Tim Stevens - Delivering Caliban

It came through after a minute. Purkiss forwarded the file to Berg’s laptop. It was, as Vale had said, a personnel file for the CIA station in the Honduran capital for the years 1995 until 2005. There were dossiers attached for six or seven of the names.

The head of station from 1995 to 1999 was one Philip B. Mayhew. Berg opened the dossier. Two indistinct photos accompanied a short biography.

Mayhew was African American. ‘Not him,’ said Purkiss. Ramirez had appeared to be of mixed race, but lighter-skinned than would be likely if Mayhew were her father.

The deputy head for the years 1996 to 1999 was a possibility. He stared back in a single black-and-white mugshot, perhaps a passport photo. In his late forties, clean-shaven but with the shadowed cheeks of a naturally hirsute man, solidly built. His name was Raymond Giordano.

The rest on the list were lesser functionaries, field agents and support staff for the most part. Purkiss and Berg scanned through them; then Purkiss said, ‘Check the names.’

Berg entered the complete list on her database and began the search.

*

‘Some hits,’ she said. Purkiss had been stretching his arms and legs, trying to ease the pain in his shoulder, talking to Kendrick. He came over to the laptop.

‘Four of these people are based in Langley now,’ she said. ‘The boss, Mayhew, is in the Middle East.’

‘His deputy? Giordano?’

‘Langley.’ She brought up a window. ‘Deputy Director. No portfolio.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘The Bureau isn’t sure, but it’s suspected the CIA has a department dedicated to investigating enemy action against its own personnel, in the US and abroad. Whatever it is, Deputy Director’s a senior position. Giordano’s one of the big boys.’

The accompanying picture was another mugshot but a more up-to-date one. Giordano had aged, put on weight, and grown a salt-and-pepper beard. With his face now partly obscured, his eyes were more distinctive. Purkiss had seen those eyes before: in the service station shop, staring at him as he tried to entice them away from Pope.

‘That’s him,’ he said. ‘That’s Ramirez’s father.’

Manhattan, New York City

Tuesday 21 May, 7.30 am

Pope was saying something but Nina didn’t register a word.

For the first time since lunchtime yesterday — was it really less than twenty-four hours ago that this had begun? — she craved music. Not to play it; just to hear it speak to her, to lie adrift in the river of it. Something pure, without bombast. Bach, maybe, or Beethoven’s late quartets.

She couldn’t hear any, so she clutched her violin to her as a reminder of that world.

They were on the outskirts of a park, somewhere. She didn’t think it was Central Park; it was too small for that, and she had a vague notion they were near the East River. She’d been to New York exactly three times in her life, once on a trip with her grandmother and twice to attend concerts with her group. She was fascinated and repelled by the city’s gargantuan size in equal measure, and had learned little of its geography.

Vaguely she registered mild surprise at the number of people on the streets at this hour, a time when back in Charlottesville most people would still be in bed. She was incurious about where they were going, or why they had left the car they had reached the city in (the second, or perhaps third, car since the terrible time at the gas station) and were now on foot, Pope striding at her side, gently but firmly compelling her to keep pace with him.

A homeless man strummed a guitar in a bus shelter. She slowed to listen, but before Pope could chide her along the man pulled out a cell phone to answer it and the moment was gone.

She was incurious because she knew, finally, that she could trust Pope. The doubts that had pricked at her ever since she’d met him in such violent circumstances, and that had threatened to skewer her through when he’d first held her like a human shield and then when the other man, the one who’d come in through the back and had also sounded English, had enticed her away from Pope… these were gone like flute notes in the wind. Pope hadn’t let her down yet. He’d told Nina terrible things, things that most other people would have kept hidden from her… had kept hidden from her since she was a child. Things she’d suspected to be true. And despite the things she’d seen him do, which previously would have convinced her of a man’s wickedness, she knew he was, at heart, good. Good in a way nobody she’d ever met before was good, apart from her mother and grandmother. And even they’d concealed things from her, as she had now discovered.

The clincher, the thing that finally convinced her of Pope’s honesty, was hearing her father’s voice. Pope had been driving them through some darkened town, in Jersey, she guessed, and had pulled over beside an old-fashioned call box. He’d indicated to her to climb out with him and she’d obeyed, then crowded close at his signal so that she could hear the voice on the other end of the line. Even after fifteen years there was no mistaking the gruff warmth, the weight of what she’d always thought of as kindness behind the tones.

She didn’t say anything, half-expecting Pope to make her speak in order to convince her father that she was really there. But it was as if her father believed Pope, implicitly. When Pope said I have your daughter he winked at her, drawing the sting from the menace of the words.

She’d never been able to find her father. Her grandmother had discouraged her from trying to make contact with him, and the tentative attempts she’d made as an adult to find out even where he was living had come to nothing. Yet Pope, in her life for less than twelve hours, had not only located her father but had allowed her to hear his voice.

Somebody who could do that for her was to be trusted.

*

Abruptly Pope led her off the street and into the darkness of a covered public parking lot. Their footsteps echoed in the sudden cavernous space. Pope stopped at a light truck, grey in the gloom. He fished out a set of keys and unlocked the passenger door.

‘Our new wheels, for the moment.’

Nina climbed in, propping the violin case at her feet as she’d done in the last three or four or however many cars it was they’d used. This was, she noticed, the first one Pope had keys for other than the one he’d taken from the gas station. He was round the back of the van, working the doors there. Nina stared straight ahead. In a minute he climbed in beside her.

The truck lumbered under the raised boom, feeling to Nina as if it was struggling to move under a heavy load.

*

They crawled through the canyons of the city, low orange morning sunlight splashing them in bursts before retreating again behind the bristling towers. How could anybody live here, she wondered. Loomed over at every turn. Landmarks she recognised came and went: the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, Grand Central Station.

Pope navigated easily, deftly turning aside from congested streets down side routes, always giving the impression of driving with purpose. He turned right down a ramp that led to another boom, where he took a ticket from the dispenser. They rolled into another car park, this one subterranean beneath a tower whose peak was higher than Nina could imagine.

The parking lot was around half full. Pope drove slowly between the columns, turning his head this way and that, occasionally dabbing the brake as if considering a bay, then moving on. Eventually he swung into one between two smaller cars and cut the engine.

She waited until he’d helped her down, then walked alongside him past the barrier and back up the ramp into the light. Once more she twisted to look up at the building. Some kind of office skyscraper.