Blackout

by Dawson, Mark

  No one would miss him.

  Yet, even as he had persuaded himself that that was the sensible move, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to do it. The news that Logan had delivered had knocked him sideways. His memories of Jessica were fresher than he had expected, and he found that he was keen to see her again.

  Yet, of course, it was more than that.

  She had told Logan that she had had Milton’s child.

  There had been women in Milton’s life, both during his employment and after it. He had been promiscuous when he had been drinking, and his behaviour with women had been one of the many reasons that had eventually coalesced into an overwhelming desire to find sobriety. He had met other women during his time on the road when he had been dry. Most of them had been transitory, and that had been as obvious to them as it had been to him. There had been a handful of relationships that might have grown into something else, had he allowed them the time and space to flourish. Ellie Flowers, the FBI agent that he had met in the Upper Peninsula, had been one. Mattie, the sister of a friend he had met during his time in the Regiment, had been another. There had been a connection with both women, enough for him to be confident that they would have at least tried to understand him.

  But he couldn’t do it.

  There were things in his history that he knew he would never be able to reveal, not to anyone. Any kind of relationship needed firm foundations of truth and honesty, and Milton couldn’t offer that. There would be no rock to build upon; all he could offer was a shifting sand of lies and deceit. So what was the point? It wasn’t fair. He had treated women badly before, and he had forced himself to stop drinking so that he might be a better man. Encouraging a relationship when he would have to hold so much of himself back and lie about his past was beneath him now. It wasn’t something that he was prepared to do.

  So he had always forced himself to move on.

  But a child?

  Did that change things?

  Milton couldn’t even begin to process how he felt about that.

  He felt a gentle nudge on his arm and opened his eyes. The woman to his right was holding the collection plate. Milton smiled at her, took the plate, dropped a five-pound note onto it and passed it along the row to the man on his left.

  The secretary led the meeting in the Serenity Prayer and brought proceedings to a close. Milton stood up, waited until the woman to his right had stepped into the aisle and then, with as friendly a smile as he could manage, he left the room.

  6

  MILTON WALKED to Mare Street, took the 254 bus south to Whitechapel and then boarded the District Line train to the Embankment.

  He was outside the Royal Festival Hall thirty minutes before the time of the rendezvous and used the extra time, as was his habit, to look for anything that might lead him to suspect that the meeting might be observed. He walked north along the promenade, passing by the under croft, with the kids on their skateboards and bikes, the walls covered with a dazzling array of graffiti’d designs. He carried on toward Waterloo Bridge and paused beneath it for five minutes with his elbows resting against the metal railing, looking out at the grey expanse of the water, the commuter taxis and pleasure boats slicing through the waves, and then at the impressive array of buildings on the opposite bank. He looked up and down the pathway, but saw nothing that gave him any reason for suspicion. He set off back to the south, the wheel of the London Eye visible above the trees. The hall was hosting the Festival of Love, with a multicoloured temporary entrance leading into the building.

  Milton bought a latte from EAT and took it out to one of the covered tables.

  He saw Logan at the same time as Logan saw him.

  The man came down the steps from the promenade and sat at the table.

  “Good morning.”

  Milton nodded.

  “How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” Milton said tersely.

  “What have you decided?”

  Milton didn’t answer.

  “You have questions?”

  “Why does she want to see me now?” Milton said. “I haven’t seen her for years.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can’t go halfway across the world without more information, Logan.”

  “No,” he replied. “Of course you can’t. Would it help if you spoke to her first?”

  “It might.”

  “Can you get online this afternoon?”

  Milton had several hours before he needed to be at the shelter. “Yes.”

  “She says she’ll talk to you on Skype.”

  Logan took a discarded freesheet from the adjacent table and scribbled on it. He tore out the page and pushed it across the table. “That’s her username,” he said. “They’re seven hours ahead of us. She can speak after two thirty our time.”

  Milton looked at his watch. It was ten minutes after two.

  “I think the child will be in bed,” Logan suggested as a reason for the particular time.

  Milton thought about that. “The child,” he said, the word sticky in his mouth. “I don’t even know if it’s a boy or a girl.”

  “A boy,” Logan said. “But she didn’t tell me anything more than that.”

  Milton exhaled. “I don’t know why she’d do this now.”

  Logan rested his arms on the table, steepled his fingers, and leaned forward. “Look, you must’ve thought it, so I’ll just put it out there. Maybe she needs money. Maybe she’s managed to bring him up without any help, but now something’s changed. Or maybe she just wants to shake you down.”

  “She wouldn’t do that.”

  “I don’t know her. All I can do is speculate. But one thing I do know—we have to come up with something to keep her happy. Her involvement with Attila could be a problem. There are assets who worked on that job who are still in theatre. She could cause trouble, and that’s not something that the FO will let happen.”

  “What do you mean? She’d be a threat? She’d be in danger?”

  “I’m not saying that,” Logan said unconvincingly. “But just because there’s no more Group Fifteen doesn’t mean that there aren’t protocols in place for when British interests are threatened.” He paused, saw Milton’s glower, and added, “Look, what I’m very clumsily trying to suggest is that it would be better for all concerned if you make her feel better about things. The government will fly you out there and, if it is money that she wants, it’ll step in and take care of that, too. You just need to find out what she wants. And… I don’t know—maybe she’s just reaching out now because her boy wants to meet his father. Maybe you’d like to meet him, too.”

  Milton looked away from the table and gazed back to the promenade, to the steady stream of joggers and the pedestrians and tourists ambling along the pavement. He looked down at his watch again. It was two twenty.

  “At least speak to her,” Logan said. “Find out what she wants.”

  Milton stood.

  “You’ll do it?”

  “I’ll call her. And then I’ll think about it.”

  “Let me know when it’s done.”

  Milton walked away without replying.

  7

  MILTON WALKED across the Golden Jubilee bridge, up Villiers Street and then took the Strand in the direction of Nelson’s Column. There was a branch of easyInternetCafe just before Trafalgar Square. He went inside, paid for an hour, and took a seat at one of several vacant workstations. Each PC was equipped with a set of headphones and a microphone, and Milton put his on, adjusting the microphone so that it was just below his mouth. He opened Skype, logged in, and searched for the username that Logan had given him. He found it and clicked that he wanted to add the name as a contact.

  He waited. Nothing happened.

  And then it did.

  The phone icon started to buzz and Milton heard the sound of ringing.

  He accepted the call.

  “Hello,” she said. “Can you hear me?”

  He recognised her voice at once. “I ca
n. But I can’t see you.”

  “Oh. Hold on.”

  A moment passed and then a window opened out to show the feed from the webcam at the other end of the call.

  “Better?” she said.

  The blank screen was replaced by the feed from her webcam. She smiled, and Milton remembered why he had fallen for her so hard. Her long black hair was tied back, revealing a slender, graceful neck. Her eyes were brown, soulful, and expressive, and, as she leaned back in her chair, she raised a hand and waved to him.

  “It’s been a while,” he said.

  “Years. I’m sorry to contact you like I did. I didn’t know how else to find you.”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m pleased to see you again.”

  “You were surprised, though?”

  “I was.”

  “What did they say?”

  “That…” He paused, finding that the words didn’t come easily. “They said that you had a child.”

  She smiled. “A son,” she said. “His name is James.”

  “They said that you… that you told them he was mine.”

  “He is.” She stopped for a moment, reaching down below the line of the camera. “Would you like to see a picture?”

  Milton swallowed and cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

  She brought up a smartphone. She played with it for a moment and then turned it around and held it up so that Milton could see the screen.

  “Can you see it?”

  He could. The photograph was of a young boy—Milton guessed that he was nine or ten—holding up a football and beaming into the camera. He had a head of thick dark hair, tousled and untidy and falling down over his forehead. His skin was a very light brown, a shade or two lighter than Jessica’s, his teeth were white and even and his eyes were a sharp blue.

  “Hold on.”

  She flicked through additional photographs: the boy holding a PlayStation controller; riding a bicycle along a neat and tidy street; turning to the camera in a busy shopping mall, a wide smile on his face.

  “He looks like you, John.”

  Milton swallowed once more, his throat dry. The noise of the Internet café faded out, and his focus narrowed on the screen and the pictures of the boy. There was a resemblance.

  “John? Can you still hear me?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Sorry, I… He’s a handsome lad.”

  She smiled. “He’s started asking about his father. There’s only so much that I can tell him. I just say that his father didn’t know about him.”

  “I didn’t,” Milton said.

  “Of course. I’m not blaming you for anything, John. It was my choice. I didn’t think it would be a good idea. But I wonder, now that he is older, whether I made a mistake.”

  “I wouldn’t have been a very good father,” Milton said. “And it would have been complicated. My work—”

  “I know. I don’t want you to feel I’m resentful. And I don’t want any money from you. We are comfortable. He has a good school and he works hard for the things that he has.”

  “They didn’t tell me—”

  She cut him off. “James wanted to know whether you would come here to meet him. I said that it might not be as easy as that—that you have an important job, that you—”

  “I don’t,” he corrected her with a wry smile. “A lot of things have changed since the last time you saw me.”

  “You don’t work for the government?”

  “Not for a long time,” he said. “But that’s a long story.”

  “Perhaps you could come here and tell me about it?”

  He looked at the screen and, within it, the window from which Jessica was smiling hopefully at him. He had been reluctant to speak to her, to risk opening up old feelings and long-buried memories, but now, with her familiar face in front of him, listening to her warm, reassuring voice, he found himself responding.

  “When?” he said.

  “You’ll come?”

  He nodded. “When are you thinking?”

  “I don’t have any plans.”

  Neither do I, he thought. Nothing at all.

  There was no point in waiting.

  “How about tomorrow?” he said.

  8

  MILTON PUSHED up the blind and gazed out of the porthole window at London laid out below them. It was dark, and the lights of the city glittered around the dark snake of the Thames as it wound its way out to the sea. The pilot banked and continued their climb to cruising altitude. The flight was scheduled to take thirteen hours and forty-five minutes. Milton hoped to be able to sleep through most of it.

  There had been no reason to delay once he had made his decision. He went into the shelter after he had spoken to Jessica and told Cathy that he needed time off for personal reasons. She was understanding, didn’t ask questions, and said that his job would be waiting for him when he came back. As she reached up for him and gave him a warm hug, Milton wondered, again, whether he was doing the right thing. He had a life here, or at least a semblance of one. The job was the anchor around which he could arrange everything else. It was a point of normality, a steadiness in an existence that had, for so long, been a vortex of uncertainty and confusion.

  But then he thought of Jessica and he knew that he had no choice.

  There were other things he had grown used to. He had his flat. He had a series of meetings that he had come to rely upon, the emotional bulwark that helped him deal with the burden of his guilt. The longer he went without meetings, the heavier that guilt would become and the more likely he was to resort to his old method of coping.

  He resolved to find a meeting in Manila as soon as he landed.

  Logan had offered to pay for his flight, but Milton did not want any more contact with him and the government than was absolutely necessary. The fact that they had found him was disturbing enough; it was a wake-up call that he had relaxed a little too much, and he would take steps to change that from now on. He would guard his privacy. He had a little money salted away, so he used it to purchase a non-stop Philippine Airlines flight from Heathrow to Manila.

  Milton looked at his cheap Timex watch. It was just after ten. They would arrive mid-morning. The plane levelled out and the captain switched off the fasten seatbelts sign. The cabin crew busied themselves with the dinner service. Milton put on his sleeping mask and then slid his headphones over his ears. The steward was approaching with the drinks trolley. Milton could do without being asked if he wanted a drink or the temptation of the jangling bottles.

  * * *

  THE WOMAN sat three rows behind Milton on the other side of the aisle. She couldn’t have asked for a better spot: she was able to watch him without the need to move, able to observe him with the discretion that would be necessary for a mark like him. Another member of the team had followed him from the café that afternoon. They did not know what to expect, but he hadn’t been particularly careful; they had three of them on standby should he attempt any counter-surveillance techniques, but he had not. Rather, he had gone to the tube station, travelled across London to Paddington, and then taken the Heathrow Express to the airport. The woman had picked him up as he had arrived at the departures hall. Logan had taken the precaution of booking seats on all of the direct flights to the Philippines, and it had been a simple enough matter for her to check in at the same time as he did and then follow him down to the gate.

  She watched as he reclined his seat and put the eye mask over his face. This part of the operation was simple. They just wanted to know where he was and, particularly, that he was doing what he had promised to do.

  The difficulty would come later.

  9

  THE APPROACH had been spectacular. Milton had looked out of the window as they passed over the islands that made up the Philippines, many of them marked by tall volcanoes and others garlanded with sandy crescents of beach that were as white as bone against the deep blue of the ocean. There were acres of paddy fields, vast rectangles that
were separated into hundreds of uniform terraces.

  They touched down on schedule and taxied to Terminal NAIA-1. Milton watched the baggage handlers fussing with the luggage as it was unloaded from the hold, and then followed the shuffling queue of passengers as they made their way down the aisle to the air bridge. He felt the warmth and humidity as he left the plane and crossed over to the terminal. The captain had announced that the temperature was already eighty degrees, and that the forecast was for ninety by the time the day was done. Milton had packed a T-shirt in his case and he stopped in the first bathroom to change into it, splashing his face with lukewarm water in an attempt to scour away the rheum of sleep. He followed the windowed alleys to the luggage reclaim and went straight through since he had only brought his carry-on with him. He passed through health control and stood before the infrared camera as a glum-looking official checked the temperatures of the arriving passengers and asked a few cursory questions about SARS and bird flu. Milton carried on, queued for immigration and finally shuffled forward to hand over his passport and arrivals card. He bought some Philippine pesos at the exchange desk and, finally, pushed through the doors into the muggy soup outside the terminal.

  He waited there for a moment, watching the other travellers as they emerged onto the concourse.

  He spotted a woman dressed for business, with a sheen of sweat on her skin, and went over to her.

  “Hello,” he said.

  She looked at him with an expression that mixed surprise with resignation.

  “Tell Logan that I don’t need to be followed,” he said. “I’m here like he wanted. But if I see anyone else following me, that’ll be the end of things. I’ll just disappear. All right?”