Ascension

by Oliver Harris

  Fuck that. He couldn’t stop her. She replied, Further discussion regarding the GCHQ program should be conducted via the chief’s office. Talk to C.

  Finally, reports from the overnight signals team: There’d been no more searches on Edward Pearce identified. No other evidence of attention on Kane. They were still working on determining the source of the original probe.

  At eight thirty a.m. Kudus came into Taylor’s office, handed her a printout from the news archive: LA Times, March 2, 2009. The front page was dominated by a picture of Barack Obama, but a column on the right carried the headline: Mystery over doctor’s suicide. Family of US govt psychologist demand answers.

  “Dr. Jack Moretti,” Kudus said. “As we know, he died July twenty-nine, 2008, age thirty-eight. Buried Cedar Lawn Memorial Park, California. All that’s uncontroversial. It’s not easy finding out further details, but someone’s had a go.” Kudus tapped the printout. It was dated seven months after Moretti’s death, a follow-up story.

  “A journalist did some digging. So, we’ve got a few additional facts: Moretti hanged himself in a wasteground behind a couple of foreclosed homes in Antelope Valley. His parents demanded answers, because nothing made sense to them. He’d been happy, then he hangs himself. Why? Where had he been that day? Why was he in Antelope Valley?

  “Turns out he’d been there for work. He hadn’t been physically based at the hospital for a couple of years. The work address they’re given is 1349 El Monte Road, Los Altos Hills. That’s the official address used for a facility called Lake Ravenna. It’s a secure site sixty miles into the desert, run by the US Air Force. A very secure one.”

  “Okay.” Taylor had the distinct sensation of slipping into the black side, both ominous and promising.

  “They ask to collect his belongings from this place and are told, in no uncertain terms, that that’s not possible. Eventually they do receive a bag of belongings, but items are missing. Moretti’s family hire a lawyer to represent them—Charles Becker, from the firm Markman, Becker, and Reith. Becker steps in, requests the police file, then when that’s refused, he goes sideways, presses for information relating to any other suicides connected to Lake Ravenna. This is blocked, but the pressure he’s exerting has an effect. To get him off their back, the military eventually release a pathology report. And it puts Moretti’s death at July twenty-nine, six days before the family were informed. Turns out it wasn’t handled by the police at all—it was the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations.”

  Taylor felt the story darken further. The OSI provided independent investigative services outside of the traditional military chain of command. They covered everything too sensitive for the regular teams: national security issues, espionage, terrorism. She brought up a map of Lake Ravenna on her PC.

  The lake itself was an unreal turquoise, blank and flat, shaped like a kidney. The facility that took its name extended to the west. Taylor wondered why she couldn’t see fences, then realized she was looking at less than a tenth of it.

  “It covers three thousand acres, stretches from Palmdale in the north down to Quartz Hill,” Kudus said. He zoomed out. There were individual clusters of buildings miles apart. Then several more miles of blank, beige scrub before you got to the double-layered outer fence, where you could just about see security booths on the gates. Mountains to the east created a defensive wall. But even here you could see the fence extended over the rock. Within the perimeter were several individual airstrips, each accompanied by aprons of tarmac and the blank oblongs of vast hangars over a square kilometer each.

  “Plant Twenty-One alone, where Moretti was listed, has three hundred square kilometers to play with. It has a runway complex shared between several private contractors. There are eight production sites specially suited for what they call ‘advanced technology,’ leased from the Air Force on a government-owned contractor-operated basis.”

  “What’s a psychologist doing there?”

  “Fair question. So now Moretti’s family want to see where he worked,” Kudus continued. “And, of course, they’re refused. They ask for access to belongings they say are missing, including a journal of some kind. The Air Force spends three months denying it ever existed, then they say it’s accidentally been destroyed.”

  “I bet.”

  “It gets stranger. Moretti’s family want to know exactly what he was working on. Did it somehow place him in danger? Or create unnecessary stress, leading him to take his life? Is it even possible he was killed because of objections?

  “At this point the government gets involved. They assert executive privilege and claim the federal court has no jurisdiction over the matter. When Becker requests the files documenting the Air Force investigation into Moretti’s suicide, he gets another stone wall. A district court judge takes his side, however, and orders them to be handed over, so now the air force refuses on the grounds of national security. Protocol is that in this kind of situation a judge is allowed to review the documents so any compromising information can be excised, but the air force wouldn’t even permit that.”

  “Deep black.”

  “Deep black something.”

  “Where’s Moretti’s wife in all this?”

  “Not sure. The people driving this are his parents. They’re the ones who hire the lawyer. They’re the ones who eventually got paid off. Healthily, it seems. Lake Ravenna kept its secrets. The end. Or, until Rory started thinking about it.”

  Taylor lifted the printout. It carried a photo of Moretti wearing a lab coat, pens in the top pocket. He was smiling, a little care-worn, with black hair and thick dark eyebrows. A man who looked like he could have been a GP or a pharmacist but had answered the patriotic call out to the military-industrial desert. To LA’s dark research sprawl.

  . . . A psychologist called Jack Moretti—American, I think—can you find out what happened to him?

  What had made Rory suddenly curious, during his final days alive? Taylor turned back through Kudus’s notes. She reasoned that most of the people Moretti’s family were in contact with wouldn’t have known much themselves. Taylor had worked closely with the US in enough roles to have gained some insight into how things operated. Once above “top secret,” operations branched out into special access programs, each with its own security channel. That covered new weaponry research, special forces, black ops. You were read into the information compartments one by one. The idea was to prevent anyone but a tiny handful from having a complete picture.

  The investigative journalist who’d done the digging was called Lee Perryman. According to his web page, Perryman was now a professor of journalism at Berkeley. Taylor called the office number on his university web page, listened to it ring for a minute, then left a message, asking him to get in touch with her.

  She returned to the hanging at the heart of it all. In a wasteground behind a couple of foreclosed homes in Antelope Valley. Studying Google Maps, she tried to identify the wasteground in question on satellite view, but it looked like it was now a playing field.

  “Was it on his way home?”

  “I don’t think so, not according to the family. I can’t get a residential address. I think he may have been staying on-site.”

  “No suggestion of what he might have been doing there?”

  “Nothing that I can find.”

  Hanged himself out of the blue . . .

  She called the direct number she’d been given for the pathologist taking another look at Rory’s corpse, Dr. Alexandra Glenning.

  “I wondered if you’d had any fresh insight,” Taylor said.

  “I was about to call you,” Glenning said. “I can’t promise answers, but I may be able to give you some new questions. Can you come in? This is something that should probably be done in person.”

  Saint Thomas’s was the major Westminster hospital, surreptitiously serving all manner of governmental needs, and as such it had secure areas: subterranean facilities, secret morgues, dedicated clinics. They also had pathologists vet
ted by the military and government to work on sensitive corpses.

  Rory Bannatyne was a sensitive corpse. Taylor was met at the front, led through by Glenning herself, a brisk middle-aged woman with a Scots accent. Former army medic, Taylor guessed. She knew Glenning had overseen the Berezovsky autopsy and consulted on a couple of intelligence service suicides.

  “The body’s been badly looked after. There’s traces of everyone who came into contact with it. Was he in military hands?”

  “Yes.”

  “On a plane?”

  “Yes.

  “Okay.”

  They arrived at a postmortem examination room. It was operation-­theater white, with a camera and mic suspended above the slab, a twenty-seven-­inch screen at the side, infinite drawers and cupboards.

  Taylor wouldn’t have recognized the corpse on the central slab. Rory’s head had been shaved, with a neat line where they’d sewn the scalp back up after opening the skull. His body had been covered by a thin blue sheet, which had then been arranged so that his paper-white arms were free, and his hands sealed inside clear plastic bags.

  “I’m not going to be able to give you anything definitive, but I don’t think he killed himself.”

  The screen was attached to a MacBook. Glenning turned it on, entered a password. What looked like an aerial shot of a landscape appeared, dry but for the occasional cobalt blue lake. For a second Taylor wondered where this was, then realized she was looking at flesh.

  “This is his neck,” Glenning said. “The colors show bruising and rope burn.” She clicked through to another image, even more microscopic. “These are fibers. There’s been another material involved in the strangulation, not just the cable. That’s my belief. At some point his hands have been on the ground, with weight on them.” Now she clicked to what looked like a tray of jewels: microscopic traces of rock and dust, reds and yellows and blacks. Volcanic particles.

  “Where was he? If I’m allowed to ask.”

  “Certainly not around here. Why?”

  “This is trachyte. It’s volcanic rock, rich in silica and quartz. It was dug into the skin of his palms.” She clicked through again: more of the shades Taylor was beginning to recognize as bruising.

  “If you look at his lower back, significant pressure has been applied here. If he had been on the ground, facedown, then this could potentially indicate someone applying pressure with a knee while strangling him.”

  Finally she led Taylor deeper into the room to where a vacuum-sealed bag sat on the side counter. It contained a portion of the cable noose. Glenning indicated with the top of her pencil.

  “The knot is a running slip. Most hanging deaths involve a fixed type of knot. Ninety-five percent or so will be half hitches, overhand knots, granny knots. This is more in the style of a bowline, quite sophisticated. I’d say it was made by someone who has used knots professionally or knows a bit about them. You don’t have to tell me if the deceased falls into any of those categories, but I thought you might be interested.”

  “Very.”

  “The knot was placed over the back of the neck. The cable was doubled, looped twice, which isn’t so unusual when using a thin material like electric wire. But, again, you could consider it a signature of sorts. Other than that, there’s very little I can tell you at this stage. I’m not sure the blood tests will turn up anything more. In your email you asked if he might have had any recent contact with a young woman, sexual or otherwise. I’m not seeing any evidence he had close physical contact with anyone other than a possible assailant. Certainly no evidence of recent sexual activity.”

  Even though it had begun to rain, Taylor walked back to work along the river. She needed to think before she got there.

  Rory Bannatyne was most probably killed. That meant she had an issue. There was no way of keeping the murder of an officer localized; it was big news, demanding a big investigation. It would have to go to Skinner first. She didn’t relish that meeting. Then perhaps the chief himself. How would the conversation go?

  So you think he might have been killed? And then framed?

  All I have so far is this.

  Are we aware of any hostile parties on the island?

  No.

  And what about this missing girl?

  That bit’s not clear.

  What preparations were made in advance of the operation proceeding? Was Rory Bannatyne the best man for the job? Do we know much about him at all?

  Taylor thought back to the morning when Mackenzie had assigned her to the South Atlantic desk. She’d been called in to see him, first day back from sick leave. She’d thought he was going to fire her, but he said he wanted to see a more enlightened approach to trauma in the service. That was the box in which he’d put her experience, which was okay with Taylor. He said: Be open with me. That’s all I ask. We can’t afford to crack in private.

  Taylor watched the river. She passed people taking pictures, kissing, living their lives, and wondered why she had been assigned the clandestine work of preserving this peace on their behalf.

  The office was still mercifully quiet. Taylor opened her safe and found the report from the Ascension Island police concerning Rory Bannatyne’s suicide. She read it again, trying to see it as a murder. If the same person killed both Rory Bannatyne and Petra Wade, how did the sequence of events play out? Say Rory had been killed, transported to the antenna, strung up to look as if he’d been hanged. At some point the girl was killed too and disposed of by other means. Without knowing the island, Taylor couldn’t move toward any more certain hypotheses, no matter how many maps and photographs she studied. Only someone there could assess the logistics.

  Kane’s only report so far had been ominous: involved with an attack on a boy called Connor. Whether or not it pertained to the objective of his mission over there, it suggested an environment on the edge of control. She was wondering what to make of it when she saw her message light flashing. Lee Perryman’s West Coast accent filled her office when she pressed play, the journalist who’d dug into Moretti’s apparent suicide. He’d left a personal number, which he answered promptly this time.

  “You’re looking into Jack Moretti?” he said.

  “Yes. I realize this must be strange. My name’s Kathryn Taylor. I work in the British civil service. For complicated reasons, I’ve become quite interested in Jack Moretti, and it seems you’re one of the few people who’ve investigated what happened.”

  “The civil service, right.” Perryman sounded good humored. He sounded like he saw through bullshit. “Who exactly am I speaking to? Are you police? Government?”

  “More government than police,” she said, making her own attempt at a knowing humor.

  “Okay, well, this is going back a bit.”

  “I know.”

  “What’s going on over there?”

  “Moretti’s death may connect to something that’s happened more recently. That’s what drew my attention.”

  “Really? Like what?”

  “Like another death.”

  “Can you tell me what’s happened?”

  “Not at this stage. But I’m very happy to keep you in the loop if anything progresses. Obviously, this is just speculative for now.”

  There was a moment as he inhaled noisily and she imagined a fresh notebook being opened.

  “This other death—is it a government employee?”

  “I can’t go into details.”

  “No one ever has when it comes to Jack Moretti. I can dig out what I’ve got. But it’s questions for the most part. I was moved off the story before it even began to make sense. And it was made clear to me that that was for the best.”

  “By who?”

  “Well, my editor for one thing. Plus everyone I spoke to who might have known anything about it.”

  “But you’ve still got your notes?”

  “Notes, sure. I don’t know what use they’ll be to you.”

  “I’ll take everything. Just in case.”

  �
�Tell me again what made the British civil service interested?”

  Taylor decided to give him some crumbs.

  “A man took his life, a colleague of mine, in fact. It turns out he’d been looking into Moretti. So I’m just curious what drew his attention, and what he found. All I know so far is what’s available on open source, and that’s enough to tell me there’s a lot being suppressed.”

  “And if I send through what I’ve got, you’ll keep in touch?”

  “Of course.” She could hear pencil on paper. Taylor gave him her personal email address; she didn’t want this coming through MI6 systems.

  “In the files, are there pathology details for Jack Moretti?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. Like I say, it’s been a while. But I’ve got copies of the original police report, from just after they found the body, and that involves photos.”

  “I’d love to see them.”

  “Okay,” Perryman exhaled. “Jack Moretti. Never expected him to walk back into my life.”

  The journalist was as good as his word. He sent through a zip file ten minutes later and an email with a public key for encrypting any further communications. Taylor clicked through the files: interviews, notes, reams of Moretti’s psychological papers. Finally she got to a smudged copy of the original police report, compiled in the hours before the investigation was taken off their hands. It contained several pictures, including two of the abandoned lot where he’d been found, five of the body itself, and one of the rope. Taylor checked a magnified version until she felt sure: It was doubled. It was the same knot.

  Kudus came in as she was staring at the screen.

  “This is from the American journalist,” Taylor said. “Moretti’s noose. Rory’s was tied in exactly the same way.”

  Kudus studied the image.

  “What’s the implication?” he said, carefully.

  “That possibly the same person was responsible—for killing them and staging a suicide.”