Saint Death

18

“Take a seat, Miss Thackeray,” the man said.

Anna Thackeray did as she was told. The office was impressive, well-appointed, spacious and furnished in the tastefully understated fashion that said that money had not constrained the choices that had been made. There was a wide picture window that offered a view of the Thames toiling sluggishly under a gunmetal grey sky. The room was light and airy. Military prints on the walls. Silver trophies and two photographs in luxurious leather frames: one was of the man on the other side of the desk in his younger days, in full battle dress; the other was of a woman and three children. A central table held a bowl of flowers, and there were two comfortable club chairs on either side of an empty fireplace.

The international HQ for Global Logistics was on the same side of the Thames as the more imposing building in Vauxhall where the important decisions were taken but that was as far as the similarities went; it was built in the sixties, with that decade’s preference for function over form, constructed from red brick and concrete, its anonymous five floors all rather squat and dowdy when compared to the Regency splendour of its neighbours or the statement buildings of government that had been constructed more recently. A grand terrace had been smashed down the middle by a three hundred pound Luftwaffe bomb and this unpromising building had eventually sprouted from the weed-strewn bombsite that had been left. The windows were obscured with Venetian blinds that had been allowed to fade in the sunlight; the staircase that ascended the spine of the building was whitewashed concrete and bare light bulbs; the lift — when it worked — was a dusty box with four walls of faux wooden panels and dusty mirror. And yet the drab obscurity of the building was perfect to cloak its real purpose. The government organisation that did its work here lived in the shadows, a collection of operatives that was secret to all but those with the highest security clearances.

Anna had never even heard of it until yesterday and she prided herself in knowing everything.

“You asked to see me, sir?”

His codename was Control. Only a handful of people knew his real name, and even fewer his background. He was a plump, toad-like man, dressed with the immaculate good taste of the best class of public schoolboy. A well tailored suit, an inch of creamy white cuff, a regimental tie fastened with a brass pin. His hands were fleshy, his glistening nails bearing the unmistakeable signs of a recent manicure. Anna found that, above everything else, rather distasteful. He was oleaginous and slippery, undoubtedly brilliant but as far removed from trustworthiness as it was possible to be. That, of course, made him ideal for his position. Like the building from which he worked, he was perfect for his purpose. Control commanded Group Fifteen, otherwise known as the Section, Pegasus and the Department. He supervised two hundred civil servants, mostly seconded from MI5, MI6 and the Foreign Office, analysts and spooks that were simply the network that facilitated the work of the twelve men and women who carried out the jobs that Group Fifteen was allocated. When the government found itself with a particularly intractable problem, and every other route had failed — commercial, diplomatic, political — Group Fifteen would occasionally be put out into the field. And, for them, all solutions were in play.

“Thank you for coming to see me, Miss Thackeray,” Control said.

“Not a problem, sir.”

She tried to project a feeling of ease, but she did not find that simple to do. The occasion was not suited to that, for one, and the formality of the place bothered her. She had already made more concessions than she was comfortable with making: she had removed her earrings, scrubbed the black nail varnish from her fingers and borrowed a trouser suit and a shirt. And, of course, there was her hair. She had dyed it red over the weekend and she was damned if she was going to spend the night before this meeting changing it to something more … conservative.

There were limits.

“Everything I tell you this morning is beyond top secret — I’m sure that goes without saying?”

“It does”

“Very good. I’ll be as brief as I can be. Six months ago, one of our most valuable agents went AWOL. Have you read the file?”

“Yes — John Milton.”

“Indeed. It is our belief that Mr. Milton suffered a mental breakdown following an unsuccessful operation in France. The decision had been taken to bring him in for observation and treatment but, as one of our agents approached him for that purpose, he opened fire on him. A member of the public was killed and the agent was badly wounded. We suppressed that from the report for obvious reasons.”

“Yes.”

“Following those events, Milton has dropped off the grid. We tracked him north to Liverpool and our working assumption is that he either found work on a boat or stowed away on one. The trail went cold from there and we have seen neither hide nor hair of him since. That is a state of affairs that we cannot allow to stand. Mr. Milton was our most experienced operative. He has intimate, first-hand knowledge of operations that would cause the government enormous embarrassment if their existence was ever to be disclosed, and that’s not even considering the operational knowledge that would be of great interest to our enemies — and to our friends.”

“You want me to find him.”

“We do. We’ve been working with your department for some time but, so far, with disappointing results. Your predecessor made no headway and so he has been reassigned and you are replacing him. I understand from your supervisor that you’re the best analyst that GCHQ has to offer.”

“No question.”

“You don’t suffer from false modesty, do you?”

“I don’t see the point in it.”

“You might come to wish you had been more circumspect because now I expect you to meet with more success.” He sipped at his cup of tea; Anna found the sight of his pursed, fleshy lips nauseating.

“I have the file. Is there anything else I need to know?”

“You should be under no disillusions, here: John Milton has been trained to be totally invisible. His profession for ten years was to be a ghost. He has operated in some of the most inhospitable, dangerous places you can imagine — if he was not as good at this as he is, he would have been captured and killed years ago. He is not married, he has no children, he has no real friends. No ties, not to anyone or anything. It will not be an easy task to find him, but I must re-emphasise: he must be found. This could be the making of your career or” — he paused and spread his hands — “not. Do I make myself clear?”

The implication was very clear.

Find him, or else.

“You do,” she said.

19

It was early the next day when Anna stooped to position her eye over the iris scanner, the laser combing up and down and left to right before her identity was confirmed and the gate opened to allow her inside. The guard, his SA80 machine-gun slung loose across his shoulder, smiled a greeting as she passed him. An exhibit in the main entrance hall contained treasures from the history of British code-breaking: the Enigma machine was her favourite but she passed it without looking and went through the further two checks before she was properly inside. GCHQ had the feel of a bustling modern airport, with open-plan offices leading off a circular thoroughfare that was known as the Street, offering cafés, a bar, a restaurant and a gym. Anna walked to the store and bought a copy of the Times and a large skinny latte with an extra shot of espresso.

Most of the staff were dressed conservatively; the squares on their morning commute might have mistaken them for workers on their way in to the office. Suits and blouses, all very proper. But they would not have mistaken Anna like that. She wasn’t interested in conformity and, since she was not ambitious and didn’t care whether she impressed anyone or not, she wore whatever made her comfortable. She was wearing a grey Ministry t-shirt, a black skirt, a battered black leather jacket, ripped Converse All-Stars and red tights. She cocked an eyebrow at the attendant working at the x-ray portal; the man, beyond the point of being exasperated with her after the last six months, readied his wand and waved her through. She smiled at him and, when he smiled back, she winked. She had a sensuous mouth, a delicate nose, and well defined cheekbones that would have suited a catwalk model.

She followed the thoroughfare to the junction that, after another five minutes and a flight of stairs, led to the first floor SigInt Ops Centre where she had her desk. It was a busy, open-plan area, staffed by mathematicians, linguists and analysts scouring the internet for intel on terrorism, nuclear proliferation, energy security, military support, serious organised crime and counter-espionage in different regions. Computer engineers and software developers helped make it possible; the Tempora program alone, responsible for fibre-optic interceptors attached to sub-surface internet cabling, siphoned off 10 gigabits of information every second. Twenty-one petabytes a day. The Prism and Boundless Informant programmes added petabytes more. That huge, amorphous mass of data needed to be sorted and arranged. GCHQ’s gaping larders were stuffed full of data to be harvested by their algorithm profiles against a rainy day.

There were hackers, here, too. A small team of them, including Anna.

Most of them had never considered a career in intelligence.

Anna had wanted the job specifically.

They had instructed her to get it.

And, as it turned out, it had been easy.

Thackeray was an anglicised name that she had adopted when she had moved to London. She was born Anna Vasilyevna Dubrovsky in Volgograd in 1990. Her father was a middle-ranking diplomat in the Russian diplomatic service and her mother worked for the party. She was their only child and her prodigious intelligence — obvious from a very early age — was a source of tremendous pride to them. She had been precocious in school, a genius mathematician, quickly outpacing her peers and then her teachers. There was an annual children’s chess competition in the district and she had won it for two straight years; she had been banned from entering for a third time. She had been inculcated in data and analysis almost before she could read. The day she had been given her first computer — a brand new American-built Dell — was the day that the scales had truly fallen from her eyes. She was taught everything there was to know about it and then, once again, she outpaced her teachers. Volgograd was a dreary backwater and the internet spread out like a vast, open vista, a frontier of unlimited possibility where you could do anything and be anyone. She was taught how to live online. It became her second life. She became addicted to hacking forums, the bazaars where information was exchanged, complex techniques developed and audacious hacks lauded. It became difficult to distinguish between her real self and ‘Solo’, as she soon preferred to be called.

Her instructors were pleased with her.

The family travelled with Vasily when he was assigned to the Russian embassy in London.

Her hacking continued. Questions of legality were easily ignored. Property was effectively communal; if she wanted something, she took it. She set up dummy accounts and pilfered Amazon for whatever she fancied. A PayPal hack allowed her to transfer money she did not have. She bought and sold credit card information. She joined collectives that vandalised the pages of corporations with whose politics — and often their very existence — she disagreed. After six months, they told her to draw attention to herself. She left bigger and bigger clues, not so big as to have been left obviously — or to have been the mark of an obvious amateur, which would have disqualified her from her designated future just as completely — but obvious enough to be visible to a vigilant watcher. She was just twenty-two when, from the bedroom of her boyfriend’s house, she had hacked into ninety-seven military computers in the Pentagon and NASA. She was downloading a grainy black-and-white photograph of what she thought was an alien spacecraft from a NASA server at the John Space Centre in Houston when she was caught. They tracked her down and charged her. Espionage. The Americans threatened extradition. Life imprisonment. The British pretended to co-operate, but then, at the last minute, they countered with a proposal of their own.

Come and work for us.

She appeared to be all out of options.

That was what she wanted them to think.

She had accepted.

Anna sat down at her desk. It was, as usual, a dreadful mess. The cubicle’s flimsy walls were covered with geek bric-a-brac: a sign warning DO NOT FEED THE ZOMBIES; a clock designed to look like an over-sized wristwatch; replicas of the Enterprise and the TARDIS; a Pacman stress ball, complete with felt ghosts; a Spiderman action figure. A rear-view mirror stuck to the edge of a monitor made sure it was impossible to approach without her knowledge.

She took a good slug of her coffee, and fired up both of her computers, high performance Macs with the large, cinema screens. On the screen to her right, she double-clicked on Milton’s file. Her credentials were checked and the classified file — marked EYES ONLY — was opened. A series of pictures were available, taken at various points throughout his life. There were pictures of him at Cambridge, dressed in cross-country gear and with mud slathered up and down his legs. Long, shaggy hair, lively eyes, a coltish look to him. A handsome boy, she caught herself thinking. Attractive. A picture of him in a tuxedo, some university ball perhaps, a pretty but ditzy-looking redhead hanging off his arm. A series of him taken at the time that he enlisted: a blank, vaguely hostile glare into the camera when he signed his papers; a press shot of him on patrol in Derry, camouflage gear, his rifle pointed down, the stock pressed to his chest; a shot of him in ceremonial dress accepting the Military Medal. Maybe a dozen pictures from that part of his life. There were just two from his time in the SAS: a group shot with his unit hanging out of the side of a UH-60 Blackhawk and another, the most recent, a head and shoulders shot: his face was smothered with camouflage cream, black war paint, his eyes were unsmiling, a comma of dark hair curled over his forehead. The relaxed, fresh-faced youngster was a distant memory; in those pictures he was coldly and efficiently handsome.

Anna turned to the data. There were eight gigabytes of material. She ran another of her homebrew algorithms to disqualify the extraneous material — she would return to review the chaff later, while she was running the first sweep — reducing it to a more manageable three gigs. Now she read carefully, cutting and pasting key information into a document she had opened on the screen to her left. When she had finished, three hours later, she had a comprehensive sketch of Milton’s background.

She went through her notes more carefully, highlighting the most useful components. He was born in 1973, making him forty. He was an orphan, his parents killed in an Autobahn smash when he was twelve, and so there would be no communications to be had with them. There had been a nomadic childhood before that, trailing his father around the Middle East as he followed a career in petrochemicals. There were no siblings, and the Aunt and Uncle who had raised him had died ten years earlier. He had never been married and not was there any suggestion that he enjoyed meaningful relationships with women. There were no children. It appeared that he had no friends, either, at least none that were obviously apparent. Milton, she thought to herself as she dragged the cursor down two lines, highlighting them in yellow, you must be a very lonely man.

David McClellan, the analyst who worked next to her, kicked away from his desk and rolled his chair in her direction. “What you working on?”

“You know better than that.”

McClellan had worked opposite Anna for the last three months. He’d been square — for a hacker, at least — but he had started to make changes in the last few weeks. He’d stopped wearing a tie. He occasionally came in wearing jeans and a t-shirt (although the t-shirts were so crisp and new that Anna knew he had just bought them, probably on the site that she used, after she had recommended it to him). It was obvious that he had a thing for her. He was a nice guy, brain as big as a planet, a little dull, and he tried too hard.

“Come on — throw me a bone.”

“Above your clearance,” she said, with an indulgent grin. McClellan returned her smile, faltered a little when he realised that she wasn’t joking, but then looked set to continue the conversation until she took up her noise cancelling headphones, slipped them over her ears and tapped them, with a shrug.

Sorry, she mouthed. Can’t hear you.

She turned back to her screens. Milton’s parents had left a considerable amount in trust for him, and his education had been the best that money could buy. He had gone up to Eton for three terms until he was expelled — she could not discover the reason — and then Fettes and Cambridge, where he read law. He passed through the university with barely a ripple left in his wake; Anna started to suspect that someone had been through his file, carefully airbrushing him from history.

She watched in the mirror as McClennan rolled back towards her again.

Coffee? he mouthed.

Anna nodded, if only to get him out of the way.

Milton’s army career had been spectacular. Sandhurst for officer training and then the Royal Green Jackets, posted to the Rifle Depot in Winchester, and then special forces: Air Troop, B Squadron, 22 SAS. He had served in Gibraltar, Ireland, Kosovo and the Middle East. He was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal and that, added to the Military Medal he had been given for his service in Belfast, briefly made him the Army’s most decorated serving soldier.

She filleted the names of the soldiers who had served with him. Emails, telephone numbers, everything she could find.

McClennan returned with her coffee. She mouthed thanks, but he did not leave. He said something but she couldn’t hear. With a tight smile, she pushed one of the headphones further up her head. “Thanks,” she repeated.

“You having trouble?”

“Why —?”

“You’re frowning.”

She shrugged. “Seriously, David. Enough. I’m not going to tell you.”

He gave up.

She pulled the headphones down again and turned back to her notes.

The next ten years, the time Milton had spent in the Group, were redacted.

Classified!

Dammit! she exclaimed under her breath.

She couldn’t get into the contemporaneous stuff?

They were tying both hands behind her back.

It was impossible.

She watched McClellan, scrubbing a pencil against his scalp, and corrected herself: impossible for most people. Hard for her, not impossible.

Anna picked up the fresh coffee and looked at her précis for clues. Where should she start looking? Nothing stood out. Control had been right about him: there was no-one that she could monitor for signs of contact. She clicked over into the data management system and calibrated a new set of “selectors”, filters that would be applied to internet traffic and telephony in order to trigger flags.

She started with his name, the nub of information around which everything else would be woven. She added his age — five years either way — and then the names of his parents, his aunt and uncle. She ran a search on the soldiers who shared record entries with him, applied a simple algorithm to disqualify those who only appeared once or twice, then pasted the names of the rest. She inputted credit card and bank account details, known telephone numbers and email addresses. He hadn’t had a registered address since he had left the Army, but she posted what she had and all the hotels that he had visited more than once.

His blood group, DNA profile and fingerprints had been taken when he joined the Group and, miraculously, she had those. She dragged each of them across the screen and dropped them in as new selectors.

Distinguishing marks: a tattoo on his back, a large pair of angel wings; a scar down his face, the memento of a knife fight in a Honolulu bar; a scar from the surgery to put a steel plate in his right leg after it had been crushed in a motorcycle crash.

Each piece of data and metadata narrowed the focus, disambiguating whole exabytes held on the servers in the football-pitch sized data room in the basement. She spun her web around that central fact of his name, adding and deleting strands until she had a sturdy and reliable net of information with which she could start filtering. Dozens of algorithms would analyse the data that her search pulled back, comparing it against historical patterns and returning probability matches. “John Milton” alone would generate an infinitesimally small likelihood rate, so small as to be eliminated without the need for human qualification. Adding his age might nudge the percentage up a fraction. Nationality another fraction. Adding his blood group might be worth a whole percentage point. The holy grail — a fingerprint, a DNA match — well, that happened with amateurs, but not with a man like this. That wasn’t a break she was going to catch.

She filed the selectors for approval, took another slug of coffee, applied for capacity to run a historic search of last month’s buffer — she guessed it would take a half day, even with the petaflops of processing power that could be applied to the search — and then leant back in her chair, lacing her fingers behind her head and staring at the screens.

Control was right. Milton was a ghost and finding him through a digital footprint was going to be a very long shot. GCHQ was collecting a vast haystack of data and she was looking for the tiniest, most insignificant needle. Control must have known that. If Milton was as good as he seemed to be, he would know how to stay off the grid. The only way that he would surface was if he chose to, or if he slipped up.

She stood, eyes closed, stretched out her arms and rolled her shoulders.

Anna doubted John Milton was the kind of man who was prone to mistakes.

She started to wonder if this job was a poisoned chalice.

The sort of job that could only ever make her look bad.

20

Five in the morning. Plato looked at the icon of Jesus Christ that he had fixed to the dashboard of his Dodge. Feeling a little self-conscious, he touched it and closed his eyes. Four days, he prayed. Please God, keep me safe for four days. Plato was not usually a prayerful man, but today he felt that it was worth a try. He had been unable to sleep all night, the worry running around in his mind, lurid dreams of what the cartel would do to him and his family impossible to quash. In the end, with the red digits on the clock radio by his bed showing three, he had risen quietly from bed so as not to disturb Emelia and had gone to check on each of his children. They were all sleeping peacefully. He had paused in each room, just listening to the sound of their breathing. Satisfied that they were safe, he had gone downstairs and sat in the lounge for an hour with a cup of strong black coffee. His service-issue revolver was laid on the table in front of him. It was loaded and the safety was off.

The kitchen light flicked on and Emelia’s worried face appeared at the window. Plato waved at his wife, forcing a broad smile onto his face. She knew something had happened last night but she had not pressed him on it and he had not said; he didn’t want to cause her any more anxiety than he could avoid. What was the point? She had enough on her plate without worrying about him. He might have been able to unburden himself but it would have been selfish. Far better to keep his own counsel and focus on the light at the end of the tunnel.

Four days.

He started the engine and flicked on the headlights. He backed the car down the drive, putting it into first and setting off in the direction of Avenue 16 de Septiembre and the Hospital San José. He turned off the road and rolled into the underground car park. As he reversed into a space he found himself thinking of the Englishman. It was out of character for him to break the rules, and he was quite clear about one thing: giving a man he did not know the details of where the witness in a murder enquiry was being taken was most definitely against the rules. The man wasn’t a relation and he had no obvious connection to her. He was also, very patently, a dangerous man who knew how to kill and had done so before. Plato had wondered about him during his night’s vigil. Who was he? What was he? What kind of ex-soldier. Special Forces? Or something else entirely? He had no reason to trust the man apart from a feeling in his gut that they were on the same side. Plato had long since learnt that it was wise to listen to his instincts. They often turned out to be right.

Plato rode the elevator to the sixth floor. The girl was being kept in her own room; they would be better able to guard her that way. Sanchez was outside the door. He had drawn the first watch and his eyes were red rimmed from lack of sleep.

“About time,” he grumbled.

“How is she?”

“Sleeping. The shoulder is nothing to worry about — just a flesh wound, they’ve cleaned it and tidied it up.”

“But?”

“But nothing. They shot her up to help her sleep and she’s been out ever since.”

“Has anyone told her about the others?”

“No. I didn’t have the chance.”

Plato sighed. It would fall to him to do it. He hated it, bringing the worst kind of news, but it was something that he had almost become inured to over the course of the years. How many times had he told relatives that their husband, son, wife or daughter had been murdered over the last decade? Hundreds of times. These two would just be the latest. He hoped, maybe, that they would be the last.

“Alright,” he said. “I’ll take over. Have you spoken to Alameda?”

Sanchez nodded. “He called.”

“Alright?”

“Seemed to be.”

“He’s still relieving me? I’ve got to start looking into what happened, for what it’s worth. I can’t stay here all day.”

“He said he was.”

Sanchez clapped him on the shoulder and left him.

The room was at the end of the corridor. There was a chair outside it and, on the floor, a copy of El Diario that Sanchez had found from somewhere. The front page had a number as its headline, capitalized and emboldened — SEVEN HUNDRED — and below it was a colour picture of a body laid out in the street, blood pooling around the head. It would be seven hundred and eight once they had processed the victims from last night. Plato tossed the newspaper back down onto the ground, quietly turned the handle to the door and stepped inside. The girl was sleeping peacefully. She had been dressed in hospital issue pyjamas and her right shoulder was swaddled in bandages. He stepped a little closer. She was pretty, with a delicate face and thick, black hair. The silver crucifix she wore around her neck stood out against her golden-brown skin. He wondered if it had helped her last night. She had been very, very lucky. Lucky that the cook had been there, for a start. And lucky that the sicarios had, somehow, failed to complete their orders. That was unusual. The penalty for a sicario’s failure would be his own death, often much more protracted and unpleasant than the quick and easy ending that he planned for his victims. It was a useful incentive to get the job done and it meant that they very rarely made mistakes.

It also meant that they often visited hospitals to finish off the victims that they had only been able to wound first time around.

Plato was staring at her face when the girl’s eyes slid open. It gave him a start. “Hello,” he said.

She looked at him, a moment of muddied confusion before alarm washed across her face. Her feet scrambled against the mattress as she pushed herself away, her back up against the headboard.

“It’s alright,” Plato said, holding his hands up, palms facing her. “I’m a policeman.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“I know I’d say this even if I wasn’t, but I’m one of the good ones.”

She regarded him warily, but, as he took no further step towards her, smiling what he hoped was his most winning and reassuring smile, she gradually relaxed. Her legs slid down the bed a little and she arranged herself so that she was more comfortable. The movement evidently caused her pain; she winced sharply.

“How’s the shoulder?”

“Sore.” The pain recalled what had happened last night and her face fell. “Leon — where is he?”

Plato guessed that she meant the man she was with. “I’m sorry, ma’am” he said.

Her face dissolved, the steeliness subsumed by a sudden wave of grief. Tears rolled down her cheeks and she closed her eyes, her breathing ragged until, after a moment, she mastered it again. She buried her head in her forearms with her hands clasped against the top of her head, her breathing sighing in and out. Plato stood there helplessly, his fingers looped into his belt to stop them fidgeting. He never knew what to do after he had delivered the news.

“Caterina,” he said.

She moved her arms away. Her eyes were wet when she opened them again and they shined with angry fire. “The girl?”

Plato shook his head.

“Oh God.”

“I’m very sorry.”

She clenched her teeth so hard that the line of her jaw was strong and firm.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, not knowing what else he could say.

“When can I get out of here?”

“The doctors will want to see you. It’s early, though. I don’t think they’ll be here until morning. A few hours.”

“What time is it?”

“Half five. Why don’t you try and get a little extra sleep?”

She gave him a withering look. “I don’t think so,” she said.

“One of my colleagues watched over you through the night and I’m going to stay with you now,” he said. “The men who did this might come back when they find out that you’re still alive.”

“And you can stop them?”

There was the thing; Plato knew he would have no chance at all if they came back, and the girl looked like she was smart enough to know that too. “I’ll do my best,” he told her.

21

Plato spoke to the girl for an hour. He got more of the story, wrote it all down. Eventually, her eyelids started to fall and, as dawn broke outside, she was asleep again. Plato covered her with the coarse hospital blanket and picked up her chart from the end of the bed. They had given her a mild dose of secobarbital and he guessed that there was still enough of it in her system to make her drowsy. It was for the best, he thought. She would need all her strength about her when she was discharged. He was not sure how best to go about that. There was no question that she was in a perilous situation. The cartels wanted her dead and his experience suggested that they wouldn’t stop until that had happened, or until she was put out of reach. There was no easy way for him to help her with that. Once she was out of the hospital, she was on her own.

He looked down at his notebook. Her name was Caterina Moreno. She was twenty-five and she was a journalist, writing for the Blog del Borderland. He wasn’t as savvy with computers as some of the others but even he had heard of it; it was generating a lot of interest, and the cartels had already murdered several of its contributors. The dead man was another of the blog’s writers and the dead girl was a source who was to be interviewed for a story she was writing.

He sat down on the chair outside the room, his pistol in his lap. He watched as the hospital switched gears from the night to day: nurses were relieved as they went off shift, the doctors began to do their rounds, porters pushed their trolleys with their changes of linen, medicines and breakfasts. Plato watched all of them, looking for signs of incongruity, his mind prickling with the anticipation of sudden violence, his fingers never more than a few inches from the stippled barrel of his Glock. They might come in disguise, or in force, they might come knowing that the power of their reputation was enough to grant them unhindered passage. The girl was helpless. Plato resolved to do his best to slow them down.

His vigil was uninterrupted until Alameda arrived at nine.

“Capitán,” Plato said.

“How is she?”

“Not so good.”

“How much does she know?”

“I told her enough.”

Alameda scrubbed his eyes. “Stupid kids.”

“That’s harsh.”

“Pretending to be journalists.”

“They’d say they were journalists.”

“Hardly, Jesus.”

“We’re out of touch.”

“Maybe. But writing about the cartels? Por dios, man! How stupid can you get? They got what’s coming to them.”

Plato did not reply. He stood and stretched out his aching muscles.

“How did she take it?” Alameda asked, looking into Caterina’s room.

“She’s tough. If I were a betting man, I’d say it’s made her more determined.”

“To do what?”

“This — it won’t shut her up.”

“You ask me, she should get over the border as fast as she can. She won’t last five minutes if she stays here.” Alameda sighed. Plato thought he suddenly looked old, as if he had aged ten years overnight. “Diablo, Jesus. What are we going to do?”

Plato holstered his pistol. “We’re gonna stand guard here until she’s discharged, which I guess will be when the doctor comes to see her this morning. We’ll make sure she’s safe getting to where she wants to go. And then it’s up to her.” He put a hand on Alameda’s shoulder. “Are you alright?”

“Not really. Couldn’t sleep.”

“Me neither.”

“Go on,” he said. “I’m fine. Take a break.”

“Won’t be long. I want to talk to her again when she wakes up.”

He said he would take twenty minutes to get them both some breakfast from the canteen and, when Alameda lowered himself into the chair, his hand on the butt of his pistol, he quickly made for the elevator.

He did not mean to be very long.

22

Milton changed into his jeans and a reasonably clean shirt and walked to the hospital. He stopped in the coffee shop for an espresso and a copy of the morning paper. He scanned it quickly as he waited in line. There’d be nothing about the shooting at the restaurant yet. Instead, he saw a picture of some sort of memorial, a stone cross, with a wreath propped up against it and a notice fixed up with wire. When he got to the checkout he asked the girl what time they got the afternoon edition.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t read it.”

“Can’t say I blame you.”

“Haven’t read it for years.”

“Is that right?”

“Don’t you think it’s all too depressing? When was the last time you read anything good in the newspaper?

Milton shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “Probably quite a long while.”

“I’ll say,” she said. “A long while.”

He handed her a ten dollar bill. “I’m looking for a friend,” he said. “Young girl. Brought in last night. Gunshot wound. You know where they would’ve taken her?”

“Try up on the sixth floor,” she advised.

Milton told her to keep the change and followed her directions. There was a triage area and then a corridor with separate rooms running off it. He went down the corridor, looking into each room, looking for the girl. There was an empty chair at the door to the last room from the end. He walked quietly to the door and looked inside: the girl was there, asleep, her chest rising and falling gently beneath a single white bed sheet. A man in a white doctor’s coat was leaning over her. A loose pillow was lying across the girl’s legs. The man reached his right hand, the fingers brushing against the pillow, then closing around it.

Milton opened the door all the way. “Excuse me.”

The man looked up and around.

“Hello.”

“Who are you?”

He had smooth brown skin, black hair, an easy smile. There was nothing remarkable about him. The kind of man you would never see coming. “My name is Martinez,” he said. “I’m a doctor here. Who are you?”

Milton ignored the question. “What are you doing?”

“Checking that she is okay.” He picked up the pillow and tossed it onto the armchair at the side of the bed. “Just making her comfortable.”

Milton tapped a finger to his breast. “You don’t have any credentials.”

The man looked down at his white medical jacket, shrugging with a self-deprecating smile. “I’ve just come on shift. Must’ve left it in my locker. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Do you know her?”

“I’m a friend.”

The doctor looked over Milton’s shoulder and, for a tiny moment, a flicker of something — irritation, perhaps, or frustration — fell across his face. He replaced it with a warm, friendly smile. “Nice to meet you, Señor —?”

“Smith.”

“Señor Smith. I’m sure I’ll see you again.”

The man smiled again, stepped around him and left the room. Milton turned to watch him go just as the policeman from last night, Lieutenant Plato, came in the other direction. The two met in the corridor, Plato stepping to the side to let the other man pass.

Plato was carrying two wrapped burritos. He didn’t look surprised to see him. “Who was that?”

“Said he was a doctor but there was something about him. Seen him before?”

“No.”

Milton started to move.

“Was there anyone else here?” Plato asked. “There should’ve been—”

“No-one else.”

Plato’s face twisted with anxiety. “Is she alright?”

“You better check.”

Milton walked quickly, and then broke into a jog, passing through the busying triage area to the lobby beyond. The elevator was on the first floor and so he couldn’t have taken that. He pushed the bar to open the door to the stairs and looked up and then down. There was no sign of Martinez anywhere. He quickly climbed to the seventh floor but, as he opened the door onto a paediatrics ward he could not see him. He went back down, then descended further, to the fifth, but he couldn’t see him. The man had disappeared.

23

Plato sat on the chair and Milton stood with his back to the wall. They ate the breakfast burritos that Plato had purchased in the canteen.

“How many people died last night?”

Plato looked at him evenly. “Two of the three on the table — the girl died at the scene, the guy was DOA by the time they got him here. Apart from them, one woman eating her dinner got shot in the head. Three dead, all told, and that’s not even counting the five sicarios you took out. Caramba, what a world.”

“The girl who died?”

“That’s the coincidental part. Her name was Delores. Poor little thing. I knew I recognised her when they were wheeling her out. I found her a month ago on Avenue Azucenas. Half undressed and beside herself with panic. She was a worker in the maquiladoras. She’d been abducted and raped but she managed to get away.”

“You think that had something to do with it?”

He shrugged. “Looks to me like she was there to talk to Caterina. Tell her story, maybe. I don’t know — maybe that’s why they got shot.”

“Why would Caterina want to talk to her?”

Milton knew that the information was confidential but, after just a moment of reluctance, Plato shrugged and said, “She’s a journalist. This isn’t a safe place to write about the news. The cartels don’t like to read about themselves. The dead guy was another writer.”

“Newspaper?”

“No,” Plato said, shaking his head. “They’re online — they call it Blog del Borderland. It’s started to be a pretty big deal, not just here but over the border, too. There was a piece in the El Paso Times just last week, all about them, and someone told me they’ve got a book coming out, too. The cartels are all they write about. The shootings, the abductions. It’s like an obsession. Most papers won’t touch that stuff, or, if they do, they don’t write about it truthfully. It’s all under control, there’s nothing to worry about, you know the sort of thing. These kids are different. They’ve had writers go missing and get murdered before but it hasn’t stopped them yet. This time, though? I don’t know, maybe they’ll listen now.”

“What would you do — if you were her?”

“I’d try and get over the border. But that won’t be easy. As far as I can make out she doesn’t have any family here. No ties. She doesn’t have a job. She’s not the kind of person who gets a visa. As far as I know, no journalist has ever been given one. And I doubt she’d even get a border crossing card. They’ll say the chances of her staying over there illegally are too great.”

“So?”

“Join the dots. If she’s going to get across, she’ll have to do it the other way.”

Milton finished the burrito, screwed up the paper and dropped it into the bin. “That doctor —?”

“Who knows. My guess? He was someone they sent to finish her off and you got here just in time.”

“You didn’t recognise him?”

“No. No reason why I would.”

“Why was she unguarded?”

He frowned. “You’d have to ask my captain that.”

“But you’re still here.”

“How can I leave her on her own?” he said helplessly. “I’ve got daughters.”

“I’ll stay with her.”

Plato finished his burrito and wiped his hands with a napkin. “Why would you want to do a thing like that?”

“Like you say — how can we leave her on her own. I’m guessing you boys will have to leave her as soon as they discharge her, right?”

“Right.”

“And how long do you reckon she’ll last without any protection at all? Christ, they almost got her when she was supposed to be guarded. She won’t last five minutes and you know it.”

Plato exhaled wearily. “What’s your story? — really?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“You need to give me a reason to let you stay.”

“I can help. Come on — you know I can. You saw what I can do. You know I could be useful. That’s why you told me where to find her.”

“Maybe it was. And maybe I shouldn’t’ve done that, putting you in harm’s way as well as her.”

“I can look after myself.”

“They’ll come back again. What makes you think you can stop them?”

“Because I’m not afraid of them, Lieutenant.”

24

The girl was awake. She had shuffled back in bed so that she was resting against the headboard, her knees bent beneath the sheet. Her black hair fanned out behind her, long strands running across her shoulders and across the pastel blue hospital pyjamas and the white of the bandage on her right shoulder. She was staring at Milton through the window. He got up from the chair, knocked on the door and went inside.

“Hello,” he said.

“Who are you?”

“My name’s Smith.”

“Have we met?”

“Not really.”

She looked at him. “No. I recognise you. You were there last night. You work in the restaurant, don’t you?”

“I did. Doubt there’s a job for me there any more.”

“You helped us.”

“I did my best.”

The conversation tailed off. She was nervous and Milton felt awkward about it. He pointed to the armchair next to the bed. “Do you mind?” She shrugged. Her right hand tensed and gripped the edge of the sheet. He could see the tendons moving in her wrist.

He moved the pillow out of the way and sat down. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I just got shot in the shoulder.”

“You were lucky — it could’ve been much worse.”

A bitter laugh. “Lucky? I wouldn’t call that luck. And my friends—”

“Yes. They were very unlucky. I’m sorry about them.”

Her chin quivered a little. She controlled it, a frown furrowing her brow. He turned his head and looked at her. She was slender and well put together. He saw that her nails were trimmed and painted. She had an intelligent face, sensitive, but her smoky eyes looked weary.

“Do you have any next of kin I could call?” he said.

“No. My parents are dead. I had a brother, but he’s dead, too.”

“Husband? Boyfriend?”

Her lip quivered again. “I’m not married. And my boyfriend — my boyfriend got shot last night.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She went quiet again. She stared out into the corridor and blinked, like she was about to cry. Like she was ready for it all to come out. Milton found that he was holding his breath. He didn’t know what he would do if she started to cry. He wasn’t particularly good with things like that.

“I spoke to Lieutenant Plato,” he said.

“Does he think I killed her?”

“Who?”

“Delores — the girl — it’s my fault she’s dead.”

“How could it be your fault?”

“She was safe as long as she kept out of the way.”

“Of course it isn’t your fault.”

“I persuaded her to come and talk to me. I went on and on and on at her. Because of that, now she’s dead.”

Milton didn’t know what to say to that. He started to mumble something that he hoped might be reassuring but she cut him off.

“Why are you here?”

“Because you’re not safe, Caterina.”

“I can look after myself,” she said, her eyes shining fiercely.

“They came back this morning. A man pretending to be a doctor. I saw him off, but it’ll get worse as soon as they discharge you.”

“Then I’ll hide,” she said angrily. “I’ve managed until now.”

“I’m sure you have.”

He watched her. She was pretty, and her fieriness made her even more attractive.

“Caterina — I want to help.”

“You’re wasting your time. I don’t have any money and, even if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you.”

“I don’t want money.”

“Then what?”

“I help people who need it.”

“Like some sort of charity?”

“I wouldn’t put it like that.”

“And I do? Need help?”

“The odds are against you. I can even the odds. That’s what I do.”

“You know what the cartel is capable of. You saw it. Last night was just them being playful. If they really want to come after me there won’t be anything that anyone can do about it. I’m sorry, Señor Smith, it’s not that I don’t appreciate the offer and I don’t want to be rude, but, at the end of the day, you work in a kitchen.”

He let that settle for a moment. And then he said, staring at her evenly, “I did other things before that.”

25

Beau’s snakeskin cowboy boots clipped and clopped as he stepped out of the red Jeep Cherokee and walked across the pavement and into the hospital. There was a florist in the reception — a pathetic display of flowers, most of them half-dead and fading away in the broil of the early morning sun — but he found a halfway decent bunch of Bougainvillea, then went to the shop and supplemented it with a bag of withered and juiceless grapes. He went to the desk and, putting on his friendliest smile, said he was looking for the girl who had survived the shooting at the restaurant last night, said he was her brother. The nurse looked down to the bouquet, bright colours against the blue of the suit, looked up at the warm smile, bought the story all the way and told him that he could find her on the sixth floor, towards the back of the building, and that he hoped he had a nice day. Beau thanked her most kindly and made his way to the elevator.

He got in and pressed the button for the sixth floor. The doors closed and the elevator ascended. He stood with his back to the wall, looked down at the toe of his boot, lifted his leg and passed the toe against the back of his jeans to clean it off. The lights for each passing floor glowed on the display until the elevator reached the sixth. The doors opened. He reached inside his jacket, his fingers brushing against the inlaid handle of the revolver that was holstered to his belt, and stepped out.

The place smelt of hospitals: detergent, and, beneath that, rot. The girl was in a room at the end of a corridor. Beau walked easily down towards it, his heels striking the floor noisily. As he approached, a man who had been leaning against the door jamb, just out of sight, peeled off the wall and stepped out into the corridor. He took a step forwards and blocked the way.

“Who are you?” the man said.

“Beau Baxter. Who are you?”

“Smith.”

Beau grinned. “Mr. Smith —?”

The man smiled, or, at least, his taut, thin lips rose a little at the edges. “John Smith. What do you do, Mr. Baxter?”

Beau looked him over. Not much to him, really, at least on the surface: a little taller than average, a little slimmer than average for someone his size, running two hundred, maybe two ten. Caucasian, a nasty scar on his face. Salt and pepper hair. Heavy, untidy beard. Around forty, maybe. The kind of man who’d be swallowed up by the crowd. He knew that sort. He was anonymous, at least until you looked a little harder. His eyes were different; they were cold and dark, enough to give a man a moment of reflection, a chance to think about things.

Beau shrugged. “I’m thinking you know what I do. Me and you, I’m guessing we’re in the same line of work.”

“I doubt that. Let me put it a different way: what are you doing here?”

He held up the wilting bouquet. “I brought the girl some flowers.”

“She doesn’t want them.”

“I want to speak to her.”

“I don’t think so. Not while I’m here.”

They both looked through the dirty window into the room. Caterina was sitting up in bed as a doctor examined the wound on her shoulder.

“You’re the cook, right? I heard what you did.”

“And how would you know about that?”

“My line of business, it pays me to know people who know things.”

“Police?”

“Sure — among others.”

“What do you want?”

“She had any visitors? Unexpected ones?”

Milton looked at him. He didn’t answer.

“Let me describe him for you, tell me how close I am: he’s in his forties, his hair is perfectly black, plain skin, smiles a lot but there’s something going on beneath the smile that you don’t feel too comfortable about. How am I doing?”

“Close enough.”

“Thought so — can we talk about him?”

“Talk, then.”

“When was it?”

“Half an hour ago.”

“And what happened?”

“I scared him off.”

“I doubt that. He’s a bad man.”

“There are a lot of bad men.”

“Not like him. He’s one of a kind.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”

“I can get him out of the way.”

“You think I can’t do that myself?”

“I doubt it. You don’t know what you’re up against.”

“And you don’t know who I am.”

“I know you ain’t no cook.” He smiled at him. “Okay. What do you know about him?”

The man didn’t answer.

“You speak Spanish?”

“Enough.”

“They call him Santa Muerte. Know what that means?”

“Saint Death.”

“That’s right: Saint Death. Bit grandiose, I’ll give you that, but, believe me, this dude, my word, he backs it up. This is not a man you want to know. Those people he takes a personal interest in, they tend not to be around for long after he’s introduced himself, you know what I mean?”

“I’ve met people like that before. I’m still here.”

He held Beau’s gaze without flinching. It was rare to meet a man like this. It didn’t look as if he had an ounce of fright in him. He was either brave or he had no idea what he was dealing with. “You’re a long way from home, bro. That accent — English, right?”

“Yes.”

“Alright, then, old partner. Let me just lay it out for you. Imagine living in a place where you can kill anyone you want and nothing happens except they drop down dead. You won’t get arrested. Your name won’t get in the papers. You can just carry on with things like nothing has happened. You can kill again, too, just keep on going, and nothing will be different. Look at your friend in there — you can take a woman, anyone you want, and you can rape her for days and nothing will happen. And, once you’re done with her, you can kill her, too. Nothing will happen. That kind of place? You’re in it. That’s Juárez, through and through.”

“Sounds awful.”

He stripped the good humour from his voice. “You need to pay attention, Mr. Smith. This man, Santa Muerte, even in a place as fucked up as this, he’s the worst of the worse. Top of the food chain. What you’d call the apex predator. And you have his attention now. Undivided. All of it. I know what you did in the restaurant. I know what you did here, too, sending him away. And now he’s not going to stop. Men like him, they survive because of their reputations. People start to think he’s lost his edge, maybe they start getting brave, maybe someone who bears a grudge decides now’s the time to get their revenge and stamp his ticket for him. Reputation, man. He has to kill you now. And there’s nothing you can do to stop him short of putting a bullet in his head.”

“What does this have to do with you?”

“I can help you. My line of work: I find people, I settle accounts, I solve problems. And my employers — this group of Italians, not men you’d want to cross — these men, well, see, they have good reason to speak to him. They had a business arrangement with the organisation he works for. Didn’t go to plan. He sent them a video, one of theirs hung upside down from a tree while he sawed off his head with a machete. They’re paying me to bring him back to the States. They’d prefer him alive, but that don’t really matter, not really, they’ll take him dead if that’s the only way I can get him to them. And I will get him eventually. The only question is whether it’s after he’s killed you and your friend in there or before. I don’t have any reason to protect you but I will, if you help me out.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

Beau stood up and straightened out the fall of his trousers. “I don’t know why, but he wants the girl. He’ll drop out of sight now. You won’t be able to find him. He’ll bide his time, and then he’ll come after her. And that’s when you’ll need me.” He took a pen from his pocket and, tearing off a square of the brown paper sheaf that was wrapped around the flowers, he wrote down a number. He handed it to the man. “This is me. When you’re ready to start thinking about how to get her out of the almighty motherfucking mess she’s got herself into, you give me a call, alright?”

“What’s his name?”

“His real name? I’ve heard lots of possibilities but I don’t know for sure.”

“You’re sure I can’t find him?”

“Have you been listening to me? You don’t find him, man. He finds you.”

26

They discharged Caterina a little before midday. The doctor said that she would be fine; there were no vascular injuries, no bones had been clipped, it was all just flesh. They had performed a quick fasciotomy while she was out cold and had cleared away the fabric from her shirt that had been sucked into the wound, removed the dead tissue. The doctor checked the sutures were holding, gave her a tetanus shot, told her to take it easy, and sent her on her way. Milton led her to the elevator, shielding her as they stepped out into the lobby downstairs.

Lieutenant Plato was waiting for them.

“How are you feeling?” he asked her.

“Better now. Thank you.”

“Do you know where you’re going?”

“A hotel.”

“I was going to ask you,” Milton said to him. “What would be a good hotel?”

Plato chuckled. “You know all the hotels get booked?”

“By who?”

“The narcos own them,” Caterina answered. “They book the room but no-one ever stays. Perfect way to launder all their money.”

“There is a place,” Plato said. “La Playa Consulado, up by the border. You should be able to get in there.”

“Thanks.”

“And then?”

“New Mexico. Señor Smith says he’s going to help me. Doesn’t seem I have much choice in the matter.”

“Alright, then. You keep your head down. If I need to speak to you about what happened — the investigation, and what have you — I’ll be in touch.” He reached out a hand and she took it. “Good luck, Caterina.”

Milton led Caterina out of the hospital. The midday heat was like a furnace. It was so fierce that it had just about cleared the streets, forcing everyone inside. A siesta sounded pretty good right around now, he thought. Those people who were out looked punch drunk and listless. He led the way down to the cabstand, opened the door of the cab parked there and ushered her inside.

The car was air-conditioned.

“You know the La Playa Consulado?” he said.

The driver looked at him in the mirror. “Near the US Consulate?”

“That’s the one.”

“Si — I know it.”

They drove out, Milton checking that they were not being followed. If the narcos were good there would be no way of knowing, but they would have to be very good, and Milton didn’t see anything suspicious.

“What about you?” Caterina asked him suddenly.

“What about me?”

“I told you about me. What about you? You married?”

“I was, once. She left me.”

“Oh — I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

“Family?”

“My parents died when I was little. No brothers or sisters.”

“Girlfriend?”

“I’m never in the same place long enough to get attached.”

“You must have someone?”

“Not really,” he said with a wry smile. “This is it.”

“I’m sorry about that,” she said.

“For what?”

“That you’re alone.”

“Don’t be. I choose to be that way.”

“You’re not lonely?”

“No. It’s the way I like it. To be honest, I’m not the best company. I doubt anyone would put up with me for all that long, not unless they had to.”

“And you move around a lot?”

“All the time.”

“Why Mexico?”

“Why not? I’ve been heading north the best part of six months. Mexico was just the next place on the way.”

“And Juárez? How long have you been here?”

“I got in on Monday.”

She stared out of the window. “Good timing.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m glad I was there. It could’ve been a lot worse.”

“But why here? Most people would go a hundred miles in either direction.”

“Then I suppose I’m not most people.”

“Why do you move around so much? Are you running from something?”

My history, he thought, but rather than that he said, “Not really. I just needed some time alone. To clear my head.”

“From what?”

“That doesn’t really matter, Caterina.”

She thought about his answer. He saw her tension coming back and she was quiet again.

La Playa Consulado was on Paseo De La Victoria. A two storey motor court set around a large parking lot, an ugly sign outside advertising Restaurant Cebollero and its flautas, tacos and hamburguesas. Milton got out first, his hand resting on the burning roof of the cab as he checked again that they had not been followed. Satisfied, he stepped aside so that Caterina could get out, paid the driver and went into the reception. Net curtains, wood panels, décor from deep into the eighties. A woman was sitting watching a chat show on TV. She got up and went around behind the desk.

“We need two rooms, one next to the other.”

“I can do that. How many nights?”

“I don’t know. Let’s say a week.”

“Weekly rate’s forty-five dollars per night plus two dollars seventy-five tax. Cash or card?”

“Discount for cash?”

She took out a calculator and tapped it out. “No discount, sir. Forty-seven dollars, seventy-five cents per night, times two, times seven. That’s six hundred and sixty-eight dollars and fifty cents.”

Milton took out a roll of notes from his pocket and peeled off seven hundred dollar bills. He gave them to the woman. “If anyone asks, we’re not here. No visitors. No messages, at any time. No-one cleans the rooms.” He peeled off another note and laid it on the desk. “Is that going to be alright?”

“Absolutely fine, sir.”

Milton took the two keys and led the way outside again, following a scrappy path around the parking lot to the row of rooms. He opened the door to the first room, number eleven, and went inside. He waited until Caterina had followed, shut the door again and closed the curtains. He checked the room: a queen-sized bed with a heavy wooden headboard and a garish quilt cover; purple carpets, stained in places; an artexed asbestos ceiling; a print of a vase of flowers on the wall; a bathroom with shower. Light from outside came in through the net curtains. Milton switched on the overhead light.

Caterina sat down heavily on the bed.

Milton stood at the window, parted the curtains a little and looked out through them at the courtyard outside. A few cars, lots of empty spaces, plastic rubbish and newspaper snagged in the branches of sickly creosote bushes. He ran things over in his mind. He got two glasses of water from the bathroom and came back and went to the window again. He took a sip and set the water on the cheap bedside table. Halfway there, he thought.

Caterina slumped back on the bed. “This is crazy. I can’t hide here forever.”

“Just for a few days.”

“So you can do what?”

“I know someone who’ll be able to help you get across the border.”

“In exchange for what? I told you I don’t have any money.”

“He has a problem I can help him with. And there’s no harm in you staying here until I can do that, is there?”

She shook her head and stared straight up at the stippled ceiling. “I don’t suppose so. I know I can’t go home.”

“Is there anything you need?”

“Nothing we can’t get in New Mexico.”

“Sure?”

“There is something — we’ve got another couple of writers. I have to get word to them.”

“Call them?”

“Their details are on my laptop. I need that, then I can mail them.”

“Where is it?”

“In my apartment.”

“Alright — I’ll get it. Write down your address.”

She did, writing it on a page that she tore from the Gideon’s bible in the drawer. Milton closed the curtains.

“You’re not just a cook, are you?”

“No.”

“You were a soldier.”

“Yes.”

“What kind of soldier?”

He thought about what to say. He had a sudden urge to be completely truthful but he knew that might not be the best policy with her: good for him, bad for her, so he evaded the question a little. “I was in the special forces for a while. And then I was transferred to work for a special detail. I can’t really tell you very much about that.”

“You were good at it?”

“Very good,” he said.

“Have you’ve killed people before?”

“I have.”

She fell silent.

He found the TV remote and tossed it across to the bed. “Try and get some sleep,” he said. “And I know you’re not stupid, but lock and chain the door and don’t open it to anybody but me. Alright?”

“You’re going now?”

“There are some things I need to get, too. I might be back late. Maybe this evening. Alright?”

She said that she was.

“Don’t open the door.”

27

Milton took a taxi to the border and then got out and walked. The Paso del Norte bridge spanned the Rio Bravo, and he took his place in the queue of people waiting to cross. He paid three pesos at the kiosk and pushed through the turnstile. A couple of hundred strides to reach the middle, where Mexico ended and the United States began. He paused there and looked down. The floodplain stretched beneath him, the Rio Bravo a pathetic trickle, slithering between stands of Carrizo cane. A chain link fence on either side, tall guard-posts with guards toting rifles, spotlights and CCTV.

The American gatepost was worse, bristling with security. He walked towards it and joined the queue. Well-to-do housewives chatted about the shopping they were going to do. Bored children bounced. Kids slung book bags over their shoulders, waiting to pass through to their Methodist schools. Vendors hawked hamburgers, cones of fried nuts and bottles of water. A woman in a white dress with a guitar sang folk songs, a handful of change scattered in the torn-off cardboard box at her feet.

It took an hour for Milton to get to the front.

“Hello, sir,” the wary border guard said. “Your passport, please.”

Milton took out the fake American passport that he had been using since he arrived in South America. He handed it to her.

“Mr. Smith,” she said, comparing him with the photograph. “You’ve been away for a while, sir.”

“Travelling.”

She stamped the passport. “Welcome home, sir.”

He walked through into America. There was a McDonalds near the border, a hub of customs agents, girls laden with huge packets of diapers, Mexican businessmen and Mexican ladies on their way to clean American toilets. The mumbling homeless gathered outside, pushing their belongings in supermarket carts.

Milton had a fifteen minute cab ride to get to where he was going. He fished out his phone from his pocket and took the scrap of paper that the man in the hospital had given to him from out of his wallet. He dialled the number and put the phone to his ear.

“Baxter?”

“Who’s this.”

“John Smith.”

“Mr. Smith. How are you, sir?”

“Our friend — how much is he worth to you?”

“He’s worth plenty — why? You ready to help?”

“If you help me — then perhaps.”

“How much do you want?”

“Nothing. No money. I need you to do me a favour.”

“I’m listening.”

“Those Italians you work for — I’m guessing it’s a reasonably simple thing for them to bring someone across the border?”

“Sure. I’ve got to get our mutual friend across, and I’m damn sure I ain’t taking him over the bridge. I don’t reckon it’d be any great shakes to add another to the trip. Who do you got in mind?”

“The girl.”

“Makes sense. Yeah — I reckon I could do that. Anything else?”

“A new life for her on the other side. Legitimate papers in a different name. Away from El Paso. Somewhere where they’ll never find her.”

“That’s a bit more demanding. But maybe.”

“What would you have to do?”

“Make a couple of calls. You on this number all day?”

Milton said that he was.

“I’ll call you later.”

The taxi had arrived. Milton put the telephone away, paid the driver, and got out.

The El Paso gun show was held every Saturday at the El Maida Shrine Centre at 6331 Alabama Street. A sign outside the venue advertised roller derbies, pet adoption fairs and home and garden shows, but it was obvious that guns were the big draw. He paid sixteen bucks at the entrance and went inside, passing a row of ATMs, an NRA information booth where two bored teenagers were smoking and lazily handing out leaflets, ice cream and Mexican food stands and two emphatic sandwich boards requiring visitors to unload their weapons. A banner above the entrance to the hall said that YOUR SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS GUARANTEE ALL THE OTHERS.

Milton passed beneath it and went inside.

He had seen the show advertised in El Diario, a whole page advert that promised that every gun that he could imagine would be available to buy. Milton could imagine a lot of guns but, after just five minutes, he saw the claim wasn’t fanciful. The place was like a bazaar. Several long aisles had been formed by tables arranged swap-meet style, dozens of vendors on one side of them and several hundred people on the other. Milton recognised the hunters, but there were plenty of people buying for other reasons, too. He watched with a detached sense of professional interest as a rotund and cheerful white-bearded man, easily in his seventies, walked past with an ArmaLite and attached bayonet slung casually over his shoulder. A blue-rinsed lady of similar age negotiated hard for extra ammunition for the Smith & Wesson she was purchasing. Other shoppers were pushing hand carts of ammunition out to their trucks. Apart from the guns and ammo, there was surplus military apparel; first aid supplies; kippered beef in flavours like Whiskey BBQ and Dragon Breath; war movies; badger pelts; replica uniforms and flags from the Soviet Union, North Vietnam and Nazi Germany; knives, brass knuckles and katana swords; cougar skulls; crates of canned meat with expiration dates years into the future, ‘perfect for bunkers’; remote-controlled helicopters.

Milton sauntered along the aisle, looking for the right kind of seller. It didn’t take long to find one: the man had a table, covered in blue felt, with a selection of weapons sitting on their carry cases, a handwritten sign on the table reading PRIVATE SELLER/NO PAPER. The slogan on the man’s black wifebeater read “When All Else Fails, Vote From the Rooftops!” and revealed sleeves of tattoos up both arms. He wore a baseball cap with a camouflage design.

“Afternoon, sir,” he said.

“What do I need to buy from you?”

“Cash and carry. No background check, I don’t need no address — don’t really need nothing, no sir. This is a private party sale. What are you looking for?”

“What have you got?”

The man cast his hand across the heaving table. “I keep a nice selection. All the way from these little stainless steel Derringers, good for concealment, to the long guns. I got the Ruger .22 — extremely popular gun. I got weapons with pink grips, for the lady, engraved pieces with inlaid handles and decorative stocks. Walthers, Smith & Wessons. A lot of people are shooting .40 calibres. Those are pretty vicious. I got revolvers—”

“No, automatic.”

“I have nice automatics. I got modern plastic guns. I got the Glock, I got the Springfield. And then, over here, I got the Mac semi-autos all the way up to the rifles: the .208s, the .223s, I got an AK-47 and an AR-15, a .50 calibre with fluted barrel and sniper green finish.”

Milton looked down at the metalware lined up across the table. They were all expertly made, although he found it easier to feel affection and admiration for the collector’s items with the wooden butts than for the coldly efficient and inorganic weapons that made sense only in combat. The cold grey foreboding of an AR-15. The leaden heaviness of the Czech MFP, modelled on the Kalashnikov.

He picked up a Springfield Tactical .45 auto.

“How much?”

“$480, cash money and it’s all yours, out the door you go.”

“I’ll take it.”

“You want ammo with that, too?”

The Springfield boxed thirteen rounds per magazine; Milton bought four, mixed factory hardball and jacketed hollow points from Federal and Remington, for a straight hundred.

He paid the man, thanked him and went back outside. It was seven in the evening by now and the winds had picked up. The faint orange dust that had hung in the windless morning had been whipped up into a storm and now it was rolling in off the desert. He took a taxi back to the border and was halfway across the span of the bridge when the storm swept over Juárez. Sand and dust stung his face and visibility was immediately reduced: first the mountains disappeared, then the belching smokestacks on the edge of town, and then, as the storm hunkered down properly over the city, details of the immediate landscape began to fade and blur. The streetlights that ran along the centre of the bridge shone as fuzzy penumbras in the sudden darkness.

Milton’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out and pressed it to his ear.

“It’s Beau Baxter.”

“And?”

“Smith, are you outside in this?”

Milton ignored the question. “Get to it. Can you help?”

“Yeah, it can be done. You help me with our mutual friend, I’ll help get the girl where she wants to get and set her up with a nice new identity. Job, place to live, everything she needs. Want to talk about it?”

“We should.”

“Alright, buddy — tomorrow evening. There’s a joint here, does the best huaraches you’ve ever tasted, and I’m not kidding. I always visit whenever I’m in Juárez, compensation for having to come to this godforsaken fucking town in the first place. It’s at the Plaza Insurgents, on Avenue de los Insurgents. Get a taxi, they’ll know. Eight o’clock, alright?”

Milton said that he would be there and ended the call.

The lights of Juárez faded in and out through the eddies of dust and grit. The Hotel Coahuila’s neon throbbed on and off, the huge sign with a girl wearing bandolero belts and brandishing Kalashnikov machine-guns. He passed a police recruitment poster with a ninja-cop in a balaclava and the slogan ‘Juárez te necesita!’ — Juárez Needs You. There was no-one in the gate shack on the Mexican side of the river. No passport control, no customs checks, no-one to notice the Springfield that was tucked into the back of his jeans or the clips of ammunition that he had stuffed into the pockets of his jacket. There was no queue, either, and he pushed his way through the creaking turnstile and crossed back into Juárez.

28

The storm gathered strength. Milton took a taxi to the address that Caterina had given him. He told the driver to stop two blocks earlier and, paying him with a twenty dollar bill, told him to stay and wait if he wanted another. He got out, the sand and grit swirling around him, lashing into his exposed skin, and walked the rest of the way. It was a cheap, dingy area, rows of houses that had been sliced up to make apartments. He passed one house, the road outside filled with SUVs with tinted windows. The cars were occupied, the open door of one revealing a thickset man in the uniform of the federales. The man turned as Milton passed, cupping his hand around a match as he lit a cigarette, the glow of the flame flickering in unfriendly eyes. Milton kept going.

Caterina’s apartment was just a few doors down the street. Milton felt eyes on his back and turned; two of the SUVs were parked alongside one another, their headlights burrowing a golden trough through the snarling, swirling dust. He turned back to the house, walking slowly so that he could squint through the sand at the third floor. There was light in one of the windows; a shadow passed across it. A quick, fleeting silhouette, barely visible through the darkness and the grit in the air.

Her window?

He wasn’t sure.

A narrow alleyway cut through the terrace between one address and its neighbour and Milton turned into it, gambling that there was another way inside around the back. The roiling abated as he passed inside the passageway but it wasn’t lit, the darkness deepening until he could barely see the way ahead. He reached around for the Springfield and pulled it out, aiming it down low, his finger resting gently on the trigger.

The passageway opened into a narrow garden, fenced on both sides, most of the wooden panels missing, the ones that were left creaking on rotting staves as the wind piled against them. The ground was scrub, knee high weeds and grasses, scorched clear in places from where a dog had pissed. There was a back extension attached to the ground floor property, no lights visible anywhere. He looked up: there was a narrow Juliet balcony on the third floor. There was his way inside. Milton climbed onto a water butt and then boosted himself onto the flat roof, scraping his palms against the rough bitumen. He stuffed the Springfield back into his trousers and shinned up the drainpipe until he was high enough to reach out for the bottom of the balcony, shimmied along a little and then hauled himself up so that he could wedge his feet between the railings.

He leaned across and risked a look inside.

There was no light now.

He took the gun and pushed the barrel gently against the doors. They were unlocked, and they parted with a dry groan. He hauled his legs over the railings and, aware that even in the dim light of the storm he would still be offering an easy target to anyone inside, he crouched low and shuffled forwards.

He heard movement in the adjacent room: feet shuffling across linoleum.

Milton rose and made towards the sound. He edged carefully through the dark room, avoiding the faint outlines of the furniture.

He reached the door. It was open, showing into the kitchen. The digital clock set into the cooker gave out enough dim light to illuminate the room: it was small, with the cooker, a fridge, a narrow work surface on two sides and cupboards above. A man was working his way through the cupboards, opening them one by one and going through them. Looking for something.

Milton took a step towards him, clipping his foot on the waste bin.

The man swivelled, a kitchen knife in his hand. He slashed out with it.

Milton blocked the man’s swipe with his right forearm, taking the impact just above his wrist and turning his hand over so that he could grip the edge of the man’s jacket. The man grunted, trying to free himself, but Milton plunged in with his left hand, digging the fingers into the fleshy pressure point behind the thumb, pinching so hard that the knife dropped out of his hand. It had taken less than three seconds to disarm him; maintaining his grip, Milton dragged the man’s arm around behind his back and yanked it up towards his shoulders, pushing down at the same time. The man’s head slammed against the work surface.

“Who do you work for?” he said.

“Fuck you, gringo.”

Milton raised his head a little and slammed it back against the work surface.

“Who do you work for?”

“Fuck you.”

Milton reached across and twisted the dial on the hob, the gas hissing out of the burner. He pushed the button to ignite it, the light from the blue flame guttering around the dark kitchen. He guided the man towards the hob, scraping his forehead across the work surface and then the unused burners, raising him a little over the lit one so that he could feel the heat.

His voice remained steady and even, implacable, as if holding a man’s face above a lit flame was the most normal thing in the world. “Let’s try again. Who do you work for?”

The man whimpered. There was a quiet, yet insistent, crackle as his whiskers started to singe. “I can’t—”

“Who?”

“They’ll — they’ll kill me.”

Milton pushed him a little closer to the flame. His eyebrows began to crisp. “You need to prioritise,” he suggested. “They’re not here. I am. And I will kill you if you don’t tell me.”

He pushed him nearer to the flame.

“El Patrón,” the man said in a panicked garble. “It’s El Patrón. Please. My face.”

“What are you looking for?”

“The girl — the girl.”

“But she’s not here. What else?”

“Contacts.”

“Why?”

“They’ve been writing about La Frontera. El Patrón — he wants to make an example of them.”

Milton turned the man’s head a little so he could see him better. “Where can I find him?”

The man laughed hysterically. “I don’t know! Just look around. He’s everywhere.” He squinted at him. “Why would you even wanna know that?”

“I need to speak to him. He needs to leave the girl alone.”

“And you think he’ll listen?”

“I think he will.”

“Who are you, man?”

“Just a cook.”

The man laughed again, a desperate sound. “No, I tell you what you are — you’re fucked. What you gonna do now? Call the federales? How you think that’s going to go down, eh? You stupid gringo — El Patrón, he owns the cops.”

“I won’t need the cops.”

Milton snaked his right arm around the man’s throat and started to squeeze. The man struggled, got his legs up and kicked off the wall; Milton stumbled backwards and they went to the floor. The man was trying to get his hands inside Milton’s arm but he could not. Milton squeezed, the man’s throat constricted in the nook of his arm. He braced his left arm vertically against his right, his right hand clasped around his left bicep, and he pulled back with that, too, tightening his grip all the time, his face turned away. The man was flailing wildly, his arms windmilling, and he scrabbled sideways over the floor, kicking over the waste bin, treading dusty prints up the kitchen cupboards. His sneakers squeaked against the linoleum floor. He was gurgling, a line of blood trickling from the mouth. He was choking on his own blood. Milton squeezed harder. The man’s legs slowed and then stopped. Milton relaxed his grip. The man lay jerking. Then he stopped moving altogether.

Milton got up and flexed his aching arm. He poured himself a glass of water and drank it, studying the dead man gaping up from the floor. Early twenties, a cruel face, even in death. His eyes bulged and his tongue lolled out of blue-tinged lips. He crouched down next to the body, frisking it quickly: a mobile phone, a wallet with three hundred dollars, a small transparent bag of cocaine. Milton took the money and the phone, discarding the wallet and the cocaine, and then took a dishcloth and a bottle of disinfectant he found under the sink and cleaned down anything that he might have touched. He wiped the glass and put it back in the cupboard. He wiped the tap. He wiped the hob.

Milton took the man’s torch and went into the bedroom. The laptop, covered in stickers and decals — Wikileaks, DuckDuckGo, Megaupload — was under the mattress, where Caterina said it would be. He slipped it into a black rucksack he found in the closet and dropped the Springfield and the ammunition in after it. He climbed down from the balcony and followed the passageway back to the front of the house. The storm had still not passed. Visibility was poor. Milton walked back in the same direction from which he had arrived. He passed the parked SUVs, ignoring the man smoking a cigarette in the open door, his eyes fixed straight ahead. He found the taxi again and got in.

“La Playa Consulado,” he said.

He bought cheeseburgers, fries and Big Gulps from the take-out next to the hotel. He could hear the sound of the television as he approached the door to Caterina’s room. The curtains were drawn but light flickered against the edges. Milton stopped in his room first, taking out the revolver and ammunition and the things that he had taken from the dead man, hiding them under the sheet. He locked the door behind him and knocked for Caterina.

“Who is it?”

“It’s John.”

He heard the bedsprings as she got to her feet and then her footsteps as she crossed the room. The lock turned and the door opened. Milton went inside.

“You were hours.”

“I’m sorry. It took longer than I thought. Was everything alright?”

“The cleaner tried to come in but I sent her away.”

“Nothing else?”

“No. I’ve been watching TV all day.”

She looked tired and, despite the permanent glare of defiance, her red-rimmed eyes said that she had been weeping.

“Here.” Milton put the wrapped meals on the bed. Caterina was hungry and so was he; he realised that he hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast this morning. The meat in the cheeseburgers was poor, but they both finished quickly, moving onto the little cardboard sheath of greasy fries. Milton watched the TV as he put the food away; Caterina had tuned it to a channel from El Paso, news about local Little League sports, a fun run to raise money for cancer research, the pieces linked by glossy presenters with white teeth and bright eyes. It was a different world north of the river, he thought. They had no idea what it was like down here.

Milton put the rucksack on the bed and took out the laptop. “Is this what you wanted?”

“Perfect, thank you,” she said. “Did you — did you have any trouble getting it?”

“No trouble at all.”

29

Three more days.

Jesus Plato reminded himself, again and again, as he stared up at the bridge.

It was Wednesday today.

Just three more days and then an end to all this.

It was a fresh morning, a cool wind blowing after the fury of the storm last night. Plato was at the concrete overpass known as Switchback Bridge. The bodies had been called in as dawn broke over the endless desert, ropes knotted beneath their armpits, tied to the guard rail and the dead tossed over the side. They both dangled there, the rope creaking as they swung back and forth in the light breeze, twenty feet above the busy rush of traffic at the intersection. A small crowd of people had gathered to watch as a fire truck was manoeuvred around so that the ladder could get up to them. Former school busses from across the border, now ferrying workers to and from the sweatshops, jammed up against one another and, behind them, a queue of irate drivers leant on their horns. Just another day in Ciudad Juárez. Another morning, another murder. No-one was surprised, or shocked. It was an inconvenience. This was just how it was and that, Plato thought, was the worst of it.

He could see that the bodies had both been decapitated. Hands had been tied behind their backs and their feet flapped in the wind. He hadn’t had a proper breakfast yet, just a Pop Tart as he left the house, and he was glad. The bodies revolved clockwise and then counter-clockwise, bumping up against each other, a grotesque and hideous display. They were suspended between advertising hoardings for Frutti Sauce and Comida Express fast food and the sicarios had left their own message alongside their prey. A bed sheet was tied to the guard rail and, painted on it, was a warning: “FREEDOM OF THE PRESS” and then “ATENCION — LA FRONTERA.” A fireman scaled the ladder and, with help from colleagues on the bridge, the carcasses were untied, lowered to the ground and wrapped in canvas sacks to be taken to the morgue.

Plato was about to head back to the station when he saw John Milton and Caterina Moreno. The girl was crouched down, leaning her back against the side of his Dodge, hugging her knees tight against her chest. Her face was pale and, on the ground next to her, there was a puddle of drying vomit. Milton was leaning against the bonnet, his face impassive and his arms folded across his chest.

“What are you doing here?” Plato asked him.

“She knows who they are.”

“Who?”

“Up there.” He pointed. “She knows them.”

“Even without their — you know — without their heads?”

“They used to write for her blog.”

“Shit.”

“I know.” Milton pushed himself away from the car and led Plato out of the girl’s earshot. “She wanted to see them before I get her over the border. Warn them that they should get out, too. We went to their address but — well, we were too late, obviously. The place had been turned over. We saw the bodies from the taxi as we were driving back to the hotel. Went right underneath them. They were husband and wife. Daniel and Susanna Ortega.”

“This is what happens if you get on the wrong side of the cartels. There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

He pointed to the bridge. “That wasn’t a five minute job. There must have been witnesses — passing traffic?”

“They don’t care. No-one’s going to say anything.” Plato nodded to Caterina. “And it’ll happen to her, too — they won’t stop. When are you taking her across?”

“I’m working on that.”

The white morgue van backed away and drove away. The fire truck was lowering its ladder.

“Work faster.”

30

Felipe watched from the car as the Cessna 210 touched down on the rough gravel runway that had been constructed right down the middle of the arid field. It had big tyres and metal strips under the nose to protect the engine from stones. It was one of several that Felipe owned. He had sent it north this morning, touching down in a similar field in New Mexico to collect its passengers and refuel, and then to deliver them to him here. He stepped out of the Jeep. Adolfo had already disembarked and was leaning against the bonnet, watching as the plane taxi’d across the field, dust kicking up from the oversized tyres. Felipe shielded his eyes against the sun and waited for the plane to come to a halt.

“Wait here,” he said to his son.

“Padre?”

“Stay here.”

He stared at him sourly. “Yes, Padre.”

“Pablo.”

Felipe and Pablo crossed the desert to the plane. He was not particularly concerned about his guests. They would have been frisked before they got onto the plane and he knew very well that the fear of his reputation was the most effective guarantee of his own security. That said, you couldn’t be too careful and, with that in mind, Adolfo and the men in the second Jeep were all equipped with automatic rifles.

The ramp was lowered and the three passengers inside descended. Felipe was wearing a Stetson; he removed it, wiped inside the rim with his handkerchief, wiped his forehead, and put the hat back on. He paused and allowed the gringos to come to him.

“El Patrón?” said the man who had stepped to the front.

“That’s right.” He smiled at them. “Welcome to Mexico. How was your flight?”

“Was good — thanks for arranging it.” He was a thick-limbed Texan, tall, a little colour in his face.

“You are Isaac?”

“I sure am.”

“And your friends?”

“Kevin and Alejandro.”

“Your business partners?”

“That’s right.”

Felipe smiled at the other two. His first impression: they were not particularly impressive. Isaac was the owner of the business that they were going to use and was, not surprisingly, the most interesting.

Felipe turned and indicated in the direction of the two Jeeps. Adolfo and the other two men were lounging against the vehicles, the brims of their hats pulled down to shield their eyes from the glare of the sun. “We’ll drive back to Juárez and discuss our business.”

“Forgive me, El Patrón,” Isaac said. “Before we do, there’s something I’d like to clear up.”

Isaac was standing with the sun behind him and Felipe couldn’t see his face through the glare. Why hadn’t he made sure that he had approached the plane from the opposite direction? He clenched his teeth in frustration at his error and Isaac’s presumption. “Of course,” he said, squinting a little and yet managing to smile.

“Listen, I hope you can forgive me — I don’t mean to be blunt, but there’s no point in pussyfooting around it so I’m gonna come right out and get to the point. I’m sure you know all about this, but there’s a whole lot of coverage about the girls that are going missing over here. Someone’s been writing about it and now the TV channels and newspapers and such like over the border have got hold of it.”

“How is this relevant?”

“It’s extra heat, right? More attention? Makes things more — what would you say — more precarious.”

“I would say you shouldn’t worry. And that you should trust me.”

“I’d like to be able to say that I can, El Patrón, truly I would. I’m sure, in time, we’ll come to trust each other like brothers. But now, well, we don’t even know each other.”

His tone suddenly lost the avuncular tone he had been working hard to maintain. “What does that have to do with us?”

“The word over the border is that your men are behind it. They say they’re doing it for sport. Now, I’m sure that ain’t true, El Patrón, because if it was, well, yessir, if someone was allowing them to get away with hijinks like that then we’d have to question whether that someone was the sort of someone we’d want to get into business with. Not morally — I don’t care about none of that. It’s business — a person who’d allow someone to bring so much attention to his operation, well then, that wouldn’t make no sense.”

Besa mi culo, puto! Felipe breathed in and out: the sun in his eyes, the huevos on this man, coming over to Mexico as his guest and insulting his hospitality like this! It would have taken a moment for him to signal to Adolfo and his goons to bring up their rifles and perforate them, blow them away. All he would have to do would be to click his fingers. It was tempting, but he could not. Since he had ended his business relationship with the Luciano family — and ended it in such a way that a reconciliation was impossible — he needed Isaac and his pajero friends to distribute his product in the south-west. He had tonnes to move. Without them he would have to split the product between small-time operators and that would mean less leverage for him, less profit and much greater risk. It was impossible.

So he forced himself to swallow his anger and cast out a bright smile. “I know the stories, Isaac, and I can assure you, they are nothing to do with La Frontera. If I found out that my men were responsible, they would be dealt with. But they are not. The police here suspect a group of serial killers. In fact, they have already charged one man — perhaps you have read about that, too?”

Isaac shrugged. “That’s what I thought.”

“As I say, you needn’t worry. Now — shall we go? There is much to discuss.”

31

Anna Thackeray had almost forgotten about John Milton. The results of the first sweep had come back negative and then the second and then the third. She had tried everything she could think of trying, feeding every combination of selectors through every megabit of data that they had. She ran it again and again and again, working well into the night, but every variation, every clever rephrasing, none of them returned anything that she could use. Since he had disappeared, it appeared that Milton had neither used the internet in any way that could be traced back to him, nor been referred to by anybody else.

No emails.

No social media.

No banking activity.

No credit cards.

No immigration data.

Anna had been warned that he would be good at this, and she had not doubted it. But she had not expected him to be this good. Control had been right. It was as if he had sunk beneath the surface of the world, leaving not even a ripple behind him.

“What are you missing?” she said aloud.

“I don’t know — what?” David McClellan said.

“Excuse me?”

“Talking to yourself again.”

“Sorry,” she said, managing a laugh. “Just frustrated.”

“Going to tell me what about?”

“Not really, it’s—”

“—classified,” he finished for her.

“I don’t know — all this computing power, all this information, but if you really want to drop out of sight, if you can drop everything and get off the grid, all of this is useless. You can still do it. I keep thinking I’ll think of something different — anything — something that’ll change the results, but I know that’s not going to happen. This guy is either a hermit, living in some jungle somewhere, or he’s dead. If I was going to find anything at all, I’d have found it long before now.”

But she couldn’t give up, so she thought it through again.

Eventually, she knew, they would have to go out into the field. The realistic plan was to confirm her assumption that nothing concerning John Milton existed in any data that GCHQ or the NSA held. After that, she would appeal to Control to broaden the scope of the exercise. Interviews with victims, witnesses, reporting parties, informants. Anything that might buy her more information, more selectors to add to the sweep. She knew from unredacted excerpts from his file that he had been in contact with people in East London before he had disappeared. Elijah and Sharon Warriner. They would be a good place to start.

“Coffee,” McClellan said. “Look at you. You need caffeine. Fancy it?”

She stood and stretched, working the kinks out of her stiff muscles. “Sorry, David, I would, but I’m meeting someone tonight.”

He looked almost comically crestfallen. “A boyfriend?”

“A friend,” she said. She logged off and collected her leather jacket from the back of the chair. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The rendezvous had been arranged the day before and was to take place in the Beehive, a pub two miles away in the centre of town. Anna made her way into the car park where she had left her motorbike. It was her one concession to luxury in an otherwise ascetic life: it was the Triumph Thruxton, built in the style of the 60s, an authentic café racer in Brooklands green with low rise bars, 18-inch spoked wheels and megaphone-style silencers. It was a beautiful machine and she loved it. She lowered her helmet over her head, straddled the bike and gunned the 850cc engine. David was coming down the steps into the car park as she pulled away; he looked flustered, the wind billowing his open coat around him. He started as she twisted the throttle and revved the big engine.

The cloud was low and leaden and the wind was cold. She was thankful for her leathers as she hurried along the A40. She arrived at the pub ten minutes later, parked the bike and went inside to her usual table before the fireplace. A man was waiting for her. She didn’t recognise him, and that made her nervous.

“Haven’t I seen you before,” she said as she paused beside him. “Waterloo station?”

He was plain, early-middle age, a receding hairline, nondescript, just like they all were.

“I think it was Liverpool Street,” he corrected, completing the introduction.

Satisfied, she sat down. “Where is Alexei?” she said curtly.

The man spoke in quiet Russian. “He has gone home. Don’t worry about him. You deal with me from now on.”

“Fine. But in English, please. You are less likely to draw attention.”

“Sorry.” The man switched languages. “Yes, of course.”

“Have you done this before?”

“No. You are my first.”

She sighed. “Wonderful. Why couldn’t this wait until Saturday as normal?”

“Your last report has been passed to the highest levels. There are some questions.”

“A little more information about you before we can talk, please.”

“Very well. I work in the same department as you, but I work in the consulate. My name is Roman. I know you are going back to Moscow in two weeks and I know they want to sit down with you and talk officially about your work, your performance, and so on, but before that, we need further details after your last report.”

“Okay. What do you want to know?”

“The English spy — are you any nearer to finding his location?”

“Not yet. And I’m not sure that I’ll be able to. He’s good.”

“Too good for you?”

“Probably not. But they are withholding information from me. It makes it very much harder.”

“Have you seen Control again?”

“Daily progress reports. It’s all one-way, though. I get nothing back.”

“Do you know why they are looking for him?”

“He tried to resign. They wouldn’t tell me why. But they’re not happy.”

“The fuss with the other agent — in London?”

“Classified. Like almost everything else. But obviously connected.”

“What about him?”

“Milton? He knows how to drop out of sight.”

“But they value him?”

“Yes — very much. I get the impression he was one of their best. I’d say this has caused them serious problems. They are very keen to have him back.”

“Colonel Shcherbakov is to be kept up-to-date. You must contact me if you make a breakthrough.”

“Why is he so interested?”

“You know better than to ask that.”

“Yes. But —?”

“I believe they have something planned for Mr. Milton.”

Anna’s iPhone bleeped.

Roman cocked an eyebrow.

She took it out of her pocket and checked it. She had set up the system to ping her if any of her selectors were tripped. The message said that that was precisely what had happened.

“What is it?”

“The spy. I might have found him.”

She gunned the Triumph on the way back to headquarters, touching seventy as she weaved through the slow-moving evening traffic. She didn’t wait to strip out of her leathers as she hurried through security for the second time.

The report that the system had emailed to her indicated that the selector that had been triggered was for fingerprints.

A finger print?

Seriously?

She jogged to her desk and sat down and there it was: a scanned PDF of a row of fingerprints, inked onto a strip of paper with instructions in Spanish printed along the side in green ink. The strip had, at some point, been scanned and dumped into a database. The NSA’s XKEYSCORE program had picked it up in transit.

“No fucking way.”

She sat down and fumbled for her mouse, scrolling through the metadata.

“Fuck,” she said. The probability matrix was off the charts: the name, personal statistics, identifying features, the metadata all ringing back super-strong hits. But the prints themselves were the thing: the system had matched them with the positive set that she had taken from Milton’s SAS file and they were unquestionably the same.

The loops and ridges, whorls and arches, delta points and type lines.

One set fitted snugly over the other when they were overlaid.

That kind of thing couldn’t be a mistake or a coincidence.

It was him. There was no doubt about it.

She moused over to the second data packet that had been marked for her and opened it.

She nearly fell off her chair.

Pictures, too?

There were two: front and profile. In the first, Milton stared out into the camera. His eyes were the iciest blue and his expression implacable. He had a full beard and his hair was unkempt. The second offered a clear angle of the scar that curled down from his scalp. He was holding a chalkboard with his name and a reference number. Again, the board was written in Spanish. It was marked Ciudad Juárez.

“Hello, Milton,” she said. “I found you, you sneaky ublyudok. I found you.”