Delivering Caliban (John Purkiss 2)

by Tim Stevens

  What Pope hadn’t bargained on – and it was a mistake, he admitted to himself – was that Giordano would have Nina under constant surveillance. That detail had, like Purkiss’s intervention in Amsterdam, nearly derailed the plan. Pope’s first visit to the United States in January had established Ramirez’s whereabouts, her working patterns, but it had failed to appreciate the fact that she had watchers constantly. Pope considered himself lucky that the watchers hadn’t spotted him at that early stage.

  He’d used the January trip to obtain - with moderate difficulty – Giordano’s cell phone number. He had done this through that most ancient of the spy’s tactics, namely the honey trap. One of Giordano’s aides, an up-and-coming junior staffer named Naomi Johnson, had proved hard to pin down but less difficult to win over. He hadn’t discussed politics or work or anything with her; had simply obtained her own cell phone by sleight of hand at an opportune moment and found the required number listed as RAG, Giordano’s initials.

  Pope’s second visit to the US, the April trip, had been concerned with the practicalities of the final stage in his operation. He’d obtained a staff member’s ID pass to the Holtzmann Solar offices in the Loomis building and had committed to memory the details before returning it to the unsuspecting staffer. Those details he later used back in his SIS base in Amsterdam to produce a forged pass. Also while in the US on the second trip, he’d rented the apartment across from the Loomis building. The floor plan of the Holtzmann Solar headquarters wasn’t that hard to come by, and he’d identified the room directly across from his apartment, namely the Board Room Annex.

  A journey upstate had obtained for Pope the light truck, and some shopping around had procured the necessary materials for the bomb: a urea nitrate main charge with nitroglycerine as a booster explosive and several tanks of bottled hydrogen to enhance the effect of the blast. The entire bomb weighed just under a tonne. He’d left the truck in the public car lot near Gramercy Park and made sure he’d paid enough to last until his return this time.

  And here he was, in the end phase. He was at the vantage point he’d decided on, with the woman, Giordano’s daughter, at his side, waiting for Giordano to make an appearance in the adjacent building.

  He’d made it. Somewhere, Pope believed, his father had taken note.

  Forty-Three

  9.45 am

  The gridlock had shut down on the streets as suddenly as a trap springing shut.

  Berg punched buttons on the radio, trying to get a clearer signal. Eventually one broke through.

  …Credible threat of a bomb in the Loomis Building. Evacuation of the building and the surrounding blocks underway. All units to regard as a priority.

  ‘Car bomb,’ said Purkiss. ‘The light truck Pope rented. It’ll be in the basement.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Berg. ‘Jesus.’ She picked up her phone, dialled, spoke rapidly and concisely, then rang off. ‘At least now they know what to look for.’

  Through the windscreen Purkiss watched people stepping out on to the streets, gazing off in the direction the police vehicles appeared to be heading, disregarding the traffic which wasn’t moving anyway.

  ‘Out,’ said Purkiss.

  Berg hesitated, then climbed out to join Purkiss and Kendrick. The road was blocked as far ahead as they could see. The crowds on the streets and the pavements were catching the mood already, becoming a herd united in rising wonder and panic.

  ‘Lead the way,’ said Purkiss.

  They moved rapidly, weaving their way through the throng, the three of them abreast. Berg said, ‘I’m trying to figure this… Pope’s in the building? Going to take it down, him and the Ramirez woman included?’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Purkiss.

  ‘You’re not convinced?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ They were, Purkiss guessed, a few blocks from their destination. Uniformed police were corralling the crowds away and deploying tape and barriers across the streets. ‘There’s a loose end. And that loose end’s Giordano.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Pope wants revenge on Giordano and he’s going to kill his daughter to achieve that. I think we can assume that’s correct. But is he really going to stop there? Is Giordano’s daughter’s death really punishment enough? Look at the vengeance Pope’s exacting on Holtzmann Solar. Bringing their entire headquarters down, literally. It doesn’t make sense that he’d allow Giordano to escape relatively unscathed.’

  ‘You think Giordano’s in the building with him?’

  ‘I think he might be.’

  Berg took out her phone and punched buttons as they strode.

  ‘Yeah. I need to know if a Raymond Giordano is on record as having entered the Loomis Building in the last twenty-four hours. Yes, I know it’s being evacuated.’

  She pressed the phone against her ear and covered the other one. In a moment she said, ‘Okay. Thanks.’ She looked at Purkiss. ‘He was signed in at nine fifteen. Twenty minutes ago.’

  *

  The Loomis Building looked a new construction to Purkiss, a soaring blue-and-silver tower with a wedding-cake base and a sharp narrowing to a long, spire-like neck. The stream of people emerging from the front was just on the right side of becoming an uncontrollable torrent. Purkiss couldn’t remember having seen so many police officers in one place before.

  To the left of the building stood a more uniformly slender apartment block, the one in which Pope had rented a property. Its entrance too was spilling bodies. Helicopters were chattering overhead, spiralling like slow moths around a flame. On the ground the inevitable television crews were trying to tunnel their way in.

  The police line was ebbing outwards, forcing the crowds ever further back, and Purkiss and the other two were forced along with the masses. Purkiss struggled to keep his footing while hanging on to the thought that was tugging for his attention.

  The apartment Pope rented. Why in this particular building? It had the advantage of proximity, so that Pope would have had a convenient base from which to set up the bomb plot… but why not take one even a few streets away?

  And then he had it.

  *

  Purkiss spotted Berg a few heads away, Kendrick even further. He called across to Berg and she pushed her way through the jostling bodies until she reached him.

  In her ear, over the noise, he shouted: ‘How would one get back into the building?’

  She frowned as though she’d misheard. ‘Back in? No chance. There’ll be a cordon all around that you’d never cross. It’d have to be with the bomb squad, if anything.’ She shook her head. ‘Anyhow, are you nuts? Why’d you want to get in there? It’s a thirty-floor building.You’d never find Pope and the girl in time.’

  ‘I’m not going in there,’ Purkiss yelled back. ‘You and Kendrick are.’

  Forty-Four

  9.30 am

  Giordano was aware of a strange peace, as though he was in an impenetrable capsule cocooned from a world that was coming to an end around him.

  After Pope’s call he’d stepped out of the elevator as soon as the doors opened, even though it wasn’t the floor he wanted. The bustle in the corridors was that of a normal working day in the headquarters of a global company, not the barely contained hysteria of crowds seeking an exit. He had time to hide.

  He found that old standby, a restroom, shut himself in one of the cubicles and sat on the lid of the toilet with his feet propped up so that they weren’t visible under the door.

  Ten minutes later the first alarm sounded.

  *

  He gave it half an hour, as long as he dared while still leaving time for possible delays up to the eighteenth floor, and at nine forty-eight found himself in the plush, airconditioned surroundings of the Board Room Annex. Some annex, he thought. It was twice the size of the most of the boardrooms he’d been in.

  Faintly, as if through many fathoms of water, he heard a cacophony. The glazing on the windows all but shut out the sound.

  Giordano kept away from the window and sat
in one of the seats around the enormous conference table, alone, to wait.

  *

  His guilt about Nina was cold and twisted and fossilised, but his betrayal of Naomi was raw as a wound in his conscience. She’d watched his back, had bent and even broken the rules for him on more than one occasion. Yes, she was ambitious, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt her career prospects to have a mentor of his seniority and reputation (though how that was going change now, he thought with bitter mirth). But her loyalty was based on more than just political calculation.

  He’d played her, and his lesser assistant Kenny, with finely honed skill. Giordano’s people in Amsterdam had removed the CCTV cameras from outside Jablonsky’s and Taylor’s apartments and sent the footage electronically straight to Giordano. The footage wasn’t continuous – Giordano hadn’t thought it worthwhile having continuous twenty-four-hour surveillance on his former partners – but rather in a series of bursts of film. The man entering Jablonsky’s apartment was the one Giordano soon identified as John Purkiss.

  Giordano assumed back then that Purkiss was the killer, so he’d kept the footage from Naomi, pretending it had been removed, and had sent those two idiots, Campbell and Barker, to monitor the arrivals at JFK Airport. He was correct in assuming that Purkiss would arrive there, but wrong in thinking he planned to kill Grosvenor, whose murder occurred before Purkiss set foot in the US. Campbell and Barker, the idiots, had bungled Purkiss’s capture. If they hadn’t done that, Purkiss would have been in Giordano’s hands now for over eighteen hours and would have given up Pope’s name. Pope might have been taken down by now.

  As for Nina… the watchers Giordano had put in place for her, Druze and Laymon and the rest, might have taken her into protective custody if Giordano hadn’t told them to hang back at first, keeping close to her but seeing if they could spot if she was being followed by somebody else. That was Giordano’s mistake and nobody else’s. If he’d let them take Nina immediately instead of trying to use her as bait to flush out Pope, she’d be safe now, and Pope would have no leverage.

  If, if, if. If he could change the past, Giordano would go even further back. Of course he would. Now, though, he needed to focus on making decisions that would minimise the damage that was going to be done. He’d already phoned Naomi, apologising for his delay in replying to her calls earlier and saying he was on his way back to Langley. This was to head off any move she might make to put a trace on his phone, worried as she no doubt was about his failure to respond. He didn’t need her discovering he was in this particular building. She might send someone in to get him, and that would interfere with whatever plan Pope had and thereby jeopardise Nina’s safety.

  He was going to die, Giordano knew. He had no way of avoiding this, but it didn’t matter. What mattered to him was that Nina not suffer. He had nothing with which to bargain with Pope, no hands to play. If Pope had wanted a simple swap, Giordano for Nina, he would have gone along with it without hesitation. But that clearly wasn’t what Pope had in mind. He wanted Giordano to suffer, and deep in Giordano’s mind, hidden yet present like a walled-up body, was the dreadful suspicion of what Pope intended to do.

  Nine fifty-five. Five minutes.

  Giordano placed his phone on the table before him, and watched it.

  Forty-Five

  9.50 am

  In his career Purkiss had broken into more places than he remembered, both as an SIS agent and in recent years in his new role. He’d learned the correct techniques for picking old-fashioned mortice locks, had become practised in the art of using a credit-card or similar strip of plastic to crack a Yale; he’d also mastered the subtler skills of deception to gain entry into places he wasn’t welcome.

  This time he went for brute force.

  The pathway directly behind the building gave on to manicured gardens. A concrete sculpture in the form of a Greek god, some three feet high, adorned the edge of a pond. The garden was unoccupied. Purkiss had shoved his way forward into the milling throng at the front of the building, holding his passport aloft like a staff ID card of some kind and pretending he was helping to herd the occupants of the building away from the doors. He’d edged close rot the corner and, when he was as certain as he might be that nobody was looking directly at him, or at least registering what they were seeing, he slipped round it.

  The statuette was freestanding. He lifted and hefted it, then advanced to the nearest window. The ground floor of the block seemed to be like that of a hotel, without apartments but instead taken up with offices and residents’ facilities such as the gym he could see beyond the window.

  Purkiss swung the base of the statuette against the window, wielding the object like a hammer rather than like a battering ram. The glass first chipped, then starred, then bulged spongily inwards. He knocked the webbed hole until it was large enough to fit him; then he threw the statue aside and climbed in.

  Another noise had started up – a burglar alarm, he assumed – but it was drowned by the steady two-tone note of the fire alarm.

  Purkiss ran through the gym into the corridor beyond, turning once and then again and finding himself at a bank of lifts. Pope’s apartment was number 1926, on the nineteenth floor.

  He mounted the fire stairs, prepared all the time to encounter somebody coming down but meeting no-one. He supposed many if not most of the people who lived here were wealthy professionals who were out at work.

  His phone rang and he slipped it out as he ascended.

  It was Berg: ‘We’re in. You?’

  ‘Yes. Any trouble?’

  ‘Just a little. I told the cops we were involved in a hostage situation but they had to shut up about it. Then we just ran and got in past the bomb guys. The cops are too busy with crowd control to come after us.’

  ‘Good.’ He reached a landing and said, ‘I’m on the sixth floor. Fifteen to go.’

  ‘But the apartment’s on the nineteenth storey.’

  ‘I’m going two up, directly overhead. One up and he might hear me through the ceiling. Head up to as near as you can get to straight opposite his apartment. The eighteenth to twentieth floor, probably.’

  ‘Got you.’

  *

  Purkiss reached the twenty-first floor and paused on the landing, catching his breath. A full-length window gave on to a spectacular view of the skyline. When he felt ready he moved down the passage from door to door, reaching number 2126.

  The locks, four of them, took him five minutes. He fumbled at the last one and forced himself to slow down. Beyond, a plush furnished apartment showed signs of having been recently abandoned: magazines were in disarray on the floor and two half-full coffee mugs stood on the table.

  At the far end of the living room was a set of glass doors opening on to a balcony. Beyond, he could see the Loomis Building stretching upwards. He unlocked the doors and peered out, the sudden air chill on his face. A helicopter swung past and he ducked back inside.

  ‘I’m in the apartment two floors up,’ he said into his phone. ‘I’m coming out for a moment.’

  When he was confident no choppers were coming he stepped on to the balcony, scanning the building opposite and seeing nothing in any of the windows, before going back in again.

  Berg said, ‘Yeah, I saw you. We’re around four flights down, diagonally across to your right.’

  ‘Stay out of sight,’ said Purkiss. ‘The moment you see anything in Pope’s window let me know.’

  He hung back beside the drapes and waited.

  *

  Berg’s voice was low, but excited so that it sounded like a shout: ‘He’s there. Coming out on the balcony. He’s got Ramirez with him. He’s talking on the phone.’

  Purkiss opened the doors of his own balcony once more and emerged, crouching behind the wall. He peered across at the sheer steel-and-glass face of the Loomis building, letting his eyes rove across it, allowing the sensors in the periphery of his vision to detect any movement rather than seeking it out actively.

  There. Belo
w him but in a straight line opposite. Two, perhaps three floors down.

  A hand pressed against the glass. A bearded face.

  ‘Berg,’ he said. ‘It’s Giordano.’

  Purkiss made his move.

  Forty-Six

  10.00 am

  ‘Am I going to die?’

  She hadn’t moved from her place on the sofa, while Pope had stood, paced, stretched. Normally quite able to keep still for long periods, he was allowing himself the luxury of impatience.

  He came back and sat in front of her again.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  It was the truth. The Loomis Building might do what the Twin Towers had done and collapse vertically downwards. Or, it might topple sideways. The bomb he’d constructed was based on the one that had been used in the original terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in February 1993, when the intention had been to drive the North Tower into its southern neighbour. If that happened, if the Loomis Building hit the apartment block, then yes, both Nina and Pope would die.

  It was the luck of the draw. Life was like that. Apart from certain insignificant aspects that were under willed control, most of human existence was governed by randomness.

  Nina nodded, as though it was the answer she’d been expecting.

  Pope checked his watch. Ten o’clock. Still seated, he dialled Giordano’s number.

  ‘Yes.’