by Gulvin, Jeff
‘He’s calling you at the office now?’ Her husband paused on the other end of the line. ‘Maybe we could …’
‘Don’t even think about it, baby. This is the President’s attorney’s office. The partners will never allow it.’
‘OK. Just a thought. What did he say?’
‘I taped it. I’ll play it to you.’
The New Orleans team were still gathered in the conference room, and Byrne put the taped conversation with Boese through the conference line, so they could all hear it. When it was over, he said goodbye to his wife and told her to get an FBI escort home. She told him audibly to fuck off, she could look after herself.
Harrison cocked an eyebrow at Byrne. ‘Sounds like my kinda gal,’ he said.
Swann was pensive. ‘Jackal and crow again. What’s he talking about?’
Nobody could give him an answer.
Darkness had fallen in Meridian, Mississippi. Boese crossed the street and ate buffalo wings and french fries in the diner next to Howard Johnson’s. When he was finished, he left a five-dollar tip and went back to the hotel. He already had his eye on a grey Ford sedan parked two up from his van. He had number plates in the back, which would take him no time to fix. Back in the hotel room he closed his eyes again. An hour later, he switched the number plates on the Ford. Quietly, he moved his equipment, then took the magnetic KYZ Radio signs and refixed them on the side of the van. He got behind the wheel of the Ford, hot-wired the ignition and pulled out on to the highway, heading west. He wondered how long it would take them to find the van.
Kovalski had decided on his course of action, and he called a late meeting to announce that he was going to run a team on the ground, initially out of New Orleans. Two or three people with specialist knowledge, headed by Cheyenne Logan. Everyone stared at her as he said it.
‘Logan was in London with the FEST last year,’ Kovalski explained, ‘and she also worked the Salvesen case from the US. She’s had four years in Domestic Terrorism and will be the ground liaison with the SIOC He looked then at Swann. ‘If you want to tag along, your knowledge will be useful, Jack. You’ve got no jurisdiction, of course, but you can participate in the investigation other than fugitive contact.’
‘I’ll clear it with SO13,’ Swann said. ‘But he’s on the run and we want him, so I’m sure they’ll let me stay.’
Mayer interrupted them. ‘What about from this office, you want some agents on temporary duty?’
Kovalski nodded. ‘I’d like a couple of co-ordinators based right here,’ he said, ‘and whatever intelligence analysts you can spare.’ He looked then at Harrison. ‘Apart from them, I want Johnny Buck on the ground.’
Harrison sat back, gazed hard at Swann and spat into his empty Coke can.
17
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, THEY gathered in the conference room. Kovalski suggested that Logan brief the people back east as to what had transpired. Byrne had flown back to Washington first thing that morning. It was suggested that they might want to get the behavioural science people involved, as well as the fugitive and violent crimes units.
Harrison pursed his lips. ‘Don’t we got enough people involved already?’ He sat up straighter. ‘What can they tell us anyway, goddammit? We know who the fucker is.’
Kovalski glanced at him and winced. ‘We’ll think about it,’ he said. ‘If we need them later, we’ll bring them in. Right now, we need to find the TV van or whatever vehicle he used.’
‘What about the identities of the other two with Boese?’ Swann asked.
Logan answered him. ‘I’ve run the pictures through the NCIC and we’ve got a couple of possibles, but nothing definite.’
‘We have to talk to Jakob Salvesen again,’ Kovalski stated. ‘I’m asking two agents outta Salt Lake to go see him. We might luck out and get something, but I doubt it.’
Swann scratched his temple. ‘None of this makes sense,’ he said. ‘Why do what he did? Why announce himself quite so spectacularly, without actually going for the full vanity trip and plastering his name all over the television stations? He rang the local ones down here. He even rang CNN in Atlanta. So why not tell them who he is? He told the crewman and the hookers. He sent you a feather. Why not go all the way?’
‘I thought you said this guy was the ultimate enigma,’ Harrison said.
Swann did not answer him directly. ‘Even bearing that in mind, it doesn’t answer my question. He was made public, after years of secrecy, last year.’ He looked round the room. ‘He’s got nothing more he can hide. What’s the reason behind it?’
Logan cut in on him then. ‘Jack, yesterday, you told us how he likes to put people on warning without giving them a reason.’
Swann folded his arms across his chest and nodded. ‘I know I did, Chey. But somehow this feels different.’
‘“Feels different.”’ Harrison cocked an eyebrow at him. ‘Just exactly what does that mean, bubba?’
The phone rang on the side cabinet and John Cochrane, who would be the office of origin ground liaison, leaned over and picked it up. His features stiffened and he nodded. ‘OK. Right.’ He put the phone down and looked across the table at Logan. ‘Guess the debate’s over,’ he said. ‘That was the Jackson field office. They think they’ve found the van.’
Taking Harrison’s car, they drove out of the city on Interstate 10, crossing the bridge which clipped the southeastern corner of Lake Pontchartrain. Swann looked out across the expanse of the water, the surface shimmering, crystal blue in the Louisiana sunshine. He could see the causeway more clearly now, the cars moving up and down. He had seen it from the air when they flew in to the airport at Kenner, lit up in the darkness. Twenty-four miles long, and when you got to the middle, you could not see land in any direction.
Logan sat up front with Harrison; Swann in the big back seat of the silver Crown Victoria. Harrison had attached a blue light to the inside of the windshield and traffic moved out of the way as he raced up the highway at 110 miles an hour. The car moved effortlessly.
‘It’s got the basic police package,’ Harrison told him, when Swann asked. ‘Up-rated suspension, reinforced floor and an oversize engine.’ He indicated the overdrive switch on the gear shift. ‘Alls I gotta do is press that and she really kicks ass.’
Logan had her lap-top open and was scrolling through pages of the notes and reports she had on file. Swann leaned over the front seats. ‘All the stuff from London, Jack.’ She turned her face to his and smiled.
Harrison looked sideways at her, then in the mirror at Swann. ‘How come you let this mother get away in the first place, duchess?’ he said. Logan flashed dark eyes at him, but he ignored her.
Swann stared at him in the mirror. Harrison was fifteen years older at least, with a battered, lined face, like old leather, and his hair long and grey down his back. The baseball hat was grimy at the peak, and in his denims and boots, he looked like a roughneck from the oilfields.
‘We didn’t let him get away,’ Swann said quietly. ‘Strangely enough, we don’t do that. He employed a bunch of ex-soldiers to shoot up the escort taking him to trial. Close-range suppression fire in a crowded London street. Have you ever been to London, Harrison?’
‘Never had any call to.’
‘I don’t suppose you have. Well, twenty-two people got killed that day. Sixteen of them policemen. Machine-gun fire and phosphorus grenades. Ugly sight. Not one I want to look at again.’ He pressed his lips into a line. ‘I think I want Boese a bit more than you do.’
They drove for half an hour in silence. Harrison plucked a cigarette from an unseen packet in his shirt pocket. He popped a match on his thumbnail and Logan wrinkled her nose, but said nothing. Her hair fell across her face and Swann was filled with the desire to hook it behind her ear. She did it herself, exposing a high, chocolate-coloured cheekbone. She looked back at him again. ‘I’ve got everything logged here, Jack.’ She indicated the computer. ‘Copies of all your files. We can check through it later if you want to rerun any
thing. We’re in twenty-four-hour contact with the SIOC. I can download whatever I want, either to them or from them. All I need is a phone line.’
They got to Meridian at the top of Highway 59 just before noon. The SWAT team from the Jackson field office had been deployed and had opened the van with KYZ Radio flashed along the panels on its flanks. Logan sought out the SAC, and he explained that the van had been sighted in the parking lot by one of the guests. After the Jackson agents got there, they discovered that another car, a grey Ford Taurus, had been stolen sometime during the night. The driver of the van had been in room 202, and, as they spoke, it was being scoured by evidence response agents.
Logan walked over to the van. Two ERT guys in paper suits and sterile gloves were conducting a fingertip search. ‘You guys come up with anything?’ she asked them. ‘I’m running the ground force team for D.C.’
‘Oh, right.’ One of them sat back on his haunches and indicated the floor of the van. ‘A couple of fibres is all. No fingerprints yet.’
Swann stood at Logan’s elbow and scanned the empty back of the van.
The hotel manager was hovering behind them with the SAC from Jackson. Logan turned to him. Harrison was standing looking at the van, with one hand on his hip.
‘Who drove it?’ Logan asked the manager. He was a big, fleshy man with a red face and broken veins in his nose. His hair was thin and black, and little globs of perspiration bedecked the pink of his scalp. He looked at her, then at Swann, and spoke as if he should be talking to Swann.
‘Black guy. I mean a negro.’
Logan nodded. ‘What did he look like?’
The man frowned. ‘Well, I don’t know …’
‘We all look alike, don’t we,’ Logan said, shaking her head. ‘But was he black black, like I’m black, or lighter?’
He scratched his arm with his middle fingernail. ‘I guess he was lighter’n you.’
‘What about his hair?’
‘Afro, you’d call it, I guess. Short though, not big on top.’ He patted his own head lightly and smiled at Swann.
Harrison came up behind them and spat a stream of tobacco juice. ‘The van,’ he said to the manager. ‘Did it come in like that?’
The manager looked puzzled. ‘Like what?’
‘Like it is now.’ Harrison waved a hand at it. ‘KYZ Radio.’
‘I guess. I didn’t see it.’
‘But you checked the guy in, right?’
‘Yeah, but I didn’t notice the van.’
‘You mean you didn’t see or you didn’t notice?’ Harrison walked over to the van, and, putting on a pair of gloves, he took hold of the radio station sign and peeled it off.
‘Magnetic,’ he said to Logan. ‘It’s a taxi cab underneath.’
‘The taxi cab,’ she said.
‘Right.’
The manager looked bug-eyed at them, almost a little sheepish. ‘No wonder I didn’t notice,’ he said.
They looked through the room: unmade bed, nothing in the drawers, the closets or the bathroom. It was a standard, run-of-the-mill Holiday Inn bedroom. Swann stood with his hands in his pockets, feeling the presence of Boese.
Harrison stood by the door, smoking. ‘He drove in without the magnetic signs on,’ he said. ‘Then he ups and puts them back on.’ Swann looked round at him. Harrison was looking at Logan, who leaned against the window. ‘Why do that?’ Harrison finished.
‘Because he wanted us to find it,’ Swann said.
Webb and McCulloch had left Catherine Morgan to sweat a bit longer. Her solicitor had told them she was ready to resume the interview, but they let her go another night. They were both at the Yard, listening to the early morning briefing given by Colson.
‘We need to get sound into The Regiment’s clubhouse in Hounslow,’ he was saying. ‘We’re going to create a diversion, get everybody in that street out and get a technical unit from Box inside.’ He looked at Webb. ‘George, I’ll want you to do the sneaky beaky, so the sound men can do their job properly.’
‘No problem,’ Webb said. ‘Just tell me when.’
‘We’re set up for tomorrow with the gas board. There’ll be a leak in Wellington Avenue, which is a parallel street to theirs. The whole area will be evacuated for a period of two hours.’
‘Plenty of time,’ Webb said.
He and McCulloch drove over to Paddington Green in McCulloch’s car. ‘Have you spoken to Jack?’ McCulloch asked him.
‘Not since the tanker thing, no.’
‘Wonder how he’s getting on over there?’
‘I’ll speak to him later today.’
McCulloch rasped a palm over his jawline. ‘Good that he could get out of London in some ways. He was struggling, wasn’t he.’
Webb looked sideways at him. ‘Who wouldn’t be in his position, Macca?’
Catherine Morgan was brought down to the interview room after a second night in the cells. Her face was pinched and white and darkened hollows accentuated the depth of her eyes. ‘I want to speak to my son,’ she said.
Webb stroked his moustache. ‘Well, maybe we can think about that. Talk to us first, Catherine. Tell us why Ismael Boese’s fingerprints are on a map in your car.’
She glanced at her lawyer, tugged at her lip with her teeth and lit a cigarette. ‘I went to France with him and my son,’ she said.
Webb breathed out heavily. ‘Go on.’
She made a face. ‘I didn’t want to. I had to.’
‘How did you get the car?’
‘The money was sent to me. I was told to go and buy something practical and half decent, you know.’
Webb nodded. ‘How did it begin, the contact, I mean?’
‘My brother. He’d not wanted to see me for over a year, then he writes me a letter and sends the money for me to come down on the train.’ She looked at Webb then, a little bit of pleading in her eyes. ‘We’ve never been the closest of families. He was always the bad one. Violent. He’s hit me more than once.’
‘What did he tell you to do?’
‘Messages. I was to put messages in the newspaper on a certain day of the month.’
‘Which newspaper?’ Webb was leaning further over the table.
‘The International Herald Tribune. I’d never heard of it before.’
‘We found some copies in your flat,’ McCulloch said.
‘Aye, that’s right. I kept them. My brother passed me the messages written on a piece of cigarette paper. I put the advert in and paid for it. Then I had to copy out the reply and take it into the prison.’ She sat back. ‘It was pretty easy really. Nobody thinks to check a packet of Rizlas.’
Webb pushed his chair back and folded his arms across his chest. ‘What about after?’
‘I had no part in the killings. My brother told me that he was going to get a lot of money if I helped. He was due out in a year or so, and he said we’d be set up for life on the money. He also told me if I didn’t help he’d send somebody after me.’
Webb cocked one eyebrow. ‘Your brother did that, threatened you?’
‘Aye. He’s done it before now, I’ll tell you.’
‘So what did you do?’ McCulloch asked.
‘I just drove to Portsmouth and waited for him to come. Then we all went on holiday to France. One of them farmhouses, but he only stayed a couple of days.’ She shook her head then and started crying. Webb rolled his eyes to the ceiling.
‘You’ll have to protect us now,’ she sobbed. ‘He threatened to kill my son if I ever said anything.’
Back at the Yard, they got the copies of the newspapers which had been brought from the flat, and Webb and McCulloch sat in the squad room, scouring the advertising pages.
‘Listen to this,’ McCulloch suddenly said, ‘November, last year: “To sell bookcases to engines to xylophones. And shortly to be in York and Birmingham and Brighton. In Kendal next year. For beds or Queen Anne oval mirrors, xylophones or violins, call British and Anglian.”’ He frowned heavily, the lines creasing his fac
e. ‘What the hell is that about?’
‘Code, Macca,’ Webb said, patting him on the arm. ‘We’re going to need Box to look at it.’ Christine Harris scrolled through the notes on her computer screen in the Special Branch cell. Before he had flown to the United States, Jack Swann had passed over the information he had obtained from NCIS on the biker gang, The Regiment. Harris had a sheaf of photographs at her side, the stills taken from the funeral parade across the Tyne Bridge, some of which had been already scanned on to the computer. She studied Collier’s face now. Dog Soldiers, a warrior faction amongst young men of the Cheyenne Indian nation. Collier had served time in the most elite regiment in the British army.
Flicking through Swann’s notes, she picked up on Janice Martin again. She had been considering her, and considering the whole subornation process in the wake of Amaya Kukiel. Since she left the country, Vaczka had been silent. The surveillance was cancelled and, so far, that was that. But every instinct she had ever relied upon told her that Jorge Vaczka and his little Polish army were linked to the events in Hanwell Green. But by travelling up to Ellesmere Port, Vaczka, Stahl and the others had managed to procure themselves the best alibi possible: how could they have been involved, when they were under surveillance in the north of England.
Again, she looked at Janice Martin’s picture, reading the notes that MI5 had dug up on her background. She was the only daughter of a wealthy antiques dealer, who, Box believed, still allowed her some money a month, notwithstanding the company she was keeping and the cocaine habit he was inadvertently feeding. Everything else they had on The Regiment indicated that, unlike other bike gangs, they were not dealing in drugs. Stolen motorcycles shipped out of the US possibly, but nothing to do with drugs. Janice Martin was a mamma, which meant she slept with any gang member at any time. As Swann had done previously, Harris considered the hairs recovered from the discarded crash helmets in the canal. Those hairs could give them DNA, but only if they had something to match it with. She wrinkled her face at the thought. But what other way was there? Janice Martin was the weak link in The Regiment’s armour. Again, she looked at the pictures. Gringo, ex-marine commando and second in command to Collier. Then there was Fagin, the skinny one, who had been in the Guards, like the deceased John Stanley. She looked back at Janice again, a very pretty blonde-haired girl in her mid-twenties.
