Tim Stevens - Delivering Caliban

Purkiss got out. The gate was a normal one, not electronic, and slightly gone to rust. He unlatched it and opened it to let the Taurus through.

They parked halfway up the driveway and walked the rest of the distance. A battered pickup truck squatted in front of the cabin. The front porch was illuminated by a single bulb.

Kendrick muttered: ‘Boondocks.’

When they were ten yards from the front door it opened and a man emerged, a shotgun in his hands.

*

‘What in the hell do you want.’

Purkiss’s first thought was: this man is dying . He was skinny to the point of emaciation, the skin drooping off his face like wax down a candle. His shirt hung off bony coat-hanger shoulders, and his trousers were cinched in so severely that the waistband was bunched and folded. The shotgun over his forearm looked too heavy to be supported, like a steel girder draped across a broom handle.

Berg stepped forward, shield held out before her. ‘FBI. We need to speak to Mr Dennis Crosby.’

Purkiss saw it in the man’s eyes, which had appeared small and blue before but were now large in contrast with the rest of his face. He was Crosby, the man from the photo on the FBI database.

‘What about?’ The voice was a whispered rasp. Purkiss could see his fingers, burnt yellow by nicotine.

‘You Crosby?’ said Nakamura.

‘What do you want?’ the man said again.

‘You need to put the gun down, sir.’ Berg put a hand on her hip in a practised gesture, the movement partially opening her jacket to display the shoulder holster.

‘God damn it.’ The man turned and went back through the screen door.

Purkiss glanced at Berg, who nodded. The four of them made their way up to the door. Purkiss half expected a dog to start barking.

The two agents positioned themselves on either side of the door, Berg motioning Purkiss and Kendrick to keep back. She called, ‘Mr Crosby, we’re going to come in now. I need to know you’re not waiting for us with the shotgun.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ The reply was barely audible. An instant later the screen door creaked open. Crosby stood there, holding it. The gun was nowhere to be seen. He jerked his head.

Purkiss and Kendrick followed the agents into the cabin. It was dim and dingy and smelled of cigarette smoke, stale clothes and fried food. The shotgun was on a rack on the wall below a hunting rifle. Propped against the back of a dilapidated sofa was a home oxygen cylinder, its attached tube hissing quietly.

‘Just god damn do it,’ said Crosby, his arms held out in front of him.

‘Do what?’ said Berg.

Purkiss glanced about the room. There was no sign anybody else was there, no tell-tale noises from the other rooms.

‘Take me. At least I’ll get decent hospital care inside. Fuckin’ Medicaid.’

‘Inside?’

Nakamura pointed at the couch. ‘Sit down, man.’

Crosby lowered himself, wheezing, into the sagging seat. He groped for the oxygen tube and fitted the nubs into his nostrils.

Berg said, ‘Why do you think we’ve come to arrest you?’

Crosby shook his head. ‘Don’t play games with me.’

Purkiss said, ‘Holtzmann Solar.’

The agents glared over at him.

Crosby wagged a finger in his direction. ‘See? Told you.’

He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket and shook one out, put it between his lips. Nakamura snatched it away.

‘There’s oxygen around.’

Crosby cackled, the sound high and frightening. ‘I’ve got maybe four months left, maybe six. A little Russian roulette livens things up.’

Berg squatted in front of him. ‘Okay. We’re not here to arrest you, necessarily. We’re here to find out what exactly your connection is with Holtzmann Solar, and with two other Company operatives, Gregory Taylor and Sylvia Grosvenor.’

Crosby recoiled as though the names were pellets hurled in his face. ‘You’ve got them?’

‘They’re dead. Murdered.’

‘You’re shitting me.’ He stared over at Purkiss. ‘Ah, Jesus.’ A bout of coughing interrupted him. Towards the end, it sounded as if he was laughing. ‘Funny how people are. Here I am, half a year left at most, and I’m scared of getting whacked.’

Berg said: ‘I think you’d better explain.’

*

‘Jablonsky got me involved. He’d already recruited Taylor and Grosvenor. There might have been others, but I didn’t know about them.’

Crosby was pacing himself, talking in short, fast bursts between periods of wheezing and coughing. Berg and Nakamura were perched on bar stools in front of him. Purkiss leaned against the kitchenette counter off to the side, while Kendrick prowled, gazing out the windows.

‘This was early 1997. No, later. Maybe in the fall of that year. I was a rookie, two years with the Company. Still doing low-level data analysis, based in Washington. Jablonsky’s my superior. He asks me one day, how’d I like to make a little extra? I assume he means freelancing. He says, there’s a pharmaceutical company needs our help. And we need theirs.’

Coughing took over. At the window, Kendrick peered at something. He looked back, caught Purkiss’s gaze, shook his head. Nothing .

Crosby went on. ‘I didn’t get the details at first. Not for several months, in fact. All I knew was that he was suggesting something unsanctioned by the Company, a private project. Once I’d agreed to his proposal, my job was to clean the funds. Take them from Holtzmann Solar as they came in to various accounts around the world, process them till there was no trace of their origins, and funnel them into a final account. Jablonsky and whoever he was working for in the Company would then have access to that.’

‘Whoever he was working for?’ Berg.

‘Oh, yeah. He wasn’t the boss. Might have been small fry, for all I know.’ A brief cough this time. ‘Anyhow. I did that for six months. Laundered money, basically. In return I got perks. Discounted shares in the firm, and insider tip-offs about when to sell. Built up quite a nice little nest egg.

‘Then Jablonsky started letting me in on the work he and his group were doing with Holtzmann Solar. The details, I mean. The operation was named Caliban. It involved drug trials. A new substance. Something that was going to prove invaluable in the field of interrogation, but that couldn’t be subjected to the usual process of authorised clinical trials and FDA approval.

‘It sounded like something the Nazis did. I asked Jablonsky where he was getting the volunteers for this project. He said they weren’t exactly volunteers, that they were the scum of the earth. Prisoners, low-lifes. I got cold feet. It was okay when I was just being creative with electronic money; not so much when I learned what the money was being used for. I said I wanted out.

‘Jablonsky laid it on thick. Was I a patriot, did I truly care about national security, blah, blah, blah. Then he got threatening. I told him I had insurance, documentary evidence of everything I’d done for him hidden away with instructions for it to be revealed in the event of my disappearance. He got shit scared. Agreed to let me get out, no questions asked, in return for my silence.’

‘And you got out,’ said Nakamura.

‘Yeah. But around a year after he’d first approached me — would have been the end of 1998, I guess, before Thanksgiving, I remember that — Jablonsky called me out of the blue. I was working in Syracuse by then. He just said, “If it eases your conscience, Caliban’s been terminated.” He wasn’t being nice; it was just that he probably hoped I’d be less likely to blow the whistle if I knew it was all over.’

Purkiss said: ‘You retired ten years ago. So you stayed with the CIA for, what, five years after all this?’