‘Kind of. She got away. Couple of her asshole friends got killed. Civilians.’
‘Where are you now?’
‘Where — Charlottesville, still. Hold on. Who is this?’
Purkiss killed the call.
Berg said, ‘Jesus. You took the phone from one of those guys back at — ’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you nuts? They might be tracking it with GPS as we speak.’
‘But it’s given us a way in.’
*
While Kendrick took the phone apart, crushing the memory card underfoot, Purkiss and the two agents crowded round Berg’s laptop.
Berg found it in an instant: a local online Charlottesville newspaper carried the breaking news of a fatal double shooting in the city. Two people in their twenties, names withheld for the time being. The police were appealing for a Ms Nina Ramirez to come forward as they believed she might have vital information about the killings.
Nakamura had his cell phone out. He dialled the Charlottesville PD’s number on the screen.
‘Yeah. This is Special Agent Daniel Nakamura of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’m calling about the shootings in your jurisdiction tonight.’
He spoke quickly, giving his shield number and then mostly listening. Afterwards he put the phone away.
‘Two kids, a boy and a girl, shot dead around six this evening. Signs of forced entry. Hell, the front door of their apartment was kicked off of its hinges. Another young woman was seen by neighbours jumping out the window. Later these two beat cops get approached by this frightened girl who tells them the names and address of the two murdered kids, then runs off. The cops find the bodies, and there are photos in albums of someone who looks like the girl that ran away, labelled Nina. The dead woman’s got an address book and the cops find an address for Nina Ramirez. They visit her apartment but she’s not there.’
‘Because she’s on a Greyhound to Washington,’ said Berg.
Nakamura said, ‘Yeah, but get this. While they’re tossing Ramirez’s place, they answer a call for her from some guy who sounds like he’s a friend but would like to be more than. Calls himself Thomas Beaumont. The cops tell him to stay put, they’ll pick him up and question him, but he disappears. The cop who spoke to him on the phone said he sounded a little odd. Like he was trying on a voice, an accent, that didn’t suit him.’
Purkiss saw it in Berg’s eyes, and Nakamura’s. Pope?
Berg turned back to the laptop. Nakamura had asked the cop he’d spoken to for Ramirez’s address and any other information they had on her, and it came through as an email with attachments.
The picture, the one that was being posted on flyers throughout Charlottesville, was a head shot of an unsmiling young woman with shoulder-length black hair, facing the camera full on. Her features were fine, Hispanic; her eyes huge and at the same time wary. Haunted, even.
‘Nina Consuela Ramirez,’ read Berg. ‘Age 26. US citizen, resident of Charlottesville, Virginia, since 1998. Father, unknown. Mother Carmen Maria Ramirez, deceased. Honduran by birth.’
‘Honduran,’ said Purkiss. ‘There’s the link.’
Twenty-Eight
Interstate 95
Tuesday 21 May, 1.05 am
Pope was aware of the risks, but believed progress was impossible, in this situation as in life, without them.
Apart from the obvious risks of letting her sit with a loaded gun in the glove compartment in front of her, within easy reach, and allowing her out to use the service station restroom where she might have either run away or been recognised by the boy behind the counter if he’d heard anything about the fugitive from Charlottesville, there’d been an enormous risk in telling her all he had: about her father, about himself. But it had to be. The plan was dependent on understanding on the part of everyone involved. Pope had needed Taylor and Jablonsky to understand, just before he’d shot them; he’d needed, and achieved, Grosvenor’s comprehension just before he’d tipped her out of the window.
So Nina Ramirez needed to understand; and above all, Z had to.
*
He’d wanted to see his father’s body, but they hadn’t let him. It was barely a body any more, he supposed, after several days in the sea, subject to the predations of the water and the weather and the fish.
He was seventeen, and hadn’t seen or spoken to his father since a curt phone call on his fifteenth birthday. He lived with his mother, who as far as he knew hadn’t spoken to his father since their divorce when Darius was twelve. She delivered the news flatly, on a Tuesday afternoon after school. Your father’s dead. His plane crashed. I’m sorry.
He’d heard that bereavement could trigger anger, even hate, when the relationship with the deceased had been difficult or non-existent. He waited for the anger for a year. For fourteen years. It still hadn’t come. All he was aware of was a silent, frightening blankness.
A week after the news of his father’s death he checked his email. Not his regular account, but the secret, web-based one nobody but he knew about. Or so he thought. There, like a communication from the spirit world transmitted not through a medium but via the modernity of electronics, was a single message from his father. The message was dated twenty-first of October, two weeks before his father’s body was found.
Hello, son, it began. Happy birthday.
It wasn’t his birthday and wouldn’t be for another three months. There followed four paragraphs of utter banality, an expanded version of the things people wrote on postcards. Weather’s fine here, wherever here was. Missyou and hope to see you soon was how it ended.
Darius read the message repeatedly, printing it out and poring over it at school, during homework, late into the night. The breeziness, the sickly platitudes, were unlike anything he’d ever heard come out of his father’s mouth in his presence.
It was then he began to take an interest in cryptography.
*
He broke the code sixteen months and five days after he first read the email, and for the briefest moment the blankness inside was displaced by a rush of such euphoria it was like a drug high.
It was a difficult one, deliberately so because it had been used to outwit professionals. Yet he, Darius Pope, his father’s son, had cracked it all on his own.
His father’s son…
The message, denuded of its camouflage, read:
Darius, this is of vital importance. Ring the number below. Ask for Llewellyn. Tell him about this message and give him these co-ordinates: 17˚ 24’38”N 83˚ 55’19”W. There’s a compound with a basement, the only one on the island. Under one of the flagstones at the bottom of the steps is a mini-disc in an oilskin bag. This must be found and played. Your father.
The phone number followed.
After the euphoria ebbed, Darius felt let down. The message was almost ludicrously cloak-and-dagger. Was it some kind of joke? A warped way for his father to amuse himself at his son’s expense?
Then he remembered there’d been no clue that the original email had been in code. He’d been expected not only to break the code, but to recognise it as such in the first place. His father had trusted him that far.
Darius was aware his father worked for the diplomatic service, and was aware too that this was often thin cover for unofficial, clandestine activities. But he’d never until now fully confronted the notion that his father was a spy.
He didn’t know who Llewellyn was. Probably his father’s handler or control or whatever they called it. He never found out, because he never rang the number. Instead, Darius Pope saved his money and, in the university summer holidays of 2001, he travelled alone to the Caribbean.
The island — islet, really — was a bulge of scrubby rock little more than a mile wide and three miles long. He reached it by sailing boat, having come to an arrangement with a local yachtsman who ferried him there and back. Pope was on the island for a little over six hours, but in that time he saw no other living thing apart from the gulls that wheeled overhead.