Salvation Row

JOHN MILTON peered through the rain that hammered on the windshield, trying to pick a path that would spare the car the deepest of the potholes that disfigured the muddy track. He had been driving for six hours, the headlamps on all the way, initially caught up in the throng of traffic as people sought to escape the city. Then he had been slowed by the terrain, the visibility, and his lack of familiarity with his surroundings. He rolled past a fork in the road, slowed and parked the rental on the margin of the road. It wasn’t much more than a backwoods track by this stage, cutting between groves of cypress trees that were garlanded in Spanish moss, heading straight into the heart of the bayou.

His directions told him to look for a big red maple tree.

Milton saw it, just off the road.

He had been in New Orleans for a week, arriving just as the meteorologists had given Katrina her name and warned the city that she was headed straight for it. People had initially laughed it off, and Milton had overheard plenty, suggesting that this would be no different than any of the other storms that made landfall here. But then the forecasters had become more and more apocalyptic, upgrading Katrina all the way to a category five storm and warning that she could be the big one. The mayor and the governor had issued mandatory evacuation warnings, and people had started to listen. It had been bumper-to-bumper gridlock until he was out past Norco, and even then, the roads had only started to flow easily when he exited at Laplace and made his way into the swamp.

Milton had been in hurricanes like this one before, and he knew what they could do. Some people still refused to evacuate, telling newscasters proudly that they weren’t going to be chased out of their homes, and Milton had looked at them and shaken his head at their blasé stupidity. He would have evacuated, if he had been given the choice. But his target was one of those stubborn-headed locals and, because of that, he had to stay, too.

Milton looked down at the instructions for a final time. He had followed coordinates that he had plotted into his GPS at first and then, when that had reached the limit of its utility, he had found the rest of the way with a set of written instructions that he would burn as soon as he was done.

It had been raining heavily for hours, the grim outrider of the monster that was gathering its resources out in the Gulf of Mexico. He stepped out of the car and onto the muddy verge and was quickly soaked through. He opened the passenger door and took out the shovel that he had purchased at the Walmart that he had passed on his way out of town. He rested it across his shoulder and started to walk out into the swamp.

He recognised the spot from the picture that he had been shown in London. There was a cypress grove, fringing a narrow clearing, and, at the centre of that, a large boulder sat incongruously amid the grass and foliage.

Milton went up to the rock, paced out three steps back into the clearing, and then started to dig. The ground was saturated, and the shovel sliced through the grass and sod with ease. He rammed the blade into the earth, pressed it home with his boot, scooped out the wet muck and slung it over his shoulder. He was quickly covered in mud. He worked for ten minutes, digging a wide trench until the shovel clanged against something metallic. Milton assessed the dimensions of the object and then worked around it, quickly excavating enough so that he could stand the shovel in the ground and haul the object out of the ground with his hands.

It was a metal locker, five feet long by a foot wide, secured with sturdy steel clasps. A large padlock held the lid closed. Milton took a key from his pocket and undid the lock, unthreading it from the clasp and opening the lid.

The first thing he saw was the M16 assault rifle, but he didn’t need that. There was a wide assortment of weaponry: a long gun, machine pistols, semi-automatics. There were boxes of ammunition in several different calibres. Night-vision goggles, scopes for the sniper systems, surveillance and anti-surveillance gear, and encrypted satphones. And more than a million dollars in banknotes of various denominations, sealed inside a series of waterproof polythene bags.

Milton didn’t need anything extravagant. He ignored the heavy artillery and selected a Sig Sauer P226, a discreet shoulder holster, and a spare magazine. He removed his leather jacket, slipped the holster over his shoulder and tightened it, secured the Sig in the holster and put the spare magazine in his inside pocket. Next, he took out a hideaway .25 NAA Guardian with a holster that could be Velcro-strapped around the ankle. He stood, replaced his jacket, closed the lid, reattached the padlock, and hauled the locker back into the ditch.

He took up the shovel and started to spread the displaced earth over it.

THE RAIN fell. Cascades. Torrents. A deluge. The water poured from roofs and ran in full spate along gutters and into already overflowing drains. It gushed out of drainpipes, slicked the roads with wide pools of standing water, and saturated beds of hibiscus, banana and palm trees. It swamped hydrangeas, falling heavier and heavier until it surely couldn’t fall any harder. And yet it did.

John Milton slid the mud-slicked rental against the curb. He killed the engine and listened to the thrum of the wind, faster and stronger minute upon minute. A flowerpot was picked up and tossed off the second floor balcony of the apartment block opposite him, bursting into fragments that scattered across the flooded road. The wooden panels of the fence that demarked the border between the apartment block rattled and clattered against their posts, nails slowly prying loose, ready to fly.

And then, as if at the flick of a switch, the rain stopped.

He opened the car door, stepped outside, and cast an assessing glance up at the sky. The storm was churning its way across the Gulf of Mexico. They said the leading edge would be here in another couple of hours. The air felt damp and humid, and it smelled full of brine and sodden vegetation, as if the ocean had been dragged closer to the limit of the city. It was a Saturday evening, and streets that would normally have been busy, thronged with life, were empty. The indigo dome of the twilight was torn through with veins of yellow and blood red. It was as though the sun had not yet left, that it was planning a spectacular sunset to cow the anger of the storm. Milton paused there for a moment, staring to the south, to the deeper darkness that was gathering over the Gulf, and felt the electricity crackling through the air like a premonition. The storm wasn’t done. It hadn’t started, not yet. This was merely a drawing of breath.

He had taken a room in the Intercontinental. He stopped in the reception area. The clerk was standing behind the desk. He was watching a TV tuned to the local news. A radar image of the hurricane was playing as the anchor told people that they needed to get away from the coast. The storm looked like a huge vicious pinwheel.

“Any messages?”

The man looked up at him and saw the mud on his clothes.

“I know,” Milton said, shaking his had. “I slipped. I’m going to go and get changed. Any messages?”

“No, sir.”

The clerk was older, his lines bearing witness to his age, and to the other storms that he must have seen. “Wind blow you over?”

He nodded. “Can’t believe how powerful it is.”

“It’s not done,” he said. “That wasn’t nothing.”

They shared the moment, the sense of foreboding. “No,” Milton said.

“You should stay inside, sir. You’ll be fine, I was speaking to the guys down in the kitchen, got plenty of food and water, and there’s a big old generator in the basement if the power gets knocked out.”

“That’s good to know.”

“You want a drink? They’re on the house in the bar.”

“Thanks,” Milton said. “I might do that.”

MILTON HAD taken a suite on the top floor. He took off the holstered pistol and hooked it carefully over the back of the chair. He took off his sodden leather jacket, taking a bottle of beer from the minibar and standing by the wide picture window. He was ten floors up, elevated higher than the surrounding buildings, and was treated to a panoramic view over the rooftops. Milton had a sense of foreboding. It wasn’t the hurricane, although that was part of it. It was what he had been sent here to do.

It was the man Control had sent him here to kill.

Milton had a way of dealing with it: he did not consider the men and women who were assigned to him for liquidation. He didn’t want to know their backgrounds, save the information he needed to ensure that he could hasten their departures from this world. He didn’t want to know about families, about histories, about the people who would miss them when they were gone. He didn’t want to know about any of that, but it invariably littered their files, and he was too much of a professional not to absorb every last detail. Standing there, high above the city with Mother Nature ready to unleash a hurricane, Milton felt very alone. There were some thoughts and experiences that he would never be able to share with anyone, burdens that he would always have to bear alone.

But that was his own fault.

It was the result of his own choices.

He had accepted his fate so blindly and for so long that there
were
no choices, not any more.

His mouth was suddenly bone dry, his desiccated tongue sticking to his palate, and he necked a good mouthful of the beer until the sensation was gone.

Milton stripped, went to the bathroom, and stood under the shower for ten minutes until the room was humid with steam. He got out, went to the mirror and swiped his hand to clear away the condensation. His blue eyes stared back at him, cold and unempathetic. He filled the sink with water and plunged his face into it, the cold shocking him around.

He went to the wardrobe and took out the clothes that he had brought for the occasion. He had a loud Hawaiian shirt, a pair of stonewashed Levis and a pair of oxblood loafers. He stepped into his trousers, arranged the shirt so that it fell loose around his waist, and then looked at his reflection in the full-length mirror. There you go. He looked like a tourist, the kind of rube who might easily wander into the French Quarter, even on a night like this, the sort who might be impressed by an ersatz Irish bar.

There was a knock at the door.

Milton went to the chair, withdrew the P226 and hid the holster in the drawer. He pushed the gun into the back of his trousers, the metal icy cold against skin that was still warm from the hot shower, and pulled the shirt so that it fell over it.

He went to the door.

“Yes?”

“It’s me.”

He unhooked the latch and opened up. Ziggy Penn was standing in the corridor, glancing left and right. He looked shifty and suspicious.

“Get inside,” Milton said curtly, standing aside.

Ziggy did as he was told. He was small and wiry, a succession of sharp points, all elbows, shoulders, and knees. He had a thatch of thick and unruly ginger hair, as stiff as wire wool, and his eyes seemed to bulge from their sockets. His skin was pallid, thanks to a life spent in front of a computer screen, and his cheeks and the hollow channels on either side of his nose were pitted with old acne scars. He was wearing a pair of cargo pants and a black Depeche Mode T-shirt.

“I told you,” Milton said, his voice tight and compressed with anger. “We don’t meet. You don’t speak to me. I’m here on my own.”

“I know that.”

“So?”

“The weather,” Ziggy said.

“What about it?”

“What about it? Have you
looked
outside?” He gestured at the wide window and the huge banks of pitch clouds that were rolling over the city.

Milton nodded. “It’s going to be rough.”

“It’s going to be a category five
hurricane
.”

Milton took the P226 and laid it on the bureau. “There’s no need for it to change anything.”

Ziggy stared at the gun. “Are we going ahead?”

“He’s here. McCluskey is here. I’m here. It’s taken long enough to engineer that. And look at it another way, where’s he going to go?”

Ziggy frowned, still anxious. “I suppose so.”

“No change. We’ll go ahead as planned.”

ZIGGY PENN went down into the basement and made his way across the parking lot to his rental car. He unlocked the door, opened it, and got inside.

He was not particularly reassured. Milton was right, of course, the operation had taken a lot of planning. The target was a transplanted Irishman who was presently going by the name of Jimmy Maguire. His real name was Gerry McGovern, and he had been a bagman for the Irish Republican Army throughout the worst years of The Troubles. He was here tonight to meet Peter McCluskey, a businessman who had emigrated to the United States in his twenties after a successful career as a Provo sniper in the bandit country around County Antrim. Since then, McCluskey had reinvented himself as a successful businessman with a string of Irish theme pubs all around the American south and southwest. By all accounts, he had foresworn his violent past and had crafted a new identity for himself. He had, it would have appeared to the casual observer, taken advantage of the particularly American facility for reinventing oneself.