But you’re too late. Forty-one stories above us those electronic brains have emptied, leaving just the vacant corpse of technology, the low-level current ticking through it like a pulse, like brain-dead patients on life support.
He holds out an ID card with curious formality. He says, “You need to come with me now. Please don’t try to run.” The sweat is beading on his brow. He turns his head a fraction, glances back; eight feet behind him, Anna’s standing, hands in the pockets of her mackintosh, watching, serene and lovely.
Powell says quietly, “She has a gun.”
It’s only then I realize he’s terrified.
She walks behind us, all the way: under the concrete legs of the DLR tracks, away from the Docklands monoliths, and out toward the ordinary streets of Poplar. Before we reach the tracks, Powell says, “There are cameras everywhere here, you know?” and he’s saying it to her; but she just says, “I’ll get the footage wiped.”
Like me, but stronger.
Just then we pass a pale-faced man in a dark overcoat, briefcase in one hand, staring at his phone. He glances up once, sees me, sees Powell, and instantly switches his gaze back to his phone, as if we’d never met.
DAY 24: FRIDAY
POWELL
He tried to talk. Walking into Poplar, and at the garage while he secured the woman’s wrists behind her back with cable ties—Leeson holding the gun and hissing “Tighter”—right up to the moment when Leeson duct taped his mouth, he tried to talk. And even lying in the back of the van he’s rehearsing, telling himself it’s not out of his control yet. He’s been on courses, hostage negotiation, high-pressure situations—he knows the things that you’re supposed to say. Stay calm, be persuasive, show that you can help her. She has to see there’s been a misunderstanding, but they can get it sorted. Go somewhere, sit down and clear this up …
It sounds so trite and thin.
All the time he’s wondered how this could have happened: how it could have come upon him quite so fast—as if he should have seen it in a rearview mirror, bearing down on him before it hit. There should have been some premonition of this.
The woman from Docklands is quite small, midthirties maybe, elegantly dressed. The moment he saw her he thought how tired she looked. She hardly spoke on the walk to the garage in Poplar: the shock had made her passive. But now, sitting in the chair in this new location—an empty building in a light-industrial park, he’s guessing—her eyes are wide and desperate above the tape gag. She must be so afraid.
The cable ties are cutting into his wrists and ankles. He tries to relax. Control. Somehow he has to keep control.
Leeson steps toward him. Rips off the gag. “Where is she?”
He doesn’t even understand the question.
He makes his voice calm, measured: “Leeson, you know why I was brought in? To investigate a source called Knox. He’s been supplying MI5 with intel, through a retired Moscow handler, Peter Laidlaw. Knox trusted no one else. Laidlaw died suddenly three weeks ago, MI5 lost contact with Knox, my job has been—”
Leeson takes a pace across the room and strikes the woman, hard: one smart clean blow with the flat of her hand. The woman’s head whips round, but the gag’s in place: she hardly makes a sound.
Leeson draws breath, steps back as if nothing’s happened.
She says, “The first week I wasn’t sure what you were doing. I was watching Bethany and Mitch. I hadn’t worked out they were just the smoke screen. Then one week in, a Met DI called Joe Ellis pulled the MisPer file on Catherine Gallagher. Was it supposed to look like coincidence? Some nosy copper, digging in the files?”
“I don’t know anyone called Joe Ellis—”
A pace, hand raised—the woman flinches from the blow, but she can’t move away, and it catches her across the face again, and this time she makes a small, sharp, desperate sound through the gag.
Leeson says, “Joe Ellis is your handy way of asking questions. Pretending he was investigating a murder, too—as if she really might be dead.”
In the chair opposite the woman blinks away tears. Her cheek’s raw from the blow. Leeson looks at her, but calmly, dispassionately.
She says, “I didn’t know about this one until Wednesday night. She’s very good; you must be proud of her. She was all over Mark ten days ago, but women always were. He never could resist the damsel in distress. And I didn’t put it together, even when I saw Elizabeth Crow—Crow looks older, plainer, heavier. But I was trailing Ellis on Wednesday afternoon. There’s a tire workshop—you know it, of course. On Wednesday it was closed. I saw Ellis go in, I saw him leave, five minutes later she comes out. And of course I’ve got the number she gave Devlin, so I got on her mobile account straightaway. She checked her messages halfway through to Brecon—we guessed where she was heading. She’ll have told you all about the evidence she found. Shame she didn’t get pictures.” She pauses. “Well, Lucas? Or should I call you Powell? You only ever call me Leeson.”
He wants to say, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know any of these names. Mark, Elizabeth Crow, Ellis, Catherine Gallagher—he looks at the nameless woman opposite. She knows what’s coming. His powerlessness washes through him.
Leeson says, “You knew of course that Catherine was alive; you knew just where she was. You knew, presumably because Hamilton told you, once you’d got him tucked up in that house. Did he know you were also using him as bait? You realized I could trace his calls: you were just waiting for me to come after him, weren’t you? Only I know what a safe house looks like. Shame you couldn’t keep him there. And the moment you lost him, you should have called time on it. But you wanted to have all the little pieces before you trotted off to the Chief with your report. That’s why you still didn’t make a move against me. You hadn’t got her yet. Until this morning.
“So what did you want to talk to me about? After you pulled the file on Fenty but before you made your report to the Chief. What were those last few loose ends you had to tie up?”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know what to say.
After a moment Leeson says quietly, “You’re going to tell me where you’ve put her.” She waits, and then when he doesn’t reply she says, “I presume you know what I did to Fenty.” She glances at the woman on her chair. “Don’t think that I won’t do the same to her.”
Fenty? This is all about Fenty? The tech ops guy who tried to sell that file—
The missing week in Leeson’s life, after Fenty disappeared. The things he said to her in the kitchen at work, the pressure for a result, time to get out the thumbscrews, how she twitched—
The pieces drop into place with a tiny click. She didn’t lose Fenty, did she? She found him.
He doesn’t understand the rest of it. The names, or where the woman opposite fits in. But he knows with utter certainty that Fenty’s dead.
He says, “You killed Daniel Fenty?”
“Of course not. All I wanted him to do was talk. Where is she, Powell?”
“I don’t know. I swear it, I don’t know.” I’ve never heard of Catherine Gallagher, I don’t know what any of this is about.
Leeson blinks. She’s thinking. He can see it. Believe me, please, believe me.
She says, “There is a possibility you’re telling the truth. It could be only Ellis knows. He’s not reported in. That’s why you were waiting.” Then she adds, “You understand, I have to check.”
She goes to stand behind the woman’s chair. She says, “I’m going to break her fingers now.”
The woman’s eyes widen. She’s trying to suck in air against the gag, and then her head goes down. She’s bracing herself against the pain. He says rapidly, “I’ve never seen this woman in my life—I don’t know who she is.”
“Really? Do you think I wasn’t watching? I must say, you’re very good. Looking at you, when she came through that door, I’d almost believe you. But I was looking at her, too. And she knows you.”
DAY 24: FRIDAY
KARL
A
She bends one finger back and back and back. Nothing can hurt this much, nothing. I’ll sell Catherine Gallagher out, I’ll do it now, please just take off the gag—
I feel it snap.
The room turns red, then white. My ears are full of hissing. It hurts so much I’m going to vomit.
Something crashes nearby. Powell is yelling. But he’s become irrelevant, lost in the whiteout.
At last the room comes back, in a strange, sick, bleached-out form. My mouth is full of bile. I gulp it down. The pain in my hand is now a background roar. I focus on my breathing.
Powell’s on the floor, the chair pulled over on its side. He’s saying, “Please, please, please,” as if he doesn’t know that it’s too late, it won’t make any difference.
He says, “I don’t know where she is, I don’t know—” His face is twisted, unrecognizable. “Why are you doing this, Leeson? Why?”
Anna’s standing over him. She says, “You know what was on that list. The name of every last man and woman under surveillance in the U.K., and precisely how they were being watched—every bug planted, every phone tapped, every car tracked. Some of these people are nobodies. But some of them want to hurt us, and hurt us badly; except they think they’re under our radar, they think we don’t know what they’re planning. And what does Fenty do? He puts all that up for sale to the highest bidder. But he gets the protection of the law. He gets a solicitor, he gets rights. We work to keep this fucking country safe—” She knows she’s losing it. She stops. Her head comes up. She straightens. “These people have forfeited the right to our protection. I only did what had to be done. I had to make him talk. I won’t be punished for it.”
She walks out of the room. When she comes back, she’s holding the roll of duct tape. She squats down. He says, “Please don’t, we need to talk.” She says, “Shut up or I’ll break another of her fingers.” She tapes a new gag over Powell’s mouth, and then she rises, gets out her phone and walks away, thumbing keys. Just before she passes out of earshot, I hear her saying, in a different voice, “DI Ellis?”
Two minutes later she comes back. She looks down at Powell again. She says, “You’d better hope that Ellis talks.” She goes, without a glance at me.
I would have sold Ellis like a shot; Ellis and Catherine Gallagher. I would. I’m not that good with pain. The moment she takes off the gag I’ll give her everything. The network, Knox, the lot. I wonder if it will make any difference. She works with Powell, she’s a janitor, but they’ve kept Laidlaw’s source a careful secret: she’s never heard of me.
And Karla’s already fading into nothing. Her tracks have gone from Charlotte Alton’s flat. Her mobile’s dead. Her right-hand man has watched her leaving, under arrest, and will be shoring up his own position; I can’t blame him for that. Johanssen’s sleeping in the safe flat in London, oblivious, under Whitman’s care … I want to be beside him in that bed, listening to the rhythms of his breathing, wrapped up in the warmth of him—
Do not lose it now.
After a while Powell makes a noise. I’ve closed my eyes—I’m still trying to think this out, spot the gap in the fence through which I can wriggle, the maneuver that will turn this all around—it means that I don’t think about my finger, and that’s a good thing—but now I open them. From behind the gag comes a quiet, rhythmic moaning, and with every moan he’s beating his head against the floor, again and again.
He has a wife in Washington, and a child. I wonder if it’s coming home to him: he won’t see them again.
He doesn’t know it, but he’s just like Daniel Fenty: back up against the wall, being asked for answers that he cannot give, with no one to believe his ignorance, and no exits in sight.
Craigie and I found out who took that list, although she took some tracking down. She worked in an administrative role within MI5, acting as liaison between departments; until we contacted her she thought that she was safe. We made it clear our role wasn’t to punish traitors—we wouldn’t be passing her name on to her superiors—but that we wouldn’t stand by while she sold secrets to terrorists. If in future she had information to trade, she should come direct to us. She’s contacted us twice since then, but only with little snippets of data, useful rather than spectacular. I don’t like her—she’s very focused on the money—but then few criminals are in it out of love; it doesn’t bother me.
She mentioned that they’d pinned the blame on Fenty; that was what made her safe. The fact he’d run did suggest that he was guilty, but if he was, then I don’t know of what. Perhaps simply of crossing Anna’s sights. Perhaps that was enough.
But Anna caught him.
I wonder what she told Mark Devlin. That Daniel Fenty was a colleague, injured in a black op, on the run? Someone who needed a safe place and a doctor who wouldn’t talk? Help me, Mark—
And so Mark Devlin helped: with the house and with Catherine. He must have sat in his London office, or in his beautiful Notting Hill flat, believing that what he’d done was good—
While Anna went to work on Daniel Fenty, with Catherine Gallagher in support: clever, ambitious, coldhearted, but skilled, and vouched for by Mark Devlin.
If Fenty had been guilty, he’d have cracked. He was in technical operations: a boffin, a geek. He’d never have withstood hard-core interrogation. Anna would have turned in a prisoner, a confession, a result. Fenty’s injuries would have aroused suspicion, then been explained away. Catherine would have been bribed into silence: a prestigious new posting, a research budget, all in recognition of her valuable assistance. If she’d had misgivings, she’d have buried them.
Fenty would have lived. If he’d been guilty.
But Fenty wasn’t guilty, and he couldn’t crack.
Anna must have shown Devlin the body. She did this to him, and now she’s set you up to take the blame. Or maybe she just appealed to his sense of rightness, the same blind sense that had him stepping out in front of a speeding vehicle, believing he could make it stop.
Catherine killed this man. Bringing the police in won’t help. It’s up to us to put it right.
They cleaned the house, disposed of the remains. Then Anna spent a year looking for Catherine. At last she found her in the Program.
But she’d been looking over her shoulder, too; and when Powell arrived, to run some hushed-up investigation, she thought he’d come for her.
Across the room Powell has stopped moving. I doubt he understands what’s going on. I like him much more than I thought I would. I have a sense of him already: smart, straight down the line. Copes with the politics of intelligence less well than he believes. An honest man, and they’re always hard to manage. No wonder they sent him off to Washington. I think back to his file: the child’s a girl, her name is … Thea. Well remembered, clever you.
Oh, yes, I know everything now.
I hear her coming back before I see her. She walks in, and instantly I’m trying to read her. Did she corner Ellis? Her face doesn’t give anything away. I’m sweating, cringing, gulping, searching for the first sign she’s coming to me—already I can feel her touching my fingers, squeezing so gently on the broken bone—the pain’s already singing in my ears …
She comes over and looks down at Powell. One long quiet moment.
She says, “Now we wait.” She goes again.
She isn’t going to hurt me this time.
Ellis has talked.
DAY 24: FRIDAY
JOHANSSEN
Johanssen’s drifting.
He’s back at the South London flat, and he’s alone: no guard this time. He overheard Whitman releasing the two British guys with a story about reinforcements—“And he’ll be no trouble, you’ve seen the state he’s in”—then Whitman, too, went out, though he’ll be back. He’s got a wife in Paris, even showed Johanssen a picture before he left, of a pretty dark-haired girl with wayward eyes. Whitman wants to wrap this up as soon as possible: “Yeah, we’ll do it properly, but since Laura cleared it with Washington …” He s
hrugged. He left behind a phone, one of Karla’s specials, heat sealed in a soft plastic envelope; Johanssen broke the seal and called Fielding on it, reporting in on Cate’s evacuation—“She was wounded, there was nothing I could do.” Fielding said, “You heard someone snatched her?” and Johanssen said, “Heard it on the news. The client?” and Fielding muttered something dark. He’s pissed off, thinks it’s the client taking matters into their own hands, and he’s lost out on his fee.
Johanssen called Karla, but the line was dead.
The drugs are still muffling his senses. Through them he can just catch the ghostly outlines of pain—his head, his arms and back, his shoulders, torso, neck … He’ll ease off the painkillers in a day or two, but first he needs to sleep.
The afternoon ebbs. He lets the TV drone in the corner, a low-level distraction while he dozes on the sofa: the sound mingles with the sounds of other TVs in other flats, the child coughing its smoker’s cough next door, a woman talking on her mobile in the corridor outside—“I told him, I said I hope you’re fucking proud of yourself.” The sounds wash over him. He’s entering period of transition, like decompression: as if he’s a diver who’s surfaced too fast out of a dark depth, and this scummy flat’s his hyperbaric chamber, a place to wait it out until he’s in a fit state to rejoin the outside world. The days will pass. He won’t go out. He’ll keep the TV on round the clock. The wounds will heal, the bruises yellow and fade, the stiffness ease: the pains will become aches. He’ll mend. A few more days of this, and he’ll move out of here, shed Ryan Jackson like a discarded skin, return to his own life. And Karla. Karla.
When the phone rings, he gropes for it, thinking of her, suddenly hopeful.
Fielding says, “Client’s got us a new address for the target.”
An address. Through the fug, the world shifts; and then the floor seems to drop away, as if someone’s blown it out from under him. Karla isn’t answering her phone.
The Distance: A Thriller Page 39