Delivering Caliban (21 page)

Mayhew was African American. ‘Not him,’ said Purkiss. Ramirez had appeared to be of mixed race, but lighter-skinned than would be likely if Mayhew were her father.

The deputy head for the years 1996 to 1999 was a possibility. He stared back in a single black-and-white mugshot, perhaps a passport photo. In his late forties, clean-shaven but with the shadowed cheeks of a naturally hirsute man, solidly built. His name was Raymond Giordano.

The rest on the list were lesser functionaries, field agents and support staff for the most part. Purkiss and Berg scanned through them; then Purkiss said, ‘Check the names.’

Berg entered the complete list on her database and began the search.

*

‘Some hits,’ she said. Purkiss had been stretching his arms and legs, trying to ease the pain in his shoulder, talking to Kendrick. He came over to the laptop.

‘
Four of these people are based in Langley now,’ she said. ‘The boss, Mayhew, is in the Middle East.’

‘
His deputy? Giordano?’

‘
Langley.’ She brought up a window. ‘Deputy Director. No portfolio.’

‘
What does that mean?’

‘
The Bureau isn’t sure, but it’s suspected the CIA has a department dedicated to investigating enemy action against its own personnel, in the US and abroad. Whatever it is, Deputy Director’s a senior position. Giordano’s one of the big boys.’

The accompanying picture was another mugshot but a more up-to-date one. Giordano had aged, put on weight, and grown a salt-and-pepper beard. With his face now partly obscured, his eyes were more distinctive. Purkiss had seen those eyes before: in the service station shop, staring at him as he tried to entice them away from Pope.

‘That’s him,’ he said. ‘That’s Ramirez’s father.’

Thirty-Nine

Manhattan, New York City

Tuesday 21 May, 7.30 am

Pope was saying something but Nina didn’t register a word.

For the first time since lunchtime yesterday – was it really less than twenty-four hours ago that this had begun? – she craved music. Not to play it; just to hear it speak to her, to lie adrift in the river of it. Something pure, without bombast. Bach, maybe, or Beethoven’s late quartets.

She couldn’t hear any, so she clutched her violin to her as a reminder of that world.

They were on the outskirts of a park, somewhere. She didn’t think it was Central Park; it was too small for that, and she had a vague notion they were near the East River. She’d been to New York exactly three times in her life, once on a trip with her grandmother and twice to attend concerts with her group. She was fascinated and repelled by the city’s gargantuan size in equal measure, and had learned little of its geography.

Vaguely she registered mild surprise at the number of people on the streets at this hour, a time when back in Charlottesville most people would still be in bed. She was incurious about where they were going, or why they had left the car they had reached the city in (the second, or perhaps third, car since the terrible time at the gas station) and were now on foot, Pope striding at her side, gently but firmly compelling her to keep pace with him.

A homeless man strummed a guitar in a bus shelter. She slowed to listen, but before Pope could chide her along the man pulled out a cell phone to answer it and the moment was gone.

She was incurious because she knew, finally, that she could trust Pope. The doubts that had pricked at her ever since she’d met him in such violent circumstances, and that had threatened to skewer her through when he’d first held her like a human shield and then when the other man, the one who’d come in through the back and had also sounded English, had enticed her away from Pope... these were gone like flute notes in the wind. Pope hadn’t let her down yet. He’d told Nina terrible things, things that most other people would have kept hidden from her...
had
kept hidden from her since she was a child. Things she’d suspected to be true. And despite the things she’d seen him do, which previously would have convinced her of a man’s wickedness, she knew he was, at heart, good. Good in a way nobody she’d ever met before was good, apart from her mother and grandmother. And even they’d concealed things from her, as she had now discovered.

The clincher, the thing that finally convinced her of Pope’s honesty, was hearing her father’s voice. Pope had been driving them through some darkened town, in Jersey, she guessed, and had pulled over beside an old-fashioned call box. He’d indicated to her to climb out with him and she’d obeyed, then crowded close at his signal so that she could hear the voice on the other end of the line. Even after fifteen years there was no mistaking the gruff warmth, the weight of what she’d always thought of as kindness behind the tones.

She didn’t say anything, half-expecting Pope to make her speak in order to convince her father that she was really there. But it was as if her father believed Pope, implicitly. When Pope said
I have your daughter
he winked at her, drawing the sting from the menace of the words.

She’d never been able to find her father. Her grandmother had discouraged her from trying to make contact with him, and the tentative attempts she’d made as an adult to find out even where he was living had come to nothing. Yet Pope, in her life for less than twelve hours, had not only located her father but had allowed her to hear his voice.

Somebody who could do that for her was to be trusted. 

*

Abruptly Pope led her off the street and into the darkness of a covered public parking lot. Their footsteps echoed in the sudden cavernous space. Pope stopped at a light truck, grey in the gloom. He fished out a set of keys and unlocked the passenger door.

‘
Our new wheels, for the moment.’

Nina climbed in, propping the violin case at her feet as she’d done in the last three or four or however many cars it was they’d used. This was, she noticed, the first one Pope had keys for other than the one he’d taken from the gas station. He was round the back of the van, working the doors there. Nina stared straight ahead. In a minute he climbed in beside her.

The truck lumbered under the raised boom, feeling to Nina as if it was struggling to move under a heavy load.

*

They crawled through the canyons of the city, low orange morning sunlight splashing them in bursts before retreating again behind the bristling towers.
How could anybody live here,
she wondered.
Loomed over at every turn.
Landmarks she recognised came and went: the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, Grand Central Station.

Pope navigated easily, deftly turning aside from congested streets down side routes, always giving the impression of driving with purpose. He turned right down a ramp that led to another boom, where he took a ticket from the dispenser. They rolled into another car park, this one subterranean beneath a tower whose peak was higher than Nina could imagine.

The parking lot was around half full. Pope drove slowly between the columns, turning his head this way and that, occasionally dabbing the brake as if considering a bay, then moving on. Eventually he swung into one between two smaller cars and cut the engine.

She waited until he’d helped her down, then walked alongside him past the barrier and back up the ramp into the light. Once more she twisted to look up at the building. Some kind of office skyscraper.

‘Are we going to meet my father?’ She hadn’t intended to say the words; they’d been plucked from her involuntarily.

‘
Yes,’ said Pope. ‘In a manner of speaking.’

Forty

6.40 am

Giordano slipped the photo of Adrienne from his wallet and looked at it. It was a couple of years old, had been taken on one of their rare vacations together at Cape Cod. He loved it because it captured her perfectly: the cheeriness of her eyes, the knowingness of her smile.

The trouble is,
he thought
, you
don’t
know.

He grasped the picture in his fist, pressed it against his forehead like a totem.

Giordano had jettisoned his Catholic faith like a cast-off flak jacket in his twenties. He hadn’t embraced any of the trippy alternative religions that had been so much in vogue at that time, in the early seventies; he’d been too busy blazing his way up the Company ranks, a hotshot new kid who was being tipped for big things one day. But he wondered now about karma.

He’d always known today was coming. He just couldn’t be sure what form it would take.

*

He wandered the corridors to the elevator. Krugmann emerged from his temporary office behind him.

‘You off?’

‘
Yeah. Thanks,’ said Giordano, without turning round.

‘
Don’t mention it,’ Krugmann said sourly.

When he’d been in Manhattan on previous occasions and had needed to think, and when the weather was fine, Giordano had walked complete circuits of the perimeter of Central Park, and it was there he headed out of habit. But there really wasn’t anything to think about. There was no plotting to be done, no strategy to work out in his head.

He would no more organise back up, or inform anybody of his movements, or have a GPS trace put on his cell phone, than he would ignore Pope’s summons. He would be at the appointed place, in the Board Room annex of the Holtzmann Solar offices, at the appointed time of ten o’clock, which was three hours from now. Access to the office would be simple; God knew he was regarded as a figure of authority there, even though he hadn’t been near the place for more than a decade.

He would meet Pope there, and he’d see in the young man’s face the ghost of his father. Giordano recalled, clear as light, the moment Taylor had presented him with evidence of Geoffrey Pope’s true identity. Taylor had voiced his suspicions weeks earlier but Giordano hadn’t wanted to believe. The man he knew as Rickman, the British former intelligence operative who could secure financial backing for the worldwide manufacturing and distribution of the drug from the Caliban project, was still an active SIS agent. They’d been penetrated, compromised, and it was through Giordano’s weakness; because Giordano had liked the man.

He hadn’t been Giordano to Rickman, any more than Rickman had been Pope to him. Instead, he’d been Zaccardo, or just Z. But at the end, when Giordano had watched three of his men hold Rickman – Pope – down while a fourth jammed the needle in, Pope had whispered his name –
Giordano
– while staring into his eyes with a look almost of triumph.

As if the man had known today would arrive, like an arm clawing out of the past.

Yes, Giordano thought as he made his way up Eighth Avenue, he’d meet Pope at the appointed place, and Pope would kill him. But first, Pope would do something to his daughter. To Nina. And that was what Giordano had to prevent, if it was the last thing he did. Which it certainly would be.

*

Had he loved her?

He was using the walk around the periphery of the park not to plan, but to review, as if the meaning of a decade and a half – a lifetime, really – could be crystallised in the space of an hour’s stroll.

Giordano had met Carmen Ramirez in 1986, at Langley. He was by then vying for the Central America desk. The Iran-Contra scandal was coming to the boil – the lid would blow off that November – and it was widely expected that heads would roll and new blood would be needed. Giordano was well respected and a strong candidate for the post, but he was up against somebody who had an edge over him, someone marginally more senior and more of an ass kisser.

Carmen was a probationer of twenty-five, a year out of college and at an entry-level accounting job in the Company. She was bright, she had a sharp eye for financial irregularities, and she was beautiful. It started as a fling. Giordano was ten years older than her and acutely aware of the need not to be seen as abusing his authority over her.

She fell pregnant, and Giordano made his decision. They were married in the fall. Giordano now had a direct connection with Latin America, and a reason to visit Honduras regularly to see Carmen’s family. Over the following year, through Nina’s birth and beyond, he developed an intimate familiarity with the country, learning to speak the local dialect fluently.

It swung it for him. The new broom of 1987 swept out the dead wood and propelled Giordano to the job he wanted. He’d made it his own, pulling off some spectacular successes – the groundwork for the Noriega ousting in Panama in 1989 was his doing, as was the bringing about of the elections in Nicaragua the following year. 

And then, in the next half-decade, came the increasingly intimate contact with Holtzmann Solar and Giordano’s growing interest in what one of their prototype compounds promised. In Honduras, the notorious Battalion 316, the death squad that had operated in the eighties, had been disbanded but many of its personnel remained, and it was through these men that Giordano was able to procure both impoverished volunteers for the Caliban project and somewhat less voluntary subjects.

In 1997 Giordano took the job as Company station chief for Honduras. It was a step down, career-wise, but Giordano assured the Director that it was for a limited time only, maximum two years, and would allow him to build richer networks in the region than he’d otherwise manage. And so Giordano, Carmen, who’d by that time left the Company, and little Nina relocated to Tegucigalpa.

Giordano had moved his family to the island off the coast when the trials had begun in 1998. He was spending increasing amounts of time on the island, and felt Carmen and Nina would be safer there with him rather than on the mainland. Accordingly, he’d arranged for Nina to take six months out of school, to be made up for by private tutoring when they returned. Carmen was furious. Carmen was also by then well aware that Giordano’s activities had crossed the line into illegality, and her guilt at her complicity paralysed her, prevented her from defying him.

Yet, in the end, she had defied him. As the hurricane approached the island that fateful October, her hysteria had spilled over into concrete threats. She would take Nina and flee, go straight to the Director and to the FBI and the New York Times and tell them everything. Giordano had never been an impulsive man, and he’d taken the decision to silence her in his usual measured way. He hadn’t done the act himself, had left it to Jablonsky and Taylor.

Giordano had been coming down Museum Mile on the park’s east side, but found that he’d wandered a couple of blocks away, to Park Avenue. Before him loomed the Church of St Ignatius Loyola. He stared up at the crucified figure.

He felt nothing. No yearning for absolution, no stirrings of conscience. The guilt was a gnarled and twisted thing inside him, like an alcoholic’s cirrhotic, dead liver.

Ten to eight. A little over two hours until he met his destiny.