The John Milton Series Boxset 4

by Mark Dawson

  “Do you have a map?” Milton asked.

  “Of course.”

  Marks went inside and returned with a folding map. He opened it and spread it over the table. Milton found Avenida Vieira Souto and the Saverin apartment. “This was where they hit us,” Milton said, pressing his forefinger against the map. “They had men waiting and backup. It was well organised and well equipped.”

  Marks looked back at the map and drew his finger along it, following the coast road. “You crashed here,” he said, laying his finger on a sharp right-hand bend. “It’s the edge of cartel country. If it was Red Command, they would have headed for Rocinha.”

  Milton looked at the map. Rocinha was a mile square, a misshapen district between São Conrado, Vidigal, Leblon and Gávea, with a splash of green rainforest bordering it to the north. “What’s it like?”

  “Brutal. The police won’t go in there. They shot a helicopter down with an RPG two years ago. They don’t even fly over it now.”

  “I told the judge I’d bring his daughter back safe and sound.”

  “It’s not your fault, Milton. You’re not responsible. And it sounds like you did all you could to stop them.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I promised. And she’s six years old, Harry. I’m not abandoning her.”

  “Still stubborn?” Marks asked him with a wry upturn to his mouth.

  “When I say something, I do it.”

  “Still stubborn, then.” Marks looked down at the map again. “Rocinha’s a big place.”

  “I know where to start looking,” Milton said. “But I’m going to need a weapon—do you have anything?”

  Marks smiled. “Oh yes.”

  46

  Milton’s shirt and jeans were covered with blood from the crash and, despite Marks’s best efforts to wash them, the garments were stained; Milton binned them both. Marks had anticipated the issue and presented Milton with a plastic carrier bag that contained three plain black T-shirts, two pairs of jeans in different sizes, and underwear. Milton thanked him and went through into the bathroom to change. He looked in the mirror at his reflection. His skin had been scratched in several places, and there were two ugly bruises, one across his torso and the other on his forehead. The first had been caused as his seat belt snapped tight against his sternum; the second—a dark blue line with purples and reds radiating out from it—was from where he had cracked his head against the steering wheel. It was a vivid bruise that would be impossible to miss. Milton hated the thought of anything that might draw unnecessary attention to himself, but there was little that could be done about it now.

  He filled the sink with cold water and dunked his head in it, leaving it submerged until his skin tingled. He took his head out of the water and stared at his reflection: droplets of water ran down his skin, falling back to the basin. He looked into his own cold, blue eyes, and made himself a promise: whoever had killed Drake and taken the girl was going to pay a steep price. He would find them and, when he did, he would make them wish that they had never been born.

  He dried himself off, dressed in the new clothes, and then went to find Marks.

  There was work to do.

  Marks had a beaten-up old BMW parked in a garage at the end of the street. He brought it up to the front door and, after confirming that the road was empty and that the property was unobserved, he tapped the horn. Milton stepped outside, closed the door behind him, and hurried across to the car.

  Marks released the brake and set off.

  “Where are we going?” Milton asked.

  “Up near Bonsucesso,” he said. “Half an hour if the traffic is kind.”

  Marks drove north through Santa Teresa. Milton wound down the window and let the warm air blow onto his face. He still had a dull throb in his head and the unsettling feeling that he might be sick without much warning. He’d been concussed before and knew the symptoms. The fresh air took his mind off it, at least a little.

  “So how long has it been, Milton?”

  He turned away from the window. Marks was looking over at him.

  “Ten years?” Milton offered, although he wasn’t completely sure.

  “At least that. You were Number Eleven then.”

  “Might be longer, then. I lose track.”

  “You remember the job you were here for?”

  “Of course.”

  The dates were fuzzy, but Milton remembered the operation very clearly. He remembered all of his victims: their faces, whether they had families, the things that they had said in an effort to ward off the inevitability of their ends. The memories were his curse, the revenge that the men and women that he had killed took from beyond the grave.

  One particular man was a British businessman who was working for a defence contractor. He had been selling his company’s secrets to the Russian government, and MI6 had collected enough evidence for his file to be passed across Whitehall desks to end up in the scruffy building near Vauxhall Cross that housed Group Fifteen. Control had summoned Milton and had sent him to Rio with orders to eliminate the man. Marks had been the Group’s quartermaster for this part of South America, and he had provided Milton with the compound derived from the toxic gelsemium plant that had been chosen as the means of causing the target’s demise. The man had dined at the exclusive Pérgula restaurant every night. It had been a simple enough matter for Milton to infiltrate the kitchen and lace the man’s foie gras. The target had expired at the table as the dessert plates were being cleared away; Milton was on a plane out of the country while his body was still warm.

  Milton closed his eyes in a vain effort to banish the memory.

  “You been back since?” Marks asked him.

  “No,” Milton said. “Not until now. Did you ever leave?”

  “The wife and I split up. She went back home, but I found it agrees with me here. The climate is reliable. I suffer with my joints—the thought of going back to England now…” He shook his head. “Well, it’s not going to happen. When I leave, it’ll be in a box.”

  “Are you still working for the Group?”

  “Just as a stringer,” Marks admitted. “Now and again, if they need me, I’m here.”

  “When was the last job?”

  “You ever meet Number Nine? A woman. Young. Very intense.”

  “She would have been after my time.”

  “They sent her over last year. She needed a place to stay, and she needed to be equipped. They gave her my details. Don’t know exactly what she was over here to do, but two days after she left, I read that the chief executive of an oil and gas exploration company that was tangled up with a British project in Barreirinhas went missing. They said he loved deep-sea fishing. He had a boat that he kept in Fortaleza. He took it out, but he never came back. They found the boat a week later. Empty. The police said there was nothing suspicious. They said he must’ve fallen over the side.”

  “It was her?”

  Marks shrugged. “She asked me to find her some scuba gear. You tell me.”

  They reached a junction, and Milton paused for a moment until Marks had successfully negotiated it. “So,” Marks said, “what are you going to do? About the girl?”

  “Find her.”

  “Won’t be easy. These aren’t just gangsters, Milton. They own the favelas. The streets, the buildings, the people who live in them—they all belong to them. You don’t look like they do. You don’t speak the language. You can’t just go into Rocinha and ask questions. You’ll stand out like a sore thumb. Someone will come up behind you and put a bullet in your head.”

  “I’m going to be subtle, Harry.”

  Milton could tell that Marks was unpersuaded, but the older man held his tongue. “So where do we start?” he said instead.

  “I think it was an inside job,” Milton offered. “And there’s someone who can help me prove that.”

  47

  Group Fifteen maintained arms caches all around the world. Most countries were covered, with the larger or more politically interesti
ng ones being accorded multiple sites. Standard operating procedure was for the agents to infiltrate the country under the cover of the legends that had been prepared for them—businessmen or women, tourists, diplomats—and then to equip themselves with whatever the operation demanded once they were in country. Milton had used many of them during his time in the Group and had taken advantage of them after he had left, too. Some of them were unattended, like the crate that had been buried in the bayou outside New Orleans. Others were maintained by local quartermasters, just as Harry administered this dump in Rio.

  They were in Parada de Lucas, to the north of the city. Avenida Brasil was a large eight-lane highway that passed through a district that was given over to industrial and office use. Everywhere looked rough and down-at-heel. They passed a series of empty municipal buses that had been left at the edge of the road, and then went by the depot where the buses were maintained. Trash was dumped outside buildings, and the walls had been marked with graffiti. The road itself was in dreadful condition, and the BMW bumped up and down as they drove along it, the antiquated suspension groaning and whining with every new pothole.

  Marks approached a high concrete wall that was surmounted by billboards advertising local businesses. He indicated, slowed down and turned off. The new road was typical for the area: ancient warehouses, some barely standing, lined both sides of the street. Lines of cars had been parked outside the warehouses, and a tangle of telephone wires stretched between the poles overhead. The wall, painted white and blue, bent around and ended with a pair of heavy corrugated iron gates. A hand-painted sign that had been fixed to one of the gates advertised a mechanic, and a sign on its twin offered praise to God.

  “Nice area,” Milton said.

  “I’m sure you’ve seen worse.”

  Marks sounded the horn and waited for two men to open the gates. He leaned out of the window and spoke with one of the men in fluent Portuguese, reaching into his pocket and taking out a banknote that he pressed into the man’s hand. The man nodded his thanks, raised a hand to acknowledge Milton, and then opened the gates the rest of the way so that Marks could drive through. There was a yard, with a series of brick garages built against the flanks of the larger warehouses that formed its northern perimeter. The garages had not been expertly constructed, and some looked as if they were ready to collapse.

  Marks parked the BMW in an empty space and stepped outside. Milton followed. It was already almost unbearably hot, and Milton’s head throbbed as he followed Marks to the garage at the end of the row. Marks knelt down and undid the padlock with a key that he carried on a loop in his pocket. He held onto the grips and pulled up, the old roller door grumbling on unoiled tracks.

  “Et voila,” Marks said, standing aside.

  Light poured into the garage. It was of normal dimensions, big enough for a reasonably sized family car. But, despite that, it would have been impossible to store a vehicle here. The garage was full of trash: large black plastic bags had been stacked up along one side of the wall, falling over each other to fill almost half of the space. There were old domestic appliances—washing machines and tumble dryers—and along the left-hand wall a long line of junk televisions had been stacked in two precarious courses. The garage smelled musty, with an underlying note of rot. It was unpleasant, and Milton took a step back for a breath of fresh air.

  “Here?”

  Marks switched on a light and then went back to the door and rolled it down again.

  “This way.”

  “It stinks,” Milton said. “That’s deliberate, I assume?”

  Marks turned back with a smile. “Of course.”

  There was a narrow passage between the stacked televisions and the heaped black bags, and Marks led the way along it into the rear of the garage. Milton followed. The passage ended at the wall at the back of the garage; the televisions did not end flush with it, leaving a narrow space that Marks could stand in. Milton watched as Marks placed both hands on the wall and pressed. A narrow strip of wall, half the width of a doorway, sank back with a click. Marks kept his hands on the wall and slid it to the left, running it behind the remaining length of wall.

  “Very nice,” Milton said.

  “Took me a while to get it right,” the old man said proudly.

  Marks squeezed through the secret door into the dark space beyond. He had erected a plasterboard wall and crafted a compartment beyond it. The junk in front of the wall served two purposes: the first was to make it appear that the garage was used as a dumping ground, a less likely subject of attention should anyone ever break in; the second purpose was to baffle the eye and make it more difficult to discern that the garage was smaller than might otherwise have been expected.

  Milton heard the flicking of a switch, and the secret compartment was lit. He turned to the side and passed inside.

  “Very nice,” Milton said.

  The space was around five feet deep and nine feet wide. The brickwork that comprised the real back wall had been equipped with a series of tactical wall panels. Hangers and brackets had been fitted onto them, and from those were suspended a large armoury of weapons. Milton saw pistols, automatic rifles, sniper rifles, submachine guns and shotguns. Drawers at the bottom of the wall were marked with various calibres of ammunition. There were grenades—smoke and fragmentation—and magnetic mines that could be fastened to the undersides of vehicles. There was a selection of bugs and other surveillance equipment, and ballistic vests in different sizes were hung from hooks on the narrow wall behind Marks. The smell was different from the room next door. It smelled of oil and gunpowder rather than decay.

  “I think I’ve got everything you’ll need,” the old man said.

  “Are you serious? You could equip an army with this.”

  “I remember not being able to get the load-out I wanted when I was in the Regiment. Used to annoy the hell out of me.”

  Milton didn’t need an arsenal for what he had in mind. He ran his finger along the slide of a Beretta and decided he wanted something a little smaller, a little less conspicuous, something that he would be able to carry unobtrusively. He took a Walther PPK/S from the rack and let it rest in his hand. It was the version of the pistol with the extended beaver tail grip that protected the shooter from catching the flesh between the index finger and thumb in the slide. It was chambered in .32 ACP, with eight rounds in the magazine. Milton looked down at the drawers, took out two spare magazines, and put them in his pocket.

  “Got a suppressor?” he asked.

  Marks took one from a drawer and handed it to him.

  “That enough for you?”

  “I don’t need a cannon,” Milton said. “I’m going to be as quiet as I can.”

  “We’re done, then?”

  “We are.”

  Milton went back to the roller door, waited until Marks had moved the hidden door back into place, and reached down to unfasten the padlock. He heaved the door up, and light poured inside. Marks followed him out before reaching into his pocket and giving Milton a key.

  “A spare,” he said. “In case you need anything else.”

  “Thanks,” Milton said, pocketing the key.

  “What now?”

  “Can I borrow your car?” he said. “There’s someone I need to see.”

  48

  Paulo knelt down on the floor next to his daughter’s bed and stroked her hair. Eloá was tired and, as he sat there, her breathing deepened and she fell asleep. He looked at the clock on the wall: it was early, just a little after six. Eloá would normally have been awake for another hour or two, but there had been no chance of that tonight.

  They had had an appointment with the specialist that afternoon and had left the hospital having sketched out a plan to treat her cancer. They had the money to take a taxi home, but Rafaela had insisted that they take the bus, just as they had always done. The money would last longer if they budgeted responsibly, she said, and that meant avoiding unnecessary luxuries. The trip had been long and the bus h
ad been swelteringly hot, and by the time they returned home, Eloá had been so exhausted that Paulo had had to carry her inside.

  Rafaela came up behind him and laid her hand on his shoulder. “What do you think?”

  For the first time in an age, he didn’t have to pretend to be confident; he was confident. “The doctor said it’d work, didn’t he? She’s going to be fine.”

  “Look at her,” Rafaela said. “She’s so tiny.”

  She was right: their daughter did look small with her legs curled up to her chest. He thought of Alícia locked in the tiny room at the top of the Hill, and felt a shudder of shame.

  “I’ve got to go,” Paulo said.

  “Tonight as well?”

  “I’m late.”

  She hadn’t asked him where the money had come from, and Paulo had no idea how he could even begin to tell her. She must have known that it was illegal, or at least questionable; they had exhausted all of the legitimate options that were available to them in the frantic days that had followed Eloá’s diagnosis. Rafaela knew that he was a racer—she had met him at a race night, after all—and he had explained to her that he was going to find the money on the road. But he hadn’t mentioned that he had been any more or less successful than usual, yet the cash had appeared. Rafaela was no fool. But, after her initial surprise, and after Paulo’s unconvincing assertion that he had won the money, she had never asked him again. They had been desperate and, now that they had what they needed, they would be able to give Eloá a chance to fight her illness. If it meant that Rafaela needed to turn a blind eye to the money’s provenance, then so be it.

  He kissed his wife on the lips and left the apartment.

  49

  Paulo climbed the Hill and, as usual, he worried about what he was going to find when he reached the top. He had come up here three times the day before, and he had already visited Alícia this morning. She had cried as he had started to leave and told him that she was frightened. He had only been able to stop her tears by promising to return and, as he looked anxiously at his watch, he saw that he was already much later than he would have preferred to have been.