Saint Death - John Milton #3 (18 page)

She turned to the series of stills she had grabbed. Milton was approaching the camera across a broad parking lot. He had a rucksack slung over his shoulder. Black glasses obscured his eyes. He was tanned and heavily bearded.

“How did you find that?” Coad asked.

“The software’s pretty good if you can narrow the search for it a little. There was a disturbance at this restaurant the same day this was taken. A shooting. Seven people were killed. Footage from all of the cameras in the area was uploaded by the police. I was already deep into their data. Made it a lot easier to find.”

Control scowled at the pictures. “Was he involved?”

“Don’t know.”

“Was he arrested?”

“Don’t think so.”

Coad held up his hand. He paused for a moment, drumming the fingers of his right hand on the armrest of his chair before turning to her again.

“Do you know where he is?”

“No,” she admitted.

“You’ve checked hotels?”

“First thing I checked. Nothing obvious. He’ll be paying in cash.”

“So where do we look first?”

“Lieutenant Jesus Plato––the policeman who fingerprinted him. He’s the best place to start.”

“And if we should decide to send agents to Mexico to find him … what is your estimate of the odds that we would find him?”

“I can't answer that. I’d be speculating.”

“Then speculate,” Control said.

“If he’s as good as I think he is, he won’t stay in once place for more than a week or two and he’s been in Juárez since Monday. Plus there’s the danger that what happened at the restaurant might have spooked him. But if you’re quick? Like in the next couple of days? Decent odds, I’d say. He won’t know you’re coming. If he’s moved on, he won’t be far away. A decent analyst might be able to pick up a trail.”

Control looked across at Coad and, at the latter’s curt nod, he turned back to Anna. “We’ve been in contact with the Mexican government. They’ve given us approval to send a team into Mexico to bring him out. Captain Pope will be in charge. Six agents and you, Ms. Thackeray.”

“Oh.”

“Are you willing to go?”

“I’ll do what I’m told.”

Pope nodded at her. “Juárez is not a small place,” he said, “and, if you’ve done your research, you’ll know it’s not the easiest city in the world to find something. It’s overrun with the drug cartels. Normal society has broken down completely. We might need help tracking him down. And you know him as well as anybody.”

“Well?” Coad said.

“Of course,” she said.

Control nodded brusquely. “You’ll be flying from Northolt and landing at Fort Bliss in Texas. You’ll go over the border from there. Do you have any questions?”

“When?” she said.

“First thing tomorrow.”

ANNA RODE home, changed out of her leathers and went out for a walk. Pittville Park was nearby and she made her way straight for the Pump Room and the ornamental lakes. The building was a fine example of Regency architecture and the lakes were beautiful but Anna was not distracted by them. She slowed as she approached the usual bench. She sat and pretended to watch the dogs bounding across the grass. When she was satisfied that she was not observed, she reached down beneath the bench, probing for the metal bars that held the wooden slats in place. Her fingers brushed against the narrow plastic box with the magnetic strip that held it against the rusted metal. She retrieved the box, opened the end and slid the memory stick inside. It contained her full report on Milton, plus the regular updates that she provided on the operation and scope of GCHQ’s data-gathering activities. She didn’t know how long she would be out of the country, and she did not want to be late in filing. She paused again, checked left and right, waited, and then reached back and pressed the case back into its place. As she left for home, she swiped the piece of chalk that she held in her hand against the side of the metal bin next to the chair.

35.

CAPTAIN MICHAEL POPE took off his boots and his jacket and went through into his kitchen. It was late and his wife was asleep upstairs. He looked in the fridge but there was nothing that took his fancy. He took a microwave meal from its paper sleeve, pierced the film and put it in the oven to heat. While he was waiting, he reached the bottle of whisky down from the cupboard, poured himself a double measure, added ice and sipped it carefully to prolong it. He rested his hands on the work surface and allowed his head to hang down between his shoulders.

Did he know Milton?

He did. He knew him very well indeed.

THEY MET twenty years ago. They had both been in the sandpit for the first Iraq War, young recruits who were too stupid to be scared. They were in the same Regiment, the Royal Green Jackets, but in different Battalions. Milton had been in the Second and Pope in the First. They hadn’t met in the desert but, once that was all over, Pope had transferred into the First Battalion. He was assigned to B Company.

That was the same company, and then the same rifle platoon, as Milton.

They were almost immediately sent to South Armagh.

B Company had been assigned to South Armagh. That was bandit country, and Crossmaglen, the town where they would be based, was as bad as it got. It was right on the border, which meant that the Provos could prepare in the south and then make the quick trip north to shoot at them or leave their bombs or do whatever it was that they had planned to do. The men had been billeted in the security forces base and their rifle company lived in ‘submarines,’ long corridors with beds built three high on one side. Milton had the top bunk and Pope was directly beneath him. It was the kind of random introduction that the army was good at but they quickly discovered that it was propitious; they had plenty in common. Both liked The Smiths and The Stone Roses and the films of Tarantino and de Palma. Both liked a drink. Both wore civilian duvet coats from C&A beneath the nylon flak jackets and both had taken to writing their blood groups on the jackets just like all the other blokes. Both had girlfriends back home but neither was particularly attached to them. Milton’s sense of humour was dry and Pope’s was smutty. They were both obsessed with getting fitter and stronger and both intended to attempt SAS selection when they had a little more experience. The chemistry just worked and they quickly became close.

One memory was clearer than all the others.

One night.

He remembered it almost as if it were yesterday.

It had been towards the end of their first posting. The battalion was due to go back to Andover the following week and they had one more patrol to do. They were picked up by helicopter and flown out into the countryside. It was a four-day cycle: four days out, four days on town patrol, four days in sangars. The helicopter was one of the Army Air Corps’ Lynx AH-9s and, as it powered up to take off again, there was a muffled bang from the direction of the tailboom and the engines died. The pilot tried everything he could think of to get it started but nothing worked. It was grounded.

The Lynx was a multi-million pound piece of equipment and not something they could just leave there overnight. The men were put on stag to guard it while they flew in an engineer. It was farmland. The farmhouse itself was five hundred feet away. Dark and isolated, lots of barns and outbuildings. It was cold and wet and there was an almost tangible sense of danger. The platoon were arranged in a defensive posture with an inner and an outer cordon, split up into groups of two and three. Their arcs overlapped each other, giving them three-hundred-and-sixty degrees cover around the stricken chopper.

Milton and Pope formed one of the two man teams. They lay face-down in the mud, their SLRs resting on bipods, both squinting down range into their nightsights. They were cold and soaking wet. Pope’s legs were frozen, the cold chilling all the way through to the marrow, his hands felt like blocks of ice and he couldn’t cover his ears because he had to listen for activity. They were both in a foul mood, cursing the pilot for breaking the chopper and the engineer for his inability to fix it.

Pope looked through the nightsight.

Movement? He checked and rechecked.

“Two men coming out of the barn towards us,” he reported.

“Bollocks.”

“And there’s a third. I’m serious, John.”

Milton looked through his nightsight. “Alright. Not bollocks.”

Pope watched them as they approached. They were moving carefully, keeping low. Two of them were carrying rifles and the other the unmistakeable shape––long, and with a bulbous onion-shaped end––of an RPG. Just their luck. They must have landed right in the middle of a PIRA hotspot. They were coming straight for them.

Despite the short tour in Iraq, Milton and Pope were still green. Chasing outclassed Republican Guardsmen on the road back to Baghdad was one thing; the Provos, with years of experience and full of hatred for the army, were something else entirely. Pope started to panic. What were they going to do? They couldn’t contact an officer or NCO for advice since they were too young to warrant a radio. Protocol said that they should issue a challenge since these could be three of their own men but if they weren’t friendlies then that would mean that they would either be in a firefight or chasing the players as they went to ground, and this was not the sort of country where you wanted to get lost and cut off from your mates.

Milton did not panic. He was calm and assured. He knew the correct routine for this situation and he followed it to the letter.

He pulled back the bolt to cock his rifle, identified himself as army and called out for them to stop.

They ran for it.

Milton fired. Pope fired.

The farm descended into pure chaos. The inner cordon saw the two tracer rounds from the tops of their magazines and thought that they were under attack. They started to fire on Milton and Pope. They both rolled into a slurry-filled ditch and covered their heads, screaming out that they were friendly. One of the lads with a light-machine-gun joined in the fun, sending a fusillade of fire down onto them. They were safe enough in the ditch and Pope remembered very well the look he had seen on Milton’s face as he risked a glance across at him. He grinned at him and then, in the middle of the firestorm, in bandit country with a broken-down Lynx and twenty men throwing fire down upon them, he gave him a big, unmistakeable wink.

The search for the three Provos had been both immediate and thorough. And utterly thrilling. It had been, Pope recalled, the best night of his life and the one when he had decided that the army was definitely what he wanted to do. It seemed as if the whole company had descended on the farm. The brass sent a Gazelle to join in the search, circling overhead as it shone down its powerful Night Sun searchlight. A Saracen armoured car turned up with a soldier manning the big turret-mounted machine-gun. Roadblocks were thrown up and dogs and their handlers spilled out of cars. The rifle company was out all night but it looked as if their quarry had got away.

But then, two days later, a man admitted himself at a hospital in the south with a 7.62mm wound in his buttocks. Pope and Milton knew it was one of the Provos that they had chased into the fields and that one of them had shot him. They argued about who should claim the credit for months.

POPE WASN’T ONE for mementoes but he had kept a couple of photographs from that part of his career. He took down an album and flicked through it, finding the photograph that he wanted: seven men arranged around a Saracen. In those days, the vehicles were fitted with two gallon containers at the rear. They called them Norwegians. The drivers filled them with tea before they left the sangar each morning and although the tea grew lukewarm and soupy before too long, it was a life-saver during cold winter patrols. The photograph was taken in a field somewhere in Armagh. Three of them were kneeling, the other four leaning against the body of the truck, each of them saluting the camera with a plastic cup. Milton was at the back, his cup held beneath the Norwegian’s tap, smiling broadly. Pope was kneeling in front of him. Milton was confident and relaxed. Pope remembered how he had felt back then: it had been difficult not to look up to him a little. That respect was something that remained constant, ever since, throughout their time together in the Regiment and then the Group.

The microwave beeped. He knocked back the rest of the whisky, collected the meal and took it into the lounge.

He sat down with the album on his lap.

Memories.

He didn’t question his orders but they were troubling. Control had said that Milton had suffered from some sort of breakdown. That didn’t seem very likely to Pope. Milton had always been a quiet man, solid and dependable. Extremely good at his job. Impossible to fluster, even under the most extreme pressure. The idea that he might snap like this was very difficult to square. But, there again, there was all the evidence to suggest that something
had
happened to him: the trouble he had caused in East London, shooting Callan, and then, after six months when no-one knew where he was, turning up again in Mexico like this.

Something had happened.

He had his orders, and he would obey them as far as he could.

He would go and bring him back. But he wouldn’t retire him unless there was nothing else for it. He would do everything he could to bring him back alive.

36.

BEAU BAXTER DIDN’T even see him come in. He was hungry, busy with his plate of quesadillas, slicing them into neat triangles and then mopping the plate with them before slotting them into his mouth. It was a public place, popular and full of customers. He had let his guard down just for a moment and that was all it took. Adolfo González just slid onto the bench seat opposite him, a little smile on his face. It might have been mistaken for a friendly smile, one that an old friend gives to another, except for the fact that his right hand stayed beneath the table and held, Beau knew, a revolver that was pointed right at his balls.

“Good morning, Señor Baxter.”