Alex’s appetite for his road trip was dwindling. What was causing him especially strong palpitations was the thought – he didn’t know from where – that he recognised that man. Could the man have been stalking him or something? He thought of Rutger Hauer’s character in The Hitcher: a blond, amused lunatic killing his way through the desert and always, as in a nightmare, seeming to get ahead of the hero. Wherever you showed up, he’d already be there, and would have marked his arrival with some dead bodies or a severed finger in a bowl of chips.
Alex kept going west.
He stopped, two hours later, when his petrol gauge started to wag into the red zone. He found a service station, a busy one. And only when he’d been standing in there for twenty minutes, affecting to browse the Doritos under the reassuring eye of the CCTV camera, watching the arrivals on the forecourt, did he set out on the road again with something like a restored sense of calm.
The guy couldn’t possibly be following him. Too much time on his own was affecting his imagination. Even so, he came within an ace of calling Saul, just to hear his brother’s voice, sleepy and annoyed, at whatever time it was in England.
Chapter 16
They’d risked sending the photograph of the dead man in over the dead man’s phone.
Red Queen had spent fifteen minutes talking Bree down.
‘I did not sign up for this,’ had been the agent’s first words when she’d got a line to the Directorate. ‘Your guy killed someone in cold blood. We don’t do that. We don’t do things like that. We have no -’ Bree flapped her hand – ‘no – we have no – we’re not -’
‘Don’t panic,’ said Red Queen. Red Queen was panicking.
‘- we have no jurisdiction. If we were – we’re not -’
Bree was hyperventilating, nearly. The DEI wasn’t a judicial body. It didn’t have any jurisdiction at all. It just had a remit.
‘Did you know? Did you know he was going to do that?’
‘Don’t panic -’
‘Tell me.’
Red Queen left a silence a bit too long. ‘No, I didn’t. He wasn’t supposed to…’
‘You – what – who told him? He’s… this, this “thing”. He’s like mentally ill, and you’ve got him -’
‘We thought. Our Friends thought -’
‘He’s what? He’s what? Our Friends are involved?’
‘Of course they’re involved. This is very big. Of course -’
‘Jesus, RQ. He could go to jail. I could go to jail. He murdered someone. In a Kwik-E-Mart parking lot. With a frigging squad car outside.’
Bree breathed in and out, raggedly, gathering breath to continue, goggling at the telephone cable. She felt sweaty.
‘Where did he get a knife? What was he doing with a knife?’
‘Bree – half the people in this country carry a gun -’
‘So why didn’t he use a gun? What’s wrong with him? He’s a Friend? Are you saying he’s a Friend? I thought he was Directorate -’
‘On loan. Their asset.’
‘Well, how do you know? Was this part of their plan?’
Red Queen exhaled.
Bree said: ‘You don’t know, do you?’
The silence lengthened.
Eventually Red Queen said: ‘None of that matters. You know how important this is. Keep your head. Stay with it. Do your job. We’ll look after you. Trust me.’
Bree didn’t say anything to that, put down the phone, went back to the motel room.
The dead man, as Red Queen had feared, was linked to MIC: off-books payments over five years. Frederick Gordon Noone. Forty-one. A British national, ten-year veteran of the UK’s Parachute Regiment, where he was known as ‘Davidoff’ for reasons unclear to Red Queen.
Noone had got his boots sandy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clean service record. After leaving the regiment he had, along with many like him, touted for private hire and found himself doing a similar job for much more money and with the rules of engagement tilted in his favour. He was on Blackwater’s books, briefly – then left. The payments from a slush fund linked to MIC had started shortly after.
The trail pointed to sub-Saharan Africa, some time in South America – training FARC, probably, thought Red Queen. The run-of-the-mill end of MIC’s operations involved arming and training terrorists and their opposite numbers in government in most of the major conflicts around the world. Creating customers, was how they thought of it.
No family, apparently. Good. His employers weren’t going to be reporting this guy missing any time soon. He’d entered the country on his own passport, a guest visa, but that wouldn’t send up flags from USCIS for a while. He’d booked a return ticket, no doubt just for the sake of form, but that was still a fortnight away. Hotel? Car? His partner would probably take care of that.
Good.
That they were fielding someone – one of a team, presumably – with traceable connections to them, travelling under his own name, suggested haste and urgency. They were taking very big risks with this thing. So either they were counting on some powerful protectors or they were starting to flail. More likely the former.
This wasn’t Red Queen’s usual beat. Not at all. The Directorate seldom if ever staged interventions. It soaked information up, spread spiderwebs, moved as invisibly as possible through the world. If it did something stagy, like bringing in Hands, it called in a favour from Our Friends. But this situation was beyond the usual thing. The executive branch, so to speak, needed the DEI’s knowledge. And DEI needed the executive branch.
There was still at least one more guy loose on the ground.
Red Queen spoke to Porlock. Explained the situation, though something about his manner suggested he knew about it already.
‘Go to Our Friends. Tell them it’s their mess. They need to go, find this dead man before anyone else does, and make him disappear. This needs to be contained, agreed?’
‘Agreed.’
Sherman waited in the car park of their motel for three hours for Davidoff to return. Better safe than sorry. Then he risked a call to Davidoff’s pay-as-you-go.
The phone, on the side table of Jones’s room in the motel, trilled and its screen lit up. Jones picked it up and got a pen and wrote down the number but did not answer it.
Jones waited. The phone went again. Same number. Jones carefully wrote it down underneath where he had written the number the first time.
Sherman frowned. He knew the big fella would be pissed off that he’d bolted, but there was no great percentage for Sherman in standing around to make friends with Mr One Millionth Customer and the meet-and-greet girls, and Davidoff could take care of himself.
He’d last seen Davidoff at the front of the shop before it had all gone tits skyward. He’d slipped off, Sherman assumed, to go round and cover any back exits. Much use he’d turned out to be. How the little sod had managed to hit Sherman with the door, he didn’t know, but it had done his shin a mischief and from then on in Sherman hadn’t had much of a chance to do anything but follow his nose.
This was a crap job, he thought. A crap, crap job. Everything that could have gone wrong had. And now, when he’d like to have been safely indoors having a chod and a read of the paper, he was sitting in some backwater in the middle of America surveilling his own motel room from a car park – he seemed to spend a lot of time in car parks – or feeding crap tin money into crap tin payphones. Lost idiot wanted. Please call Ed Otis, answers to Sherman.
He didn’t know what was keeping Davidoff. He thought about phoning Ellis but then thought about not phoning Ellis and preferred the second thought. He thought about returning to the shop, wondered about whether the car had been seen. He thought not. As far as they were concerned he was just a violent nutter who missed out on a free trolley dash and the chance to have his photograph taken with a couple of village idiot beauty queens.