The Righteous Men (2006)

by Sam Bourne

  Yet, now he flicked a few pages back in the notebook to see his encounter with the medical examiner and Oxford man, Allan Russell. ‘Contemporaneous’ was his verdict on the needle mark. It was strange but inescapable: Baxter’s killers had anaesthetized him first.

  Will clicked back on to the Macrae story. No talk of injections there. Just a frenzied stabbing. He sat back in his chair. Another hunch was evaporating. He had thought he was going to prove these two deaths were somehow connected. Not just by the odd coincidence of the word ‘righteous’ but something physical. A real tie that might suggest a pattern. But it was not there. What had he got? Two deaths which had good-guy victims in common. That was it so far. In one case, Baxter’s, there had been a weird twist: he had been sedated before he was killed. That was not true of Macrae.

  Or rather, Will had no idea if it was true or not. The police had never mentioned it — but he had never asked. He had not seen Macrae’s body; he had not met the coroner. It had not been that kind of story. And if he had not asked, then no one had. After all, the Macrae death had hardly been a big deal. Apart from a few briefs written on the night, no paper had run much on it — until Will’s story in The New York Times, of course.

  Will reached instantly for his cell phone, punching at the internal phonebook. There was only one person who could help. He hit J for Jay Newell.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Saturday, 10.26pm, Manhattan

  ‘This is Jay.’

  ‘Jay, thank God I got you.’ Newell was the member of Will’s Columbia set who had taken the least likely career route. He was a fast-tracker at the New York Police Department, leapfrogging over all the old doughnut-munchers on his way to becoming a big city commissioner before he was forty. Jay was as resented by the old guard cops as Will was by the aged newsmen.

  ‘It’s Will. Yeah, I’m fine. Well, I’m in a bit of a jam but I can’t explain it now. I need you to do me a very large favour.’

  ‘OK.’ But the word was drawn out.

  ‘Jay, I need you to check out something. I wrote a piece in the paper this week—’

  ‘About that pimp guy? Saw it. Well done on making the front page, big fella.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks. Look, I never checked autopsy reports or anything. Do you have access to those?’

  ‘It’s the weekend, Will. I’m kind of, you know.’

  Will looked at his watch. It was late on a Saturday night; Jay was a single guy with a lot of girlfriends. Will guessed he had called at a spectacularly inconvenient moment. ‘I know. But I bet you have the authority to see whatever you want, whenever you want.’ The old flattery manoeuvre. Jay would not want to admit that, as it happened, he did not have that kind of access.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘I want you to see if there were any unusual marks on the victim’s body.’

  ‘I thought the guy was stabbed like a million times.’

  ‘He was, but he was still in one piece. I want you to see if there was anything like a needle mark on him.’

  ‘Some pimp scumball from Brownsville, you kidding? The amount of drugs these guys are whacking into their veins, he probably looked like a pincushion.’

  ‘I don’t think so. None of the people I spoke to said anything about injecting drugs. In fact, no one said he used drugs at all.’

  ‘OK, my man. Whatever you say. I’ll check it out. This the right cell for you?’

  ‘Yeah. And I need whatever you’ve got really fast. Thanks, Jay. I owe you.’

  Suddenly he could hear voices, followed by a burst of laughter. It seemed to be a knot of men, walking in this direction. And then, louder than the others, the unmistakable intonation of Townsend McDougal, talking newsroom talk.

  ‘Can we hold it for twenty-four hours? Do we have this to ourselves?’

  Will had no idea why they would be heading towards this barren part of the third-floor landscape: they had no shortage of meeting rooms at their end. Oh God. Maybe McDougal was looking for Will, coming with a posse of senior executives this time, to begin the inquisition right away.

  He could not risk that, not now. At top speed, with too little time to check what he was doing, Will shoved the essentials — cell phone, notebooks, pen, BlackBerry — off his desk and into his bag, wheeled around and headed away from the McDougal ambush. The only perk of this faraway corner of the office, Will realized at that very moment, was its proximity to the back stairway. He had never used it before, but now was the time.

  Once outside, Will gulped in the Saturday night air. He let his eyes close in relief, leaning backwards against the wall, the Times clock just above his head.

  It was late, and quiet. In normal circumstances, Will liked this vibe. Working at a time when the rest of the city was not; leaving a half-empty office and walking into the Manhattan evening. It was such a contrast with the usual throng that bustled down this street. No one around, save a lonely tourist in sleeveless body-warmer and baseball hat peering into one of the Times display windows, doubtless looking at an antique printing press or a framed photograph of the late Mr Sulzberger shaking hands with Harry Truman or something. He must be cold, standing around outside. But Will was in a hurry to get away. He barely saw him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Saturday, 11.02pm, Manhattan

  TC’s room was just how he would have imagined it and, he realized now, he had indeed imagined it. Perhaps a dozen times since his marriage to Beth he had thought about TC not just for a second or two, but in long, extended sessions. Daydreams, really, in which he had brought back to himself her face, her voice, her smell. In these reveries of thought sometimes staring out of an aeroplane window, sometimes during a night drive while Beth slept in the passenger seat next to him — he had followed TC out of the past they had shared and into the present he could only imagine. He would work hard to conjure her face, four years older. Or to see her at work. Or to picture the man she was with now.

  And in these wonderings, he saw the front door of her apartment opening to afford a view of bookshelves and cream coloured couches and a neglected, small-screen TV. He would have to push himself — though not too hard, lest the effort break the spell — to update TC’s taste. It was too easy to put her in a grad student’s digs, as if she had stayed frozen in their Columbia winter romance. He wanted to imagine his former girlfriend as she would be now.

  He had done a good job. The room was less bohemian than the studio where he had seen TC the previous night. Much of the furniture was vaguely ethnic — dark wood tables that Will guessed were from India or Thailand; a pair of Moroccan window-shutters in distressed blue wood, not attached to a window but hung on the wall, like a painting. Mementos, Will guessed, from some serious travelling: TC had been a fearless explorer, even when he knew her.

  Still, there were no incense sticks, no batiks flung over couches. Instead the place was uncluttered, almost minimalist in its preference for clean space. He knew that TC had been reluctant to let him in here, but when Will phoned from outside the Times office, she explained that she had grown tired of cafe-hopping. She needed to shower, to sleep in her own bed — and to hell with the risk. Will, who had earlier fired off a text accusing YY of ‘horseshit games,’ knew exactly how she felt. He simply asked for her address and said he would come straight over. He reckoned it was easier on both of them if she had no chance to say no.

  When he came in, she tried to pretend it was no big deal.

  There was no ceremonial flinging open of the front door, no tour of the apartment. Instead, she let him find her kneeling on the floor in the main room surrounded by yellow Post-it notes. On each one was written a biblical verse. Will recognized them: Chapter 10 of the Book of Proverbs.

  TC was in the middle of them, her sketchbook on her lap, surveying the pattern she had arranged. He crouched down to look at the ink-covered page, and at the Post-its arranged around the hardwood floor, and felt sudden powerful surge — gratitude for this woman who was offering not only emotional
sustenance but a razor-sharp intellect. He felt as if she was saving him.

  In a gesture that was almost involuntary, he reached out to touch the back of TC’s neck, so that his palm touched her skin and his knuckles brushed against her hair. Her head was down, as if she was a coy schoolgirl receiving a prize but now it came up to meet his gaze. Again without conscious thought, a pulse of energy went through Will’s hand, pressing slightly on TC’s neck as if to bring her closer towards him.

  She moved and he moved and now their lips were touching in the lightest of kisses. He could smell her skin, an aroma that made his muscles weaken and his blood race at the same time. It was a familiar feeling, one he had known with TC a thousand times before. His innards seemed to melt, even as his loins hardened.

  She stopped suddenly, gripping his arm with an urgency he knew was not lust. Her mouth was away from his.

  ‘Shhh. What’s that?’

  It was a metallic rattle, now repeated. It seemed to be coming from inside the apartment. They froze, neither risking movement. Will saw his hand still cupping the back of TC’s head, his fingers in her hair, and caught himself. What the hell was he doing? Beth was a hostage in some God-forsaken jail and he was making out with his ex-girlfriend on the floor of her apartment. The shame seemed to congeal somewhere in his guts; he sickened himself.

  He pulled his hand away and pushed back out of the embrace. He was exhausted, he told himself, his spirits sunk.

  It was a reflex, a cry for help, the act of a desperate man, a grasping for human comfort; it was gratitude for all TC had done, it was the familiarity of a former lover, it was a lapse, a moment of madness, the unhappy by-product of a crisis.

  All these explanations coursed through his mind and he knew they were all true. But they would not convince anybody, least of all him.

  TC tensed again, gripping Will’s arm tighter. The buzzing had returned, a grinding, jangling sound. Was someone inside this flat, carrying an electric saw, attempting to muffle it inside a blanket?

  Will now leapt to his feet, striding over to the couch by the front door where he had dumped his coat. He shoved his hand into the side pocket and held up his phone for TC to see: set on silent, it had vibrated against his keys.

  ‘Damn, we missed a call.’

  Will dialled his voicemail. You have one new message. His chest began pounding. What if it was some vital clue? What if it was Beth herself, having wriggled out of her chains and somehow crawled on hands and knees to a phone, only for her husband’s number to ring out — because he was too busy necking with his ex-girlfriend? Will appalled himself.

  At last the message was playing.

  ‘Hey, big fella.’ It was Jay Newell. ‘Don’t know what this is all about and my ass would be in the wringer if anyone knew I had so much as farted in your direction, so this stays strictly in the vault, OK. Capisce? All right, here is the news. Turns out the autopsy report on your friend Howard Macrae found, cue drum roll, a “puncture on the right thigh, consistent with” — get this — “a tranquillizer dart”.’ Newell was beginning to chuckle. ‘Can you believe that? A tranquillizer dart? Like they use to stun elephants in the zoo. Apparently, they fire ‘em from some big safari gun. Anyway, blood tests confirm the guy had a shitload of sedative in his system at ToD as well. Sorry, time of death. I’m going native, Will! I’m talking like a cop! Help! OK, hope that works for you. Give me a call, sometime. We should hook up. And send love to your gorgeous wife from me.’

  Will almost fell into the couch, as if knocked off his feet. He realized now that he had never expected this theory of his to stack up; a Brownsville hustler and a wing-nut from Montana were almost mathematical opposites. He had contacted Newell to confirm that the deaths of Macrae and Baxter could not possibly be linked. With that proved, he could start looking in more likely directions.

  But Yosef Yitzhok had told him to look to his work and so he had. In the lead up to Beth’s abduction, his work had consisted of two bizarre stories at opposite ends of the continent. And yet now Will had proof that they were connected. In life these two victims had both performed an unusually good deed; in death, they had both been anaesthetized before the act of murder. The method of sedation was radically different, just as the killings had been. But it was too much of a coincidence.

  Will began to feel elated. At last he had made progress; a hunch had been vindicated. Somewhere in the events of the last week lay the key to Beth’s kidnapping and, therefore, her freedom. He had come this far, all he had to do was work out the rest. He was closing in.

  Will jumped to his feet, about to stride over to TC and trumpet his breakthrough. Instead he halted after two paces. First, he was hit anew by the memory of a few minutes ago. Now, to add to the shame and self-disgust at his betrayal of Beth, was embarrassment. He had made a pass at TC and both of them would have to act as if it had never happened.

  Then another thought struck him. It surely meant something that Baxter and Macrae had been killed in a similar fashion, but what exactly? Just because these two deaths were apparently related, what did that have to do with Beth’s kidnap? Baxter and Macrae might have lived thousands of miles from each other, but they both lived in different worlds from Beth — and from the Hassidim for that matter. So YY had told him to look to his work, but what possible connection between these three events could there be?

  As he began to pace around the room he wondered: could his stories have served as a trigger for the Hassidim to take Beth? She had gone missing on Friday morning, just as his Baxter story had appeared in print. Could something in that story have set off the plot to kidnap his wife? Was there something in the combination of the two, Baxter and Macrae, that spurred the Hassidim to abduct Beth?

  Will spooled back to last night in Crown Heights. His story on Baxter had been marked and laid out in the room where he had been interrogated. The Hassidim had been discussing it. It was not the by-line that interested them: they already knew he was a reporter for the Times. They had emailed him at the Times address. No, it was the story itself. Or, thought Will for the first time, the stories.

  He reached for his cell phone, finding the inbox of messages and scrolling through the batch from YY. He counted ten, making sure he got past the latest riddles. There it was.

  Decoded, it read : 2 down: More’s to cone.

  At the time, both he and TC thought it was a mere confirmation message. Like one of those computer games: Well done, you have reached level 2, the Castle of Doom. Next, prepare to enter the Sanctum of Fire …

  Now Will saw it differently. ‘2 down’ referred to Macrae and Baxter. But who were the rest?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Saturday, 7.05pm, Cape Town, South Africa

  He used to come here when it was all-white. This beach, with its gentle curve of fair sand, was one of his favourite spots. When he was a student, he would come to ogle the girls and drink beers by the crateload. Back in those days, outsiders thought his country was in flames, consumed by a race war. But it did not feel like that; at least not to him. He was white and well-off and having the time of his life. He knew a couple of guys who had signed a petition, but otherwise politics did not intrude. Besides, as an Afrikaaner who had grown up in the rural heartland of the Transvaal, he was raised to believe the separation of the races, apartheid, was not offensive but natural. On the farm, rabbits and cows had their own places and did not mix, so why should blacks and whites be any different?

  Now the beach looked as beautiful as ever, the water glittering in the moonlight. As he faced the Atlantic Ocean, he could hear the buzz of the bars behind him: a more mixed crowd now, black, white and what he had grown up calling coloured. He tried to tune out the noise; he wanted to listen to his own thoughts.

  Was he elated by what he had just done? He was not sure. Relieved, certainly. He had been planning this moment for months. Each day, taking a different document home — sometimes a diagram, sometimes a string of algebraic numbers until he had built up the full set.<
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  He breathed out heavily. He remembered those years at university, followed by more years in graduate school, most of them spent in a lab. He had become a research pharmacologist by the time he was twenty-seven and had spent the next fifteen years working on a single project, codenamed Operation Help. It was his boss’s little joke, playing on ‘help’ as a synonym. For Andre van Zyl belonged to a team searching for a cure for AIDS.

  They were just a part of it, of course. The headquarters of the research effort was in New York, with satellite teams in Paris and Geneva. The South Africa field office was smaller still, chosen for what the corporate literature called its ‘clinical resonance’. Translation: South Africa had a handy supply of AIDS sufferers.

  They had been testing out new remedies on groups for years now. Andre had been at some of the trials, clinics out in the sticks taking one hundred sick men and women, marking fifty of them as a control group and handing new tablets to the rest. Andre had been at his computer when the results came through. Time after time his reports had had the same conclusion: no impact; statistically negligible results; needs further work.

  But nine months ago, a set of data had come back that could not be ignored. The sample group had shown an improvement unlike any seen before. The symptoms were not just held at bay; they were becoming non-existent. The medication seemed not only to pacify the virus, but to chase it out of the system altogether.

  Within a week, scientists from the Geneva team had flown in to see the patients for themselves. A few days later the head of the entire project arrived from New York. He ordered the control group be put onto the new drugs immediately, on ‘humanitarian grounds’.

  Andre had to laugh at that. For he knew what would happen next. The head honcho from America would publish a paper in Nature, hailing his breakthrough and bidding for the Nobel prize that was surely his, while the US Food and Drug Administration would start testing the new tablet. Once they had given the seal of approval, it would go on sale and make the company they all worked for one of the richest in the world. They had found the holy grail of twenty-first century medicine: they had found a cure for AIDS.