Tim Stevens - Delivering Caliban

‘Iraq, autumn 2003 to 2006. Basra mainly.’

‘No kidding. I was with the First Marine Division. March ’03.’

Kendrick put down his fork. ‘You were there at the beginning? Part of the invasion force?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Jesus.’ Kendrick’s eyes were alight. He shifted his chair closer.

Standing near Purkiss, Berg said: ‘Boys and their games.’

Purkiss watched a group of late-night revellers career close to the wide front window of the diner and peer in before reeling away.

He said, ‘Hurricane Mitch. When exactly did it strike?’

‘It hit hard from October twenty-ninth till November third.’ She’d memorised the data from her search earlier.

‘Pope senior was found dead in the aftermath. Crosby said Caliban was terminated at the end of 1998, before Thanksgiving. Is that what ended the trials? The hurricane? Did it do some damage to the infrastructure of the project?’

She watched his face, thinking about it. Then shrugged. ‘Long shot, Purkiss.’

‘If I’m right, there’s a link to Central America. Somehow.’

‘Like I say, a long shot. The hurricane wrecked several countries. Honduras got the worst of it, but Guatemala and Nicaragua were also hit. Even Florida, though it had reduced to a tropical storm by then.’

‘Holtzmann Solar don’t have facilities in the region? A laboratory, a factory?’

‘No. But it doesn’t mean anything. Illegal activity like this, Nazi-style drug experiments… they’d be conducting it far away from the public eye.’

A phone rang, a thin warbling that startled them. Purkiss felt the sound coming from his pocket and fished the tiny clam-shaped device out. No caller ID.

He’d taken it off the body of one of the men who’d attacked them at Crosby’s cabin, the man who’d crawled up to the wall and almost shot Kendrick. Purkiss thought the man looked like the leader of the group.

He opened the phone. ‘Yeah.’ He could manage a flat, Mid-Western accent.

‘McCammon? It’s Druze.’ A man’s voice, low and rasping. ‘Where’re you?’

Purkiss switched to speakerphone. Kendrick and Nakamura got up and came over.

‘Crosby’s place, mopping up. It’s done,’ said Purkiss.

Silence for a beat. Purkiss wondered if he’d blown it. He said, ‘What’s up?’

‘Harlan and King with you?’

‘No.’

‘They left here a couple hours ago. Supposed to call in by now. I tried calling them. No answer on either of their cells.’

‘Where were they heading?’

‘The girl took a Greyhound to Washington. They were following.’

‘Problems your end?’ It was a broad enough question that Purkiss hoped it wouldn’t arouse suspicion.

‘Kind of. She got away. Couple of her asshole friends got killed. Civilians.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘Where — Charlottesville, still. Hold on. Who is this?’

Purkiss killed the call.

Berg said, ‘Jesus. You took the phone from one of those guys back at — ’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you nuts? They might be tracking it with GPS as we speak.’

‘But it’s given us a way in.’

*

While Kendrick took the phone apart, crushing the memory card underfoot, Purkiss and the two agents crowded round Berg’s laptop.

Berg found it in an instant: a local online Charlottesville newspaper carried the breaking news of a fatal double shooting in the city. Two people in their twenties, names withheld for the time being. The police were appealing for a Ms Nina Ramirez to come forward as they believed she might have vital information about the killings.

Nakamura had his cell phone out. He dialled the Charlottesville PD’s number on the screen.

‘Yeah. This is Special Agent Daniel Nakamura of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’m calling about the shootings in your jurisdiction tonight.’

He spoke quickly, giving his shield number and then mostly listening. Afterwards he put the phone away.

‘Two kids, a boy and a girl, shot dead around six this evening. Signs of forced entry. Hell, the front door of their apartment was kicked off of its hinges. Another young woman was seen by neighbours jumping out the window. Later these two beat cops get approached by this frightened girl who tells them the names and address of the two murdered kids, then runs off. The cops find the bodies, and there are photos in albums of someone who looks like the girl that ran away, labelled Nina. The dead woman’s got an address book and the cops find an address for Nina Ramirez. They visit her apartment but she’s not there.’

‘Because she’s on a Greyhound to Washington,’ said Berg.

Nakamura said, ‘Yeah, but get this. While they’re tossing Ramirez’s place, they answer a call for her from some guy who sounds like he’s a friend but would like to be more than. Calls himself Thomas Beaumont. The cops tell him to stay put, they’ll pick him up and question him, but he disappears. The cop who spoke to him on the phone said he sounded a little odd. Like he was trying on a voice, an accent, that didn’t suit him.’

Purkiss saw it in Berg’s eyes, and Nakamura’s. Pope?

Berg turned back to the laptop. Nakamura had asked the cop he’d spoken to for Ramirez’s address and any other information they had on her, and it came through as an email with attachments.

The picture, the one that was being posted on flyers throughout Charlottesville, was a head shot of an unsmiling young woman with shoulder-length black hair, facing the camera full on. Her features were fine, Hispanic; her eyes huge and at the same time wary. Haunted, even.

‘Nina Consuela Ramirez,’ read Berg. ‘Age 26. US citizen, resident of Charlottesville, Virginia, since 1998. Father, unknown. Mother Carmen Maria Ramirez, deceased. Honduran by birth.’

‘Honduran,’ said Purkiss. ‘There’s the link.’

Interstate 95

Tuesday 21 May, 1.05 am

Pope was aware of the risks, but believed progress was impossible, in this situation as in life, without them.

Apart from the obvious risks of letting her sit with a loaded gun in the glove compartment in front of her, within easy reach, and allowing her out to use the service station restroom where she might have either run away or been recognised by the boy behind the counter if he’d heard anything about the fugitive from Charlottesville, there’d been an enormous risk in telling her all he had: about her father, about himself. But it had to be. The plan was dependent on understanding on the part of everyone involved. Pope had needed Taylor and Jablonsky to understand, just before he’d shot them; he’d needed, and achieved, Grosvenor’s comprehension just before he’d tipped her out of the window.

So Nina Ramirez needed to understand; and above all, Z had to.

*

He’d wanted to see his father’s body, but they hadn’t let him. It was barely a body any more, he supposed, after several days in the sea, subject to the predations of the water and the weather and the fish.

He was seventeen, and hadn’t seen or spoken to his father since a curt phone call on his fifteenth birthday. He lived with his mother, who as far as he knew hadn’t spoken to his father since their divorce when Darius was twelve. She delivered the news flatly, on a Tuesday afternoon after school. Your father’s dead. His plane crashed. I’m sorry.

He’d heard that bereavement could trigger anger, even hate, when the relationship with the deceased had been difficult or non-existent. He waited for the anger for a year. For fourteen years. It still hadn’t come. All he was aware of was a silent, frightening blankness.

A week after the news of his father’s death he checked his email. Not his regular account, but the secret, web-based one nobody but he knew about. Or so he thought. There, like a communication from the spirit world transmitted not through a medium but via the modernity of electronics, was a single message from his father. The message was dated twenty-first of October, two weeks before his father’s body was found.