Giordano had met Carmen Ramirez in 1986, at Langley. He was by then vying for the Central America desk. The Iran-Contra scandal was coming to the boil — the lid would blow off that November — and it was widely expected that heads would roll and new blood would be needed. Giordano was well respected and a strong candidate for the post, but he was up against somebody who had an edge over him, someone marginally more senior and more of an ass kisser.
Carmen was a probationer of twenty-five, a year out of college and at an entry-level accounting job in the Company. She was bright, she had a sharp eye for financial irregularities, and she was beautiful. It started as a fling. Giordano was ten years older than her and acutely aware of the need not to be seen as abusing his authority over her.
She fell pregnant, and Giordano made his decision. They were married in the fall. Giordano now had a direct connection with Latin America, and a reason to visit Honduras regularly to see Carmen’s family. Over the following year, through Nina’s birth and beyond, he developed an intimate familiarity with the country, learning to speak the local dialect fluently.
It swung it for him. The new broom of 1987 swept out the dead wood and propelled Giordano to the job he wanted. He’d made it his own, pulling off some spectacular successes — the groundwork for the Noriega ousting in Panama in 1989 was his doing, as was the bringing about of the elections in Nicaragua the following year.
And then, in the next half-decade, came the increasingly intimate contact with Holtzmann Solar and Giordano’s growing interest in what one of their prototype compounds promised. In Honduras, the notorious Battalion 316, the death squad that had operated in the eighties, had been disbanded but many of its personnel remained, and it was through these men that Giordano was able to procure both impoverished volunteers for the Caliban project and somewhat less voluntary subjects.
In 1997 Giordano took the job as Company station chief for Honduras. It was a step down, career-wise, but Giordano assured the Director that it was for a limited time only, maximum two years, and would allow him to build richer networks in the region than he’d otherwise manage. And so Giordano, Carmen, who’d by that time left the Company, and little Nina relocated to Tegucigalpa.
Giordano had moved his family to the island off the coast when the trials had begun in 1998. He was spending increasing amounts of time on the island, and felt Carmen and Nina would be safer there with him rather than on the mainland. Accordingly, he’d arranged for Nina to take six months out of school, to be made up for by private tutoring when they returned. Carmen was furious. Carmen was also by then well aware that Giordano’s activities had crossed the line into illegality, and her guilt at her complicity paralysed her, prevented her from defying him.
Yet, in the end, she had defied him. As the hurricane approached the island that fateful October, her hysteria had spilled over into concrete threats. She would take Nina and flee, go straight to the Director and to the FBI and the New York Times and tell them everything. Giordano had never been an impulsive man, and he’d taken the decision to silence her in his usual measured way. He hadn’t done the act himself, had left it to Jablonsky and Taylor.
Giordano had been coming down Museum Mile on the park’s east side, but found that he’d wandered a couple of blocks away, to Park Avenue. Before him loomed the Church of St Ignatius Loyola. He stared up at the crucified figure.
He felt nothing. No yearning for absolution, no stirrings of conscience. The guilt was a gnarled and twisted thing inside him, like an alcoholic’s cirrhotic, dead liver.
Ten to eight. A little over two hours until he met his destiny.
Forty-One
9.20 am
‘He’s not there,’ said Berg.
Purkiss turned. He’d been staring off through the window to the west because gazing at the walls only added to his sense of frustrated crampedness. ‘They say where he is?’
‘No. But they wouldn’t, would they.’ She dropped the phone on the desk.
Berg had rung Langley, identified herself as FBI and asked to speak to Raymond Giordano. She’d made it through to a secretary.
‘You couldn’t get his cell phone number, by any chance?’
Berg: ‘They’d never give it out to someone of my rank.’
‘What about a tap on it?’
‘Even harder. Besides, it’d take a couple of hours at least to find a judge with the cojones to authorise it.’
Purkiss knuckled his forehead. They had no direct access to Pope. But there was a possibility, a strong one, that he’d either been in contact with Giordano or knew his whereabouts and was closing in on him. Giordano was their route to Pope, but they couldn’t find him either.
Perhaps he was wrong to focus on Giordano. Perhaps there was a way of anticipating Pope’s movements. In his mind Purkiss replayed everything he’d learned about Pope over the last few hours. He rewound it and replayed it again. Rewound and replayed.
‘Douglas Torrance.’
‘What?’
‘The name on the British driver’s licence Pope used to rent the car in Charlottesville. Run a check on it.’
‘He won’t still be using that now,’ said Berg.
‘I know. But he might have used it before.’
*
‘Yeah. Here we are.’
She jabbed a finger at the monitor.
‘When he arrived here at JFK on Sunday night, he used ID with the name Brian Sopwith. That doesn’t come up again. But he used a passport with the Douglas Torrance ID to enter the US, also via JFK, on April fifth this year. Departed April fourteenth. And before that, through Washington D.C., from January twelfth till February first.’
‘What?’ Purkiss frowned at the screen. ‘He’s been here twice already this year?’
‘Looks like it.’
It was intelligence he should have unearthed earlier, and now there was almost too much to process. ‘Can you dig deeper? Find out if he rented any cars, did anything else that left a paper trail?’
‘Sure.’ Her fingers sped over the keys.
Ten minutes later she said, ‘Yep. This is a good one. DMV says he took ownership of a light truck on April eighth. That’s three days after he arrived in the country on his last visit..’
‘A light truck.’
‘Yeah. This make.’ She brought up some images. It looked like a large transit van. ‘Not typically for recreational use. The kind of thing you’d get if you wanted to transport something.’
‘Any other mention of this particular vehicle?’
‘No. It hasn’t come up since. No accidents, no mentions that it’s been found abandoned or anything.’
Purkiss thought about it. ‘Does it say where he bought the vehicle?’
‘Yes. A used car dealership in Poughkeepsie. That’s upstate.’
‘Can you call them? See how he paid?’
‘Ah. I see what you’re getting at.’ Berg picked up her phone.
It took several calls: the first to establish that nobody was in the dealer’s office yet, subsequent ones to discover the identity of the proprietor and get him at home. He took the time to check Berg’s credentials with her office, and she was relieved when her boss vouched for her. Then the man had to get to his office. He rang back in twenty minutes.
Purkiss heard the dealer’s side of the conversation over the phone’s speaker. Pope had paid with a credit card, also in the name of Douglas Torrance. It was a risk, using the same ID multiple times, but Purkiss supposed somebody who was obviously foreign like Pope would be required to provide several different forms of identification when doing something like purchasing a car.
Berg rang the credit card company, had to go through an even more rigorous process of checking and transfers from one personnel member to another, and was eventually granted access. Purkiss looked at his watch. Eight forty.