by Gulvin, Jeff
Logan took the picture from him and studied it carefully. ‘Mind if I keep this for a while, Jim?’
‘Be my guest. Matter of fact, you can take all this stuff if you want.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I got to get back to work about now.’
They took the box of papers back to the motel room and Logan spread them out on the bed. The photo she laid on one side. ‘I want to get this put through the system,’ she said. ‘Gabby and Oko, that might tell us something.’
Swann was looking closely at it again, at the boy standing shyly between the women. He wore shorts and a T-shirt and his skin had an ebony tint, but his face was downcast and all that showed was the black hair on his head. He looked up at Harrison, who was looking back at him. ‘What?’
‘Nothing, duchess. Quit being so paranoid.’ Harrison spoke to Logan then. ‘Cheyenne, I need to get back to New Orleans for a night. My partner’s set up an undercover drugs buy and I need to be in the quarter.’ He looked at his watch. ‘If I haul ass now and highball a bit on the freeway, I can make Atlanta and still get a plane to New Orleans. You want me to run any of this stuff through the computer?’
‘Great idea, Harrison,’ she said. ‘In fact, the best you’ve come up with so far. Take the picture and some of these letters and see what you can find out.’
Harrison stared at her for a short moment, then scooped up the papers and stalked off.
Swann relaxed; with Harrison gone, the atmosphere eased perceptibly. He heard him tear away in his car, and then he lay back with his head against the pillow of the other bed.
‘God, that’s better. He’s winding me up like a top.’
‘Don’t go for it, Jack. Whatever happened was not your fault, no matter how that asshole chooses to see it.’
‘You don’t like him, do you?’
‘He chews tobacco and spits the juice in a Coke can. He’s arrogant, rude, a Midwestern hill-billy in an FBI raid jacket.’ She broke off. ‘I don’t know, maybe it’s me. Everybody else seems to worship the ground he walks on. To be fair, he’s been our most productive UCA since Pistone infiltrated the Mob. Tom Kovalski rates him and I rate Kovalski, so is his judgement fucked or mine?’
Swann smiled at her then and laid his hand across her arm. ‘D’you think we can find anything to drink in this town?’
‘I doubt it, but why don’t we try.’
They found no liquor, but the BP garage sold beer and Swann bought a case of Miller Lite. They packed ice around it in the sink, then ate dinner in the diner, with every eye in the place on their table. There were black people and there were white people, but none of them were sitting together. Swann felt just as much intimidated by the blacks as the whites; each group looked at them with equal disdain. Logan touched the ends of his fingers with hers. ‘Don’t let it bother you, honey. This is Georgia, remember. Folks here don’t get around too much.’
Swann finished his hamburger and looked across at the table of a tanned-faced man in his forties, who was constantly giving him the eye. Swann stared at him and the man eventually looked away. ‘You know what,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘I’ve been undercover on the Falls Road in West Belfast, and I wasn’t anywhere near as intimidated as I feel right now.’
‘Let’s go,’ Logan said. ‘I’m done if you are.’
They went back to her room and broke open the beer. Swann stood in the open door and smoked a cigarette. ‘You miss Pia, honey?’ Logan asked him suddenly.
He looked back at her, lying on the bed with her jacket off, the height of her breasts pushing against the material of her blouse, skirt riding slightly on naked thighs. Her feet were bare and her toenails painted cherry-red. ‘I don’t miss her, Chey. No.’ He looked away again. ‘I miss something, but I couldn’t tell you what it is.’
‘Closeness.’
‘What?’
She propped herself up on one elbow. ‘You know, closeness, intimacy. How long were you with her—eighteen months, wasn’t it?’
‘About that, yeah.’
‘It’s a long time, Jack.’
‘Yeah, you’re right, it is. Especially when she seemed so much in love with me.’ He looked away. ‘Ah, I don’t want to talk about it. I got stiffed, Chey. It’s time I got over it.’
He didn’t hear her get off the bed, didn’t feel her come over till she slipped her hands around his waist from behind. His heart began to pulse and he could feel a tickling sensation in his loins. He turned to face her, there in the doorway of the motel room, with the Georgia sky huge and purple above his head. He kissed her, lips yielding under his own. He pressed himself against her. She gave and then moved against him, lifting one leg to rustle against his. He kissed her again, more deeply, reaching both hands behind her, cupping the arc of her hips. Deeper and tighter. She kicked the door closed and Swann felt the breath stick in his throat. He lost himself in her, tugging at her lips with his teeth, brushing her cheek, forehead, the long line of her neck, like velvet under his tongue.
Carefully, he undressed her, easing each button from its housing till her white lace bra was brilliant against the swell of her breasts. Her skin was rich and dark, like smooth chocolate, with a depth of scent that he could only associate with black women. There was something almost regal about the arch of her back. Her hands caressed him, nails in the soft flesh at the back of his neck. She got up and wriggled out of her skirt. And then she was naked and dark, with a mound of thick, black hair rising at the top of her thighs. She laid him on his back and undressed him completely. Then, rolling him over, she took some aromatic oil from her bag. ‘Lie still and relax,’ she said softly. ‘I’m going to spoil you.’
She oiled his back and rubbed his skin into ruffles with the points of her fingers. Swann groaned and sighed and felt the cares of the past year begin to subside. The gentle, loving touch of a woman—a woman he trusted not to hurt him. He felt himself sinking into the bed, allowing her to roam his body with hers; his back, his legs, buttocks, kneading him gently and firmly in turn. Then she turned him over and eased her hands over his stomach to the tops of his thighs and worked him till he was hard. She kissed his face, his chest, his belly and the tip of his penis, and then she lowered herself on top of him.
Afterwards, they stood in the shower with hot water rinsing the soap from their bodies. Swann washed every inch of her, her flesh easy under his touch. They dried, shared a beer and lay together till morning.
David Collier looked at the CCTV screen at the clubhouse in Victoria Avenue, Hounslow, West London. Gas vans were rolling down the street. He rubbed at his jaw and frowned. One parked right outside and a man in British Gas overalls came up to the house. It was an end-of-terrace house, with CCTV on both the side and the front, and a final camera set up over the tiny patch of garden at the back. There were four bedrooms, and they’d built a small extension at the back to enhance the size of the clubroom. When out of town members came down, they slept in sleeping-bags on the floor.
The control panel was in the master bedroom, overlooking the street at the front. The brickwork and windows had been reinforced and there was space for two bikes at the front. They were in no danger of being stolen.
Only Fagin was with him in the clubhouse. Gringo, the other resident, was down at the shop working on a ’56 panhead Harley they had acquired in Texas. The gas man came right up to the door and rang the bell. Fagin would answer. Collier kept the camera on the man’s face, zooming the lens in for a close-up to see if he had seen him before. There was nothing there he recognized and he relaxed. He had smelt gas that morning when he went out for cigarettes. He heard Fagin’s feet pounding the stairs and then his head poked round the door.
‘The man says there’s a gas leak, Dave. We’ve got to clear out the house.’
‘Fuck him.’
Fagin pulled a face. ‘The leak’s across the road, man, in Wellington Avenue. They’re clearing everyone out of three parallel streets, as well as Penderel and Rossindel.’
Collier looked again at the s
creen. The gas man was looking at his watch and hopping from one foot to another. He lifted his finger to the bell once more. ‘Ah, fuck it,’ he said, and lifted his jacket from the bed.
They were shepherded down the street along with all the other residents. Collier wanted to take the bikes, but the gas man said he couldn’t. The action from the spark plugs was enough to send everything up. Collier walked along the street with Fagin, eyeing everyone that he passed. He could definitely smell gas in the air. More vans were arriving and men in breathing apparatus and equipment.
George Webb and a locksmith from MI5 walked right past Collier and Fagin, carrying their tool kits with them, suited and booted as gas men working on the leak. They looked back and Webb was given the all-clear by the observers in the evacuation area. Then the two of them went to work. The locksmith stripped off his mask and Webb let his sit under his chin, while they assessed the front door.
‘Bloody hell,’ the locksmith said. He was a small man with a black moustache and hairs sticking out of the neck of his shirt. He rubbed his finger back and forth under his nose, while he studied the variety of locks that Collier had set in the door. ‘What about the back?’ he said at length. ‘No one guards the back door like they do the front.’
There was no gate to the garden, the rear wall jutting on to the neighbours’ garden in the parallel street. The wall was brick and six feet high and there was razor wire curled on top. Webb went back to the van for a ladder and Kevlar blankets.
In the garden, the locksmith breathed a sigh of relief. ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘There’s only three on this one and they’re all bar keys.’ He took a soft metal probe from a package in the breast pocket of his overalls, and set about the first of the locks. It took him twenty minutes a key, but he made three and they all fitted, the tumbler markings being worked out partly from the pattern they made on the probe and partly from the expertise of the man. Webb had known him as long as he had been in the Branch, and they must have made in excess of twenty covert entries together. ‘What about alarms?’ the locksmith said.
Webb shook his head. ‘They didn’t have time to set them.’
‘Right. There you go then.’ The locksmith fitted all three keys and Webb had access to the house. They were joined by two other specialists from the technical support unit, and a search team who accessed the building over the wall. One of them spoke to Webb.
‘You need to check if that CCTV is taped,’ he said.
‘Right.’ Webb went upstairs and found the control unit in the master bedroom. There was a taping facility, but no cassette in the cartridge.
Tania Briggs joined him. ‘We’ll need to reshape the razor wire when we’re done, Webby,’ she said. ‘They’re the sort that’ll notice.’
He patted her lightly on the shoulder and produced a Polaroid picture of the top of the wall. ‘Ahead of you, Tania. Ahead of you.’
The technical men put in the sound-listening probes, wired into the light switches. They considered the television in the lounge, but that had a downside if the TV was on. All the listeners would hear was the burble of whatever was showing. They worked quickly and expertly. Even David Collier, with his SAS background, would never know they had been there. The whole process took them an hour and a half, and for once there was no chance of being compromised, with the roads cordoned off and the gas board genuinely checking for leaks.
Webb and Briggs and the rest of the search team went through the property with a fine toothcomb, checking every drawer, every nook and cranny, and Webb even disturbed the kick boards on the kitchen units, looking for hides. They found nothing, which puzzled him. Normally, there would be something.
Webb moved out into the yard. It was crazy paved and he stared at each section for a long time. Nothing. He looked at the small shed and inspected the dry space beneath it with a pencil-light torch. Still nothing. Again he looked at the paving, one step raised to the kitchen door. He knelt beside the step and checked the brickwork for loose mortar, but found nothing. He scratched his head and whistled to himself, and then he saw it—one line of cracked mortar in one small section of paving close to the wall. Bending over it, he looked very carefully round the edges of the cement to see exactly how it was joined. He tested it with the weight of his palm, but it didn’t feel loose. Yet his instincts told him it was. He could see that the mortar was cracked all the way round, now that he was bent right over it. He beckoned Briggs as she appeared in the kitchen doorway. ‘Give me a hand here,’ he said.
They stood either side of the slab, and Webb slipped a tiny metal probe into the crack. It gave. Very carefully, they lifted it between them, without disturbing the dried mortar any further. A shallow hole in the ground, no more than eight inches square. Webb squatted on his haunches and smiled. ‘Oh, Tania,’ he said. ‘I think we’re finally getting somewhere.’
A single sheet of paper was folded in a transparent polythene bag. Webb lifted it out and carefully unfolded it. Taking his Polaroid camera, he laid the paper flat and studied it. ‘Looks like an inventory for motorbike parts,’ he said. He snapped it up close, ensuring that all was legible. It was on a sheet of company-headed paper that had originated in the United States. Webb looked at Briggs. ‘Tell me something, Tania. Why would anyone go to so much trouble to hide a bike-part inventory?’
They replaced the stone exactly as they had found it. Then their gear was cleared out, the sound system tested and the door relocked. The locksmith carefully dusted away all trace of metal filings with an airbrush and then they climbed over the wall. The last thing that Webb and Briggs did was to reshape the razor wire, wearing padded leather gloves.
Later that afternoon, Webb went with Christine Harris to see the US Secret Service at the embassy in Grosvenor Square. They met Special Agent Combes in the leg-att’s office. Harris had already given him the information on the US companies operated legally by Collier, and now she passed him the inventory.
Combes was in his forties, thin-faced, with the kind of slow eyes that had seen most of everything before. He was a veteran money-laundering investigator for the Treasury Department and liaised between London and Washington. ‘No problem, Christine,’ he said. ‘I’ll get it across to the States, see what we can make of it. We’ll run the handwriting through our systems and see where we come out with that as well.’
‘Great,’ she said. ‘We’ve already got a warrant for UK production orders on their bank accounts over here.’
‘The only thing is, this might take a while,’ Combes warned her. ‘Lot of man hours here. I guess you’re in a hurry.’
‘We’re on top of what we have, and there’s other pieces we need to put in place, Peter. What we need is the right information.’
‘Oh, you’ll get that. You can count on it.’
Webb walked down the steps with her. ‘Seems like a good guy,’ he said.
‘He is. We’ve used him before. He wrote the manual for them, George. I mean quite literally. What he doesn’t know about cleaning up dirty money isn’t worth knowing. All he’s ever told me are the three basic principles: “placement”—that’s getting the dirty money into the system initially; “layering”—moving it around; and finally, “integration”—that’s where it becomes part of the normal economy.’
Boese had stolen the white Nissan truck in Arizona. Now he drove it under the shadow of Slide Mountain, whose one bald side had slipped down to the valley ten years previously. Bears roamed its height, along with mountain lion and white-tailed deer. Boese drove casually, one hand on the wheel, till the turn for Eastlake Boulevard. He pulled into the outside lane and halted at the sharp uphill left, while the traffic coming from Carson City rumbled past him. He waited, drumming his fingers on the wheel, then pulled across the oncoming carriageway and up the short hill. Eastlake Boulevard stretched ahead of him. On his right, Washoe Lake was glassy, low and flat, with the water higher than he remembered it. He had been here once in his life before, but that was a long time ago.
The
road drifted for a mile or so through Washoe City, then cut under the lie of the hills and edged the lake all the way back to the highway on the western shore. From there, he could get into Carson. He slowed the truck and pulled off to the right, where he parked and wandered in the dust to the shore. He was in no hurry; they were light years behind him and there were things he needed to think about. He squatted and skimmed pebbles on the lightly breaking wavetops. His hair was long and thick, a Mexican moustache drooped to his lower jaw, and a straw cowboy hat was perched high on his head. He wore Wranglers and sloping-heeled Mexican boots. He had fresh ID in his pocket and a story for any state trooper who happened to pull him over.
There was much on his mind, many thoughts, emotions, questions. He could feel nothing yet and he wondered why. He was public after all, but interestingly enough, they had not named him. The FBI knew who he was, because he had allowed them to witness his arrival, undisguised, on the twenty-second floor of that oil building in New Orleans. Yet he remained an ‘unknown subject’. They would not make public the incident with the photograph or the feather, because that would only generate a million copycats. But why not name him? After Rome and London, the world knew Ismael Boese.
It was not overly important, though it remained puzzling. No matter, the unknown subject would do for now. He would finish what he had started—until someone or something altered the path he was walking.
He heard a sound behind him and looked back to see a cowboy sitting on a horse, shaded by the sun. ‘Buenas tardes,’ he said.
The cowboy looked at him for a moment. Boese could not see his face. The horse was all of seventeen hands, and the cowboy sat in the saddle with a straight back and was but a shadow against the sun.
‘Buenas tardes to you.’ The cowboy rested both hands on the saddle horn. ‘That your truck up there?’