Ascension

by Oliver Harris

  Kane studied the drawing. Above the padlocked door of the ruined building Connor had added a sign that said NASA. Kane didn’t remember seeing anything like that when he’d driven by earlier. But he knew that NASA had built a tracking station on Ascension Island in the 1960s. It had been instrumental in the moon landing. This had to be it: the ruins of the old NASA site.

  Kane felt there was a good chance that Rory had been there shortly before dying. Which meant a distinct possibility it played a role in other trouble. Petra, Lauren, now Connor. It also seemed plausible that, for one reason or other, no one else was looking in that direction right now, and that if he was going to stop whatever was happening, he had to get there himself.

  There was a crash as someone fell against the front of the building, then more shouts. Kane stood up, turned to the back door, and removed the plank. He stepped into the parking area, past Rory’s Fiat, to the fence, which was ten feet high or so, with sloping rock on the other side but no people.

  Kane climbed onto the car, then jumped from its roof to the fence. He managed to get a grip, while his feet found some purchase in the chain link, and then he swung his leg over and let himself down, heart pumping. He moved up the hill, deeper into darkness, until he could see the town beneath him. A helicopter hung above the bungalow, fixing it in a spotlight. Dogs continued to bark. The fracas by the police station was obscured by the station building itself, but he could see people moving toward it from the old barracks. He recognized men from the Two Boats Bar, including band members still in their outfits, saw the nurse he’d been talking to. Beyond them, the waves boomed and the antennae stood silently against the night sky.

  He needed a car.

  The back streets of Georgetown looked deserted, including the one with the Honda he’d borrowed the previous night. Kane crept down the slope, very slow and quiet. He found the car with the keys still in the ignition, climbed in, and began to drive.

  24

  Taylor headed toward Vauxhall through predawn London, cramming in a hands-free mic and trying to get more details from the overnight manager.

  “The missing person’s a fifteen-year-old girl, Lauren Carter,” Hayes said. “This information’s from New Scotland Yard. She went missing sometime late yesterday.”

  “How is Elliot connected?”

  “Her clothes were found in the place where he’s staying.”

  “I don’t understand. Are they saying he killed her?”

  “I don’t know. He’s being interviewed at the island police station.”

  The first thing she did once in the office was check for messages from Kane. There was nothing. She sent one: Contact me asap. What else could she say? This was why she preferred being in the field: HQ meant when things went wrong you were in the wrong place by definition. By design.

  She returned a missed call from DCI Rehman.

  “Are you aware of the current situation on Ascension?” Rehman asked. “That another girl has gone missing?”

  “I’ve just heard. What’s going on? How does this connect to Petra Wade?”

  “I’d like to find out. We need to speak to you.”

  “You can speak to me now. Did you leak information to the press?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Someone did.”

  “Not us. I believe you spoke to Nicola Bannatyne, Rory Bannatyne’s sister.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “She mentioned a postcard, one that’s currently in your possession.”

  “You spoke to Nicola Bannatyne?”

  “Yes. What does the postcard say? She claimed you were very interested in it.”

  “I’ll find it. I’ll call you back.” Taylor hung up. She couldn’t imagine where that lead would take Rehman, but she suspected the detective wasn’t going to get any further than she already had, and she didn’t have time for it now. Owen Hayes, the office night manager, knocked on her door.

  “Were you here running searches last night? An officer code: DX/3372?”

  Taylor froze.

  “Why?” she said.

  “Personnel called.”

  “Saying what?”

  “Saying you should speak to them.”

  “Was it Laura Whitemore?”

  “Yes.”

  The previous night’s transgressions flooded back. Taylor called Whitemore on a direct line.

  “DX/3372?” Whitemore said.

  “Yes, that was me. Who are they?”

  “Are you working with the Global Issues desk?”

  “No, why?”

  “I don’t have information on this officer; it’s missing. I’m looking into that. But someone else was asking after it yesterday, in Global Issues.”

  “Who?”

  “Chris Hawkes.”

  “Do you know why he was asking?”

  “No. He just said it was urgent. He’s in now, I just spoke to him.”

  “This is sensitive, Laura. Does anyone else know I was looking?”

  “Just me.”

  “Let’s keep it that way. Thank you.”

  D7, the Global Issues Controllerate, had been set up as the Cold War began to wane and the intelligence service, feeling the need to rebrand, put increasing resources into investigating organized crime. A few years later, when terrorism became the biggest game in town, the department was well placed to draw in resources: Everything, it turned out, came back to organized crime—arms, drugs, money laundering.

  Taylor crossed the sprawling open-plan office to Hawkes’s desk. He had his phone to his ear, standing in front of a monitor filled with photographs of badly mutilated corpses. The bodies had been shot or hacked to pieces or both. One had a rope tied around his wrists. Hawkes looked wired, tie askew, his usual good looks grown pallid.

  “DX/3372,” Taylor said. Hawkes glanced at her, told the caller he’d get back to them, and hung up.

  “Is it you?”

  “No.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know, but I’d also like to find them.”

  “Why?”

  She looked across the images: a man lying on the floor of an inflatable lifeboat filled with blood; two men bound together and shot in the head in what looked like a ship’s hold.

  “What is this?”

  “Trouble. Why are you chasing it?”

  “I’ve got an issue on Ascension Island. I believe that the officer who used that personnel code knew something about the place. Where is this?”

  “A long way from Ascension. I’ll tell you what I know.”

  The boat appeared on November 2, a couple of miles out from Coron, in the Philippines. It sat there overnight, and in the morning it still hadn’t moved. Coron was home to the Club Paradise Palawan Hotel, so there were plenty of people who noticed the boat and the fact that it didn’t appear to be going anywhere or doing anything.

  Club Paradise Palawan was an exclusive island resort, monetizing azure waters and a pristine beach. It wasn’t unusual to get boats passing, but there was something odd about this one: approximately 130 feet—not big but not small, either—with visible machinery on deck and no crew in sight. It didn’t broadcast any radio signals. On the third morning, when birds had started gathering around the ship, the resort’s security took their own craft out to get a closer look.

  They found the first body in the water, tied by its feet to the railings. Two more on the deck itself, which was sticky with blood.

  “There were three in the cabin,” Hawkes said. “All had been tortured and shot. The men were of various ethnicities and carried no identification. The machinery, including towing winches and stern rollers, looked like it was for some kind of salvage work. The boat had been torn apart.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like they were searching it for something.”

  After liaising with several maritime administrations, the Philippines authorities managed to establish that the vessel had sailed from Hong Kong via Manila. But it still wasn’t clear w
hat the boat was for. The local police had passed the ship’s details on to Interpol. Interpol automatically contacted all organized crime units globally, including London’s Serious Organised Crime Agency, who contacted the intelligence service.

  Naturally enough, it came through to Chris Hawkes. Hawkes kept D7 operating on multiple fronts. Taylor liked his energy. He’d been a good agent runner, she’d heard, withdrawn from the Balkans after a cycling accident, although that wasn’t the story he always told. The desk job sometimes appeared to be constricting him, but he applied the same level of enthusiasm, and he needed it. D7 wasn’t as big as once promised, but every conventional target crossed over with organized crime—from Russia to the DRC—so he was kept busy. His team had seen it all, or so they thought.

  Hawkes showed Taylor a plan of the boat.

  “First thing I noticed: This boat is highly customized. It looks like a research or survey vessel, with a lot of onboard computing but also diving equipment and the contraptions for salvage work: generators, steel-cutting equipment, salvage pumps. Then, at the back, you get the real oddity: a separate, unmanned submersible vehicle sitting in the hold. Like a robotic sub.”

  “Military?”

  “Not like any we’re aware of. Not naval, not used by any oil exploration, either. The sub has advanced deep-sea sensing tech: cameras, lights, sonar. The only similar vessels I could find are used for searching out plane wrecks. But the weirdest things on board were some of the objects stored in a safe nearby: There are human bones and jewelry and watches. According to notes in the safe, it’s all historical. There are watches belonging to people who died in the Second World War, bones belonging to Japanese crewmen from the sixteenth century, you name it.”

  “What the hell were they up to?”

  “Peer behind a couple of front companies, and the owner of the boat turns out to be Jerry Lau, son of one of Hong Kong’s biggest property developers. This is where it gets troubling. Lau was security vetted by us in 2016. It looks like he was on our books in some capacity, being run by officer DX/3372.”

  “Who’s vanished.”

  “Right.

  “So, what does Lau use the boat for?”

  “He’s a treasure hunter.”

  “A treasure hunter?”

  “That’s his thing: searches shipwrecks for treasure. It’s how he spends his millions. He’d been cruising for lost galleons or something just a week before the hit, then got called away to some business in Hong Kong. His crew were going to reconvene with him the following week. I ran Lau through our system and almost all traces of him have been scrubbed away. But since word broke of what happened in the Philippines, he’s been trying to contact us. He’s hiding somewhere in London and claims we owe him protection.”

  “Has he said what he did for us?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Any idea where he is?”

  “No, but I’ve got a number.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Keep searching for someone who knows what’s going on. What put you onto it?”

  “A thing,” Taylor said. “Do me a favor—hold off searching for a moment. I’m going to see what I can do. This touches on something, and I’d appreciate you keeping it to yourself for now.”

  Hawkes looked at her with wary acceptance. This happened—a polite word, a nudge: This touches on something live. Usually at least one of you knew what was going on.

  Taylor returned to her own department. The first light of morning lay flat against the windows. The chief had called and instructed her to present herself at his office asap. That had to mean he knew about the chaos unfolding on Ascension.

  Kudus was in.

  “I heard,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t have.”

  “I came in early to read about Argentine oil exploration. I got told about another girl missing. I thought it might take priority.”

  “And?”

  “Kane’s been arrested. The girl comes up in reports as a friend of Petra Wade. Someone said you were upstairs.”

  Taylor hid her relief at having an ally. She’d tried to keep him out of it. Now he was going to have to come along for the ride.

  “Are you able to tell me what’s going on?” Kudus said.

  “I’m looking into a guy called Jerry Lau. He knows something. That’s my object of interest at this moment.”

  Kudus watched her run an open-source search on Jerry Lau. There were no shortage of biogs and appraisals. Lau was the second son of a construction tycoon, Lau Chao-yung, whose China Construction and Engineering Company appeared responsible for half the buildings going up in the Republic. Jerry Lau had been sent to the UK at age nine, educated at Harrow and then Imperial, where he gained a master’s in mechanical engineering. He’d gone into e-finance, specifically electronic trading platforms, investing his father’s money wisely. In April 2009, Lau Junior was ranked as the twenty-third wealthiest man in Hong Kong, worth 900 million dollars. He divided his time between Hong Kong and London. According to various profiles, he discovered his first shipwreck at seventeen years of age. At twenty-three his hobby had been professionalized under the name JL Marine Exploration and he’d raised further millions from people willing to invest in his maritime archaeology.

  “This is not what I was expecting,” Kudus said.

  “He knows something about Ascension. So did whoever was handling him.”

  MI6 picked up strange people of necessity. It liked dilettantes, who were often internationally mobile, well connected, cloaked by their own eccentricity. As Hawkes had described, there was a vetting file from 2016 suggesting he had entered into some form of work with the intelligence service, but no records beyond that. Taylor dialed the number Lau had left. When it went to voicemail, she recorded a message saying she could help and gave her direct line.

  He called a minute later.

  “You can help?” Lau sounded skeptical, angry.

  “I really hope so. Are you still in London?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you meet me in an hour?”

  He inhaled. “That should be possible.”

  Taylor suggested a hotel in the center, somewhere discreet but public just in case anyone wanted to cause them trouble. He said no and suggested the corner of Pembridge Square and Chepstow Place, Bayswater. Taylor brought up a map with the phone cradled against her shoulder.

  It was an expensive part of town, residential; it would be quiet but still public—inconvenient for surveillance, inconvenient for assassination. You didn’t let agents dictate arrangements, but then, he wasn’t her agent, and this was the only chance she had.

  “Okay,” she said. “Be there in an hour.”

  She hung up, grabbed her coat.

  “Where are you going?” Kudus asked.

  “Out.”

  “Not going to C?”

  “No.”

  He got his coat, joined her in the corridor. Taylor stopped.

  “Please, Daniel, your career is starting. I think mine’s over. I’m doing this because someone needs to figure out what’s happening on the island—for Elliot and Rory. But it will likely get me fired, at best, whatever I find. At worst, it’s a lot messier than that. So please . . .”

  “There’s no way this is a solo operation,” he said, moving for the stairs. “Come on. I’ve never met a treasure hunter.”

  25

  Kane drove fast. The twisting roads were still a nightmare to drive, but empty now. Everyone was in Georgetown for the drama or hiding at home.

  He almost missed the turnoff for Devil’s Ashpit. Kane swung onto the overgrown road, aware that he was heading into more mystery than he’d ever faced before. He passed the crater striped like a racing track, the glimpse of blackly glinting sea, continuing toward the interior. The moon was low and swollen, and he was grateful for its light. What the hell was he heading toward?

  He stopped the car before the station came into view, got out, and listened. Nothing. Kane approached
on foot. As he drew nearer, Kane saw what he thought was a girl with her arms out, but it was one of the decaying stumps of palm tree. Beyond it, the ruins appeared. In the cold moonlight the concrete blocks where the deep space antennae would have sat looked like ancient plinths. The front doors remained locked. Nothing had changed. Kane was wondering how he might get in when he heard a sound behind him.

  Kane turned. A figure appeared from the darkness, pointing a gun.

  Connor.

  The boy advanced slowly, limping on his bandaged foot, gun shaking. It was a Beretta, heavy in his hand, but his finger was determinedly on the trigger.

  “Hey, Connor,” Kane said. “You okay?”

  Connor’s eyes were wide, terrified. “What are you doing here?”

  “Taking a look. What’s going on? Where’s Lauren?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for her.”

  “Okay. Where did you get the gun?”

  “I took it.”

  “Anyone know you’re up here?”

  “No. I think I’m going to be killed.”

  “Who’s going to do that?”

  “Whoever killed them.”

  “I want to make sure that doesn’t happen, Connor. Do you have any idea who we should be looking for?”

  “No.”

  “But you know I’m on your side, right?”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  It had been a while since Kane had had a gun pointed at him. The Beretta M9 was reliable and easy to use, one reason it had been standard issue in the US Air Force. You were taught how to respond to this kind of scenario: distract, redirect, disarm. But persuasion could work too.