Stealing People

by Wilson, Robert

  Boxer called al-Wannan, who said he would have to call him back, which he did.

  ‘I’m sorry, Charlie, I’ve had some security issues recently. I have to be more discreet. What can I do for you?’

  Boxer gave him a rough outline of the kidnap scenario that had unfolded in London, and how he’d come to believe that Evan Rampy was an important connecting piece. He also told him he would need something for his protection while in Morocco. Al-Wannan said he would make enquiries and call him back.

  While waiting for the return call, Boxer tried to relax, but lying down was impossible. He poured himself a Famous Grouse on the rocks, paced the room again, trying to analyse what was making him so anxious. Obviously the loss of Isabel was a contributing factor, but to find that he couldn’t access an emotional response was more disconcerting, rather than distressing. This was like being uncomfortable in his own head, in fact his whole skin.

  The boards creaked under the fitted carpet as he paced from side to side. He remembered being mesmerised by a jaguar in a Mexican zoo and his incessant loping of the length of his cage as if planning killing sprees after his release.

  And it was at that moment, when he was almost outside himself looking down, that he realised it had been the stranger, Louise, who’d got under his skin. What was it she’d said?

  Yes, he’d almost ignored it, let it wash over him, the fact that she’d seen the psychopath in him and then later been disorientated by his unexpected humanity. It was strange to be seen back to front. Most people thought him human. Of course they did. Why wouldn’t they?

  Louise had seen him for what he was. She’d used words about him that nobody else had dared to: personality disorder, psychopath.

  Then it came to him, and not for the first time, that scene in a loop in his head that had taken place in Madrid a couple of years ago with the Colombian drug trafficker El Osito. The way he’d looked at him, this man, the epitome of evil. He’d called him his compañero: a hideous concept that he could even be thought of as that man’s partner. The effect had been powerful. Later, in his hotel room, after he’d failed to carry out his revenge – to bludgeon El Osito to death with a baseball bat – he’d looked in the mirror and seen the unacceptable truth. On the integral scale of evil, he was much closer to El Osito’s end.

  Was it possible to be this aware and yet psychopathic? Did humans have the capacity to be selectively psychopathic: the vigilante psychopath who felt no remorse as long as he was killing bad guys? Was this what Louise called a personality disorder?

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet and the piece of paper she’d given him with the number of the psychologist from the marines. He needed help. What had she said? With his motivations? But did he? He knew very well why he was doing this. He blinked at the intensity of that belief.

  The phone rang, jolting him. Al-Wannan. He tucked the paper back in his wallet.

  ‘Your first point of contact should be by ferry to Ceuta. That is the least conspicuous way for you to come in. You ask for a woman called Mercedes Puerta at the Bar Madrid and she will look after your entry into Morocco. She will take you to see a contact in Tétouan who will supply you with what you need. Afterwards she will bring you to see me in Meknes and I will give you a car and the information you require for travelling south. Just let me know when you will be able to arrive in Ceuta.’

  29

  06.30, 18 January 2014

  Mercy’s house, Streatham, London SW12

  Mercy woke up late, dazed to find herself in bed with Alleyne, the adrenalin still kicking in and then dissipating as she realised the real horror was over. He was sleeping. She lay there staring at his back, willing herself to get up. Fear was still seething in her head as she contemplated the possibility of her exposure. Would there be a problem when Rakesh Sarkar was released and he revealed that there’d been a third kidnapper involved? Only if Louise hadn’t successfully disappeared.

  She showered and dressed, dropped in on Amy, who was completely unconscious. She saw Boxer’s note and had another burst of adrenalin at the thought of what he might be doing. She double-locked the front door, paranoid about leaving Amy and Marcus alone in the house, and drove to the office. She was due at a meeting with all the special investigation teams working on the kidnaps. DCS Hines called her into his office before she could get there.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

  ‘Total silence from the kidnappers is what’s going on,’ said Hines, handing over a file of paper. ‘This is the rescued data from Chuck Powell’s phone. You’ll probably want to get your teams working on it, but you might be disappointed.’

  ‘Hasn’t he come round yet?’

  ‘We’re having a little battle there with the CIA, to the point where the FO is now in conference with the White House.’

  ‘But it’s a murder investigation. His blood has been matched to the site of the dead girl in the Royal Victoria Dock. He has to answer questions.’

  ‘That’s true, and he will have to answer to the homicide team investigating that. It’s just a question of who gets to talk to him first, and the CIA don’t want it to be anybody else but them.’

  ‘Seeing as they’ve been so helpful throughout?’

  ‘They’ve got something to hide,’ said Hines. ‘When we look at all the people involved in this kidnap, we quite quickly realised that most of them are disaffected allied ex-military personnel who served time in Iraq and Afghanistan. I assume they know things that the CIA would prefer not to be aired or that the CIA would like to control. I am getting a lot of pressure from all sides letting me know that if we do find Conrad Jensen, the CIA, especially this guy Walden Garfinkle, don’t want anybody else but them to interview him.’

  ‘I never did get to speak to Garfinkle.’

  ‘And I don’t think you ever will,’ said Hines, ‘because we’re being told in no uncertain terms that Jensen is CIA property. The reason we’re getting precious little intelligence from them is that they want to get to him first.’

  ‘So what are my orders regarding intelligence on the whereabouts of Conrad Jensen?’

  ‘If you get any, call me, and by then I might know what the official line is.’

  ‘Why will I be disappointed by the rescued data from Powell’s phone?’

  ‘A lot of names have been blacked out.’

  Boxer had slept fitfully. There were dreams that woke him and left him on the brink with no memory of their content. Finally he lay awake staring at the ceiling with tears leaking down the side of his face and a sense of loss so vast that he was unsure how his body was containing it. This time it was for all his losses; not just Isabel, but his father as well, the belief that Amy had been murdered, even Louise disappearing into the night to be restarted in a different future. He wondered if there was some transference going on with Louise. That having lost Isabel, he’d just shifted a whole bunch of feelings with nowhere to go on to someone who was at least alive. He didn’t think so. Too fleeting. And she was gone now and there was no reeling her back from where she’d vanished. The guy he’d sent her to was very thorough.

  He got up, turned on a single lamp in the living room and went to work by its low light. He put fifteen thousand in a mix of pounds and euros with twenty thousand Moroccan dirhams in the false bottom of his case, along with a passport in the name of Christopher Butler for when he went into Morocco. He packed clothes on top.

  In the bathroom he turned the light on over the mirror and prepared to shave. He was drawn in by his own bright green eyes, wanted to see if he believed in them any more, if he could work out what was going on behind them. There was no difference: still Charlie Boxer going about his business. But this time the business was going to be killing. He leaned in closer. No deadness. No psychosis. In fact, a slight pinkness from his earlier crying. He was so human.

  He left the flat. His flight wasn’t until midday, but he needed to be on the move. He took the tube and a bus up to the Chelsea and Westminster Hos
pital, listened to a couple of Brazilians discussing the hideous cost to their country of staging the World Cup.

  At the hospital, he went to the neonatal ICU. The nurse on duty remembered him but he had no recollection of her. She told him that Alyshia and her partner had been there for hours yesterday. She asked him to wash his hands and put on a gown before she took him to the incubator.

  The little frog looked different, or his memory was playing tricks. He asked the nurse if that was possible, and she said it was.

  ‘He’s growing all the time.’

  He gave a little kick with his legs as if to prove he’d just added a micron in length to them. He was wearing a sleeping mask to protect his eyes from the light. He was on a ventilator, as his lungs were not quite as mature as they’d first thought. A range of drips from saline to antibiotics were running into his arms. There was a whiteboard behind him:

  Name: ? Boy

  Date of birth: 16 January 2014

  Weight: 812 grams.

  Mother: Isabel

  Father: Charles

  Boxer stared down at him, put his hand into the Perspex cabinet and touched the perfect round head. How was he going to fit this into his life? The boy needed a mother. He shook his head at the impossibility of what Isabel had left him. He found a chair and sat down, got to eye level with the baby. What a way to start your life, he thought. He remembered locals in the Ivory Coast telling him: ‘La lutte continue.’ The struggle continues. And yet life for this boy hadn’t officially even started and he was already in the midst of a tremendous battle for survival.

  ‘We’re very confident,’ said the nurse. ‘He’s a fighter.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘You can see it in them. The ones with a real will,’ she said. ‘Your son dances. He wants to get on with it.’

  She moved away to keep an eye on another even smaller life. A tiny mahogany-coloured baby with feet about half the size of a little finger. This provoked an existential lurch in Boxer. What was he doing here? His mission was to find and kill. Only yesterday he’d seen all manner of destruction. While these nurses were fighting to keep these tiny lives going long enough for them to survive on their own, he was snuffing others out. There was a terrible disconnect. It was madness for him to be here. He stood to leave, shrugged off the gown and made for the door, which he opened on Alyshia.

  ‘Charlie,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve been worried about you.’

  ‘I just came to see him,’ he said. ‘I have to leave the country in a few hours’ time. I thought …’

  ‘He’s so beautiful, isn’t he? I love him. I can’t stop looking at him. I was here all day yesterday. Deepak came too. We’re addicted. Have you been all right?’

  Boxer swallowed at the footage ripping through the gate of his mind: the gun jumping in his outstretched hand, the bullet slamming into Gav’s temple behind Louise’s head.

  ‘I’ve been OK,’ he said. ‘Are you all right, Alyshia? I know what she meant to you.’

  Alyshia looked off down the corridor as if she might see her mother coming out of room 574.

  ‘I don’t know what I’d do without the baby,’ she said.

  Mercy had her meeting with the special investigation teams. She flicked through the printout of Powell’s phone data as they made their presentations. Hines was right. A lot of names had been blacked out. Even the email traffic seemed minimal, as if plenty had been withheld. She did her best to maintain morale by linking all the personnel who’d been arrested or killed to the various kidnaps the teams were investigating.

  Hines dropped in and asked her to come to a meeting at Thames House with all the parents, Ryder Forsyth and the representatives of the intelligence agencies, which was to take place at 11.00. They crossed the river from Vauxhall to Millbank.

  ‘I don’t want you to take this badly,’ said Hines, ‘but I think it better that we don’t say anything unless we’re addressed.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘If we try to find out what game the CIA are playing, we’re not going to do ourselves any favours.’

  ‘Is that some political advice from above?’

  ‘The Metropolitan Police Commissioner in a personal phone call.’

  They went up to the meeting room on the third floor. The atmosphere there was one of latent aggression. Sergei Yermilov and Anastasia Casey looked particularly poisonous. Ken Bass appeared to have inside information. There was something comfortable about him that the other parents didn’t like, and there was a little distance between him and the rest.

  Mercy assumed from what Hines had said to her, and the seniority of the intelligence community present, that they were expecting trouble. Mike Stanfield made the opening statement about what had happened to the £150 million last night. Ray Sutherland was accompanied by a disturbingly hirsute man who, she was later informed, was the mysterious Walden Garfinkle. Clifford Chase, the London CIA chief, had the look of a righteous preacher.

  Stanfield finished his presentation by saying how little of the money had been recovered and revealing their current belief that the hostages had been moved outside the UK and that the gang had now dispersed.

  ‘So what makes you think our children aren’t in the country any more?’ asked Casey. ‘That’s a serious leap.’

  ‘MI5 has a comprehensive network of agents and informers right across the UK in all communities of all ethnicities. Given the level of alert in the post-kidnap phase, it would have been impossible for them to move the hostages to another location within this country without something leaking,’ said Stanfield. ‘From the arrests we’ve made, and the personalities we know are involved, we are talking about a team of people with deep knowledge of the global intelligence communities. They would have known what had to be done.’

  ‘So how do you think they were moved?’

  ‘A shipping container is most likely.’

  ‘And presumably you manned all the ports?’

  ‘Just over forty per cent of container traffic leaves the UK via Felixstowe at a rate of around eleven thousand containers a day. We maintain a significant presence at that port looking for drugs, illegal immigration, firearms and the like. But there’s a limit to what you can achieve without very specific intelligence.’

  ‘So where do you think they’ve taken them?’

  ‘We think it’s most likely to be a location in Africa. It’s not a long sea journey, and corruption at all levels makes it easier to do things undetected and be protected.’

  ‘And the ransom?’ said Yermilov.

  ‘The final communication from the kidnappers, which you’ve all seen, came a few minutes after the money was blown up in Victoria Park last night,’ said Forsyth. ‘I’ve heard nothing more from them.’

  ‘What happened last night was the clearest demonstration I’ve ever seen of one thing,’ said Casey. ‘These fuckers are not after our money. So what’s the game?’

  ‘You’re all powerful people with important government connections and companies that have global reach,’ said Stanfield.

  ‘Yeah, blah, blah, blah,’ said Casey. ‘We know that shit. We also know you’re not telling us things. We think there’s a bigger game and we’re the pawns in it. We want to know what that is. Who’s going to tell us about this guy Chuck Powell? What more have you learnt about Conrad Jensen and what he was doing for the US military? We’re all right-wingers here, and capitalists, and we’ve heard about some kind of left-wing conspiracy. What’s that? More bullshit to put us off the scent?’

  Stanfield gave a long, hard look at the three CIA representatives across the table. Nothing came back.

  ‘It’s not as if nothing is happening, Anastasia,’ said Forsyth.

  ‘Ryder, you’re on our side, I know that. The people we want to hear from are the ones protecting their arses at our expense. The kidnappers who’ve been caught are all vets from Iraq and Afghanistan. Do they know something? Are they unhappy about some covert action over there? They th
reatened to execute Ken’s daughter and Ryder negotiated a way out.’ Casey pointed at the CIA trio. ‘You guys had to agree to come clean about the manipulation of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. What does all that shit mean?’

  ‘You’re right, Ms Casey,’ said Clifford Chase. ‘The point about intelligence manipulation is a very complex one when a country is about to go to war. Some of the findings are exaggerated, others are played down. It would not be the first time. We’re still in a long debate about Pearl Harbor.

  ‘There’s no doubt that there are some very angry US vets who feel badly let down by their country, and more specifically the Bush administration. A lot of them don’t know why we went to war. They are attracted by the theories that we invaded Iraq because that’s what big business wanted, that we were after oil and influence in the Gulf region, that the Saudis told us to go in there. None of that is true.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’ asked Anastasia Casey. ‘The Iraq war cost one point seven trillion dollars. Don’t tell me that none of that found its way into American corporate pockets. Kinderman alone earned something like forty billion from Iraq war contracts.’

  ‘We can go into a long discussion about that if you like, Ms Casey, but it will come at the expense of what we’re trying to do in this scenario, which is to get your children back. And we’d like that to happen with as little distress to you as possible.’

  ‘What we’re getting from you, Mr Chase, is some diluted reassurance and fuck-all hard facts.’

  ‘We are an intelligence agency and we necessarily have to be secretive. We cannot reveal modus operandi or give you reasoning that, if known in the world, might have an impact elsewhere. So we might appear to be obstructive, but believe me, we want to get your kids back safely. That is our objective.’