The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 (55 page)

There was another reason for her amusement: she was right at the heart of government now.

That was good. It was confirmation that they knew nothing about her at all.

Control turned to the second man. “And this is Captain Pope.”

He was tall and grizzled. Slab-like forehead. A nose that had been broken too many times. Cauliflower ears. Anna recognised the type: unmistakeably a soldier.

“Captain Pope is one of our agents,” Control explained. “Like Captain Milton was.” He cleared his throat. “As you know, the Foreign Secretary has asked for a briefing from you about your findings.”

“Fine. Here.”

She handed them each a folder labelled JOHN MILTON, CAPTAIN. The name was followed by his government record number neatly typed on the cover. It was a much slimmer volume than the reports she typically provided, but since her predecessor had found nothing at all, she felt that her smirk of pride was justified.

“You wanted everything I could find about him. I’ve written up his early history, plus sections on his time in the army and the SAS, his friendships—that’s a short section—relationships with the opposite sex—even shorter—where he lives, his bank accounts, medical records, the cars he’s driven, and so on and so forth. Everything I could get my hands on. I’ve found a decent amount. There are three hundred pages.”

Coad looked at the report with a dismissiveness that Anna found maddening. “The potted version will be fine for now, please.”

She mastered the annoyance that threatened to flash in her eyes, nodded with polite servility and, when she began to speak, her voice was clipped and businesslike.

“Milton is a very private man, but even so, I was able to build up a picture of his life in the years before he disappeared. He’s forty years old, as you know. Single. He married a Danish national in 1999. Martha Olsen. A librarian. There were no children, and the marriage didn’t last. They were divorced two years later. Olsen has remarried and has two children, and save a couple of emails and texts between them, they don’t appear to have kept in touch. There have been affairs with other women: a businesswoman in Chelsea, a Swiss lawyer in Basel, a tourist in Mauritius. Nothing serious, though.”

“Milton’s not marriage material,” Pope said.

“My main task was to find Mr. Milton’s current location. That was not a simple assignment. He is evidently an expert in going off the grid, and it would appear that he has an unusual dedication to doing that—this is not the sort of man who makes silly mistakes. The task was made considerably more complicated by the fact that all the information after he started to work for you”—she nodded at Control—“remained classified. That was like having one hand tied behind my back.”

She didn’t try to hide the note of reproach. Control glared at her and then turned to the Foreign Secretary. “Some things about Milton must remain private.”

“Quite. Get on with it, Miss Thackeray.”

“I ran all of the usual searches, but none of them paid off. I wasn’t able to find anything on him at all. No obvious sources of income—”

“Then how is he affording to live?”

“Frugally. There was a withdrawal of £300 in Liverpool before you lost him but nothing since. He has £34,534 left in the account. It’s been untouched for six months. He’s not stupid—he knows that’s the first place a decent analyst would look. There is another savings account with another £20,000, also untouched. No pension.”

Pope laughed. “He wouldn’t have anticipated retirement. Not that sort of job.”

“My guess would be that he has been picking up work on the way. Bar work? Bouncing? Something that attracts migrants. Cash-in-hand, no questions asked. I don’t think we’ll be able to find anything substantial. How detailed shall I be?”

“Whatever you think is relevant.”

“There’s been no correspondence with any of the few contacts I was able to find,” she continued, casting a reproachful look at Control. “He has no family, and there have been no emails, calls or texts to the friends he does have. He dropped off the face of the earth.”

“And yet you found him.”

“Mostly down to a stroke of luck. He was fingerprinted in Mexico. Ciudad Juárez. The Mexican police upload all their data to a central database in Mexico City, and we picked it up en route. Pictures, too.”

She flicked to the page with the picture of Milton in the police station.

“And there he is,” Pope said.

“This was taken on Monday night. Standard procedure. The passport he gave to the local police is a fake.”

“He’ll have several,” Pope observed.

“I’m sure he does.”

“What else?”

“Knowing which passport he has been using made it much easier to get more on him—like where he’s been for the last six months, for example.” She flipped forwards to a double-page map of South America. “The red line marks the route that he’s taken. Passport data is collected at most borders these days, and that data is very easy to find. Once I knew the number of the passport he was using, it was quick to find out where he’s been. He landed in Santos in Brazil in August. He came ashore from the MSC
Donata
, a cargo ship registered in Panama. It sailed from Liverpool two weeks earlier. From there, he started west. He crossed into Paraguay at Pedro Juan Caballero, then into Bolivia and Peru. Since then, he’s always headed north—Ecuador, Colombia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, then Mexico. Most of the time he was photographed at the border, and I have those pictures, too.”

She flicked through to a series of photographs. The tall cranes of Santos appeared in one picture and the barren deserts of the Brazilian interior in another. Milton was looking into the camera for some of them, bored and impatient. Others had been taken without him noticing.

She scratched her head. The Foreign Secretary examined her with searching eyes. “So he’s been in South America since you lost track of him,” she said. “No idea what he’s been doing in between his border crossings. But we do know where he is now. He came across the Mexican border at Tapachula four weeks ago, travelling by bus. He’s been heading north, and it looks like he got to Juárez earlier this week. We’ve got the police pictures and the prints, so I tried to find something else. I ran face recognition on everything I could think of and picked up this. They’re from CCTV from a restaurant in the city.”

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 one 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.

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 tail boom, 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 multimillion-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-degree 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 night-sights. 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.