a seat; but everything was different then. Now he’s dressed in clothes a size too small for him. Gray bristles sprout from his chin. Most of his front teeth are missing. He must be sixty, but he looks eighty.
For a moment they stand there in silence. Then Charlie Ross says, “They looked for you. You disappeared. I thought they might have found you.”
“No.”
“They found the other three.”
“So I heard.”
“But not you. You were always going to be different. I’m glad, you know? That they didn’t get you. If anyone had any right to kill you, it was me.” And Ross smiles, as if this is a shared memory, something they can joke about now. Then he says, “Where did you go?”
“Just away.”
“But you came back to the business, didn’t you? Or you wouldn’t be here now.”
For a second both of them look around the room. The windows don’t fit, and the cold blows in around the frames. Ross says, “It’s a long way down, isn’t it?”
“You could do better than this,” Johanssen says, and in the same moment he knows he’s wrong.
Ross says, “Any better than this and you have to fight to keep it. You get tired of that after a while.” And he looks tired, tired to the bones. “I didn’t expect I’d ever see you here.” But then he seems to rouse himself, stand a little straighter. “I never talked, you know. Whoever shopped you, it wasn’t me.”
“I know.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Couple of weeks.”
“Takes a bit of adjusting to. But you’re in with Quillan.” He nods to himself.
“Why d’you say that?” Johanssen says, too sharply. Ross gives him a look.
He says, “The way you came in here. Like you’re untouchable. You’re in the compound then?”
“Clinic,” Johanssen says.
Ross looks briefly interested. “You got some medical training. After what happened—?”
“Before that.”
“So you’re saving lives.” Ross says it as if it makes sense to him; he nods to himself.
Johanssen says nothing.
“He’s a fair man, is Quillan. He leaves me alone now.” Ross’s gaze is steady, and he’s got that head-up posture again, as if being left alone is something to be proud of: a mark of character. Though they both know different.
He leaves you alone because you’re broken now. He leaves you alone so people can point at you and say, Wasn’t he Charlie Ross?
Then Ross says, “He doesn’t know, does he? He doesn’t know it was you.”
Johanssen shakes his head.
“Best keep it that way, eh?”
Get on with it.
The distance between them is no more than four feet. Johanssen takes a slow breath, filling his lungs, gathering himself. Ross just stands there, waiting: a tired scarecrow of a man with half his teeth punched out and nothing to fight for.
Ross says, “It was the beginning of the end, that night, you know? When you did what you did. Oh, we cleaned up afterward, but that’s what it was. The beginning of the end.”
Johanssen takes the second breath. On three he will move.
“But not for you.”
The third breath comes and goes. Suddenly he’s tired, too; tired of all of this.
“If anyone asks, you don’t know me,” Johanssen says.
It takes a second before Ross understands. Then he nods and drops his head a little. “I don’t know you,” he says.
“You looked at me in the street because you thought I was someone else.”
“Of course,” Ross says. “And that someone else …?”
<
br /> “Is dead,” Johanssen says.
Ross pauses, then nods.
Johanssen turns toward the door.
Ross says, “That’s not why you came here, though, is it?” Then he adds, “You needn’t worry. I was never going to sell you out to Quillan. If he thought I knew something … well, you’ve met Brice, I’m sure. He’d want to be thorough. I don’t fancy that.”
“No.”
“So don’t come back.”
After the door has shut behind him, Johanssen stands in the corridor for a moment, listening as Charlie Ross’s soft footsteps shuffle away.
Ross won’t hurt him. No one can even connect them.
Charlie Ross is not a risk. He doesn’t need to die.
As he walks down the stairs it loops in his head. Charlie Ross is not a risk—
Outside the late-afternoon light is dull and cold, like tarnished metal. The dark is drawing in.
The man who opens the compound gate looks at him and then away as if there’s something he knows but mustn’t tell. There are others standing around in the yard, groups of twos and threes: they, too, turn and look at him, but no one speaks to him.
Anxiety tightens in his gut, clears his vision, sharpens his breathing. He breaks into a run.
Through the main door, through the waiting room—a man, one of Quillan’s, sits in a chair with a baseball bat across his knees. When he sees Johanssen he doesn’t get up.
Johanssen pushes on into the clinic.
Riley’s standing there, his eyes wide: his mouth moves, but no sound comes out.
A chair lies on its side in the middle of the room: duct tape on the arms and back. There’s a long smear of blood across the clinic floor. In a corner of the room, a male human form, middle aged, soft featured, is propped half naked against a cupboard like a broken doll, the limbs twisted at all the wrong angles. Drill’s bending over it. For the first time he looks perplexed.
Vinnie.
Riley’s fists are working. He finds his voice. “Fuck it, they locked us out, all we could do was fucking listen—” The last word strangles itself. Riley is crying.
The door to the side room is open a crack. Please no no no—
Johanssen crosses the room to the door. It swings away from him.
She’s forced herself into a corner, behind one of the broken cots. Her breathing’s raw edged, as if with each breath something inside her is tearing. Her face is porcelain white, eyes staring, sightless, and she is rocking, rocking.
He crouches on the floor beside her.
Everything changes.
There were five of them with Brice this time, and they blocked the doors so no one could intervene. But for once she wasn’t alone in the clinic; Vinnie was with her. That was the only reason they picked Vinnie, because he was there.
And she must have known what was going to happen because Riley, hammering at the doors, heard her begging Brice to take her instead, not Vinnie—heard her say, “I deserve it, I deserve it,” and Brice’s reply, “No, you deserve to watch.”
They gagged her and taped her to the chair.
“Watch his eyes,” Brice said. “Watch his eyes.”
Later, in the little room upstairs, after they’ve sedated her, he’ll sit by the door and stare at the marks on the wall—she counts the ones she saves—and he’ll fight with it. He’ll force himself once more to pace it out, make it possible, make it real: Through the streets, across the waste ground, pausing just inside the doorway, her silhouette ahead of him, his hand reaching for her … Over and over, rehearsing the event, testing himself with the moment of impact and the aftermath, because there isn’t room for anything else, he has a job to do, or it’ll be Terry Cunliffe all over again.
He will fight with it, but by then it will be too late.
DAY 22: WEDNESDAY
KARLA
I phoned Whitman. “For Christ’s sake, get him out.”
Gone four; and the gates would close at six. Too late already, though Whitman must have heard something in my voice, because he said, “I’ll try.” He failed.
All last night I camped on the Program surveillance feeds, looking for Johanssen, that four-second snatch of sound—a man, screaming—repeating in my head. I was sure he was dead. Dead, or broken beyond repair.
At 6:00 a.m. the phone rang: my safe line.
I swear, when he first spoke I didn’t know his voice.
Now I’m in Tower Hamlets Cemetery, among the dead of the Victorian East End: iron founders and corn merchants, small tradesmen and their wives, vicars and physicians and schoolteachers. Their monuments crowd between the bare trees and through the frost-blighted undergrowth: slablike chest tombs, obelisks, and Gothic pinnacles, open Bibles and angels, and rank upon rank of headstones, the DEARLY BELOVEDS, the IN LOVING MEMORYS. They don’t bury people here anymore: it’s a place of contemplation, a public park, an outdoor classroom even—local primary-school kids come to dip the ponds and look for butterflies in summer. But no one’s here today, at eleven on a Wednesday in early February; no one but me, and a man slumped on a bench, his head bowed.
I don’t like to meet in the open. There are surveillance issues to consider. So I’ve dressed myself like a charity worker or a church volunteer: a practical do-gooder with a satchel of sandwiches and the address of a local shelter.
I stop a few meters away from the man on the bench. He might be drunk, or stoned, or asleep. “Hello?”
He doesn’t move, but his eyes open.
I come a pace closer: “Are you all right?”
But he isn’t. I know that already.
“I’m not doing it.”
He’s pulling out? That doesn’t happen, ever. But suddenly I’m back in those four seconds of sound: the baying male voices—the man screaming—
“Are you hurt?”
I’ve come to sit on the other end of the bench. He turns his head and looks at me as if I’m speaking another language. “No.”
“I tried to reach you yesterday, I phoned the number, someone picked up—I heard—”
“It wasn’t me.”
For a moment neither of us says anything.
“Vinnie,” he says, “his name was Vinnie.”
And you knew him. “He’s dead?”
“Yes.”
“Because of you?”
“Yes.” Then he says, “They made her watch.”
Oh sweet Jesus.
The smiling man with the angelic features, whose specialty is torture … It’s Terry Cunliffe all over again. And all because of Johanssen. He knows he has to pull out, that’s why he’s here: he’s a mess now, and the risks are just too great. But he’s staggering under the weight of that decision. He sees a job, and he commits to it. Turning away from this one makes it a failure, doesn’t it? Guilt and shame and inadequacy rolled into one.
“Does Fielding know?”
He turns his head away, stares down at the path in front of us. “Not yet.”
I take a breath: let the cold air fill my lungs, and then release it, slowly.
Already I know what I must do. Return Johanssen to the South London flat. Talk to Fielding—he’ll be pissed off, but it can’t be helped; he’ll just have to find someone else to do it. The man with the knife—I turn that thought away. Tomorrow, begin to ease Johanssen out of Ryan Jackson’s ID and by careful stages back into his own life and then away.
“All right,” I say, “we’ll get you out of this.”
“No,” he says, “I’ve got to go back in there.” Then, quite simply, “I’ve got to get her out.”
Oh Jesus, she’s turned you. You got too close, and she’s turned you.
A middle-aged couple comes along the path toward us. They glance at us, curiously: the vagrant on the bench and the woman with the satchel. Maybe they can read the tension between us. They pass, but five paces farther down the path the woman glances back over her shoulder. I nod to her: It’s okay, it’s fine.
It’s not.
The surveil
lance feeds again: Johanssen and Catherine Gallagher, in that workshop, talking. I saw them, and I was pleased, wasn’t I? Thinking, This is good, she’s confiding in him, this is how we’ll get to the truth. Not realizing he was getting sucked into her world.
It doesn’t matter how close he stands to his target, as long as he maintains that other distance, that cold psychological space that lets him do the job and not wake screaming. He’s lost that distance now. She’s turned him.
“She knows they sent you for her?”
“No.”
“She ask you to get her out?”
“No.”
“But you told her you’re doing this.”
“No.”
But she’s clever and she’s ambitious, and she’ll do anything to get what she wants. She was never a victim, and she doesn’t intend to start now.
“We don’t even know what happened—”
There’s a silence. He sits, eyes dead ahead, so still. And I know: She told you.
He says, “His name was Daniel. She never knew his surname. My age or maybe younger. Dark hair. He was injured: broken ankle, other wounds. She was called in to treat him. He was kept in a room; from the window she could see a gate, with dragons on it. She stayed with him for four days; I think in that time he was tortured.”
“By her?”
“I don’t know.”
“And then she killed him?”
He looks down. Yes. “He struggled; it took time, got messy. Blood.”
“She tell you why she did it?”
“Because she could.”
I’m staring at him. He turns his head away.
“She said her patients could have been another species.”
Six years now, so many jobs, and every time his targets never suffer, regardless of how sick and twisted they are, regardless of what they’ve done. He makes sure of that. But this woman—
I do not understand.
“Why?” I ask. “Why get her out?”
He doesn’t reply. He’s struggling with this one. At last he says, “She has nightmares.”
I don’t know what to say. I don’t think he does either. He shakes his head, as if it’s all beyond him—as if he doesn’t understand himself. And something crawls into my head. You care for her.
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