Blackout - John Milton #10 (John Milton Thrillers)

by Mark Dawson

  Josie turned and watched as the car slowed for the junction, the taillights glowing for a moment before the driver released the brakes and stepped on the gas once more. The engine hummed and the car turned sharply to the right, quickly passing out of sight behind the corner.

  She glanced up and saw her mother’s face looking down from the window of the apartment. She gripped the Glock a little tighter. Her palm was slick against the polymer butt, and she could feel the perspiration running down her back. She wasn’t sweating because of the heat. It was a cold sweat.

  Mendoza?

  He had black hair and he wore a linen jacket.

  Josie was frightened.

  She took the stairs two at a time and went back into the apartment.

  Her mother was waiting. She stared down at the Glock in Josie’s hand.

  “Pack a case,” Josie said.

  “Why? What is it? What’s the matter?”

  “We have to leave.”

  37

  MILTON LAY down and closed his eyes, but sleep did not come.

  His mind was restless, a flashing of emotions through the static of pain.

  There was relief. He had wondered whether he might have killed Jessica. At least he knew that he had not.

  And there was fear.

  Fitzroy de Lacey.

  He remembered.

  * * *

  MILTON HAD been given a file on de Lacey while he was serving in Group Fifteen. He didn’t remember exactly when it was, but it had been during the start of his descent into alcoholism. Those months and years had congealed into a vague mess, and it was difficult to peel them apart. He remembered receiving the file and being briefed by Control. De Lacey had come to the attention of the spymasters in the River House, and Milton was to be the agent responsible for bringing him down.

  The intelligence had been excellent and the report was voluminous. There had been a man—a member of de Lacey’s inner circle—who had fled after his son had been murdered by another colleague. MI6 had been able to flip the man, promising him retribution for his son’s death in exchange for his returning to the fold and providing his new paymasters with the information that they needed to bring de Lacey to justice.

  There had been a detailed portrait. De Lacey was around the same age as Milton, but the similarities ended there. He had enjoyed a privileged upbringing, the scion of an ancient family. He had been educated at Bryanston and then read law at Cambridge. He became Earl of Montgomery following the death of his father, Percy de Lacey, the nineteenth Earl of Montgomery.

  De Lacey began in the aviation industry in the mid-1990s. He had moved to the United Arab Emirates to pursue his legal career and was seconded to the local offices of an air freight company that operated out of Dubai’s international airport. He saw how much money the company was making despite the fact that the management—which he despised—had no obvious business acumen. He quit his job and, leveraging some of the connections that he had made while working at the airport, he recruited a pilot and rented a Russian cargo plane.

  Tactical Aviation was an immediate success and, within six months, he had been able to recruit additional pilots and crew and had put together a small rented fleet of planes. He did business all around the world, with a focus on Africa. He transported agricultural equipment, domestic appliances, textiles and furniture from his base in Dubai to Benin, Botswana, Namibia, Rwanda, Senegal and the Congo. He developed contacts in Afghanistan, initially transporting Afghani textiles from Kabul but quickly increasing the variety of goods that would ship.

  It was reported that he became close to elements within the government in Kabul. The Taliban was making advances from its redoubt in the south of the country, and the government was interested in resupplying its army with new weapons. De Lacey was approached by a source close to the Afghani president and asked whether he would be able to source and deliver a large amount of weapons. The profile had marked him down as a gambler and someone who was adept at thinking on the spot. He had no way to fulfil such an order, but he told the Afghanis that he could.

  He then set about finding a source who could provide the goods. He had previously done business with a businessman in Latvia. The man—Mariss Gulbis—was comfortable operating in the grey area between legal and illegal trade. De Lacey flew to Riga to present him with a proposal: if Gulbis could source the weapons, de Lacey would transport them. They would share the profit equally.

  The Latvian black market was swamped with weapons from the former Soviet Union, and Gulbis put together a cargo that matched the Afghan request. The continued rise of the Taliban meant that the initial contract was renewed and then renewed again. The quantities doubled and then tripled. De Lacey stopped his business in legitimate freight and moved exclusively into running guns and other weapons.

  After six months, with business continuing to grow, Mariss Gulbis was shot in the street outside his apartment in Riga. Local police had no leads and, after a cursory investigation, the case was closed. It was never proven, but off-the-record sources said that de Lacey had paid a corrupt police inspector to murder his associate and then shut down the investigation.

  Tactical ran into regulatory problems with the authorities in Dubai, and de Lacey transferred his business to South Africa. He found an airstrip that was suitable for his large Ilyushin IL-76 cargo planes in Polokwane, a city two hundred miles to the northeast of Johannesburg. He set up an array of companies all around the world, many of them fronts through which he could funnel his burgeoning profits so as to minimise taxes and the ability of the authorities to investigate his activities.

  He had contracts with the Rwandan government to supply arms during the genocide. At the same time, another contract transported UN peacekeepers into the country. The soldiers who had travelled on his planes were attacked with the weapons that he had sold.

  He did deals with the corrupt regime in Liberia.

  He sold surface-to-air missiles to Hezbollah.

  He sold tank rounds to the Libyan regime.

  He supplied machine guns to the rebels in the Sierra Leone civil war.

  The Igla missiles he supplied to rebels in Kenya were used to attack an Israeli airliner as it took off from Nairobi in 2002.

  He met with Hezbollah officials in Lebanon in the run-up to the 2006 war, and documents found in the wreckage of Muammar Gaddafi’s former intelligence headquarters proved that de Lacey had a commercial presence in Libya and aimed to increase his dealings there.

  He was ruthless and amoral.

  A fresh contract supplied the Tutsi militias in Congo. Millions of civilians were massacred. If his complicity in their deaths preyed upon his conscience, it was not apparent. De Lacey bought a palatial retreat in the south of France. He filled the garage with supercars, commissioned his first yacht, and purchased a Gulfstream to take him to and from his business meetings. Tactical Aviation grew, employing several hundred people and leasing nearly fifty planes.

  But his success brought him to the attention of the authorities. MI6 took an interest and, when he was described in the House of Commons as a “merchant of death” following the discovery of a shipment of arms to the Tutsi militants, it was decided that something needed to be done. Discussions were undertaken in conference rooms in the Vauxhall Cross headquarters of MI6. Intelligence mandarins considered the benefits and disbenefits of de Lacey’s continued activity. Chief among the latter was the fact that he was a British citizen and that he was working against British policy in some of the most flammable areas of the world. A decision was made and a file was created. It was sent to the shabby building nearby that was the base for Group Fifteen. The file was passed to Milton. Usually, those files spelled the imminent death of the men and women whose lives were laid out within those pages, but, when it came to de Lacey, a different course of action was proposed. He would be taken out of circulation another way.

  Milton had found that curious, but it wasn’t his place to ask questions.

  He was responsibl
e for putting the plan into effect.

  De Lacey was to be set up and put in prison.

  * * *

  MILTON COULD hear the sound of Isko’s light snoring as he slept. The man was close; Milton could have reached out and touched him without stretching his arm. He shifted, trying to find a position that didn’t press up against the tender spots all over his body. It was impossible; the mattress was too thin and he had bruises everywhere. He rolled over onto his back, folded his arms across his chest and looked up at the ceiling. The light in the cell was off, but the illumination from the lights outside meant that it wasn’t close to being dark. He heard the sound of conversation from the nearby cells and, higher up, the sudden shrieking of a man in pain.

  Milton closed his eyes. He tried to think. He would need to be smart if he wanted to stay alive. He would need all of his experience.

  His thoughts slowed, and, eventually, his mind became fogged with sleep. He saw Fitzroy de Lacey swimming in the sea as Milton watched from his yacht. Jessica was there, too, lying on the deck in a bikini with a cocktail close at hand. She looked up at Milton and smiled.

  He allowed his breathing to deepen and, finally, he slept.

  38

  JOSIE DIDN’T get much sleep.

  She woke from a light doze and fumbled for her watch on the nightstand next to her bed: it was six thirty. She blinked her eyes, slowly bringing them into focus, and saw her pistol on the nightstand, too.

  It all came back to her.

  She wasn’t in her own bed.

  She wasn’t in her mother’s apartment or even in Alabang.

  Last night had been awful. Her mother was stubborn and cantankerous, but she didn’t demur when Josie told her that they had to leave. It was a family joke that Josie was slow to panic, and she must have seen her alarm and heard the urgency in her words. Both women had packed small cases and then they had packed a third case with Angelo’s things.

  Josie had woken her son, scrubbing the fright from her face as she told him that he needed to get dressed for an adventure that she and his lola were going to take him on. He was too lost in sleep to protest and had fallen asleep on her mother’s lap as Josie went outside to bring the car closer to the door of the apartment building. She had loaded the cases into the trunk and then she had waited for her mother to scoop Angelo into her arms. Josie led the way down the stairs with her Glock in her hand. She went outside first and waited anxiously while her mother carried her boy to the car and strapped him into his seat.

  They had driven north, continuing for thirty minutes until they reached Taguig. Josie pulled over outside the city and, using her mother’s phone, found a suitable place to stay, calling ahead to ensure that they had a vacancy and that they would be able to check in after hours. The place was on Labao Street, and Josie had entered the address into her phone and followed the directions. It was called the Napindan Castle. It was a budget B&B, clean and tidy, and she had enough money in the bank to afford two rooms for a month or two.

  She scrubbed her eyes and turned over. Angelo was still asleep beside her, his breathing slow and even. The boy had been confused by the night’s activities, but, once they had settled into the room, he had very quickly burrowed against her and drifted back off into a carefree sleep.

  Josie wished that she might have done the same thing herself, but she couldn’t; she remembered the fire at the hotel, the bullet with the picture of her boy, and the black car in the street outside the house.

  She had been given a message, and its meaning was clear.

  Her continued investigation into the death of the girl at the hotel had been noticed.

  She was being warned off.

  She lay back and closed her eyes, trying to maintain her composure. She needed to be rational.

  She had spent hours last night trying to work out who might have been responsible for the threats that she’d received, and, as much as she tried to steer her thoughts in another direction, ultimately she could not.

  It had to be Bruno Mendoza.

  There was no question that he was involved.

  He had transferred Smith to Bilibid.

  The owner of the bar had died the night after meeting him.

  Josie knew too much about him. She knew that he ran a death squad out of the station, a group of officers who prosecuted the president’s war on drugs with a spree of extrajudicial executions. Killing the owner of the bar would have been a simple matter for him. He could have sent any one of his flunkies. The same could be said for the fire at the hotel.

  She doubted that he would have any compunction in doing away with her, too, if he decided that her investigation was dangerous to him.

  And he knew everything about her: that she had a son and where she lived.

  She had done the right thing in leaving and coming here.

  But now they were here, what next?

  She had given thought to calling in sick and staying off work, but she decided that that would not help her. She was never sick, and to be away from the station now would signal to Mendoza—and anyone else involved in the conspiracy—that she was frightened. And that might suggest that she had something to hide.

  No, she concluded once again. If she stayed away, she would be telling them that she had a reason to be fearful. She couldn’t afford to do that.

  She needed to go to work.

  39

  ISKO WAS already up when Milton awoke the next day. He heard the sounds of exertion and, as he opened his eyes and looked over at the old man’s bedroll, he saw that he was working through a set of push-ups. He had taken off his shirt and Milton could see his ribs, a corrugated pattern visible through his parchment-thin skin.

  Isko noticed that Milton was awake. “Good morning,” he said between push-ups. He performed another three to complete the set, dipping down so low that his chest touched the bedroll and then pushing up again. “How did you sleep?”

  “Not bad,” Milton said.

  “The noise did not wake you?”

  “What noise?”

  “There was a fight last night. Two men in the cell along from this one. I saw through the door—one of them was hurt. They took him out on a stretcher.”

  “Does that happen much?”

  “It is not unusual,” Isko said with a shrug that suggested it was mundane.

  The old man rose to his feet and put on his shirt.

  “What time is it?” Milton asked.

  “A little after six. We will have breakfast soon. How do you feel?”

  Milton assessed the damage. He had been hurt, but it was superficial. His bones appeared to be intact. His face was tender and his body was sore from the kicks and punches that Tiny had delivered, but that was the extent of it.

  “Better than last night,” he said.

  “You look worse,” the old man said with a grin that exposed his disastrous teeth.

  Milton managed to get his feet beneath him and pressed himself upright. He winced from the effort as he slowly straightened his back.

  He heard a sudden clattering from the corridor.

  “Rancho!” came a shouted call.

  “What’s going on?”

  Isko stood. “Breakfast.”

  Milton heard the squeak of unoiled castors as the breakfast cart was wheeled down the corridor and the rattle of chains as the prisoners who were still restrained started to rouse themselves. The cart was attended to by a prisoner who, under the lazily watchful eye of a guard, deposited a bar of soap and a metal billycan of food for each inmate. There was a small opening at the bottom of the bars, and a second inmate slid the cans inside with dexterous flicks of his feet.

  “We’re not going to the mess?”

  “Not today. Sometimes they prefer to keep us in the cells. Not a bad thing for you, perhaps.”

  “I’m not complaining,” Milton said.

  * * *

  THEY SLID the breakfast cans back out of the cell so that the inmates could collect them and stack them on the trol
ley as they made their way back along the corridor in the direction that they had arrived.

  Milton took a moment to close his eyes and think about the Steps. He wished that he still had his copy of the Big Book. It had been left behind in the hotel room when he had been arrested. The book had accompanied him around the world. It was well thumbed, the pages turning to particularly familiar passages when he let it fall open. The margins were decorated with his annotations, and the text was garlanded with underlining and highlighted passages. He doubted whether he would ever see the book again.

  One of the guards walked down the corridor, shouting out a word that Milton did not understand.

  “What is he saying?”

  “Exercise,” Isko translated for him. “We have an hour in the sunshine.”

  40

  THE CELL doors were unlocked and opened and the men were allowed out into the corridor. They did not dawdle, immediately turning in the same direction and setting off. Isko waited for Milton to join him outside and then led the way.

  “You know anything about Bilibid?”

  “Nothing.”

  “They built it eighty years ago,” the old man explained as they descended the stairs to the ground-floor lobby. “It was made for two thousand men. In twenty years they had eight thousand. There was trouble—riots, murders—so they tore it down and built again. It made no difference. There are still many more men here than there should be. You will see.”

  The wall of the corridor was replaced by a wire screen that allowed them to look at a row of eight cells, each sealed by iron bars. There were men inside the cells; there was no indication that their doors were to be unlocked.