A Wild Justice

by Craig Thomas

  ‘Perhaps they went to school together.’

  ‘Perhaps. Where’s that autopsy report on the dead nurse?’

  ‘Oh, over on my desk — that table in the corner. One of those in that pile. Sort through them, will you? I’ll just get changed — lunchtime, by my stomach’s protests.’

  Vorontsyev nodded and wandered across to the littered trestle table. Dismembered lives, just like the steel bench. A full ashtray, the remains of a sandwich meal, dozens of files. He flicked through one of the neater heaps, preoccupied with the chill of Lensky’s analysis of his current self; the specious, indifferent, lazy, corrupt-by-omission minor bureaucrat he had become.

  Never put your head above the parapet, never volunteer, never suspect, never dig beneath the surface. Mottos to keep a man alive and sane in Novyy Urengoy. The place was full of steamrollers and crushers, waiting for the unwary.

  He found Rawls’ autopsy report. Bakunin must already have the GRU’s copy … He spread the files under his long fingers.

  It’s too late for ideals, he reminded himself. Lensky was whistling to himself as he re-entered the mortuary. The noise seemed like a warning from a bird rather than a tune. Hussain’s dead face, the dead nurse’s face, Rawls’ face — the Iranian carved for inspection like a joint. His hand idly opened another file ‘Found it?’ Lensky asked, slapping him on the shoulder.

  ‘Who’s this?’ Vorontsyev asked in a quiet, halting voice.

  ‘Who?’ The pathologist adjusted his bifocals and studied the photograph and the report. “I remember. Cardiac arrest. Died in his hotel room, without even being on the job or full of drink.

  Congenital heart condition, almost certainly. Why? That was a week ago now. Ambulance got there too late. No suspicious circumstances.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘Need glasses, Alexei? Yuri Maximovich Pomarov. See? From Kiev. A minor subcontractor to the gasfield — to GraingerTurgenev.

  It’s all here.’

  ‘Where’s the body?’

  ‘Flown home for burial, or so I understand. I don’t collect them, Alexei!’ He laughed uproariously. ‘When I told you to light your inner flame again, Alexei, I did mean you to be selective in your enthusiasms! What can this man be to you? He died of a heart attack.’

  ‘Maybe. But why was his picture in a completed Dutch passport, in the possession of Mr Al-Jani of Tehran? If he’s from Kiev, why is he a Dutchman — and how does he come to know our jointed friend behind us?’

  He stared at Vaughn Grainger. The old man, face masked, symbiotically existed with the machines and leads and drips that surrounded him. The nurses paused, checked, passed on — as if already imitating peasant women queuing past an open coffin containing the body of a national hero or dictator. Lock felt separated by more than glass from the faint rise and fall of the sheet over the old man’s chest, from the hidden features and the neatly brushed hair. As distant as he had been as a child from the bodies of his parents.

  He turned away from the window into the private room in the Grainger Wing of the Mountain Park Hospital, hands in his pockets, his features set in appalled, determined planes and creases.

  He had ridden in the ambulance with Grainger, while the paramedics kept him alive. The old man had been cautioned not to move, talk or even think when he came round after his collapse.

  His heart had been damaged, they said. Lock had kept him warm and still until they arrived. But when he opened frightened, knowing eyes in the hurtling rear of the ambulance, he could not be prevented from protestation, as if he had merely been hypnotised during his heart attack. He continued his monologue directed at Lock the moment he regained consciousness.

  He’d held Vaughn’s hand and tried not to squeeze or crush it in his rage and fear at what the old man had to tell him; it had seemed more important than going on living. Stay away from this, John-boy, for your own good … look what happened to Billy, your own sister ~ God’s sake … nothing, do nothing …

  On and on, over and over. Do nothing … people dangerous, ruthless, dangerous people … The pieces shone in the lurid, hard lighting in the rear of the ambulance — shone in his mind like gold become bloodstained. People within Grainger Technologies were engaged in smuggling heroin — incredible to believe, certainly true, the old man’s strain and desperation to convince him showed that. The paramedics hardly attended, except to attempt to quieten Grainger, who would not be silent until Lock promised not to act, to forget, leave it alone …

  He hadn’t, of course. He’d let them put Grainger out again, once he was certain of what he had heard, had his violent, horrified suspicions confirmed. Billy and Beth had been murdered by people inside Grainger Technologies because Billy had uncovered their racket.

  He left the room adjoining Grainger’s and entered the quiet, aseptic corridor. Helped himself to a paper cup and water from the dispenser. It was insipid, stale-seeming in his dry constricted throat. He threw the cup into a wastebasket, and thrust his hands into his pockets.

  Beth had died to conceal evidence of a drug racket. A Russian drug racket, There’d been no names. He wondered if Vaughn even knew them — just what they’d done, what they were capable of doing. He had been unselfishly afraid, in the chaos and fear of his own heart attack, for Lock. He was touched, even indebted … feelings that his rage consumed every time Beth came to mind.

  Billy told me, Billy was dealing with it, Billy …

  … was dead. Like Beth.

  Dead, Vaughn. To keep him quiet and just because she was in the house, just because she was there-Ś!

  He wiped viciously at his eyes, clearing them. A nurse paused as if to speak solicitously, but his features must have repelled her. She hurried away and out of sight around a turn in the corridor, with images of Beth and Billy flickering over her retreating form like pale flames.

  Tran, the Vietnamese … He looked back at the door he had closed on Vaughn Grainger. The old man knew nothing more than he had desperately communicated. There was nothing to keep Lock in the hospital, in Phoenix. Vaughn would live or die according to the doctors’ skills, not his presence or absence.

  He glanced up as he heard noises along the corridor, only then realising he was leaning against the wall like someone in a queue. A gaggle of men in dark suits, women power-dressed, thrusting a nurse and a doctor ahead of them like a snowplough.

  Grainger Technologies executives. He recognized one or two of them, though none of them as much as glanced at him as they passed like a train, urgent and oblivious. The business would be taken care of. Since Beth’s stock would have returned to Billy, it would now return to the company. To Vaughn, if he lived.

  There were other, treasured things in her will for himself. There was nothing to keep him here -

  except Tran. Nguyen Tran, staying at the Biltmore, less than a mile from the hospital. He glared around him. The Grainger executives were in a football huddle with doctors and nurses outside the door of Vaughn’s room. There was a fierce, communal, sharklike concern about them, with a conflict of loyalties present on only one or two older faces. Otherwise, it was the beginning of a designer-clad acquisition of power within Grainger Technologies that was happening in the quiet corridor.

  It nauseated him.

  The doctors wouldn’t let the suits in.

  Tran. He needed a telephone. Not to ring the Vietnamese, not just yet. First, he needed to know the man. He pushed himself away from the wall and along the corridor, away from Grainger and the crows at the banquet. More quiet corridors. He descended a flight of stairs and found a public phone. Visitors passed as he dialled the Washington number, with armfuls of flowers and an air of reluctance; tike a funeral.

  The duty man in the East Europe Office at State answered the phone.

  ‘Lock — is that Ed?’

  ‘Security identity code, please.’ It was Ed. Lock gave his number and his password. ‘Hi. John,’ Ed said easily.

  ‘You knew it was me, right?’

  ‘It always pa
ys to be security conscious,’ Ed replied, imitating one of their seniors.

  ‘Ed — I want you to check some files for me, and fax me copies of what you find, to …’ He paused, then recollected Vaughn Grainger’s fax number and gave it. ‘Tonight. The subject is Vietnamese — no, don’t ask why, just do this. It isn’t top security, just top curiosity. OK?’

  ‘OK, John. I go down to East Asia ‘

  ‘No, I don’t think you do. The guy’s name is Tran, Nguyen Tran, and I think you’ll find a file under Special Immigrants.

  You remember? I’m guessing he came over sometime in the mid-‘70s, and was set up in a business, probably without a name change, though he’ll be filed under both old and new identities, if he has changed. Got that?’

  ‘This is Vietnam, right?’ Ed made it sound like the War of Independence, a subject purely historical, somehow mythical.

  Da Nang equals Valley Forge. Unfortunately, it never had.

  ‘Sure. But then, you majored in history, right?’ Lock, despite the still-draining rage, accepted the office banter welcomingly.

  ‘Tran. Tonight. I need to know everything about him, Ed.’

  ‘OK, John. Will do.’ He repeated the fax number, then added acutely: ‘Be careful, uh?’

  ‘How did you—? No, don’t worry. Just background.’

  ‘Did he know your sister’s husband and father-in-law over there? They were in ‘Nam, weren’t they, both of them?’

  Shocked, Lock stared at the receiver. ‘Yes,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Yes, both of them. Thanks, Ed.’

  He put down the receiver as if it burned his hand. It didn’t mean anything, he told himself. It couldn’t mean anything.

  Coincidence?

  He smiled awkwardly at a child almost enrobed in a huge bouquet of flowers. The child smiled hesitantly back, though the father appeared truculently suspicious of him.

  As Tran would be, when they met. Once he knew about Tran, he realised he would have to confront him. For Tran — alone could lead him to Beth’s murderers. Which was all that mattered to him, all that had ever mattered. Tran could bring them into focus, show him behind the nonsense that they were art or jewel thieves. Show him the truth.

  When he knew who they were, he would kill them.

  He breathed in deeply, grinning ferally in the direction of a young woman with a baby slung across her breasts like a papoose. It was a papoose, he realised. The woman was Apache.

  The Grainger Wing treated anyone, without question of income or insurance. Heroin was soiling that ideal just as surely as it had killed his sister.

  He’d get back to Vaughn’s house and wait for Ed’s results.

  Tran was there in the files of State somewhere. If he was into heroin, he’d have had the capital of a wealthy man. Usually, wealthy Vietnamese had grown rich on the seed-corn that State and the Company had provided to those who had helped the US during the war.

  The young Apache woman passed on up the gleaming, aseptic corridor, diminishing with distance. He nodded to himself, accepting the mood of dark elation which filled his body and thoughts. He wanted revenge for Beth — not justice, except in its most primitive form. They’d killed her, he’d kill them.

  And Tran might have done it, or had it done … Tran, who was less than a mile away at that moment —

  ‘This was his cot, his locker?’ Marfa Tostyeva asked, sniffing as the warmer air unblocked her sinuses. Goludin, the young detective Vorontsyev had sent with her like a nursemaid, hovered beside her like an idiot, lumpen and unaware. The rig’s assistant manager nodded, his beard sparkling with melted snow. ‘And everything he possessed is still here?’

  ‘We don’t have pilfering up here,’ the bearded man replied.

  His Russian was peremptory and acquired; he was Norwegian.

  ‘Can I have the key?’

  The Norwegian instead unlocked and opened the locker, then stood to one side. The dead Iranian was no one; unless the Norwegian’s luxuriant beard hid emotions Marfa could not identify.

  She rummaged gently through the soiled clothes, the few possessions. It was a perfect cover story. Except for one silk shirt.

  She unfolded it and held it up.

  ‘Liked dressing well, didn’t he?’ she murmured. The Norwegian inspected the shirt with seeming surprise.

  ‘Up here?’ he asked eventually after his fingers had identified the material. ‘Why?’

  ‘That’s what I came to find out.’

  ‘He wasn’t anyone — wasn’t paid well.’

  ‘He had hundreds in dollars — credit cards, a cashmere coat.’

  ‘Not up here he didn’t. What’s going on? The guy was lazy, unreliable. Should have been fired off the rig-‘ He hesitated, remembering something.

  Marfa stood up, as if in his shadow. The Norwegian bulked over her.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘He was fired once, I think. Months ago. I’d have to check. It was reversed — the decision.’

  ‘It wasn’t your job?’

  He shook his head. ‘Personnel. Or his foreman. You want me to check?’

  ‘Yes.’ She thrust the shirt back into the locker. ‘Pull the blanket back, Goludin. And the mattress.’

  ‘Nothing here.’ Goludin peered under the cot. There were five others in the cramped room. Bare walls, the minimum of comfort; a windowless segment of the accommodation block.

  ‘Nothing under there, either.’ He smiled like a dog expecting a pat.

  She had told Vorontsyev the trip would, in all probability, be a waste of time. Seventy miles from town, out on the tundra where the last, sparse, dwarf trees straggled north, she felt isolated and uncomfortable. Rig 47. A man had worked here, but for the sake of establishing anonymity, a cover story. But why here? What he was really doing was focused on the town. Why would he be up here at all? When he was sacked, or about to be, why hadn’t he just left and taken up residence in the Gogol, as he did when on R & R?

  The wind banged against the accommodation block, making it seem flimsy, constructed of cardboard like an itinerant’s shelter.

  She shrugged.

  ‘What the hell was he up to?’ She studied the Norwegian assistant manager. ‘Check his file for me, would you? Find out, if you can, who stopped the sacking and why. It’s not difficult to get people, is it?’

  ‘Any arsehole Third-World country has them queueing up.

  That includes Russia.’ He grinned within the nest of his beard.

  ‘Just a joke.’

  ‘Not really.’ She looked at the now unkempt cot, the small locker. In a gap in the wind, she felt certain she could hear the endless rush of gas through huge pipelines. ‘Can you do that now?’

  ‘Sure. There’s no hurry, though. There’s a blizzard on the way — you won’t be out of here before tomorrow.’

  She shivered. ‘Hell.’

  ‘We’ll make you comfortable.’

  ‘It’s all that bloody space out there. I’d forgotten it.’

  They left the dormitory, their boots sucking on the thermoplastic tiles of the corridor. The wind struck at them as they left the accommodation block, snatching away the smell of the evening meal being prepared in the kitchens. Marfa ducked her head into the wind. There was heavier snow on it now and the low sun struggled against fast-moving cloud. She squinted around her. Gas flared from distant oil rigs as it was burned off.

  Rigs like Gulag watchtowers pressed along the horizon. Closer around them rose scattered buildings — administration, stores, vehicle sheds, accommodation. There were orderly rows of dilapidated trailers and caravans away to her right, where the overflow of workers bunked during their fortnights on site. A tracked crane lumbered out of the flying snow, startling her. The wind howled across the Hat, empty tundra, making Rig 47, its flimsy buildings, skeletal towers and network of pipes raised about the tundra not merely inhospitable, but alien. She felt herself shaken by utter dislocation. Isolated, of no significance. If it was agoraphobia, it seemed to empty her. />
  Then, in another moment, the doors of the administration block had slammed shut behind them and she could hear, in frozen ears, blaring music rather than the wind or piped gas.

  Marfa felt her whole frame shivering. Goludin’s puffing relieved breathing at her shoulder seemed an inadequate commentary.

  Dear God in Heaven, it was appalling out there … The Norwegian was clambering up open stairs and she followed him as if fleeing the tundra outside.

  He closed the door of his outer office behind them. Marfa, still icily cold, refused to hand him her parka or gloves and he smiled in superior amusement.

  ‘Bring the file on Al-Jani through,’ he asked the narrow-faced male secretary as he led them into his office.

  Marfa slumped into a proffered chair, arms wrapped tightly around her. Goludin studied her in a not unkindly manner even if she felt it was somewhat patronising. God, what a bloody place … After a few moments, during which the secretary deposited the file and left, she raised her eyes and looked through the long window. The sun was lost except for a reddish smear along the flat horizon. The clouds rushed towards the rig’s fragility in the last of the daylight. The window was wormed with wet.

  ‘There’s nothing here about his being fired,’ the Norwegian offered, passing the file across his desk. T was back home on leave at the time,’ he added. ‘I heard about it later.’

  ‘Who dealt with it?’

  ‘Maxim — him outside — I expect. At least with the initial complaint. He’d have passed it on down, not up to Gustafsson, the manager. Maybe to Personnel. Perhaps he just forgot about it — it happens. We get a lot of people who don’t come back, or get ill or injured, or can’t stand the loneliness … If he wanted to work, maybe Maxim decided he couldn’t be bothered to find a replacement roughneck.’

  The telephone rang.

  ‘Is it OK if I talk to Maxim?’

  ‘Sure,’ the Norwegian murmured, his hand over the mouth piece. Then: ‘What kind of fucking trouble have you got on that stretch of pipe?’ He was nodding them out of the room.

  Marfa opened the office door, glimpsing Maxim arranging his features carefully into blandness. Above his narrow, highcheekboned face, his black eyes were suspiciously alert.