Road (A Joe Tiplady Thriller Book 2)

by John Sweeney

  ‘Therefore, it behoves this court to come to the ineluctable conclusion driven by the weight of evidence. This court finds against Jameela Abdiek and in favour of Dr Dominic Franklyn. This court rules that Dr Dominic Franklyn should have custody over his son, Ham Franklyn, in perpetuity, and that Jameela Abdiek should have no visitation or access rights whatsoever. Costs are awarded in full to Dr Dominic Franklyn.’

  ‘All rise,’ said the court usher with the iridescent toupee and the pronounced underbite. Everyone in court stood up apart from Jameela, whose body was locked in shock. The judge left the court and Jameela’s lawyer, a woman who had fought hard – as best as she could, with no serious evidence to submit to the court – to no avail, got her client to her feet. Slowly, the two women, arm in arm, walked down the central aisle of the court. As Jameela passed Joe, she stared at him and hissed, ‘You stole my son.’

  Joe closed his eyes and bent his head. He had nothing to say to that.

  Then it was the turn of the other side to make their exit. First, the government agents and lawyers filed past Joe, then the experts, then the lawyers, until there was only Dominic Franklyn, Luke McDonald and the private investigator, Rocky Montefiore, left.

  It had ended exactly as Jameela had always feared it would end, in total and abject defeat. The truth of it was: everything she said would happen, happened. The algorithms, the money, the secret power of Dominic’s connections with the Agency, they had trumped the pitiful attempts of a Muslim immigrant from Syria to prove them wrong.

  As the victors filed past Joe, he lifted up his head like a bull beginning to take notice, looked Franklyn directly in the eye and said, ‘This isn’t over.’

  Franklyn smiled indulgently to himself, saying nothing, but Luke McDonald halted, ran his fingers through his thick, lustrous blond locks and retorted: ‘Mommy takes the boy off to ISIS summer camp, what do you expect?’

  ‘You fuck beautiful women, but deep down you want to fuck pretty men. Nothing wrong with that, but you pay Shorty over here’ – he nodded towards Franklyn – ‘to zap your brain to make it behave, and you pay Rocky to kidnap other people’s kids to keep the lid on it when your dick misbehaves, because what you lust for doesn’t sit well with the box-office receipts. You’re a fake, Luke, and Shorty is a torturer and Rocky is a slimeball. Jameela fought ISIS, through and through. Today, power and money won, as it so often does in the courtrooms of the United States. The three of you defeated a good woman and mother who happened to be born in Syria. But your power and money stinks. As I said, this isn’t over.’

  Joe brushed past them and walked out of the courtroom, taking the stairs, all twenty-two storeys of them, because the thought of being trapped in an elevator and sharing oxygen with them sickened him to his core.

  The men with baseball bats came for Joe two days later. He’d just parked his car in a basement car park. They did their work deftly, not touching his face once, leaving him gasping with pain. He pissed blood for a week, but even as they hit his kidneys, again and again, he knew that what he had said in the courtroom had touched a chord, and that made it – kind of – worthwhile.

  SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA

  The door was locked, a mess of letters and community newspapers jammed in the mailbox. It was early morning, and Joe had come the first day he was able to walk without a stick since his beating. Down the street a woman was walking her dog, eyeing the big stranger with the limp at her neighbour’s door without trying to look nosy. Joe ignored her and put his shoulder to the door. That didn’t work, so he returned to his car and fetched a big screwdriver, which he jammed in the doorframe and leant on it, hard, so the door popped out of its frame. He’d pay for a new one down the track.

  The door opened onto her tiny kitchen, which was empty; so was her bedroom. In the small dining room there was a note written in Jameela’s rather beautiful handwriting: I’ve gone home to Aleppo. Don’t try to find me.

  Joe slumped against the wall, not knowing what to do. Returning to Aleppo was a kind of suicide. Jameela’s mind had been broken by power and money; broken by a legal system that treats rich and poor alike, or so it lies; broken by Joe, who’d stolen her son; broken by the pitilessness of her ex-husband; broken by the Agency that funded his hideous experiments; broken for committing the twenty-first-century crime of being Syrian.

  More than anything, he wanted to sleep at night without suffering his recurring nightmare of kidnapping the boy in Hungary and hearing his mother’s haunted cries pierce through the fog: Ham . . . Ham . . . Ham . . .

  To achieve that goal, he knew what he had to do – and where, eventually, he would have to end up – and even though he was not a timid man, the fear of that made him retch violently.

  BEAR LAKE, UTAH

  The Stars and Stripes flapped in the stiff breeze as clouds scudded across the blue sky, the snow-tipped peaks of the Rockies above, Bear Lake below. The trees were turning, a cold snap in the bright morning air foretelling that soon fall would give way to winter. The simple wooden cabin hadn’t changed since Joe had last been here, when Katya had been shot. Woodsmoke spiralled from the stone chimney before being scattered by the wind, and Joe wondered if Zeke might, after all, be home. He skipped up to the deck and knocked on the wooden door. After a short while it swung open to reveal a woman in her sixties – petite, lithe, her grey hair piled up in a bun, wearing blue jeans and a cream shirt. Beyond middle age as she was, you could tell in an instant that she had been a ravishing beauty in her youth, and there was still a fiery sweetness about her that Joe found beguiling.

  ‘Joey? How are you, stranger?’ No one on this earth was allowed to call Joe by that silly name; no one, that is, apart from Mary-Lou, Zeke’s wife for so many years. The old lady held him by his hands, giving him the once-over.

  ‘You look pale, Joey. Not enough sun.’

  ‘It’s the dissolute life I lead, Mary-Lou. Hanging around in bars, the bad life.’

  ‘Oooh, take me away, take me there.’

  ‘I don’t think old Zeke would like that.’

  At the mention of her husband’s name, her face crumpled. She put her hand to her mouth, turned away and said, ‘You’d better come inside.’

  They sat in the kitchen in an edgy silence while she fussed around brewing fresh coffee – she didn’t take a drop, on account of her being a Mormon – and providing Joe with a plate piled high with homemade cookies. Eventually she sat down opposite him as he sipped his coffee.

  ‘So Zeke’s not here?’

  ‘No, he’s not, Joey.’

  ‘Can I ask . . .’

  Her face crumpled once more, and she ran off to the bathroom and found herself some tissues, and blew her nose and wiped her eyes and returned, sniffling all the while. ‘Damn that Ezekiel Chandler, damn him, damn him, damn him.’

  Joe opened and closed his mouth several times, like a goldfish lapping in his bowl, but no sound came out. For the life of him, he didn’t know what to say. Marital discord, it’s what you did when you’d been married for four, five years, not decades.

  ‘Mary-Lou, I don’t know what’s happened.’

  ‘Oh, Joey, he’s gone out of my life.’

  ‘Mary-Lou, I am so sorry. The thing is, I need to talk to Zeke. I need his advice; I need to get in touch with him. There’s a court case I’m involved with, and the bad people in the CIA, they’re running rings around us. I need Zeke’s help.’

  ‘That’s the problem, Joey. I don’t know where he is. I believe he’s in trouble with the CIA’ – she pronounced all the initials long, so that she made it sound like a children’s nursery rhyme – ‘and they’ve told him to skedaddle, to lie low for a while.’

  ‘Mary-Lou, you know Zeke better than anyone else alive. Where do you think he might have gone?’

  The wind stiffened, rattling the cabin’s windows. She looked up and out at the stunning panorama, as if Zeke might be hiding in the mountains on the other side of the Utah–Idaho line.

  ‘He can’t go
to the badlands, him being a CIA man and all. So not Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Eritrea, Syria, North Korea, South Sudan.’ She’d clearly put some thinking-time into it. ‘The rest of the world is his oyster. He speaks twenty languages fluently. He could be anywhere.’

  ‘Give me some clues.’

  ‘All right. He’s vain about his gift for languages and he doesn’t want the CIA knowing where he is, so I don’t think he would hole up in any Anglophone country – that rules out Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and most of Micronesia. T’other thing is, he’s happiest with ancient stuff, unlocking long-dead languages, decoding ancient texts. His hero was an Oxford professor, name of Archibald Sayce, who decoded Hittite, whatever damn thing Hittite is.’

  ‘I don’t know either,’ said Joe.

  ‘The best place to find out where he might be is to go into that graveyard of books he’s got in his den, and look at the latest ones he bought before he hightailed it.’

  She led the way. The den smelt musty, unused, the memory of woodsmoke from the stove in the air. It was long and thin, walled with books of an astonishing variety of cultures and languages. A long pine table ran along the window and that, too, was stacked high with piles of books, some of which had toppled over onto the floor. At the end closest to his desk and the stove was a fresh pile, with titles on Catharism, Bogomilism and the Fraticelli.

  Joe knew nothing about any of these, but he also knew that Zeke wouldn’t just disappear without leaving a clue for his friends, in case of emergency. It just wasn’t his style. He sat down at the table and started to read while Mary-Lou brewed him some fresh coffee.

  ‘So you now know what a Hittite is, Joey?’ she asked, entering with a pot of coffee, milk and yet more cookies.

  Joe lifted his head from the books and shook his head. ‘Not yet, Mary-Lou, not yet.’

  Time wandered by. Joe looked up, his eyes tired, to realise that the sun was going down behind the Rockies. Mary-Lou entered the den and clicked the lights on.

  ‘You’ll go blind reading in the dark.’

  Joe smiled to himself. He hadn’t been fussed over like this for a very long time.

  ‘So what have you learnt?’

  ‘Heretics,’ he said. ‘They’re all heretics. By and large the Cathars were French, the Bogomils Balkan, the Fraticelli poor friars from Italy – it wasn’t called Italy then – who went to war against the corruption and obscene wealth of the Catholic Church.’

  Joe scratched his head, found a notebook that Zeke had been using, full of his spidery writing. On the last page, a number: 2231. He dived back into the fattest book about the Fraticelli with an idea of where Zeke might have gone to ground.

  MONTERIPIDO MONASTERY, PERUGIA

  Few sounds on earth are more ethereally beautiful than a chorus of one hundred Franciscan monks intoning the ‘Ave Maris Stella’, a plainsong first written down in the ninth century. The monks walked slowly out of the chapel into the cloisters overlooking the Umbrian hills to the west and the Apennines to the east. Looking at them with a kind of awe was a group of tourists led by a professor with a basso profundo voice and a love of learning.

  ‘In the year 1322,’ said the professor, ‘a convocation of the most powerful cardinals, monks and friars of the Catholic Church met here in this monastery to deliberate the most pressing question of the day and ruled on the absolute poverty of Christ. This was a thunderclap for Pope John XXII and caused immense turmoil . . .’

  The professor led his tour group towards the refectory, but one of the tourists, a big man who looked too pale for his own good, as though he’d been kept out of the sun, peeled off to stand quietly by a column. As one of the last friars walked past him, the pale man stepped out, not quite blocking his path but advertising his presence.

  The friar came to a stop, smiling at the pale man with an open, gap-toothed smile, that might, just might, be mistaken for the smile of a simpleton.

  ‘How did you find me?’ asked the friar.

  ‘Twenty-two thirty-one sounds like some kind of space movie,’ said the pale man.

  ‘But it’s one-three-two-two backwards, the year of a broadside against a rich and corrupt papacy. You’re not so dumb after all, Irishman.’

  ‘We need to talk, Zeke.’

  ‘Let’s go to my cell.’

  Aforesaid cell was a plain room, eight feet deep, white-walled, decorated by a black wooden crucifix, a bed and a wooden chair. Set in the wall above the bed was a window looking out on Assisi to the south-west and the green rolling hills of Umbria beyond. Zeke sat on the bed, Joe on the chair, sunlight fell between the two of them.

  ‘So, Mormon to monk. How’s that work?’

  ‘To be exact, I’m kind of in training to be a friar, not a monk. I didn’t want to leave Langley but, if you’re on the run from the most powerful data-wranglers on earth, a fourteenth-century monastery isn’t a bad place to hide.’

  ‘Maybe. Reason I’m here, Zeke, is that you set me up for a fool. You played me. You betrayed me. I go to Damascus with a guy called Humfrey DeCrecy. He gets shot, dies in front of my eyes. Bad news for you is that while I’m doing a job in Caracas, I meet the dead man. Humf tells me, after some deliberation, that he was working for you. Why did you play with me like this?’

  Zeke hesitated. ‘You wearing a wire?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK. On my watch, the CIA ran and funded a covert Free Syrian Army operation in Damascus – essentially a sleeping operation until the regime collapsed. That longed-for eventuality didn’t happen. Instead, the military intervention of the Russians in Syria changed the balance of the war. The KGB/FSB, under Grozhov – who I’ve been crossing swords with since Afghanistan in the eighties – started sniffing around. Reluctantly, I took the decision to close our operation down and get as many of our people out before they got boiled alive. This wasn’t a case of what’s the best we can do, but the least bad we can do in horrible circumstances. You pull people out; you don’t want the regime to know you’re doing that. You kick sand in their faces. Your friend Humfrey was window-dressing, visible evidence that Team Zarif was cracking down, was killing our guys. The more we fooled around, the safer were our people.’

  Joe pressed on: ‘So Mansour mock-kills Humf.’

  ‘Qureshi’s was one of ours, too. He’s safe now.’

  ‘But Mansour gets to torture me. That’s real, by the way. No mocking that up. And all the while you’re running him?’

  Zeke nodded.

  ‘How’s that work?’

  ‘Some people we pay. We own them. Some people are doing their own thing and our interests are aligned, for a time. Some people take out an insurance policy, help us every now and then, in case of what might happen in the future. Mansour works for Zarif, but will do us the odd favour, just in case his boss ends up dead sooner than expected. The prize was to convince Zarif’s people that Qureshi was finished so that he and his people could get out of Syria. The show was scripted to give Qureshi and the others the chance of a safe exit. Then you, my favourite Irishman, come along, dragging Humfrey behind you. We’ve used Humfrey before. He’s good at playing dead. So we turn this unexpected opportunity to our advantage. Mansour makes a show of beating up Qureshi and pretends to shoot Humfrey – a nice touch. Our plan was that Mansour would arrest you and kick you over the border. But you disappear, then reappear in a regime prison. To keep his cover, Mansour has to give you something of a hard time. Remember, the other side is tyranny. You play straight with those people, everyone dies. I got you out again, at no little cost to my standing in the Agency.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks for that,’ Joe’s tone was the opposite of warm. ‘But somebody else walked into the crossfire too, Zeke. She’s called Jameela and she’s Syrian and was on the run from her man back in the States, who is a psycho. She’d taken her boy from him because Dominic Franklyn is so freaking weird. But here’s the thing. Psycho Franklyn works hand in glove with the Agency. He’s doing some batshit crazy re-br
ainwashing research which isn’t really getting ISIS fanatics from seeing the error of their ways. I didn’t know any of that when Franklyn hired me to get his kid back. When the game stopped, I snatched her son and psycho Dominic got him. You gave Franklyn a great reference, saying I would be good at finding his boy. So from where I’m sitting, you used me twice, once as a hapless bystander to add necessary credibility to a fake killing; the second time, to do the Agency’s dirty work, to get a boy back to a father who is useful to the CIA, but hardly a good guy. So explain to me why I shouldn’t break your neck, right here and now?’

  ‘Put it that way, Joe, go ahead. If you seriously believe I did that to you, break my neck. It’s an old neck and the head on top of it belongs to a silly old fool. Go ahead.’

  Joe didn’t move. Zeke started to say something when the monastery bell tolled noon. As the last toll died away, Zeke started again: ‘Joe, we’ve both been played, both been gulled. Since the war in Iraq, the CIA has been under enormous pressure to stop the bad guys, to stop Islamist terrorists. Under that pressure, the Agency has gone to hell in a handcart. To keep us on the straight and narrow, we have rules. To get around the rules, the Agency has fallen in love with black ops. Don’t ask, don’t find out, don’t even look. Strange things were happening in Albania, ISIS men frying themselves in the middle of thunderstorms. I go there to see for myself. I start hearing about a black facility. I lose my security escort, deliberately, and then we’re ambushed. The countryside is sprayed with bullets. Shrapnel hits my lung and I would have died were it not for a shepherd looking after me and an Albanian cop who is even more unpopular with his employers than I am. Curiosity did not go well for this cat.’

  ‘Franklyn’s facility is in Albania, Zeke.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Jameela.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Zeke mused that over for a time.

  ‘Is she sure?’ he asked.