Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

The dead man, as Red Queen had feared, was linked to MIC: off-books payments over five years. Frederick Gordon Noone. Forty-one. A British national, ten-year veteran of the UK’s Parachute Regiment, where he was known as ‘Davidoff’ for reasons unclear to Red Queen.

Noone had got his boots sandy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clean service record. After leaving the regiment he had, along with many like him, touted for private hire and found himself doing a similar job for much more money and with the rules of engagement tilted in his favour. He was on Blackwater’s books, briefly – then left. The payments from a slush fund linked to MIC had started shortly after.

The trail pointed to sub-Saharan Africa, some time in South America – training FARC, probably, thought Red Queen. The run-of-the-mill end of MIC’s operations involved arming and training terrorists and their opposite numbers in government in most of the major conflicts around the world. Creating customers, was how they thought of it.

No family, apparently. Good. His employers weren’t going to be reporting this guy missing any time soon. He’d entered the country on his own passport, a guest visa, but that wouldn’t send up flags from USCIS for a while. He’d booked a return ticket, no doubt just for the sake of form, but that was still a fortnight away. Hotel? Car? His partner would probably take care of that.

Good.

That they were fielding someone – one of a team, presumably – with traceable connections to them, travelling under his own name, suggested haste and urgency. They were taking very big risks with this thing. So either they were counting on some powerful protectors or they were starting to flail. More likely the former.

This wasn’t Red Queen’s usual beat. Not at all. The Directorate seldom if ever staged interventions. It soaked information up, spread spiderwebs, moved as invisibly as possible through the world. If it did something stagy, like bringing in Hands, it called in a favour from Our Friends. But this situation was beyond the usual thing. The executive branch, so to speak, needed the DEI’s knowledge. And DEI needed the executive branch.

There was still at least one more guy loose on the ground.

Red Queen spoke to Porlock. Explained the situation, though something about his manner suggested he knew about it already.

‘Go to Our Friends. Tell them it’s their mess. They need to go, find this dead man before anyone else does, and make him disappear. This needs to be contained, agreed?’

‘Agreed.’

Sherman waited in the car park of their motel for three hours for Davidoff to return. Better safe than sorry. Then he risked a call to Davidoff’s pay-as-you-go.

The phone, on the side table of Jones’s room in the motel, trilled and its screen lit up. Jones picked it up and got a pen and wrote down the number but did not answer it.

Jones waited. The phone went again. Same number. Jones carefully wrote it down underneath where he had written the number the first time.

Sherman frowned. He knew the big fella would be pissed off that he’d bolted, but there was no great percentage for Sherman in standing around to make friends with Mr One Millionth Customer and the meet-and-greet girls, and Davidoff could take care of himself.

He’d last seen Davidoff at the front of the shop before it had all gone tits skyward. He’d slipped off, Sherman assumed, to go round and cover any back exits. Much use he’d turned out to be. How the little sod had managed to hit Sherman with the door, he didn’t know, but it had done his shin a mischief and from then on in Sherman hadn’t had much of a chance to do anything but follow his nose.

This was a crap job, he thought. A crap, crap job. Everything that could have gone wrong had. And now, when he’d like to have been safely indoors having a chod and a read of the paper, he was sitting in some backwater in the middle of America surveilling his own motel room from a car park – he seemed to spend a lot of time in car parks – or feeding crap tin money into crap tin payphones. Lost idiot wanted. Please call Ed Otis, answers to Sherman.

He didn’t know what was keeping Davidoff. He thought about phoning Ellis but then thought about not phoning Ellis and preferred the second thought. He thought about returning to the shop, wondered about whether the car had been seen. He thought not. As far as they were concerned he was just a violent nutter who missed out on a free trolley dash and the chance to have his photograph taken with a couple of village idiot beauty queens.

Finally, he decided he’d rather just go than keep sitting here. He waited till after dark, and then drove. The forecourt and the neon sign were still illuminated but the glass front was shut. Sherman parked the car a couple of blocks away, and walked back to the shop.

The snake of trolleys, locked and chained in the black light, looked like something’s spine. A single car, seemingly abandoned, gleamed grey-white in the middle of the car park. The display windows of the shop faced blankly over the asphalt, eating the dark. Sherman shivered, pushed his hands into the pockets of his jacket and broke into the beginnings of a trot.

There was nothing outside the building. Sherman spent a few minutes in a pool of shade near the exit, watching the windows of the building for the sweep of a flashlight – anything that said ‘nightwatchman’. Nothing. He circled towards the back of the building.

A sign directed deliveries to a roughly laid tarmacked strip down the side of the store. He trotted down under the shoulder of the building, into the dark. He could smell diesel and grass. He walked round – down a long wall, one locked door and a shuttered loading bay. All quiet. On the other side of the loading bay was the fire door that had knocked him over that afternoon. There was a dim, hooded light over it. He shuffled down the wall towards it.

He was startled, then, by a rustle in the bushes and froze. A tousled figure – not tall enough to be Davidoff – was standing still out there in a pool of dark, seemingly looking in his direction. As Sherman’s eyes adjusted he could see the outline of a rough beard. He’d disturbed a hobo. Dumpster-diving probably. There was another rustle, and the old man stepped back and was gone. He wouldn’t have been able to see much of Sherman, not from that distance and with Sherman in the shadow of the building. Probably just heard him.

Sherman waited, then went on. Screened from two sides by the low bank and the hedge, he risked the light, tried the door. There wasn’t a handle – just the bar on the inside, and the shop may not have had a nightwatchman but it was bound to be alarmed.

If Davidoff had got trapped in there, he supposed, he could have decided it was better to wait the night out than risk tripping the alarm. He didn’t have a car. But that didn’t make sense. Davidoff hadn’t gone into the shop, not from the front, anyway. And if he was in there he wouldn’t know that Sherman had taken the car. And why would he have got locked into the shop in the first place? He had a phone… No. Sherman had a bad feeling about his partner.

It was just as he was thinking about this bad feeling he had, about his partner, that Sherman heard the sound of a motor idling outside the front of the shop, then coming closer. It sounded like it was coming down the side of the building, where he’d just walked. It stopped. Then there was the sound of a car door opening, and closing. What made Sherman freeze was that the noise of the car – throatier, a van of some sort – and the noise of the voices sounded like someone trying to be quiet. His route back was cut off.

He moved quickly, scrambling out of the light and over the wall and up the slope into the foot of the hedge. He wriggled down into a long, ditch-like concavity he found in the earth. He could hear low, purposeful voices. The foliage was good above him. He risked raising his head.