by John Sweeney
‘What?’ asked Bejtullah, incredulous.
‘The Lichtenberg figures. You do know what a Lichtenberg figure is?’
The look on Bejtullah’s face suggested that no, he did not.
‘When lightning strikes a human being,’ explained Zeke, ‘it does so at 220,000 miles per hour with an electric charge of up to one billion volts, generating temperatures up to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s five times hotter than the surface of the sun. But the bolt lasts a fraction of a millisecond and the human body, so much salty water in a bag, isn’t too bad at conducting electricity, so nine times out of ten, people survive lightning bolts. Unless, that is, they’re holding on to an iPhone or a fishing rod or a golf club. That’s why in America the state with the most lightning fatalities is Florida – not because the weather’s freakish down there, it’s simply a question of statistics. More people are playing golf in Florida at any one time; golf clubs are metal and so the person holding metal gets to sizzle. The lethality of a lightning bolt increases exponentially if you’re holding on to metal. If you’re in a metal box during an electrical storm, you’re going to get electrocuted, no question. Are you with me?’
Bejtullah scowled at Zeke, which he took as a yes.
‘Lichtenberg was an eighteenth-century German scientist. A hunchback, shrewd, witty, an Anglophile, an aphorist who came up with “God, who winds up our sundials”, an—’
Bejtullah coughed impatiently.
‘. . . the father of plasma physics. While our Benjamin Franklin was playing with kites in a storm, Lichtenberg went looking for the victims of lightning bolts and repeatedly found the same phenomenon: lightning-shaped marks – fractals, if you like – leaving a tracery of burnt blood vessels on the skin. He then built his own electricity-generating machine and reproduced the same fractals in other materials. Let’s look, once more, at the photographs of our seven dead men . . .’
Zeke went through all seven. Each one had distinctive red tracery on his skin. Each time, Zeke pointed to the lightning mark and said, ‘Lichtenberg figures,’ and smiled at Bejtullah.
It was like watching someone’s brain being salami-sliced, thought Agim. He almost felt sorry for Bejtullah.
‘All seven, self-electrocuted by lightning. This theory,’ Zeke continued, ‘fits the known facts but begs the question: why do something so insane as to risk death during an electrical storm on a mountaintop in the middle of nowhere? And the seventh death is even more puzzling: the man has the telltale Lichtenberg figures but appears to have survived electrocution, only to stab himself in the face repeatedly with a sharp stone dagger. Why do that? We are looking for an anomaly, something unusual in the environment which might explain the behaviour of these men. But before we do that, we should ask ourselves a primary question: who are these men? I’ve done a little background data-checking and I’m confident that at least five of the seven are Islamic State operatives, senior players, hostile to the West and, I’m afraid, my country. That goes, in particular, for the dual citizen, the Iraqi-American.’
He paused, took a sip of water. He held the room, entirely.
‘So, Mr Bejtullah, we return to the question you ruled out: what facility has the deaths of these men, at least five of whom were in ISIS, the most feared terrorist organisation in the world, got nothing to do with? Where is it and what happens inside it, what does it do and who does it?’
Bejtullah leant forward and said in English, ‘Well, Mr CIA, it’s your facility, isn’t it? Why ask us all these questions?’
‘Our facility?’ asked Zeke. Now it was his turn to be incredulous.
A look of panic washed over Bejtullah’s face and there was a sense that he had uttered something that should not have been communicated to this man. His wrist jerked in front of his face and he stared at his watch – not the room – as he said, ‘This meeting has overrun and I am late for a conference with the minister. Thanks for your questions, Mr Chandler. One of my team will get back to you. Good day.’ And then he got up and left in a hurry, his underlings standing up quickly and gathering in a huddle to block the exit so that Zeke couldn’t pursue him any further.
Later that day, an encrypted call was made from Tirana to CIA headquarters at Langley in Virginia.
‘The Angel Moroni is in town.’
‘I heard.’
‘He’s been asking all the wrong questions.’
‘Damn.’
‘In Albanian.’
‘He speaks Albanian?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Hot damn. Does he know about the facility?’
‘Not yet, not the whole story. But the needle on his moral compass is troubling him. You know what he’s like. If he’s allowed to continue, the programme will be dead in the water. Get him off my back.’
‘Understood. I’m on it.’ And the call ended.
WEST HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA
Joe woke up and took his fool of a dog, a black whippet-poodle cross by the name of Reilly, for a long walk in Runyon Canyon. He climbed up and up, to a vantage point where he could see the Hollywood sign etched clear and bold against a bluff and, as he turned, the great dismal sprawl of LA stewing in the heat. It was only ten o’clock in the morning, yet already the sun was haloed by a dirty shade of bronze. He’d traded the overcast skies of Ireland, then London, for a sky of molten brown, and he scratched his head as to why that was the case. Reilly shot into some bushes, didn’t like what was in there, and reversed out, tail between his legs, fear curled in muscle.
Truth was Joe was still running: running from the IRA, who still wanted to kill him; running from his time in North Korea, when he’d first realised in the act of killing a sociopath, their master in terrorism, that he’d been brainwashed into elevating his cause of a united Ireland into an excuse for spilling blood; running from the Russians who had tried to kill him because of their own stupid mistakes; running from the moment when their man inside the CIA had shot dead Joe’s lover Katya in the mountains of northern Utah.
And so he’d ended up in LA, working as a private investigator, but one with a very unusual set of rules. No divorce, no corporate. That left him a pretty limited field. But his conscience did allow him to find people and, it turned out, he was exceptionally good at that. He could find people because he’d had to hide himself, first from the IRA, then the Russians. He knew the mistakes people made when they covered their tracks. Finding people in the digital age wasn’t that hard. It was often more like following a burglar’s footprints in the snow. Thing is, some people didn’t want to be found. They had their own reasons to run. And as far as he could, within and without the law – Joe wasn’t a huge respecter of lawyerly rubbish – he wouldn’t give up people he found if they were running from darkness. His philosophy wasn’t that sophisticated. Most people were a bit of a mess, true, but very, very few were genuinely evil. If you got that, you understood humanity.
So if someone had run from an aggressive or violent partner, then Joe wouldn’t take the case or, if he had by mistake, their secret was safe with him. What he tried to do when the story was more complicated was ask the runner, when he’d tracked them down, for permission to tell his client that they were safe and, well, that they were OK. More often than not, the runners got that, said that was fine. The hardest bit of his new job was going back to the client and managing their expectations, telling them that though, maybe, they loved someone, the other person did not love them back. Sometimes, he didn’t get paid. That didn’t bother him too much. He was surviving. If he ran out of money, he could always get in touch with Zeke, who was forever asking him to meet in Virginia for breakfast, lunch, dinner, to chat about work. He loved Zeke, but he’d spent too much of his life in the shadows to want to work for the CIA.
Reilly had found a stick and was circling him at a bewilderingly fast pace, prancing, full of doggy joy. Joe smiled to himself. In Syria, he’d miss Reilly. But he would be in good hands while Joe was away. He’d found an old Navy vet, Alf, who’d been in the Seco
nd World War, who looked after Reilly when Joe was on his travels. The dog and the vet enjoyed each other’s company so much that Joe sometimes felt like an interloper. Still, Reilly was his dog, the only living thing that truly loved him.
Joe could see it coming at him, a tsunami-style wall of melancholy at the memory of Katya. He did his best to sidestep it, thinking about the moment when Dominic had started to sob and Joe had given him a little hug. That was the truth of it: Joe could only survive if he felt he was doing some good. He would get Dominic’s son back to him. That way, his own loss would feel less total.
He returned to his trailer, half-perched over a ravine, with a goodish view of the city offset by the possibility that it might collapse into said ravine any day now. Joe’s strength as a tenant was that he didn’t care, so he got a good imminent-death discount. It still cost him too much, but what the hell.
He started reading the file on the flash drive.
Jameela Abdiek had been born in Aleppo twenty-seven years ago, her father a colonel in the army, her mother a much-loved teacher. She became a star pupil at a lycée in Damascus and then, aged seventeen, made the move to California, prior to entering college to study English and American Literature. From the very moment of touchdown at LAX, she was no longer Jameela. She became Jam – or, more often, Jammy. Her family back home in Syria had enough money to make sure she lived the good life, renting a tiny but beautiful apartment three blocks from the Santa Monica Pier. It didn’t say it in black and white, but Joe got a feeling that she’d ended up having way too much fun. There was a line or two on a few gossip websites, hinting at scandals that had been hushed up. One made some not-so-subtle hints at sex in a toilet at the Oscars with a Hollywood screenwriter on the make. Joe made a mental note to look up that particular sleaze merchant. Somehow it got through to her that when you go off the rails, you end up in a train wreck. Leastways, she got, not religion, but a conviction that TMI therapy was a force for good. She quit college and began working for Dr Dominic Franklyn. From that moment, the digital record didn’t quite dry up but it got much, much drier. That first year in LA was brilliantly curated by the digi-snitches. But once she fell under the sway of Dominic, there was virtually nothing in the file about her life for the last seven years. She bore him a son, Ham, when she was twenty. And, seven years later, she and the boy vanished.
Joe closed the file and made himself a cup of tea. America was the greatest nation on earth, no question, but he still preferred tea to coffee. He went online to check his bank account and gave out a soft woo. The one thing you could say about Dominic Franklyn and his ice-maiden lawyer, Joe thought to himself, was that they didn’t worry about money. The first tranche of cash had swished into Joe’s account, two months’ pay in advance, $120,000 in one fell swoosh and he hadn’t even left West Hollywood.
The screenwriter was so easy to track down it made Joe laugh. His first name was Humfrey and his second was DeCrecy and there was only one of those online – or in the whole world – and he lived three blocks away. After another thirty minutes on the Internet, Joe figured out who he really was and what he did with some of his money and where he liked to go on holiday. Joe emailed him directly and DeCrecy agreed to have lunch on Joe, right there and then. Philip Marlowe, eat your heart out.
Marlene Dietrich blew a smoke ring at Joe while Frank Sinatra looked impossibly young in acne and a bow tie. The bar’s theme was the Golden Age of Hollywood – the faces of stars from the 1920s to 1950s stared out from gilt frames, long-dead actors captured in repose, elegant for eternity. The stardust was wasted on the two customers drinking at noon on the dot, a morose Chinese man nursing a scotch, and Joe, sipping a pint of Guinness, Reilly slumbering by his feet, his snout on his paws. Unless he got a good run once a day – and he’d had that up in the canyon – he would turn into a cat. Unless, that is, he took a dislike to someone.
Humfrey DeCrecy entered the bar just like Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia had strode into the officers’ mess to announce that he’d taken Aqaba. That is, he made his entrance with a theatricality bordering on farce, but it was very watchable. He had sandy blond hair in curly bubbles, slightly too long and not necessarily washed recently, bulging eyes, cornflower blue in colour, and finely chiselled cheekbones with the first flush of the burst little veins that mark an irredeemable drinker. He was tall, taller than Joe, built like a stick and dressed in a bile-pink shirt, white shorts and pink sneakers: a human flamingo.
‘Hello, dudes!’ he said. ‘Surf’s up!’ His accent was West Coast, with a hint of something else, possibly the Deep South. He went up to the Chinese guy and asked, ‘Mr Tiplady, I presume?’ Joe corrected him before the other guy hit him and he joined Joe on the next bar stool along.
‘My name is Humfrey Marmeduke DeCrecy. You can call me Mr DeCrecy.’
‘That’s a silly name,’ said Joe. Humfrey growled, at which Reilly got up, nipped Humfrey on the back of the leg and then re-burrowed his snout in his paws.
‘Ow!’ whined Humfrey. ‘Control that beast.’
‘Don’t criticise my dog,’ said Joe, with an edge that brooked no argument. He ordered two pints of Guinness and, in hushed tones, called Humfrey a ‘fecking idiot’ in Gaelic.
Humfrey stopped dead, and his pop-eyes drank Joe in. ‘So you really are Irish? Not just a plastic Paddy?’ Joe told him to go play with himself, again in Gaelic, while keeping a mild but genuine amusement on his face. Humfrey was clearly a pain in the arse and funny, both at the same time. Joe liked him. It was kind of hard not to.
When his Guinness arrived, Humfrey downed it in one. He banged the empty pint on the bar, ordered a second, and closed his eyes and sat in a catatonic state for half a minute.
Then the pint appeared, and his eyes opened wide and he said, ‘Paddy, people like you bombed London, didn’t you? Naughty Paddy-dude.’
He shot Joe a look from the side of his eye that was somehow more knowing than Joe was comfortable with. There was, of course, no way that a Hollywood sybarite would know what Joe had done, or tried to do, during his years of useless idiocy. But Humfrey drained his second pint and was off again.
‘What made you think of arranging to me meet here? Look at this place. Like so much else in La-La Land, we’re worshipping at a shrine to falsehood. This one’s shtick honours a past that didn’t exist, or didn’t exist the way they said it did. Look at these black-and-white photographs. Look at them! They give their subjects old-fashioned integrity, heh? Yeah? And the real people in those frames just weren’t like that. The stars fucked the wrong people, punched waiters, snorted coke, befriended the mob and jacked up just like we do, dude, only the studios were much better at covering it up back then. Hollywood, then, was a lie factory. Still is now. The thing is, people, the people, they want the golden memories of a heroic age, not the tawdry reality of humdrum human failure. They want the lie. May I please’ – he hiccoughed, unpleasantly loudly – ‘have another one? Just the one. I presume Naughty Paddy-dude is paying, because I’m a little short at the moment.’
He shuddered, calmed down a little and sipped his third pint in the fashion of a normal drink, then looked at Joe out of the corner of his eye again, slightly bemused, and said, almost sheepishly, ‘So, you wanted to talk to me?’
‘It’s about Jameela,’ said Joe. ‘I read something on the Internet, an old news story from eight, nine years ago, and I figured it might be yo—’
‘Jammy!’ He gave out a massive sigh. ‘Oh no, is she OK? Tell her I’m so sorry. I feel so bad about it. The thing is, Paddy-dude, I really loved her. We both hit Hollywood at the very bang bang bang of the millennium, and she was such a hottie that I had to have her, and she found me amusing but we fought – oh my God! She had such a love of life. Such fun. The best sense of humour I’ve ever come across. And she could fight, she had a real temper on her. But she was, Paddy-dude, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever been to bed with. She had a body like a buttered angel. And in the morning she was so, so, so intereste
d in words, in playing with the English language, in books, plays, poems. She loved Keats, could recite whole chunks of it. So romantic. The first night we’ – his voice dipped an octave – ‘made love, I took her in the car and we drove off to the Pacific and watched the sun come up. It came up like thunder. I’m a Hollywood screenwriter and that’s how the sun always comes up. Like thunder.’
He hiccoughed again. His eyes fluttered open and shut, then closed fully, then opened wide and he turned to Joe and said, ‘She’s not dead, is she?’
Joe shook his head. ‘But she’s gone missing. Good people want to know she’s safe and well.’
‘And who are you, anyway?’ He’d gone quite cold.
‘My name is Joe Tiplady and I’m a private detective.’
‘Prove it.’
‘Your real name is Dwayne Dunlop III, and you were born and raised in the Ozark Mountains, in Arkansas. Humfrey DeCrecy has been dead seven centuries. Your mother is English, from Essex, and you got the name from a crypt in a churchyard in Colchester when visiting family there. When you came to LA, you started out as an actor, but the stars weren’t with you. You made three or four soft-porn films under the pseudonym Ronny Dymond. Then you made the switch to straight TV dramas. Your speciality is playing the man who gets murdered in the first five minutes. In the meantime, you turned screenwriter. You plagiarised your first screenplay, which was turned into a film, but you managed to get away with it, just. You’ve found a niche doctoring bad scripts for vanity projects but you think you’re better than that and you might just be right. You affect to be a moronic hedonist but you anonymously give one thousand dollars a month to a leprosy charity, and you go to a leprosy centre in India once a year where you teach people with no fingers and rotting noses how to speak English. In the shallowest, most narcissistic, most self-obsessed town on earth, you are a fake. Deep down, you’re a half-decent human being. Should I call you Dwayne or Ronny?’
