Tim Stevens - Delivering Caliban

‘Are we going to meet my father?’ She hadn’t intended to say the words; they’d been plucked from her involuntarily.

‘Yes,’ said Pope. ‘In a manner of speaking.’

6.40 am

Giordano slipped the photo of Adrienne from his wallet and looked at it. It was a couple of years old, had been taken on one of their rare vacations together at Cape Cod. He loved it because it captured her perfectly: the cheeriness of her eyes, the knowingness of her smile.

The trouble is, he thought , you don’t know.

He grasped the picture in his fist, pressed it against his forehead like a totem.

Giordano had jettisoned his Catholic faith like a cast-off flak jacket in his twenties. He hadn’t embraced any of the trippy alternative religions that had been so much in vogue at that time, in the early seventies; he’d been too busy blazing his way up the Company ranks, a hotshot new kid who was being tipped for big things one day. But he wondered now about karma.

He’d always known today was coming. He just couldn’t be sure what form it would take.

*

He wandered the corridors to the elevator. Krugmann emerged from his temporary office behind him.

‘You off?’

‘Yeah. Thanks,’ said Giordano, without turning round.

‘Don’t mention it,’ Krugmann said sourly.

When he’d been in Manhattan on previous occasions and had needed to think, and when the weather was fine, Giordano had walked complete circuits of the perimeter of Central Park, and it was there he headed out of habit. But there really wasn’t anything to think about. There was no plotting to be done, no strategy to work out in his head.

He would no more organise back up, or inform anybody of his movements, or have a GPS trace put on his cell phone, than he would ignore Pope’s summons. He would be at the appointed place, in the Board Room annex of the Holtzmann Solar offices, at the appointed time of ten o’clock, which was three hours from now. Access to the office would be simple; God knew he was regarded as a figure of authority there, even though he hadn’t been near the place for more than a decade.

He would meet Pope there, and he’d see in the young man’s face the ghost of his father. Giordano recalled, clear as light, the moment Taylor had presented him with evidence of Geoffrey Pope’s true identity. Taylor had voiced his suspicions weeks earlier but Giordano hadn’t wanted to believe. The man he knew as Rickman, the British former intelligence operative who could secure financial backing for the worldwide manufacturing and distribution of the drug from the Caliban project, was still an active SIS agent. They’d been penetrated, compromised, and it was through Giordano’s weakness; because Giordano had liked the man.

He hadn’t been Giordano to Rickman, any more than Rickman had been Pope to him. Instead, he’d been Zaccardo, or just Z. But at the end, when Giordano had watched three of his men hold Rickman — Pope — down while a fourth jammed the needle in, Pope had whispered his name — Giordano — while staring into his eyes with a look almost of triumph.

As if the man had known today would arrive, like an arm clawing out of the past.

Yes, Giordano thought as he made his way up Eighth Avenue, he’d meet Pope at the appointed place, and Pope would kill him. But first, Pope would do something to his daughter. To Nina. And that was what Giordano had to prevent, if it was the last thing he did. Which it certainly would be.

*

Had he loved her?

He was using the walk around the periphery of the park not to plan, but to review, as if the meaning of a decade and a half — a lifetime, really — could be crystallised in the space of an hour’s stroll.

Giordano had met Carmen Ramirez in 1986, at Langley. He was by then vying for the Central America desk. The Iran-Contra scandal was coming to the boil — the lid would blow off that November — and it was widely expected that heads would roll and new blood would be needed. Giordano was well respected and a strong candidate for the post, but he was up against somebody who had an edge over him, someone marginally more senior and more of an ass kisser.

Carmen was a probationer of twenty-five, a year out of college and at an entry-level accounting job in the Company. She was bright, she had a sharp eye for financial irregularities, and she was beautiful. It started as a fling. Giordano was ten years older than her and acutely aware of the need not to be seen as abusing his authority over her.

She fell pregnant, and Giordano made his decision. They were married in the fall. Giordano now had a direct connection with Latin America, and a reason to visit Honduras regularly to see Carmen’s family. Over the following year, through Nina’s birth and beyond, he developed an intimate familiarity with the country, learning to speak the local dialect fluently.

It swung it for him. The new broom of 1987 swept out the dead wood and propelled Giordano to the job he wanted. He’d made it his own, pulling off some spectacular successes — the groundwork for the Noriega ousting in Panama in 1989 was his doing, as was the bringing about of the elections in Nicaragua the following year.

And then, in the next half-decade, came the increasingly intimate contact with Holtzmann Solar and Giordano’s growing interest in what one of their prototype compounds promised. In Honduras, the notorious Battalion 316, the death squad that had operated in the eighties, had been disbanded but many of its personnel remained, and it was through these men that Giordano was able to procure both impoverished volunteers for the Caliban project and somewhat less voluntary subjects.

In 1997 Giordano took the job as Company station chief for Honduras. It was a step down, career-wise, but Giordano assured the Director that it was for a limited time only, maximum two years, and would allow him to build richer networks in the region than he’d otherwise manage. And so Giordano, Carmen, who’d by that time left the Company, and little Nina relocated to Tegucigalpa.

Giordano had moved his family to the island off the coast when the trials had begun in 1998. He was spending increasing amounts of time on the island, and felt Carmen and Nina would be safer there with him rather than on the mainland. Accordingly, he’d arranged for Nina to take six months out of school, to be made up for by private tutoring when they returned. Carmen was furious. Carmen was also by then well aware that Giordano’s activities had crossed the line into illegality, and her guilt at her complicity paralysed her, prevented her from defying him.

Yet, in the end, she had defied him. As the hurricane approached the island that fateful October, her hysteria had spilled over into concrete threats. She would take Nina and flee, go straight to the Director and to the FBI and the New York Times and tell them everything. Giordano had never been an impulsive man, and he’d taken the decision to silence her in his usual measured way. He hadn’t done the act himself, had left it to Jablonsky and Taylor.

Giordano had been coming down Museum Mile on the park’s east side, but found that he’d wandered a couple of blocks away, to Park Avenue. Before him loomed the Church of St Ignatius Loyola. He stared up at the crucified figure.

He felt nothing. No yearning for absolution, no stirrings of conscience. The guilt was a gnarled and twisted thing inside him, like an alcoholic’s cirrhotic, dead liver.

Ten to eight. A little over two hours until he met his destiny.

9.20 am

‘He’s not there,’ said Berg.

Purkiss turned. He’d been staring off through the window to the west because gazing at the walls only added to his sense of frustrated crampedness. ‘They say where he is?’