The Nameless Dead

by Paul Johnston

  The door closed behind the special agent before I could say anything.

  And so Karen told me—how she had given birth normally, the panic having been faked by the medical team and had then been given something to make her sleep. When she came round, she was told by Julie Simms that Peter Sebastian had taken me to Washington for pre-trial meetings. The TV and laptop were removed and she didn’t receive any newspapers, so she had no idea what happened in Maine and Texas. Then, a couple of days ago, they had been flown to Washington and lodged in a Bureau house for the night, before being brought up to NYC that morning.

  I held Karen and Magnus while she was talking, my mind filled with conflicting images—the pair of them in the camp morgue, their skin cold and blue; the voices I had heard calling me, the visions of them disappearing down the road of no return. This was not the time to share that with her—maybe that time would never come. I looked at my son’s face again. He hadn’t been the baby in the morgue. They must have used some other poor mother’s dead child. What had Peter Sebastian done? I’d known he was devious, but I’d never have thought he could go so far to convince me of Rothmann’s guilt. Then I followed that line of thought. They’d been brought to New York this morning, after his death. There was only one person who could have ordered that—the dead Director. He and Sebastian must have been working together. Did Sebastian know about the former admiral’s conditioning? If he did, he had paid the price. But Sebastian hadn’t deserved that—for all he’d done, I still had some respect for him. Seeing Karen and our son had made me more compassionate, it seemed.

  ‘Matt?’ Karen said softly.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, coming out of my reverie.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, whatever you’ve done. We’re together now.’ She kissed me. ‘Forever.’

  She was thinking of Rothmann, assuming I’d killed him. I didn’t want to tell her about what had happened to him now, or what I’d done to Sara.

  I heard voices outside the door, and then heavy footsteps going down the corridor. There was a knock on the door. I went over and looked through the spyhole.

  ‘Arthur,’ I said, after I’d opened up. ‘Your hair still looks like it’s standing to attention.’

  He smiled. ‘I know—I can’t get it to lie—’ He broke off and stared at Karen in astonishment. Any thoughts I’d had of his being part of Sebastian’s scam disappeared. I gave him a rundown.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said, walking over and examining the baby. ‘Well, congratulations. May I?’ He pulled an armchair toward the door and sat down.

  ‘Of course.’ I went over to Karen. ‘You know, I couldn’t have put this in a novel.’

  He laughed. ‘No, you couldn’t.’

  ‘Drink?’ I asked, trying to locate the minibar. I needed one myself.

  ‘No, thanks. I’m not staying.’ He paused. ‘Neither are you.’

  I turned toward him, my heart making a break for my mouth. To my left, Karen made a smothered, high-pitched noise. Arthur Bimsdale was screwing a silencer into the barrel of his service pistol.

  ‘What the—’

  ‘Be quiet,’ he ordered, waving me closer to Karen and Magnus with the weapon. ‘This won’t take long. When I said I couldn’t believe it, I meant I couldn’t believe that my esteemed former chief managed to conceal this stratagem from me.’

  ‘Exactly who are you working for?’

  ‘Ah, that would be too easy. What I will tell you is that I had no idea about the ex-Director’s allegiances, either.’

  ‘He and Sebastian were working together,’ I said, trying to buy us time. I’d seen Bimsdale in action and I knew I couldn’t reach him without being shot. Maybe I’d have to do that to save the others, but I was still looking for another option.

  ‘Apparently so,’ he agreed. ‘But now, I’m afraid, your usefulness has run its course, Mr. Wells. It will look like you lost your mind and tragically killed your family. Rothmann’s fault, of course.’

  ‘Let them go,’ I said, looking at Karen. ‘She won’t say anything. Will you?’

  ‘We’re not going anywhere,’ she retorted. ‘We’re staying together forever, remember?’

  I glared at her, but she stayed where she was.

  ‘Touching,’ Bimsdale said, leveling the pistol at my chest. ‘And, indeed, correct.’

  ‘Why?’ I demanded. ‘There’s no reason to kill us.’

  ‘I don’t write the script,’ he said casually. ‘If you want my opinion, I’d say my principals feel you’re more trouble than you’re worth.’

  ‘Zig!’ I yelled. That was the call for a rugby move that I’d told Karen about when Sara had been after us in London—both of us made a rapid move to the left. That took us out of the pistol’s immediate line of fire. Taking advantage of the momentary surprise, I dived forward, trying to get my body as horizontal and low as possible. Bimsdale knew what he was doing, because sitting down made his position more secure.

  There was a spit and I felt a tug on the back of my shirt. Then my head crashed into his midriff. The air blasted from his lungs and the pistol was flung out of his grip.

  Bimsdale let out a yell. I looked round as I wrapped my arms round him. Karen must have hit him. But where was the baby? The agent slipped one of his arms from my grip and backhanded her in the face, sending her spinning backward. I shoved myself up his body and then stopped. Something very sharp was piercing my back.

  ‘It’s…a…switchblade,’ he said, panting as I increased pressure on his chest. ‘I…found it…on the Soul… Collector’s…body.’

  ‘Matt!’ Karen screamed.

  ‘Let…me go,’ Bimsdale gasped.

  I kept shoving with my legs, the chair now up against the wall. The pain in my back became almost unbearable, but I wasn’t going to let him harm my family. Behind me, I could hear Magnus crying and Karen moaning.

  ‘You’re about…to die,’ Bimsdale said, pushing hard against me.

  Then I saw his wooden pencil. The end with the eraser had been forced out of his jacket pocket. I remembered a story Dave Cummings had told me about an SAS friend, who had been in a similar situation. This was for Dave.

  Ignoring the blinding pain, I moved my head toward Bimsdale’s jacket and got my teeth around the pencil. He realized what I was doing, but couldn’t do anything about it except continue sticking me with the knife. I pulled my head back as far as I could, and then smashed my loaded mouth forward.

  There was a muffled shriek and I felt the pain in my back recede slightly. Karen was suddenly close, removing Bimsdale’s hand but leaving the blade in me—she’d been trained for such situations.

  ‘You’ll be all right, Matt, darling,’ she said, but the tone of her voice, as mournful as an autumn sunset, gave her away.

  The last thing I saw was Arthur Bimsdale’s face. The pencil had gone through one of his nostrils and deep into his traitorous brain. The last thing I heard was the conjoined wail of my wife and son.

  Epilogue

  I lost a kidney and a fair amount of self-respect. After all, Arthur Bimsdale was a lanky kid without special forces training. I should have taken him out with my hands rather than a primary school writing implement. I expressed that feeling to Karen and she dispatched me to the Ice Age with her eyes. After a week in hospital, I was allowed out to make it up to her. I did, somehow managing not to split my stitches.

  We spent a week in an FBI apartment looking over the East River. I even managed to tag along on short walks with Karen and Magnus. I could have taken a taxi to the lawyer’s office in Queens that Sara had told me about, but I decided against it. Given her record, whatever she’d stashed there would be a contemporary version of Pandora’s Box. I was still puzzled by her physical condition—the sweats and the pain she seemed to be affected by—but didn’t ask to see the postmortem. Sara’s life was over and so, I decided, was her influence on mine. I could also have checked out the address that Roger had found for the email account of my former lover’s broker, or passed it
to the FBI. As it happened, neither was necessary. On our penultimate day in New York, there was a report in the papers of a murder. An economist by the name of Xavier Marias was found near that address, his throat cut. Nothing seemed to have been stolen from his person and there was no indication of who the killer might have been. Sara had somehow got at her broker from beyond the grave. That was another reason to avoid her stash—what else might be waiting for me there?

  We were flown to Washington by Bureau jet. Ethan Simonsen was seriously embarrassed over the Bimsdale affair, but I told him to lighten up. As it was, he stuck to us tighter than superglue. We were put up in a smart hotel near the Hoover Building while I was questioned at length. I told them more or less everything I knew. You should always keep something to yourself—in this case, I kept back much of what Sara had told me about her activities. They weren’t germane to the case and, since they had never caught her, they had no claim to title. We visited Quincy several times. I had the feeling he might have known that Karen and Magnus hadn’t died, but I didn’t encourage him to come clean. It was irrelevant now.

  I never knew Sir Andrew Frogget, but I had come across his sleazy sidekick Gavin Burrows. The postmortem on the Routh Limited chairman was inconclusive. There were small traces in his bloodstream of a chemical compound that had never been seen before, but it was deemed to be irrelevant. I immediately thought of spies and dirty tricks. Obviously the CIA or their foreign equivalents would be interested in Heinz Rothmann. I let that go—I didn’t need any more hassles. That was also why I’d left Hercules Solutions to the Bureau. As for Arthur Bimsdale, it was assumed he had been conditioned by Rothmann, though the chances of Peter Sebastian having had a second assistant who had been turned struck me as being even more minimal than those of Great Britain becoming the best rugby league team in the world. Besides, I had other things on my mind: baby shit, breast-feeding and its psychological effects on fathers, baby shit…

  We were eventually cut loose by the FBI and given tickets for a flight to London. I didn’t have many plans. That was because Karen did. She was going back to work, taking the baby with her until she stopped feeding him, which would be a tester for the Metropolitan Police. I was vaguely thinking about writing a book, but not about our experiences. Perhaps a kids’ story, one with no monsters—and no nameless dead. Rothmann and his sister had stolen the identities of all the people they had conditioned, and their father had been responsible for hundreds of anonymous deaths at Auschwitz. It was beyond me to bring any of those victims back.

  There was still the small matter of our wedding. We had some time before the thirty days after Magnus’s birth that Karen stipulated. Maybe we’d slip off to Nevada before we went home. Julie Simms managed to find the engagement ring Peter Sebastian had bought. I considered sending it to his grieving family, but decided against that. He owed us big time.

  In the evening, after Magnus dropped off, Karen and I listened to Monteverdi’s Orfeo again. The mythical singer had gone to the underworld to find his dead wife, but had lost her on the way back to the sunlight.

  I wasn’t ever going to let go of Karen and our son.

  Acknowledgments

  My sincere thanks to: the MIRA teams around the world and, especially, to Adam Wilson, prince among editors; my admirable agent Broo Doherty; and the excellent people at MIDAS PR, London.

  My gratitude and love to the family and friends who have acted as this author’s support system. Particular thanks to Sofka Zinovieff for lunches and listening.

  And a belated public vote of appreciation to the dedicated people who give their time and energy to supporting crime fiction in different ways—an incomplete list includes Declan Burke, Sharon Canavar and the Harrogate Crime Festival team, Michael Carlson, Barry Forshaw, Maxim Jakubowski, the Jordans, Calum Macleod, Adrian Muller and the Crime Fest team, Mike Ripley, Chris Simmons, Mike Stotter, Richard Thomas, David Torrans, Len Wanner—anyone I’ve carelessly omitted can look forward to the next book.

  Finally, as has been customary in the Wells series (not that anyone has commented), a Neil Young title for my beloved Roula and children to ponder: ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’…

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-8880-9

  THE NAMELESS DEAD

  Copyright © 2011 by Paul Johnston

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