The Distance: A Thriller

by Helen Giltrow

  Johanssen goes down.

  Brice is on him. Brice has got him by the hair—he says, “First I’m going to break your jaw and then cut out your tongue”—and his fist comes up, without the knife this time.

  And then Brice’s eyes fix, and he folds.

  Johanssen’s on the floor, just breathing, letting the pain come and go. Brice is on the floor, too, on his belly, head turned toward Johanssen: his eyes are open, and he, too, is breathing, but badly. The knife—Johanssen’s blade, it must be—quivers in place between his vertebrae. His bowels have voided. The room smells of shit.

  Riley kneels beside him, very pale, quite still. He’s ex-army, killed at least once; forgot what it was like? He says, “Bastard had it coming.”

  Johanssen staggers to his feet. To reach the door he has to walk past Quillan. The old man is still leaning on his cane. He’s watching Riley. He murmurs, “I always wondered what it would take to make him snap—” And then he glances sharply at Johanssen: “You thought it was you I had in mind? Oh, I knew you couldn’t do it: you didn’t care enough.” He nods at Riley. “Not like he did.”

  Brice is still on the ground. Eyes still open. Still breathing, in gasps. He hasn’t moved. No one has touched him.

  Quillan says, “I suppose he’ll need a doctor,” but he says it without interest.

  Across the room Drill’s watching Brice, too. He must have picked up Brice’s fallen knife; he holds it close, caressing the blade, and there’s a look of hunger in his eyes.

  Johanssen walks out through the door, into the bright day.

  He’s wandering, still shirtless in the cold and bleeding, when the patrol picks him up.

  Much later, in the back of Whitman’s car, stitched and strapped up and muffled with painkillers, he hears it on the car radio: an injured patient snatched from an ambulance, on a street in East London, in broad daylight.

  They don’t give a name.

  DAY 24: FRIDAY

  POWELL

  Five more days. No leads. Where does he go from here?

  Yesterday he had Knox’s delivery boy Isidore Maksoud brought in again. The Section Chief’s idea—“And go in hard this time.” He didn’t. He’s got nothing to go in hard with. The package Isidore handled for Knox contained a tip-off, about laundered money and friendly young men with oddly blank smiles and terrorist connections. What can we charge him with? Supplying information that benefited national security? And it’s the wrong play with Knox, in any case. Knox won’t respond to threats.

  And so: more tea, more chat. Did Isidore pass the message on? “Who to? Told you, I don’t know no Knox”—Isidore grinning at his own alliteration, delighted with himself. Powell came back to the office with a sense of emptiness, to find Kingman in a foul mood, Leeson looking like she hadn’t slept, and Bethany pointedly running out of tasks. He shut himself in his office and sat there, staring down the barrel of his own failure.

  The case has died on him.

  He knows what happens next. He writes his report, which summarizes all the evidence, outlines the steps he’s taken to investigate, and reveals precisely nothing. He is then sent back to Washington—to Tori and Thea and his colleagues, no one any the wiser that he’s failed.

  It sits in his mouth like dust.

  He thinks of Knox. You talked to Laidlaw. Won’t you talk to me?

  But Knox likes to choose his confidants. He’ll choose somebody else.

  And that’s it, isn’t it? That’s what Knox offers: the sense of being chosen. It’s the subtext of all Laidlaw’s careful notes: Knox chose him, made him special. And although he tried to track Knox down, Laidlaw was never going to hand him over to MI5, or let MI5 take Knox away from him. Because Knox chose him. He understands that now.

  But Laidlaw’s dead. Who’ll be chosen next?

  The Section Chief wants it to be him. How many times has the man ordered him not to talk to Knox? The moment contact’s made he must back off, hand Knox up the chain of command, let the Section Chief be the one to make a play for Knox—let the Section Chief be the one that Knox selects.

  But if Knox calls, if Knox chooses him, he knows: he’ll disobey that order in a heartbeat.

  He was leaving the office last night when he saw Leeson again, this time without her seeing him. She looked fragile. Suddenly he was struck by a surge of fellow feeling: We’re the failures on the team, aren’t we? He’s growing used to her quiet reserve; it disconcerts him less now. And talking to her that time in the kitchen did help. He’d like to return the favor, find something positive to say to her, before he leaves. He knows it’s not entirely altruistic—it’s as much for his benefit as hers: he needs to feel he’s done some good somewhere, that something positive came out of all this.

  He must be careful what he says, that’s all. There is so much he’s not supposed to know.

  He’d better read the file.

  The tip-off first, though this file doesn’t say where it came from, just that an MI5 surveillance list turned up on the open market and was attracting bidders; that steps were taken—successfully—to secure the item and neutralize the threat. Leeson was tasked with hunting down the seller. She found him soon enough: a tech ops officer called Fenty—smart but chippy, lacking social skills, passed over for promotion, soured with resentment. He’d left no clear electronic trail but twitched right through the interview. That night he went home, packed a bag, and vanished. Leeson put out an alert, went after him. She came back a week later, empty-handed. He can read her exhaustion in her own report.

  Officially she signed off months ago, but he’s prepared to bet she’s been on it every waking hour since then: calling in favors, scouring for leads, sure that Fenty’s out there somewhere, and one day she will find him …

  His tea is cold. He picks up his mug, leaving the file on his desk, and steps out into the corridor.

  There she is; coming straight toward him with her coat on, walking fast. When she sees him, for a second he’d swear she flinches. Odd.

  “Leeson,” he says. Already it sounds too formal. He wishes he could remember her first name. “I was hoping I’d catch you.”

  She’s pulled up. She says, “I really am in a hurry,” but her eyes don’t leave his face. He has the odd sensation she’s measuring him, measuring the level of threat that he might pose.

  He steps back into his office doorway to let her pass. She doesn’t move.

  He says, “I thought perhaps we could have a chat,” and immediately wishes he hadn’t; it sounds so staged. He tries again. “We spoke on Monday night, you probably won’t remember, about a case I’m working—”

  She says suddenly, and quite clearly, “Have you reported yet?”

  “Not yet. Some loose ends I still have to tie up.”

  “The Section Chief is in the loop, of course.” That’s brittle, with a little sting to it.

  He thinks of his own planned disloyalty. “Not entirely.”

  Something shifts behind her gaze. A tiny reassessment. She says again, “I really have to go,” but this time it’s thoughtful.

  He nods. “Then I won’t stop you.”

  She walks past him and down the corridor. But at the end she turns and looks back.

  He grabs his coat, locks the office. She’s taken the lift—he hits the stairs. When he comes through the fire door at the bottom he’s panting. Her footsteps echo across the basement garage, baffling him. He walks along the row of cars—and there she is, between the concrete pillars, the key to her little red Citroën in her hand. She looks up and sees him, and stops; then glances round, as if they might not be alone. Her eye goes to the CCTV camera. This will be on the record. He can’t tell if she’s reassured or not.

  He doesn’t want to say, I’m worried about you, I know something’s wrong. Makes do with, “I need to talk to you.”

  She says, “Of course you do.”

  She unlocks the car—the indicators flash—and gets in, closes the door, but doesn’t start the engine.

&n
bsp; He walks to the passenger door. Hesitates, opens it. Hesitates again. Gets in.

  She’s staring straight ahead.

  “You know what the problem with us is?” she says. “We always have to know everything.”

  She starts the car.

  DAY 24: FRIDAY

  KARLA

  Ellis says, “What the fuck—?” I can’t tell if he’s impressed or shocked or angry. I doubt he knows himself.

  One in the afternoon. He’s at the house in North London: high walls, electric gates, good security. The neighbors are all offshore-business types with complex financial arrangements, expensive lifestyles, dubious friends. They won’t ask questions. Catherine’s in a back room, out of sight.

  On all the screens in my apartment, the news channel’s looping the same footage, with the sound on mute. I wonder if Ellis is watching it, too.

  “Snatched out of an ambulance? In daylight?” He adds scathingly, “Nothing like keeping this low profile—”

  “It was the only way, Ellis. Nobody got hurt.”

  “And now I’m supposed to babysit her?”

  “Ellis, the moment her picture crossed your desk, you’d have ID’d her. You’d have turned up at my apartment waving your warrant card and demanding to know what I’d done with her. This saves us both a lot of time. Or are you saying you don’t want to be in on this now?”

  For a moment he’s silent. All along he’s wanted the inside track. He’s got it now, but it’s not what he was expecting. He thought that with Catherine in his hands he’d be able to control what happens next. It hasn’t quite worked out. And it’s dawning on him that just by being there he’s in up to his neck.

  At last he says, grudgingly, “I’m saying it’s put the entire fucking Met all over the case. Any minute now someone’s going to put a name to her. And when they do, who’s the first person they’re going to call? They’ll want my arse in the office yesterday—”

  “Then phone me. I’ll have someone standing by to take over at the house. I want you on that investigation, Ellis.”

  “So I can fuck it up for you?”

  “Give them the benefit of your theories. She’s been hiding in the Program. You don’t know why, but she must have been scared. Hamilton put her in there; Graves covered it up. They were killed because they’d tried to protect her. But no one could get to her in there. Then she got injured, got evacuated, and someone pounced.”

  “So they’ll think she’s dead? And what about Mark Devlin? Where does he fit into this little picture?”

  “They don’t need to know.”

  “And I don’t either, eh? I talked to the guy, Karla, remember? He shagged her half a dozen times, he hardly knew her. How come he ends up dead? Don’t tell me: you don’t know. And someone’s still coming after her, and you don’t know who they are either.”

  I can’t tell him about the intelligence link. He’d only freak. “We’re on it, Ellis. As soon as I’ve got something—”

  Bitterly: “Yeah, right.” Then he says, “Or I could decide to bring her in myself. Could say I had a tip-off, turned up at this address, there she was—”

  “Then she’ll be dead within an hour, and you’ll never find out who killed her.”

  “Within an hour? I’ll have her in protective custody—”

  “It won’t be enough.”

  A silence follows, but he doesn’t argue.

  “So how’s she doing?” I ask.

  “How the fuck should I know? Doctor’s stitched her up. She’s conscious, yeah? But weird.”

  “It’s just the anesthetic wearing off. He’ll give her painkillers, too—”

  “He tried. She wouldn’t take them. Something about needing to feel it.”

  What’s that about? Guilt? Masochism? I wonder if she’s likely to confess. I need to get over there, I need to talk to her. Tonight? Tomorrow? A brief spasm of anxiety. I don’t know what it means. Johanssen’s safe, she’s safe, we’ve got this under control.

  “All right. Call me if anything changes.”

  I’m about to ring off when he says, “Oh, Thames Valley’s got an e-fit coming. The woman who was seen near Graves’s house? Though you were right: it doesn’t look a bit like you.”

  I put the phone down. Suddenly I’m so tired. I want to walk into my bedroom, crawl under the duvet, sleep. No: I want to see Johanssen, right now.

  The memory slices across my vision again: he’s bleeding on a Program street, stumbling, dazed. What did he go through in there? Whitman says he’ll be fine. How would he know?

  How long till I can see him, talk to him, touch him? How long until it’s safe? A month? Two?

  And there it is again, that same unease. A glimmer of something at the edge of my vision. A sense of something bad I can’t quite place, something I knew once but have forgotten. But I keep getting this. Fragments of memory and a deep sense of misgiving. It’s sleeplessness and stress that do it. I’ll be all right soon.

  My phone rings. Charlotte’s phone. I stare at it a moment, then pick up.

  A woman’s voice, uneven with emotion, says, “Charlotte? Charlotte Alton? It’s Anna—you won’t remember me … I was a friend of Mark

  Devlin’s—”

  Anna. The woman outside the restaurant that night. The girl in that earlier photo, so young and so in love. The woman watching him with other women, the one who wouldn’t cope without him … He said she didn’t want him in her life—not like that—but he was wrong, she was just waiting for an opening, waiting for her turn to come again.

  It hits me fresh: it’s never coming now.

  A sudden rush of feeling I can’t kill. “Anna, I’m sorry—”

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she says hurriedly; her voice wavers. For a moment I think she’s going to cry. Then she says, “I’m trying to talk to everyone who knew him. Someone must know what happened to him that night—”

  Gently I say, “I don’t think I can help you.”

  “But is it okay if I just come and talk? It helps, you see, to talk about him—”

  I shouldn’t say yes. Not now. “Well … All right.”

  “This afternoon? You’ll be at home? Thank you.”

  She puts the phone down. What have I just done? You still feel guilty, don’t you?

  Coffee. I need more coffee. Then Craigie’s coming for our usual Friday meeting, convinced we have to stick to our routine. I was too tired to argue.

  I walk to the kitchen. Put the coffee on. Stand there blankly while it brews. I must phone Anna back, confirm a time. Don’t want her arriving while Craigie’s here. I wonder how she got my address.

  On the kitchen screen the news is still playing: talking heads this time. And then a caption: Ian Graves murder e-fit …

  And there it is. The face of the woman seen outside Graves’s house the night he died.

  Ellis was right. It doesn’t look like me. It looks like Anna.

  How much time? How much time?

  I click into the building’s CCTV, go to the lobby camera and then to the one that scans the walkway directly outside the building’s front doors. No one’s loitering. Click to the service bays at the back. A couple is clutched in an embrace, hungry for each other, and oblivious. There’s no one else.

  How long before she gets here? Five minutes? Ten?

  Devlin’s ex, the girl who couldn’t have him, the one who simply followed him around—best cover of all, the disappointed female, the nice woman no one’s particularly interested in. My own stupidity hits me like a slap. Charlotte Alton’s played that card for years.

  Anna is intelligence. She’s been behind this from the beginning, and now she’s coming here. She knows that Charlotte Alton’s on the trail of Catherine Gallagher. She knows I was at Graves’s house—and Devlin’s, on the night he died. She thinks I know where Catherine’s hiding. She wants that information. And then she wants me dead.

  She doesn’t know the other cards I’m holding: Karla, Knox. Those are my trumps. I’ll
play them only when I’m ready. She’ll search the place, but she’ll find nothing. Already I’m loading up the software, the program that will fry everything on my system, burn out the data and all connections to the network, wipe out all the trails—to Johanssen, Craigie, Whitman, Robbie, Ellis, Finn—

  The fear knifes through me: how long has she known? How long has she been watching me? If she knew before two days ago, she could know about them all.

  There isn’t time to warn them.

  I hit EXECUTE. The warning flashes up, in red: ! THIS WILL DELETE ALL DATA. I hit YES. Already I’m shaping up my deal: working out the price Karla will demand for cooperation. No one goes down but me.

  I grab the scrambled phone. Text Craigie first: Abort. Then Finn: a close-down code to wipe the phone’s account. My fingers fumble over the keys—press SEND—then flip the phone’s back off, pull out the SIM. With scissors, slice it into tiny, brittle chips. Run to the roof garden, to the rail, toss the chips out into the wind, forty-one stories up.

  Back to the office. On the screen a timer reaches zero: the screen goes blank. I’m cut off from the network.

  Now get out of here.

  Coat. Bag. Keys to the Merc—but she’ll know it. Go on foot? One last glance out of that big main window—has she got people out there already, behind the blank watchful office windows opposite? Can they see me now?

  Go. Just go.

  There’s no one in the hallway when I run to the lift, no one there when the lift doors open on the lobby. The concierge turns his head to me and smiles, and I smile back, automatically, as I walk past him and out into a Friday afternoon.

  Get out of here. Get as far away as possible. Then contact Powell and set up the deal. Intelligence gets Knox and access to the network. My team goes untouched.

  And Catherine?

  I scan the area. Is someone waiting at the end of the lime-green bridge, or among the tourists on the walkways, or across the dock where the smokers gather, outside the bars? Impossible to know, at this distance.

  I turn, and there he is, just feet away. A tall black man in a good suit. Lucas Powell.