Tim Stevens - Delivering Caliban

The FBI people had collared Purkiss for a reason. Probably they hadn’t got much from him and were tailing him even now.

Which meant they knew why he was here.

Giordano debated getting up and walking the ten yards or so after Naomi to call her back. Instead he picked up the phone and heard it ringing in her office down the corridor. She answered it in a rush.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Another word?’

When she’d come back, he said: ‘Find out who the Feds were that spoke to Purkiss. Give the job to Kenny if you like.’

‘That’s okay, boss. I’ll do it.’ She beamed, vindicated. ‘Want me to have them put under surveillance?’

‘No, I want you to have them terminated with extreme prejudice.’ After a full five seconds he laughed at her expression. ‘Good God, girl. Too many Jason Bourne movies on your TiVo. Just their names is fine. If I need to speak with them I’ll make a couple of calls myself.’ He placed the glasses back on his nose like a pair of pince-nez. ‘And may I remind you, Agent, that the Central Intelligence Agency is forbidden by federal law from conducting surveillance activities on US soil.’

‘If you say so, sir.’

One of these days, he thought, she was going to put her tongue out at him. He let them run rings around him like a big teddybear of an uncle.

*

Giordano called Adrienne, something he often did when under pressure. Just the sound of her calm, no-bullshit tone was enough to both ease and lift his spirits. He told her it was ‘staff trouble’ he was having, which was as much as he could reveal. After he’d offloaded, she in turn told him about the difficult conversation she’d had with her son Adam, Giordano’s stepson. The boy was a grad student in business at Columbia who was talking about jacking it all in and becoming an aid worker in Somalia. Adrienne was disappointed but supportive of her son. Giordano thought he was nuts, and had told both him and Adrienne as much. Adam now referred to his stepfather as “that fascist”. Resorting to the F word put you beyond the bounds of rational debate, in Giordano’s opinion.

He wondered not for the first time what his and Adrienne’s own kids would have been like, if they’d met ten years earlier and had had any. It might have been an attractive combination: her warmth and people skills with his analytical mind and drive. On the other hand, he thought, surveying his desk, they might have ended up overweight slobs like him with the added handicap of their mom’s driving abilities.

After the call he sat with the phone in his hands. He was kidding himself. The call to Adrienne had been a distraction, a way of stalling.

This Purkiss. Not Grosvenor’s killer, because he’d arrived the day after her murder. Did he have an accomplice? It was the only explanation that made sense.

Giordano heaved himself over the desk, picked up the phone.

.

New York City

Monday 20 May, 4.05 pm

The trick, Purkiss had learned, was to fix on a distant point and allow it to dwindle so that it became a pinpoint, then to focus your vision on it so intently that the rest of the visual field seemed to expand around it.

He chose the Statue of Liberty. The green figure, so familiar even to those who hadn’t seen it, stretched skywards over to his left. It drew his gaze and held it.

The movement from his left was both seen and felt. At the same time, his heightened awareness told him something was happening behind him and on his right.

Two men approaching. At least.

Purkiss did what would be least expected and instead of turning one way or the other, stepped backwards and rightwards. He collided with the man just as the one on the left moved fully into view, and brought his elbow round as he did so. He felt it collide with the solid bulk of a torso and heard a gasp.

The blow came so suddenly and unexpectedly that Purkiss didn’t even make an effort to parry it: a knuckle strike to the left side of his neck that seemed to punch all voluntary control from his body so that he was inhabiting it but unable to manipulate it in any way. He saw the railing rush towards him, the water tilting beyond; felt hands grab each arm and jerk him back before he collided with the rail; heard shrieks on either side along the esplanade. He was dropped to his knees, the hard concrete of the walkway biting through the material of his trouser legs, and lowered only fractionally more gently to the ground so that his face was turned sideways and through his swimming, roiling vision he identified a pair of tasselled loafers inches from his face.

His arms were jerked behind his back and he felt the ratcheting grind of cuffs being clamped shut around his wrists. Hands hauled him to a sitting position against the railing. He tipped sideways a little and vomited thinly. Around him people were backing away, in some cases running.

Above him, limned by the bright afternoon sun, stood two men. They kaleidoscoped in and out of focus but he made out that one was white and curly-haired — the man Kendrick had identified earlier — and the other was African-American with a shaved head. Both wore dark suits and sunglasses. The black man was holding up some sort of ID, a badge in a leather casing. He brandished it from left to right for the benefit of the passersby, then pushed it towards Purkiss. Purkiss couldn’t make out the details, apart from the arching words Central Intelligence Agency .

He tried to speak but the words came out as a slurry of sounds unintelligible even to him. The men didn’t read him the familiar Miranda rights. When they seemed satisfied he wasn’t going to vomit again or pass out they seized his arms and pulled him upright once more. He swayed but kept his balance. One on either side of him, they began to march him back across the park.

*

He stumbled towards the entrance between the two men, the crowds peeling aside, their fascinated stares lingering. The men had done a brief, professional frisk but had left the phone in his pocket. It was useless to him there.

Beyond the park entrance, in the sudden shadow of the city once more, they reached a slate-grey Crown Victoria, a standard government issue car. The shaven-headed man pushed Purkiss’s head down into the back, slid in beside him. The curly-haired one got in the driver’s seat.

The car pulled away into the traffic. Both the men remained silent. They’d be armed; Purkiss had seen the bulge of shoulder holsters under their jackets.

They weren’t Company; or if they were, they were acting independently and beyond their remit. Beyond this, he knew nothing about them. He’d been seated behind the passenger seat, not the driver’s, so even if he could somehow contrive to bring his legs up he wouldn’t be able to get a stranglehold on the driver. In any case, the man next to him would react within a second.

The Crown Vic headed up a wide main thoroughfare along the western side of the island, the Jersey shore looming intermittently between the buildings across the water. At one point the man beside him murmured into a cell phone and Purkiss strained to hear; but the blow to his neck had knocked his hearing out of kilter and it hadn’t yet returned to normal.

The impact came from the left, a shocking fist into the side of the car that shunted it sideways into the next lane in a crump of buckling metal segueing into the screams of tyres and blaring horns. The man next to Purkiss was driven across the space between them as his door stove in; the driver himself was shoved sideways as the side airbag bloomed, usurping his space behind the wheel. A violent jolt followed as the car behind tailended the Crown Vic.

The shaven-headed man’s face was inches from Purkiss’s own and he took the chance, snapping his forehead forward into the bridge of the man’s nose. The man recoiled with a cry, blood gouting from his nostrils. He flailed, half-sliding down the seat, not unconscious but far from fully alert. Purkiss pressed his back against the door on his side and kicked out through the partition between the front seats, catching the driver in the side of the face with the tip of his shoe. The man was quick to pull back and avoided the full force of the kick. His right hand groped inside his jacket, the front of which was pressed against his body by the tumescent airbag.