Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) (34 page)

Amber, her mother a thief, her father a player. School of hard knocks. A real piece of work. Her body was the weapon she had used on Victoria and me, but her mind was the really impressive instrument.

How long have I been standing here? With my arm outstretched and the big coat sleeve partially but not wholly concealing a gun held in my hand.

One second? Two?

But in that moment, that brief increment of time, I see everything. From its very beginnings. After years of paying off Alan Houghton, Charles confesses or lets slip to his wife about the blackmail. Amber knows Charles is her ticket from the shanty-Irish muck. An old-money WASP with political ambitions. There is only one thing to do. She decides to kill Houghton. The easy way would be to tell her da. But she’s burned that bridge. She will do this on her own. Her da is the past she’s escaping from. She will make her own future. She plans it all. She plans the murder. She’s learned well from her da’s success, her ma’s failures. Yes. Handle this on her own, keep Charles out of it, keep Dad out of it, she’ll do it by herself. Just as she worked hard to get into Harvard, reinvented herself, probably forced the coincidence whereby she and Charles would meet at Vail. This was one more obstacle to be overcome.

Yes.

Then Victoria Patawasti finds out about the slush fund. Victoria leaves a trail in the accounts. Charles notices that someone has been looking at the secret account file. He panics, tells his wife. Of course it could only be Victoria and silly, poor, doomed Victoria writes up her suspicions in her computer. Only Charles, Robert, and, what was that Klimmer said, yes, Mrs. Mulholland, only those three ever went into Victoria’s office. Amber has to know what Victoria knows. Seduces her, gets her to reveal her password and what she knows. And once the decision is made to kill Alan Houghton, Victoria has to die too. Victoria can’t be bought. Amber has to act quickly. Hector Martinez is working at the CAW offices. Maybe he drops his license, maybe she rifles through his wallet. It doesn’t matter, she gets the license and knows she can use it to set up an innocent man. She kills Houghton and Victoria on the same night, sets up Hector as a burglar. Brilliant.

Does Charles know about it all? He must have told her that someone had been looking at the secret account. Is he in on the murders? Did Amber tell him? Did he have anything to do with Maggie Prestwick’s death? Does it matter? I don’t think I even care now.

And only after she botched my murder did Amber see she was at the limit of her power. She needed professional killers to kill me. The risk of hiring unknowns—who could blackmail her—was too great. Who to turn to? Daddy. Because she needed him. Because blood was thicker than water. A rapprochement. Oh, Amber. It had to be you.

I move the gun sight from him to her.

And I hold it. Hold it. My finger on the trigger. The sight between her shoulder blades. For a second. Amber’s fair face. Her golden hair.

Beautiful.

Another long second.

A squeeze.

And then.

And then I release the tension on the trigger.

No, Amber, you will not make me do the wrong thing again. I was weak before. I failed. In Ireland. But not here. Not this time. Some other way.

I begin lowering the gun. A man at her dad’s table sees me, reaches inside his jacket, pulls something out.

I finally breathe.

A blast like a firecracker.

The man next to me is thrown backward into a woman holding a champagne glass. Blood gushes from his back. There is a ghastly silence and then people start to scream. The other man beside Amber’s father draws his gun, begins to shoot. The men next to the senator and the congressman pull out their guns, shoot across the room at Amber’s father’s table. Panicky fast shots thumping into the walls. Shooting from all directions, all around.

People begin screaming, diving for cover. At least half a dozen men now are shooting at once, seemingly at random, in a panic, at me, everywhere. Bullets from semiautomatics and big-caliber revolvers, the sound horrendous in the enclosed space of the ballroom. People yelling, terrified, running, trampling one another, falling to the floor. A bullet hits a spotlight and a fire starts behind the band. The fire alarm goes off.

Charles and Amber have dived to the floor.

I drop a smoke bomb.

Confusion, more gunshots.

The sprinklers start spraying water and the water makes the lights fuse, flicker, go out.

Now the screaming really starts.

Yellow emergency lights come on above the fire exits. I run for one.

I sprint across the darkened room, unhindered, untouched. Something comes whizzing over my head and crashes into the wall. There’s the sound of shooting and a yell to cease fire. Not an unarmed person left isn’t screaming, isn’t diving under the tables.

I push on a metal bar and the door flies open. I run down a corridor, open another fire door, and am suddenly out in the night. I hammer across the street to the ball-bearing factory. I wipe the gun clean and throw it through one of the broken factory windows. I tear off the white jacket and pants, change into jeans, an Eddie Vedder shirt, black jacket, sneakers. I unlock the bike, ride like crazy. I head east, I just keep going. I don’t look back.

In two minutes, I don’t hear the fire alarm, I don’t hear anything, I’m on big empty streets going anywhere. A fire truck shoots past me heading for the Eastman Ballroom.

I ride through the unfamiliar landscape of northeast Denver until I come to a bus stop. I ditch the bike, I get the bus to the airport bus stop.

I take the airport bus to Denver International.

That big teepee structure. The windows. The sun behind the Rocky Mountains. The blue sky. The stars. I queue up at the British Airways desk. I get my boarding card for the direct flight from Denver to London.

I find the toilet and throw up. I wash my face. I smack the hand dryer off the wall. What a disaster. What a terrible balls-up. I go to the gate.

I get on the plane. Sit in my seat. The plane idles for a long time, gets delayed, loses its place in the queue. The captain explains why. Something mechanical. We wait. My heart going like a rivet gun. I bite my nails. We finally get another takeoff slot. The plane taxis, turns, roars down the runway. Lifts into the night, leaving behind the city, the plains, and, eventually, Newfoundland and then North America itself.

John’s body in the landfill in Aurora and Amber safe and alive. Unharmed, and as strong and as beautiful as ever.

12: THE HIDDEN RIVER

T
hrough the window it’s morning. Night slinking away over the lighthouse and the milk churns and the cliff path. The moon’s breath, cold, in the gray light that in the east they call the wolf’s tail.

Across the Irish Sea, the peak of Ailsa Craig and the hills of Galloway.

A line of yellow in the sky.

A smattering of vessels, fishing boats, tankers, and big container ships waiting for the pilot to guide them to the container docks of Belfast. Closer to the shore, a lobsterman, pulling nets, swearing so loud that you can actually hear him.

A man is coming up the road.

This isn’t my house. I’ve come here, to hide as best I can. Dad was useless as usual, but Mr. Patawasti suggested their cottage up the Antrim coast if I wanted a place to rest.

There is only one way to the house.

Along the cliff, around the lighthouse. Coming over the boggy fields would be a nightmare.

An assassin has to come up the one narrow road.

That’s the beauty of the thing.

And he’s here. I can’t tell if he’s being furtive. There isn’t enough light. But I can see him. Glimpses of him between the thorns and the blackberry and the bramble bushes. Walking fast. Not running. That’s how I’d come too. At dawn. In the half-light. I would never have spotted him but for the fact that all I do in my waking hours is look out at the sea, the cliffs, the path.

And now the decision.

There is a shotgun over the fireplace. I checked it as soon as I moved in. Twelve-gauge. Nice. Clean. For shooting foxes, badgers. A box of shells near the range. It would be easy to slip out the back, circle behind the cottage, and take him as soon as he gets to the front door. Easy.

And yet.

I sit here, the gun untouched, the shells untouched.

I’ll let him come, I say, and smile. Aye, I’ll welcome him.

For I have failed in everything.

The debacle in the Eastman Ballroom. I didn’t even fire my weapon. More than a dozen people injured, two nearly died, and, of course, Charles and Amber completely unharmed. More famous now than ever while an inquiry sorts out what on earth happened. No one really knows, but they think a security guard panicked and started shooting at a man he thought had a gun.

Charles has been on
20/20
and even
Larry King,
displacing for a moment the round-the-clock O. J. Simpson coverage. CAW’s profile has been raised a hundredfold. I couldn’t have given them a better gift. He’s a shoo-in for Congress, a rising star. He’s got a chance of running for governor or even being the balance on the GOP presidential ticket at some point in the future.

I have fucked up utterly, in all ways.

I fell in love with heroin, I fell out of love with truth. I was beguiled by a killer, smarter than me. I let down my old love, failed her, too, failed my friend.

So come, assassin.

I’ll wait here.

Come. And he does.

Who would they get to kill me? Would they have told the IRA that I was a senior police officer, or an independent drug dealer, something like that? The IRA, the UDA, it doesn’t matter. As long as they are efficient.

I look out the window. The Scottish coast, the ships, the birds, farther up the channel the barest outline of the Mull of Kintyre.

And the worst part is, the day I got back to Carrickfergus Mr. Patawasti had come around and thanked me. Congratulated me for a job well done. Dad had told him that I had helped Hector Martinez’s lawyer get him off. Mr. Patawasti had said that although I hadn’t found the person who killed their daughter, at least I’d helped set an innocent man free, got the police looking for the real killer.

I almost threw up.

I had to get out of there. Get up here. Where I would be safe. For a while. Until now. I suppose it was inevitable they would find me. Northern Ireland is a small place.

The assassin.

Closer. I can make out a few details now. He’s wearing a parka raincoat and a flat cap.

Breathing hard.

His breath curling into the morning air.

His footsteps heavy.

His gray face.

He opens the gate and walks to the house.

He knocks on the door.

Which is slightly unusual.

I open it.

“You’re a hard man to find, Lawson,” he says.

I recognize him at once. It’s Commander Douglas from the Samson Inquiry.

Not an assassin, then, but just as bad. As good as a gun. As good as a bullet in the brain. Just more complicated.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding for the last couple of months,” he says.

It’s more like a couple of weeks, but I don’t quibble with him. He sits in the chair by the window. Lights himself a cigarette. It doesn’t calm him down.

“Well, since you’ve no phone, I thought I’d drive up here myself and let you know. I wanted to see your fucking face. You’re just like every other paddy in this fucking country. Be in the papers tomorrow, Lawson, you’re off the fucking hook.”

“What do you mean?”

“The first question you should ask is how I found you.”

“How did you find me?”

“Broke into your house yesterday, found a letter your father was about to post, careless, very careless.”

He blew smoke aggressively in my face.

“You want to get me a drink?”

“There’s only water,” I said.

“Forget it then. Typical. Anyway, so you’re off the hook, Paddy, we won’t arrest you, and your own lads won’t kill you. You’re free as a fucking daisy.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Only the collapse of the entire Samson investigation into the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Only thousands of man-hours of work and millions of pounds down the drain. Only the destruction of a good man. Not to mention a couple of dozen senior Northern Irish coppers getting away with graft of the most outrageous kind. I tell you, it’s no coincidence, I see the work of MI5 in all of this.”

“Yes, but what, how?” I asked, getting frustrated.

“Samson’s been arrested for fraud, criminal mischief, falsifying documents, and, get this, statutory rape. Apparently, Tony Samson’s casebook wasn’t as clean as we all thought. He just did things every other copper did, cutting a few corners here, losing papers there, you know, fitting up a few hoods who deserved it. He’s been arrested and the whole inquiry has of course collapsed, all the preliminary findings are suspect now, it’s all going to be scrapped. The PM has already said he wants this finished, we’ve been instructed to close our files and send them to the Home Office for permanent seizure, or at least until after the thirty-year rule releases them again to the public domain. Yes, Lawson, you might have to watch your back sometime around 2025, but until then…”

“I still don’t understand,” I said.

He looked at me, disgusted. Took off his cap. Spat on the floor.

“Thought you had that big IQ. They fitted him up. Samson has been arrested, for corruption. Ironic, eh? Oh, aye, and they even threw one at him for having sex with his sixteen-year-old baby-sitter. His career is over, the inquiry is over, you won’t be forced to testify. The story will break on today’s evening news. You fucked us. You sneaky Paddy bastards, I don’t know how you did it, but you fucked us.”

I sat for a while. The RUC, or MI5, or the Home Office, or someone else entirely had seen that Samson was going to blow the lid off corruption within a section of the police in Northern Ireland, had seen that it could jeopardize Northern Ireland as a political entity in and of itself, had therefore begun digging for dirt on Samson himself, had found enough to bury him. His whole inquiry was compromised, useless. He was just like me now, the poor bastard.

And it really was over. No one would compel me to testify. Nothing to testify about. I was what I’d always been. A drugged-out, worthless, wasted cop. I was safe.

“Tell me one thing,” Commander Douglas said.

“What?”

“Off the record, Lawson, why did you resign?”

I believed him. I didn’t mind telling him.

“It’s very simple. Buck McConnell was my mentor in the peelers, he pulled me along. He used me. He put me in the drug squad, figured I’d shake things up. I did. I found out that several senior RUC officers were allowing the IRA and UDA to traffic heroin and e, protecting them, regulating the market, I could have blown the lid off a dozen big careers, but they found out about me. They weren’t sure if I was loyal or if I was going to go to Special Branch. I wasn’t sure if I was going to go to Special Branch. I didn’t want to be killed, I didn’t want to live in fear in some witness-protection program, so I took a third way out. I destroyed my credibility. I injected myself with heroin, enough times to convince them I was an addict. Then I stole heroin from the police evidence room, I got myself caught stealing, they said they wouldn’t prosecute if I resigned. I resigned in disgrace.”

Commander Douglas grimaced, stamped his cigarette out.

“Very clever, Lawson, you made yourself a pariah. Sneaky. You’re all alike. I don’t know why we stay in this bloody country. It’s like the fucking Raj and you’re the niggers.”

I said nothing, Douglas rubbed his hands over his face. His eyes narrowed, closed. A comic effect in a man incapable of comedy. He sighed, nodded to himself.

“Well, you fucker, you don’t get off that easy,” he said.

He pulled out his gun and pointed it at me.

“You were lying,” I said, surprised.

“No, I wasn’t lying. It’s all true, you’re off the hook, with Samson, with the Brits, with your own side. Off the fucking hook with everyone. Everyone except me.”

“But you can’t do anything, the investigation’s over.”

He nodded in agreement. Sighted the revolver.

“You fucking bastards, ruin a good man like that, you just sitting up here waiting for your pals to do the dirty work. You fucking coward. You fucker. Biding your time. Well, Paddy, let me tell you about this gun. It’s not a cop gun. It’s off the books. If I shoot you, no one will ever know who did it.”

I looked at him, looked at the gun, saw that he was serious. Did I want to die now? Now that I was free? Things were different. I wasn’t sure. Douglas got up and walked over toward me. He put the gun against my temple. Was he really this fucking crazy?

The touch of the cold steel. This is not how I want to go. Every second of every day someone dies. Every minute someone’s murdered, someone’s murdering. But not now, not me. Not this place.

“I could kill you, Paddy,” he said, furious. “I could fucking kill you easy. A squeeze of this here trigger. Nice gun. Browning. Yes. I’d enjoy it. I would.”

His face was dispassionate, resolved. He meant to do it, he would do it. His eyes, ice. It was a decision he had made in advance.

He took a step back so the blood spray from my skull wouldn’t get on his clothes.

I knew he’d do it. For I was everything he hated about this country. I was the distillation of all that rage. I was the symptom and the disease.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“What do I want? What do I want? I want what I’ve always wanted. A fucking bit of cooperation. One fucking Paddy who knows right from wrong. I want to know the name of the copper running the heroin, I want to know his name. Give me that. Fucking give me the name. I don’t care if
they
fucking kill you. I don’t care if the investigation
has
collapsed. I want that fucking name. I’m going to count to three.”

For emphasis, he clicked the hammer back on the revolver. One slip of his finger and I was dead.

“One,” he said.

The barrel and the sweat. This little room. The sea outside. His mouth fixed, resigned, one way or the other, it didn’t matter. If I didn’t give him the name, he’d top me.

“Two.”

That face, that scarred hand, the paratrooper wings on his wrist. That gun. Would this be the last impression in my retina, the last memory in my brain?

I gagged. I was afraid.

No.

“Thr—” he began.

“John,” I said.

“What?”

“John Campbell. Big guy, blond hair, only a constable, part-time RUC. He’s the one you’re after. Carrickfergus Police Station. You won’t find him, though. He’s already run. He’s in America. But he’s the one, he ran all the drugs, he was the kingpin. Low-key character. He’s the one you want. Constable John Campbell, smart guy, wouldn’t even take promotion. Stayed out of the limelight. He’s the one all right, the one you want.”

I swallowed, felt sick.

Douglas looked at me for a second. Revulsion crept over his face. He knew mentioning that name had cost me something. He believed me. What a coward I was. Douglas spat. And I hated myself. Doing down John like that to save my skin.

Another betrayal.

Douglas nodded, took his finger off the trigger.

“Piece of shit,” Douglas said, put the gun in his pocket, picked up his hat, walked out of my life forever.

* * *

The river begins on the roof of the world. All the great rivers of Asia are born there. The Hindus believed that their gods were born in the Himalaya and went there to die. The Tibetans felt that the air was so full of spirits that not even the clean vision of the Buddha could purge it.

The plane flying over the Hindu Kush. Over the opium fields of Afghanistan. I look out the window. The Flower of Joy. I remember. Sip my orange juice.

A round-trip ticket from London to Delhi costs five hundred pounds. I didn’t have that kind of money. But Dad did. Dad, amazingly, had gotten fifty-eight votes in the local council elections. He got his deposit back, for the first time ever. And he promised me he’d lend me the dough if he got the money back. I held him to his word. India? Why not. What else was there? The plane flying over the hazy brown Indian subcontinent.

Touching down. The Morris Ambassador taking me from the airport. The heat, the orange sky, the pollution so palpable it coats your tongue. Child beggars at the traffic stops, filthy and in rags.

“Jao,” the taximan says, which means piss off.

The insane streets around Connaught Place. Connaught—the wildest of Ireland’s four provinces, an appropriate name for central New Delhi.