Tim Stevens - Delivering Caliban

‘You think Giordano’s in the building with him?’

‘I think he might be.’

Berg took out her phone and punched buttons as they strode.

‘Yeah. I need to know if a Raymond Giordano is on record as having entered the Loomis Building in the last twenty-four hours. Yes, I know it’s being evacuated.’

She pressed the phone against her ear and covered the other one. In a moment she said, ‘Okay. Thanks.’ She looked at Purkiss. ‘He was signed in at nine fifteen. Twenty minutes ago.’

*

The Loomis Building looked a new construction to Purkiss, a soaring blue-and-silver tower with a wedding-cake base and a sharp narrowing to a long, spire-like neck. The stream of people emerging from the front was just on the right side of becoming an uncontrollable torrent. Purkiss couldn’t remember having seen so many police officers in one place before.

To the left of the building stood a more uniformly slender apartment block, the one in which Pope had rented a property. Its entrance too was spilling bodies. Helicopters were chattering overhead, spiralling like slow moths around a flame. On the ground the inevitable television crews were trying to tunnel their way in.

The police line was ebbing outwards, forcing the crowds ever further back, and Purkiss and the other two were forced along with the masses. Purkiss struggled to keep his footing while hanging on to the thought that was tugging for his attention.

The apartment Pope rented. Why in this particular building? It had the advantage of proximity, so that Pope would have had a convenient base from which to set up the bomb plot… but why not take one even a few streets away?

And then he had it.

*

Purkiss spotted Berg a few heads away, Kendrick even further. He called across to Berg and she pushed her way through the jostling bodies until she reached him.

In her ear, over the noise, he shouted: ‘How would one get back into the building?’

She frowned as though she’d misheard. ‘Back in? No chance. There’ll be a cordon all around that you’d never cross. It’d have to be with the bomb squad, if anything.’ She shook her head. ‘Anyhow, are you nuts? Why’d you want to get in there? It’s a thirty-floor building.You’d never find Pope and the girl in time.’

‘I’m not going in there,’ Purkiss yelled back. ‘You and Kendrick are.’

9.30 am

Giordano was aware of a strange peace, as though he was in an impenetrable capsule cocooned from a world that was coming to an end around him.

After Pope’s call he’d stepped out of the elevator as soon as the doors opened, even though it wasn’t the floor he wanted. The bustle in the corridors was that of a normal working day in the headquarters of a global company, not the barely contained hysteria of crowds seeking an exit. He had time to hide.

He found that old standby, a restroom, shut himself in one of the cubicles and sat on the lid of the toilet with his feet propped up so that they weren’t visible under the door.

Ten minutes later the first alarm sounded.

*

He gave it half an hour, as long as he dared while still leaving time for possible delays up to the eighteenth floor, and at nine forty-eight found himself in the plush, airconditioned surroundings of the Board Room Annex. Some annex, he thought. It was twice the size of the most of the boardrooms he’d been in.

Faintly, as if through many fathoms of water, he heard a cacophony. The glazing on the windows all but shut out the sound.

Giordano kept away from the window and sat in one of the seats around the enormous conference table, alone, to wait.

*

His guilt about Nina was cold and twisted and fossilised, but his betrayal of Naomi was raw as a wound in his conscience. She’d watched his back, had bent and even broken the rules for him on more than one occasion. Yes, she was ambitious, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt her career prospects to have a mentor of his seniority and reputation (though how that was going change now, he thought with bitter mirth). But her loyalty was based on more than just political calculation.

He’d played her, and his lesser assistant Kenny, with finely honed skill. Giordano’s people in Amsterdam had removed the CCTV cameras from outside Jablonsky’s and Taylor’s apartments and sent the footage electronically straight to Giordano. The footage wasn’t continuous — Giordano hadn’t thought it worthwhile having continuous twenty-four-hour surveillance on his former partners — but rather in a series of bursts of film. The man entering Jablonsky’s apartment was the one Giordano soon identified as John Purkiss.

Giordano assumed back then that Purkiss was the killer, so he’d kept the footage from Naomi, pretending it had been removed, and had sent those two idiots, Campbell and Barker, to monitor the arrivals at JFK Airport. He was correct in assuming that Purkiss would arrive there, but wrong in thinking he planned to kill Grosvenor, whose murder occurred before Purkiss set foot in the US. Campbell and Barker, the idiots, had bungled Purkiss’s capture. If they hadn’t done that, Purkiss would have been in Giordano’s hands now for over eighteen hours and would have given up Pope’s name. Pope might have been taken down by now.

As for Nina… the watchers Giordano had put in place for her, Druze and Laymon and the rest, might have taken her into protective custody if Giordano hadn’t told them to hang back at first, keeping close to her but seeing if they could spot if she was being followed by somebody else. That was Giordano’s mistake and nobody else’s. If he’d let them take Nina immediately instead of trying to use her as bait to flush out Pope, she’d be safe now, and Pope would have no leverage.

If, if, if. If he could change the past, Giordano would go even further back. Of course he would. Now, though, he needed to focus on making decisions that would minimise the damage that was going to be done. He’d already phoned Naomi, apologising for his delay in replying to her calls earlier and saying he was on his way back to Langley. This was to head off any move she might make to put a trace on his phone, worried as she no doubt was about his failure to respond. He didn’t need her discovering he was in this particular building. She might send someone in to get him, and that would interfere with whatever plan Pope had and thereby jeopardise Nina’s safety.

He was going to die, Giordano knew. He had no way of avoiding this, but it didn’t matter. What mattered to him was that Nina not suffer. He had nothing with which to bargain with Pope, no hands to play. If Pope had wanted a simple swap, Giordano for Nina, he would have gone along with it without hesitation. But that clearly wasn’t what Pope had in mind. He wanted Giordano to suffer, and deep in Giordano’s mind, hidden yet present like a walled-up body, was the dreadful suspicion of what Pope intended to do.

Nine fifty-five. Five minutes.

Giordano placed his phone on the table before him, and watched it.

9.50 am

In his career Purkiss had broken into more places than he remembered, both as an SIS agent and in recent years in his new role. He’d learned the correct techniques for picking old-fashioned mortice locks, had become practised in the art of using a credit-card or similar strip of plastic to crack a Yale; he’d also mastered the subtler skills of deception to gain entry into places he wasn’t welcome.

This time he went for brute force.

The pathway directly behind the building gave on to manicured gardens. A concrete sculpture in the form of a Greek god, some three feet high, adorned the edge of a pond. The garden was unoccupied. Purkiss had shoved his way forward into the milling throng at the front of the building, holding his passport aloft like a staff ID card of some kind and pretending he was helping to herd the occupants of the building away from the doors. He’d edged close rot the corner and, when he was as certain as he might be that nobody was looking directly at him, or at least registering what they were seeing, he slipped round it.