“I can’t. Please—I’m old. When I have to go… well, you know. I’m sorry, it’s embarrassing, but there’s nothing I can do. Please.”
Pope told Beck to hold on, flicked the indicator and took the slip road off the motorway. He slowed down, turned into the car park and found a space next to the buildings. He got out, went around to Beck’s side, and helped him to get down, too. The old man’s hands were still behind his back. Pope stood him against the car and, for the second time, frisked him. There was nothing of concern. Pope took the key for the cuffs from his pocket and unlocked them.
Beck rubbed his wrists. “Thank you,” he said.
Pope gripped Beck’s elbow and led the way to the entrance. The car park was lit by the yellow sodium wash of the overhead lights and they could hear the occasional rush of cars on the motorway. Beck allowed himself to be led, reaching up to remove his spectacles as if to clean them. Pope paid no heed to it until Beck put one arm of the spectacles into his mouth and bit down on it. Pope reached for his hand and pulled it away from his mouth; the glasses fell to the ground and shattered, and, as Pope looked, he saw that Beck had chewed down hard on the arm so that a section of the plastic was missing.
Shit.
Beck was already gasping for breath. Pope manoeuvred him to a bench and lowered him down onto it. He grabbed the spectacles and examined them; the missing piece of plastic was a cap for the compartment that would have held a sodium or potassium cyanide pellet. The compartment was empty.
“You stupid fucker,” Pope said.
Beck stared up at him. He was already frothing at the mouth. Pope had been trained on the use of cyanide and knew precisely how it worked. The chemical affected the haemoglobin in the blood, compromising its ability to transport oxygen around the body. Cyanide led to death by asphyxiation. He might have been able to reverse the process with amyl nitrate, but he didn’t have any. Pope loosened the old man’s collar, but it was hopeless. His lips were blue and, as Pope leaned over him, his breathing grew shallow and, finally, stopped.
London
41
Milton woke up. He lay on the damp sheets and concentrated on his breathing—in and out, in and out—until he found a point of balance, some equilibrium, something stable that he could build upon. He didn’t feel nauseous any longer but, instead, he just felt washed out. His sleep had not been restorative; quite the opposite. It was as if the strength had been allowed to drain out of him, as if his resistance had been scoured away.
He opened his eyes. The bedroom was a mess. He had undressed down to his shorts, and his trousers and shirt were strewn over the back of the wooden chair in the corner of the room. He reached across to the bedside table to his right, scrabbling through the loose change, his cigarettes and lighter until he felt the links of his watch strap. He took it, holding the watch close to his face until he was able to focus on the time.
It was one o’clock in the afternoon. He tried to remember what had happened after he had left the property in Kings Worthy. He couldn’t recall what time he had made it back to his apartment, but, he knew that he must have been out of it for several hours. He turned over so that he could look for his phone; it wasn’t on the bedside table, which meant that it was probably still in the pocket of his jeans.
He sat up, and immediately wished that he hadn’t. His head throbbed and he tasted vomit, stale cigarette smoke and alcohol in his mouth. He glanced around the room and saw the detritus of another lost night and morning. There was a bottle of gin on the floor, resting on its side; there was an inch of liquid still inside it, a damp patch darkening the carpet just beneath the mouth. He saw three crumpled tin cans in the wastepaper basket and a bottle of prescription sleeping pills, the contents spilled out over the floor.
He put his feet down and gingerly stood up. A fresh wave of vomit bubbled up his gullet, and he stumbled to the bathroom to lower his head over the toilet bowl, just in time. His vomit was thin and acidic, followed by mouthfuls of bile. He spat it all out, rubbed the sweat off his face with a hand towel and then ran the shower. He stripped and stepped into the cubicle, turning his face so that the water could splash off him.
He stood there for five minutes, scrubbing away the dirt of the previous day. A wave of guilt swept over him. He thought of the dream, of Callaghan, of the latest in the long line of victims whom he had murdered. He thought of all the others, the men and women, more than a hundred of them. They all visited him in his dreams, the things that he had done replaying over and over again: a knife slashed across a throat, the muzzle of a gun pushed against a head, a chokehold cinched until life drained away. They visited him more and more often. Milton thought of them and imagined all the others that he would be asked to kill if he continued working for Control. How many more victims? How many more dreams?
He felt dizzy and thought that he was going to be sick again; he spat out a mouthful of phlegm, but the moment passed.
He needed to get out of the Group. He had known it before, a thought that drifted through his consciousness like a phantom, but it was tangible now. He couldn’t ignore it. He knew that it wouldn’t be easy—that it might not even be possible—but he knew, with complete conviction, that his career spent murdering for the government needed to come to an end.
Milton towelled himself off and went back into the bedroom. He found his jeans, fished his phone out of the pocket, and checked the display. There were no missed calls. He didn’t know whether that was a good or a bad sign, but he put it out of his mind. He opened the browser and navigated to the page that he had bookmarked, the one that showed the details of the AA meetings in London. There was one near Dalston in an hour. He found clean clothes in his wardrobe and dressed, putting on his shoulder holster with the Group-issue Sig. He hid it beneath his jacket, pulled on a pair of boots and made his way to the door.
42
Milton performed careful counter-surveillance on his journey. He took a bus from his flat in Chelsea, riding it for ten minutes before hopping off and getting another that headed back in the opposite direction. He hurried down into the underground and changed trains twice before boarding the eastbound East London Line train that eventually deposited him at Dalston Junction station. It was a classic dry-cleaning run and now, as he emerged from the station onto the street, he was confident that he was black. It felt ridiculous to have to assure himself that he was not being surveilled by his own people, but this would hardly have been the first time that Control had assigned agents to follow one of his own. Control was paranoid, his neuroses bred in the suspicions of a divided Berlin, and Milton knew that he had to be careful.
He walked east. St. Jude and St. Paul’s Church was on Mildmay Grove, a pleasant road to the north of one of the main thoroughfares that passed through this part of central London. It was a warm afternoon and Milton unzipped his jacket a little. Milton could see half a dozen men and women ambling toward the entrance of the church and he felt the same mixture of anxiety and nervousness as he had felt at the hospital meeting last night. He delayed, pausing on the bridge to watch a train as it passed through the cut. The church was ahead of him, on the junction of King Henry’s Road. There was a row of terraced houses beyond it that would once have offered accommodation to the workers who had made this part of London their home, but had now been forced out by rising prices that could only be afforded by the professionals who travelled into the city every morning. There were expensive cars parked in bays on both sides of the road, with a leafy canopy overhead. The tall spire of the church reached up high into the afternoon sky. Milton looked back to the entrance and watched as the men and women went inside. He looked at his watch: a minute before two. The meeting was about to start.