Die Twice (8 page)

The only question was whether they were still alive.

The younger one’s problem was with the side of his head. Something had made a real mess of it, just above his right cheekbone. The skin wasn’t broken, though, so I was thinking maybe an elbow had been used. Delivered hard enough to knock him out cold, if not more. I checked his breathing. It was shallow, but definitely present. The other guy hadn’t been so lucky. He’d taken a blow to the throat. It looked like his airway had been crushed. I guessed he’d suffocated, but I wasn’t about to put my fingers down his windpipe to make sure. There was no point. His days of receiving help were clearly over.

The floor was much dirtier than yesterday. I could make out at least nine sets of dried, muddy footprints leading from the door to the stairs. They’d be from the emergency crews I’d seen swarming all over the grass, I guessed. Two more sets—darker in color, with less well defined sole patterns—were smeared over the top of these.
They led toward the window. Which had been broken. From the inside, out, judging by the pattern of glass fragments. That suggested two people escaping, presumably from whoever had set upon the other homeless guys. I thought that was all there was to find, but when I looked really carefully I picked up one final set, on top of all the others, also heading for the stairs. Someone had gone up there. Recently.

And there was no sign of them having come back down.

Logic told me that whoever had arrived there before me could have gone anywhere in the building. But I didn’t believe in coincidences. And I didn’t have much time. It would be stretching credulity to be found there with another dead body. So I gambled. I headed straight for the apartment that McIntyre had been hiding in. I still had the mirror I’d borrowed from Rollins, so I used it to check the entrance. The door had been replaced with a new one. It was made of rough, unfinished wood. Industrial ply. I could see Chinese emblems stamped into the surface with red dye. A flimsy plastic handle had been attached above a roughly cut, not quite circular keyhole. Off cuts of the wood someone had used to build the temporary frame had been left lying on the floor near the bannister rail. And next to the timber was a wad of discarded crime-scene tape.

I took out the replacement cell phone Fothergill had pressed on me and checked that it was set to vibrate as well as make a sound. I scanned the list of ringtones and selected the one that looked the most annoying. Made sure the volume was set to maximum. Then fired off a text to the duty receptionist at the consulate.

call back. this no. 2 mins
.

Most of the pieces of leftover wood were too short to be of any use—five or six inches, at the most—but I did manage to uncover
one chunk that interested me. It was a hair short of three feet long. I extracted it from the pile and picked my way toward the apartment door, moving carefully to avoid the worst of the ill-fitting floorboards. I took my time, arriving silently with twenty seconds to spare. Just long enough to wedge the phone between the handle and the frame—tight, so its vibrations wouldn’t shake it loose—step to the side, and line up with my makeshift club.

The phone rang, dead on cue. “Ride of the Valkyries” grated electronically from its tiny speaker. It was surprisingly loud. The hollow door buzzed and rattled in time with the vibrations. I tightened my grip on the wood. But no one emerged for me to hit.

The snippet of music played for a second time. And a third. Until finally I heard movement from inside the apartment. Rapid footsteps. They approached the door. Stopped. Then bullets started to rip through the plywood surface.

Three were at head height. Three at chest level. And three low down, skimming the ground.

I heard a thud. Metal on wood. A magazine being changed. Then nothing for twenty seconds. Thirty. The person inside was patient. Armed. And with a choice of exits. I wanted to be sure they came out of mine. So I switched my grip on the wood and tossed it down the stairs, spinning it around and sending it cartwheeling off the treads.

The footsteps started moving again. Faster than before. The door flew open. I dropped down to the floor, took all my weight on my hands and whipped my legs around in a wide arc, catching the guy emerging from the apartment just above his ankles. He went down, hard, losing his grip on his gun. I was up first, kicking it away and closing on him before he could get to his feet. He rolled onto his side, keeping his head off the ground, jabbing with his right leg, effectively fending me off. They were controlled kicks. Well aimed. Economical. Certainly not desperate lunges. He clearly
knew what he was doing. Overpowering him was going to take a while. It would be tiring, and hard to guarantee he’d be in a position to talk at the end of it. So I pulled out my Beretta and put a round through the floor on either side of his head. To warn him. I didn’t want him dead. I just had no desire to waste all my energy.

And after that, he decided not to waste any more of his.

In training, we’d learned to look for items that could be useful to us.

In the field, we found the same thing applied to people.

There are lots of ways to teach a person to navigate.

The way our instructors did it was to show you a map. Give you an hour to memorize it. Make sure you didn’t have a compass. Then send you out into the Welsh countryside to find a specific place where they said another agent would be waiting.

The exercise was designed to be realistic. The idea was to simulate your part in an emergency covert rendezvous. And it seemed simple enough, at the outset. You didn’t have far to travel. There was nothing heavy to carry. You didn’t have to steal anything or trick your way into anywhere secure. It was daylight. They even gave you a packed meal.

Get there on time, you pass. If not, you fail.

The truck dropped you off exactly where they promised. But that was the last thing to go as advertised. First, they changed the meeting point. Four times. Each time you reached what you thought was the correct spot, all you found was a concealed note containing
new coordinates. Each set was harder to find than the previous one. And on the third occasion, they added an extra piece of information. The “agent” had been delayed. She could be anything up to two hours late. And despite the sheets of icy rain that had begun to fall, you had no choice. You had to stay. You couldn’t abandon your contact.

My final map reference turned out to be the location of a telephone box. One of the old-fashioned red ones that you don’t usually see anymore, except in the tourist hot spots around London. I guess it was too remote for the phone company to bother with a replacement. It really was isolated. Scrubby, barren fields stretched out on both sides. A narrow, winding country lane led back to the nearest village. The lights of a single farmhouse glowed in the distance. And nowhere in sight offered any kind of adequate shelter.

I slid under a stretch of thin, weedy hedgerow and settled down to wait. The rain cascaded onto me from above. My clothes absorbed more water from the ground. I was thoroughly soaked within seconds. Daylight started to fade. The temperature was dropping steadily. The wind picked up and started to make the sharp strands of bramble dance and scratch at my face. My head filled with reminders of why I’ve never felt at home in the country, but I kept my eyes on the phone booth the whole time. And saw that no one approached it. Not a single person passed it on the road. Even a pair of stray dogs gave it a wide berth. It was like a magnet with the wrong polarity, designed to repel people and animals.

An hour and a half crawled by. The daylight had drained almost completely away. Another half hour passed, and I realized I was shivering more or less uncontrollably. I’d been there for the designated two hours. There was no sign of the agent. She’d technically missed her contact. I would have been entitled to return to base. Officially it was time to call it a day but I gave her an extra fifteen
agonizing minutes, just in case. And because I hated the idea of not having met my objective. But still, she didn’t show up. So I slid out from my hiding place. Crouched at the edge of the rough grass verge. Checked both ways along the road. Scanned the fields. Saw nothing. Started to move. And heard the sound of a shotgun cartridge crunching into place behind me.

At that moment I thought I’d blown it, but the exercise turned out to have been a success after all. The scope was just a little wider than I’d been led to believe. As well as our people, the army was involved. Their challenge was to capture the operator I was supposed to be meeting. It was a kind of contest. Pride was at stake, so our instructors were taking no chances. They suspected that details of the final rendezvous would have been leaked, since the army was handling the communications. So, to find out, I was sent to the place alone. The theory was that if the army was staking it out, they wouldn’t react as soon as they saw me. They’d wait for my contact to show herself and snatch both of us. And if she didn’t show up, they’d snatch me hoping that I’d know about some backup plans, rather than let the trail go cold. So my role had been to flush them out. With that achieved, the other operator was successfully retrieved. The navy won. And an important lesson was learned.

In an operation, everyone has a role to play.

It just may not be the one you’re expecting.

Everyone knows that interrogating a suspect is A PEST. To make it work, you need:

A
ccess control, so that word of his capture doesn’t have the chance to spread.

P
rivacy, to make sure nothing he reveals is overheard.

E
fficiency, to milk every last drop of useful intelligence out of him.

S
ecurity, so that no one can silence him before he spills the beans.

And a way to judge the . . .

T
ruth of what he says before you commit any resources on the strength of it.

So, all things considered, the third-floor landing of an insecure building would not be top of your list of favorable locations for the job. If the guy was a big enough fish, you’d take him somewhere specially designed for the task. A place where he couldn’t escape, and no one else could get at him. Where the physical environment itself would help to demoralize him. And where experts were on hand to harvest and validate his information. The snag was, in the middle of Chicago, in daylight, without a vehicle outside, and with no one to assist, I had no way of moving him. Not without attracting unwanted attention. There was nowhere locally to take him. And no one qualified to handle the questioning. So that left me only one option. If I couldn’t move him physically, I’d have to take him somewhere else inside his head.

It was obvious that the guy knew how to handle himself, so there was no point in trying to beat any information out of him or scare him with threats of arrest or jail. Instead, I’d have to rely on a technique I’d picked up a few years ago. Or at least a variation of one. Something I’d seen a Danish anarchist cell use. I’d been sent to Copenhagen to penetrate them after the eavesdroppers at GCHQ
sniffed out a plot to blackmail one of the ambassador’s assistants. As missions go, it was pretty much a damp squib. Two months of work to confirm the threat they posed was negligible. They were more interested in raising beer money than stealing state secrets. The shadow they cast just turned out to be larger than they were because they were so good at manipulating hostages. And that was down to one of their leaders. He prided himself on controlling people. Not through violence, though. Or bribery. Or empty threats. He had a much more effective technique. He turned his victims’ minds against themselves. Led them to accept they were about to die. To really, truly embrace the fact that their lives were over. And when they reached that place, they were like putty in his hands.

I took a step back, scooped up the discarded gun and waited in silence. The guy from McIntyre’s room lay as still as the wooden floorboards beneath him. He stayed that way for just over a minute. Then, very slightly, beginning with his left foot, he started to fidget.

“Take out your phone,” I said.

My plan was to offer him one last call. I didn’t care who to. His wife, maybe. His girlfriend. Or a significant other of whatever kind. Because whoever he spoke to, if I could get him to say goodbye to them, to hear his own voice announcing out loud that he only had moments left to live, I knew he’d be on the verge of believing it himself.

Things didn’t start out very promisingly. The guy glanced to his left and his eyes settled on the shattered remains of the Nokia that Fothergill had given me. One of his bullets must have caught it when he shot up the door. The corners of his mouth curled into a tiny smile, but other than that, he didn’t move. Then confusion spread across his face, followed by a tinge of hope.

“Wait a minute,” he said, in a faded Newcastle accent. “You’re English?”

Nothing like that ever happened to the Danish anarchist. No one had shown the slightest interest in his dialect, and I’d seen him use the same trick four times in two months.

“Get your phone, Einstein,” I said. “It’s not for me. It’s for you.”

“Are you from the Wrigley Building?” he said. “You know, UK Trade, et cetera?”

An intriguing question, from a civilian.

“Get the phone,” I said. “Do it now.”

“Oh, I get it,” he said. “I know who you are. You’re Green Slime.”

That was even more intriguing. Green Slime is generic British Army slang for military intelligence, but I hadn’t heard it used in years.

“I’m right, aren’t I?” he said. “But I know you won’t admit it. So let’s stop talking about the phone, and start talking about how I can help you.”

Maybe things would work out after all. People always ended up helping Kaspar the anarchist, but even with him they didn’t usually volunteer so readily.

“You think you can help me?” I said. “With what?”

“Can I sit up?” he said. “This is getting uncomfortable.”

“No. Help me with what?”

“Finding Tony.”

“Who’s Tony? And why would I want to find him?”