by G. J. Moffat
‘Most of you already know the lieutenant,’ the British officer said, pointing at a young-looking woman in the front row of the briefing room. ‘She is our Civil Military Ops Cell representative today and will communicate with the ANP contingent through our interpreter.’
If there was one thing that both armies had in common, Raines thought, it was their love of TLAs: Three Letter Acronyms.
ANP — Afghan National Police.
‘This is a hearts-and-minds job for the local population,’ the officer went on. ‘The ANP will burn a designated opium poppy field in a very public manner and our job is to ensure that nothing untoward happens while this is taking place.’
The Brits were good at that sort of thing, Raines knew — hearts-and-minds jobs. They’d had plenty of practice during the troubles in Northern Ireland.
‘We also have two colleagues from the US Marine force today. Sergeant Raines and PFC Horn.’
There were a total of twelve soldiers in the room for the operation and Raines and Horn were the only Americans. The Brits turned to look at them. Raines nodded his head in greeting.
Raines knew what kind of first impression he made on people. He had identical, Maori-style tattoos on his shoulder blades — all loops and curls with pointed ends — and they extended up on to his neck. The very topmost points curled around on to the sides of his neck and were visible even above his body armour. His hair was shaved down to a fine bristle and his eyes were so dark in colour that even from a modest distance they looked almost black.
Next to him, Horn was like a choirboy with his razored blond hair and fresh face.
‘They will travel in the lead Snatch,’ the British commander continued. ‘With the lieutenant and Corporal Johnson of the Royal Military Police. Everyone clear on what they have to do? Good, let’s get going. It’s going to be bloody hot today so the quicker we get this done the better.’
Raines stood with Horn, both men lifting their helmets and rifles and moving with the other soldiers out of the room and towards the heat that they could feel as they neared the open door.
Outside, Raines saw the three Land Rovers that were going to be used for the op: two ‘Snatches’ — lightly armoured versions of the vehicle — and a WMIK — an armed Land Rover. The latter had a. 50 calibre machine gun mounted on top.
‘You boys up for this, today?’
Raines and Horn turned as the female lieutenant approached behind them. She was wearing regulation desert camo fatigues, body armour and helmet. She had a sidearm in a holster on her hip but no rifle. Loose strands of dark hair fell from under her helmet.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Raines said. ‘Happy to help.’
‘Good. How long have you got left?’
‘We’re done end of this month. Twelve months in.’
‘Lucky you, eh? I just got here.’
‘It’ll go quick,’ Raines told her.
‘Let’s hope so.’
She walked ahead of them heading for the lead Snatch. Raines looked at Horn, seeing his young private watching the lieutenant. Horn looked sheepish when he saw that Raines had caught him.
‘She seems nice,’ Raines said.
‘Yes, Sergeant. She does.’
It always ended the same way for Matt Horn: in dream or memory.
Raines forced himself to think of something else, ran his hand over the rough scar of the bullet wound on his shin and watched the coffee start to drip into the pot fixed under the machine.
The apartment was sparsely furnished: a simple table and two chairs in the kitchen, a couch and TV in the living room and a bed with a table beside it in the bedroom. Raines didn’t think of it as home. It was a place to live. That was all. The furniture was second-hand, bought mainly from ads he found in local shops and newspapers. He could leave it all behind and never give it a second thought.
The place was perfect for what he wanted: a one-bed, one-bath apartment in a big, Victorian redstone building. He was the quiet, dangerous-looking guy with the tats who lived alone and didn’t have anything to do with anyone else. He said hello to all his neighbours and smiled but didn’t know any of them by name. It was how he liked it. No one invited him to parties and no one stopped him to talk about work or football or anything else.
Raines didn’t think of himself as having a home anywhere any more. Not the apartment and certainly not the place in the mountains outside of the city.
The phone rang and Raines went to the counter to pick it up.
‘It’s me,’ a man’s voice said.
‘Yeah.’
‘Did you hear?’
‘No.’
‘Stark got on the plane last night.’
Raines said nothing, scraping his nails at the stubble on his face.
‘The plane that went down,’ the man said.
‘You saw him get on? You’re sure of it?’
‘He was on it. But he wasn’t using the name Stark. The ticket was under the name John Reece.’
Raines listened to the hiss and burble of the coffee machine.
‘There’s nothing more to be done about it, then,’ he said.
He hung up and went to the window, opening the blinds. Sunlight slanted in through the narrow slats.
He felt numb. It was all he had ever felt since coming back from the war.
2
Raines drove into Lower Downtown Denver, glancing at a sign welcoming him to ‘LoDo’. He passed by converted Victorian warehouses housing bars and shops and parked his pick-up truck on the street outside a diner at the corner of Seventeenth and Market.
Inside, he told the waitress that he was meeting someone and needed a table for two. She grabbed a couple of menus and led him to a table set against a bare brick wall. The place was nice, but nothing out of the ordinary — anonymous.
Raines liked anonymous.
He rubbed at his jeans where the scar was on his leg, feeling an ache starting to throb.
He stared out of the window fronting the street, light from the sun reflecting in the glass of the shop fronts across the road. Remembered the baking heat of the sun that day at Lashkar Gah. Remembered the oven-like interior of the Land Rover they travelled in to get to the poppy field.
Raines and Horn got to the Land Rover and waited at the rear door with the British lieutenant and the RMP corporal. Two privates came over from the body of British soldiers, unlocked the rear doors and went round to the front.
The corporal looked no older than Horn, who was twenty-three. Raines still found it hard to believe that Horn had left college, where he was studying chemistry and physics, to join the army and come to this god-awful place. Plus, he’d had his shaggy, student hair shaved off in a regulation military cut. Raines had turned forty on this tour and for the first time in his military career was starting to feel old.
The lieutenant motioned for Raines and Horn to get in the back of the Land Rover. They climbed in and sat facing each other on parallel benches immediately behind the front seats. They shifted, trying to get comfortable in the heat, swatting at flies that buzzed in from outside. Horn wiped his sleeve across his face, smearing sweat on his uniform.
‘Christ it’s hot,’ the British RMP corporal said, climbing in and sitting next to Horn.
The lieutenant sat next to Raines and pulled the rear door shut.
‘Yeah,’ Horn said. ‘Wait till next month, then complain.’
The corporal stared at Horn as though he had insulted his mother. He caught himself and tried to smile. It was less than convincing.
Raines knew the type: way too much testosterone and always on the verge of a fight. Even the most innocuous of comments or a look out of place was likely to set him off. He knew, because it was how he used to be.
‘What’s your name, son?’ Raines asked him.
‘Andy Johnson, Sarge.’
The lieutenant leaned towards the soldiers in the front of the vehicle.
‘Let’s get this moving, please, gentlemen,’ she shouted over the sound of t
he diesel engine starting up.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ the driver replied.
‘Hold on to your hats,’ Raines said. ‘We’re heading for bandit country.’
A man sat opposite Raines in the diner and put his newspaper down on the table; waved at the waitress to bring him some coffee. He was a stocky man with dark hair cut military short.
‘Penny for them?’ the man asked.
Raines said nothing and waited for the waitress to finish and leave. He thought about Matt Horn. About how it all went so wrong.
‘How did it go last night?’ the man asked.
Raines put his hand on the newspaper and turned it to read the headline on the front page about the crash. The man waited.
‘He was on that.’ Raines tapped the photo under the headline. ‘Stark, I mean.’
‘That won’t be the end of it. You know that, right?’
‘Of course I know.’
‘So what do we do now?’
‘Nothing. I mean, it’s business as usual. I’ve got my meeting with the… investor tomorrow.’
The man looked at Raines for a long beat, leaning back in his seat.
‘You know if that’s the way you want to do it I’ll go along with it. So will everyone else. But it’s risky.’
Raines snorted.
‘Like it was all fun and games up to this point.’
The man held his hands up.
‘I’m just saying, is all.’
Raines remembered another man doing the same thing in very different circumstances. A British field medic in an operating theatre at the camp in Afghanistan. The man’s hands covered in Matt Horn’s blood. His hands up like he was giving in, letting Horn go. Raines didn’t care much for surrender. Made that plain to those medics.
Raines looked at the man across the table.
‘We can’t stop now,’ he told the man. ‘And I don’t want to anyway. I’m owed. We all are.’
The waitress came over and they ordered breakfast, Raines staring at the photograph of the downed plane on the front page of the newspaper.
Now they’ll really come after me hard, he thought.
Bring it on.
Part Three:
Secrets
1
Nobody was talking.
Cahill tried Scott Boston again at the Secret Service in Washington. Couldn’t get his call taken. Boston dodged him every time.
It was the same for Tom Hardy’s contacts. They had all clammed up. Not that they had been talkative that morning. But it was worse in the afternoon. As though a communications smart bomb had been detonated. Don’t talk about Tim Stark. It was working.
Hardy even tried to see if he had could get anything via their contacts in the British Government. Same story.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ Cahill told Hardy at four-thirty. ‘Clear my head.’
Hardy watched him go. Didn’t say anything. Knew that there was nothing that would calm Cahill.
Cahill sat on a stool by the window of a cafe on Buchanan Street. A teenager walked by nodding his head in time to music on his iPod, oblivious to all around him. He had long hair and wore a vintage AC/DC T-shirt advertising a tour from 1984. The kid wasn’t old enough. Probably bought it on eBay. He reminded Cahill of Bruce, CPO’s resident ethical hacker and IT director. Bruce had a quite astonishing collection of rock band tour T-shirts. All of them purchased at a gig on the tour. Cahill couldn’t remember the last time he saw Bruce wearing anything to work other than jeans and a tour T-shirt.
‘Yo,’ Bruce answered when Cahill called him.
‘It’s me.’
‘Boss. What’s on your mind?’
‘Can you run a check on the names Tim Stark and John Reece for me?’
‘Sure. Are there likely to be flags on the names already? I mean, if I run a search will it come back at us?’
‘They’ll be flagged.’
‘Uh…’
‘I kind of want it to get back to us.’
‘I get it.’
Bruce paused.
‘You want me to check it out on any, eh, official sites?’
‘No.’
‘Good. When do you need it?’
‘I’ll be back in the office in ten minutes.’
‘I’m on it.’
What Bruce meant by ‘official’ sites was law enforcement sites. And not the publicly available ones. The ones that required hacking. Cahill was wary of that. The firewalls and security systems on those things were good. Bruce was better, but the risk of accidentally tripping up was too great. Even being on such a site was a serious criminal offence.
Sometimes such an approach was necessary. This time, Cahill thought that staying on the right side of the law would be enough.
Cahill walked back to the office and straight to Bruce’s room.
Today’s T-shirt — ZZ Top.
‘Old school,’ Cahill said, pointing at the T-shirt.
Bruce puffed out his chest.
‘Best live band I ever saw,’ he said.
Bruce started playing an air guitar and making a noise with his mouth roughly approximating a ZZ Top riff. Cahill thought he recognised it, though he was no fan.
‘“La Grange”?’ he asked.
Bruce stopped his elaborate air guitar histrionics.
‘You the man, boss.’
Cahill nodded.
‘Results?’ he asked.
Bruce turned to one of five computer monitors in his room and tapped it meaningfully with a finger. There was an archived news story from the States about an FBI investigation several years ago. Stark was mentioned as one of the agents.
‘Okay,’ Cahill said. ‘Why are you showing me this?’
‘That’s all I can find on the guy,’ Bruce said, sweeping hair behind his ears.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Archives. Old stuff. Nothing recent at all. I’d normally expect something to show up even if it’s a simple Google search, you know. But this is it. I mean, unless your man is a schoolteacher from Manchester with a Facebook page extolling the virtues of bondage?’
Cahill said nothing.
‘Coz that’s all I got,’ Bruce went on. ‘Strictly weirdos and normals.’
‘What does that tell you?’
‘That there may have been some kind of recent effort to hide your boy’s activity. Law enforcement types usually show up somewhere.’
Cahill looked around the room. It was exceptionally clean and organised. Most people assumed from Bruce’s external appearance that he was a slob, expecting his workspace to be littered with McDonald’s wrappers and empty Coke cans.
Nope.
‘You want anything official looked at now?’ Bruce asked.
‘No. Thanks, Bruce.’
Cahill went back to his office and slumped in his seat. He stared at the paperwork in front of him but found it hard to concentrate. He knew that his singular nature was both his biggest strength and weakness — his inability to change his focus once he had zeroed in on something.
And he had zeroed in on Tim Stark now.
2
It was after six that night when Irvine and Kenny Armstrong got back to Pitt Street. The sun was falling, painting the sky orange. A streetlight above them buzzed on and off.
They had been to the three previous crime scenes and taken a tour of the areas where drug dealing was now most prevalent, stopping only for a quick sandwich over lunch. Irvine realised how much things had changed since her days in uniform. It seemed that the territories changed every few years as new dealers and gangs took over.
There was a note on Irvine’s desk telling her that a uniformed officer had called to identify the girl in the river as Joanna Lewski — pronounced Leff-ski. A Polish immigrant and known prostitute. She showed Armstrong the note.
‘That’s one of the uniforms who found the girl today,’ he said, looking at the name on the note. ‘I’ll set up a meeting with them tomorrow. Get the full story.’
Irvine nodded.
‘Have you made a connection between any of the victims?’ she asked.
Armstrong was sitting across the desk from her. Most of the staff had gone home for the night and the place was nearly empty. Irvine saw a light on in Liam Moore’s room, but the boss was nowhere to be seen. Never was after six.
Armstrong stretched in his chair.
‘Other than the fact that they all died of overdoses and that the drugs were the same, no. Why?’
Irvine opened the file for the third victim and took out a set of photographs. The first one showed a young man lying curled on a mattress on a floor. His skin was pale, his lips blue. The room he had died in was bare other than a mattress on the floor. It was stained and dimpled where the springs had gone.
‘This is probably just my CID brain working overtime, but did you explore the angle that these deaths might not have been random?’
Armstrong leaned forward, resting his forearms on the desk. ‘You mean, like, could these people actually have been targets rather than having the bad luck to buy some bad gear?’
‘It’s just a thought.’
He scratched his face.
‘I appreciate you guys are going to come at this from the perspective of the drugs,’ Irvine said. ‘Looking for dealers or suppliers or whatever. But maybe there’s another angle, you know. Maybe it’s about who the victims are.’
‘That would make it a serial killer?’
Irvine raised her eyebrows. ‘Yes it would.’
‘You start throwing those two words around and it’s going to take this thing on to a whole ’nother level. I mean, Warren wouldn’t like it.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, for starters, the case would be pulled from him. CID would take over. He likes nothing more than breaking a big case. Helps him when he goes to get budget increases for us. And he’d look like an idiot for not making the connection before. Four deaths is a lot to explain away.’
‘I suppose…’
Irvine flipped through the files, checking the locations of the deaths and anything else that might link them. They were all within a five-mile radius, but that didn’t mean much. Glasgow wasn’t a big city, really. And drugs were prevalent in the deprived council estates, many of them bounding one another. So there was nothing unusual about them being that close.