Nom de Guerre

by Gulvin, Jeff

  Harrison pushed away his soup plate, finished his beer and took another from Joey. He glanced at the Mexican. ‘Wild night out there, huh.’

  ‘Si.’ The Mexican looked at him. He had thick black hair and a drooping moustache. ‘Sticky.’ He held up his bottle. ‘Need you cold beer.’

  ‘You betcha.’

  The Mexican nodded and smiled and Harrison looked away. He yawned, glanced at his watch and thought about the Sweet Sensation Band and Maria’s black eyes in the Jazz Café. He shook the beer bottle at Joe. ‘Put this in a “to go” cup for me, will you, bro?’

  ‘You got it.’

  Joe dispensed the beer and Harrison slid off his stool. ‘Later, Joey.’ He stepped out into the rain.

  Boese could see him seated on a stool in the Jazz Café, with a beer bottle in his hand, watching the black girl singer in the band. Lust in his eyes. Boese smiled thinly—another tourist among the thousands that thronged Bourbon Street at night. He lifted his camera, sighted, zoomed in on Harrison’s face and pressed the shutter. Harrison saw the flash from the corner of his eyes, blinked and looked up. He saw no one on the street he recognized.

  It took the army a week to come up with the identity of the dead biker from the fingerprints supplied to them by the Antiterrorist Branch. His name was John Stanley and he had served with the Scots Guards. His family were informed and they travelled from their home in Manchester to see the body. It would be a while before it was released for burial. Swann and Webb spoke to them at their hotel. They had no idea that their son had been involved with a motorcycle gang, let alone anything like what had happened at Hanwell Green.

  ‘Rough on them,’ Swann said, as they drove back through a wintry London to Scotland Yard. Hyde Park Corner was choked with traffic and they sat amid the fumes, engines idling all round them.

  ‘Especially the mother.’ Webb sighed and smoothed a hand through his hair. ‘It’s always worse for the mother.’ He looked sideways at Swann. ‘Mothers will love their sons, no matter what. They may be the worst kind of bastard walking, their mothers may not even like them, but they always, always love them.’

  Swann lifted one eyebrow. ‘Even yours?’ he said.

  The traffic began to move at a crawl and Swann drummed the steering wheel with the flat of his hand. Webb watched him out of the corner of his eye. ‘Colson is talking about re-interviewing Pia, Jack.’

  Swann suddenly went cold. For a moment he did not say anything. The traffic had eased and they were heading down Grosvenor Place, with Buckingham Palace Gardens on their left.

  ‘Makes sense,’ Webb continued. ‘Maybe there’s things she hasn’t told us yet.’

  ‘Like what?’ Swann stared through the windscreen.

  ‘Like anything.’ Webb breathed out audibly. ‘We’re back to square one, Jack. Nothing can be discounted.’

  ‘I suppose.’ Swann pulled on to Victoria Street and sped up. ‘Who’s going to see her?’

  ‘Not been decided yet.’

  ‘Tell the old man I want to do it.’

  Back in the squad room, he sat at his desk and thought about a night in Scotland when he had poured out his heart to Pia, told her the innermost fears in his soul, how he had tried to climb Nanga Parbat in the Himalayas and ended up cutting the rope that held himself and his partner together. His partner fell to his death. That dark night was with him now as he sat in the squad room, with the afternoon fading outside. He could hear the others, the hubbub of the office, phones ringing, keys tapping on computers; but in his mind he was still out there in the storm, with the rope freezing and the snow falling, and above him the unsteady lurch of the ice screw, pulling itself free from the wall.

  He opened his eyes, not realizing he had closed them, and he was aware of the stickiness on his brow. Getting up, he went out to the toilets and washed his face in cold water. Bill Colson came in behind him.

  ‘You OK, Jack?’

  ‘Yeah. Sure.’ Swann stood up quickly and flapped his hands to dry them.

  Colson washed his own hands and regarded him, almost like a father would his son. ‘You sure?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You look a bit pale, that’s all.’

  ‘Tired, Guv. We’re all tired.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’ Colson poured a plastic cup of drinking water from the tap at the far sink and swallowed it down.

  Swann waited for him to finish. ‘Webb told me you’re thinking of re-interviewing Brigitte Hammani.’

  Colson looked squarely at him. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘It makes sense,’ Swann said. ‘She’s a lead. Maybe Boese told her something that might give us a clue about this biker gang.’

  ‘Or the Poles, perhaps.’

  ‘If they’re connected.’ Swann leaned against the sink. ‘From what Box told us, the Poles are more than capable of carrying out a hit like that. Why use somebody else?’

  ‘The informant.’

  ‘Possibly. It could be unrelated, though.’

  Colson tilted his head slightly higher. ‘Is this leading somewhere, Jack?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I want to interview Hammani.’

  For a long moment Colson was quiet, then he said: ‘I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.’

  ‘I want to do it, sir.’ Swann held his gaze evenly, arms folded across his chest.

  ‘I’ll think about it.’ Colson turned and the door swung closed behind him.

  Pia looked tired, pale and drawn; a darkness crawling beneath her eyes that Swann had never seen before. Colson had not agreed to let him see her on his own. Webb was with him, the three of them in the police interview room at Holloway Prison for women, in North London. Pia—Brigitte Hammani—was still on remand. Swann was choked. His anger still burned from time to time, but he had loved this woman, had even asked her to marry him, and he was shocked by her appearance. All at once he was at a loss, nothing to say to her. Webb picked up on the moment and leaned over the desk.

  ‘How you doing?’ he asked.

  Pia looked from him to Swann, looked in Swann’s eyes until he looked away, then sat back in the seat. ‘I’m doing all right.’ Her voice was softer, broken almost.

  Swann looked up at her. ‘You look like shit,’ he said.

  She half smiled. ‘What did you expect, Jack? I can’t afford make-up.’

  Webb cleared his throat. ‘You know about Boese, obviously.’

  ‘Of course. Everybody knows about Boese.’ She looked at Swann again. ‘How’re you, Jack? How’re the kids?’

  ‘They’re living with Rachael again.’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

  Swann shrugged. ‘They’re better off with her. You know I’m never home.’

  ‘Pia,’ Webb said. ‘Brigitte. Shit.’ He sat back and suddenly smiled. ‘This is difficult for all of us, right.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘We need to know about Boese.’

  ‘I’ve told you everything there is, George. I confessed. Remember?’

  Webb glanced at Swann. ‘I know. But is there anything else you can think of. He clearly intended to get caught. He always knew he could get out. All he had to do was let someone know the time he’d be in transit between the prison and the Bailey. He must’ve set it up way in advance. Is there anything else you can think of that he might have said?’

  Pia passed a hand through her spiked black hair and shook her head again. ‘George, you’re talking about Storm Crow. He was the nastiest, most thorough person I ever had the misfortune to come across. He didn’t say anything to me that was not relevant to me. Nothing. Not one time in nearly ten years.’

  ‘Absolutely nothing?’

  ‘I’d remember. I would’ve included it in my confession. We made contact. He told me what to do. He provided the money. And I did it.’ She lifted the flat of her hands. ‘That’s it. There is no more.’

  Swann and Webb both looked at her then, weak and small and suddenly terribly vulnerable. Swann wanted to say something, something that wou
ld encourage her, something that would ease the ache inside him. But there was nothing he could say.

  ‘This is very hard,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ve told you all that I know.’ She looked at Swann then. ‘I’ve seen you, Jack. I’m glad.’ She scraped back her chair and stood up. ‘I’d like to go back to my cell now.’

  Boese got out of the cab in the loading zone of the Mobil Oil building and walked up to the main entrance. On his left, an escalator carried people up to a mezzanine floor. Other people in business suits milled here and there, making their way to their correct floor or back to the Amoco building. Boese took the escalator and then waited for the elevator which only stopped at the twenty-second floor, the FBI field office. The doors opened soundlessly before him. No one inside. He pressed the button and the elevator began to rise. He stood and looked at the metal of the doors, at the envelope between his palms, and then the doors slid back and he saw blue paint and twin leather couches and the FBI shield on the wall. A receptionist looked up and smiled at him from behind her glass partition. Boese returned her smile, then very deliberately stared into the face of the COTV camera mounted above the door. He handed the receptionist the envelope. ‘Some papers,’ he said. ‘For Special Agent Dollar.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He walked back into the lift.

  Harrison parked his car on the seventh level and made sure the chain lock was secure on the trunk. He sucked the last out of his cigarette and ground the spent tobacco under his heel before walking to the elevator. Penny was already at his desk, on the phone. A tin of snuff was upended on the desk, and he was rolling it back and forth like a wheel. From the tones of the conversation, Harrison could gather that he was talking to the dicks downtown about another group of crank dealers they were looking at. Harrison scratched his head and sat down, and his gaze then fixed on the slim, brown envelope on his desk. He looked at it—delivered by hand for his attention. Taking his pocket knife from his jeans, he sliced open one end and looked inside. Spider’s legs crawled on his spine.

  He took the stairs to the twenty-second floor and the ASACs office. Charlie Mayer, the special agent in charge, was talking to Fitzpatrick, as he knocked on the door. Both his bosses together.

  ‘What is it, John?’ Fitzpatrick asked him.

  ‘I think we got a problem, boss.’

  ‘We do?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Harrison tipped the envelope up and the contents dropped on to the desk. ‘This was delivered by hand for me this morning.’

  Fitzpatrick and Mayer both stared at the items on the desk: a photograph of Harrison with a bullet hole in his head, and a single, black crow’s feather.

  For a moment none of them spoke, then Harrison looked again at the picture. He was sitting on a stool in the Jazz Café, watching the band playing. He tried to place when it was, then remembered the other night, the flashbulb going off on the street. When he had looked up, no one was there. He had dismissed it; flashbulbs went off on Bourbon Street all the time.

  ‘Delivered by hand?’ Mayer said.

  ‘This morning.’

  Mayer looked at Fitzpatrick. ‘Get the videotape out of the security camera, Kirk. Let’s see what we got.’

  They took the tape into the conference room and set it up in the huge, flat-screened TV. Harrison sat in one of the high-backed blue chairs with the FBI logo embossed in gold on them, and looked again at the picture on the table before him. One of the evidence response team had been over it for prints and any fibres, and it and the feather were sealed now in separate plastic bags. They rewound the videotape, then played it through and slowed it when a man came into reception. Nobody spoke. The man turned his face deliberately to the camera—short dark hair, dark skin, wearing a two-piece business suit. Fitzpatrick moved in his seat. ‘Charlie, I think we better get on to headquarters,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t swear to it, but my guts tell me that is Ismael Boese.’

  Harrison was still staring at the screen, Boese’s black eyes on his. Unnerving; even with his experience. ‘Johnny.’ Mayer laid a hand on his arm and indicated the feather and photograph. ‘You’ve just become a member of a very elite club. The only other guy in the States to get a set of those is Lucky Louis Byrne.’

  Harrison didn’t hear him. He thought back over the past day or so. That picture had been taken the night before last. He had been with Penny in the projects and then he had walked in the rain. The Apple Barrel, then Bourbon Street long enough to piss himself off in the Jazz Café. The Apple Barrel—the little Mexican man at the bar. Fitzpatrick had frozen the image and Harrison stared again at those eyes. ‘There was a Mexican in the Apple Barrel the other night,’ he said quietly. ‘Came in out of the rain. Might’ve been driving a blue Buick.’

  ‘You think that was Boese?’

  ‘Coulda been.’ Harrison tapped the photograph with a fingernail. ‘This was taken about an hour later.’ Getting up, he walked to the window and looked out over the business district. He could see the crescent of the river in the distance; the day was clear, with the February sun beginning to burn in the sky. Looking down at the streets, he thought about Mardi Gras, almost upon them. Already the bleachers were being set up, green and gold and purple on the streets below him. They would run all the way along St Charles Avenue. Mardi Gras, and the Storm Crow in the city.

  Louis Byrne was having lunch with his wife in the Old Ebbitt Grill, just around the corner from her office on New York Avenue. He looked across the table at her, statuesque and serious as she always was. He’d hate to face her across a courtroom. ‘So, how’d it go this morning?’

  ‘I’ll get him off.’

  ‘He’s an embezzler, Angie.’

  She looked coldly at him, ignoring the playful light in his eyes. ‘No, he’s not, Louis. He’s a wronged corporate executive. I’m his attorney and I’ll get him off.’ She picked at the caesar salad, then laid the fork down and swallowed her carbonated mineral water. ‘Shall I cook tonight?’

  ‘Will you be home in time?’ Byrne said.

  ‘Seven-thirty, I guess.’

  ‘I’ll cook.’

  ‘Whatever.’ She folded her hands in her lap.

  Byrne’s pager sounded on his belt and he unclipped it. ‘Gotta call the office,’ he said. He went outside to make the call, the restaurant disallowing the use of cellphones on the premises. Angie watched him go, his cropped hairline and straight back, and she smiled. Outside, Byrne spoke to the SIOC.

  ‘This is Byrne,’ he said.

  ‘New Orleans field office are trying to locate you, sir.’

  ‘OK. Patch me through.’ Byrne waited, looked at his watch, then through the restaurant window. Angie was in conversation with a couple of lawyers at the next table. New Orleans answered.

  ‘SAC please.’

  ‘One moment.’

  A pause and a click, then, ‘Mayer.’

  ‘Charlie. Louis Byrne.’

  ‘Hey, Louis. What’s up?’

  ‘You’re looking for me.’

  ‘Yeah. We might have a situation going on down here.’

  Byrne stood very still, listening to what Mayer was telling him, no longer aware of the traffic noise. He stared at the agents guarding the White House.

  ‘We thought you’d want to know pretty quickly, Louis,’ Mayer finished.

  ‘I’ll be down on the first available flight.’ Byrne switched off the phone and placed it back in his pocket. The wind flapped at his jacket and all at once he shivered. The sky was growing overcast, with clouds rolling in from the west. He went back inside the restaurant and sat down.

  Angie stared at the sudden chill in his face. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘We gotta cancel dinner.’

  Back at headquarters, he took the elevator from his office on the fifth floor to the eleventh floor and the Domestic Terrorism Section. Like his own, this part of the building was a SCIF, secret compartmented information facility, and the windows that looked out over 10th Street were permanently blinded, the walls spec
ially concreted to interfere with any covertly planted listening device. He walked through the array of sectioned desks and saw Tom Kovalski on the phone in his office. Kovalski had just been promoted, now deputy section chief. Byrne tapped lightly on his open door and Kovalski beckoned for him to come in. He sat and waited as Kovalski put down the phone, his eyes resting on the booklet-sized copy of the constitution that lay on the desk. Kovalski never let anyone forget that the FBI was set up to protect the constitution, particularly when he was dealing with the ever-growing problem of the militia.

  ‘Goddammit,’ he said. ‘You know the bomb in St Louis?’

  Byrne nodded.

  ‘Local PD gave us a skunked licence plate and now the fucking ATF are sniffing around.’ He shook his head. ‘What is it with those guys? They’re so fucking desperate to stay in existence, they break all the goddamn rules. They poke their noses into another agency’s jurisdiction, and now they’re trying to muscle in on my turf.’

  ‘Bombs, Tom.’

  ‘Right. But, Louis, terrorism is an FBI problem. The chosen weapon of the terrorist just happens to be the bomb. The ATF can butt the fuck out.’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Shooting off at the mouth. What d’you wanna see me about?’

  Byrne looked deep in his eyes. ‘The Storm Crow just showed up in New Orleans.’

  14

  JACK SWANN RESTED HIS head against the seat back, as the aircraft wobbled violently again. Next to him, the elderly lady gripped the twin armrests with hands that boned white at the knuckle. Swann looked out of the window at the bruise-coloured thunder heads, and the turbulence hit them again, dropping the plane so much that his stomach was left in his chest. The pilot came on the intercom once more and assured them that they would be landing in a few minutes and the storm was nothing to worry about. Swann glanced at his seating companion and saw the disbelief etched in her eyes. He looked again through the window, and the land appeared below the mist, grey and black, trees here and there, and the crisscrossing intersections of roads. He could barely make out the traffic, as the plane banked high, the wing dipping almost vertically. The Yard had had a call from the FBI terrorism team telling them what had happened in New Orleans. Swann had been on late turn that day, and was at Regent’s Park Zoo with the kids, when George Webb phoned him. He had dropped the children home, much to Charley’s dismay, then he had scuttled into the Yard. There would be an SO13 liaison and he was determined to be part of it.