by Chris Ryan
The guy looked again.
He did a spit-take and beer dribbled down his shirt as he said, ‘Hey. You ain’t Pete.’
twenty-one
East Texas. 0957 hours.
Bald took a detour off the I-90 between Devers to the west and Nome to the east. He was eighteen miles from Beaumont, just over thirty from the Louisiana border. Abandoned oil gushers towered over the salt domes like ancient edifices. The sky was grey. Bald arrowed the Buick down Farm to Market 365, a crappy single-lane road that bulldozed its way past blistered farmhouses and sunburnt Fresno trees. After a couple of minutes he pulled over beside a bleached field and slammed on the brakes. He left the engine running.
He stepped out onto the cindered asphalt and went round to the boot. Pete’s friend had stopped thumping his fists a couple of hours ago. Now Bald cranked the boot open. Bleary daylight spooked the guy. He went to shield his face, but Bald was already grabbing his shirt and hauling him to his feet. His skin had paled during the seven-hour ride from Eagle. The cuts on his lips were wide enough to slide the side of a quarter through. His nose had been smashed into the approximation of a nose, like a five-year-old’s sketch. Bald had dragged him into the Buick back at Eagle and beaten the living shit out of him, and the dead shit too. Now he shoved him roughly to the side of the road. The guy’s eyes were on the grip of the Colt jutting out of the front of Bald’s jeans.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘Don’t kill me.’
Bald pulled out the pistol and walked up so close to the guy that he could smell the sweat and booze leeching off his pallid skin. He reached into the man’s pocket, pulled out his crocodile-leather wallet, removed his driver’s licence and tossed the wallet into the field. ‘Duane Kurlansky. Now I know your name and where you live. And if you tell anyone – and I fucking mean anyone – that you saw me, I’ll kill you. Do you understand?’
‘Y-yes,’ the guy stammered. ‘I won’t say a word.’
His cries were interrupted by the sound of piss hissing down his leg.
‘Now fuck off,’ said Bald.
Bald watched the guy walk off down Farm to Market, urine streaking and misting on the asphalt. Then he fired up the Buick and raced back onto I-10, heading east. He passed Beaumont and the Louisiana border. He passed Lake Charles and Lafayette and Baton Rouge. At 1311 hours, having covered 620 miles on I-10 and I-12 since he’d left Eagle City, Bald could feel himself starting to flag, like someone had sewn hockey pucks under his eyelids. Ten hours on the road, and he still had another 560 miles to go before he would hit Clearwater.
He took a rest-stop at a nothing hole called Superior. Ditched the Buick down a side street on the outskirts of town and changed from his muddy T-shirt to a lumberjack shirt he’d found lying on the back seat. He retrieved a DVD disc from inside the gym bag. The disc had been an extra treat from Land. The sleeve plastic was cracked from the border crossing. Kind of a miracle something that delicate had survived the journey intact. Then he made his way into the town centre and paid $5 for a half-hour at the Xpresso Internet café and $3.75 for a large Americano. Between heavy swigs of his coffee Bald accessed the Hotmail.com web page and typed in the details Cave had given him. Username ‘[email protected], password ‘whisky1503’.
He flicked his eyes to the drafts folder. Two saved items were marked for his attention. Bald clicked on the first and the text sprang up in the main window.
The draft email contained personal information about Shylam Laxman. According to the Florida voters’ registration database Laxman lived at 11 Gladeview in eastern Clearwater. He drove a black Infiniti G37 four-door, licence plate 504 XKW, and he was employed as Chief Research Officer at Lance-Elsing R&D Inc. He lived with his wife, Sameena, and two children, Gurvinder and Sunny. He earned $127,544 a year and had no convictions against his name.
There was no information from Cave about how they had identified Laxman as the sleeper, or what he stood to gain. That didn’t come as a great shock to Bald. He was a soldier. Never once in the Regiment had a rupert stood up and said, ‘This is why we need to kill X.’ The Blades were just told where a guy would be, and why, and how many X-rays were lying in wait for them on the ground. The rest, as his old Major Pete Maston was fond of saying, was none of their fucking business.
Bald drained more of his milky Americano. The size of the cup was monstrous. No wonder everyone seemed so fucking fat. He clicked on the second draft email. This one had no text; its subject header was labelled ‘RK’. There was a .jpeg file embedded in the HTML text body. It was a photo of Rachel; the kind of thing you might find in a passport or a driver’s licence. Bald sat upright. Rachel had smiling eyes and mischievously straight lips, like she was trying hard not to laugh at a crude joke. Red-apple cheeks, chlorine-blue eyes. Bald shook his head and reminded himself that as an employee of the Agency, Rachel Kravets was about as trustworthy as an email from a Nigerian farmer. Either way, she was hot and definitely beat having to deal with a shit-flinger like Cave.
There was a phone number below the picture. Bald saved it to the burner’s memory. Then he deleted both drafts to indicate to Cave that he’d read their contents, logged out of the Hotmail account and waited until the manager was distracted. Bald removed the DVD disc and inserted it into the machine drive. Windows auto-ran the program on the drive. Then the screen went blue, then white, and Bald ejected the disc and placed it back inside the cracked sleeve. The program on the disc was designed by the Firm’s tech crew, and it fried a computer to shit and turned the drive contents into garbage. A highly effective way of covering his tracks.
And he needed to cover them, and cover them well. He was on a non-attributable operation. Fuck this one up and he was entirely on his own.
Bald left the café.
He didn’t head back to the Buick. Instead he walked north for six blocks, stopping at a hardware store to pick up a crosshead screwdriver. There seemed to be an abundance of hardware stores and shops selling booze or buying gold, and not much else. He pressed on north for a couple of minutes, looking for a Buick similar to the ’93 Roadmaster. Having crossed state lines, he’d decided that he would be far less conspicuous if he swapped the Roadmaster’s Texas licence plate for a Louisiana one. Another hundred metres and Bald reached the fag end of Superior. He found himself cutting through a warren of tired, Depression-era wooden houses with boarded-up windows and front yards full of scrap metal, where the people looked like they lived off the dollar menu at McDonald’s. A fat old guy was dozing on a rickety chair on his porch. He looked like he’d been asleep since 1997. At the end of the street Bald clocked a white vehicle with the distinctive trishield badge and fender vents of a ’96 Buick Regal coupé. Louisiana plates.
Bald checked the coast was clear, then knelt down beside the rear bumper and unscrewed the licence plate with the screwdriver. He removed the plate, tucked it down the front of the lumberjack shirt and diligently gathered the screws. Then he walked quickly back south to the Roadmaster, took off the Texas licence plate and replaced it with the Louisiana one. The two cars were made by the same manufacturer and from the same era, so the screw holes on the licence-plate frames were a perfect match.
Bald dumped the Texas plate in a trash-filled alley next to a boarded-up house. He was climbing back into the Buick and preparing for the long haul along I-10 when his burner vibrated.
It was Cave. ‘I’ve got a problem,’ he said.
‘Try Viagra,’ said Bald.
‘The birthday party’s been moved forward. It’s going to happen tomorrow at 2000 hours your time.’
Bald slumped behind the Buick’s wheel and felt his bowels splicing and tensing. Thirty metres ahead a bum was pushing a lopsided shopping trolley down the road. The trolley was piled high with sheets of crumpled aluminium.
‘That’s not enough time,’ said Bald. ‘I’ll be going to the party half-cocked. It’ll be a clusterfuck. I need time for planning and preparation and all that shit.’
Cave breathed heavily down t
he line. ‘Tough shit, John Boy. That’s just the way it is.’
Click.
Bald watched the trolley trundle past. Then he slammed a fist against the wheel. His plans had been thrown out of the fucking window. He’d planned on observing Laxman for a while, carefully making notes on his routines and assessing a good strike-point. Now he’d have to virtually kill him the moment he reached Clearwater. It would be messy, unplanned and risky.
His mission had suddenly become a whole lot more dangerous.
twenty-two
Clearwater, Florida, USA. 1959 hours.
Bald rolled off the Courtney Campbell Causeway feeding into Clearwater and gunned down Gulf to Bay Boulevard, heading west. He’d covered the last five hundred metres clocking a cautious 55 mph, not wanting to veer above the miserly state speed limit and attract unwanted attention from Florida’s finest. It was 2000 hours exactly when a road sign enthusiastically announced, ‘WELCOME TO CLEARWATER, SPRING TRAINING HOME OF THE PHILLIES.’ Twenty-four hours to find Laxman, check out his routine, kill him and fuck Rachel Kravets. Then Bald was distracted by a double-dozen of borderline-ten blondes milling about the Clearwater Mall. Peroxide blonde, tanned skin the colour of butterscotch sundaes and D-cup tits. Bald thought about Rachel again. His balls felt like they were about to burst.
He thought, too, about how his life would look this time tomorrow. Laxman would be dead. And he would be on his way out of the country to pick up his reward. Some people might take that five million and invest it in stocks, real estate, government bonds. Bald had other plans. He pictured himself cashing in on the Spanish property crash, snapping up a villa and a bar on the Costa del Sol for rock-bottom prices, the local whores busting lines of coke off his chest. Lena, his Russian part-time PA with the tits that demanded full-time devotion, would be his permanent mistress. He wasn’t so sure about the bar. Bald and alcohol didn’t exactly sound like good business partners. But his future was looking bright; brighter, anyhow, than Joe Gardner’s.
Bald fished out his burner and called the number he’d saved from the draft email. There was a scratchy beat while one carrier tried to establish contact with another across a network of cell towers. Finally he got a long, sonorous ringing tone. Someone picked up on the fourth ring and said, ‘You’re in town?’
‘Just arrived.’ Bald tried to sound as much like Sean Connery as possible.
‘There’s a slight change of plan,’ Rachel said. ‘I’m caught up with some other stuff here at the moment. I can’t meet you until later tonight.’
‘So what am I supposed to do until then?’
‘Keep an eye on birthday boy.’
But Rachel had hung up before Bald could get a word in. He flipped out the SIM card, destroyed it and threw it away. Then he stashed the phone in his pocket and figured he’d pay Laxman a visit at Lance-Elsing’s offices. He drove another third of a mile down Gulf to Bay Boulevard before hanging a left onto Edenville Avenue. Then he took the first right onto Druid Road East and drove past a gang of bikers whose bikes were pelting out a pneumatic bass. A quick right guided him onto an unmarked road that coiled around the Everglades. Cable lines hung slackly from utility poles. There were no homes here, just a tangle of sawgrass marsh and slash pines. The road curved sharply to the right for two hundred metres until it finally broke free onto an isolated length of blacktop.
An elegant sign announced Gladeview.
Bald hit the brakes, stopping the Buick ten metres shy of the entrance to the estate. Either side of a wrought-iron gate, three metres tall and five wide, was a two-metre-high brick wall with spikes on top. On one of the gate’s pillars there was a camera and a metal sign warning passers-by, ‘DO NOT TAMPER WITH GATES. RISK OF DEATH.’ Gladeview looked like a fortress.
Rolling gently past the gate at five per, Bald checked for cameras and guards. There were none. Through the bars he could see spruce lawns and people carriers in the driveways and whitewashed villas with terracotta roofs. He drew to a halt thirty metres beyond the gate. Sundown, and the heat was still merciless. Bald could feel beads of sweat gluing his back to the seat. Warm air wafted in through the broken driver’s side window, carrying the excited rattle of crickets.
He couldn’t risk patrolling the perimeter on foot. People who lived in gated communities naturally tended to be paranoid about strangers hanging around. If someone spotted Bald climbing over the walls he’d have half the fucking Clearwater PD on his case in the time it took him to set foot on the manicured lawns. But then he got to thinking that if another car came out of the gates, he might be able to wing his way inside. ‘I’m visiting a friend. He’s not answering.’ Then he could drive right up to Laxman’s house. Knock on the front door. Double-tap the cunt on his doorstep. Effective.
Bald checked his Aquaracer. 2100 hours. Twenty-three hours to go. He watched the sun burn up on the horizon. Drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and slapped himself on the face to stay alert. He hadn’t slept for more than forty-eight hours, ever since he first touched down in Mexico City. His body was sending him warning signals. Telling him that unless he got some shuteye soon he’d be putting the mission at risk. And his payday.
Thirty-six minutes after Bald arrived at Gladeview a whirring noise disturbed the crickets. He flicked his eyes to the rear-view mirror. The gates were fanning open. Bald strained his neck to get a look at the car emerging from the estate. He noticed the badge on the grille. Suddenly his luck was taking a turn for the better. The car was an Infiniti. The licence plate matched the one Cave had given in the email.
Laxman was on the move.
The Infiniti slithered out of Gladeview. No sooner had the gates closed than Laxman was speeding off in the direction Bald had arrived. Bald quickly fired up the Buick and K-turned. Then he hit the gas and sped after the Infiniti. A breeze blasted through the window and he felt the tiredness lift from his shoulders.
He was closing in on the sleeper.
Laxman hung a left onto Prosper Avenue and passed a church the size of a shopping mall and a golf course with the texture of marzipan. The sun had slipped under the horizon. Five hundred metres down the road Laxman turned into Gateway Industrial Park.
Gateway was pissing distance from the Gladeview community. Bald figured that the employees were all required to live on the doorstep so their paymasters could keep a close eye on them. Whatever the reason, it didn’t look like some top-secret research facility. The unguarded entrance widened into a deserted parking bay and a series of Lego-block lots. Bald decided against tailing Laxman into the industrial park. He figured there had to be a heavy security presence. Slotting Laxman on the doorstep of Lance-Elsing’s offices was too fucking risky. Cameras, microphones, infra-red sensors. Instead he slowed the Buick to a fast walk and took the next right onto County. He drove around the perimeter of Gateway. Midway down County he found what he was looking for.
A blind spot.
Bald noticed that most of the buildings on the edge of the industrial park had cameras on their rooftops that faced out across the street. Good idea in principle. But whoever had contracted out the work had screwed up. The cameras were fixed, not set on rotatable mounts, and there was a gap where two of them failed to criss-cross a certain angle overlooking the street. As long as Bald stuck to his current position at the side of the road he would be invisible. He killed the engine and studied the industrial park. A wire-mesh fence screened several rows of Humvees. He spotted stacks of radar equipment too.
The lots were basic. The only distinguishing marks were the businesses’ names displayed beside the doors. These were all unimaginative, like Acme Dental and The Tiling & Flooring Co Inc. Except for three lots further down. The two signs closest to the street indicated Forensic Intelligence Services and Ballistic Development Inc. The third lot belonged to Lance-Elsing. Laxman’s Infiniti was the only occupant of the eight parking spaces out front.
The company’s offices were much smaller than Bald had been expecting. He scanned the immediate area se
veral times. No sign of any sophisticated intruder-detection system. Just a basic ADT alarm, the kind of thing that’s fine for securing a small private house, but not a multi-million-dollar military research facility. Whatever security Lance Elsing had was discreet and well hidden.
Ten minutes later, at 2130 hours, Laxman exited Lance-Elsing’s offices and headed for his car. He looked edgy. Under his right arm he was carrying a briefcase. He thrust this onto the front passenger seat, gunned the Infiniti and sped out of Gateway. Bald tailed him south down South Keene Road. Laxman took a right onto Jackson Street, heading west. Downtown.
Neat rows of white-picket-fenced bungalows gave way to shabby-looking slum dwellings. Gangs of kids hung around outside porches and stared at Bald as he passed by, their arms hanging low and their baggy jeans hanging lower. A hundred metres west on Jackson and suddenly the homes were pleasant again.
After just over a mile Laxman turned on north onto South Myrtle Avenue, then west onto Chestnut Street. Now they were in downtown Clearwater. It was almost 2200 hours and the stores were all closed up for the day. Traffic was sporadic but Bald hung three cars back from the Infiniti at all times. Like any sleeper or terrorist, Laxman would be getting more agitated and paranoid the closer he got to accomplishing his mission. With less than twenty-four hours to go he was probably expecting to be tailed.
Laxman took a right onto South Fort Harrison Avenue, the main drag along Tampa Bay. Four- and five-storey whitewashed buildings lined either side of the smooth blacktop. Laxman continued north. Soon they hit downtown Clearwater and Laxman dropped to forty per. Bald did likewise. He noted that every third or fourth building along the road was anonymous. Blacked-out windows, no store signs, nothing to indicate any human activity. Then he saw half a dozen men file out of one of the buildings, dressed in pristine white shirts and grey trousers. They clutched colourful textbooks and walked down the street with their eyes fixed ahead. No one was talking to anyone else. Like kids on a school trip to a museum.