[Jack Harvey Novels 03] Blood Hunt

by Ian Rankin

  “What?”

  “All these precautions. You haven’t said why.”

  Vincent looked up and down the empty platform. “They tampered with my car, too. Remember I told you about the farmer?”

  “The one who’s been campaigning against OPs?”

  “Yes. A vet was helping him, but then the vet died in a car crash. His vehicle went out of control and hit a wall; no explanation, nothing wrong with the car. I had a similar crash. My car stopped responding. I hit a tree rather than a wall, and crawled out alive. No garage could find any fault in the car.” Vincent was staring into the distance. “Then they bugged the telephone in my office, and later I found they’d bugged my home telephone, too. I think they opened my mail and resealed the envelopes. I know they were watching me. Don’t ask me who they were, that I don’t know. I could speculate though. MI5 maybe, Special Branch, or the chemical companies. Could have been any of those, could have been someone else entirely. So”—he sighed and dug his hands into his Barbour pockets—“I keep moving.”

  “A running target’s the hardest kind to hit,” Reeve agreed.

  “Do you speak from experience?”

  “Literally,” said Reeve as the train pulled in.

  Back in London, Reeve returned to the apartment. Fliss had left a note wondering if he’d gone for good. He scribbled on the bottom of it “Maybe this time” and put the note back on the table. He had to retrieve his bag and his car and then head home. But first he wanted to check something. He found the page of Jim’s notes, the one headed MV. On the back were four two-digit numbers. He’d suspected they were the combination of some kind of safe, but now he knew differently. He found a screwdriver in the kitchen drawer and opened up the telephone: apparatus and handset both. He couldn’t find any bugs, so he replaced the screws and returned the screwdriver to its drawer. He got the code for France from the telephone book and made the call. A long single tone told him he’d reached a French telephone.

  An answering machine, a rapid message in a woman’s voice. Reeve left a short message in his rusty French, giving his telephone number in Scotland. He didn’t mention Jim’s fate. He just said he was his brother. This was called “preparing someone for bad news.” He sat and thought about what Josh Vincent had told him. Something had been telling Reeve it couldn’t just be about cows. It was laughable, unbelievable. But Josh Vincent had made it both believable and scary, because it affected everyone on the planet—everyone who had to eat. But Reeve still didn’t think it was just about cows, or pesticides, or coverups. There was more to it than that. He felt it in his bones.

  He made another call, to Joan, preparing her for his return. Then he gave the rest of the flat a once-over and locked the door behind him.

  An engineer was checking the telephone junction box outside. The man watched Reeve go, then lifted the tape out from the recorder and replaced it with a fresh one. Returning to his van, he wound back the tape and replayed it. A thirteen-digit number, followed by a woman’s voice in French. He plugged a digital decoder into the tape machine, then wound back the tape and played it again. This time, each beep of the dialed number came up as a digit on the decoder’s readout. The engineer wrote down the number and picked up his cell phone.

  PART FOUR

  LIVING DANGEROUSLY

  ELEVEN

  GORDON REEVE HAD BECOME INTERESTED in anarchism because he needed to understand the minds of terrorists. He had worked in the Counter-Revolutionary Warfare Unit of the SAS. They were happy to have him—he wasn’t the only one among them who’d specialized in languages during his early training, but he was the only one with so many.

  “Including Scots,” one wag said. “Could come in handy if the Tartan Army flares up again.”

  “I’ve got Gaelic, too,” Reeve had countered with a smile.

  After he left the SAS, he retained his interest in anarchism because of its truths and its paradoxes. The word anarchy had Greek roots and meant “without a ruler.” The Paris students in ‘68 had sprayed “It is forbidden to forbid” on the street walls. Anarchists, true anarchists, wanted society without government and promoted voluntary organization over rule by an elected body. The real anarchist joke was: “It doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.”

  Reeve liked to play the anarchist thinkers off against Nietz-sche. Kropotkin, for example, with his theory of “mutual aid,” was advocating the opposite of Nietzsche’s “will to power.” Evolution, in Kropotkin’s view, was not about competitiveness, about survival of the strongest individual, but about cooperation. A species which cooperated would thrive, and grow stronger collectively. Nietzsche on the other hand saw competitiveness everywhere, and advocated self-reliance and self-absorption. Reeve saw merit to both assertions. In fact, they were not separate, distinct arguments but parts of the same equation. Reeve had little time for government, for bureaucracy, but he knew the individual could go only so far, could endure only so much. Isolation was fine sometimes, but if you had a problem it was wise to form bonds. War created bizarre allies, while peace itself could be divisive.

  Nietzsche, of course, could convince almost no one of his philosophy—give or take a tyrant or two who chose to misunderstand the whole. And the anarchists… well, one of the things Reeve found so interesting about the anarchists was that their cause was doomed from its philosophical outset. To grow, to influence opinion, the anarchist movement had to organize, had to take on a strong political structure—which meant taking on a hierarchy, making decisions. Everyone, from players of children’s games to the company boardroom, knew that if you took decisions by committee you came up with compromise. Anarchism was not about compromising. The anarchists’ mistrust of rigid organizations caused their groupings to splinter and splinter again, until only the individual was left, and some of those individuals felt that the only possible road to power left to them was the bullet and the bomb. Joseph Conrad’s image of the anarchist with the bomb in his pocket was not so wide of the mark.

  And what of Nietzsche? Reeve had been one of “Nietzsche’s gentlemen.” Nietzsche had carried on the work of Descartes and others—men who needed to dominate, to control, to eliminate chance. But while Nietzsche wanted supermen, controllers, he also wanted people to live dangerously. Reeve felt he was fulfilling this criterion if no other. He was living dangerously. He just wondered if he needed some mutual aid along the way…

  He was on a hillside, no noise except the wind, the distant bleating of sheep, and his own breathing. He was sitting, resting, after the long walk from his home. He’d told Joan he needed to clear his head. Allan was at a friend’s house, but would be back in time for supper. Reeve would be back by then, too. All he needed was a walk. Joan had offered to keep him company, an offer he’d refused with a shake of his head. He’d touched her cheek, but she’d slapped his hand away.

  “I’ll only be a couple of hours.”

  “You’re never here,” she complained. “And even when you’re here, you’re not really here.”

  It was a valid complaint, and he hadn’t argued. He’d just tied his boots and set out for the hills.

  It was Sunday, a full week since he’d had the telephone call telling him Jim had killed himself. Joan knew there was something he wasn’t telling her, something he was bottling up. She knew it wasn’t just grief.

  Reeve got to his feet. Looking down the steep hillside, he was momentarily afraid. Nothing to do with the “abyss” this time; it was just that he had no real plan, and without a plan there would be a temptation to rashness, there would be miscalculation. He needed proper planning and preparation. He’d been in the dark for a while, feeling his way. Now he thought he knew most of what Jim had known, but he was still stuck. He felt like a spider who has crawled its way along the pipes and into the bath, only to find it can’t scale the smooth, sheer sides. There was a bird of prey overhead, a kestrel probably. It glided on the air currents, its line straight, dipping its wings to maintain stability. From that
height, it could probably still pick out the movements of a mouse in the tangle of grass and gorse. Reeve thought of the wings on the SAS cap badge. Wings and a dagger. The wings told you that Special Forces would travel anywhere at any notice. And the dagger… the dagger told an essential truth about the regiment: they were trained in close-combat situations. They favored stealth and the knife over distance and a sniper’s accuracy. Hand-to-hand fighting, that was their strength. Get close to your prey, close enough to slide a hand over its mouth and stab the dagger into its throat, and twist and twist, ripping the voice box. Maximum damage, minimum dying time.

  Reeve felt the blood rush to his head and closed his eyes for a moment, clearing them of the fog. He checked his watch and found he’d been resting longer than he’d meant to. His legs had stiffened. It was time to start back down the hill and across the wide gully. It was time to go home.

  “Jackie’s got this really good new game,” Allan said.

  Reeve looked to Joan. “Jackie?”

  “A girl in his class.”

  He turned to his son. “Playing with the girls, eh? Not in her bedroom, I hope.”

  Allan screwed up his face. “She’s not like a girl, Dad. She has all these games…”

  “On her computer.”

  “Yes.”

  “And her computer is where in the house?”

  “In her room.”

  “Her bedroom?”

  Allan’s ears had reddened. Reeve tried winking at Joan, but she wasn’t watching.

  “It’s like Doom,” Allan said, ignoring his father, “but with more secret passages, and you don’t just pick up ammo and stuff, you can warp yourself into these amazing creatures with loads of new weapons and stuff. You can fry the bad guys’ eyeballs so they’re blind and then you—”

  “Allan, enough,” his mother said.

  “But I’m just telling Dad—”

  “Enough.”

  “But, Dad—”

  “Enough!”

  Allan looked down at his plate. He’d eaten all the fries and only had the cold ham and baked beans left. “But Dad wanted to know,” he said under his breath. Joan looked at her husband.

  “Tell me later, pal, okay? Some things aren’t for the dinner table.” He watched Joan lift a sliver of ham to her mouth. “Especially fried alien eyeballs.”

  Joan glared at him, but Allan and Gordon were laughing. The rest of the meal was carried off in peace.

  Afterwards, Allan made instant coffee for his parents—one of his latest jobs around the house. Reeve wasn’t so sure of letting an eleven-year-old near a boiling kettle.

  “But you don’t mind fried aliens, right?” Joan said.

  “Aliens never hurt anyone,” Reeve said. “I’ve seen what scalding can do.”

  “He’s got to learn.”

  “Okay, okay.” They were in the living room. Reeve kept an ear attuned to sounds from the kitchen. The first clatter or shriek and he’d be in there. But Allan appeared with the two mugs. The coffee was strong.

  “Is milk back on the ration books?” Reeve queried.

  “What’s ration books?” Allan asked.

  “Pray you never have to know.”

  Allan wanted to watch TV, so the three of them sat on the long sofa, Reeve with his arm along the back, behind his wife’s neck but not touching her. She’d taken off her slippers and had tucked her feet up. Allan sat on the floor in front of her. Bakunin the cat was on Joan’s lap, glaring at Reeve like he was a complete stranger, which, considering he hadn’t fed her this past week, he was. Reeve thought of the real Bakunin, fighting on the Dresden barricades shoulder to shoulder with Nietzsche’s friend Wagner…

  “A penny for them,” Joan asked.

  “I was just thinking how nice it was to be back.”

  Joan smiled thinly at the lie. She hadn’t asked much about the cremation, but she’d been interested to hear about the flat in London and the woman living there. Allan turned from the sitcom.

  “So what’s it like in the USA, Dad?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.” Reeve had spent some time deciding on the story he’d tell Allan. He painted a picture of San Diego as a frontier town, exciting enough and strange enough to keep Allan listening.

  “Did you see any shootings?” Allan asked.

  “No, but I heard some police sirens.”

  “Did you see a policeman?”

  Reeve nodded.

  “With a gun?”

  Reeve nodded again.

  Joan rubbed at her son’s hair, though she knew he hated it when she did that. “He’s growing up gun-crazy.”

  “No, I’m not,” Allan stated.

  “It’s all those computer games.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “What are you playing just now?”

  “That game I told you about. Jackie copied it for me.”

  “I hope it hasn’t got a virus.”

  “I’ve got a new virus checker.”

  “Good.” At that time, Allan knew only a little more about computing than Reeve and Joan put together, but he was steadily pulling away from them.

  “The game’s called Militia, and what you do is—”

  “No fried eyeballs,” Joan demanded.

  “What happened to the game Uncle Jim sent you?” Reeve asked.

  Allan looked embarrassed. “I was stuck on screen five…”

  “You’ve given it away?”

  Allan shook his head vigorously. “No, it’s upstairs.”

  “But you don’t play it anymore?”

  “No,” he said quietly. Then: “Mum said Uncle Jim died.”

  Reeve nodded. Joan said she’d had a couple of talks with Allan already. “People grow old and tired, Allan, and then they die. They make room for other younger people to come along…” Reeve felt awkward as he spoke.

  “But Uncle Jim wasn’t old.”

  “No, well some people just—”

  “He wasn’t much older than you.”

  “I’m not going to die,” Reeve told his son.

  “How do you know?”

  “Sometimes people get feelings. I’ve got the feeling I’m going to live to be a hundred.”

  “And Mum?” Allan asked.

  Reeve looked at her. She was staring at him, interested in the answer. “Same feeling,” he said.

  Allan went back to watching television. A little later, Joan murmured, “Thanks,” put her slippers back on, and went through to the kitchen, followed closely by Bakunin, scouting for pro-visions. Reeve wasn’t sure what to read into her final utterance.

  The telephone rang while he was watching the news. Allan had retreated to his room, having given his parents over an hour and a half of his precious time. Reeve let Joan get the phone. She was still in the kitchen, making a batch of bread. Later, when he went through to make the last cup of coffee of the night, he asked who had called.

  “They didn’t say,” she offered, too nonchalantly.

  Reeve looked at her. “You’ve had more than one?”

  She shrugged. “A couple.”

  “How many?”

  “I think this was the third.”

  “In how long?”

  She shrugged again. There was a smudge of flour on her nose, and some wisps in her hair, making her look older. “Five or six days. There’s no one on the other end, no noise at all. Maybe it’s British Telecom testing the line or something. That happens sometimes.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  But not more than once in a very blue moon, he thought.

  They’d been in bed for a silent hour and were lying side by side staring at the ceiling when he asked, “What about those callers?”

  “The phone calls?” She turned her head towards him.

  “No, you said some customers had turned up.”

  “Oh, yes, just asking about courses.”

  “Two of them?”

  “Yes, one one day, one the next. What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. It�
��s just we don’t often get people turning up like that.”

  “Well, I gave them the brochure and they went away quite happy.”

  “Did they come in the house?”

  She sat up. “Only as far as the hall. It’s all right, Gordon, I can look after myself.”

  “What were they like? Describe them.”

  “I’m not sure I can. I hardly paid them any attention.” She leaned over him, her hand on his chest. She was feeling his heart rate. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. But he swung his legs out of bed and started to get dressed. “I don’t feel tired; I’ll go down to the kitchen.” He stopped at the door. “Anybody else come while I was away?”

  “No.”

  “Think about it.”

  She thought about it. “A man came to read the meter. And the freezer lorry turned up.”

  “What freezer lorry?”

  “Frozen foods.” She sounded irritated. If he kept pushing, the end result would be an argument. “I usually buy chips and ice cream from him.”

  “Was it the regular driver?”

  She slumped back on the bed. “No, he was new. Gordon, what the hell is this about?”

  “Maybe I’m just being paranoid.”

  “What happened in the States?”

  He came back and sat on the edge of the bed. “I think Jim was murdered.”

  She sat up again. “What?”

  “I think he was getting too deep into something, some story he was working on. Maybe they’d tried scaring him off and it hadn’t worked. I know Jim, he’s like me—try that tactic and he’d just be more curious than ever, and more stubborn. So then they had to kill him.”

  “Who?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to find out.”

  “And?”

  “And, because I’ve been doing just what Jim was doing, maybe they’re targeting me. The thing is, I didn’t think they’d come here. Not so soon.”

  “Two potential clients, a meter-reader, and a man with a van full of spuds and sprouts.”

  “That’s four callers more than we usually get. Four callers while I was out of the country.” He got to his feet again.