Midnight Empire

by Andrew Croome

  Daniel breathed out. He’d be able to get away after the evening’s flights. He watched the screens and the landscape was long and wide, an immensity that was a form of liberation, lines of river and hard mountain, foothills and the flat sweep of valleys between. He could almost conjure the whip-rush of the wind.

  There were things you could never imagine yourself doing, things that others did that transformed them into enigmas. There were simple explanations—greed, anger, jealousy—but they were never up to task. What was the something else, the extra inch, the separation of mind?

  It was 2.58 a.m. when he parked outside the Riviera Inn, dim light in the sky above. He walked into the motel’s car park and the hire car was not there. There were no lights on anywhere. He switched on the netbook and waited for it to boot. He felt himself tense, his hands all nerves. A few minutes passed and his laptop still had not shown on the netbook’s scan. It wasn’t there. The man must have taken it with him.

  Well. He’d just have to wait here and challenge the man when he got home. He’d be alright. It would be just like the mugging in the circuit only this time the initiative would be his.

  He looked up at the second-floor balcony and thought that that might be the place to stand. Then something occurred to him: what if the battery in the laptop had simply run flat? It could have been on for twenty-four hours or more. There was every chance that it was dead. It could still be in that room, along with the USB stick.

  He went to the back of the car for what he needed. He approached the door to room 19, felt the gap between it and the jamb with the tip of his finger. He put the sharp end of the tyre iron into the gap. Looking once around the lot, he pulled. He felt a surge of resistance and nothing gave.

  He moved the iron a little lower, closer to the lock. He pulled again and now there was a strain and creak and he did not stop, he drew his hands close to his chest. There was no sound of anything breaking but something slid and the door came suddenly open as if it had been gently kicked.

  He was in.

  He stepped inside, closed the door behind him and stood for a moment at the curtains, peering out. There was no sign that anyone had heard him.

  He found the light switch. It was the type that required the room key to stay on but would give a minute or so of light without. The room was like any motel room: a double bed and a single one, a television, brown wallpaper, an air conditioner, a bedside table with a phone. On the single bed was a suitcase. Shirts and pants hung over the chairs and also sat in piles on the floor. There was the malignant smell of cigarettes; cans of Bud Light and tissues in the trash.

  In the bathroom he saw familiar clothing on the benchtop. It was Ania’s green blouse and one of her bras. The man had obviously stolen them, was doing with these things who knew what. For a moment he thought to reach out and take them but first he needed to find the memory stick.

  He checked the suitcase, looked under the beds. He searched the cupboards beneath the television and the closet, the back of the room’s only chair.

  The light went out. Moving to the switch in the dark, he turned it on again.

  He looked to see whether anything had been taped to the underside of the benchtop, or perhaps hidden in the roll space below the drawers or in the gap behind the toilet. He checked above the air conditioning unit and inside the small fridge then below it and between the mattresses of both beds. He tried the pillows and peered into a ventilation grille.

  He tipped the contents of the bin onto the floor. He pulled the extra bedding from the cupboard and shook it out. He took the drawer in the telephone stand all the way out of its moorings, but there was nothing under or behind it. He lifted the bedside lamp and then the TV. He checked the seams of the carpet to see whether any had been pulled.

  He was almost out of options when the noise came. It was the gravelly sweep of a car into a spot outside, the drag of its tyres on the bitumen. It did not sound as if it was the spot in front of room 19 and so he did not panic. He waited. He expected to hear voices: a couple in late-night conversation. But there was nothing. Dry silence. As the quiet wore on, he became afraid. He stood by the door to the bathroom. The light went out.

  He felt for the handle of the air weight.

  Perhaps a minute passed in which he heard only his own breath. Then the front door creaked. It was off its latch and the creak was slight enough to have been the wind. He stood completely still.

  It’s nothing. It’s nothing.

  But it wasn’t nothing. The door began to voice a slow, complete opening and the dimness in the room grew less.

  Act now, he thought. Bloody act. He took a step forward. The figure in the doorway seemed enormous in the backlight, filling the frame. Daniel wasn’t sure at all what to say but he wanted to take the initiative, he wanted to speak first.

  The figure shifted.

  ‘No closer,’ Daniel said. His voice came out malformed, beginning hoarsely as a whisper.

  The return voice took time. ‘No clow-sa,’ it said, and Daniel realised he was being mocked. Then, booming: ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  Daniel almost jumped. Did he hear in the voice the slip of intoxication?

  ‘I want what you stole,’ Daniel said, trying to sound reasonable and justified, as if he hadn’t just now broken into a motel room. ‘Where is it?’

  The man said, ‘Ahh.’ He took a step forward and closed the door behind him. It put them in complete darkness. The figure was lost in it, but Daniel was sure that the man was still by the door.

  ‘Turn the light on,’ Daniel said. ‘Turn it on now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘On.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘Now, please.’

  ‘What are you going to do with it?’

  ‘Where is my stuff?’

  ‘You’re not going to use that, why even hold it?’

  ‘Don’t come any closer.’

  ‘Boo!’ The man sniggered.

  ‘I can hear you moving,’ said Daniel.

  ‘What are you going to do? I’m going to come over there.’

  ‘Don’t,’ he said. He meant it, or it sounded that way. He thought about Ania’s things in the bathroom.

  He could hear the man’s breathing but beyond that he made out nothing in the dark.

  ‘I can kill you,’ the man said. ‘Here, you are on my property.’

  There was a scuff, the drag of a foot. Daniel took a step back, and shouted, ‘Stop!’

  Silence.

  Daniel thought that the man was now by the television. Three yards or more away. He realised then that he would do it. If it came. Slippery in his hand but he wasn’t going to allow himself to be hurt here.

  He said, ‘Give me the computer and the memory stick. And I’m taking Ania’s clothes.’

  At the mention of her name the man hissed. There was the knock of something—it sounded like a knuckle on glass.

  ‘How about I cut you?’ the man said. ‘How about I cut you then I gut her?’

  ‘I’m telling you now not to come any closer.’

  ‘I rescued that bitch.’

  ‘I want our things, then I’ll go.’

  ‘Things, things, things . . . Fucking my wife.’

  ‘Turn the light on.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  He felt the hate. Unalloyed. He knew that he’d made a mistake.

  ‘Listen—’

  There was the creak of something like leather. He was sure that the man was by the television. It made no sense, then, that something suddenly smashed with terrific force across his shoulder and face. He fell back against the wall. Went down onto one knee. What entered his head was the word knife. Everything was black. He knew at any second he’d be hit again.

  He squeezed off a shot. There was an enormous blue spark but the sound that came was hardly anything, a firecracker. He shrank down further and held an arm above his head for the blow that would surely come.

  A few moments passed. He held the revolver to one
side, made himself smaller and lifted a knee. His ears were ringing from the blow and the shot and he couldn’t hear where the man was. The spark was etched on his vision.

  He waited for a long time.

  ‘I want our things,’ he eventually said.

  There was no reply. After a while he decided to stand up. He felt for the side wall. He walked its length to the front of the room and hesitantly turned on the light.

  The blood was dark. The massive body lay on the ground by the bathroom. There was so much blood Daniel couldn’t see where he’d hit him; didn’t want to know. For the remainder of his time in the room, he tried very hard to realise that this was happening. He knew that he had to get it right. These next few minutes would define him forever.

  He had to step over the blood and the body to get to the bathroom. There he gathered up Ania’s blouse and bra and took a towel from the rack. He ran the towel over every surface in the bathroom he thought he’d touched. He did the same in the motel room proper. It took time but his prints had been recorded at LAX; he could either clean the room and run the risk of being arrested with the body, or be arrested later when they found a print.

  When he was done with every flat surface and object, he did the light switch, and the door. He knew that if there was anyone outside who’d come to investigate, he was done for. He opened the door with his boot and went out. There was nobody. The Desert Springs Agency car was right in front of him. He went to its passenger side and there was a bag on the seat. It had to be.

  He used the towel on the door; it was unlocked. He opened the bag and saw his laptop and fished around fast until, yes, he pulled out the memory stick. He began to walk. He felt distant and removed but at the same time there was a knot in his throat. He kept the bag and shoved everything into it as he went, Ania’s clothes, the towel, the tyre iron, the revolver. He put it on the passenger seat of his Toyota and drove away. He took back streets, dark zones, a numb pathway between places disconnected. It was the most unreal journey of his life and by its end he felt very far from home.

  12

  For a long time Ania sat in disbelief. She looked at him as if he were mad. She said, ‘This is not possible.’ And later: ‘This I would not have picked.’ He explained again that it had been an accident.

  ‘An accident,’ she whispered. ‘Do you accidentally shoot someone dead?’

  ‘I didn’t want it to happen.’

  ‘I cannot believe.’

  ‘He was going to kill me.’

  ‘Who is at fault?’

  He scrubbed his hands. She watched him do it. He scrubbed his wrists. He changed his clothes and put the old ones in a garbage bag.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ she said. In that second she looked completely detached; in the next, as if she were about to cry. ‘My God,’ she said. ‘I would never have picked.’

  He looked away. He was trying to think.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ she said, hands to her mouth. ‘This is what is happening to you because I exist.’

  She stood and he saw her expression change, suddenly distant and unreadable except to say distraught. ‘I will have to go,’ she said. He took a step towards her. ‘There is no choice. I have to go because when they figure out who he is and discover that he had a wife we do not want them to find me in this city. They cannot connect me to you.’

  He looked at her.

  ‘I’ll go now,’ she said.

  ‘They’ll figure out you were here. They’ll suspect you.’

  ‘So what? I don’t have to deny it. I’ll be on the tape at the Venetian at the time.’

  He felt dreadful. He had to be calm. Had to think rationally.

  ‘This means what?’ she said. ‘We can never see each other again?’

  He looked at his feet.

  Ania wiped her face. She seemed to steady for a moment. ‘You cannot be caught, Daniel. Do you understand? We must have you get away.’ She gathered his hands in hers. ‘Now we’ll see what happens. You are smart so you will figure it out. And let’s say that we will see one another again. Just not for a while. Yes?’

  She kissed him on the cheek but didn’t really look at him. She was soon packing her things, and finally she was leaving, her belongings in the shopping bags they’d used to bring them in. At the door, she stopped. ‘I am very sorry, Daniel. Whatever happens, remember that it is my fault.’

  Then she was gone. He felt tremendously tired. It would have been wonderful to close his eyes, to forget this. But he had to do something now. While it was still dark.

  There was a twenty-four-hour Walgreens off Convention Center Drive. He approached the counter like any wasted tourist and asked for something to fill a Zippo. The woman turned to the cigarette shelf and sold him a twelve-ounce bottle of Ronsonol.

  He drove along the I95. He passed hardly any traffic and when he came to a dirt track that veered left he took it, headed for some foothills. After a while he came to a gate. For a moment he worried that it would be locked. It wasn’t. On the other side the track petered out until he was essentially driving over desert, hard earth and tufts of grass.

  He had only the end of the tyre iron to dig with so the hole he made was shallower than he would have liked. He was running out of time. Into the hole he put the bag, the gun, the towel and the clothes he’d worn, including his shoes. He poured the entire bottle of fluid over them and threw on a match. The smoke was black and terrible. In daylight, you would have seen it for miles.

  Once the objects had been incinerated, he began piling the dirt back over. He spent time smoothing it out, leaving the least disturbance possible.

  It was still dark when he returned to the highway. Dawn came only after he got to the loft. He turned the shower tap up as far as it went and sat in the recess for a long time. Water travelled in rivulets down the glass.

  To survive this he wasn’t going to think about it. When he got into bed, it was everything to fall asleep.

  He had to go to Creech and play at normal. If he stayed away, it would be suspicious later.

  He passed the dirt track on the left and it seemed shorter to him in the daylight. He could see the gate that he’d thought was hidden from the road. The area was clearly not as secluded as it had seemed.

  He walked onto the base and felt vacant. At the huts were Ellis and Wolfe.

  ‘Any news?’ he asked, a line he’d prepared.

  ‘Nothing from the FBI,’ said Ellis. ‘Something tells me it won’t be too long.’

  ‘The squad will go to ground,’ said Wolfe, not looking up from a document he was reading. ‘It ends with them disappearing into Mexico or with a shoot out in the middle of the street.’

  Daniel sat. After a time he made coffee and announced that he’d be in the communications hut if they needed him. He went there and sat outside it. The mountains beyond the base seemed crystal close. A few training drones flew above them, between the peaks and into and out of the valleys. They were grey and mindful. The cut sound of their propellers felt like a misstep, a flaw. He watched as they flew a wide, imaginary track in serial form.

  When they were gone he watched the land, wide and endless. A sky marked by high floats of cloud. Long zones of shattering intensity. Flats and sudden ridges and rocks. The light on the mountains was bright and red without the drones it was all different, vastly present.

  ‘Daniel.’

  Gray’s voice. He stood up to walk across.

  John Wright had finally had his meeting with the US consulate in Peshawar. Raul had listened in. Interesting. John Wright had suggested all kinds of things—not only that Dupont’s true employer was the CIA, but that his most trusted agent was a man named Abu Ja’far, a man who was now killing people, murdering innocents alongside the enemies of an Islamic Afghanistan, a mission essentially brought to you by the taxpayers of the USA.

  The consul, Raul said, had done the perfect job of playing dumb and expressing doubt, for the most part because he’d had no idea what Wright was talking about. Th
at might delay Wright for a day or two, but they could expect shortly to be reading everything in The Guardian.

  By the time the call ended, both Gray and Wolfe looked pale. Wolfe eventually went outside, and there was a short phone call followed by a very long one with someone who Daniel presumed was from Langley. He came back and said something about a critical incident level.

  Daniel did his best to remain aloof, to carry the outsider’s quiet concern. He remembered that he’d wanted this. That he was the cause. Indeed, that he’d just killed for it.

  He wondered who he was. He began to imagine some committee or tribunal where he’d get to explain all this, exactly what and how it had happened, if not to some benevolent power, then at the very least to himself.

  The day outside was glary. He looked to the horizon, in the direction of where he’d buried everything. He was terribly tired. It must have been showing. The distraction of John Wright was probably preventing the others from asking.

  Gray kicked a chair perfectly. He was looking at a computer screen and he turned to the nearest object and it flew momentously across the hut and clanged as it struck the wall.

  Raul’s promise of a day or two’s reprieve was proved incorrect. Within an hour, the article was online, the truth as Wright knew it: the Taliban who’d deceived the CIA and was now waging a violent campaign, killing first his handler and now the innocent citizens of Pakistan. It named him as Abu Ja’far, and said only that he’d previously been an ‘effective source’ against al-Qaeda—nothing about the assassinations he’d set up. That surprised Daniel. Perhaps Wright had been unable to verify them? Far more surprising though was this: ‘William Dupont, a CIA spy-master who had earlier confronted his agent on the street, was killed in the blast.’ The fact that Wright’s knowledge of the ‘confrontation’ could only have come from the photo scared Daniel.

  Why would Wright print that? Did he not realise it might endanger his source?

  He hoped that the sentence would go unnoticed but it was nearly the first thing out of Wolfe’s mouth: ‘Confronted on the street. Who has he spoken with to know that?’