Delivering Caliban (3 page)

Four

Charlottesville, Virginia

Monday 20 May, 12.25 pm

A sensation of warmth on the back of Nina Ramirez’s neck was the first sign that someone was watching her.

They’d finished their first rehearsal in the Old Cabell Hall where they’d be performing in public in a fortnight, and it hadn’t gone well. Madison, the second violinist, had played sluggishly, and the rest of them had fallen into step. They made it through the Bartok piece, the third quartet, after which Ruth, their conductor, got up and strode towards them, hands buried in her huge hair.

‘
Guys. Enough, already.’

She bawled them out in her usual mild way, exasperated rather than furious. They agreed that they’d call it a day rather than dig themselves in deeper, but would schedule an extra rehearsal to make up for it. Dispirited, they packed up their instruments and decided not to go for a coffee, since all they’d do would be mope about their crappy performance.

Nina decided to take a stroll around the university grounds, something she liked to do whatever mood she was in. Three years ago she’d graduated, but although she had no postgraduate connection with the University of Virginia she loved it like a home: its carefully preserved beauty, the way that everywhere you went you sensed the history that had soaked into the very walls and boulevards.

She’d passed the Rotunda when the heat flared at the back of her neck.

Nina had learned not to turn suddenly when that happened. Whoever was watching would be gone and she’d feel – and look – foolish. The trick was to pretend nothing was amiss, then try to catch the watcher out of the corner of your eye. Sometimes they were still there when you looked, just for an instant. Usually they weren’t.

As nonchalantly as she could, Nina shrugged her shoulder as though hefting the violin case slung across it, turning her head slightly as she did so. Her glance took in the Rotunda. Students milled in small groups on the steps, but there was nobody looking in her direction. Nobody doing so overtly, anyhow.

Heart hammering, her mouth like ash, she turned her back deliberately on the building and set off across the lawn, passing Jefferson’s statue with its blank stare.

*

Nina had formed the string quartet shortly after graduation, together with two other alumni and Joe, their cellist, who was older. Ruth, their manager, was a former tutor of Nina’s and still taught at the university. She was as supportive of Nina as ever, while making it quite plain that she believed her former pupil was destined for greater things than a small-town quartet and needed to stretch herself a bit.

Then again, Ruth didn’t know everything about Nina.

Since graduating Nina had lived in the same tiny rented apartment downtown. She’d had offers from potential flatmates, and would have been able to afford a bigger place had she chosen to share, but she preferred to be on her own, needed her own space. Her grandmother, with whom she’d lived here in Charlottesville since she was eleven, had died a week after Nina’s graduation ceremony. It was as if she’d hung on until her granddaughter had reached the point where she could fend for herself.

Her grandmother had left her enough to live modestly but comfortably for ten years, and now Nina had a small but growing income from the quartet, which was getting highly favourable notices in the Charlottesville press. Enough money to be content with, a place to call home, a small but close circle of friends, her music, and her violin. Nina would, if asked, have said truthfully that she was happy.

Her pulse had slowed by the time she was halfway across the lawn, and she decided to meander down the pavilions and enjoy the ingenuity of their serpentine walls. It was almost lunchtime and students were starting to spill out of classrooms and congregate in couples and groups. They looked, for the most part, scarily young.

Twenty-six, girl, and they see you as old.

Overhead the sky was a flawless expanse of cornflower. The air held the merest bite of coolness, something that would disappear for good in the coming weeks as the spring heat settled in. The sinuous walls separated the pavilions’ individual gardens from each other. Nina tipped her head back and drew in the scents of honeysuckle and rose.

A man stood on the path ten yards ahead, facing her.

Staring at her.

He stuck out because of his height – six feet four, perhaps – and the dark suit he was wearing. He had his hand to his ear and was talking into a cell phone. As Nina approached – her stride hadn’t faltered; she’d learned to avoid doing that, too – she realised he wasn’t looking at her, was simply gazing off into the distance as people sometimes do when on the phone.

She drew near and, as she passed him, glanced at his face. He was maybe forty, deeply tanned, his skin seamed by thin white scars which stood out in contrast.

She caught the liquid flash of his eye as he peered at her.

Once again terror choked her throat, though she walked on.

This time you have to look back,
she told herself.
He’s real. He won’t disappear.

Nina took six more steps. Then turned.

The man was gazing back at her over his shoulder.

She held his stare and after a second he glanced away, continuing his phone call. Nina walked backwards, keeping her eyes on him, but he didn’t turn again.

Despite herself, Nina broke into a stumbling run.

*

The leaves on the maple trees were flat hands grabbing for her, the unbroken dome of the sky a lid keeping her prisoner.

Of course it was possible the man had turned to look at her because they’d made eye contact and he was wondering if he knew her. Of course his might have been the normal reaction of a man noticing a young and reasonably attractive woman passing by. But Nina knew the difference between the feel of a man’s interested gaze and that of a Watcher.

This was definitely the latter.

She ran, and the cool lunchtime air sucked at her, trying to slow her, turning viscous. Ahead the perimeter of the campus beckoned and threatened, the anonymity of the city beyond. It was a small city, Charlottesville, and she wouldn’t be able to lose itself among its forty thousand souls the way she would in New York or Chicago.

She didn’t look back, even when she felt the footsteps pounding at her heels, even as the hand descended on her arm to slow her. Except it didn’t; that was imagination intruding again, bleeding into the real word, its thick strokes smudging the boundaries.

Time for meds, a crazy voice inside her piped up. Time at long last to start taking the pills, girl. And the hell with your violin playing.

Nina erupted on to the street, where suddenly young people didn’t predominate and elderly ladies with shopping baskets shuffled past harassed mothers with bunches of bawling kids sprouting from their hands. She weaved and jostled, the sidewalk like a combined minefield and obstacle course. Downtown reached for her in the near distance. There was her apartment, her haven. And while part of her laughed at the idea that she’d feel any safer there - the Watchers, after all, wouldn’t be deterred by the simple locks she’d had installed on the door and windows - another part shielded itself behind the atavistic power of the notion of
home
.

Three streets on, after a hair’s-breadth dodging of a car bumper and a forest of raised middle fingers, Nina slowed, her chest finally tightening in protest and her legs cramping.

She turned, swept the street left to right and back, ready to run again.

There was nobody. No tall tanned man striding in pursuit, no slowly cruising car with tinted windows and bald man in mirror shades presenting his granite face through the window.

No voices.

Nina sank to her knees, the crack of the sidewalk against bone sending unnoticed jabs of pain up her legs. She clasped her face in her hands.

It hadn’t been as intense as this for a long time. Six months, maybe.

When she felt ready to stand she did so, rising with a straight back, not trusting her balance to cope with the heft of the violin on her back and avoid toppling her over. She took her hands from her eyes, blinked at the garish glare of the noonday light around her.

A woman pushed an infant-laden stroller by her, smiling happily into Nina’s face.

Two businessmen in pinstripes, one fat and one thin like Laurel and Hardy, bustled past, arguing mildly.

A skateboarding kid sailed precariously close, too cool for school in his skinny gear and mantle of nonchalance.

Downtown Charlottesville was before her, familiar and unchanged.

Nina took a step, and another. Her legs worked. She was real again, calm and solid, not ephemeral as she’d started to be only minutes earlier. She wasn’t going to evaporate, was an entity that existed in its own right.

She smiled. Touching her violin through its case, she set off towards downtown.

And the men broke apart to let her between them: two of them, each in a suit, one black and one white. Each had a tiny dot in his ear, one in his right and the other in his left. She saw these as she glanced from one to the other when they passed.

Dreamily, she looked back.

They didn’t. Their backs receded.

But she knew, finally, that she hadn’t been wrong. This time it was real.

This time, the Watchers were moving in.

Five

Outside Amsterdam

Sunday 19 May, 11.30 am

‘
Tickets, alsjeblieft.’

She was past forty with a weighed-down air and a nice, tired smile. Pope stirred out of his put-on doze and returned her grin.

‘Dank uw.’
She punched his ticket, caught his eye again. Her glance and her smile lingered.

Pope thought:
Careful, now.
The last thing he needed was to be remembered.

When she’d moved down the carriage he folded his
Spiegel
and over the edge of the paper watched the man opposite him. Middle fifties, Teutonic, and engrossed in a laptop which the reflection in his Himmler glasses revealed to be displaying a spreadsheet on its monitor.

The man probably wasn’t Service, or CIA, or German or Dutch intelligence. Pope couldn’t be certain. But then, it was always about probabilities.

The probability of John Purkiss’s arriving at Jablonsky’s house while Darius Pope was despatching Jablonsky was... low. Vanishingly so. Which meant, it was
probable
that Purkiss had been alerted to Pope’s presence in the city, and to his connection with Jablonsky. Which meant one of two things. Either, Jablonsky or Taylor had been tapped, and had revealed some connection with Pope. Or, Pope had been under suspicion for some time. The second was the more alarming possibility. It was also the less likely, Pope thought. He’d done nothing to arouse suspicion among the mandarins at the top ranks of the Service. He’d taken care to carve a career of solid, unspectacular achievement over the years. He’d done none of his research on Service time or using Service equipment. His tradecraft was exceptional; he found it hard to believe he’d allowed surveillance to gain much of a hold on him or his movements.

So one or both of the Americans had revealed something. it could have happened in one of a number of ways. Routine Service surveillance of the Company men might have picked something up - the most likely scenario. Or the pair had approached the Service themselves, for whatever reason.

In any case, Pope was now officially identified as the killer of two Company operatives. The Service knew this; perhaps the CIA did as well. The Service would be taking care not to let its transatlantic rival know of this, but it would struggle to keep it a secret for long. Which meant the Service was going to do its utmost to track down Pope, and neutralise him, before the Company found out about him. And they’d be using John Purkiss to do so.

Pope allowed his eyes to close and settled back in the seat, feeling the gentle rolling of the train beneath him. John Purkiss. He was an open secret within the Service, his actual identity suspected by some and known by fewer, his role accepted as a reality by all but the most naive. The Ratcatcher had emerged some five years ago, a vigilante of sorts. Pope had been a junior employee at the time, but he’d known his share of grafters, corner-cutters, agents on the make. Zero tolerance had been the mantra passed around, unwritten: the new way, the salve for the Service’s public wounds caused by scandal after scandal. It was no longer safe to take a little sweetener for the minor intelligence you passed on to your Iraqi police contact or your Shanghai stool pigeon. You’d be looking over your shoulder after doing the deed, and more likely than not would feel a hand descending on it.

Once Pope had tracked down the identity of the Ratcatcher, he’d gathered as much intelligence on Purkiss as he could find. An active agent since his recruitment after Cambridge in the late nineteen-nineties, Purkiss had excelled in the Mediterranean arena as a vetter of Islamist notaries in southern France and the Dalmatian coast. His fiancee, a fellow agent, Claire Stirling, had been murdered in 2008 by Donal Fallon, a senior operative who’d subsequently been arrested and convicted of murder, and had turned out to have been part of a black ops group within the Service, carrying out hits on people deemed a threat to British national security. Purkiss had left the Service soon after Fallon’s imprisonment.

And it was then the crackdown had begun in earnest, on the crooks and the chancers within the Service. Possibly it was a coincidence that Purkiss had disappeared at the same time. But Pope had run checks, analysed patterns of movement. Purkiss had been sighted at too many locations close to areas from which agents had quietly been removed, for mere chance to have been involved. No, Purkiss was the Ratcatcher. The probabilities were in its favour.

Purkiss had come close to besting Pope, and that rankled. Back at Jablonsky’s house, if he’d focused on taking Pope down instead of hesitating to ascertain if Jablonsky could be saved, Purkiss would have taken Pope down; Pope was certain of it. Later, after Pope had placed some distance between them and had allowed his natural advantage of stamina to come to the fore – he was more than half a decade younger than the other man, and the difference counted for more than people realised – Pope had been surer of his chances of winning. But even so, Purkiss had made him drop his blade, and had been deadly accurate with the chunk of metal he’d thrown at Pope’s head.

He’d been a formidable opponent, Purkiss; and he was behind, somewhere, and in pursuit. Which was why Pope had laid the trail he had.

He allowed his eyes to crack open a few millimetres. The Germanic businessman was still wrapped up in his perusal of his laptop spreadsheets. There were no likely candidates in the rest of the environment, nobody who could remotely pose a threat to Pope. Pope knew that was the first impression of the imminently dead.

Keeping his eyes minutely open, he allowed the feelings aroused by the killings to flood to the surface. Taylor’s death was the first, but Pope was surprised to find the sensory memories to be less intense in this case. Probably it was because he’d done it more quickly, putting the first bullet through Taylor’s face even as he turned; there’d been barely time to ensure the man recognised him, and even then Pope couldn’t be sure, as the lifelight dulled in the ruined eyes, that Taylor had fully appreciated who he was.

Jablonky’s killing had been different. The first shot, in the abdomen, had dropped him. Even if he’d been carrying a gun in his own kitchen – and given that Pope now knew Jablonsky might have been expecting him, that wasn’t so far fetched – he’d have had no opportunity to reach for it. That wouldn’t have been the case if Pope had hit him in the legs or the shoulder. On the kitchen floor, his hands cramped over the roiling surge from his belly, Jablonsky’s look had been that of a man who knew exactly what was happening to him, who was doing it to him, and why.

Pope had killed before, but never in such a planned way, and never with that same thrill of feeling he’d got from these two despatches. It was too soon after the killings for him to have any perspective on the emotions he was feeling, or what they signified about his personality. He’d tried them on for their fit; now he put them away again, as neatly as clothes into a wardrobe.

Once more he closed his eyes. This time, his thoughts turned towards not John Purkiss, not Taylor or Jablonsky, but somebody else.

*

23 June

Taylor brought in two more today. Prisoners, this time, local Hondurans by the look and sound of them. They’d been roughed up, which meant they probably resisted transfer.

Grosvenor and Z supervised the administration of the agent to each man in turn. I observed through the one-way mirrored glass. As before, the agent was intravenous, given by slow injection through an infusion set with saline running at the same time. Dehydration had been a problem with the last batch of subjects.

The first of the two men was the older and weaker-looking. Z stood by, making an occasional contribution – the glass wasn’t soundproofed but it did limit what I could hear – while Grosvenor conducted the interrogation. She paced, she alternately cajoled and raged and soothed; but she didn’t lay a finger on the man. The prisoner/subject didn’t hold out at all, started jabbering from the start. But he clearly wasn’t telling Grosvenor what she wanted to hear. As Grosvenor’s rantings grew more relentless the prisoner started gibbering and weeping. He was fastened to his chair and couldn’t move his torso or limbs, but his head rolled and slumped on his neck, back and forth.

After twenty-seven minutes – I kept time by the clock high on the wall at the back of the cell – the man died. His back went rigid, his neck arched, and all hell broke loose in the room. The medics ran in and Grosvenor and Z moved to free the man and lower him to the floor. I didn’t see the rest, but I found out later that he’d gone into cardiac arrest and all efforts to resuscitate him had failed.

The second of the two prisoners was more interesting, if that’s the word to use in a situation like this. He glared at his interrogators, scowled and spat at their questions, seemed intent on provoking and riling Grosvenor to make him lose control. Grosvenor’s performance was masterful – bearing in mind that I couldn’t hear much of what she was saying - in that she appeared at times close to snapping, to beating the prisoner into unconsciousness, but then switched to a demeanour of such sweet calmness that it must have been part of her stock-in-trade, and was unnerving in its obvious calculatedness. Grosvenor used physical force, to be sure: slapping, twisting the man’s ears, on one occasion grabbing his hair and forcing the head back past the point where it must have hurt; but there was never any sense that she was at the brink and ready to kill the prisoner for the sake of a moment’s gratification.

Thirty-nine minutes in, the prisoner began to show signs of fatiguing. His eyelids fluttered, his words – unheard by me – seemed to stumble from his mouth. Grosvenor pressed home her advantage, moving in ever closer to the man, wheedling and threatening and imploring, never stopping.

And then the experiment seemed to start bearing results. Frustrated at my inability to hear what was being said, I watched not Grosvenor or the prisoner but Z. He was standing back, presenting a one-quarter view to me through the one-way glass, but his back stiffened, his face tensing. Whatever the prisoner was saying, it was having an effect.

Grosvenor had gone very quiet - I could make out nothing she was saying, not even individual sounds - and her torso was between me and the prisoner, obscuring the man’s face. But when she stepped away, glancing across at Z, there was a flicker of triumph in her features.

The prisoner slumped in his seat, his torso held upright by his bonds but his head lolling forwards. For a moment I thought he’d succumbed, like the first man; but I caught sight of his eyes blinking faintly below his lowered brows. In a moment Z and Grosvenor conferred quickly and Z called something across. The medics came in, untied the prisoner and carted him away, having to support him under his arms if not quite carry him.

It was the first evidence I’d seen of the potential effectiveness of Caliban; and God help me, but I felt a stab of excitement at what they seemed to have achieved.

*

Pope had the words down pat in his memory. He was an eidetiker, one of those rare human beings with the ability to memorise text at a first reading; and he’d read the material more than once. He’d chosen this section to revisit, because the woman he was thinking about got a mention in the scenario. Had a starring role, in fact.

The woman was Grosvenor, and she was Pope’s next target.