Because he couldn’t leave an encounter feeling like he was the one who’d been humiliated, he patted Taylor’s cheek and watched her flinch. “Sort this out.”
She returned to her office, his aftershave still in her nostrils, so that she had to chew some Nicorette just to clear her sinuses. Her cheek tingled nauseatingly. Enough for an official complaint. She could win—there were enough other women to call upon—but that would be promotion over. One thing rarely prized in an intelligence agency is a whistleblower.
Suspend all operations? On his say-so? No, she thought. Gabriel Skinner didn’t trump the might of GCHQ. Press interest was an issue of its own. She suspected Rehman or those around her. Fucking police.
Taylor called the MI6 media liaison.
“How bad is it?”
“Under wraps for now. Speculative on their part.”
“Anyone suggested legal instruction? Give the papers a clear warning?”
“We’ve been advised to tread carefully, in case it does more harm than good.”
She called SO15. Her contact there confirmed he had four officers ready to interview any intelligence service employees deemed necessary for the Petra Wade investigation.
“Hold for now. No one speaks to anyone until I say so, okay?”
She spoke to the technical assistance department that arranged the surveillance side of Six operations and confirmed what clearance she’d need to intercept communications from Ascension Island police or New Scotland Yard. It would be governmental level sign-off, extraordinary circumstances.
Slow down, she thought. The press wouldn’t draw in the intelligence service in any specific way; they could use hints, allusions if they wanted. That wasn’t a story. Meanwhile, she could only pray Kane somehow proved a negative: that whatever happened, Rory wasn’t involved. Which meant finding another explanation for Petra Wade’s disappearance. And what consequences would that bring him?
She logged in to the file-sharing system, felt excitement at seeing a report from Kane, then increasing concern as she read it. He had outlined the previous night’s incident. What on earth was one to make of that? Just a very unfortunate beginning, or—in spite of the unpleasantness—a promising glimpse of whatever was going on on the island? An explanation of events that drew attention from Rory Bannatyne?
The victim of the attack was a boy called Connor, who lives with parents on the US base.
Taylor felt a pang of guilt at subjecting Kane to this mission. Behind his terse account she sensed disorientation. The hotel closing down was a ridiculous mess, and she was about to have a word with the operations team responsible when she saw Kudus approaching, a frown on his face.
“Got something,” he said. “Maybe.”
“On what?”
“Jack Moretti. The name on the postcard.”
He spread papers on her desk.
“There’s around twenty Jack Morettis I can find currently alive, mostly American, thirteen of them between forty and sixty years old. None are psychologists. But there was a Jack Moretti born September 30, 1971. He graduated from Stanford in 1990 with a doctorate in clinical psychology, died July 29, 2008, Los Angeles. What caught my eye is how he died.”
“How did he die?”
“He hanged himself. Seemingly out of the blue.”
Taylor felt butterflies. She moved to see the papers more clearly: printouts of a newspaper and a magazine article.
“Go on,” she said.
“The death’s odd. Moretti’s a respected psychologist, happily married, with one son. He’d reported no issues, according to his family. He’d just been promoted at work. Next thing they know he’s committed suicide.”
Taylor brought the notes closer. The article was an obituary from the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. Moretti had been based at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, home of the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute. It spoke about his service to medicine, pioneering work in neurology and psychology, his popularity as a lecturer, sense of humor as a colleague. It mentioned he left behind a wife and son, didn’t mention the cause of death.
The report, from the Los Angeles Daily News, gave a bit more but not much: Mystery Over Senior Doctor Who Took His Life.
Dr. Moretti’s family insist his death was entirely out of character and have demanded an investigation into the events leading up to it.
“Did Rory’s sister say anything else?” Kudus asked. “Other requests?”
Taylor decided to keep the gift requests to herself for now.
“Nothing like this. Would you see if you can get any more? Someone will have chased the story.”
“I’ll try. There’s been something else on Kane as well. It may be nothing. Look at this.”
He showed her another sheet, this one a log of website visitors. Just before three a.m., someone had checked Edward Pearce’s university profile. The academic webpage they’d created for his cover was set to automatically record and analyze the IP address of anyone probing, but whoever had done this had disguised their device and whereabouts.
“Could be anyone,” Kudus said. “Someone curious, maybe someone he met on the way. Or a fellow academic.”
“On a hidden device?”
She studied the log again.
“His cover looks solid to me,” Kudus said. “It’s not so unusual to use a private server. Some people have them set up as standard.”
“Send it through to technical analysis, see if they can extract any more data. I’d really like to know who’s interested in him.”
Bring him back, Taylor thought. Cancel it. Do as she’d been instructed to do. But she sensed it was already too late. She wasn’t going to drop everything just because Gabriel Skinner felt left out.
It was six o’clock. Taylor told Kudus to call it a day. She lingered in the office. There was a dinner party she was meant to attend that evening, an old uni friend. She would have loved, more than anything, to have a drink with someone to whom she could unload the aggravations of the last twelve hours, but neither of those things was permitted. She locked her work in the office safe and tried to remember what other people liked to talk about.
8
Hunger woke him, followed by a stab of adrenaline. Kane sat up. The room was lit by a weak blue light from the curtainless window. His watch said five forty-five a.m.
The events of the previous night returned in fragments, as if out of an alcoholic escapade: the spotlit scene by the church; the boy’s wounds beneath the bare bulbs; the final sight of him walking into the US base. Kane saw himself returning the car, like a regretful thief, and sighed.
He checked the laptop for any indication his report had been received by Kathryn Taylor, but there was nothing yet. He found an old radio in the kitchen, turned it on, and listened to a man with an English accent reading messages from soldiers on deployment. Hi, Sarah. Happy birthday . . . British Forces Broadcasting. Unmistakable. It did pop music, the Archers, and service-oriented news bulletins on the half hour. Kane hadn’t heard it for a while.
UK prime minister in visit to new Brunei base. EU Defence Co-Operation in tatters. Mental health charity recruits veterans for new campaign.
Kane tried other frequencies and got an earful of static. He dialed back to BFB as a weatherman recited his way through the network: Gibraltar, Afghanistan, the Falklands, and finally Ascension. Clear skies, hitting a maximum of thirty-three degrees in the shade. Going to be the same tomorrow and the day after that.
Kane turned the radio off, checked the ash on the hallway floor. No one had been in. The door was still locked.
He searched for food. The departing family had left plenty of possessions but nothing edible. Kane unpacked the rations he’d picked up in the Johannesburg airport: an apple, a protein bar, a cheese sandwich. He found his folding knife and divided the bar in two, ate half, then the apple and half the sandwich, wrapped the rest. He refilled his water bottle, pocketed the knife.
Thirty days until the next flight out. He
had no idea how to play it. Worst-case scenario: Some men turn up with scores to settle. He ends up in the island’s hospital or its police station. Either way, his ability to operate is all but ruined.
But it hadn’t happened yet.
He was determined to get a car and establish means of survival. To proceed with the existing plan as far as humanly possible. Do what he could before repercussions hit, which they would, in some shape or form. With a car he’d be able to see where Rory had been living, look for any of the messages that Taylor thought might be left behind, or any suggestion of what led up to his death. But acquiring one meant he was going to have to show his face among the local population and discover how badly he’d sacrificed any anonymity.
Kane stepped out.
Georgetown looked more ramshackle in the flat light of dawn. The buildings were weather-worn and flimsier than he’d first noticed. Donkeys shuffled through the streets, rummaging in bins. Kane counted six of them: large, smooth-coated, with sad eyes. He walked back to the car he’d borrowed the previous night and checked it was parked straight, then looked inside for incriminating traces. He opened the passenger door and wiped blood from the inside of the window where the boy’s head had rested, then eased it shut.
The area where the attack took place looked very different in daylight. The barracks building had shops beneath the arches: the Turtle Nest Gift Shop, Glamour Fashion and Beauty, one charity shop selling clothes and ornaments. Some broken glass remained on the ground, with traces in the dirt where someone had raked it to the side with their boot. The black ground had soaked up the blood. Against the ash, the white church spire looked as defiant as a Klan hood. Two palm trees fanned out on either side of the door like brushes used to keep it spotless.
He kept walking. Kept an eye out for indications of the men he’d encountered, but most contractors and soldiers would live on base. This area was more civilian. Some of the homes had fashioned verandas with wicker chairs and vases of fresh flowers. A canary sang. Kane imagined remnants of a colonial routine: morning tea, evening cocktails, quinine nightmares; empty, sweaty ex-pat days, drinking against the creeping knowledge that you were in the wrong place, that your life had taken a very odd turn. The gardens contained old scrap and driftwood arranged in place of growth, with plastic paddling pools and a child’s swing lending some splashes of color.
Sleepy town. He found the post office with its red post box standing surreally outside. Close by it was a delicate pink-colored building that turned out to be the seat of government for the island, with a Union Jack on a pole sunk into the lava. Further along was a picket-fenced vicarage, then the small building signed POLICE STATION. Kane heard the boy’s laugh when he’d suggested reporting the incident to the police and wondered what that was about. The station door was locked. On a side wall, someone had affixed a torn poster for the missing girl. CAN YOU HELP? It was dominated by the school photo image Kane had seen: bright smile, hair plaited. Last seen at Two Boats, 6 p.m. on November 7th. If you have any information, please speak to Sergeant John Morrogh. It looked like a second one had hung beside it at some point but had been torn down.
He returned to the harbor and checked the boats. They were several hundred meters out, turning on their anchors, masts swaying. Last resort for an escape. He didn’t think it was quite that desperate yet, but worth researching the option. Fishing boats for the most part, small and solid: a couple of older-looking trawlers, but mostly cabin cruisers with outboard motors. These would be pull start, no key needed—you just needed to procure a dinghy to reach them. A full tank of fuel would get you a hundred miles or so. Enough to be out of sight. It wouldn’t exactly get you to Angola.
He watched the lines of rolling swell heading to shore, then turned and admired the hill looming over Georgetown taking on a murky shade of red in the dawn. Cross Hill. It looked manmade, like a slag heap. Halfway up, the remains of one of Georgetown’s historic Victorian-era forts clung to its grit.
Kane walked toward the hill, and then, without fully intending to, began to climb. The red earth was like ground-up brick beneath his feet, rolling down with each step. But Kane progressed, and as he climbed he felt previous visitors alongside him making the same instinctive journey: to achieve height, to survey the parcel of land on which they’d found themselves and establish how alone they were. To set up a cross, give the place a name, and shake off the image of a hostile planet.
The fort was little more than a few stone walls now. At some point someone had hauled a couple of First World War ship’s guns up the hill, and their long white barrels still pointed cautiously at the Atlantic. A few meters below them were their ancestors: a pair of bulbous Victorian cannons also keeping watch. Kane propped himself against the fort’s remains and studied the sleeping town, then the sea itself, wondering how many had stood here gazing out. Men wrecked or abandoned; men discovering new worlds, new parts of existence, then setting up guns to protect them.
Kane slid his way back down. He needed a car. The museum where he’d been told he could hire one was on the road out of town: a long, flat building painted the same flesh color as the rock behind it. It was still only seven a.m. and he didn’t expect it to be open, but the door swung when Kane pushed.
Artifacts and display cases crowded the main room. An old US jeep sat in the corner beneath a ship’s bell: Roebuck—wrecked off Ascension, 1701. Huge turtle shells the size of shields lined one wall. Shelves sagged under the weight of telegraph equipment and rusted cannon balls.
Kane stepped inside, heard someone vacuuming at the back.
“Hello,” he called. The vacuuming continued. He turned the light on, studied the sepia photographs: Eastern Telegraph Company staff in high socks and stern mustaches. A game of cricket in front of St. Mary’s, circa 1920. Several photographs showed turtles tipped onto their backs, ready for slaughter. Then you reached the Second World War: American GIs staring out with guarded smiles and cigarettes behind their ears and what may have been the faintest flicker of bemusement. The BBC engineers arrived in the first color images, with shaggy hair and tinted glasses, ready to bring the voice of Britain to Africa and South America. There was nothing about GCHQ or the NSA.
An office in the corner contained a lot of cardboard files and an old PC. Beside it was a bookcase advertising the Ascension Island Book Swap. If you take a book, please replace it. Warped copies of Dickens, Stephen King, Tom Clancy. The bottom shelf had a stack of issues from a local newspaper called the Islander, each comprising a single, folded sheet. The top copy was dated yesterday. Marine Protection Area Approved; New Pier at Georgetown Delayed.
Kane dug into the pile, checked the one dated November 9, two days after Rory died, but no hanging had been reported. Maybe it wasn’t that kind of publication. No mention of Petra Wade, either. The back page listed church services, film showings, live entertainment. There were results of a darts tournament and appeals for football players. Finally, a message from Canon Damian Duncan: I am very pleased to say that a few females have expressed an interest in becoming members of the choir, but nothing so far from the men. We are desperately in need of more members; please think about it, even if you are only here for a short period of time.
Kane turned back through the old issues to gauge the general tone and saw that pictures had been torn out. When he tried to discern a pattern, it seemed they accompanied stories about Ascension Island children. He found three instances over the last year: Ascension Island scouts help out in bird survey. Young Islanders take their first diving certificate. Fifteen-year-old Petra Wade, smiling after her contest victory. All had been robbed of their accompanying image.
“Hello?” A woman appeared. “Can I help?” She wore a floral blouse, her graying hair tied back. Kane returned the papers to the pile. “I was told I might be able to hire a car off you. Is this the right place?”
“Not here. We had one but it’s being used.”
“That’s a shame. Any idea where I could pick one up?”
“Maybe Terry’s at One Boat. Know it?”
“Is it, by any chance, near Two Boats?”
“It’s on the way.”
“That makes sense. Terry.”
“If he’s not at the pump, try the golf course.”
No golf course had shown up on the satellite imagery. But the woman seemed sincere.
“The golf course is near a pump?”
“Petrol pump. You’ll see it.”
“What’s the best way to get to One Boat?”
“I take it you’re not driving.”
“Not yet.”
“I’d find someone who is.”
“Okay.”
Kane stepped back into the sunshine. The day was already hot. He wanted to survey the place before it became a furnace. He walked back toward his bungalow, saw a figure at the door waiting for an answer, then the police car from which he’d emerged.
Kane stopped. The man hadn’t seen him. He stepped sideways, out of sight, then circled wide of the accommodation back to the road.
He had a sense that it was worth keeping moving as long as he could. Maybe there was something important that wasn’t too difficult to find. Maybe he didn’t have long.
9
A dirt track led along the coast, north from Georgetown toward Comfortless Cove. That had been the main landing site for the original telegraph cables, and was set to fulfill the same role when fiber optic arrived. Kane followed the path and soon the buildings were behind him and he was in a world without shade. Huge pyramids of rust-red ash appeared from slopes of black cinders. Sometimes these cones appeared solid, other times you could see the surface formed of loose fragments of clinker. Black lava welled from fissures in the paler rock, looking as if it had set just yesterday. Occasional plant life broke through: low, plump prickly pear cacti and a tough grass, flattened by the wind. Then even the cactus plants dwindled and the ground resembled crushed charcoal again. But one growth survived. In the morning glare, the antennae shone so bright they appeared liquid, ascending out of the fire-blasted scene.
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