Salvation Row - John Milton #6 (John Milton Thrillers)

by Mark Dawson

  —Ground rules. All non-negotiable. No names, under any circumstances. Nothing that could be used for ID. No chat. This isn’t a secure medium. You read the news, you’ll understand.

  —Understood.

  —What do you want?

  —Help.

  —I’m not in that game anymore.

  —Neither am I.

  —I heard. So?

  —You know where I am?

  A pause.

  —Yes. New Orleans. 1610 St. Charles Avenue. Third row from the back, second unit from the wall.

  —And you remember Katrina?

  There was another pause. Milton stared at the screen for thirty seconds, still nothing, and he wondered whether Ziggy had signed out.

  Three characters appeared, the cursor blinking after the last.

  —Yes.

  —The people who helped us. Who saved your life. They need us.

  —I told you. I’m not in that game anymore.

  —For this, you are. You owe them. Don’t make me come and find you.

  —Like you could find me.

  Milton smiled at the webcam.

  —Want to gamble on that?

  A pause, and then:

  —LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL.

  There was another pause, the longest yet, and Milton was convinced that he had gone too far and had scared him off. He stared at the little camera, knowing very well the effect that his eyes had when he fixed them like this, deadened, cold, full of the promise of ice.

  —FFS, Six, this is ridiculous.

  —It’s easy. And I’ll make it worth your while.

  —How much?

  Milton tried to find a number that would work. Not so much that he would reduce his capital—he had other uses for that, after all—but not too little that Ziggy would dismiss it.

  —10k.

  —20.

  —Okay.

  —Plus expenses.

  —Reasonable expenses.

  —What do you want?

  —Where are you now?

  —Don’t be silly. Just tell me what you need.

  —I need you to get on the next plane to New Orleans.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  JACKSON DUBOIS parked his Jaguar on River Road, beneath the Huey P. Long Bridge. The struts of the structure ascended high overhead. To the left was a grassy bank topped by a wire-mesh fence and then, beyond that, the river. To the right was a rough parking lot filled with the vehicles from the construction crews that were tending to the bridge’s feeble structure. There were pickups, several temporary cabins, a row of Port-A-Johns and, stretching above them, a crane.

  Dubois got out of the car, collected a flashlight from the glove compartment, and walked into the yard. He felt the comforting bulk of his shoulder-holstered pistol, and he still had the combat shotgun in the car. He didn’t expect trouble, but there was no sense in going into a situation unprepared.

  He saw the shape of the man leaning against the side of a Ford. He swung the light up into his face.

  “All right, pal,” Detective Peacock said. “Put it down.”

  “Dragging me all the way out into the boonies, this better be good.”

  “You want us to be seen together? Your boss want that?”

  Dubois felt his temper bubbling. He bit his tongue.

  “Anyway,” Peacock went on, “you’re gonna want to hear this. Your friend. The English guy. I got something on him.”

  “Who is he?”

  “His name is John Milton.”

  Dubois frowned. “They said his name was Smith.”

  “Not true. I’m guessing a lot of the stuff he says isn’t true.”

  “All right—go on.”

  “I know that there’s more to him than meets the eye.”

  “I don’t have time for twenty questions. Specifically?”

  “Can’t say for sure, but it looks like he’s worked for the bureau before—”

  “The bureau?”

  “—I think as a confidential informant.”

  “Informing on what?”

  “Haven’t been able to find that out.”

  “That doesn’t make me very confident.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s been sealed pretty tight.”

  “So, what? He’s a criminal? Giving evidence for amnesty?”

  “Don’t necessarily mean that. A CI could just be someone with information that he’d only give on the condition that he was kept out of whatever it was. Impossible to say. I’m still looking, but don’t hold your breath.”

  “That’s useless. What are we supposed to do with that?”

  Peacock ignored him. “The other thing I found,” he said instead, “is that he does have a record. Arrested in Texas last year. They think he might have come across the border. Got into a brawl, knocked out a couple of local toughs, one was the sheriff’s son. They were going to throw the book at him until he got pulled out by an FBI agent who—get this—turns out not to be an agent after all.”

  “So, he either works for the feds or he doesn’t work for the feds. That makes him… what?”

  “Like I said. Until I know better, someone to be careful of.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Got a couple of friends in the bureau. They owe me a few favours, I called them in. Very reliable.”

  Dubois straightened his jacket. “It’s more questions than answers,” he said, making no effort to hide his disdain.

  “Yeah, well, that’s life. And I don’t answer to you or your boss.”

  “Mayor Chalcroft answers to Mr. Babineaux,” Dubois corrected. “And your boss answers to the mayor. That means you answer to us, Detective. Mr. Babineaux has high standards, and, frankly, I’d be embarrassed to bring this to him like this. I want to see better results next time.”

  “Yeah,” the detective said, “and I’d like to fuck Scarlett Johansson, except that ain’t gonna happen.”

  Dubois already had his cellphone out of his pocket by the time he was in his car again. He thumbed through the contacts until he found the number for Melvin Fryatt. He pressed call and put the phone to his ear.

  #

  JACKSON DUBOIS arranged to meet Fryatt and Crossland in the Lower Ninth. They were waiting for him on Surekote Road. The road had been abandoned, with vegetation reaching up high into the air. The tumbledown houses that were still standing had been claimed by nature, and the empty lots where shacks had been washed away thronged with substantial growth. Dubois rolled up behind their car and killed the engine. He could see them both inside. He wound down the window and sampled the atmosphere. He could hear the bass of a distant boom box, the buzz of the city, the chirping of the nocturnal wildlife that had claimed the street for its own. There was no one else around.

  That was good.

  The two of them got out of their car. Melvin came up to him. The white guy, Chad, pimp rolled behind him.

  Dubois stayed in his car. The two of them came up to the open window.

  “Just you,” Dubois said, pointing to Melvin.

  “Say what?” Chad protested.

  “Say get the fuck back into the car, you fucking junkie.”

  Chad looked as if he was going to protest, but Melvin turned back to him and said something that Dubois couldn’t hear. He shrugged, his expression morose, and did as he was told.

  “Get in, Melvin.”

  He came around the car and got into the passenger seat.

  “What happened?”

  “She got away.”

  “I know that, Melvin. I saw that. What I want to know is how it happened.”

  “I don’t know, man. We hit the car, but I guess we didn’t get it good enough. We came out to finish her off, but the car drove off. I put a couple of rounds into it, but, well, you know…”

  “It was a simple thing to do, Melvin. Very simple.”

  “We tried, man. I don’t know what else I can say.”

  “You know what? It doesn’t matter.”

  “
You’re not mad about it?”

  “I’m not happy, but mistakes happen. This time, I’ll let it ride. There won’t be a next time, though. You hear me?”

  “Sure, boss. Thanks. No more fuck-ups, I got it.”

  “There’s something else you can help me with, and then we’re done.”

  Dubois took out the printout of the photograph that Travis Peacock had given him and laid it on the dash.

  “The man who attacked you. Is this him?”

  Melvin squinted at it, his brow clenching into an angry frown. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s him. That’s the motherfucker. Dude was driving the car today, too. Who is he?”

  “Do you think he’d recognise you if he saw you again?”

  “Probably,” Melvin said. “Dude was talking to us, like you and me are talking, right before he hit me upside of my head.”

  Dubois took the photograph. “Thank you, Melvin.”

  “That it?”

  “That’s all I needed to know. We’re done here. I’ll be in touch.”

  Melvin shrugged, knowing better than to outstay his welcome, pushed the door all the way open, and stepped out. He closed the door, rapped his knuckles against the roof, and slouched back to his car.

  Dubois corkscrewed in his seat and reached down into the footwell between the back and front seats. He picked up the shotgun that he had laid down carefully before setting off that evening, opened the door and, the gun held loosely before him, walked briskly to the other car. It was gloomy, the street lit by the glimmer of the moon overhead, and it was only when Melvin started his engine and flicked on his headlamps that he and Chad could see that they had just a few seconds left to live.

  Dubois raised the combat shotgun. It was a semi-automatic, tubular magazine-fed weapon chambered for twelve-gauge cartridges, and allowed the shooter to apply a rapid rate of fire over a large area. It was also very accurate for a weapon with a reputation for being indiscriminate. The choke barrel was about the same diameter as a dime and, up to ten feet away, the pattern of the buckshot wouldn’t stray outside the edges of a six-inch circle. Dubois fired it from the waist. The first shot shattered the windshield, hitting Melvin. The second spread drilled Chad. The third and fourth shots were, in all likelihood, superfluous. But since Dubois had not gotten to be as successful as he was by being lackadaisical, he fired them both anyway.

  When he had finished, the windshield was completely gone and the two men had been blown to pieces.

  He stepped up to the car to make doubly sure, returned to his vehicle, put the shotgun in the trunk, and took out a five-gallon gas can that he had filled at the Shell station he had passed earlier. He went back to the car, unscrewed the cap and upended the can, sloshing the pungent liquid over the upholstery and both bodies. He emptied it completely, took a packet of matches from his pocket and, tearing one off, lit it and flicked it into the interior. The flames took hold immediately, curling up to the roof and spewing thick black smoke out of the open windshield.

  Dubois waited for a moment to make sure that the fire had taken hold and then went back to his Jaguar. He started the engine, put the car into drive, and drove away.

  Chapter Thirty

  ZIGGY PENN’S apartment block was in the heart of Tokyo’s exclusive Yoyogi district. The enormous city was not a particularly green place and, because Yoyogi was near to one of the largest municipal parks, it had become one of the more expensive places to live. It was sandwiched between the busy Shinjuku and Shibuya neighbourhoods, but the price of living there meant that it was quieter than both.

  Ziggy limped back from the convenience store, two polythene shopping bags clasped in each hand. One bag held two litre bottles of diet Coke, practically the only thing that Ziggy drank. The other had four tubes of Pringles. It was six in the morning, and Ziggy had been up all night. That was the way that he usually worked, starting his daily endeavours when other people were going home for the day. He looked around as he approached the entrance to the block and watched the suited salarymen emerge from the lobbies of blocks similar to his own, slouching to the subway and the commute into their dreary, uniform offices. He didn’t envy them. Ziggy had worked a regular job, once, and it hadn’t suited his temperament. Working for himself like this, being his own boss, earning when he needed to earn and relaxing when he didn’t…that was the way to live.

  Ziggy would normally have been finishing for the day, white noise spilling out of the high-end Bose stereo in an attempt to shut down his questing, sprawling intelligence so that he could have his regular ten hours of sleep. Today was going to be a little different. Ziggy was going to work, too. There were things that he needed to do before he set off for the airport and the flight to New Orleans that he was already second-guessing. It was a fourteen-hour trip, with a short stopover in Dallas. He needed to get a ticket. He would sleep when he was in the air.

  The block was twenty storeys high, a grid of identical windows reaching up to the top floor. There was a communal area on the roof that offered a decent view of the city, and you could see for miles when the smog allowed. The apartment was fine for his purposes. The leases were short, six months or a year, and there were enough well-heeled international students so that his Western appearance did not mark him out as particularly unusual.

  Anonymity was important for Ziggy. There were international agencies that would have been very interested to find his location. Six months earlier, a consortium of multinational law enforcement experts had conducted dawn raids on the properties of a number of Ziggy’s online acquaintances. The forums that he had frequented, previously hidden on the dark web, had been smashed. That sent those who had escaped the round-up into chat rooms and fora that were insecure, riddled with grasses and snitches and undercover police waiting to entrap the unwary.

  Ziggy was careful. He was not driven by the same anti-establishment zeal as some of the others, and he was too lazy to organise himself to profit from the crimes to the extent that some of the others had managed. Some of them had earned millions of dollars, transferring their ill-gotten gains into Bitcoin wallets that the authorities would never be able to recover. Ziggy was happy to skim just enough to live. Many of his comrades had gloried in the notoriety with which they had clothed their avatars. Ziggy just wanted to stay out of the way. It was that, he knew, that had meant he had escaped the dragnet.

  He took the elevator to the nineteenth floor, hobbling past the door to his apartment and then turning back at the end of the corridor, making sure that he had not been followed. He stopped at the door and listened, decided that he couldn’t hear anything, slid the key into the lock, opened the door, and went inside. It was a one-bedroom place, not too big. There was a kitchen-diner, a small bathroom and a balcony that looked down onto Yoyogi Park. The apartment was stiflingly hot, thanks to the heat that was pumped out by the servers and laptops that were crowded into the small space. Ziggy had initially run the air-conditioning on a constant basis, but the electricity bill had been so high that he had worried that it would bring him unwanted attention. Now, he tended to work in his underwear, with the windows open and a couple of oscillating fans switched on. It was still hot, but it was bearable.

  He took off his shirt and trousers. He glanced down at the lattice of scars on his leg and thought, again, of what had happened in New Orleans. He didn’t remember all of it. There was the operation, the pursuit into the Lower Ninth and then nothing. He had woken up days later, in a hospital bed, his leg in bits and waiting to be reconstructed. The blanks had been filled in later. Control had said nothing, and so he had waited for Milton to file his report and then hacked the server to take a copy for himself. It didn’t help him to remember, but it made it very plain to whom he owed his life.

  He stepped over the nest of cables and wires to his main computer. He took out one of the bottles of Coke, unscrewed it and slugged down a quarter in a thirsty series of gulps. He dropped down onto the floor, leant his back against the wall, put the Macbook on his lap and woke u
p the screen. There was a large parabolic antenna on the balcony, aimed out at the neighbouring block. Ziggy had taken the apartment on the highest floor possible. Wireless security was getting better all the time, but it was still child’s play for him to crack. He ran a homebrew application that found all the wireless routers using the older 802.11b standard, sifted those for routers that still had their encryption switched off thanks to the factory default, and then jumped onto the one that had the strongest signal and the fastest connection.

  Ziggy was careful. If his hacking was discovered, the police would only be able to trace it back to the patsy whose connection he had just hijacked. He jumped across to the server in the convenience store that he had just visited. He had realised that the PC was acting as the back-end system for the point-of-sale terminal. It collected the day’s credit card transactions and sent them in a single batch every night to the credit card processor. Ziggy quickly isolated the day’s batch, stored as a plaintext file, with the full magstripe of every card that had been swiped. He skimmed through the dump, found the first Western name—Anthony Shakespeare—and then jumped across to the website for Delta.

  In five minutes, he had purchased a ticket to New Orleans. In another five, he had ordered a false British passport in the name of Mr. Shakespeare, hacked into the Uber website and summoned a taxi to come and pick him up.

  He shut down the computers, turned off the fans, went into his bedroom and packed his case.

  #

  ZIGGY WHEELED his suitcase to the desk and waited for the attendant to finish serving the customer before him. The woman ahead of him was cavilling at the cost of a flight to New York and trying to persuade the girl to upgrade her to business. She wasn’t getting anywhere.

  He stepped up to the desk. “Can you get a move on?”

  The woman turned her head and glanced at him. Her first reaction, indignation, was quickly replaced with a combination of fright and odium. Ziggy knew why. He was dressed without any real concern about how he looked, he was unshaven, his face covered in a patchy ginger beard, and the word FUCK was displayed prominently across his T-shirt.