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

by Mark Dawson

  “We’ve called the police,” she said.

  “You sure these are the real ones?” Izzy said sharply.

  The doctor frowned at her, but didn’t bite. “And we’re reviewing the feed from the cameras.”

  “You mind if I have a look?” Milton asked.

  She looked up at him with anxiety and then suspicion. “Can I ask who you are, please, sir?”

  “My name is Smith. I’m a friend of the family.”

  She looked at Izzy for confirmation and, when she nodded her assent, she paused to consider the request and then, no doubt realising that it would do her no good to refuse, agreed to it. She led them into a small office behind the reception. A male member of staff was spinning through footage that had been shot from the security camera behind the desk.

  “Show them,” the doctor said.

  The man pressed play and Milton watched. The woman, masquerading as a policewoman, was young and good looking. He couldn’t recall ever seeing her before.

  “What did she say?”

  “That she had reason to believe that Mr. Bartholomew was involved in a serious assault. She said that we had to release him for questioning. There’s not much that we could’ve done.”

  “You didn’t think to check her credentials?”

  “We did check, sir. Everything looked like it was in order.”

  “You didn’t call the precinct?”

  The woman was getting defensive. “Why would we do that? I told you, everything looked like it was in order.”

  Milton reined it back in. He wasn’t finished with the clinic yet and he sensed that if he pushed too hard, the woman would ask him to leave.

  “You’ve got a camera out in the parking lot?”

  “Sure we do.”

  The picture switched to footage from a camera that offered a high angle of the lot. They scrolled through the footage until they saw the woman emerge into the left of the shot, Alexander in front of her. Milton watched as Alexander said something, protesting, and the woman pressed her arm close to his back. The pistol that she must have been holding was hidden by Alexander’s body. The camera swivelled to the right, losing them for a moment, but then it stopped and they re-emerged into the shot again. They walked to a parked car with a man inside it. Milton estimated that the car was twenty feet from the camera.

  “Can you zoom in on the driver?”

  The man selected that portion of the image and zoomed. The picture was heavily pixellated, but even before the software took steps to clean it up, Milton had identified the man behind the wheel.

  “Thank you.”

  Milton left Izzy to speak to the administrator and waited for her outside. It was a warm and damp night. The palm trees that fringed the lot rustled in the breeze. A storm coming in, perhaps? He shook a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. He had already started to plan what he was going to have to do. The process had begun subconsciously, but, now that he was alone and quiet, he opened himself up to it. There were few options open to him. Retaliation was all he had.

  Izzy followed him outside.

  “We need to speak to the police, right?”

  “Yes,” Milton said. “But I’m not sure how helpful it’ll be.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Two reasons. They’re involved. They arrested you and the crew, no reason for them to do that unless they wanted to cause you disruption. And why would they want to do that? You’re not doing anything wrong. No. The only person who stands to benefit from it is Babineaux. If you ask me, he’s bought them off. They won’t help.”

  “And?”

  “The second reason’s worse. The guy who came to kill me this morning? His name is Avi Bachman. He worked for the Mossad. Have you heard of them?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I think so.”

  “Israeli intelligence. Very dangerous. Very ruthless.”

  She was confused. “What do they have to do with it?”

  “Them? Probably nothing. But Bachman was driving the car that took your brother away.”

  #

  MILTON TOOK IZZY to the Comfort Inn, delivering her right to the door of the room next to the one where her parents were staying. He told her not to leave the room. When she paused at the door, a pained expression on her face, he smiled at her with all the reassurance he could muster.

  “What are we going to do, John?”

  “We’re not going to do anything. I am. I’m going to get him back.”

  “How? You don’t even know where he is.”

  “I’ll find out. I’ll get him, Izzy. I promise.”

  “You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.”

  “I never do that. If I say I’ll do something, I’ll do it.”

  She looked at him, started to say something, then changed her mind. “But what do I tell them?” she said, gesturing at her parents’ room.

  “I wouldn’t tell them anything yet. There’s no sense in worrying them.”

  “How long can I keep that up for? They’ve got a right to know.”

  “Yes, they do. But if I can get him back before they know he’s gone, isn’t that better for them? They think he’s in rehab. They don’t expect to hear from him. No harm done. Just give me two days.”

  #

  HE TOOK out his cellphone in the lobby and called Ziggy Penn.

  “Where are you?”

  “Outside Dubois’s house.”

  “I need you.”

  “Not now. I’m getting some very juicy stuff.”

  “Now, Ziggy.”

  “What is it?”

  “We’ve got work to do.”

  “More important than this?”

  “Much more.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  THEY MET at the Café du Monde again. Ziggy hobbled across the open space, picking a route between the tables, still busy despite the late hour. He sat down opposite Milton and took the coffee that was waiting for him. Milton banished his distractions and scanned left and right, his eyes adjusting to the glare of the floodlights and the pools of darkness between them. Decatur Street buzzed with life, traffic and pedestrians passing by, but he saw nothing that gave him a reason for concern.

  “You sure this is important?” Ziggy started. “I’ve got some great stuff on our friend.”

  “That doesn’t matter right now.”

  “So?”

  “It’s Alexander Bartholomew.”

  “Izzy’s brother?”

  He nodded. “The man who saved your life.”

  “You don’t need to remind me. What?”

  “He’s in a lot of trouble.”

  A waiter hustled alongside and asked if they wanted anything to eat. Milton dismissed him brusquely and waited until he was out of earshot.

  “What trouble?” Ziggy asked.

  “Babineaux and Dubois are deeper into this than I thought. I should’ve anticipated it, the money at stake here, what they might do. I’ve underestimated them.”

  “Tell me what the problem is, Milton.”

  “They’ve hired someone I used to know, a long time ago.”

  “What kind of someone? Someone like you?”

  “Yes,” Milton said. “Just like me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He tried to kill me this morning.”

  Ziggy gaped. “Fuck, Milton.”

  “Just dumb luck that he didn’t.”

  “And Bartholomew?”

  “Not so lucky. He was in rehab. I should’ve gone and gotten him, taken him somewhere else, him and his family, all of them, somewhere away from the city. This man checked him out. He’s using him to make Izzy drop the case. It won’t matter what happens. He’ll kill him. He’s not in the business of leaving people around who can identify him. If we don’t help him, he’s dead. That’s as near to a sure thing as there is.”

  Ziggy stared at him. He looked fearful.

  “He’s dangerous, Ziggy, but so am I. And I know he’s here now.”

  Z
iggy gave a quick nod. “Okay. I get it. What do I need to know?”

  Milton explained about Bachman, about the Mossad, about the operation where he had worked with him, about what had happened at the clinic that day. He gave him everything he knew which, he realised as he relayed it, was not very much at all. Ziggy listened intently, tapping details into his phone.

  “What do you need?”

  “Two things,” Milton said. “First, I need as much as you can find about Bachman. He was supposed to be dead. Obviously, he isn’t. Anything on what might have happened to him. I don’t like going into something blind, and that’s what I feel like. You need to give me some coverage on him.”

  “I can try. The second thing?”

  “We’re on the back foot. I don’t like that, either, not at all. We need to do something to put that right.”

  “You want to retaliate?”

  “I want some leverage.”

  #

  MILTON DROVE down to the river, got out of the car, and rested against the hood. He looked down at the wide, sluggish Mississippi. A fisherman cast his line into the brown water as a gargantuan light-spangled oil tanker drifted by. The air was heavy with the effluent and pollutants sprayed out of bilge tanks, and it was quiet save for the susurration of traffic passing over a nearby bridge and the call of gulls disgusted by the fetid carrion that was all the river had to offer them.

  Ziggy had stayed at the table for another five minutes. He explained that he had taken delivery of a piece of equipment that allowed him to eavesdrop on both sides of Dubois’s cellphone conversations, and that he was building up a collection of evidence that would expose the scale and scope of the conspiracy.

  Milton had hardly heard a word of it.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about Avi Bachman.

  He closed his eyes.

  Bachman.

  Jesus. What had he gotten himself into?

  An email buzzed on his cellphone. Milton opened it. It was from Ziggy. It was a précis of Bachman’s MI5 file. He had no idea how Ziggy could possibly have obtained it so quickly and, seemingly, so easily. But he had learnt long ago that some things were best not enquired into too deeply.

  He opened the email and read.

  Bachman had been well known to MI5. Information on his early life had always been sketchy, but it was believed that he was born in the early 1970s in Paris to a French mother and an Israeli father. After spending his early years in Paris, he had moved to the United States. His father, a diplomat, had died after driving his car into a culvert. His mother had taken that as badly as might be expected and had developed a reliance on prescription tranquillisers. One day she took too many and the young Avi found her on her bed, dead. Milton wasn’t one for over-analysis, but, even to his jaded mind, it was pretty straightforward to see that an early experience of death had become a preoccupation that would stay with Bachman through the whole of his life.

  Bachman was shipped to his grandparents in Jerusalem and, after finishing school, he was enlisted into the IDF and assigned to the Combat Engineering Corps. There was a period of service in the West Bank. Combat experience included an ambush on two Hezbollah vehicles during which eight militants were killed. His file recorded a commendation from his CO and the suggestion that he showed great promise.

  Information was thin after that. He had been recruited by the Mossad after the end of his military service and had submerged into deep cover. It was known that he was sent to the London School of Economics as part of his preparation for service, operating under non-official cover, meaning that he would have had no diplomatic immunity had anything gone amiss. Nothing had, the testament to his efficiency being that the spooks only found out about the work that he had been doing once he had been reassigned and, even then, they didn’t know precisely what it was.

  He had been assigned to the Mossad’s Kidon unit some time after his return to Israel. Kidon was a Mossad within the Mossad, an elite subset of forty-eight men and women whose main function was to eliminate the plentiful threats to the state. The unit was based in the Negev desert, scrupulously trained with all manner of weapons and in espionage techniques, self-defence and vehicle handling, and was deployed only when a target’s elimination had been signed off by the prime minister himself.

  It was rumoured that Bachman had been a Kidon combatant in sub-Saharan Africa, and hacks on the CIA and FBI had revealed that he had served in an official liaison capacity with those organisations. He was reputed to have played a leading role in the assassination of Fawzi Mustapha Assi, a Hezbollah operative who was procuring weapons technology in the United States. There were unconfirmed reports that he had been active in Syria, Azerbaijan, North Africa, and Iran. He was credited with the execution of al-Qaeda confederates responsible for the 1998 United States embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. He was also suspected of being behind the sniping of two Iranian agents in South Africa. MI5 was certain that he had led the two-man team who had shot Gerald Bull, the ballistics expert who had offered to build a super-gun for Saddam. And there were rumours that he had led the expedition to kill Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in Dubai.

  Milton knew the report was just the tip of the iceberg. These things could only ever be educated guesses. There would be a file on him, too, somewhere in the Mossad’s files, and he knew it would contain the same suppositions, estimations, and hunches. The truth, as with Bachman, was much bloodier.

  He and Bachman were cut from the same cloth.

  And that was a worrying thought.

  Their paths had crossed just the one time.

  Milton didn’t need the file to remember that.

  It was in 2010. The Iranians had been close to developing a workable nuclear bomb. In exchange for Israel postponing a military attack on Iran, the CIA and MI6 worked with the Mossad to sabotage Tehran’s program. GCHQ had introduced the Stuxnet virus into thirty thousand Iranian computers in Iran’s nuclear reactors. That, alone, was not enough to deter the Israelis and, in addition, a joint MI6, CIA and Mossad operation was responsible for the explosions at a factory in the Zagros Mountains. The factory manufactured Iran’s Shihab missiles, and the deaths of eighteen technicians retarded its abilities by a year. The subsequent assassination of five scientists delayed the fundamentalist bomb by another year.

  Milton and another Group Fifteen agent had been the British contingent.

  Avi Bachman had represented the Mossad.

  Milton remembered him very well. He had a brash personality that Milton found a little grating, confident to the point of arrogance, but he could certainly walk the walk. He was lethal in Krav Maga, the mongrel martial art that fused jiu-jitsu, boxing, savate, Muay Thai, Wing Chun, and wrestling. The Mossad taught it to all its recruits, and, as Bachman had rather vaingloriously boasted as they shared a drink in Cairo before the operation was green-lit, he was the best proponent in Kidon, which meant, if it were true, that he was one of the most dangerous men that Milton had ever met.

  The Iranian job had been in 2010, and Milton never heard from Bachman again. The file reported that he reached the rank of sgan aluf, or lieutenant colonel, before the operation that led to the reports of his death. Premature reports, as Milton now knew. The file suggested that he had been killed when a car bomb that he was preparing had detonated. Milton could only speculate what had happened, but he was confident of one thing: Bachman had wanted out of the Mossad, just as he had wanted out of Group Fifteen, but his duplicity had been more successful in achieving that than Milton’s honesty.

  There was nothing in the file that suggested the identity of his accomplice.

  He deleted the email and called Isadora.

  “Is everything okay?” he asked.

  “Yes. We’re fine.”

  “Stay in the hotel, please.”

  “You said. I will.”

  “Don’t answer the door to anyone.”

  “You told me that already. I won’t.” There was a pause, and Milton saw a flash of flame from the horizon, a distan
t refinery venting gas.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Worried.”

  “You’re going to have to trust me.”

  “I…I do, Milton. I do trust you.”

  “Goodnight, Izzy.”

  “Goodnight.”

  The flames belched again as Milton ended the call, scrolled through his contacts, and called Ziggy.

  “You get it?”

  “I did. Thanks.”

  “He sounds serious.”

  “He is.”

  “And you still want to go through with this?”

  “We haven’t got another card to play. It’s this or give up, and I’m not giving up.”

  “All right. I’m game if you are. You’re the one taking the bigger risk.”

  That was the truth. “Where’s our friend?”

  “At home. I’m a block away.”

  “You ready?”

  “Five minutes to set up my gear and I’m good. Won’t be difficult.”

  Milton pushed himself off of the body of the car as the spurt of flame lit up the darkened horizon for a third time. “I’ll call you when I’m there.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  ZIGGY HAD tailed Joel Babineaux from the offices of Babineaux Properties all the way to his mansion in the Garden District. He had carried on after Babineaux had turned off the street. The Bentley had nosed up against the wrought-iron gates, waiting for them to open. But Ziggy had continued on, only turning when it was safe to do so and driving back for a second, more careful, look. The car had driven down the drive and pulled up next to the front door. Ziggy drove on for another half block and parked. The neighbourhood was upscale, and the other houses around and about were all grand and obviously extremely, excessively expensive. Jackson Dubois’s place had been nice, but Babineaux’s place was a cut above.

  Ziggy reached across to the passenger seat and collected his MacBook. He had stopped at Radio Shack for the things that he thought he might need, and one of his purchases had been a 29dBi 5GHz parabolic dish antenna. He connected it to the laptop. The dish wasn’t as big or powerful as the one he used in Tokyo, but he didn’t need it to be. He logged on, scanning the available Wi-Fi frequencies until he found the signal that was emanating from the house, and piggybacked onto it. It took thirty seconds to crack the password. He had guessed, correctly, that a house like Babineaux’s would have plenty of systems that were controlled by computer. Lighting, entertainment, communications, security. Now they would all be accessible to him. His fingers flashed across the keyboard, stripping away protections until he had isolated the systems that he needed.