by Mark Dawson
“That’s right.” He smiled at them. “Welcome to Mexico. How was your flight?”
“Was good––thanks for arranging it.” He was a thick-limbed Texan, tall, a little colour in his face.
“You are Isaac?”
“I sure am.”
“And your friends?”
“Kevin and Alejandro.”
“Your business partners?”
“That’s right.”
Felipe smiled at the other two. His first impression: they were not particularly impressive. Isaac was the owner of the business that they were going to use and was, not surprisingly, the most interesting.
Felipe turned and indicated in the direction of the two Jeeps. Adolfo and the other two men were lounging against the vehicles, the brims of their hats pulled down to shield their eyes from the glare of the sun. “We’ll drive back to Juárez and discuss our business.”
“Forgive me, El Patrón,” Isaac said. “Before we do, there’s something I’d like to clear up.”
Isaac was standing with the sun behind him and Felipe couldn’t see his face through the glare. Why hadn’t he made sure that he had approached the plane from the opposite direction? He clenched his teeth in frustration at his error and Isaac’s presumption. “Of course,” he said, squinting a little and yet managing to smile.
“Listen, I hope you can forgive me––I don’t mean to be blunt, but there’s no point in pussyfooting around it so I’m gonna come right out and get to the point. I’m sure you know all about this, but there’s a whole lot of coverage about the girls that are going missing over here. Someone’s been writing about it and now the TV channels and newspapers and such like over the border have got hold of it.”
“How is this relevant?”
“It’s extra heat, right? More attention? Makes things more––what would you say––more precarious.”
“I would say you shouldn’t worry. And that you should trust me.”
“I’d like to be able to say that I can, El Patrón, truly I would. I’m sure, in time, we’ll come to trust each other like brothers. But now, well, we don’t even know each other.”
His tone suddenly lost the avuncular tone he had been working hard to maintain. “What does that have to do with us?”
“The word over the border is that your men are behind it. They say they’re doing it for sport. Now, I’m sure that ain’t true, El Patrón, because if it was, well, yessir, if someone was allowing them to get away with hijinks like that then we’d have to question whether that someone was the sort of someone we’d want to get into business with. Not morally––I don’t care about none of that. It’s business––a person who’d allow someone to bring so much attention to his operation, well then, that wouldn’t make no sense.”
Besa mi culo, puto! Felipe breathed in and out: the sun in his eyes, the huevos on this man, coming over to Mexico as his guest and insulting his hospitality like this! It would have taken a moment for him to signal to Adolfo and his goons to bring up their rifles and perforate them, blow them away. All he would have to do would be to click his fingers. It was tempting, but he could not. Since he had ended his business relationship with the Luciano family––and ended it in such a way that a reconciliation was impossible––he needed Isaac and his pajero friends to distribute his product in the south-west. He had tonnes to move. Without them he would have to split the product between small-time operators and that would mean less leverage for him, less profit and much greater risk. It was impossible.
So he forced himself to swallow his anger and cast out a bright smile. “I know the stories, Isaac, and I can assure you, they are nothing to do with La Frontera. If I found out that my men were responsible, they would be dealt with. But they are not. The police here suspect a group of serial killers. In fact, they have already charged one man––perhaps you have read about that, too?”
Isaac shrugged. “That’s what I thought.”
“As I say, you needn’t worry. Now––shall we go? There is much to discuss.”
* * *
31.
ANNA THACKERAY had almost forgotten about John Milton. The results of the first sweep had come back negative and then the second and then the third. She had tried everything she could think of trying, feeding every combination of selectors through every megabit of data that they had. She ran it again and again and again, working well into the night, but every variation, every clever rephrasing, none of them returned anything that she could use. Since he had disappeared, it appeared that Milton had neither used the internet in any way that could be traced back to him, nor been referred to by anybody else.
No emails.
No social media.
No banking activity.
No credit cards.
No immigration data.
Anna had been warned that he would be good at this, and she had not doubted it. But she had not expected him to be this good. Control had been right. It was as if he had sunk beneath the surface of the world, leaving not even a ripple behind him.
“What are you missing?” she said aloud.
“I don’t know––what?” David McClellan said.
“Excuse me?”
“Talking to yourself again.”
“Sorry,” she said, managing a laugh. “Just frustrated.”
“Going to tell me what about?”
“Not really, it’s––”
“––classified,” he finished for her.
“I don’t know––all this computing power, all this information, but if you really want to drop out of sight, if you can drop everything and get off the grid, all of this is useless. You can still do it. I keep thinking I’ll think of something different––anything––something that’ll change the results, but I know that’s not going to happen. This guy is either a hermit, living in some jungle somewhere, or he’s dead. If I was going to find anything at all, I’d have found it long before now.”
But she couldn’t give up, so she thought it through again.
Eventually, she knew, they would have to go out into the field. The realistic plan was to confirm her assumption that nothing concerning John Milton existed in any data that GCHQ or the NSA held. After that, she would appeal to Control to broaden the scope of the exercise. Interviews with victims, witnesses, reporting parties, informants. Anything that might buy her more information, more selectors to add to the sweep. She knew from unredacted excerpts from his file that he had been in contact with people in East London before he had disappeared. Elijah and Sharon Warriner. They would be a good place to start.
“Coffee,” McClellan said. “Look at you. You need caffeine. Fancy it?”
She stood and stretched, working the kinks out of her stiff muscles. “Sorry, David, I would, but I’m meeting someone tonight.”
He looked almost comically crestfallen. “A boyfriend?”
“A friend,” she said. She logged off and collected her leather jacket from the back of the chair. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
THE RENDEZVOUS had been arranged the day before and was to take place in the Beehive, a pub two miles away in the centre of town. Anna made her way into the car park where she had left her motorbike. It was her one concession to luxury in an otherwise ascetic life: it was the Triumph Thruxton, built in the style of the 60s, an authentic café racer in Brooklands green with low rise bars, 18-inch spoked wheels and megaphone-style silencers. It was a beautiful machine and she loved it. She lowered her helmet over her head, straddled the bike and gunned the 850cc engine. David was coming down the steps into the car park as she pulled away; he looked flustered, the wind billowing his open coat around him. He started as she twisted the throttle and revved the big engine.
The cloud was low and leaden and the wind was cold. She was thankful for her leathers as she hurried along the A40. She arrived at the pub ten minutes later, parked the bike and went inside to her usual table before the fireplace. A man was waiting for her. She didn’t recognise him, and that made her nervous.
>
“Haven’t I seen you before,” she said as she paused beside him. “Waterloo station?”
He was plain, early-middle age, a receding hairline, nondescript, just like they all were.
“I think it was Liverpool Street,” he corrected, completing the introduction.
Satisfied, she sat down. “Where is Alexei?” she said curtly.
The man spoke in quiet Russian. “He has gone home. Don’t worry about him. You deal with me from now on.”
“Fine. But in English, please. You are less likely to draw attention.”
“Sorry.” The man switched languages. “Yes, of course.”
“Have you done this before?”
“No. You are my first.”
She sighed. “Wonderful. Why couldn’t this wait until Saturday as normal?”
“Your last report has been passed to the highest levels. There are some questions.”
“A little more information about you before we can talk, please.”
“Very well. I work in the same department as you, but I work in the consulate. My name is Roman. I know you are going back to Moscow in two weeks and I know they want to sit down with you and talk officially about your work, your performance, and so on, but before that, we need further details after your last report.”
“Okay. What do you want to know?”
“The English spy––are you any nearer to finding his location?”
“Not yet. And I’m not sure that I’ll be able to. He’s good.”
“Too good for you?”
“Probably not. But they are withholding information from me. It makes it very much harder.”
“Have you seen Control again?”
“Daily progress reports. It’s all one-way, though. I get nothing back.”
“Do you know why they are looking for him?”
“He tried to resign. They wouldn’t tell me why. But they’re not happy.”
“The fuss with the other agent––in London?”
“Classified. Like almost everything else. But obviously connected.”
“What about him?”
“Milton? He knows how to drop out of sight.”
“But they value him?”
“Yes––very much. I get the impression he was one of their best. I’d say this has caused them serious problems. They are very keen to have him back.”
“Colonel Shcherbakov is to be kept up-to-date. You must contact me if you make a breakthrough.”
“Why is he so interested?”
“You know better than to ask that.”
“Yes. But––?”
“I believe they have something planned for Mr. Milton.”
Anna’s iPhone bleeped.
Roman cocked an eyebrow.
She took it out of her pocket and checked it. She had set up the system to ping her if any of her selectors were tripped. The message said that that was precisely what had happened.
“What is it?”
“The spy. I might have found him.”
SHE GUNNED the Triumph on the way back to headquarters, touching seventy as she weaved through the slow-moving evening traffic. She didn’t wait to strip out of her leathers as she hurried through security for the second time.
The report that the system had emailed to her indicated that the selector that had been triggered was for fingerprints.
A finger print?
Seriously?
She jogged to her desk and sat down and there it was: a scanned PDF of a row of fingerprints, inked onto a strip of paper with instructions in Spanish printed along the side in green ink. The strip had, at some point, been scanned and dumped into a database. The NSA’s XKEYSCORE program had picked it up in transit.
“No fucking way.”
She sat down and fumbled for her mouse, scrolling through the metadata.
NAME: JOHN SMITH
ALIAS: None
DOB: Unspecified
SEX: M
RACE: White, Caucasian
HEIGHT: 182
WEIGHT: 80
EYE COLOUR: Blue
HAIR COLOUR: Black
SCARS/TATTOOS: Scar on face // Tattoo (angel wings) on back.
RESIDENCE: None
OCCUPATION: Cook
SOC. SEC. NO.: Unspecified
STATE ID NO.: Foreign
LOCATION: Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, MEX
ORGINATING AGENCY: Juá. Muncipal Police, District 12
OFFICIAL TAKING PRINTS: Lt. Jesus R Plato
“Fuck,” she said. The probability matrix was off the charts: the name, personal statistics, identifying features, the metadata all ringing back super-strong hits. But the prints themselves were the thing: the system had matched them with the positive set that she had taken from Milton’s SAS file and they were unquestionably the same.
The loops and ridges, whorls and arches, delta points and type lines.
One set fitted snugly over the other when they were overlaid.
That kind of thing couldn’t be a mistake or a coincidence.
It was him. There was no doubt about it.
She moused over to the second data packet that had been marked for her and opened it.
She nearly fell off her chair.
Pictures, too?
There were two: front and profile. In the first, Milton stared out into the camera. His eyes were the iciest blue and his expression implacable. He had a full beard and his hair was unkempt. The second offered a clear angle of the scar that curled down from his scalp. He was holding a chalkboard with his name and a reference number. Again, the board was written in Spanish. It was marked Ciudad Juárez.
“Hello, Milton,” she said. “I found you, you sneaky ublyudok. I found you.”
* * *
DAY THREE
Desperado
* * *
“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”
Ernest Hemingway
“If Juarez is a city of God, it is because the Devil is scared to come here.”
Street dicho, or saying.
* * *
32.
ADOLFO GONZÁLEZ slammed the door of the hotel behind him and stalked to his car. He had been furious and the girls had borne the brunt of his temper. There were two of them this time, just the right age, plucked from outside the car park of the maquiladora that made the zips for the clothes that bargain retailers sold over the border and in Europe. His men had called him and told him that the two were waiting for him in the usual place. He had bought the hotel a year ago, just for this purpose, and it had earned back the hundred thousand dollars he had paid for it. Earned it back and then some.
Esmeralda and Ava.
They had struggled a little. More than usual, anyway. He preferred it like that.
He’d leave the cleanup to the others.
He took off his bloodied latex gloves and dropped them into the trash. He opened the door of his car and slipped into the front seat. His ride was a 1968 Impala Caprice, ‘Viva La Raza’ written across the bonnet in flaming cursive, the interior featuring puffy cream-coloured cushions and a child’s doll on the dash, dressed in a skirt bearing the colours of the Mexican flag. The car seats were upholstered in patriotic green, white and red.
He took off his dirty shirt, took a replacement from the pile on the rear seat, tore off its plastic wrapping and put it on. He opened the glove compartment, took a packet of baby wipes and cleaned his face. His movements were neat and precise: the shallow crevices on either side of his nose, the depressions at the edge of his lips, the hollows in the corner of his eyes. He pulled a fresh wipe to mop the moisture from his brow, tossed the shirt and the wipes into the trash, took a bottle of cologne and sprayed it on each side of his throat, then quickly worked a toothpick around his teeth. Better. Once he was finished, he enjoyed his ‘breakfast’––a generous blast up each nostril from the cocaine-filled bullet that he carried in the righ
t-hand hip pocket of his jeans. The cocaine was unadulterated, fresh from the plane that had brought it up from Colombia. It was excellent and he had another couple of blasts. He hadn’t slept for two straight nights. He needed something to keep him alert. That should do the trick.
Adolfo was always angry, but last night had been unusually intense. His father had been the cause of it. The old man had castigated him as they drove back to Juárez yesterday evening. The gringo bastardos had angered him and so he had taken out that anger on his son. He had told him––ordered him––to find the journalist and the cook. They were to be found and killed without delay.
Fine.
With pleasure.
He started the car and crossed town, the traffic slowing him up, cars jamming behind the big busses that took the women to and from the factories. The busses stirred up layers of grey dust that drifted into the sky and rendered the sun hazy, settling back down again on the lanes and the labyrinth of illicit electricity cabling that supplied the colonia shacks. When he pulled into the vast car park that surrounded La Case del Mole he was hot and irritated. He shut off the engine and did another couple of blasts of coke. He got out. He took a pistol from the trunk, slotted home a fresh magazine, pushed it into his waistband, pulled his shirt over it and walked across the asphalt. There was blood there: a pool of blood so thick that it was still sticky underfoot, two days later, the still congealing red glistening in the sunlight.
He climbed the steps and knocked on the glass door. Nothing. He turned to look out at the city: the belching smokestacks, the traffic spilling by on the freeway on the other side of the border, the heat haze. He turned again and tried the handle. It was locked. He took a step back and kicked the glass; it took another kick to crack it and a third to stove it all the way through. He reached through the broken glass, unlocked the door from the inside and stepped into the lobby.
He paused, listening. He sniffed the air. He heard someone in the other room, hurrying in his direction.
