Tim Stevens - Delivering Caliban

In the mirror the man’s eyes darted to hers, then to the case. He huffed a laugh. ‘Honey, that’s a musical instrument.’

‘That’s what it looks like.’ She touched the end against the back of his neck. This time in his eyes she saw, not fear, but resignation. A genuine crazy. At least I’ll be able to say I was forced, get danger pay.

‘Jesus. All right, all right, don’t shoot.’ His eyes widened a fraction as though he wondered if he’d goaded her too far. He set the indicator flicking and slowed, peeling off on to the side of the highway. Horns flared past.

The doors hissed and concertinaed open. Nina said, ‘Thank you,’ and stepped down. The driver flinched away, as if she might take the opportunity now that the bus was stationary of doing him genuine violence.

She dropped out into the cold, wet night, not looking back, suddenly gripped with panic. A rail lined the curve of the roadside; beyond it was a slope and darkness. As she hoisted a leg across the rail she glanced back past the end of the bus.

The Toyota sedan had pulled in, lights still on. The doors were opening.

She stumbled on the other side of here rail, feeling stony uneven ground beneath her feet, and began to scramble down. Near the bottom she dropped to her knees and rolled, holding the violin case away from her. The wet grass cloyed at her, trying to snarl her limbs.

The slope levelled to dark, flat waste ground. Nina glanced back, saw two figures vaulting over the rail.

She began to run, the awareness hitting her with the force of a blow that she’d just made a stupid, terrible mistake.

*

The blackness into which she was flinging herself was deepened by the garish orange of the lights along the interstate behind her. Faintly in the distance, much higher than her, she could see a slope leading up to another road. Even if she made it up there, she’d have to be the fastest hitchhiker in history to get a ride before they caught up with her.

Nina hadn’t looked backwards since the first time, when she’d seen them crossing the rail. Two male figures, the details difficult to make out in the dark. Her ragged breathing and the scrabble of her sneakers on the rough ground blotted out all sound, so she couldn’t tell if they were still on the slope or inches behind her, reaching out for her even now…

The bus driver wouldn’t have driven straight off. He’d be phoning his superiors, the police, whoever, to report what had happened. A kind of hijacking, she guessed it was. Again, nobody would arrive in time to help her. She was on her own.

She thought of Rachel and Kyle, their bodies tossed around like dolls. They have guns. Oh God. Maybe they weren’t following her, but were simply taking aim. The image pitched her forward at a stoop, as if ducking would save her. But no shots came.

She saw the ditch a couple of seconds before she would have run straight over the edge, and flung herself sideways, unable to arrest her momentum entirely, landing on one knee. It yawned blackly, a gulf in the ground half-filled with stagnant sump water that could probably be jumped with a decent run-up, but she had no time for that now.

It was the end. Nina straightened to a crouch, dared to turn, holding her violin up before her as though its totemic power could offer her some protection.

The men were fifty yards back, following at an unhurried pace, striding rather than running. Two black silhouettes. It made sense: they didn’t need to run, she wasn’t going to be able to get away and it was far more effective to allow her to exhaust herself while they avoided the risk of twisting an ankle on the clumpy ground.

She began to sidle along the ditch, facing the men, keeping away from the edge. The men simply changed the angle of their approach so that they were heading straight for her again.

One called out, his voice carrying clearly though the drizzle: ‘Nina Ramirez. Don’t run. You’re safe with us.’

A laugh escaped the hand she’d clamped over her mouth. Safe . Yes. There was a certain security in death.

‘Come with us now. You’re in danger, but there’s someone looking out for you. We’ve been sent to take you to him.’

If she put enough distance between herself and them, she might — might — be able to run back to the Interstate. She’d be safer there, among the speeding cars and the lights. But she was stumbling sideways, less surefooted than they were, and they were easily closing on her.

As they drew nearer Nina could make out something of their features. One man was the tall, tanned one she’d seen in the campus pavilion that afternoon. The other — she thought — was the one who’d been watching her from the steps of the rotunda a few minutes before. A few hours ago, only, and her life, precarious at the best of times, had dropped off the edge.

The tanned man was the one who spoke. ‘Nina. Seriously. Stop running. Come with us. I swear to you, we mean you no harm.’

She felt a sudden emptiness behind her and her heart lurched as she realised the ditch had curved a fraction so that she’d almost sidled into it. She began moving sidelong away from the edge, back in the direction of the interstate. The men tacked sideways to follow.

Beyond them, blurred by the rain, another figure was visible, high on the slope.

The tanned man said: ‘We’re unarmed.’ He held his arms wide from his body, his palms open.

Behind him, the figure had broken into a run.

New York City

Monday 20 May, 6.10 pm

‘Wrong approach,’ Purkiss said.

They were clustered in a near-derelict office Nakamura had taken them to on the Upper West Side, with no air conditioning and the breeze of the Hudson River filtering through the cranked windows. There were a few chairs, a desk, a couple of cupboards with doors hanging off their hinges. Berg said it was FBI property awaiting useful employment.

She’d brought a laptop with her from the car and set it up on the desk, using a dongle to get web access. There was no question of using their usual Midtown office, she explained. Their boss had ordered them off the case, and they’d be noticed.

‘But accessing FBI facilities electronically will get you noticed, too,’ Purkiss pointed out.

Berg shook her head. ‘I’m not going in using my passcode.’

‘You’re hacking your own networks?’

Nakamura: ‘Sure. All of us do it from time to time. Usually it’s to modify records we’re not allowed to officially change.’

Berg hissed at him over her shoulder.

Kendrick lounged at the window, alternately paying mild attention to the group at the desk and gazing down at the street, tense and coiled as a cat. Purkiss stood behind the two agents, watching the screen as Berg’s fingers flashed over the keyboard.

After half an hour he turned away to pace.

‘Wrong approach, how?’ said Nakamura.

‘You’re looking for patterns. Patterns in these people’s movements, their behaviour. Ways and places and times they might have interacted.’

Berg had entered the names of Pope, Jablonsky, Taylor and Grosvenor into the database she’d accessed and the screen was scrolling though the links. None so far, other than the obvious one, namely that they were all recognised intelligence operatives, the first a British agent and the last three CIA. They’d visited some of the same locales but not at the same time, as far as was known. At thirty two Pope was the youngest; the Americans’ ages ranged from middle forties to late fifties.

‘And you’d go about it how exactly?’ Nakamura again.

‘Whatever their connection, it’s unlikely to be something overt, something that would find its way on to a database. The link’s going to be something more tenuous. Counterintuitive.’ Suddenly Purkiss remembered his conversation with the local Service man, Delatour, in the park. The bang on his head shortly afterwards must have done the equivalent of knocking the memory down the back of the sofa.