The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 (65 page)

Felipe tried to scrabble away, his good leg slipping against the scree.

“Isaac!” Felipe yelled. “Help me!”

There was no sign of him.

The hazy figure came closer.

“Please,” Felipe begged.

The man lowered himself to a crouch and blocked the way forwards.

“I’ll give you anything.”

Felipe raised his head again. The sun smothered him. The pain from his leg made him retch. The barrel of the rifle swung away, up and out of his field of vision. The Englishman straightened up. Felipe saw a pair of desert boots and the dusty cuffs of a pair of jeans. He scrabbled towards them.

The muzzle of the rifle was rested against the top of his skull.

He heard the thunk of a bolt-action rifle, a bullet pressed into the chamber.

The click-click of a double-pulled trigger, and then nothing.

LIEUTENANT SANCHEZ had delayed them for an hour. Captain Pope had made an angry phone call, and eventually, Sanchez had been contacted by someone from the Ministry of Justice in Mexico City and had been ordered to stand down. The six agents had dispersed into the streets to take up the search. Anna had taken a room in a hotel with a decent internet connection, hooked into GCHQ’s servers, and spent hours running search after search. She was tired, but she did not sleep. She stayed awake with pots of strong coffee and nervous tension.

She hacked into the municipal police database and withdrew everything she could find about Jesus Plato. She started with his address, plotting alternative routes to his house from the mansion and then looking for CCTV cameras that might have recorded his Dodge as it passed along its route. There were half a dozen hits—the best was a blurred shot from the security camera at a Pemex gas station showing Milton sitting in the front seat of the car while Plato filled the tank—but nothing that was particularly useful.

She extracted the details of Plato’s private car and ran that through the number plate recognition system that had recently been installed on the Mexican highway system. That was more successful. The Honda Accord was recorded heading south: first on the 45, then past Chihuahua and onto the 16. It was picked up again on the outskirts of Parral, leaving the city on the 24 and heading south-west.

Towards the Sierra Madre.

Fourteen hours of driving.

She told Pope. He left with two of the others.

It was a long shot. They were hours behind him.

Then she skimmed intelligence from the army that said that Felipe González, the boss of La Frontera cartel, had been shot to death in the mountains.

It was all across the mainstream news hours later.

It started to make more sense.

The Accord was recorded heading north again, on highway 15 this time, heading up the coast. The camera had taken a usable picture, too. Milton was driving. He turned west at Magdalena, back towards Juárez.

She warned Pope that Milton might be meeting with Plato.

They put his house under surveillance.

They watched the police station.

No sign of Milton.

Plato went out in a taxi the next day. They followed him. He picked up the empty Accord in the car park of a
maquiladora
on the edge of town. He drove it back home. They saw him take a rifle from the back of the car and lock it in a gun cabinet in his garage.

The gun that killed González?

It didn’t matter.

They had struck out.

Milton was a ghost.

Gone.

ANNA EXCUSED HERSELF for half an hour and found a payphone in a grocery store. The phone was in the back, inside a half booth that was fitted to the wall. It looked private enough. She dialled the number she had been given several years before. She had never had the need to dial it before, and she was anxious as she waited for it to connect.

It did.

“My garden is full of weeds this year, the herbicide isn’t working.”

“Perhaps you should use a shear to clip the weeds.”

“Shears are too indiscriminate; besides, weeds must be pulled out by the roots.”

“Thank you,” the operator said. “Please wait.”

After a moment, the call was transferred.

“Anna Vasilyevna Dubrovsky.”

She held the mouthpiece close to her mouth. “Hello, Roman.”

“How is Mexico?”

“Hot.”

“Did you find the man?”

“We did, but then we lost him again.”

“And now?”

“He is still lost. They are looking for him.”

“Are you still working on the case?”

“I believe so.”

“And do you think you can find him again?”

“It depends on him doing anything foolish like allowing himself to be fingerprinted.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Maybe. I have a better idea where he is headed now. And I know where he has been in the last couple of weeks. There might be something there that I can use. So maybe.”

“Shcherbakov wants to talk to you about him.”

“The colonel?”

“Your trip to Moscow is postponed. He is coming to speak to you instead.”

“In London?”

“Next Monday. Be at the usual place at eight. You will be collected.”

Now she really was nervous. The colonel was coming to London? “Fine.”

“The man—you saw him?”

“Very briefly.”

“What did you make of him?”

“He had been beaten. But there is something about him. He is not the sort of man you would want to have as your enemy. Why is he suddenly so important?”

“The colonel will explain. But an opportunity has arisen that requires a special kind of operative. Someone just like him.”

“You know he won’t work for us?”

“We think he will. We have something—someone—that he wants.”

MILTON LOOKED up into the sky. It was midnight, and the stars, spread out across the obsidian canvas like discarded fistfuls of diamonds, burned with a fierceness that was more vivid than usual. The Milky Way was so clear it looked like a soft footpath that had been placed with great thought between the constellations. He thought of those stars, dead for millions of years, their light only just now reaching the Earth. He paused for a moment to straighten out a kink in his boot and, realising that he was tiring, dropped his pack and allowed himself to sink back down into the sand. He sat and gazed up, lost in the glorious celestial display. The black blended away into infinity and unbeing, and he felt utterly and completely alone, as if he was the only man in the universe. It was a sensation that he recognised, one that had been with him for most of his adult life, and certainly for the last ten years.

He was comfortable with that.

Part of his solitary journey through South America had been to give himself time to come to terms with what, he knew, was the only possible way that he could live out the rest of his life. He had done too many bad things to deserve happiness, and even if he could have accepted that he did deserve it, he was too dangerous to allow anyone else to drift into his orbit. That had been demonstrated to him in spades in London, with what had happened to Sharon and Rutherford. Burned half to death and shot in the head, all because they had allowed him to cross their paths. Death followed him, always close at heel, always avid, always hungry. And now Control had found him again and flung his agents at him from half a world away. What if he had allowed himself to draw closer to someone, perhaps one of the women whose bed he had shared over the last six months? What if he had allowed himself a wife? Children? The thought was preposterous. The Group would offer him no quarter, and anyone who was found with him would be executed. It would have to be that way. What might he have told them? What secrets divulged? The shoe had been on the other foot before, and he knew what the orders would be. No loose ends.

No.

There had already been too much innocent blood spilt.

He could only ever be alone.

He took off his boot and massaged his heel. He had been travelling for thirty-eight hours straight. He had taken a couple of naps in the car, parked on the side of the road, but that was it. He was as tired as a dog. It was absolutely still, the quiet so deep that it was all-consuming, enough to make you wonder if you had gone deaf. As he listened to his own heartbeat keeping him company, he wondered whether death could possibly be more serene.

He had returned Plato’s car, left it in the car park of a
maquiladora
at one in the morning. The rifle was in the back, hidden beneath a travelling blanket. He exchanged it for a stolen Volkswagen and crossed the city. He drove carefully for fear of attracting attention, only accelerating properly once he was among the scrubland and the start of the desert. He had followed the highway for two hundred miles, and then he had pulled over to the side of the road, soaking siphoned diesel into the upholstery and tossing in a match. With the heat of the burning car braising his cheeks, he turned to the north and set his face to America.

He walked.

Big Bend National Park was ahead, the Chisos Mountain range welcoming him to the border. Milton picked the distinctive shape of Emory Peak at the end of a deep valley as his waypoint. He walked. It hardly seemed to draw closer at all, but distance was almost impossible to judge, that was the way of it in the desert, and especially so at night. Milton was not concerned. He had navigated through bleaker landscapes than this.

He was close.

He walked.

The path led towards red-headed buttes at the foot of which red-headed vultures pecked at the carcass of a desert fox. He came across an abandoned railway track, an idle row of orphaned boxcars daubed with graffiti across the rust. The dawn was coming up now. The darkness was weakening, lilac blooming at the edges of the horizon, the light fading the constellations, the herald of the glorious golden desert sunrise that would be on him all too quickly. Somewhere on the mesa, a coyote howled. The long, mournful wail was followed by a yipping chuckle until it almost sounded as if the dog was laughing.

He kept walking.

John Milton trudged across the border as the light turned from black to mauve, the sun coming around again.

TABBY WILSON updated her Craigslist profile on the night she was murdered. She tweaked her personal information a little and added a new selfie that she had taken that same afternoon. It was a good likeness of her: she was wearing wispy red lingerie, her skin was smooth and blemish-free, and she was wearing a crazy blonde wig that made her look a little like Lana Del Rey. She looked fine, she thought. Her expression was sultry and provocative, almost daring men to contact her. She was slender and had big eyes, androgynous with that alien look that was so popular on the blogs that she bookmarked and the magazines she thumbed through in Walmart or when she was waiting at the laundromat.

It was important that she looked her best. The Craigslist ad was her shop window, and as she touched up the blemishes in Photoshop, she was pleased with the results. She had porcelain skin, a short bob of dark hair, and those big eyes were green and expressive. She was twenty-one and had left school when she was seventeen to have a baby. She never went back. She had two children now, each with a different father, although she never saw either man. Her mom helped to bring up the kids. Until recently, she had worked in telemarketing. She lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Vallejo funded by the alimony that her son’s father had been ordered to pay. Apart from the fact that cold-calling saps to sell them new windows wasn’t what she had in mind for her career, the alimony and her wages didn’t cover all of her expenses. Things got worse when she was fired for missing her sales targets. Delivering pizza or running the register at Walmart were not what she had in mind as her career, either, and those jobs ended just as soon as they had started.

Tabby liked to think that she was a positive person, so she concentrated on her ambitions. She had always wanted to be a model. There was money in that, lots of money, and she was sure that she was pretty enough and had a good enough figure to make a go of it. She created Pinterest and Instagram pages that she filled with photographs: selfies with the camera held as far away from her face as possible, others showing her in the full-length bedroom mirror, and a selection that she had culled from the shoot that a photographer friend had conducted in exchange for a night with her.

She knew that she needed to do something to get her career moving in the right direction. She spent a lot of time working on her page, and it wasn’t long before she noticed the ads for modelling. She clicked on a site called ModelBehavior.com, which offered free hosting for the portfolios that girls sent in. She set up an account and uploaded the best photos from the shoot. She started to see enquiries right away. She was hoping for offers from catalogues and magazines, but they were all from agencies that said that they could book her for those kinds of jobs, but when she clicked on their sites, it was obvious that what they were really looking for were hookers and escorts.

She started to take the offers more seriously when she saw how much money she could earn. Escorting was like webcam stripping, only in person, with no sex involved. And it wasn’t hard to be tempted by the money she could make if she did have sex. But she couldn’t see the point of signing up for a service and giving them half of the money she made.