Tim Stevens - Delivering Caliban

And then there was Abby. She’d been one of his two closest friends, even though as far as he could remember she’d never addressed him by his first name. Salt of the earth, and she’d been cut to pieces — murdered — during a hostage exchange at the base of a tower in Tallinn. Purkiss had let her down.

Claire, dead, and perhaps he could have saved her from herself. Abby, dead because of his blindness. Even Elle Klavan, who wasn’t dead but whose life and loyalties had been shaken loose because of Purkiss. It seemed women suffered when he came into their lives.

That way lay self-pity, the most corrosive and pointless state of all. Purkiss set a metronome in his head and watched the banal precision of its mechanism until sleep took him.

*

Purkiss flailed at the bedside table until he realised the buzzing was coming not from an alarm but from his phone. He peered at the time display before answering. Just after six in the morning. He’d slept nearly eight hours.

Vale said: ‘There’s been another killing. A Company man. Pope’s hoodwinked us.’

‘Where?’

‘New York City.’

Langley, Virginia

Monday 20 May, 7.40 am

Ray Giordano was a lapsed Catholic, but not so lapsed that days like this couldn’t make him long for the comfort of ritual, of simple shared certainties.

He sat at his desk and used his electric razor to shave the tops of his cheeks — his beard would grow right up under his eyes if he didn’t — and stared at the image on the monitor. The sack had been moved aside from the head for the purpose of the photograph. ‘Head’ was too generous a word. It was a face attached to a bag of slop.

Naomi and Kenny came in bearing coffee and doughnuts. Kenny had pulled the night shift but was still here; Naomi had come in early. Giordano swivelled the monitor round for them to look. Kenny had already seen it — he’d been on duty when the call came in — but he gritted his teeth nonetheless. Naomi swallowed hard.

‘Jesus, boss.’

She must have heard it from Kenny already, but Giordano said: ‘Sylvia Grosvenor. Pitched from the ninth storey of an apartment block in midtown Manhattan at a little after eight p.m. last night. She hit the sidewalk headfirst, as you can probably see. In true New York style, nobody saw anything.’

Giordano took a sip of his coffee. It could have stripped varnish off a door. ‘The Manhattan boys have found nothing in Grosvenor’s apartment, though the door was forced. The CCTV was disabled on that floor. Doorman swears nobody unfamiliar got by him, and the cameras in the lobby bear out what he says. They reckon whoever did it may have gotten in from the basement through the service elevator.’

He grabbed the box of doughnuts and took a bite. From his desk, Adrienne’s photo reproached him.

‘The New York people are over this like flies, but it’s been passed on to us. It links in with the Amsterdam hits. No question.’

Kenny and Naomi glanced at one another, shuffled. Giordano waved them into the chairs across his desk and pushed the doughnut box over. ‘What?’

Kenny: ‘You said, “No question”.’

‘Yeah.’

Naomi said, ‘Different MO. Different, uh, country, boss. On the same day.’

Giordano swigged more of the foul brew. ‘Different time zones. Plenty of opportunity to get from Europe to the East Coast and carry out all three kills.’ He half-hid a belch, sat up in his groaning chair. ‘Look, guys. You’ve heard the saying. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. That’s exactly what we’ve got here. Three active Company operatives taken down in quick succession. It’s the same group. Or the same guy.’

*

The Director had come in person. Giordano knew he’d been scheduled to meet a senator at the time, and that the meeting had had either to be cut short or cancelled. Giordano knew too what this would have cost the Director, in terms of both political brownie points and pride. He’d arrived at Giordano’s office rather than summoning Giordano to his, which was unheard of. Behind the Director, Grace, Giordano’s PA, had hovered, cool and professional and quaking, before Giordano waved her away.

After briefing Giordano — it was little he didn’t already know about the Jablonsky and Taylor killings, which he’d heard about an hour earlier — the Director said: ‘It’s your baby, Ray. No fanfare. Keep it quiet. But whatever you need, you’ve got. Manpower, money, intel. No restrictions.’

It had to be kept quiet because the murders of two Company agents was such big news it would send tremors through the organisation that would have a serious effect on its stability and morale, worldwide. Unless the news could be preempted by a scoop of some kind, a breakthrough in the tracking down of the perpetrator. Giordano knew this, as he knew that the Director was aware Giordano was four years off retirement and wouldn’t want to screw this up and risk his pension being snatched away from under his nose at this late stage.

So Giordano had taken charge of the investigation, setting his bloodhounds Naomi and Kenny on the trail, good kids both.

That was yesterday morning. Last night the New York killing had upped the ante.

*

‘And there’s still nothing on the cameras outside Jablonsky’s place.’

Naomi had been trawling, pumping her Amsterdam sources for all they were worth. Jablonsky had surveillance rigged up outside his apartment. He’d been a suspect once in a Company sting operation, suspected of dealing hard drugs in the city, and although he’d been cleared both officially and unofficially, the cameras had been left in place. But the local Company crew had found them to be out of working order when they’d checked, so there’d been no record of anybody entering or leaving Jablonsky’s apartment. Taylor had had no such surveillance on him.

Giordano finished his coffee and set to work on the last doughnut. ‘Okay. Kenny, you run a search on Grosvenor. Find out what her current operational status was, what she’s been involved in over the last ten years. Cross reference it with the other two.’ He knew Kenny knew this stuff. He was saying it just to cover the fact that he had nothing else to suggest at the moment.

He stood. ‘Naomi. Come with me.’

*

In the corridor he put a hand on her back.

‘Kenny’s good, but you’re better. I need you to be a backstop. Double-check his work without letting him know.’

She sighed. ‘Boss, that’s not right.’

‘It is and it isn’t. It’s not right because you’re friends. But I can’t afford anything to be missed here, so it damn well is right in the scheme of things.’

‘Yeah.’

She went back to his office to rejoin Kenny. Giordano took a walk down the corridors, following a route he’d trodden hundreds of times over the years through the Langley labyrinth. It helped him think.

*

Adrienne had been on his case to retire early. They’d been married just twelve years — a second marriage for each of them — and she’d been frank about it from the outset, that she wasn’t looking to share her husband with his job like the last time and wanted the bulk of their time together to be spent in happy, adventurous retirement. She herself was a Pentagon systems analyst, good at what she did but with a firm sense of her life’s priorities.

It was a myth, he knew: the one last job that made your legacy for you. You stood or fell by your overall record in the Company over many years, and his was pretty good: the successes outweighed the screwups at least five to one, which was decent odds. And yet… a calamitous error right at the end of your career was something that was likely to linger in people’s minds, if not those of the top brass then at least the rank and file. It was bad for morale; it told the younger recruits that the older ones weren’t perhaps the gods and legends they’d come to believe in. That in the upper ranks of the Company there were people who weren’t perfect.