Tim Stevens - Delivering Caliban

From the back seat Kendrick said, ‘Like the bloody Army.’

Berg said, ‘What do you suggest?’

‘How much slack will your boss cut you? If you tell him you’ve got an informant, i.e. me, but can’t reveal my name without jeopardising the operation?’

She rocked her head. ‘Maybe.’

‘Then that’s the line you take. Tell him about Crosby, about Holtzmann Solar and the Caliban operation, about everything that’s happened. Tell him there’s an Englishman named Pope who’s kidnapped the Ramirez woman, though you don’t know why, which is the truth. Leave out the fact that Pope’s a British intelligence agent, that his father was one too, that Kendrick or I are involved.’

‘It’ll come out in the end.’

‘But it can’t come out now. If your Bureau learns there’s a British agent operating in a situation like this it’ll have repercussions that don’t bear thinking about. It’ll scupper our job, hinder us from finding Pope. Yes, eventually my role will become apparent, but it won’t matter so much if we’ve managed to stop Pope by then.’

She drove in silence for a full minute, her thoughts visibly churning. Then: ‘All right. I must be out of my mind.’

*

Kendrick said, ‘Should’ve worked them over.’

‘What?’ Purkiss turned from the window.

‘Those two CIA pillocks. Back at the petrol station. We should’ve made them tell us what they knew. The coppers would have been none the wiser.’

‘Berg wouldn’t have allowed it.’

‘But you agree with me. You know I’m right, Purkiss.’

Purkiss turned away again. It was clear, now, that the CIA faction, the one that included the men who’d tailed him in Hamburg as well as the ones who’d shot up Crosby’s place and now the ones from the service station, didn’t want the Ramirez woman dead. If they had, Pope wouldn’t have been able to use her as a shield the way he had; they would have simply gunned her down along with Pope. That meant Ramirez was important enough for both Pope and the CIA faction to want to keep her alive.

And yes, Kendrick was right. The men they’d captured would have been able to tell them why. It was a theoretical point now, nothing more; they were in FBI custody and would lawyer up , as the Americans put it. The truth would come out, but probably too late to be of much practical use.

Ignoring what he’d said to Kendrick, Purkiss began to pace. He ran through what he knew.

Pope was here as a result of something his father had been involved in, something that had led to his father’s death, accidentally or otherwise. An illegal drug trial.

The trial was being conducted with the active collaboration of a black ops cell within the CIA, and under its auspices.

Pope had taken a woman captive and was taking pains to keep her alive.

At the same time a CIA black ops cell was trying to retrieve her.

Ramirez was key. And not only did Purkiss not know why, he’d also let her slip through his fingers. He’d let her be taken, just as he’d let Abby be taken, the second time permanently. And Claire…

He stopped, clenched his fists so that his nails bit deep half moons into his palms, and counted backwards. When the anger had subsided he applied himself once more to the problem.

Ramirez, who’d been a child of ten or eleven at the time of the Caliban operation, was connected with it. That meant she either held crucial knowledge about the project — highly unlikely — or she had some personal connection to somebody involved in it.

He replayed what Berg had found out about her. US citizen by birth. Mother Honduran. Father unknown.

It was a huge risk — Berg’s superiors might have taken her phone and be monitoring her calls — but he took out his own phone and dialled her number. She answered immediately. ‘Yeah, Purkiss.’

‘Can you talk?’

‘On my way to you. They might tail me so I’ll have to do a few evasive moves. I’ve got a reprieve. You’re my informant and your ID’s protected for now.’

‘Great.’

‘And my balls are for the chop when this is over, or would be if I was a guy. What’s up?’

‘You bringing your laptop?’

‘Of course. Why?’

He told her.

*

‘There’s an alert out, not just for the five NYC boroughs but for all the northeastern states,’ said Berg. ‘TV stations, local and the networks. Several photos of Ramirez, though we’ve only got the one of Pope.’

She’d brought coffee in paper cups for the three of them as well as a bag of doughnuts. Her face was drawn with fatigue, but her eyes burned. They sat around the laptop at one of the desks.

‘It’s worth trying, but it’s unlikely to yield anything useful,’ Purkiss said. ‘Pope knows he’s exposed now. He’ll either go to ground, or move so quickly we won’t know what he’s got planned till it’s over.’

‘You think it’s blackmail?’

Purkiss drank coffee, felt the caffeine blaze its way through his body. ‘Of some kind, yes. Not money. If my idea’s right, that Ramirez’s unknown father is the person Pope’s after, then he’s probably using her to flush the man out.’

‘Which suggests this is a harder man to get to than the other ones, the ones Pope killed. Jablonsky and the rest.’

‘Right. Which in turn suggests it’s someone more senior. Somebody protected by a greater level of security. Perhaps based in Langley itself.’

Berg had set several searches running on Nina Ramirez. Schooling records, family contacts, even her immunisation schedule. Anything that might shed light on her paternity.

‘Her birth certificate records her father as unknown,’ said Berg. ‘She’s a US citizen because she was born here. Her mother was a Honduran national. But every time I try searching for details about the mother, I get no records found . There’s nothing about her marriage, if she ever was married, or any other kids she might have had.’

‘They’ve been cleaned,’ Purkiss said. ‘Run through the daughter’s timeline.’

Berg brought up a document. ‘Born March tenth, 1987, Richmond, Virginia. School there all the way through, with a period of disruption when she was eleven when her mom died in a car crash. There’s no death certificate on the mom, by the way. Lived with grandmother after that, as we know. Graduated high school 2005, then university at Charlottesville.’

‘The mother died in 1998.’

‘At the time Pope’s father was found dead. Yeah, I noticed that.’

Purkiss said, ‘Is there any way you can identify CIA personnel from that period? Staff stationed in overseas countries?’

Berg shook her head. ‘No. We keep tabs on Company staff here in the US, but their international data is tighter than a witch’s ass. I could ask my boss to go to the Director and make a direct appeal to the CIA, but it’ll take forever and the politics would be hard to get round.’

‘There’s a quicker way,’ said Purkiss.

*

Vale rang back after an hour, one in which the shifting shadows in the office made Purkiss acutely aware of how quickly time was passing. He’d given Vale the barest outline of events — he was in New York, Pope was possibly there too and had a hostage — because he wanted him to concentrate on the task he had for him.

‘Took a bit longer than I’d have liked,’ said Vale. ‘The records from the nineties haven’t all been fully converted to digital format yet and I had to get a couple of people to hunt down the files.’

‘And?’

‘The intel the Service has on the CIA’s Central American staff and activities from that time is patchy. It’s not like the eighties when everything was kicking off in Nicaragua and El Salvador. But I did manage to get the personnel records for Honduras — there’s really only one lot of information, for the capital, Tegucigalpa. Will email it across.’