Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

He claimed, during his interview with Kimberley, that he’d been possessed by the spirit of a bear.

‘“An old bear,” he said. From a time before the arrival of the white man – an angry old bear,’ said Kimberley.

I asked if she’d believed him.

‘Have you ever heard a bear?’ she asked. ‘One that’s really angry? Nothing else sounds like a bear. It’s got that kind of deep breathy bark. Let’s just say I have heard it twice. Once when I was out hunting with my dad and again when I was talking to the shooter in Florence.’ She paused – to see how I was taking it, I think – before continuing. ‘Not literally, but like an echo or . . . I’m not sure.’

‘A memory?’ I said, and Kimberley gave me a hard look.

‘You do you know what I’m talking about,’ she said, ‘don’t you?’

‘It’s called vestigia ,’ I said. ‘It’s sort of like an afterglow from magic. Although, to be honest, sometimes it’s just stuff you make up in your head . . . or even a memory triggered by an association with something somebody says or does.’

‘So, is it real or not?’ said Kimberley.

I told her it was real, but learning to differentiate the real from the unreal was one of the things you needed a teacher for, although an annoying dog can be of some help. When she asked what breed of dog I recommended, I realised I might have been leading her a bit astray.

‘Forget about the dog,’ I said.

‘I liked the dog,’ said Kimberley.

‘The dog is a distraction,’ I said.

Kimberley’s lips twitched.

‘You don’t say,’ she said. ‘So do you think my active shooter was possessed or not?’

‘He might have been,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t mean that whatever got into his head made him kill those people. It might have wanted something else, but your shooter misinterpreted it. Or it might have been influenced by the shooter’s own personality. And even if it unequivocally did influence him to shoot his wife, that doesn’t mean that any of the other “active shooters” suffered the same thing.’

‘That’s unhelpful,’ said Kimberley.

‘It is, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I can scan some of the basic textbooks we’ve got back at the Folly, but really they’re not that useful, either. At least, I haven’t found them that useful.’

Kimberley nodded and stared at her empty coffee cup.

‘You know the coffee in this place is terrible,’ she said.

So we walked further up Uxbridge Road until we found somewhere with decent coffee and Kimberley finally told me what she was doing in the UK.

‘Now, since I have become the Bureau’s go-to girl for things both English and supernatural, I have been tasked to try and smooth the repatriation of my fellow citizens –’ she gave me an arch look, ‘– those that are still alive, back to the United States of America where they belong.’

‘You could just leave them to us,’ I said. ‘They’re facing some serious charges. False imprisonment, possession of a firearm with intent.’

‘Intent of what?’

‘Just general intent at the moment,’ I said.

Kimberley said that if it were down to her she’d be happy to let them enjoy Her Majesty’s hospitality, but there was the pesky detail of their quasi-official status and the US Government being loath to rinse out its undies in the British courts. In order to facilitate a happy outcome she’d be sent over with a grab-bag of low level secrets and concessions to tempt the palate of the British security establishment.

‘Not to mention save the taxpayer some money,’ she said.

‘Did it work?’ I asked.

‘Yes and no,’ said Kimberley. ‘Everybody agreed in principle.’

‘But?’

‘Only if your boss says yes,’ said Kimberley.

‘My boss?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nightingale?’

‘Do you have another boss?’

No, I thought, but I didn’t think his influence stretched that far.

‘Did they say why?’ I asked.

‘They said there was an arrangement,’ she said.

Of course there is, I thought.

‘And you want me to persuade Nightingale,’ I said.

‘Would you?’ said Kimberley. ‘Because that would be swell.’

‘So what do you plan to offer us?’

Kimberley smiled.

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she said, and pulled out a USB pen and put it on the table between us. ‘I’ve got their names, the organisational structure and history of the Virginia Gentleman’s Company and, most importantly, details of what got them over here in the first place.’

‘And what was that?’ I asked.

Kimberley said she had never driven out to Fort Meade, Maryland to gaze upon the collection of gargantuan modernist blocks that made up the headquarters of the National Security Agency. But she liked to imagine it a honeycomb of bland little cubicles. All the cubicles would be almost identical, but to the trained eye there would be subtle variations of status and purpose. Those cubicles tasked with monitoring global communications for unsuspecting terrorist suspects would have bigger, flatter monitors, nicer desk calendars, maybe the ones with a humorous daily proverb, and first crack at the sandwich trolley when it came past.

‘How much sleep have you had recently?’ I asked.

‘Bear with me,’ said Kimberley, and described the cubicles furthest from the canteen, the ones with the worrying smell from the pipes overhead, whose inhabitants walked the furthest to find their cars at home time. This was where the information gathered from open sources on the internet, twitter, eBay, Facebook, Tumblr and the like was processed. It was flagged by machine, of course, but some poor schlub still had to go through the items and decide which organ of the state might want to know who was selling a used pink bathrobe for suspiciously large sums of money – possible money laundering – or a rare mint snow globe – potential hazardous material transfer. There was a list, Kimberley imagined, and in an obscure subsection of that list, a section that had not been properly updated since George Bush was President, was the government contractee Alderman Technical Solutions, AKA the Virginia Gentleman’s Company.

So when the right flag was triggered the cubicle jockey dutifully notified an organisation which should have been taken off that list ever since an unspecified disaster in Fallujah had got them struck off another list – that of approved contractors.

I asked what had happened in Fallujah, but Kimberley shook her head.

‘That information was so redacted that I only know it happened in Fallujah because someone missed a reference in the document authorising the redaction,’ she said. She couldn’t even discover what they were doing in Iraq although there were references to something called ‘area shade suppression’ and ‘TechSub’.

Whatever it was they were doing, Kimberley didn’t think it was very successful because their contract was terminated in 2009 with two years left to run. Given the low, low standards for success applied to private military contractors in Iraq, the fuck-up that got them fired must have been spectacular. Not that Kimberley used the words fuck-up, you understand.

She didn’t seem surprised that they were still tangled up in the byzantine coils of the American intelligence establishment.

‘People still know people who know people,’ she said. ‘You should know that.’

I asked what she thought had triggered the cubicle jockey to contact them in the first place – what had brought Alderman Technical Solutions across the pond.

‘Your late friend Christina Chorley tried to sell something called The Wild Ledger on eBay with a reserve price of twenty grand,’ she said.

‘We knew they were after that,’ I said, and wondered why Crew Cut hadn’t just paid for it – probably cheaper than flying all his guys over and smuggling their guns in, not to mention hiring the SUVs with the suitably sinister tinted windows.