The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 (39 page)

Analysis

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Control records that Milton evinced a desire to leave the service on returning to London following the completion of his assignment in France. The meeting is said to have been heated and ended with Milton being put on suspension prior to a full assessment and review.

His subsequent behaviour was observed to be erratic. He began to attend meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous (almost certainly in contravention of his obligations under the Official Secrets Act). He rented a house in a poor part of Hackney, East London, and is believed to have become emotionally involved with a single mother, Sharon Warriner. Our investigations are ongoing, but it is believed that he was attempting to assist Ms. Warriner’s son, Elijah, who is believed to have been on the fringes of a local gang. We suspect that Milton was involved in the death of Israel Brown (the successful rapper who performed under the
nom de plume
of “Risky Bizness”), whom we understand to have been the prime mover in the relevant gang.

The order to decommission Milton was given on Monday, 15 August. A second G15 agent, Christopher Callan (aka G15/No. 12/“Tripwire”), had located Milton at a boxing club set up for local children by a Mr. Dennis Rutherford. As Callan was preparing to carry out his orders, he was disturbed by Mr. Rutherford. In the confusion that followed, Callan killed Mr. Rutherford and shot Milton in the shoulder. This was unfortunately not sufficient to subdue him, and he was able to overpower Callan—shooting him in the knee to prevent pursuit—and then make his escape. ANPR located him driving a stolen car northwards. The last sighting was on the M62 heading into Liverpool. The working hypothesis is that he boarded a ship to leave the country.

Analysis of Milton’s psychological assessments (attached) suggests that his mental state has been deteriorating for some time. Feelings of guilt are not uncommon in Group 15 operatives, and Milton has worked there for a decade. It is regrettable that warning signs were missed, but perhaps understandable: Milton’s performance has always been superb. He was perhaps the most effective of all our operatives. Subsequent analysis has led us to the conclusion that he is suffering from insomnia, depression and possible re-experiencing of past events. PTSD is a fashionable diagnosis to make, but it is one that we are now reasonably confident is accurate.

Regardless of his mental condition, Milton is far too dangerous to be ignored. He was a key part of several key British and NATO intelligence successes, not all of which have been reported in the press, and his value to the enemy is difficult to assess. The damage that he could do by going public is similarly incalculable.

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From:

To:

Date: Wednesday, September 19, 5.21 P.M.

Subject: Re: CARTWHEEL

Dear M.,

Thank you for the report. I have shared it with the P.M., who is not, as you might well imagine, best pleased with its contents. You are to convey his displeasure to Control personally and to remind him that it is of the highest importance that Mr. Milton is located. We simply cannot have a man with his skills and knowledge running around outside of the reservation, as our American cousins would undoubtedly say. I am not sure which grubby little euphemism our mutual friend would prefer, but let’s settle on “retirement.”

All due haste
, please.

Regards, etc.,

James

JOHN MILTON got off the bus and walked into the parking lot of the first restaurant that he found. It was a hot day, baking hot, brutally hot, the noon sun battering down on Ciudad Juárez as if it bore a grudge. The sudden heat hit him like a steel-yard furnace. The restaurant was set back from the road, behind a wide parking lot, the asphalt shimmering like the water in an aquarium. A large sign, suspended from a tall pole, announced the place as La Case del Mole. It was well located, on Col Chavena, and near to a highway off-ramp: just a few miles to the border from here, plenty close enough for the place to snag daring Americans coming south for a true taste of
la vida loca
. There were half a dozen similar places all around it. Brightly painted, practically falling to bits, garish neon signs left on day and night, a handful of cars parked haphazardly in the lot. Awful places, dreadful food, and not the sort of establishment that Milton would have chosen to visit. But they churned through the staff so fast that they were always looking for replacements, and they didn’t tend to be too picky about who they hired. Ex-cons, vagabonds, vagrants, it didn’t matter. And there would be no questions asked so long as you could cook.

Milton had worked in places like this all the way up through Mexico. He knew that they appealed to tourists and the uncritical highway trade and that this one, in particular, was still in business for three main reasons: It was better advertised than the tumbledown shacks and chain restaurants around it, the parking lot was big enough that it would be almost impossible to fill, and the daily seafood special was just $19.95, three dollars cheaper than the seafood special of any of the nearby competitors. Milton had worked in a place in Mazatlán until he had had to move on two weeks ago, and he was willing to bet that this would be just the same. The special would be the same every day: cold crab salad (made with a cheap fish, not crab), a fried fillet of haddock that was just about on the turn, a couple of crab legs, a fruit cup and half an onion instead of a baked potato.

It would do him just fine.

He crossed the parking lot and went inside. The place really was a dive, worse when viewed in the middle of the day when the light that streamed through the grime-streaked windows revealed the peeling paint, the mice holes in the skirting, and the thick patina of dust that lay over everything. It was seven hundred miles west to the Pacific and eight hundred east to the Gulf, but the owner wasn’t going to let small details like that dissuade him from the nautical theme he obviously hankered after: a ship’s wheel, netting draped down from the walls, fronds of fake seaweed stapled to the net, lobster pots and shrimper’s buoys dangling from the ceiling, a fetid and greening aquarium that separated the bar from the cavernous dining room beyond.

A woman was sitting at the bar, running a sweating bottle of Corona against the back of her neck.

“Hello.”

She nodded in response: neither friendly nor hostile.

“Do you work here?”

“I ain’t here for the good of my health, baby. What you want?”

“Came in to see if you were hiring.”

“Depends what you do.”

“I cook.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, honey, but you don’t look like no cook.”

“I’m not bad. Give me a chance, and I’ll show you.”

“Ain’t me you gonna have to show.” She turned to the wide-open emptiness of the restaurant and hollered, “Gomez! New blood!”

Milton watched as a man came out of the back. He was big, fat and unhealthy, with a huge gut, short arms and legs, and an unshaved, pasty complexion. The T-shirt he was wearing was stretched tight around his barrel chest, and his apron was tied right to the limit of the strings. He smelt bad, unwashed and rancid from rotting food.

“What’s your name?”

“Smith.”

“You cook?”

“That’s right.”

“Where?”

“Wherever. I’ve been travelling up the coast. Ensenada, Mazatlán, Acapulco.”

“And then Juárez? Not Tijuana?”

“Tijuana’s too big. Too Californian.”

“Last stop before America?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Are you the owner?”

“Near enough for you,
cabrón
. That accent—what is it? Australian?”

“English. I’m from London.”

Gomez took a beer from the fridge and cracked it open. “You want a beer, English?”

“No, thanks. I don’t drink.”

Gomez laughed at that, a sudden laugh up from the pit of his gut that wobbled his pendulous rolls of fat, his mouth so wide that Milton could see the black marks of his filled teeth. “You don’t drink, and you say you want to work in my kitchen?” He laughed again, throwing his head all the way back. “Hombre, you either stupid or you ain’t no cook like what I ever met.”

“You won’t have any problems with me.”

“You work a fryer?”

“Of course, and whatever else you need doing.”

“Lucky for you I just had a vacancy come up. My fry cook tripped and put his arm into the fryer all the way up to his elbow last night, stupid
bastardo
. Out of action for two months, they say. So maybe I give you a spin, see how you get on. Seven an hour, cash.”

“Fifteen.”

“In another life,
compadre
. Ten. And another ten says you won’t still be here tomorrow.”

Milton knew that ten was the going rate and that he wouldn’t be able to advance it. “Deal.”

“When can you start?”

“Tonight.”

MILTON ASKED Gomez to recommend a place to stay; the man’s suggestion had come with a smirk. Milton quickly saw why: it was a hovel, a dozen men packed into a hostel that would have been barely big enough for half of them. He tossed his bag down on the filthy cot that he was assigned and showered in the foul and stained cubicle. He looked at his reflection in the cracked mirror: his beard was thick and full, the black silvered with flecks of white, and his skin had been tanned the kind of colour that six months on the road in South America would guarantee. The ink of the tattooed angel wings across his shoulders and down his back had faded a little, sunk down into the fresh nutty brown.

He went out again. He didn’t care that he was leaving his things behind. He knew that the bag would be rifled for anything worth stealing, but that was fine; he had nothing of value, just a change of clothes and a couple of paperbacks. He travelled light. His passport was in his pocket. A couple of thousand dollars were pressed between its pages.

He took a scrap of paper from his pocket. He had been given it in Acapulco by an American lawyer who had washed up on the shores of the Pacific. The man used to live in New Mexico and had visited Juárez for work; he had been to meetings here and had written down the details. Milton asked a passer-by for directions and was told it was a twenty-minute walk.

He had time to kill. Time enough to orient himself properly. He set off.

Milton knew about Juárez. He knew it was the perfect place for him. It was battered and bloodied, somewhere where he could sink beneath the surface and disappear. Another traveller had left a Lonely Planet on the seat of the bus from Chihuahua, and Milton had read it cover to cover. The town had been busy and industrious once, home to a vibrant tourist industry as Texans were lured over the Rio Bravo by the promise of cheap souvenirs, Mexican exotica and margaritas by the jug (served younger than they would have been in El Paso’s bars). They came in their thousands to fix their teeth, to buy cheap spectacles, to buy Prozac and Viagra and other medications for a fraction of the amount charged by domestic pharmacies. There was still a tourist industry—Milton passed shops selling sombreros, reproduction Aztec bric-a-brac, ponchos and trinkets—but the one-time flood of visitors had dwindled now to a trickle.

That was what the reputation of being the most murderous place on the planet would do to a town’s attractiveness.

The town was full of the signs of a crippled and floundering economy. Milton passed the iron girder skeleton of a building, squares of tarpaulin flapping like loose skin, construction halted long ago. There were wrecked cars along the streets, many with bullet holes studding their bodywork and their windscreens shot out. Illicit outlets—
picaderos
—were marked out by shoes slung over nearby telegraph wires and their shifty proprietors sold cocaine, marijuana, synthetic drugs and heroin. The legitimate marketplace at Cerrajeros was busy with custom, a broad sweep of unwanted bric-a-brac for sale: discarded furniture, soda fountains, hair curlers, Kelvinator fridges. A block of sixties’ cookers jostled for space next to a block of armchairs and another block of ancient electronics, reel-to-reel tape recorders, VHS players and cheap imported stereos. Army humvees patrolled the crowds, soldiers in their pale desert camouflage, weapons ready, safeties off. Everything sweated under the broiling desert sun.

Milton walked on, passing into a residential district. The air sagged with dust and exhaust and the sweet stench of sewage. He looked down from the ridge of a precarious development above the sprawling
colonia
of Poniente. Grids of identical little houses, cheap and nasty, built to install factory workers who had previously lived in cardboard shacks. Rows upon rows of them were now vacant and ransacked, the workers unable to pay the meagre rent now that Asian labourers would accept even less than they would. Milton saw one street where an entire row had been burnt out, blackened ash rectangles marking where the walls had once stood. Others bore the painted tags of crack dens. These haphazard streets had been built on swampland, and the park that had been reserved for children was waterlogged; the remains of a set of swings rusted in the sun, piercing the muddy sod like the broken bones of a skeleton. Milton paused to survey the wide panorama: downtown El Paso just over the border; burgeoning breeze-block and cement housing slithering down into the valley to the south; and, in the
barrio
, dogs and children scattered among the streets, colourful washing drying on makeshift lines, radio masts whipping in the breeze, a lattice of outlaw electricity supply cables and satellite dishes fixed to the sides of metal shacks.

He reached the church in thirty minutes. It was surrounded by a high wire fence, and the gate was usually locked, necessary after thieves had broken in and made off with the collection one time too many. The sign hanging from the mesh was the same as the one Milton had seen around the world: two capitalised letter A’s within a white triangle, itself within a blue circle. His first meeting, in London, seemed a lifetime ago now. He had been worried sick then: the threat of breaching the Official Secrets Act, the fear of the unknown, and, more, the fact that he would have to admit that he had a problem he couldn’t solve on his own. He had dawdled for an hour before finding the guts to go inside, but that was more than two years ago now, and times had changed.