Tim Stevens - Delivering Caliban

‘No. But they wouldn’t, would they.’ She dropped the phone on the desk.

Berg had rung Langley, identified herself as FBI and asked to speak to Raymond Giordano. She’d made it through to a secretary.

‘You couldn’t get his cell phone number, by any chance?’

Berg: ‘They’d never give it out to someone of my rank.’

‘What about a tap on it?’

‘Even harder. Besides, it’d take a couple of hours at least to find a judge with the cojones to authorise it.’

Purkiss knuckled his forehead. They had no direct access to Pope. But there was a possibility, a strong one, that he’d either been in contact with Giordano or knew his whereabouts and was closing in on him. Giordano was their route to Pope, but they couldn’t find him either.

Perhaps he was wrong to focus on Giordano. Perhaps there was a way of anticipating Pope’s movements. In his mind Purkiss replayed everything he’d learned about Pope over the last few hours. He rewound it and replayed it again. Rewound and replayed.

‘Douglas Torrance.’

‘What?’

‘The name on the British driver’s licence Pope used to rent the car in Charlottesville. Run a check on it.’

‘He won’t still be using that now,’ said Berg.

‘I know. But he might have used it before.’

*

‘Yeah. Here we are.’

She jabbed a finger at the monitor.

‘When he arrived here at JFK on Sunday night, he used ID with the name Brian Sopwith. That doesn’t come up again. But he used a passport with the Douglas Torrance ID to enter the US, also via JFK, on April fifth this year. Departed April fourteenth. And before that, through Washington D.C., from January twelfth till February first.’

‘What?’ Purkiss frowned at the screen. ‘He’s been here twice already this year?’

‘Looks like it.’

It was intelligence he should have unearthed earlier, and now there was almost too much to process. ‘Can you dig deeper? Find out if he rented any cars, did anything else that left a paper trail?’

‘Sure.’ Her fingers sped over the keys.

Ten minutes later she said, ‘Yep. This is a good one. DMV says he took ownership of a light truck on April eighth. That’s three days after he arrived in the country on his last visit..’

‘A light truck.’

‘Yeah. This make.’ She brought up some images. It looked like a large transit van. ‘Not typically for recreational use. The kind of thing you’d get if you wanted to transport something.’

‘Any other mention of this particular vehicle?’

‘No. It hasn’t come up since. No accidents, no mentions that it’s been found abandoned or anything.’

Purkiss thought about it. ‘Does it say where he bought the vehicle?’

‘Yes. A used car dealership in Poughkeepsie. That’s upstate.’

‘Can you call them? See how he paid?’

‘Ah. I see what you’re getting at.’ Berg picked up her phone.

It took several calls: the first to establish that nobody was in the dealer’s office yet, subsequent ones to discover the identity of the proprietor and get him at home. He took the time to check Berg’s credentials with her office, and she was relieved when her boss vouched for her. Then the man had to get to his office. He rang back in twenty minutes.

Purkiss heard the dealer’s side of the conversation over the phone’s speaker. Pope had paid with a credit card, also in the name of Douglas Torrance. It was a risk, using the same ID multiple times, but Purkiss supposed somebody who was obviously foreign like Pope would be required to provide several different forms of identification when doing something like purchasing a car.

Berg rang the credit card company, had to go through an even more rigorous process of checking and transfers from one personnel member to another, and was eventually granted access. Purkiss looked at his watch. Eight forty.

‘Holy — Look at this.’

Berg’s tone made even Kendrick wander over.

She said: ‘During his last visit, on April sixth, Torrance AKA Pope laid down two months’ rent in advance on his credit card.’

‘Rent for what?’ said Purkiss.

‘An apartment in Manhattan.’ She brought up a detailed street map. ‘Here. In Midtown East.’

Purkiss and Kendrick watched as she zoomed the view in. ‘This block.’

‘What’s that next to it?’ Purkiss asked. Berg called up Google Earth, entered the address and swung the view to street level.

The apartment block looked fifteen or twenty stories high, but was dwarfed by a broad-based, soaring building beside it.

‘The Loomis Building,’ said Berg.

‘What’s that?’

‘Offices, I believe,’ she said. She typed the name in to Google and a list came up.

‘My God,’ said Purkiss.

Occupying all thirty-four floors of the Loomis Building were the offices of Holtzmann Solar.

*

Purkiss took the stairs three at a time, Berg and Kendrick jostling behind him. The crosstown journey could take any time at all, Berg said, given that it was morning rush hour.

She was still driving Nakamura’s Taurus and had parked on a yellow line up on the kerb. She had the engine running before Purkiss had strapped himself in.

In the small of his back, Purkiss felt the pressure of the Glock, now reloaded.

Berg put a flasher on the roof and turned on the sound. The Taurus howled through the streets heading eastwards.

‘Just in the beginning, to clear the path,’ she said.

Even so, the traffic threatened to snarl them and she had to detour south and loop round. Purkiss slowed his breathing, concentrated on feeling his heart beat steadily rather than gallop. He needed to be at the peak of the adrenaline curve later, when it mattered, not now.

They were crossing Broadway, Purkiss recognised, when two sirening marked police cars cut across them, heading in the same direction.

‘Shit,’ said Berg. ‘I forgot this.’ She turned on the radio.

It immediately squawked into life, voices criss-crossing and initially unintelligible over the static.

All units to First. Repeat, all units…. First. Loomis Building….evacuation……

9.40 am

Pope heard the sirens distantly and saw that Nina had, too. The triple glazing of the windows muffled the sound remarkably. The glass, the space, the location… all contributed to the colossal price tag of the apartment’s rent. But that didn’t matter; it was a one-off payment, three months’ rent in advance, and it had bought him the location he wanted.

He and Nina sat in the middle of the expanse of the living room, among the modernist-spartan pieces of furniture. The heavy drapes were drawn across the wall-length windows that opened on to the balcony, and they would stay drawn for the time being.

The alarm sounded outside in the corridor, mirroring the klaxons that were going off on every one of the building’s other twenty-one floors.

Despite himself Pope was interested in the logistics of the evacuation. Would the police or the fire department do a door-to-door search of the building, ensuring everybody had vacated the apartments? Or would they rely on a head count, measured against the doorman’s record of who had signed in to the apartment block, and concentrate their efforts on clearing everyone out of the Loomis building? Even if they did come knocking door to door, they’d hardly expect anyone to be actively hiding in any of the apartments. Pope and Nina were in no danger of being discovered.

The response had been quick, he had to admit. They’d taken the service lift from the basement, just as he had done before entering Grosvenor’s flat when he’d first arrived in the city this time, and had reached the nineteenth-storey apartment without encountering another soul. Pope had sat Nina down on the sofa, a singularly uncomfortable-looking piece of furniture just like the rest, and had stood while he made the call.