He replayed what Berg had found out about her. US citizen by birth. Mother Honduran. Father unknown.
It was a huge risk — Berg’s superiors might have taken her phone and be monitoring her calls — but he took out his own phone and dialled her number. She answered immediately. ‘Yeah, Purkiss.’
‘Can you talk?’
‘On my way to you. They might tail me so I’ll have to do a few evasive moves. I’ve got a reprieve. You’re my informant and your ID’s protected for now.’
‘Great.’
‘And my balls are for the chop when this is over, or would be if I was a guy. What’s up?’
‘You bringing your laptop?’
‘Of course. Why?’
He told her.
*
‘There’s an alert out, not just for the five NYC boroughs but for all the northeastern states,’ said Berg. ‘TV stations, local and the networks. Several photos of Ramirez, though we’ve only got the one of Pope.’
She’d brought coffee in paper cups for the three of them as well as a bag of doughnuts. Her face was drawn with fatigue, but her eyes burned. They sat around the laptop at one of the desks.
‘It’s worth trying, but it’s unlikely to yield anything useful,’ Purkiss said. ‘Pope knows he’s exposed now. He’ll either go to ground, or move so quickly we won’t know what he’s got planned till it’s over.’
‘You think it’s blackmail?’
Purkiss drank coffee, felt the caffeine blaze its way through his body. ‘Of some kind, yes. Not money. If my idea’s right, that Ramirez’s unknown father is the person Pope’s after, then he’s probably using her to flush the man out.’
‘Which suggests this is a harder man to get to than the other ones, the ones Pope killed. Jablonsky and the rest.’
‘Right. Which in turn suggests it’s someone more senior. Somebody protected by a greater level of security. Perhaps based in Langley itself.’
Berg had set several searches running on Nina Ramirez. Schooling records, family contacts, even her immunisation schedule. Anything that might shed light on her paternity.
‘Her birth certificate records her father as unknown,’ said Berg. ‘She’s a US citizen because she was born here. Her mother was a Honduran national. But every time I try searching for details about the mother, I get no records found. There’s nothing about her marriage, if she ever was married, or any other kids she might have had.’
‘They’ve been cleaned,’ Purkiss said. ‘Run through the daughter’s timeline.’
Berg brought up a document. ‘Born March tenth, 1987, Richmond, Virginia. School there all the way through, with a period of disruption when she was eleven when her mom died in a car crash. There’s no death certificate on the mom, by the way. Lived with grandmother after that, as we know. Graduated high school 2005, then university at Charlottesville.’
‘The mother died in 1998.’
‘At the time Pope’s father was found dead. Yeah, I noticed that.’
Purkiss said, ‘Is there any way you can identify CIA personnel from that period? Staff stationed in overseas countries?’
Berg shook her head. ‘No. We keep tabs on Company staff here in the US, but their international data is tighter than a witch’s ass. I could ask my boss to go to the Director and make a direct appeal to the CIA, but it’ll take forever and the politics would be hard to get round.’
‘There’s a quicker way,’ said Purkiss.
*
Vale rang back after an hour, one in which the shifting shadows in the office made Purkiss acutely aware of how quickly time was passing. He’d given Vale the barest outline of events — he was in New York, Pope was possibly there too and had a hostage — because he wanted him to concentrate on the task he had for him.
‘Took a bit longer than I’d have liked,’ said Vale. ‘The records from the nineties haven’t all been fully converted to digital format yet and I had to get a couple of people to hunt down the files.’
‘And?’
‘The intel the Service has on the CIA’s Central American staff and activities from that time is patchy. It’s not like the eighties when everything was kicking off in Nicaragua and El Salvador. But I did manage to get the personnel records for Honduras — there’s really only one lot of information, for the capital, Tegucigalpa. Will email it across.’
It came through after a minute. Purkiss forwarded the file to Berg’s laptop. It was, as Vale had said, a personnel file for the CIA station in the Honduran capital for the years 1995 until 2005. There were dossiers attached for six or seven of the names.
The head of station from 1995 to 1999 was one Philip B. Mayhew. Berg opened the dossier. Two indistinct photos accompanied a short biography.
Mayhew was African American. ‘Not him,’ said Purkiss. Ramirez had appeared to be of mixed race, but lighter-skinned than would be likely if Mayhew were her father.
The deputy head for the years 1996 to 1999 was a possibility. He stared back in a single black-and-white mugshot, perhaps a passport photo. In his late forties, clean-shaven but with the shadowed cheeks of a naturally hirsute man, solidly built. His name was Raymond Giordano.
The rest on the list were lesser functionaries, field agents and support staff for the most part. Purkiss and Berg scanned through them; then Purkiss said, ‘Check the names.’
Berg entered the complete list on her database and began the search.
*
‘Some hits,’ she said. Purkiss had been stretching his arms and legs, trying to ease the pain in his shoulder, talking to Kendrick. He came over to the laptop.
‘Four of these people are based in Langley now,’ she said. ‘The boss, Mayhew, is in the Middle East.’
‘His deputy? Giordano?’
‘Langley.’ She brought up a window. ‘Deputy Director. No portfolio.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘The Bureau isn’t sure, but it’s suspected the CIA has a department dedicated to investigating enemy action against its own personnel, in the US and abroad. Whatever it is, Deputy Director’s a senior position. Giordano’s one of the big boys.’
The accompanying picture was another mugshot but a more up-to-date one. Giordano had aged, put on weight, and grown a salt-and-pepper beard. With his face now partly obscured, his eyes were more distinctive. Purkiss had seen those eyes before: in the service station shop, staring at him as he tried to entice them away from Pope.
‘That’s him,’ he said. ‘That’s Ramirez’s father.’
Thirty-Nine
Manhattan, New York City
Tuesday 21 May, 7.30 am
Pope was saying something but Nina didn’t register a word.
For the first time since lunchtime yesterday — was it really less than twenty-four hours ago that this had begun? — she craved music. Not to play it; just to hear it speak to her, to lie adrift in the river of it. Something pure, without bombast. Bach, maybe, or Beethoven’s late quartets.
She couldn’t hear any, so she clutched her violin to her as a reminder of that world.
They were on the outskirts of a park, somewhere. She didn’t think it was Central Park; it was too small for that, and she had a vague notion they were near the East River. She’d been to New York exactly three times in her life, once on a trip with her grandmother and twice to attend concerts with her group. She was fascinated and repelled by the city’s gargantuan size in equal measure, and had learned little of its geography.
Vaguely she registered mild surprise at the number of people on the streets at this hour, a time when back in Charlottesville most people would still be in bed. She was incurious about where they were going, or why they had left the car they had reached the city in (the second, or perhaps third, car since the terrible time at the gas station) and were now on foot, Pope striding at her side, gently but firmly compelling her to keep pace with him.
A homeless man strummed a guitar in a bus shelter. She slowed to listen, but before Pope could chide her along the man pulled out a cell phone to answer it and the moment was gone.