Judgement

by Fergus Bannon

  'And what about the assassinations — wasn't it us who offed Allende?'

  'We probably offed them all,' said Leith miserably.

  He wondered for the thousandth time why he'd got into the intelligence business in the first place. He'd always wanted to feel he was doing some good, but sometimes....

  'And this stuff about serial killers. I don't see how any new perspective they'd get from some weird extra dimension is going to help them there. Even plugging into FBI databases wouldn't tell them anything. Nobody has the faintest idea who these killers are!'

  Leith rubbed his hand across the tough hair of his beard. How long had it been since he trimmed it, and shaved the stubble from his throat and cheeks? He couldn't remember. 'Perhaps they're going to frame someone. Find someone who hasn't got an alibi for when a set of killings occurred...'

  'Or maybe it was System X who organised the killings in the first place just to establish their credibility.' DeMarco was getting excited.

  'Wait a minute,' Leith held up his hands, 'before we get lost in fantasy, let's check these satellites are there.'

  They were. By the time NORAD had confirmed it copies of The Times and La Stampa, faxed daily from Europe, had been carrying the same advertisement.

  All this ran through Leith's mind as he looked at Durrell's contemptuous expression. 'Yeah, I admit it's possible this is just a religious scam. Maybe it is a coincidence that something strange like this should happen now, just when we're looking for the unexpected.'

  'Let's go back over this. Why are you so positive that System X is about to change their policy?'

  Leith looked out of the window. The wind had changed direction and the rain was sluicing off the glass. 'Well...on the face of it things don't seem to have worked out as they might have wanted. They wiped out all those mercenaries and their paymasters down in Brazil, presumably to save the rainforest or the Indians or both. But instead the government saw it as terrorism on the part of the Indians and mobilised the troops against them.' A sudden fierce gust of wind rattled the glass and Leith wondered for a second whether he had actually felt the building sway.

  'That's only one example. Lets take what happened in New York after the Crusader massacre. Did it stop the Mob or the Colombians, are there less drugs being dealt, people being killed? On the contrary; it created a power vacuum which amplified the normal internal struggles. Look at North Korea and Israel. Economies and military might crippled by monumental acts of sabotage. It's made them go crazy, made them even more repressive.'

  'But you're making one basic assumption and I'll be damned if I can see why,' said Durrell, shaking his head. 'You're assuming that System X has the good of the Palestinians and the Amazonian Indians at heart. Why should they? Maybe they wanted to increase the upheaval, make us turn against ourselves. Have you thought about that?'

  Leith tapped his empty glass against the top of the glass table. 'Maybe. But there's two things against that. First off they took all our really dangerous toys away...'

  'The nukes, sure. But maybe only because they didn't want us shitting up the Earth with radiation.'

  'You know, sometimes I wonder if you secretly agree with what they're doing.'

  Leith blinked.

  'You're a liberal, aren't you Leith?' That was still a bad word, at least in the company.

  'Yes, I am! And yes, I'm glad to see those scummy company-run death squads get wasted. And those mercenaries in the jungles, the drug runners, a curse on all their houses! Tell me, and this is my second point, if System X is so bad why do they only kill people who are murderers themselves?'

  'Come on, Leith! Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of innocent people have died from what they've done. Israeli reprisal raids, anti-government riots in Turkmenistan, the uprising in China, the bombing in Queens...just a couple of miles from where we are now. Are System X so dumb they didn't see this was going to happen? They've killed lots more innocent than guilty. Only not so directly.'

  Durrell fell silent then glanced out the window, perhaps checking to see if the storm had vanished within the space of a couple of minutes. Disappointed, he turned to the barman and gestured with two fingers.

  Leith waited until the barman had put down their drinks and Durrell had crushed the olive to make sure there wasn't a listening device in it. Leith was too tired to make up his mind if that was a crazy thing to do.

  'You've got a point, particularly when it comes to the intelligence services. We've all turned inwards, consumed by paranoia. Mossad, SIS, Dieuxieme Bureau, and the rest all doing what we did, all suspecting traitors in their own organisations, all going through the same baseless purging.' Leith absentmindedly rubbed his arm. It seemed to ache more in wet weather. 'I do know one thing for certain. The Truth is the closest to a lead we've got. We're got to follow it through.'

  Durrell said nothing but poked at the lemon floating in his mineral water. The displaced ice clunked against the side of the glass. Leith sipped at his drink and thought of the stack of computer files they'd built up over the last couple of weeks, from the scuttling of a Japanese whaling fleet to the firestorm over a Zimbabwean refinery. Some would be coincidence, but most would be the work of System X: yet there was nothing to lead them any further.

  'So what now?' said Durrell at last. 'Check with the firm in Geneva and the branch in New York, I guess.'

  Leith had already checked with Langley. There was no one in the US called 'Gabriela Ross' who matched the woman's description. He nodded his head. 'Sure, but I bet they'll never have heard of her. All System X had to do was intercept any calls Saunders made to check her authenticity.' He took a hardcopy of the woman's image out of a side pocket of his jacket. The videotape was in his briefcase, as was the original advertising copy. He'd let Langley do what they could with those.

  'I'll start a search through passport records. We know it's a woman, so that cuts it down to only about seventy-million other photographs we've got to compare it with.'

  'Assuming she is a US citizen who has applied for a passport. Maybe she's a European. Maybe she hasn't got a passport at all.'

  Leith smiled wearily. 'Thanks,' he said,' I don't know where I'd be without your encouragement.' He picked up the photo and peered closely at it.

  'We'll have to assume this is a genuine US citizen they recruited. And that she's got a passport. I'll start an electronic comparison, get some pattern recognition going. Classifications based on eye separation and head width ratios, that kind of thing. We know the age is from thirty to sixty, and that she's white. We can't assume eye or hair colour, they're too easy to alter. That probably cuts it down to twenty or thirty million.

  'Trouble is, pattern recognition algorithms are notoriously time consuming. The damn thing's got to recognise where the eyes and the other features are, even before it can classify them. Any major network activity in that area might show up on System X's monitoring set-up at Langley.'

  'You could be lucky. You might get a comparison in the first thousand you try.'

  'You're right. We will pick her out in the first thousand. And the next thousand after that. We'll pick out about ten thousand who match our criteria. It's a coarse technology. After the computer analysis it'll be up to us to eyeball the rest.'

  Leith sighed. 'That's going to take too long! Maybe we could farm some of the work out to private number crunchers.'

  'It’ll still take up to a couple of weeks to narrow things down. And if that doesn't work — foreign passport records?'

  Leith shook his head. October the fourth was only eight days away.

  CHAPTER 14

  East St.Louis, Missouri

  Beside an abandoned MacDonalds on a lot that was a wasteland of fast food wrappers and burnt-out cars, a man was being kicked to death. Blood streamed from his nose and mouth: his cries for help were liquid and bubbling.

  'For Christ's sake stop!' yelled Leith. Spears, the local FBI man, turned his head round and looked back at him with open contempt.

  '
This is an undercover operation. We're not supposed to draw attention to ourselves!'

  'There's a man being killed out there. Stop the fucking car!'

  'This is East St. Louis, not the Court of St. James.' Nevertheless, Spears turned to the driver. 'Pull in.'

  Leith grabbed the handle and wound the window down furiously as the driver braked. He stuck his head out even before the car had quite stopped.

  'Hey, you. Stop!' The stocky black man doing the kicking looked up and saw four shabbily dressed white men in a beat up old car. One of them, a young guy wearing a filthy baseball cap was yelling something at him. He replied with the finger and took another kick at the guy on the ground.

  'Stop or I'll shoot,' but even as Leith said it the gun he was pulling out snagged on the thick material of his working jacket. He watched goggle-eyed as the black man flicked a hand into a side pocket and brought out a revolver. With a terrible sinking feeling Leith realised how stupid and vulnerable he was; his head stuck right out of the car like a target in a fairground. The man brought the gun up two handed and Leith found himself staring right into the barrel.

  Something cold and hard pushed across the side of Leith's face from behind. The man's eyes widened: then he turned and ran. Swivelling his eyes hard to the side, Leith could just make out the barrel of Durrell's Ingram, so close he could hardly focus on it. Looking back he saw the guy who had been kicked suddenly spring to his feet and start to hobble off towards a block of burnt out apartments at the other side of the lot.

  'Masterful,' said Durrell right in his ear.

  The FBI man was glaring at him. 'You're the one who wanted a nativ guide. You need a native guide. So in future why don't you listen to what the fuck I have to tell you!'

  The car started up. The dirty, boarded-up and smoke-blackened buildings again began to troop wearily by. Only a few people — mainly black and all poor — were to be seen. Some lay in the street, others hung around on corners checking out each passing car very closely. Every time they paused at an intersection kids would be rapping at the windows trying to sell them drugs.

  At one point a road on a slight incline crossed the boulevard they were travelling. A great brown tongue of slurry lay across their path.

  'What's that?' asked Leith.

  'Guess,' replied the FBI man as the car ploughed through it, the slurry arcing out in dirty fountains on either side of the car. The stench hit Leith like a fist.

  He struggled not to gag. 'What's going on here?'

  The FBI man didn't bother to turn round. 'Try and think of it this way,' he replied, 'that big golden arch we passed by. 'The Gateway to the West'. Think of it as a massive teleport device, like in Star Trek. On one side we have Middle America, all hogs and corn and apple pie. On the other we have the third world — all AIDS and crack and smack. Hell, in other words.'

  'What happened?'

  'It was a slow thing. Stockyards and the associated industries started to close in the 70's. Unemployment rose so there were fewer people to pay city taxes. So they had to raise them, so the people still in work got jobs elsewhere. Tax base fell by nearly 80%. No taxes, no money to pay teachers or cops. No money to fix a fucked up sewer system, collect the garbage or kill the rats. This is Rat City. It's been this way since 1990. Check that out!'

  They were passing an intersection gummed up by a long queue of cars. Leith was surprised but he couldn't figure out why at first. Then he realised that on their drive he'd seen hardly any cars, which was very unusual for any city, never mind one in North America.

  'They're all queuing up to get to Broadway and Fifteenth. We call it the Market. Maybe you can guess why.'

  'Don't the police do anything about it?'

  'The money the city can afford, you don't get good cops. You don't even get enough of the bad ones. They won't come into this part of St. Louis at night. Your target lives just two blocks from the Market. That's why we're going in so heavy-handed.'

  At this moment there would be three other cars converging on the block where 'Martha de Meer' was supposed to live. Each car held an FBI agent from the small local office and three 'Good Men' supplied courtesy of Durrell.

  The passport files had listed her under the 'de' and not the 'Meer', which was lucky. The computer systems had only taken two days to find her. The search was continuing, in case there were more close doubles. With so many millions of other faces to compare it with, that was bound to be the case, but somehow he had known that this was the woman who had placed the ad in the Independent.

  Taking a left they passed over an older, harder river of shit. On either side dirty grey blocks five stories high hulked over the road. Windows were either boarded up or smashed. The boarding was loose on one or two windows and artificial light peeped through the cracks.

  'People live here?'

  'Sure, maybe a quarter of the apartments are inhabited, some even officially.'

  'It's kind of dark. What happened to the street lights?'

  'Shot out by the drug dealers. I doubt if there's a single light left in this part of town.'

  The car turned a corner and coasted to a stop. Without benefit of normal traffic noises the place had an eerie silence.

  They stayed in the car. It would be ten more minutes before all the men were in positions to seal the tenement block.

  'You're a smart guy,' said Durrell suddenly. After the deadening silence his clear, hard voice blasted through the car like a breath of freezing air. 'You're such a smart guy. Lots of degrees, plenty of clever ideas. Tell me,' he was talking so hard Leith wondered if it would leave a bruise on his eardrum, 'tell me. Do you sense anything strange about this situation?'

  Leith gritted his teeth.Strange, yeah, plenty strange. Why would a woman working for something as powerful as System X live in a place like this? But this was the address on her passport application and she collected her benefit cheque every week at the office three blocks away.

  'This is the only lead we've got. I'm always open to any better suggestions.' He tried to keep the irritation out of his voice.

  Durrell snorted. 'There's something I'd like very much to share with you, Bob. It’s a weird idea but it does make some kind of sense. All this—' he gestured round at the buildings, '—all this is a trap. Designed to catch us. And we're walking right into it.

  'See, we stick out like sore thumbs. We're not black and we're not poor. Sure we can wear these raggedy-assed old clothes, but we don't look poor, not really. They're going to see us coming, like we were carrying neon signs.'

  'I realise this could be a trap. That's why we're not carrying any ID. That's why the FBI took all our references out of their files. That's why we no longer exist on any major databases any more. That's why we've got these damned things stuck in our ears again. All so they can't trace us back.'

  Leith looked at him. It was getting dark now and he could hardly see Durrell's eyes, but he felt them drilling into him.

  'I'm still waiting for a better suggestion,' he said icily.

  'You've got it all wrong, Bob. You see I'm supposed to provide the muscle. You're supposed to provide the suggestions.'

  'I haven't got any other suggestions.'

  'Wonderful,' for a second Durrell's big face was weakly lit from the light on his watch. 'Zero hour. Let's all go and get killed!' He opened the door and got out.

  'Wait a minute,' said Spears loudly. 'I'm going nowhere until you give me some idea what we're up against.'

  'You're right,' said Durrell. 'You're not going anywhere.'

  'How long should we wait?' the man was trying to keep his tone even and professional.

  'For ever,' said Durrell slamming the car door.

  The entrance to the buildings was dark but all five men had flashlights.

  'Stay behind me,' Durrell opened his coat and pulled the slide back on his squat, lethal little Ingram. Somewhere in the gloom behind them Leith heard the metallic snickering sound as the two other CIA men did the same. They would stay to guard this exit
. The agent who was going up with them drew a heavy calibre revolver.

  The smell was bad. Not the urine and cabbage smell of lived-in but ill-tended blocks, but the smell of old ordure and death. Not even bothering to try the elevator they made for the doorway for the stairs. The door itself had been removed, like everything else with any possible resale value.

  A scuttling sound made Durrell shine his light round at the well beside the stairs. Something cat-sized vanished through a hole in the skirting boards. Then with a gasp of shock Leith caught sight of the remains of a dog laying in the stairwell, its stomach open and teeming with maggots. The rats had already started gnawing at the face, exposing the teeth in a final snarl.

  'Hey,' Durrell said soto voce in the darkness, 'they've burnt off the stair rails. Try and grab one and you'll join the mutt.'

  The uncarpeted concrete stairs were wet with black slurry a centimetre deep. The sound of dripping liquid echoed around the stairwell and grew louder as they climbed. They found a broken soil pipe on the second floor landing around which a pile of still wet matter had accumulated. 'Someone does live here,' whispered Leith, his voice laden with disbelief.

  One floor up there was less outright filth but the stairs were still awash with trash. At one point Durrell signalled to them, pointing out a rats nest of syringes on the landing. On the fourth floor he signalled again, this time to get them to hold back on the landing while he gently stuck his head round the corner and cast his beam along the corridor to the apartments.

  'OK,' he whispered and moved off. Leith followed, Alpert staying behind.

  The door of apartment 418 was unusual because it was still there. Passing other apartments, shining his flashlight in, Leith had seen only tangles of newspaper and cheap smashed-up furniture. The door to 418 was clean and devoid of graffiti. A small neat plastic sign below the spy-hole said 'de Meer.'

  Durrell looked at him. Leith shrugged. Durrell pushed him back clear of the door, then positioned himself on the other side. Reaching forward he rapped the door once, withdrawing his hand rapidly in case the response was a stream of bullets. There was only silence and then the sounds of unhurried footsteps coming towards them through the apartment.