by Jeff Gulvin
‘The contract has been approved.’
The Cub thinned his eyes.
‘It’s taken us this long to get it agreed. I think the politicians hoped that certain military action would render it unnecessary.’
‘But it didn’t.’
‘Absolutely.’ Birch leaned across the table towards him. ‘The Talent have located a reporter on a mission,’ he said. ‘His name’s Jim Moore and he’s an Australian based in New York. He’s freelance and the only man who’s conducted an interview with our target since the Afghan war.’ He paused. ‘For the last six months he’s been trying to set up something, along with the Australian photographer he worked with before. They went on a little assignment to Afghanistan prior to August last year, and now Moore wants to follow that trip up. Our intel’ indicates they got the green light only a week ago.’
The Cub said nothing.
‘Moore can do it, because our target trusts him. He must be about the only westerner he does trust right now, and I think the fact that he’s neither American nor British helps. The problem he’s got, though, is his photographer. He’s just blown out on the trip. You see, he got an offer of an assignment to photograph bears in Alaska, which is gonna pay him ten times what the Afghan trip would make him. He smiled. ‘And he’s a greedy man. Moore’s on his way to Pakistan right now and he still doesn’t know about it. He’ll find out when he gets there. The ISA are ready to help him out, though. You’re the only Antipodean photographer who lives in Islamabad. Your pictures have been in all the good magazines and Moore will contact you. He’s in a hurry and he’s gonna cut corners.’
The Cub sat back now. ‘And what about the opposition?’
‘Oh, they’ll check out the contract his friend was offered and find out that it’s legitimate. The oil company, who’ve funded it, really need to put something back into the environment up there.’
The Cub nodded slowly.
‘I want you to go home to your flat in Pakistan and wait for the phone call. He’ll contact you first to make sure you’re up for it, then he’ll run you by the target’s people. They’ll have been watching you already. He likes to keep an eye on all westerners in that area, but we’re confident you’ll get a clean bill of health. Moore’s a hardcase Aussie from the Northern Territories. You’re from New Zealand. You ought to be able to swap a few war stories between you.’
‘And who are we going to interview?’
Birch’s features clouded. ‘There’s a man out there who poses a bigger threat to this country than anyone else we know. He’s more dangerous than the Islamic Jihad, than the ANO, Milosovic or any of his cronies. He’s supported terrorism all over the world. We believe he’s operating in at least fifty countries and has training camps in another fifteen.’
The Cub pursed his lips. ‘And last August he blew up two of our embassies in Africa, killing two hundred and sixty odd people. On February thirteenth of this year, the British press reported that he had abandoned his Afghan enclave, and that he’s targeting the UK. But we think he’s still in Afghanistan.’ He paused then and sipped black coffee. ‘You want me to kill Osama Bin Laden.’
5
LOGAN SPOKE TO SWANN on the phone and confirmed she was coming down to New Orleans at the weekend. She put down the phone and looked across the office at Harrison. ‘When are you going back?’
Harrison shrugged. ‘I’m driving down, anyways.’
They were both seated in Kovalski’s office on 4th Street. He was at a meeting on Pennsylvania Avenue. McKensie sat at Kovalski’s desk, working on his computer, trawling the militia websites, looking for responses to the murder of Billy Bob Lafitte. Since they got back, Logan and Kovalski had been working in conjunction with the Portland office on potential identities and subsequent motives for the three Asians.
Logan sucked the end of a pencil and swivelled back and forth in her chair, watching the misty expression spreading on Harrison’s face. ‘You’re gonna quit, aren’t you, Johnny Buck,’ she said quietly.
Harrison glanced at her, but did not reply. He got up and walked to the window.
Logan moved next to him. ‘Why?’
He did not say anything immediately. He had been away barely a week and learned little of what he had hoped to find out about himself, although he was not exactly sure what that was. ‘Maybe it’s just time, Cheyenne. I’m fifty years old next birthday.’
‘So? The Bureau doesn’t put you out to grass for another seven years.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘So why now?’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe I’ve done all I planned to.’ He bit his lip. ‘I got no life, Chey. Alls I do is sit in the back of surveillance vans or pretend to be somebody I’m not. Shit, I’ve been a guy called Harrison so long, I don’t even know who John Dollar is any more.’
‘Do you have any family?’
‘I’ve got a sister in Marquette.’
‘Michigan?’
‘Right up there on Lake Superior.’ He paused and shifted the plug of chew to his other cheek. ‘I flew up there for two days before I came here. She’d moved house and never even let me know.’ He looked back at her then. ‘Some kinda family, huh.’
Logan laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘Have you ever thought that maybe Harrison is John Dollar?’
He squinted at her. ‘Yeah, I did one time. When I spent two years undercover in small-town Idaho. The two guys were one and the same right there, for a while.’ He spat into the Coke can he was holding. ‘Didn’t last, though. There’s another place I can’t go back to.’
‘You got a home anywhere other than New Orleans?’
He shook his head. ‘Two rented rooms on Burgundy and Toulouse, Cheyenne. That and my Chevy, is all.’
‘Money?’
‘None of your damn business.’ He laughed then. ‘Just kidding you. No, I got some stashed away. Not a whole lot. But there’s a log cabin up on Payette Lake I got my eye on.’
‘Why don’t you buy it?’
‘I might do that. Sit there with my fishing pole. Hunt elk come the fall. That’d be some kinda life.’
‘You’d miss the job, JB.’
‘You think so?’
McKensie took a phone call and interrupted them. ‘Cheyenne. I’ve got the resident agency from Billings Montana on line one.’ Logan looked round at her. ‘The Garfield County sheriff just recovered the body of a forest ranger from Fort Peck Lake. Gunshot to the back of the head.’
Logan picked up the phone, her eyes dark, deep and intense. She spoke for a few minutes, listened, and then put down the phone and looked back at her colleagues. ‘The forest ranger was a naturalised Korean,’ she said.
Harrison moved away from the window and sat down at the table Logan had been using. He picked up her file on the Hope Heights murder and began to flick through it.
‘BobCat Reece,’ he muttered. ‘I saw that sonofabitch a long time ago in Idaho. He killed a Montana ranger, too.’
The door opened and Kovalski strode back in. ‘You still here, JB? You must be the only agent I know who spends his vacation in another field office.’ He chuckled knowingly to himself. ‘And you’re talking about quitting the job.’
Harrison looked at him then. ‘Guess I’m just a lost soul, Kovalski. Got nowhere else to go.’ He stood up. ‘This thing in Oregon looks real messy, though, don’t it.’
Logan took the file from him. ‘Why would three Asians go to a small Pacific coast town, make themselves ultravisible and then murder the prominent militia leader?’
‘Why indeed?’ Kovalski said.
‘Maybe they were government agents,’ Harrison suggested. ‘Maybe these psychos are actually right. Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you.’
‘You got anything helpful to say?’ Kovalski asked him.
‘Hey, who knows, Tom? The websites are full of it. People surf them, don’t they. “The Ride of the Valkyrie” playing in the background. The white race will overcome. The seed is plant
ed and the mud people will be no longer.’ He glanced at Logan. ‘No offence, Chey.’
‘None taken.’
‘The government coming to get their guns,’ Harrison went on. ‘We’ll see colour-wearing gang members in Strangeville, New Mexico, next.’
‘It’s serious, Harrison,’ Logan said. ‘Whoever killed Billy Bob Lafitte wanted it to look like it was us.’
‘One hundred thousand Hong Kong troops.’ Harrison’s mouth puckered. ‘Maybe it is us, Cheyenne.’
Kovalski gave him a withering look. ‘When are you going back to New Orleans?’
‘Now.’ Harrison winked at him. ‘I’ll see ya, Tom. Cheyenne, no doubt I’ll hook up with you and the duchess over the weekend.’ He left then and closed the door behind him.
Logan shook her head. ‘He told you he was gonna quit, then, Tom.’
Kovalski smiled. ‘They dropped him from the SWAT team down there. It made him think about his age.’ He made a face. ‘So he’s not on the SWAT team any more. Big fucking deal. He’s still the best UCA I ever worked with.’
Harrison headed back to New Orleans. It would take him a couple of days, but he was in no hurry. So he drove steadily with the window rolled down, his elbow resting on the doorpanel, and listened to John Lee Hooker’s gravelled voice on the tape. Jean Carey was on his mind and that was why he was going back to New Orleans. It was a weird reason, he told himself, although, on the other hand, maybe it wasn’t. He had come away to get things straight in his head and in a way he had done that. The cabin by the lake in McCall was something he had been thinking about for some time, somewhere to go, relax and fish.
The marine at the war memorial had made him think.
That had been a moment he knew he was not going to forget in a long time: the look of respect in the marine’s eyes. Harrison wondered how often he did that, laid something on the wall to the memory of his father. It had concentrated his mind on the past. The things he had accomplished, the people he had been acquainted with. He was amazed at how many names on the Vietnam memorial he knew—kids lost to parents at a stupidly tender age. There were many names missing, though, thankfully, like his own and people like ‘Batman’ and the Rat Six he had worked with, the officer in charge of the unit. There was Billy ‘The Wormhole’ Wilson, and others like Ringo and Ray Martinez. ‘The Probe’ they had called him. That guy had almost always worked alone, or at least liked to whenever he could. He loved it underground, knew no fear, and had been the guy to take over from Harrison, when he lost the plot and fired six shots in succession that last time underground. You never ever did that: three shots and swap guns with your back-up man. Let him reload. For a long time, the memory of that mess-up had haunted him, but not any more. He wondered what had happened to Martinez. Driving south, he spent the night in Spartansburg, South Carolina, and drank large bottles of Bud for only two bucks apiece, shooting pool with the locals at the Sportsman’s Bar. He got up at the crack of dawn and drove on, making Meridian, Mississippi, by three in the afternoon, and knew he could get to New Orleans before it got dark. At six-thirty he was stuck in traffic crossing the causeway on Lake Ponchartrain, and an hour later he was watching the rain fall vertically outside his bedroom window, at the junction of Burgundy and Toulouse.
In London, Detective Sergeant George Webb looked down at the body of the black woman, holding a handkerchief to his nose. She had been there for five days, which amazed him, considering she was a gunnery sergeant based at the US Embassy. That was until they told him she had been on a week’s leave, which had commenced the previous Saturday. Webb looked at his boss, Inspector Frank Weir from the Paddington murder squad, who stood with his hands in the pockets of his immaculate, four-button suit. He chewed gum with his mouth open. The pathologist, wearing a white paper suit, with a mask over his mouth and nose, was on hands and knees, checking over the corpse. Kibibi had her eyes open and her lips drawn back, still showing traces of lipstick which had crusted into vertical lines on her mouth. She had a congealed angular cut on the right side of her forehead.
The pathologist rocked back on his heels and looked over his shoulder at Weir. ‘The head wound was made when she fell,’ he said. ‘A single stab wound killed her, under the ribs and right into her heart.’
‘Somebody knew what they were doing,’ Webb muttered.
Weir looked at him, still with the handkerchief over his nose, and smiled to himself. ‘I thought you were in charge of picking up the pieces at SO13,’ he said.
‘I was. But that meat was still frying, boss. I never did like cold cuts.’ Webb bent closer and looked at Kibibi’s hands. She wore false nails and a couple of them had worked loose. ‘Can you get any skin samples from those kind of nails?’ he asked the pathologist.
‘Sometimes we can, yes.’
Webb straightened up and looked round the flat once again. He had already followed the scene of crime officers as they dusted and photographed their way from room to room. It did not look as though anything had been stolen. Even her handbag, complete with thirty pounds in cash, was on the phone table in the hallway, and there was no sign of forced entry. He frowned and looked again at Weir. ‘This is going to be very interesting, Frank,’ he said.
‘You’re telling me. US Marine Corps. We could be camped in Grosvenor Square for months.’
Outside on the landing, Dan Farrow, the regional security officer, was waiting: US Diplomatic Security, Department of State. He had got the shock of his life when Webb phoned him. They had received a call early that morning, when the old lady who lived in the flat next door had complained about the smell. She had taken delivery of a clothing catalogue for Kibibi and had not been able to raise her on the three separate occasions she knocked. On the fourth, she lifted the letterbox and then the smell: hit her. The past week had been the hottest of the summer so far and Londoners were walking round in pools of their own sweat. Farrow had been in the post exactly three weeks, his predecessor having transferred back to Washington. He stood in the hall now, restless, wanting a look at the crime scene, but unable to get one. He was in his thirties, something of a high-flyer, so the police liaison officer at the embassy had told Webb. This was a prime overseas posting for him. Many of the people who had gone on to dominate Washington had London RSO stamped on their CV. Farrow did not even know who Kibibi Simpson was until the police called and told him she had been murdered.
‘Why did she have a flat?’ Webb asked him, as he stepped back on to the landing. ‘I thought the marines were billeted at Eastcote.’
‘Most of them are. It’s not mandatory, though.’ Farrow lifted his shoulders. ‘I don’t know, Sergeant. I really only just got here myself.’
‘You and me both, Mr Farrow.’ Webb was short and stout, hair thinning, with disarmingly cheery eyes. He had spent ten years as the senior exhibits officer at the Antiterrorist Branch, when the IRA was at the height of its mainland bombing campaign. When the Good Friday agreement came, it was, in his opinion, a good time to quit, and he moved out of Scotland Yard and joined the Southwest London murder squad. He was Weir’s minder, watching his back and looking after the ship for him when his role of senior investigating officer became too demanding.
Weir came out of the flat, unwrapping another piece of chewing gum, and looked over Webb’s shoulder at the RSO. ‘Welcome to London, Mr Farrow,’ he said.
Swann met Logan at New Orleans International Airport in a hire car provided for him by the FBI. He was amazed he had actually found his way to Kenner in the mass of New Orleans traffic. She was much earlier than either of them had expected, arriving at three-thirty, after Kovalski dismissed her early. Swann noticed her briefcase and laptop computer and guessed how much of the weekend was likely to be spent working. He did not care so long as they were together. She walked through from baggage claim and he took her in his arms and kissed her. Logan pressed herself against him, lips fixed so tightly into his that they hurt. ‘Goddamn, I missed you,’ she said. ‘Where’s the hotel?’
They
drove to Chartres Street through the Friday afternoon rush hour and got stuck in the traffic coming off Interstate 10. Swann drummed his fingers on the wheel and Logan sat next to him in her two-piece suit, with the skirt riding up naked black thighs.
‘I really missed you, Chey.’
‘You and me both, sweetheart.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘I’ve been up to my neck up there, and I tell you, I could do without this thing in Oregon.’
He lifted one eyebrow. ‘Militia.’
‘They worry me. They worry Tom. They don’t seem to worry anyone else, but they really worry us.’ She shifted in her seat. ‘Jack, why would three Asian males dress themselves in G-men suits, drive a G-man car and hang out in Hicksville by the Sea for two solid days …?’
‘And then cut somebody’s brake lines.’ He finished for her.
‘Not just anybody’s. Billy Bob Lafitte’s.’
‘It might not have been them,’ he said. ‘It could be a coincidence. A nasty one, mind, but it’s possible.’
‘I know, although somehow I doubt it. As far as I can work out, they did not single Lafitte out for particular scrutiny. They weren’t seen anywhere near his property. The closest any of them came to him was one guy in his gun store.’ She took a spearmint Lifesaver from her purse and sucked it. ‘But that’s not how the militia are gonna view it. The main man in the movement was already in Hope Heights when I got there.’
‘I didn’t think there was a main man. Phantom cells, autonomous leadership units and all that.’
‘That’s how it was, hon. But for about a year now, Kovalski’s been aware of BobCat Reece taking centre stage. He runs the West Montana Minutemen which, apart from the New Texas Rangers and maybe the Michigan Militia, constitute the largest group in the country. The three groups appear to be co-ordinating. They’ve set up what they call the FPA. “Free People of America”. We think it’s the beginning of the amalgamation we never wanted to see.’