Delivering Caliban (John Purkiss 2)

by Tim Stevens

  He’d always known today was coming. He just couldn’t be sure what form it would take.

  *

  He wandered the corridors to the elevator. Krugmann emerged from his temporary office behind him.

  ‘You off?’

  ‘Yeah. Thanks,’ said Giordano, without turning round.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ Krugmann said sourly.

  When he’d been in Manhattan on previous occasions and had needed to think, and when the weather was fine, Giordano had walked complete circuits of the perimeter of Central Park, and it was there he headed out of habit. But there really wasn’t anything to think about. There was no plotting to be done, no strategy to work out in his head.

  He would no more organise back up, or inform anybody of his movements, or have a GPS trace put on his cell phone, than he would ignore Pope’s summons. He would be at the appointed place, in the Board Room annex of the Holtzmann Solar offices, at the appointed time of ten o’clock, which was three hours from now. Access to the office would be simple; God knew he was regarded as a figure of authority there, even though he hadn’t been near the place for more than a decade.

  He would meet Pope there, and he’d see in the young man’s face the ghost of his father. Giordano recalled, clear as light, the moment Taylor had presented him with evidence of Geoffrey Pope’s true identity. Taylor had voiced his suspicions weeks earlier but Giordano hadn’t wanted to believe. The man he knew as Rickman, the British former intelligence operative who could secure financial backing for the worldwide manufacturing and distribution of the drug from the Caliban project, was still an active SIS agent. They’d been penetrated, compromised, and it was through Giordano’s weakness; because Giordano had liked the man.

  He hadn’t been Giordano to Rickman, any more than Rickman had been Pope to him. Instead, he’d been Zaccardo, or just Z. But at the end, when Giordano had watched three of his men hold Rickman – Pope – down while a fourth jammed the needle in, Pope had whispered his name – Giordano – while staring into his eyes with a look almost of triumph.

  As if the man had known today would arrive, like an arm clawing out of the past.

  Yes, Giordano thought as he made his way up Eighth Avenue, he’d meet Pope at the appointed place, and Pope would kill him. But first, Pope would do something to his daughter. To Nina. And that was what Giordano had to prevent, if it was the last thing he did. Which it certainly would be.

  *

  Had he loved her?

  He was using the walk around the periphery of the park not to plan, but to review, as if the meaning of a decade and a half – a lifetime, really – could be crystallised in the space of an hour’s stroll.

  Giordano had met Carmen Ramirez in 1986, at Langley. He was by then vying for the Central America desk. The Iran-Contra scandal was coming to the boil – the lid would blow off that November – and it was widely expected that heads would roll and new blood would be needed. Giordano was well respected and a strong candidate for the post, but he was up against somebody who had an edge over him, someone marginally more senior and more of an ass kisser.

  Carmen was a probationer of twenty-five, a year out of college and at an entry-level accounting job in the Company. She was bright, she had a sharp eye for financial irregularities, and she was beautiful. It started as a fling. Giordano was ten years older than her and acutely aware of the need not to be seen as abusing his authority over her.

  She fell pregnant, and Giordano made his decision. They were married in the fall. Giordano now had a direct connection with Latin America, and a reason to visit Honduras regularly to see Carmen’s family. Over the following year, through Nina’s birth and beyond, he developed an intimate familiarity with the country, learning to speak the local dialect fluently.

  It swung it for him. The new broom of 1987 swept out the dead wood and propelled Giordano to the job he wanted. He’d made it his own, pulling off some spectacular successes – the groundwork for the Noriega ousting in Panama in 1989 was his doing, as was the bringing about of the elections in Nicaragua the following year.

  And then, in the next half-decade, came the increasingly intimate contact with Holtzmann Solar and Giordano’s growing interest in what one of their prototype compounds promised. In Honduras, the notorious Battalion 316, the death squad that had operated in the eighties, had been disbanded but many of its personnel remained, and it was through these men that Giordano was able to procure both impoverished volunteers for the Caliban project and somewhat less voluntary subjects.

  In 1997 Giordano took the job as Company station chief for Honduras. It was a step down, career-wise, but Giordano assured the Director that it was for a limited time only, maximum two years, and would allow him to build richer networks in the region than he’d otherwise manage. And so Giordano, Carmen, who’d by that time left the Company, and little Nina relocated to Tegucigalpa.

  Giordano had moved his family to the island off the coast when the trials had begun in 1998. He was spending increasing amounts of time on the island, and felt Carmen and Nina would be safer there with him rather than on the mainland. Accordingly, he’d arranged for Nina to take six months out of school, to be made up for by private tutoring when they returned. Carmen was furious. Carmen was also by then well aware that Giordano’s activities had crossed the line into illegality, and her guilt at her complicity paralysed her, prevented her from defying him.

  Yet, in the end, she had defied him. As the hurricane approached the island that fateful October, her hysteria had spilled over into concrete threats. She would take Nina and flee, go straight to the Director and to the FBI and the New York Times and tell them everything. Giordano had never been an impulsive man, and he’d taken the decision to silence her in his usual measured way. He hadn’t done the act himself, had left it to Jablonsky and Taylor.

  Giordano had been coming down Museum Mile on the park’s east side, but found that he’d wandered a couple of blocks away, to Park Avenue. Before him loomed the Church of St Ignatius Loyola. He stared up at the crucified figure.

  He felt nothing. No yearning for absolution, no stirrings of conscience. The guilt was a gnarled and twisted thing inside him, like an alcoholic’s cirrhotic, dead liver.

  Ten to eight. A little over two hours until he met his destiny.

  Forty-One

  9.20 am

  ‘He’s not there,’ said Berg.

  Purkiss turned. He’d been staring off through the window to the west because gazing at the walls only added to his sense of frustrated crampedness. ‘They say where he is?’

  ‘No. But they wouldn’t, would they.’ She dropped the phone on the desk.

  Berg had rung Langley, identified herself as FBI and asked to speak to Raymond Giordano. She’d made it through to a secretary.

  ‘You couldn’t get his cell phone number, by any chance?’

  Berg: ‘They’d never give it out to someone of my rank.’

  ‘What about a tap on it?’

  ‘Even harder. Besides, it’d take a couple of hours at least to find a judge with the cojones to authorise it.’

  Purkiss knuckled his forehead. They had no direct access to Pope. But there was a possibility, a strong one, that he’d either been in contact with Giordano or knew his whereabouts and was closing in on him. Giordano was their route to Pope, but they couldn’t find him either.

  Perhaps he was wrong to focus on Giordano. Perhaps there was a way of anticipating Pope’s movements. In his mind Purkiss replayed everything he’d learned about Pope over the last few hours. He rewound it and replayed it again. Rewound and replayed.

  ‘Douglas Torrance.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The name on the British driver’s licence Pope used to rent the car in Charlottesville. Run a check on it.’

  ‘He won’t still be using that now,’ said Berg.

  ‘I know. But he might have used it before.’

  *

  ‘Yeah. Here we are.’

  She jabbed a fing
er at the monitor.

  ‘When he arrived here at JFK on Sunday night, he used ID with the name Brian Sopwith. That doesn’t come up again. But he used a passport with the Douglas Torrance ID to enter the US, also via JFK, on April fifth this year. Departed April fourteenth. And before that, through Washington D.C., from January twelfth till February first.’

  ‘What?’ Purkiss frowned at the screen. ‘He’s been here twice already this year?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  It was intelligence he should have unearthed earlier, and now there was almost too much to process. ‘Can you dig deeper? Find out if he rented any cars, did anything else that left a paper trail?’

  ‘Sure.’ Her fingers sped over the keys.

  Ten minutes later she said, ‘Yep. This is a good one. DMV says he took ownership of a light truck on April eighth. That’s three days after he arrived in the country on his last visit..’

  ‘A light truck.’

  ‘Yeah. This make.’ She brought up some images. It looked like a large transit van. ‘Not typically for recreational use. The kind of thing you’d get if you wanted to transport something.’

  ‘Any other mention of this particular vehicle?’

  ‘No. It hasn’t come up since. No accidents, no mentions that it’s been found abandoned or anything.’

  Purkiss thought about it. ‘Does it say where he bought the vehicle?’

  ‘Yes. A used car dealership in Poughkeepsie. That’s upstate.’

  ‘Can you call them? See how he paid?’

  ‘Ah. I see what you’re getting at.’ Berg picked up her phone.

  It took several calls: the first to establish that nobody was in the dealer’s office yet, subsequent ones to discover the identity of the proprietor and get him at home. He took the time to check Berg’s credentials with her office, and she was relieved when her boss vouched for her. Then the man had to get to his office. He rang back in twenty minutes.

  Purkiss heard the dealer’s side of the conversation over the phone’s speaker. Pope had paid with a credit card, also in the name of Douglas Torrance. It was a risk, using the same ID multiple times, but Purkiss supposed somebody who was obviously foreign like Pope would be required to provide several different forms of identification when doing something like purchasing a car.

  Berg rang the credit card company, had to go through an even more rigorous process of checking and transfers from one personnel member to another, and was eventually granted access. Purkiss looked at his watch. Eight forty.

  ‘Holy - Look at this.’

  Berg’s tone made even Kendrick wander over.

  She said: ‘During his last visit, on April sixth, Torrance AKA Pope laid down two months’ rent in advance on his credit card.’

  ‘Rent for what?’ said Purkiss.

  ‘An apartment in Manhattan.’ She brought up a detailed street map. ‘Here. In Midtown East.’

  Purkiss and Kendrick watched as she zoomed the view in. ‘This block.’

  ‘What’s that next to it?’ Purkiss asked. Berg called up Google Earth, entered the address and swung the view to street level.

  The apartment block looked fifteen or twenty stories high, but was dwarfed by a broad-based, soaring building beside it.

  ‘The Loomis Building,’ said Berg.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Offices, I believe,’ she said. She typed the name in to Google and a list came up.

  ‘My God,’ said Purkiss.

  Occupying all thirty-four floors of the Loomis Building were the offices of Holtzmann Solar.

  *

  Purkiss took the stairs three at a time, Berg and Kendrick jostling behind him. The crosstown journey could take any time at all, Berg said, given that it was morning rush hour.

  She was still driving Nakamura’s Taurus and had parked on a yellow line up on the kerb. She had the engine running before Purkiss had strapped himself in.

  In the small of his back, Purkiss felt the pressure of the Glock, now reloaded.

  Berg put a flasher on the roof and turned on the sound. The Taurus howled through the streets heading eastwards.

  ‘Just in the beginning, to clear the path,’ she said.

  Even so, the traffic threatened to snarl them and she had to detour south and loop round. Purkiss slowed his breathing, concentrated on feeling his heart beat steadily rather than gallop. He needed to be at the peak of the adrenaline curve later, when it mattered, not now.

  They were crossing Broadway, Purkiss recognised, when two sirening marked police cars cut across them, heading in the same direction.

  ‘Shit,’ said Berg. ‘I forgot this.’ She turned on the radio.

  It immediately squawked into life, voices criss-crossing and initially unintelligible over the static.

  All units to First. Repeat, all units.... First. Loomis Building....evacuation......

  Forty-Two

  9.40 am

  Pope heard the sirens distantly and saw that Nina had, too. The triple glazing of the windows muffled the sound remarkably. The glass, the space, the location... all contributed to the colossal price tag of the apartment’s rent. But that didn’t matter; it was a one-off payment, three months’ rent in advance, and it had bought him the location he wanted.

  He and Nina sat in the middle of the expanse of the living room, among the modernist-spartan pieces of furniture. The heavy drapes were drawn across the wall-length windows that opened on to the balcony, and they would stay drawn for the time being.

  The alarm sounded outside in the corridor, mirroring the klaxons that were going off on every one of the building’s other twenty-one floors.

  Despite himself Pope was interested in the logistics of the evacuation. Would the police or the fire department do a door-to-door search of the building, ensuring everybody had vacated the apartments? Or would they rely on a head count, measured against the doorman’s record of who had signed in to the apartment block, and concentrate their efforts on clearing everyone out of the Loomis building? Even if they did come knocking door to door, they’d hardly expect anyone to be actively hiding in any of the apartments. Pope and Nina were in no danger of being discovered.

  The response had been quick, he had to admit. They’d taken the service lift from the basement, just as he had done before entering Grosvenor’s flat when he’d first arrived in the city this time, and had reached the nineteenth-storey apartment without encountering another soul. Pope had sat Nina down on the sofa, a singularly uncomfortable-looking piece of furniture just like the rest, and had stood while he made the call.

  He’d seen Nina’s eyes widen perceptibly as she’d listened.

  ‘There’s a bomb in the Loomis Building, Park Avenue,’ he said, once the 911 dispatcher had put him through to the police. ‘I’m going to set it off within the next hour. It’s going to bring down the entire building. I suggest you take the necessary steps to avoid substantial loss of life.’

  And that was the extent of it. The sirens stared up within ten minutes. He’d – briefly – wondered if he’d be treated as a hoaxer. Perhaps before that day in the autumn of 2001 he would have been.

  *

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

  He sat opposite her on another uncomfortable chair, leaned forward.

  She raised her head. Her eyes were calm but questioning.

  ‘You’re letting them get all those people out.’

  ‘Because they don’t all deserve to die. Some of them do, but it’s impossible to separate them out. So they have to live, to avoid killing innocents.’

  Pope regarded himself as honest, at least with himself. such honesty made him acknowledge inwardly that his explanation was only partially satisfactory. Yes, large-scale loss of life would be tragic, and unjustified, morally. But there was another reason he wanted everybody cleared out of the building. Almost everybody.

  It meant he’d have uninterrupted time to talk to Z.

  After the call to the police, after he’d shut the switc
hboard woman off in mid-question, he’d dialled again. It was answered even more quickly than the 911 call.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you in the building?’

  ‘Yes. I’m in the elevator.’ Giordano – Z – sounded out of breath. ‘Heading up to the boardroom annex now. Where –’

  ‘They’re going to start evacuating the building very soon,’ said Pope. ‘Under no circumstances allow yourself to be removed. You understand why, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I understand.’

  ‘Hide if you have to. But be unobtrusive. And be there at ten o’clock.’

  Pope rang off.

  He walked over to the drapes and peered through the crack, in case Giordano was already there, in the specified room. But there was no movement at the glass.

  The clatter of helicopters had started up, and in the distant sky Pope saw them converging like bees.

  *

  He’d laid the groundwork over the last ten years. The practical details of the plan had been set up in the last four months.

  Once Pope had obtained the names and whereabouts of the four of them – Jablonsky, Taylor, Grosvenor and of course Giordano himself – it had been a matter of working out a schedule, one that would allow him to follow a path that would take out the first three as economically and yet as visibly as possible while keeping up enough momentum to prevent Giordano from stopping him. That path had begun in Amsterdam, almost been scuppered by Purkiss before leading to New York, and then via Charlottesville back to Manhattan.

  Pope realised quickly, once he tracked Giordano down and discovered his senior position at Langley, that he’d never reach the man directly. His home was similarly next to impossible to find: its location was such a cleverly concealed secret that Pope had marvelled when his repeated attempts had failed to find it. So, Giordano would have to be got at by another route. Pope based his strategy on a gamble: he believed, from his repeated analysis of his father’s diary notes, that Giordano had strong feelings for the daughter he’d abandoned, and that she would provide a point of access.