Delivering Caliban (8 page)

‘
No.’

Damn it, though Purkiss. Three dead agents with almost nothing to connect them. There was no evidence that Grosvenor had even known Taylor or Jablonsky.

He said: ‘Any chance you could get her financial records?’

‘
Not much. They’re pretty tight on security over here when it comes to that sort of thing. A Company person would be exceptionally so. You’d need the FBI to get access to that sort of stuff, andeven they’d struggle.’ Purkiss was aware Delatour was watching him. ‘What have you got in mind?’

‘
Money links people, more often that not. It’s a long shot, but it would be worth pursuing.’

Was that a glint in the trees, now? Brilliant early afternoon sun flashing off metal? Purkiss took out his phone again, thumbed in a text:
You may have a point about those trees. Any chance you could get on the other side?

The reply came immediately.
I’m on it.

Purkiss stood, stretched. Delatour rose after a moment.

‘Is there anything else I can provide?’

‘
I don’t think so. Thanks for your help.’

‘
Such as it’s been.’ The man looked embarrassed.

Purkiss said, ‘It’s a start.’

He manoeuvred so that he was facing the copse of trees, fifty yards away, and Delatour had his back to it. Purkiss held out his hand to shake, murmured, ‘Don’t turn round. There’s somebody watching us from those trees behind you.’

Delatour’s eyes held steady. He said: ‘Numbers?’

‘I don’t know. Light on metal or glass.’

Delatour stiffened. It could mean a camera, binoculars, or a firearm.

Purkiss said: ‘I’ve got a colleague here in the park. He’s going to be watching from the other side. We need to split up and walk away in opposite directions. You head out of the park. I’m going to head for the esplanade. Whoever it is, and however they got here - whether they followed me or you - it’s me they’ll be interested in.’

Delatour nodded with his eyes and began walking back along the pathway towards the entrance to the park through which Purkiss had come in. Breathing deeply, Purkiss strode south, towards the esplanade and its glitter of water beyond.

He still held his phone in his hand and when it vibrated he glanced at it.

Definitely a man in there. Just watching, I think, but he’s holding some sort of device. Doesn’t look like a rifle.

Binoculars? Some kind of long-distance audio device? Purkiss typed back:
Got a visual on me?

Yes.

Purkiss fitted an earbud and plugged the end into the phone. He speed-dialled.

Immediately Kendrick answered: ‘Got you.’

Ahead the esplanade stretched left to right, the harbour beyond. Purkiss reached it and turned right, walking parallel to the railing with its intermittent punctuation of old-fashioned lamps.

In his ear Kendrick said, ‘One of them. He’s coming out of the trees, heading in your direction but a bit ahead. Dark suit, dark curly hair.’

So whoever it was intended to head him off. That meant there was probably somebody else behind him.

He was in full view of the thin crowd wandering up and down the esplanade. If they made a move it would need to be a subtle one.

Purkiss stopped and stood with his hands braced on the railing, and waited.

Thirteen

Outside Charlottesville, Virginia

Monday 20 May, 9.25 pm

Nina pressed her head against the cold, grimy glass of the window. The streetlights were become fewer and further between now that the Greyhound was leaving the confines of the city and its suburbs. High above, a pale rind of moon emerged intermittently between thin clouds.

She clutched her violin to her, something she did for comfort without risking looking like a child. Nobody on the bus could be trusted, of course; but although she’d attracted a few glances on embarking, none of the other passengers seemed to be looking at her now. She’d had to wait at the station for the booking office to open at eight thirty, and every time somebody had come in she’d recoiled, the shock of fear jolting her.

She was headed for Washington.

Nina didn’t know quite what it was that her father did, hadn’t kept in touch even as far as Googling his name to find out about him; but she knew he did something in the Federal government, that he was a man of some importance and influence, and that he therefore probably worked and lived in the nation’s capital. She’d set about finding his exact location once she was there and had access to an internet café. If she’d had a cell phone, she’d have been able to start the search already and save time. But then they’d have caught her already.

She hadn’t seen her father since she was eleven. Fifteen years. His face was still clear in her mind, and she doubted he’d have changed enough to be unrecognisable. Whether he’d recognise her, a child grown into a woman, was another matter.

Nina didn’t want to sleep, but she let her eyes close and plunged into memory.

*

‘
Nina, baby, where are you?’

Her mother’s voice is distant as an echo, even though it comes from upstairs. Far louder, and clearer, is the scream when it comes.

She pads to the front door and opens it. It locks once closed and can’t be opened from outside without a key, but it’s a risk she’ll take. Her mother will be there to let her back in.

The scream comes again as she lets the door swing shut, as loud and as sudden as if it’s next to her ear. She flinches, putting up her hand. Can’t her mother hear it?

The driveway is washed in moonlight ahead of her. Her dad’s car squats off to one side. Nina touches the hood: it’s warm. He hasn’t been home long.

Except he isn’t home.

At the end of the driveway she finds the electronic gate shut. She clambers over easily and drops into the dirt on the other side, scuffing her knees. It doesn’t hurt; she’s done it before.

Across the cracked tarmac of the road, beyond its own gate, the Box sits blackly. There’s a glow from it, as though a light somewhere inside is seeping through the walls.

The scream breaks loose again.

 
A rumble starts up from over to her right. Nina swings, terror clawing at her. A car’s coming down the road, one of the old Jeeps that’s always sitting outside the Box. The headlights are burning through the night.

Nina leaps towards the boulders at the side of the road and crouches behind them.

The Jeep slows at the gate and sits, growling, as the railed metal inches its way open. When there’s just enough room the Jeep squeezes through and stops next to the Box.

The moon’s behind the Box, not behind her, so Nina knows her head won’t be seen. She peers over the top of the boulder.

Far behind her, her mother’s voice calls her again.

Two men are jumping down from the Jeep, men in those khaki uniforms she’s always seeing around. She’s seen the men before but doesn’t know their names. One of them unhooks the door at the back of the jeep while the other one stands back, a long gun cradled in his arms.

Two other men have come out of the Box and help the first two drag a man form the back of the Jeep. He loses his balance and has to be held under his arms. Nina sees that his hands are tied behind his back. He’s making funny wet hissing noises but doesn’t talk. There’s something tied across his mouth, too.

The men in uniforms drag him across to the door of the Box. When they’re almost there he suddenly twists sideways and tries to run away. One of the men jabs the end of the gun into his back and he falls. They haul him up again and through the door.

Another scream, this one going on for ten seconds at least. Not from the new man, but from somebody else inside the Box.

Nina crawls into herself, wrapping her arms around her knees. The moon’s suddenly terribly cold, like the sun in reverse.

‘Nina?’

Nina shrieks, scrambling around the boulder and losing her footing, sprawling in the dust. Then her mother is pulling her close, her warmth and smell swallowing her, whispering and sobbing into her hair.

‘Nina, oh, baby, my God, what have you seen, what are you doing here, oh Jesus, baby…’

*

Nina jerked upright, blinked around. The bus had stopped at a light, that was all. She glanced at her watch. Ten p.m.; they’d been travelling for just under an hour. She hadn’t dozed off after all.

Her head slumped back against the seat. That wasn’t the memory she’d been looking for; but it kept returning, unbidden, and she didn’t know why. She’d see worse, far worse. But that was the first time she’d seen her mother so scared for her. Terror and guilt: it was a combination that flavoured many of her recollections of her mother.

Once more she closed her eyes, but the memory she wanted, normally so richly infused with sensory associations, didn’t come. Instead, her father’s face kept appearing, as she’d seen it the day he’d told her of her mother’s death: square, the stubble blue on his chin even though it was noon and he’d shaved that morning, his mouth soft and with the beginnings of a smile as it always was, only his eyes telling her something wasn’t right. His face had splintered, the shards scattering, as she’d absorbed his words, even though she knew now that an eleven-year-old couldn’t really grasp what death meant. 

‘
The storm,’ he said. ‘It took Mama away.’

At first she thought he meant like in the Wizard of Oz, that her mother was in some faraway land doing battle with witches and flying monkeys. But as he spoke, his hands barely touching her shoulders, his arms straight out in front of him as he crouched before her, she began to understand. The storm had swept across the island, across the whole country – across a good part of the Western hemisphere, she now knew – and had taken her mother with it. Their home was gone. The Box was gone – and what of the people inside it, the ones who screamed?

In the past week there’d been frantic activity on the island, boxes being carted away by the Jeepload and extensive makeshift construction work as wood and steel was hammered down as reinforcement. Nina had watched and listened, bewildered, the feeling growing in her that none of the adults actually believed what they were doing was going to work. Sure enough, three days later her father had bundled her out of bed in the middle of the night and she’d found herself on a dream journey that involved a car and a roaring, shaking plane, before she’d woken shivering and terrified in her grandmother’s bed.

Her father came to her after two days, with the news that their home was lost, and so was her mother.

*

And now, almost a decade and a half later, she was on a night bus from Charlottesville, VA to Washington D.C., fleeing men in suits who were at the same time authority figures and the murderers of her friends, in search of the only person who could help her. Her father, whose whereabouts she didn’t, if she was honest, have a clue about; who had been out of her life for more than half of it; and whom she had learned to hate.

Fourteen

Charlottesville, Virginia

Monday 20 May, 9.05 pm

Over the years Pope had mastered the art of stillness; of waiting absolutely silently and ignoring the clamour of hunger and other more pressing bodily requirements.

After four hours in the girl’s flat he decided to use the lavatory.

Immediately afterwards his ears strained for tell-tale signs that somebody was already in the flat and had reacted. But there were none. Satisfied again that he was alone, he went back to wait on the living room sofa in the dark.

He flexed the muscles in his arms and calves and thighs minutely to keep the blood flowing. The distorted Dali clock on the wall said it was nine p.m. He’d arrived in Charlottesville on the Amtrak train at four, and had found the flat within half an hour. Entry had posed no problem. He hadn’t expected her to be at home on a Monday afternoon, and he was right. On arrival he did a quick prowl around the flat, familiarising himself with the layout and trying to determine if anyone else lived there.

Nina Ramirez seemed to live alone. There was no tract of any male presence, no man’s clothes in the wardrobe or shaving kit in the bathroom. Nor were there any signs that she shared with a woman friend. The bedroom was a single one.

The decorations were few: framed photographs of a woman in her thirties with a child of ten or so, whom Pope knew were Ramirez and her mother; considerably more of an older woman who resembled both of the other two. The grandmother. Ramirez had lived with her from childhood and through college, Pope knew.

Of her father there were no pictures.

Most of what passed for ornamentation in the flat was related to music. There were coffee-table tomes on the great violinists, on the history of the instrument itself. Two framed prints on the walls were facsimiles of yellowing musical scores: Paganini, Khachaturian. A wall-mounted unit revealed an array of CDs and DVDs, almost all of classical recordings.

At nine twenty he saw the first flicker of blue and red lights across the wall opposite the main bay window.

Quickly he moved at a crouch to the window and peered out. Police black-and-whites were pulling up, four of them.

Without stopping to consider what this meant he strode across the room. The tiny bathroom was at the rear of the flat. He stood on the toilet lid and pushed open the window as far as it would go. An alley behind the flat stretched away for ten yards and then bent to the left.

Pope dragged himself through the window, snagging his belt buckle for one moment before tearing free. The apartment was on the second floor - an American would say the first - and the drop was an easy one.

After putting two blocks between himself and the flat he doubled back by another route until he had a vantage point of the front of the complex. There was no doorman, just a simple keycode entry system. Four uniformed cops milled about on the pavement at the front. It meant four had gone inside, probably, and they were expecting her to make a run for it.

He took a few seconds to absorb this new information and try to process it. Nothing came up. There was no way anyone could have known he was heading here. Purkiss himself couldn’t possibly have worked out the connection yet, not without supernatural powers of some kind.  

When the lights came on at the second-floor windows he knew it was Ramirez’s flat they’d come to visit.

He debated waiting but decided nothing would come of it. At most he’d see a group of police officers emerge in a few minutes’ time with nothing to show for their search. Pope turned away and began walking, pondering his next move.

He knew a lot about the girl, but nothing about her friends in the city. He did know she hadn’t gone away: there were signs of recent habitation in the flat, such as dishes unwashed on the kitchen surface. So presumably she was in the city somewhere. Where precisely, he had no way of knowing.

Pope had the grandmother’s old address but that was unlikely to be of much use; he knew the house had been sold since her death. He knew also that the girl was a musician and therefore presumably had musical friends and acquaintances, but again finding them was going to be difficult.

He’d never been to Charlottesville before but had learned a little of the basic layout, and headed towards Main Street and the Mall. It was a picturesque city, he noted distantly, with a lively atmosphere even on a Monday evening.

As often happened, he ran a segment of the diary through his head to occupy his thoughts while the rest of his mind worked on the problem of what to do next.

18th October

Signs are that the hurricane is going to hit us in a week or so. Z is getting nervous - once more, he handles his tension well, but he can’t conceal it completely. He’s started “precautionary measures”, as he calls them. It’s not quite an evacuation, yet, but the beginnings of one. Little of the equipment has been moved, and the storm shutters are being hammered into place with admirable speed. But nobody here really believes the operation is going to be able to continue after the storm hits, even if the Box isn’t completely destroyed. For one thing, relief ships and aircraft are going to be prowling the area and the likelihood of discovery will be enormous.

Still the subjects - prisoners, let’s call them that and have done with it - continue to come in, sometimes in a trickle, at other times en masse. It’s almost as though Z is desperate having come this far to process as many as he can before everything ends. I don’t know quite what’s driving him. The results so far have been clear. Caliban is a failure. Or, at least, the result has been a negative one, which is not quite the same thing. But given what’s gone into the project, with regard to manpower and secrecy, an outcome like this is nothing less than disappointing.

The core people, Jablonsky and Taylor and Grosvenor and of course Z himself, are still here. Around thirty per cent of the support personnel remain, including the three medics. I haven’t learned their names. They’re guilty, of course, but they’re small fry and can be mopped up afterwards. The other four names are the important ones.

20
^th
October

Another evening talking with Z. If he’s been tainted by Taylor’s suspicions of me, he’s hiding it well. Alone with me he makes less of an effort to disguise the tension he’s experiencing. He doesn’t talk about the approaching storm much, though. Instead he speaks of Caliban as if it’s still a going concern, a project that’s far from over let alone dead in the water.

He’s deeply preoccupied with the science of it. ‘It’s the serotonin that’s doing it,’ he says. ‘The deaths. We’re overloading them with it. Probably the norepinephrine, too. The corticosteroids were contributing, but the content has been reduced and although we’ve had a reduction in mortality since then, it’s still unacceptably high.’

We’re in the mess, seated at one of the tables. There’s coffee in a pot on the hotplate. No booze. Z doesn’t drink. The others do, but not him. His face is waxy pale in the fluorescent light from above. Even if the storm leaves the Box intact, it’s going to take out the generators and that’ll be it. No power, no more project.

‘
Autopsies,’ he says. ‘God damn it, we need them. And we don’t have them.’

None of the doctors involved were pathologists. W hadn’t recruited any beforehand. Any deaths that were to occur would probably be the result of excessively forceful restraint, suicide, or escape attempts. So the thinking went. Nobody had anticipated a significant mortality rate from the drug itself.

While I watch Z’s eyes – he has a habit of looking away while he’s talking, like many people – I’m thinking. I need to make a move, imminently. If I wait until the storm hits, I might not survive, or at the very least it may be too late to provide any proof of what’s happened here. I know now that I’m unlikely to catch the big one, discover who the connection high up in Washington or the corporate world is. But that doesn’t matter now.

I’m going to dictate this diary over the next twenty-four hours, every word of it that I’ve kept in my head. A backup copy, in case I disappear.

*

It was an idea. Not the most brilliant one, but better than anything else he could come up with.

Pope found a payphone and dialled enquiries. To his surprise, the girl’s number was listed. The phone rang twice before it was answered.

The voice was cautious, a man’s. ‘Yes?’

‘Oh.’ Pope put surprise and mild dismay in his tone. ‘Is, ah, is Nina there?’

‘
Who’s speaking?’

‘
I’m a friend.’ He let a touch of belligerence creep in. ‘Who’re you?’

Silence for a beat. Then: ‘Sir, this is the police. Could you please identify yourself?’

‘The police? What’s – is Nina okay?’

‘
Kindly identify yourself.’

‘
My name is Thomas Beaumont. Like I say, I’m a friend. What’s going on?’

‘
Were you expecting Ms Ramirez at home?’

‘
Yes, that’s why I rang.’ Pope cursed himself silently. An American would say
called
, not
rang
. ‘Officer, please can you tell me what –’

‘
When did you last see Ms Ramirez?’

‘
Two days ago? No, three. Friday night. A bunch of us went out for drinks.’

‘
And your connection with Ms Ramirez is what, again, exactly?’

Pope thought about the musical paraphernalia in the flat. ‘We’re in the same music group. She plays violin.’ He raised his voice a fraction. ‘Has something happened to her?’

‘Mr Beaumont, she’s believed to have fled a murder scene.’

‘
What?
Nina?
’

‘
We don’t think she’s responsible. But we need to speak to her.’

‘
Who’s been murdered?’ Pope didn’t expect an answer; he’d said it to buy time while he tried to process what the cop had said.

‘
I’m not at liberty to disclose that, Mr Beaumont.’ The cop muttered something to someone in the background, then came back. ‘Sir, two things. One, do you have Ms Ramirez’s cell phone number?’

‘
She doesn’t give it out to many people. Only those she’s closest to.’ A trace of bitterness. It explained at least why he was ringing her home number.

‘
Okay. Second, we need to ask you some questions. Where are you right now?’

Pope twisted round to peer at the signs. Making up a fictional location wouldn’t work. ‘Corner of West Main and, uh, Fifth.’

‘Stay there. A squad car will pick you up.’

Pope hung up, stepped out of the booth and began walking rapidly, putting space between himself and the corner.

It didn’t make sense. Conceivably, it was a coincidence. He had little idea what Ramirez was like as a person. She might hang out with a druggy or gangbanger crowd, and they might have been partying tonight and lost control. Except he did have an idea what Ramirez was like. She was a graduate of the University of Virginia with a degree in music, and a violinist. Her flat hadn’t looked like a drug den in the slightest.

No. The murder scene she’d fled had something to do with his presence here. He had no idea what. And there was little point speculating at the moment, because he needed to focus on the consequences.

She was on the run from the police. That meant she’d either gone to ground with friends somewhere, or left the city. He knew Charlottesville had a population of under 45,000 souls. And people like her, of Hispanic ethnicity, were in a tiny minority compared with African-Americans and whites.