by Mark Dawson
“What the fuck you doing?”
He was a fat man, his belly straining against a dirty t-shirt.
“You in charge here?”
“What the fuck you doing, man, breaking the fucking door like that?”
“Are you in charge?”
“Who’s asking?”
“Better just answer the question, friend.”
“Alright, yeah, sure––as far as you’re concerned, I am in charge. And unless you tell me what the fuck you think you’re doing, busting the door like that, I’m going call the cops.”
Adolfo pulled back his jacket to show a holstered Glock. “Wouldn’t do that,” he said.
“Oh Jesus, I’m sorry––I didn’t mean to cause offence.”
“You didn’t?”
“No, sir. I’m sorry if I did. I’ve had a hell of a couple of days.”
Adolfo fingered one of the lobster pots that had been fixed to the wall. “What’s the point of this? We’re nowhere near the sea.”
“Just a bit of decoration.”
“It’s plastic. It’s not even real.”
“It’s just for atmosphere.”
Adolfo let the lobster pot fall back again. “What’s your name?”
“Gomez.”
“Well, then, Gomez. I’m looking for one of your cooks.”
Gomez looked at him anxiously. “I don’t ever get to know them that good. We get a high turnover here––in and out, all the time, there’s always someone new practically every day.”
“But you know the one I want to find.”
“The Englishman.”
“English?”
“Sounded like it. The accent––”
“What else?”
“That’s all I got.”
“What does he look like?”
Gomez thought. “Six foot tall. Muscular, but not too much. Black hair. Scruffy. Had a beard. And cold eyes––no light in them.”
“What else?”
“He just started Monday. He was pretty good on a fryer, but, you know, I––”
Adolfo let his jacket swing open again. “Come on, Gomez,” he said. “This is poor. Really––very, very poor.”
The man turned away and scrubbed his fist against his head. “Oh, shit, wait––there is something. He asked if I could recommend a place to stay and so I told him about that place on Calle Venezuela. Shitty place, bums and drunks––just a flophouse, really––I could give you the address if you want.”
“I know where it is.”
Gomez spread his flabby arms. “That’s it––I ain’t got no more.”
“That’s it?”
“I don’t know what else I can tell you.”
A toilet flushed somewhere.
“Who’s that?”
“Maria. Front of house.”
“Tell her to come through.”
The man called out.
“Jesus, Gomez, it’s dark in here.” A woman stood in the doorway. Her hand drifted slowly away from the switch as she saw him. “I knew this wasn’t done with,” she said.
“He wants to know about the cook. The Englishman. Did you speak to him?”
“Only when he came in. Not really.”
Adolfo pulled the pistol from the holster and shot both of them once each through the head, one after the other, and put the gun back in the holster. The woman had just enough time to open her mouth in surprise as she fell. Adolfo walked back out to his car. He got in, started it and backed around and drove out onto the busy road and back towards the middle of town.
* * *
33.
HE WOUND THE window down as he drove through the city, an old Guns and Roses CD playing loud, his arm out of the window, drumming the beat with his fingers. Welcome to the Jungle. That was just about right. Welcome to the fucking jungle. He turned off the road and onto the forecourt of the hostel and reverse parked. He took out the bullet and did another couple of blasts of cocaine. He went through to the office.
The office was hot. No AC. A television tuned to Telemundo was on in the back, a football match on. The heat made it all woozy. A dazed fly was on its back on the desk, legs twitching. The man behind the desk was dripping with sweat.
“Hola, Señor,” he said. “Can I help you?”
“You have an Englishman staying here?”
“Who’s asking?”
“Yes or no, friend?”
“I can’t tell you anything about our guests, Señor.”
Adolfo smiled, pulled his shirt aside and took out the pistol. “Yes or no?”
The man’s eyes bulged. “Yes. He ain’t here.”
“How long has he been staying?”
“Got in the day before yesterday.”
“Say much?”
“Just that he wanted a bed.”
“That it?”
“Quiet type. Hardly ever here.”
“What time do you expect him back?”
“I don’t know, Señor. He left pretty early yesterday, don’t think he’s been back.”
“He leave any things?”
“Couple of bags.”
“Show me.”
The dormitory was empty. Ten beds, pushed up close together. Curtains drawn. Sweltering hot. A strong smell of sweat, dirty clothes, unwashed bodies. The man pointed to a bed in the middle of the room. It had been neatly made, the sheets tucked in snugly. All the others were unmade and messy. Adolfo told the man to leave and he did. He stood before the bed and sniffed the air. He took the pistol and slid the end inside the tightly folded sheets, prising them up an inch or two. He yanked the sheets all the way off and looked inside them. He prodded the pillows. He looked beneath the bed. There was a bag. He took it and opened it, tipping the contents out onto the bed.
A pair of jeans.
Two t-shirts.
A pair of running shorts.
A pair of running shoes.
Underwear.
Books. English.
‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being.’
‘Great Expectations.’
No money. No passport. No visas.
Adolfo’s cellphone vibrated in his pocket. He fished it out and pressed it to his ear.
“Yes?”
“It’s Pablo.”
“What do you want?”
“You know Beau Baxter?”
“Works for our friends?”
“He’s in town. Spotted him an hour ago.”
“Where?”
“Plaza Insurgents. Avenue de los Insurgents. Driving a red Jeep Cherokee.”
Adolfo ended the call and went back to the office. The television was still on but the man wasn’t there. He went outside, got into his car, and left.
* * *
34.
ANNA STRAIGHTENED the hem of her skirt and knocked on the door.
“Come in.”
There were two men with Control.
“Anna,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”
“That’s alright.”
“Do you know the Foreign Secretary?”
“Only from the newspapers,” she said. She took the man’s outstretched hand.
“Hello, Anna. I’m Gideon Coad.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
Anna noticed Control was fidgeting with his pen and, as she glanced at him, she heard him sigh. He was uncomfortable introducing her to the politician, that much was obvious. She turned to the older man and gave him a polite smile. She was not nervous at all. She felt comfortable, not least because she had done a little illicit research before leaving the office last night. There had been rumours of Coad’s extra-marital affair with a male researcher and, true enough, it had been easy enough to find the evidence to demonstrate that those rumours were true. Emails, bank statements, text messages, hotel receipts. Anna would have been fired on the spot for an unauthorised and frivolous deployment of GCHQ’s resources for the purposes of muck-raking but, if you were good enough––and she most certainly was good enough––there we
re simple enough ways to hide your footsteps.
There was another reason for her amusement: she was right at the heart of government, now.
That was good. It was confirmation that they knew nothing about her at all.
Control turned to the second man. “And this is Captain Pope.”
He was tall and grizzled. Slab-like forehead. A nose that had been broken too many times. Cauliflower ears. Anna recognised the type: unmistakeably a soldier.
“Captain Pope is one of our agents,” Control explained. “Like Captain Milton was.” He cleared his throat. “As you know, the Foreign Secretary has asked for a briefing from you about your findings.”
“Fine. Here.”
She handed them each a folder labelled JOHN MILTON, CAPTAIN. The name was followed by his government record number, neatly typed on the cover. It was a much slimmer volume than the reports she typically provided, but since her predecessor had found nothing at all, she felt that her smirk of pride was justified.
“You wanted everything I could find about him. I’ve written up his early history, plus sections on his time in the army and the SAS, his friendships––that’s a short section––relationships with the opposite sex––even shorter––where he lives, his bank accounts, medical records, the cars he’s driven, and so on and so forth. Everything I could get my hands on. I’ve found a decent amount. There are 300 pages.”
Coad looked at the report with a dismissiveness that Anna found maddening. “The potted version will be fine for now, please.”
She mastered the annoyance that threatened to flash in her eyes, nodded with polite servility and, when she began to speak, her voice was clipped and businesslike.
“Milton is a very private man but, even so, I was able to build up a picture of his life in the years before he disappeared. He’s forty years old, as you know. Single. He married a Danish national in 1999. Martha Olsen. A librarian. There were no children and the marriage didn’t last; they were divorced two years later. Olsen has remarried and has two children and save a couple of emails and texts between them they don’t appear to have kept in touch. There have been affairs with other women: a businesswoman in Chelsea; a Swiss lawyer in Basel; a tourist in Mauritius. Nothing serious, though.”
“Milton’s not marriage material,” Pope said.
“My main task was to find Mr. Milton’s current location. That was not a simple assignment. He is evidently an expert in going off the grid and it would appear that he has an unusual dedication to doing that––this is not the sort of man who makes silly mistakes. The task was made considerably more complicated by the fact that all the information after he started to work for you”––she nodded at Control––“remained classified. That was like having one hand tied behind my back.”
She didn’t try and hide the note of reproach. Control glared at her and then turned to the Foreign Secretary. “Some things about Milton must remain private.”
“Quite. Get on with it, Miss Thackeray.”
“I ran all of the usual searches but none of them paid off. I wasn’t able to find anything on him at all. No obvious sources of income––”
“Then how is he affording to live?”
“Frugally. There was a withdrawal of £300 in Liverpool before you lost him but nothing since. He has £34,534 left in the account. It’s been untouched for six months. He’s not stupid––he knows that’s the first place a decent analyst would look. There is another savings account with another £20,000, also untouched. No pension.”
Pope laughed. “He wouldn’t have anticipated retirement. Not that sort of job.”
“My guess would be that he has been picking up work on the way. Bar work? Bouncing? Something that attracts migrants. Cash-in-hand, no questions asked. I don’t think we’ll be able to find anything substantial. How detailed shall I be?”
“Whatever you think is relevant.”
“There’s been no correspondence with any of the few contacts I was able to find,” she continued, casting a reproachful look at Control. “He has no family and there have been no emails, calls or texts to the friends he does have. He dropped off the face of the earth.”
“And yet you found him.”
“Mostly down to a stroke of luck. He was fingerprinted in Mexico. Ciudad Juárez. The Mexican police upload all their data to a central database in Mexico City and we picked it up en route. Pictures, too.”
She flicked to the page with the picture of Milton in the police station.
“And there he is,” Pope said.
“This was taken on Monday night. Standard procedure. The passport he gave to the local police is a fake.”
“He’ll have several,” Pope observed.
“I’m sure he does.”
“What else?”
“Knowing which passport he has been using made it much easier to get more on him––like where he’s been for the last six months, for example.” She flipped forwards to a double-page map of South America. “The red line marks the route that he’s taken. Passport data is collected at most borders these days and that data is very easy to find. Once I knew the number of the passport that he was using it was quick to find out where he’s been. He landed in Santos in Brazil in August. He came ashore from the MSC Donata, a cargo ship registered in Panama. It sailed from Liverpool two weeks earlier. From there, he started west. He crossed into Paraguay at Pedro Juan Caballero, then into Bolivia and Peru. Since then, he’s always headed north––Ecuador, Colombia, Nicaragua, Guatemala then Mexico. Most of the time he was photographed at the border, and I have those pictures, too.”
She flicked through to a series of photographs. The tall cranes of Santos appeared in one picture and the barren deserts of the Brazilian interior in another. Milton was looking into the camera for some of them, bored and impatient. Others had been taken without him noticing.
She scratched her head. The Foreign Secretary examined her with searching eyes. “So he’s been in South America since you lost track of him,” she said. “No idea what he’s been doing in between his border crossings. But we do know where he is now. He came across the Mexican border at Tapachula four weeks ago, travelling by bus. He’s been heading north and it looks like he got to Juárez earlier this week. We’ve got the police pictures and the prints and so I tried to find something else. I ran face recognition on everything I could think of and picked up this. They’re from CCTV from a restaurant in the city.”
She turned to the series of stills she had grabbed. Milton was approaching the camera across a broad parking lot. He had a rucksack slung over his shoulder. Black glasses obscured his eyes. He was tanned and heavily bearded.
“How did you find that?” Coad asked.
“The software’s pretty good if you can narrow the search for it a little. There was a disturbance at this restaurant the same day this was taken. A shooting. Seven people were killed. Footage from all of the cameras in the area was uploaded by the police. I was already deep into their data. Made it a lot easier to find.”
Control scowled at the pictures. “Was he involved?”
“Don’t know.”
“Was he arrested?”
“Don’t think so.”
Coad held up his hand. He paused for a moment, drumming the fingers of his right hand on the armrest of his chair before turning to her again.
“Do you know where he is?”
“No,” she admitted.
“You’ve checked hotels?”
“First thing I checked. Nothing obvious. He’ll be paying in cash.”
“So where do we look first?”
“Lieutenant Jesus Plato––the policeman who fingerprinted him. He’s the best place to start.”
“And if we should decide to send agents to Mexico to find him … what is your estimate of the odds that we would find him?”
“I can't answer that. I’d be speculating.”
“Then speculate,” Control said.
“If he’s as good as I think he is, he won’
t stay in once place for more than a week or two and he’s been in Juárez since Monday. Plus there’s the danger that what happened at the restaurant might have spooked him. But if you’re quick? Like in the next couple of days? Decent odds, I’d say. He won’t know you’re coming. If he’s moved on, he won’t be far away. A decent analyst might be able to pick up a trail.”
Control looked across at Coad and, at the latter’s curt nod, he turned back to Anna. “We’ve been in contact with the Mexican government. They’ve given us approval to send a team into Mexico to bring him out. Captain Pope will be in charge. Six agents and you, Ms. Thackeray.”
“Oh.”
“Are you willing to go?”
“I’ll do what I’m told.”
Pope nodded at her. “Juárez is not a small place,” he said, “and, if you’ve done your research, you’ll know it’s not the easiest city in the world to find something. It’s overrun with the drug cartels. Normal society has broken down completely. We might need help tracking him down. And you know him as well as anybody.”
“Well?” Coad said.
“Of course,” she said.
Control nodded brusquely. “You’ll be flying from Northolt and landing at Fort Bliss in Texas. You’ll go over the border from there. Do you have any questions?”
“When?” she said.
“First thing tomorrow.”
ANNA RODE home, changed out of her leathers and went out for a walk. Pittville Park was nearby and she made her way straight for the Pump Room and the ornamental lakes. The building was a fine example of Regency architecture and the lakes were beautiful but Anna was not distracted by them. She slowed as she approached the usual bench. She sat and pretended to watch the dogs bounding across the grass. When she was satisfied that she was not observed, she reached down beneath the bench, probing for the metal bars that held the wooden slats in place. Her fingers brushed against the narrow plastic box with the magnetic strip that held it against the rusted metal. She retrieved the box, opened the end and slid the memory stick inside. It contained her full report on Milton, plus the regular updates that she provided on the operation and scope of GCHQ’s data-gathering activities. She didn’t know how long she would be out of the country, and she did not want to be late in filing. She paused again, checked left and right, waited, and then reached back and pressed the case back into its place. As she left for home, she swiped the piece of chalk that she held in her hand against the side of the metal bin next to the chair.
