Salvation Row

Chapter One

John Milton peered through the rain that hammered on the windshield, trying to pick a path that would spare the car the deepest of the potholes that disfigured the muddy track. He had been driving for six hours, the headlamps on all the way, initially caught up in the throng of traffic as people sought to escape the city. Then he had been slowed by the terrain, the visibility, and his lack of familiarity with his surroundings. He rolled past a fork in the road, slowed and parked the rental on the margin of the road. It wasn’t much more than a backwoods track by this stage, cutting between groves of cypress trees that were garlanded in Spanish moss, heading straight into the heart of the bayou.

His directions told him to look for a big red maple tree.

Milton saw it, just off the road.

He had been in New Orleans for a week, arriving just as the meteorologists had given Katrina her name and warned the city that she was headed straight for it. People had initially laughed it off, and Milton had overheard plenty, suggesting that this would be no different than any of the other storms that made landfall here. But then the forecasters had become more and more apocalyptic, upgrading Katrina all the way to a category five storm and warning that she could be the big one. The mayor and the governor had issued mandatory evacuation warnings, and people had started to listen. It had been bumper-to-bumper gridlock until he was out past Norco, and even then, the roads had only started to flow easily when he exited at Laplace and made his way into the swamp.

Milton had been in hurricanes like this one before, and he knew what they could do. Some people still refused to evacuate, telling newscasters proudly that they weren’t going to be chased out of their homes, and Milton had looked at them and shaken his head at their blasé stupidity. He would have evacuated, if he had been given the choice. But his target was one of those stubborn-headed locals and, because of that, he had to stay, too.

Milton looked down at the instructions for a final time. He had followed coordinates that he had plotted into his GPS at first and then, when that had reached the limit of its utility, he had found the rest of the way with a set of written instructions that he would burn as soon as he was done.

It had been raining heavily for hours, the grim outrider of the monster that was gathering its resources out in the Gulf of Mexico. He stepped out of the car and onto the muddy verge and was quickly soaked through. He opened the passenger door and took out the shovel that he had purchased at the Walmart that he had passed on his way out of town. He rested it across his shoulder and started to walk out into the swamp.

He recognised the spot from the picture that he had been shown in London. There was a cypress grove, fringing a narrow clearing, and, at the centre of that, a large boulder sat incongruously amid the grass and foliage.

Milton went up to the rock, paced out three steps back into the clearing, and then started to dig. The ground was saturated, and the shovel sliced through the grass and sod with ease. He rammed the blade into the earth, pressed it home with his boot, scooped out the wet muck and slung it over his shoulder. He was quickly covered in mud. He worked for ten minutes, digging a wide trench until the shovel clanged against something metallic. Milton assessed the dimensions of the object and then worked around it, quickly excavating enough so that he could stand the shovel in the ground and haul the object out of the ground with his hands.

It was a metal locker, five feet long by a foot wide, secured with sturdy steel clasps. A large padlock held the lid closed. Milton took a key from his pocket and undid the lock, unthreading it from the clasp and opening the lid.

The first thing he saw was the M16 assault rifle, but he didn’t need that. There was a wide assortment of weaponry: a long gun, machine pistols, semi-automatics. There were boxes of ammunition in several different calibres. Night-vision goggles, scopes for the sniper systems, surveillance and anti-surveillance gear, and encrypted satphones. And more than a million dollars in banknotes of various denominations, sealed inside a series of waterproof polythene bags.

Milton didn’t need anything extravagant. He ignored the heavy artillery and selected a Sig Sauer P226, a discreet shoulder holster, and a spare magazine. He removed his leather jacket, slipped the holster over his shoulder and tightened it, secured the Sig in the holster and put the spare magazine in his inside pocket. Next, he took out a hideaway .25 NAA Guardian with a holster that could be Velcro-strapped around the ankle. He stood, replaced his jacket, closed the lid, reattached the padlock, and hauled the locker back into the ditch.

He took up the shovel and started to spread the displaced earth over it.

The rain fell. Cascades. Torrents. A deluge. The water poured from roofs and ran in full spate along gutters and into already overflowing drains. It gushed out of drainpipes, slicked the roads with wide pools of standing water, and saturated beds of hibiscus, banana and palm trees. It swamped hydrangeas, falling heavier and heavier until it surely couldn’t fall any harder. And yet it did.

John Milton slid the mud-slicked rental against the curb. He killed the engine and listened to the thrum of the wind, faster and stronger minute upon minute. A flowerpot was picked up and tossed off the second floor balcony of the apartment block opposite him, bursting into fragments that scattered across the flooded road. The wooden panels of the fence that demarked the border between the apartment block rattled and clattered against their posts, nails slowly prying loose, ready to fly.

And then, as if at the flick of a switch, the rain stopped.

He opened the car door, stepped outside, and cast an assessing glance up at the sky. The storm was churning its way across the Gulf of Mexico. They said the leading edge would be here in another couple of hours. The air felt damp and humid, and it smelled full of brine and sodden vegetation, as if the ocean had been dragged closer to the limit of the city. It was a Saturday evening, and streets that would normally have been busy, thronged with life, were empty. The indigo dome of the twilight was torn through with veins of yellow and blood red. It was as though the sun had not yet left, that it was planning a spectacular sunset to cow the anger of the storm. Milton paused there for a moment, staring to the south, to the deeper darkness that was gathering over the Gulf, and felt the electricity crackling through the air like a premonition. The storm wasn’t done. It hadn’t started, not yet. This was merely a drawing of breath.

He had taken a room in the Intercontinental. He stopped in the reception area. The clerk was standing behind the desk. He was watching a TV tuned to the local news. A radar image of the hurricane was playing as the anchor told people that they needed to get away from the coast. The storm looked like a huge vicious pinwheel.

“Any messages?”

The man looked up at him and saw the mud on his clothes.

“I know,” Milton said, shaking his had. “I slipped. I’m going to go and get changed. Any messages?”

“No, sir.”

The clerk was older, his lines bearing witness to his age, and to the other storms that he must have seen. “Wind blow you over?”

He nodded. “Can’t believe how powerful it is.”

“It’s not done,” he said. “That wasn’t nothing.”

They shared the moment, the sense of foreboding. “No,” Milton said.

“You should stay inside, sir. You’ll be fine, I was speaking to the guys down in the kitchen, got plenty of food and water, and there’s a big old generator in the basement if the power gets knocked out.”

“That’s good to know.”

“You want a drink? They’re on the house in the bar.”

“Thanks,” Milton said. “I might do that.”

Milton had taken a suite on the top floor. He took off the holstered pistol and hooked it carefully over the back of the chair. He took off his sodden leather jacket, taking a bottle of beer from the minibar and standing by the wide picture window. He was ten floors up, elevated higher than the surrounding buildings, and was treated to a panoramic view over the rooftops. Milton had a sense of foreboding. It wasn’t the hurricane, although that was part of it. It was what he had been sent here to do.

It was the man Control had sent him here to kill.

Milton had a way of dealing with it: he did not consider the men and women who were assigned to him for liquidation. He didn’t want to know their backgrounds, save the information he needed to ensure that he could hasten their departures from this world. He didn’t want to know about families, about histories, about the people who would miss them when they were gone. He didn’t want to know about any of that, but it invariably littered their files, and he was too much of a professional not to absorb every last detail. Standing there, high above the city with Mother Nature ready to unleash a hurricane, Milton felt very alone. There were some thoughts and experiences that he would never be able to share with anyone, burdens that he would always have to bear alone.

But that was his own fault.

It was the result of his own choices.

He had accepted his fate so blindly and for so long that there were no choices, not any more.

His mouth was suddenly bone dry, his desiccated tongue sticking to his palate, and he necked a good mouthful of the beer until the sensation was gone.

Milton stripped, went to the bathroom, and stood under the shower for ten minutes until the room was humid with steam. He got out, went to the mirror and swiped his hand to clear away the condensation. His blue eyes stared back at him, cold and unempathetic. He filled the sink with water and plunged his face into it, the cold shocking him around.

He went to the wardrobe and took out the clothes that he had brought for the occasion. He had a loud Hawaiian shirt, a pair of stonewashed Levis and a pair of oxblood loafers. He stepped into his trousers, arranged the shirt so that it fell loose around his waist, and then looked at his reflection in the full-length mirror. There you go. He looked like a tourist, the kind of rube who might easily wander into the French Quarter, even on a night like this, the sort who might be impressed by an ersatz Irish bar.

There was a knock at the door.

Milton went to the chair, withdrew the P226 and hid the holster in the drawer. He pushed the gun into the back of his trousers, the metal icy cold against skin that was still warm from the hot shower, and pulled the shirt so that it fell over it.

He went to the door.

“Yes?”

“It’s me.”

He unhooked the latch and opened up. Ziggy Penn was standing in the corridor, glancing left and right. He looked shifty and suspicious.

“Get inside,” Milton said curtly, standing aside.

Ziggy did as he was told. He was small and wiry, a succession of sharp points, all elbows, shoulders, and knees. He had a thatch of thick and unruly ginger hair, as stiff as wire wool, and his eyes seemed to bulge from their sockets. His skin was pallid, thanks to a life spent in front of a computer screen, and his cheeks and the hollow channels on either side of his nose were pitted with old acne scars. He was wearing a pair of cargo pants and a black Depeche Mode T-shirt.

“I told you,” Milton said, his voice tight and compressed with anger. “We don’t meet. You don’t speak to me. I’m here on my own.”

“I know that.”

“So?”

“The weather,” Ziggy said.

“What about it?”

“What about it? Have you looked outside?” He gestured at the wide window and the huge banks of pitch clouds that were rolling over the city.

Milton nodded. “It’s going to be rough.”

“It’s going to be a category five hurricane.”

Milton took the P226 and laid it on the bureau. “There’s no need for it to change anything.”

Ziggy stared at the gun. “Are we going ahead?”

“He’s here. McCluskey is here. I’m here. It’s taken long enough to engineer that. And look at it another way, where’s he going to go?”

Ziggy frowned, still anxious. “I suppose so.”

“No change. We’ll go ahead as planned.”

Chapter Two

Ziggy Penn went down into the basement and made his way across the parking lot to his rental car. He unlocked the door, opened it, and got inside.

He was not particularly reassured. Milton was right, of course, the operation had taken a lot of planning. The target was a transplanted Irishman who was presently going by the name of Jimmy Maguire. His real name was Gerry McGovern, and he had been a bagman for the Irish Republican Army throughout the worst years of The Troubles. He was here tonight to meet Peter McCluskey, a businessman who had emigrated to the United States in his twenties after a successful career as a Provo sniper in the bandit country around County Antrim. Since then, McCluskey had reinvented himself as a successful businessman with a string of Irish theme pubs all around the American south and southwest. By all accounts, he had foresworn his violent past and had crafted a new identity for himself. He had, it would have appeared to the casual observer, taken advantage of the particularly American facility for reinventing oneself.

Unfortunately for Peter McCluskey, the security services had discovered proof that corroborated the suspicion that he had not eschewed his old comrades-in-arms at all. Indeed, he had become even more virulent in his hatred of the British, had turned his back on Sinn Féin, and cast in his lot with the Real IRA, the off-shoot organisation that denounced the Good Friday Agreement and vowed to continue the war. McCluskey had continued to raise money so that they could buy their bullets and their bombs, and Maguire was here to collect that bounty. The decision had been made that those channels of funding must be stopped. The files of Maguire and McCluskey had been passed to Group Fifteen, and Control had assigned John Milton — Number Six — the responsibility for seeing that both men were liquidated.

Maguire was to be the first to go.

Ziggy was a field analyst for the Group, and he had been appointed to assist.

He turned the ignition and backed the Chevy out of the bay. He flicked on the lights and headed for the exit.

Life went on just as always in the heart of the French Quarter. The bars might have been quieter than they would normally have been on a Saturday evening, but they were far from deserted. McCluskey’s was doing a reasonable trade. It was the same kind of Irish pub that could be found all over the world. The interior was dark and inviting, the walls smothered by images of the Irish countryside, well-toned horses in mid-gallop, revolutionaries at play, a hurling team. The wide space was divided into a warren of tongue-and-groove snugs and seating areas, thanks to wooden partitions and stand-alone walls that were seemingly crafted from old biscuit tin lids and dismantled clocks. The bar was lit by lamps that hung from a ceiling held up by metal beams. Shelves bore dusty hardbacks, jars of sweets, an old slicing machine, Boyne Valley cornflakes, and scales for weighing out tea. There were framed pages from ledger books, the Chronicle and the Sligo Champion. Rattan stools were placed along a counter of solid oak that ran the entire length of the rear wall, broken by an arch that led through to a snug. It would have been evocative to the naive, perhaps even persuasive that the drinkers could have been in Dublin or Cork, but Milton had been in a similar establishment in London, and he knew the décor and the atmosphere were just the same there. It was all studied and fake.

He had no time for places like this, but he wasn’t here to enjoy himself. He had a job to do.

Milton took a beer from the bar and positioned himself at a window where he could look out onto the street. He took off the porkpie hat that he had bought at the airport to complete his look, and laid it on the table, twisting the felt brim between his thumb and forefinger. The rain had started again, just as hard and heavy as before, and the wind was picking up. A telephone wire thrummed high above the street, and rubbish from an overturned bin tumbled down the middle of the road as if fleeing the gale itself. Milton saw a working girl in a tight leather skirt, struggling to light a cigarette in the inadequate shelter of a doorway, and in the car parked alongside her, her pimp nodded his head to the beat of the music that was playing in his double-parked sedan.

He finished his first beer and went up for another. The alcohol hadn’t helped with the way that he was feeling. There was a cold lump of ice in his gut and his head throbbed with the start of a migraine, as if a rubber band had been looped across his temple and then slowly tightened.

His attention was disturbed by a group of musicians who were tuning up on a small stage area. There were six of them bearing fiddles, a bodhrán, a flute and a mandolin, and as he watched, they started to sing an old folk song that Milton thought he recognised.

And then he heard the voice in the tiny Danish-made receiver that was nestled, perfectly invisible, inside his ear.

“Six, Watcher. Come in.”

Milton wore a microphone, as unobtrusive as the receiver, beneath the tip of his collar.

“Watcher, Six. Go ahead.”

“He’s coming.”

Milton turned back to the window and saw the lights of a taxi as it turned around the corner of Ursulines and rolled up to the door of the bar. The rain was smeared across the glass, so it was difficult to identify the passenger, but Milton could see money exchanged. The door of the cab opened, and Peter McCluskey hurried across the sidewalk and into the bar that bore his name.

“You got him?”

“Affirmative.”

McCluskey was in his late seventies, but you would never have guessed. He was tall and well built, and he moved with an easy gait that belied his years. His hair had retreated to the back of his head, wisps of white that had been flattened down against his scalp by the rain. He had a large nose and cautious, suspicious eyes. He came inside, took off his jacket and hung it on a hook behind the bar. Then, complaining loudly that the room was stuffy, he opened the door and stubbed a wedge beneath it. The atmosphere was disturbed by a gust of damp wind, and, once again, Milton could smell the briny sea.

Milton watched as McCluskey turned to scout the room. His eyes flicked over him, but didn’t stop. There was no reason why they would; he had never seen Milton before.

He went to the bar and rapped his knuckles against it. The musicians stopped playing and the conversation petered out.

“Good to see you all tonight,” he called out in a strong voice. “A little bit of weather isn’t going to stop the craíc now, is it?” There was loud agreement. “Now then, because I’m grateful you’ve made your way through this filthy storm to my little bar, what do you say we all raise a glass to this fine city and tell Katrina that she’s not gonna go and disturb our fun? On the house.”

He raised his hand to the manager behind the bar and went over to an empty table.

“Six, Watcher.”

“Affirmative.”

“Get ready to party. Here comes Maguire.”

Get ready to party? Milton sighed. Ziggy was taking this too flippantly, as if they had been caught up in a Fleming novel.

He turned back to the window. A man was running down the sidewalk with a leather briefcase held above his head as an utterly ineffective umbrella. He passed beneath a street lamp that was swaying in the wind and hurried into the bar. Milton turned to the door and clocked him: early forties, big and strong. A nasty, brutal face. He had two large earrings in his right ear and a scar across his cheek. Jimmy Maguire had been a professional wrestler in his younger years, but now he was the liaison between the Provos and their American boosters.

He had led them to McCluskey.

And now he had been marked for death.

Maguire took a seat at an empty table, and McCluskey went over to him. He had collected a satchel from the bar and, as he sat at the table, he dropped it at his feet.

“The meet is on,” Milton said quietly.

Milton sat, watching them as discreetly as he could. He finished his beer and went over to the bar for another, waiting there and sipping it so that he could change his vantage point.

The two men were close together, conversing with concentrated, serious looks upon their faces. A combination of the background noise, the music and the howls of the wind outside meant that it was impossible for him to hear anything they said, but that wasn’t necessary. The cellphones of both men had been tapped for the last month, and Milton had read the transcripts. McCluskey had decided to sell three of his establishments, including this one, and he was intent upon donating the million dollars that he stood to make to the Cause. Maguire had been dispatched to thank him, and to sketch out the best way to transmit the money without arousing the suspicion of the authorities.

As Milton watched, he noticed McCluskey nudge the satchel across the floor to Maguire. That was one way, he concluded. Provide Maguire with hard currency and let him worry about laundering it.

Milton returned to his table.

Maguire raised his hand a moment, stalling the conversation, his other hand taking his cellphone from his pocket and pressing it to his ear.

“Are you getting this?”

“Hold on,” Ziggy said.

Milton’s fingers fretted with the coaster on the table, his eyes on Maguire’s face.

“Shit, Six. They’ve made you.”

Milton turned his head back to the window. “Say again.”

“The call. It’s from McGinn. He said he’s just heard from Dublin, there’s a British agent after him. They know.”

“Dammit. How?”

The Irishman looked up, turned to the room, and before Milton could look away, he found and held his gaze. Maguire turned to McCluskey, said something, and nodded in Milton’s direction.

Ziggy’s voice was fraught with anxiety. “What do we do?”

Milton bit the inside of his lip as he thought about that. There was no point in trying to continue. If Maguire had made him, there was nothing more to be done. He turned his head away and said, low and fast, “We abort.”

“After all this preparation?”

“No choice. Stand down.”

Maguire collected the satchel and set off for the door. McCluskey stood and started over in Milton’s direction. He glanced over at the bar and gestured with his finger that the barman should follow him.

“Number Six?”

Milton didn’t respond. He took a sip of his beer.

McCluskey reached the table. The barman was close behind.

“Excuse me, sir.”

“Number Six?”

Milton ignored Ziggy and turned to McCluskey. “Yes?”

“I wonder, you mind if I have a quick word with you?”

McCluskey had a solidity about him, a presence. Milton could smell the drink on his breath, the smell of stale cigarette smoke, and the rotten food that had clustered between his crooked teeth. He decided to play stupid and drunk. “What about?”

“Just a quick word. In the office, back behind the bar. Would you come with me, please?”

Milton assessed the second man: younger, heavyset, thick knuckles that were marked with a tattoo that he couldn’t read, sleeves of ink up both arms, a T-shirt that had been cut at the shoulders.

“Maguire’s leaving. I’m going after him.”

Milton gritted his teeth in frustration. He wanted to say no, to order Ziggy to stand down, but he couldn’t very well do that now.

“Sir?”

“I don’t know what you want—”

“See, I ain’t in the business of asking politely.” McCluskey pulled up his shirt tails to reveal the butt of a Glock. “And we know what you are. I’m telling you, get in the back. Why don’t we try to keep it civil?”

Chapter Three

Jimmy Maguire walked right past the rental without giving it a second look. Ziggy Penn watched as he crossed the road and got into a mauve Nissan. The courtesy light flicked on and then off, the rear lights flashed red and the headlamps glowed. The car pulled away into the empty road.

Ziggy gave him a head start of a hundred yards before he started the Chevy’s engine and set off after him. He had left the radio on, the volume down low, so that he could keep on top of what was happening with the storm. He turned it up as the announcer repeated the warning that everyone needed to find shelter. He said that anyone without anywhere else to go should go to the Superdome, but that there were already long lines of people who were trying to get inside. The governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, interrupted the broadcast to plead to anyone still left in the city to get to the dome or get out. She said that the storm was enormous, a monster. The words of another official were replayed, the man sounding like he was on the edge of mania, practically yelling out that it didn’t matter that landfall had shifted a few miles to the west. A dead hit wasn’t necessary for a hurricane as big as this. A glancing blow would still kill thousands.

He switched the radio off.

The last streaks of light overhead had been extinguished now. The black clouds were piling overhead, hundreds of feet high. Ziggy could feel the air pressure plunging. The smell in the air, the salt from the sea, now seemed to be mixed with something sulphurous.

Ziggy didn’t notice the Dodge with the blown-out muffler that pulled out and rolled after him.

Milton feigned drunkenness as he allowed himself to be hauled from his chair. McCluskey had his hands beneath his armpits and the second man, the younger guy, tugged at his shoulders.

“What’ve I done?” Milton stammered out with a mixture of faked bewilderment and fear. His act would confuse them, and it allowed him a moment to make his assessments. They couldn’t be sure that he was the man who had been sent for Maguire. Milton was concerned that the mission had been leaked, but he doubted that he had been compromised beyond that. Very few photographs existed of him. And no one, save Control and Ziggy, knew that he had been assigned this job. That particular inquest could wait.

The bar was still busy, maybe busier than it had been when he had arrived, and the patrons had dispensed with any pretence towards moderation and were plunging headlong into proper drunkenness. The band were playing loud, a series of vigorous folk songs that blended one into the other in a seamless barrage of notes and rhythm. The drinkers at the bar had glasses lined up like dead soldiers, their faces oily and slick. Two stranded Japanese tourists sat at one of the tables, the only people not already two sheets to the wind, sipping decorously at glasses of Scotch.

Not here. Too many witnesses.

The barman came up close behind him and started to pat him down. The P226 was impossible to miss. Milton felt the man’s hand as it closed around the grip, and then the metal, warm now from being pressed against his skin, as it was pulled out from the back of his trousers. Milton was facing McCluskey as the barman revealed the weapon. He saw the older man’s face change from uncertainty to anger.

“Let’s go.”

McCluskey squeezed his elbow and led him into the back. Milton permitted it. The second man followed close behind.

Ziggy picked up the car and kept it within easy sight.

“Six, Watcher,” he said into his throat mic.

There was no response.

“Six, Watcher. Come in, Six.”

Nothing.

“Come on, Six. Acknowledge!”

He felt the damp sweat as it gathered in his palms. His hands slipped on the wheel as he turned it. What had happened to Milton? This was bad.

He wondered whether he should abort. He could easily turn around and go back to the hotel. He would be safe there. He could wait the storm out and work out what to do next. Milton would return there, presuming that he was still alive. And, if he didn’t — if he wasn’t — Ziggy would be able to call London for directions. They would send backup. There were other agents, ready to be activated, who would be able to come and clean up the aborted mess of the operation.

He gripped the wheel tighter.

No.

What if Milton had left in time? He might not want to abort. If Ziggy kept a tail on Maguire, he could find him and finish what they had started.

Ziggy had been anxious about the operation. Shot up with adrenaline, but nervous, too. There had been too many times during his life where he had allowed his nerves to betray him. Too many times when he had thought twice and taken the safer, easier option. He had been lobbying for fieldwork for months. Damned if he was going to let his apprehensiveness get in the way of him improving his reputation.

No.

He was going to see this through.

He gritted his teeth, rubbed his palms against his trousers to wipe away the sweat, and kept driving.

They took Milton into the room behind the bar. It was a storeroom. There were trays of beers, bottles of wine and spirits. A desk was in the corner with a computer and a pile of paper arranged across it.

“You want to tell me who you are now?” McCluskey asked him.

The younger man had looped his arms beneath Milton’s shoulders, his hands clasped behind Milton’s neck. Milton’s stomach was exposed and McCluskey punched him there as hard as he could. He had some power in his fists, and Milton gasped as the air was blown out of his lungs. McCluskey hit him again with a left and then another right and then nodded to the man who was holding Milton up. His arms were released and he was allowed to fall to the floor, crashing heavily onto his knees. He bent double and retched, spitting phlegm onto the wooden floor.

“What about now? A little more talkative?”

Milton coughed.

“Let me tell you something, buddy, you’re about up to your nose in pig shit. You got to decide which one of two things is gonna happen next. One, you tell me who you are and who you work for, and we give you a little working over and toss you outside with the trash or, two, you don’t and I put a bullet in your thick skull. What’s it gonna be?”

Milton coughed again, loud and long. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

McCluskey looked up at the other guy, raised his eyebrows and said, “Number two, then.”

The hideaway .25 NAA Guardian was Velcro-strapped to Milton’s ankle. The barman had stopped his search as soon as he had discovered the Sig. That was an amateur move that Milton would never have made in a million years. You finished the job, always, or you ended up with your ticket punched. That was just the way it was.

Milton tore the little pistol out of the strap. He was so close that it would have been impossible to miss. The first round took McCluskey in the gut. The younger man was still fumbling his finger through the trigger guard of Milton’s P226 when the second round struck him. The Sig dropped from his fingers as he took a step backwards, looking down with bafflement at the blood that was leaking out of the hole in his chest. Milton quickly turned back to McCluskey. The old man was on his knees, one hand reaching for his Glock and the other trying to staunch the blood from the wound. Milton stepped right up close, pressed the .25 against the back of his head and squeezed the trigger. He dropped flat to the floor, twitched once, and was still. Milton turned back to the barman. He was still alive. Milton went across to him, held the gun against his temple, and fired a fourth, and final, time.

Six seconds.

No witnesses.

There was a doorway in the back of the room. Milton covered his hand with his shirt tail, turned the handle and opened the door. There was a narrow alley between the bar and the adjacent building, the wind squalling along it. Milton replaced the Guardian in the ankle strap, collected the P226, and stepped outside.

Chapter Four

Ziggy Penn kept a safe distance between his Chevy and Maguire’s Nissan, but he was aware that there was very little traffic on the roads and that he couldn’t hope that Maguire wouldn’t notice that he was being tailed. He didn’t know what he would do when that happened. He’d just deal with it when it did, he guessed.

They crossed the bridge over the Industrial Canal and turned into the grid of streets that made up the Lower Ninth Ward.

His earbud crackled.

“Watcher, Six.”

“Six, Watcher. I’m here.”

“Where’s that?”

“Just off North Claiborne Avenue. I’m following.”

“Negative, Watcher. Stand down. Repeat, Watcher, stand down.”

The Nissan reached an intersection. The traffic lights were suspended above the junction on a long arm fixed to a metal post. The wind was toying with it, blowing the lights back and forth, the post creaking as it was slowly teased out of the concrete baulk that fastened it to the sidewalk. Ziggy rolled up behind the car, putting the engine into neutral and letting it idle.

He heard the sound of the Dodge from the road to his left. He looked out and saw it, a hundred feet away, picking up speed rather than slowing down. He knew, too late, that he had been made and that what was about to happen was the price of his mistake. The engine of the Dodge roared louder and he looked back, seeing two white men in the front seats. Then the fender slammed into the side of the rental, blasting the door inwards, detonating the glass in the window. The car was tipped up onto its two right-side wheels and then, overbalancing, it toppled down and slammed against the asphalt. The Dodge was thrown into reverse, metal shrieking as the mashed fender was yanked away from the torn remains of the door.

“Watcher, report.”

Ziggy coughed, blood in his throat.

“Watcher? Come in, Penn.”

He coughed again, trying to clear his throat so that he might speak. His vision seemed to dim; an envelope of darkness closed in from the edges.

“Help,” he croaked.

Outside, the wind started to wail.

Milton broke into a car, hot-wired the ignition, and hit sixty as he headed out of the city and into the Lower Ninth. The radio had been left on by the car’s owner, and the newscaster was reporting that the storm had dropped from a category five hurricane to a category three and then changed direction and hit Gulfport instead of New Orleans. He ducked his head and looked up through the windshield into the tempestuous sky as if to confirm the information. It had weakened? That wasn’t obvious. It was still ferocious. The air pressure was still dropping, and Milton had to swallow to stop the popping in his ears.

He raced to the east, over the Claiborne Avenue Bridge and into the Lower Ninth. Most of the houses had had their shingles lifted clean off their roofs. Telephone poles had been torn out of the ground and snapped in two like matchsticks. Billboards had been ripped down the middle. The windows of strip malls had been punched in, and their roofs had been peeled off like the lids of tin cans.

Milton had heard the crash over the open channel. He tried to reach Ziggy, but there was nothing. Something had happened. The hurricane, perhaps, the car slapped by the wind and tossed onto its side? Or it was Maguire, ensuring that he was not followed, making his escape? Whatever it was, it was bad.

Ziggy was in trouble.

A convoy of police department vehicles flashed by in the opposite lane. Their flashers rippled blue and red but their sirens were muffled by the deafening roar of the wind. The road rose up on an elevated section, and Milton looked down to the left just as veins of lightning spread out across the sky. He saw a blue Chevy at an intersection, flipped up onto its side. It looked like Ziggy’s rental. He stomped on the brakes, feeding the wheel quickly through his hands as the stolen car slid around. He bumped across the median and took the opposite exit ramp. He drove down in the wrong direction, but figured it would be safe on a night like this. He looped around, speeding beneath the flyover, and drove to the intersection that he had noticed from above.

It was his rental. The rear of the vehicle was facing him. There was a small group of black and Hispanic men and women gathered around it. One man had clambered up onto the upturned side, looking down into the cabin. Others were clustered around the hood and the front of the vehicle. Milton brought the car to a stop and got out. As he ran across to the junction, he saw Ziggy Penn’s body as it was carefully lifted through the open windshield frame.

The crowd coalesced around Ziggy’s body as he was laid on the ground. Others were ambling out of their houses.

Milton pushed into the scrum. “Out of my way.”

“Easy, man,” said a man with shocking white hair.

“That’s my friend.”

There was a young woman on the ground next to Ziggy. She was stroking his head and, as she heard Milton’s voice, she turned to look up at him.

“You know him?”

“Yes,” Milton yelled over the roar of the wind. “Is he alive?”

“He’s alive, but he ain’t in a good way.”

“What happened?”

“I heard it. Our place is just over there. There was this huge crash, we came out, and this is what we saw.”

“The other guy?”

“Drove off. Didn’t get the plate.”

Milton knelt down. He knew a little battlefield medicine, but he didn’t need it to know that the woman was right. Ziggy was not in a good way at all. He had been knocked out, and there was a deep cut on the side of his head that was bleeding heavily. His breath was rattling in and out of his mouth, and it looked like his left leg had been broken.

“He needs a doctor.”

“My pops called 911, but they say they can’t tell us when an ambulance will be around. Full capacity, they said. The storm, you know.”

“The hospital, then?”

“I don’t know, sir. They were saying on the radio that they’re full.”

“Turning people away,” added one of the onlookers who was closer behind them.

“That’s not good enough. He needs help.”

“It’s what I was just saying to my mother before you turned up. My brother, Alexander, he can help. I called him. He says he’s coming over, if he can get here. If we can get your friend inside our house, Alex will be able to get him straightened out until we can get him to the hospital.”

“Where’s the house?”

She pointed across the road to a two-storey house that stood amid a welter of battered wooden shacks. “That’s us.”

Milton went around to Ziggy’s head and carefully slipped his hands beneath his shoulders. One of the men took his legs, and moving quickly, but carefully, they transported his unconscious body across the road and into the house.

Chapter Five

The house was on a corner plot. It was constructed on a raised foundation and had an asphalt roof that was bearing up well to the battering that it had received from the storm. The sidings were wooden planks, many of which had been secured with additional nails. There were five sash windows on the ground floor and each had been boarded over. The raised porch, which might have contained a table and chairs, had been cleared. The woman led the way, climbing onto the porch and opening the front door. Milton backed inside, cradling Ziggy’s body as gently as he could.

There was an elderly couple waiting just inside the door.

“What’s this?” the man said. “He the guy who got hurt in the crash?”

“That’s right, Pops,” the young woman said. “He’s pretty bad.”

“Well, you best bring him straight in and get him in the front room. Alexander be calling ten minutes ago. He’s on his way. Be here soon.”

Milton nodded to the man who had helped carry Ziggy from the car and, on a count of three, they hoisted him up again and brought him into the house’s main room. The light inside was provided by hurricane lamps. The warm orange flickered around a spacious and pleasant front room. The floors were polished hardwood, the ceiling featured crown moulding, and the furniture was clean and well maintained. They laid Ziggy on the sofa.

“Best of luck to him,” the other man said, nodding down at Ziggy’s recumbent form.

Milton thanked him, and the man nodded to the old man — it appeared as if he knew him — and left.

Milton turned to the young woman. “Could I get him some water?”

“Sure,” she said, her hand laid across Ziggy’s brow. “Kitchen’s out back.”

“I’m sorry — I don’t know your name.”

“I’m sorry, I should’ve told you. I’m Isadora Bartholomew. That’s my pops, Solomon Bartholomew, and that over there’s my mamma, Elsie. Who are you?”

“John Smith,” he said.

“And your friend?”

“Ziggy Penn.”

Milton went through into a pleasant kitchen with wooden work surfaces and patched-up appliances. He started to make an assessment of his situation. They were in a run-down part of town. The house was well looked after, but it couldn’t have been worth more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The furniture was well maintained, but cheap. The Bartholomews were a proud family, doing well with the little that they had.

Milton went back into the front room. Isadora took the bowl of water, moistened a dishcloth, and started to mop Ziggy’s brow.

“Your brother—”

“He’ll be here.”

“No, I mean, what does he do?”

“Like I said, just finished college. He’s smart.”

“Gonna make a fine veterinarian,” Solomon Bartholomew opined.

“A vet?”

Solomon shrugged. “Best help your friend’s gonna get tonight.”

Milton looked down at Ziggy and knew that he was in trouble. He hoped that Isadora and her father were right, and not just full of familial pride. Ziggy’s life depended upon it.

Alexander Bartholomew arrived twenty minutes later. He was driving an old Acura that looked like it had seen better days. The hurricane screamed as he pushed against it to open the car door, slamming it back as soon as he let go. He struggled against the wind, crossed the short yard, and came inside the house.

His mother embraced him. “Are you all right?”

“Don’t ever remember a storm like this. It’s worse than they said.”

“Gonna get worse before it gets better. I’m sure glad you’re here, baby.”

“Are you all right?”

“We fine,” she replied.

“The house?”

Solomon stepped forwards and clasped his son on the shoulder. “It’ll be fine. I battened it down good and tight this afternoon. We lose a few shingles, no big deal.”

“It’s crazy out there,” Alexander said. “They’re saying that there are gangs on the streets. Looting. God knows how the police are gonna manage.”

He turned, saw Milton and Ziggy, and stopped talking.

“This is—” Isadora started to say, before forgetting Milton’s name.

“I’m John Smith,” he said. “And my friend is Ziggy Penn.”

“That was you in that smash outside?”

“No, I wasn’t, I’m fine. Just him. He needs help.”

Alexander went over to the couch and looked at Ziggy.

“Can you help him?”

“I’m not a doctor. I’m training to be a vet.”

“But you’re the best he’s going to get tonight, right?”

“Bad luck for him.”

“The hospitals will be a waste of time,” Solomon said. “Mr. Smith is right. It’s you or nothing.”

He paused, taking a deep breath. “Probably.” He sighed, cursing under his breath and then added, “Let’s have a look.”

He undid Ziggy’s belt and pulled it out of the loops. Then, he unbuttoned the fly and took a pair of scissors, cutting down the seam. He carefully cut away the fabric so that he could look at the leg. Milton looked over his shoulder. The whole of the left leg, from the ankle up to the thigh, was discoloured with an awful contusion. The lower leg, halfway between the knee and the ankle, had been wrecked. A sharp splinter of bone had pierced the muscle and skin, a half inch, showing that was a shocking white against the purple and black.

“Shit.” Alexander winced. “Not good. Compound fracture. A bad one, too.”

He probed the rest of the leg with his fingers, following the line of the bones.

“What do you think?”

“Comminuted tibial shaft fracture. Broken in three places, at least. Displaced fracture here.” He pointed to just below the knee. Then, he indicated a spot above the shin. “Oblique fracture here. And the compound fracture here.”

“What do we need to do?”

“Hold on. Let me check the rest of him.” He worked his way around the rest of his body, pressing and probing with his fingers. “Might have a couple of broken ribs, too.”

“Can you help him?”

“A little, maybe. That’s an open wound. First thing, we need to stop it from getting infected. Is there anything else I need to know? Is he diabetic?”

“I don’t know.”

“Mom, Pops. I need a sterile dressing. Do you still have the first aid kit?”

“Sure we do,” Elsie said.

“I’ll get it,” Solomon said.

“You don’t know where it is,” the old woman said. “Come on.”

She led him out of the room.

“Anything else?” Isadora asked.

“A knife. With the sharpest point you can find. Clean it under boiling water. And keep Mom and Pop out. They don’t need to watch this.”

She nodded and followed her parents.

“You got a strong stomach, Smith?”

“Strong enough.”

Isadora returned with a green plastic case with a white cross on the front. Alexander opened it and laid out the contents: dressings, tape, gauze. She had a kitchen knife, too. He took it and pressed his finger against the tip. “Good,” he said. “That’s sharp. Can you get me a bucket of water and something to splint his leg against? And a roll of tape.”

She left them again.

“What do you need from me?” Milton asked.

“He has a lot of septic tissue around the puncture. If I don’t get rid of it, it’ll be infected, and if he’s lucky, he’ll lose the leg. If he’s not, the bacterial sepsis will kill him. I need to get rid of the dead flesh and a little of the healthy flesh, too. I need you to hold his leg. This is going to hurt like hell. If he wakes up, he’s going to kick. You need to make sure that doesn’t happen. I could easily slice through an artery.”

Alexander took a cushion, placed it on the arm of the sofa, and then carefully elevated Ziggy’s left leg until it was resting there. Milton moved around so that he could anchor it. He knelt on the floor next to him, placed his right hand above the knee and the left around his ankle. He braced himself, ready to exert as much force as was needed to stop the leg from moving.

“Ready?”

Milton nodded.

Alexander took the knife and started to debride the wound. He leant in close, his nose just a few inches from the wound, and started to remove the dirt and foreign bodies that had gathered around the area of the leg where the bone had erupted. There were pieces of glass, fragments of cloth from his trousers, tiny slivers of metal from the door. Patches of skin were blackened, already dead and rotting, and he used the knife to slice them away. He used the edge of the knife to scrape away the debris that had gathered on the shard of bone. He picked out several small pieces of unattached splinters that had been created by the pulverising force of the impact.

It took fifteen minutes. Ziggy shuddered several times, but he did not wake. Milton found that his hands were shaking a little from the adrenaline, but he had not needed to restrain him more than holding the leg firmly in place. Alexander washed out the wound, applied a sterile dressing and then fastened it in place.

Isadora had collected a broom and a roll of packing tape. Alexander undid the broom from the handle and laid it out along the length of the leg.

“I can’t set the bones here. That’s surgery. If I start messing with it, I’ll just make it worse.” He took the tape and started to unroll it around the leg. He used half of the roll, swaddling it generously until the handle was splinted firmly against his leg.

“Thank you,” Milton said.

“Don’t thank me yet. I’m worried that didn’t wake him up.”

“Concussion?”

“If he’s lucky.”

“And if he isn’t?”

“If he has internal bleeding?” He shrugged. “Then he’s dead. I can’t do anything about that here.”

“You think he has?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

Chapter Six

They finished treating Ziggy at just past midnight. Solomon and Elsie Bartholomew were hovering around outside the room, anxious to offer their help, but since there was nothing to do, Isadora sent them to bed. They were old, she said. They needed their sleep.

Milton doubted whether anyone would sleep tonight.

The room was lit by the lamps and a handful of tea lights that they had placed on the table and the windowsills. The light was warm and evocative. The hurricane shrieked outside, the winds rushing around the house and battering at it as if furious that it had the temerity to resist. Milton went to the front door, opened it and peered out. The wind had stripped the shingles from the roof of the house opposite and, as he watched, it uprooted the individual boards of a fence as if with gentle fingers, flicking them down the street at a hundred miles an hour. The windows rattled in their frames and a loose piece of siding crashed against the house, a last rattle before it was peeled off and flung away. That apart, the house was standing up to the battering.

Milton closed the door and sat down on the floor, his back pressed up against the wall.

“You want a drink, Alex?” Isadora asked.

Her brother opened his eyes and nodded.

“Mr. Smith?”

“It’s John.”

“You want a drink?”

He exhaled. “Thanks.”

Isadora went through into the kitchen just as Ziggy stirred, a low groan emitted between dry lips. Alexander went over to him, pulled back his eyelids and shone the flashlight on his cellphone into his eyes. He shook his head. “Still out,” he said.

“What do you think?”

“It’s a coma.”

“Serious, then?”

He looked at him as if he was an idiot. “Do I think it’s serious? He didn’t wake up when I cut his leg with a knife. What do you think?”

Alexander had a sharp response to everything. He was smart, Milton could see that very clearly. But his attitude was abrasive, as if he had a chip on his shoulder. He had snapped at his sister several times, lacing his replies with sarcasm. Milton didn’t even try to begin to diagnose him. He was difficult, but if Ziggy recovered it would have been entirely thanks to the young man’s efforts. He didn’t know Milton and he didn’t know Ziggy. He could have refused to help, but he hadn’t done that. Milton was prepared to cut him a lot of slack for that.

Isadora returned with a bottle of bourbon and three shot glasses.

“Izzy—” Alexander began.

“I know,” she interrupted. “It’s Papa’s. But I don’t know about you, but I could sure do with something right about now. If that wind don’t stop, it’s gonna peel the roof right off of this place.”

“Sure,” her brother relented. “Why not? It’s not like I’m driving home tonight.”

“Mr. Smith? Sorry — John?”

It was Milton’s usual practice to have a drink after the completion of an assignment. ‘One drink’ was putting it on the low side, especially recently; he had found that he needed more and more to forget the faces of the people he had dispatched. The addition of another two names to that long roster was not a reason to celebrate. He drowned himself in alcohol so that he might forget.

“John?”

“Sure,” he said. “Why not.”

She poured three large measures and passed them around.

“To your friend,” she said.

Milton turned his head to Ziggy and raised his glass. “Yeah,” he said.

He necked the whiskey and revelled in the warmth that spread out from his gut. Izzy and Alexander drank theirs with similar alacrity, and Milton did not object when she stood to pour replacements. Once he started to drink, he often found it difficult to stop. He would have one more, and that would be that. He couldn’t afford to relax.

Izzy sat down on the floor opposite Milton and extended her long legs. The candles on the table to her left cast her face in warm friendly light and Milton saw again that she was extraordinarily striking. Her skin was flawless, light chocolate, smooth and bursting with health and vitality. Her eyes were big and round, the same colour as her skin, and her lips were wide and soft. Her manner, too, was attractive. She was caring and seemingly completely open, uncomplicated and honest. Her brother was more of an enigma, with hidden depths; she was his antithesis, his mirror.

Milton found that he was staring at her. She looked over at him, noticed, and smiled.

“You want another?” she said.

His glass was empty. He hadn’t even noticed that he had finished it.

“No,” he said, although he had been sorely tempted to say yes.

“Sure?”

“I’m good.”

Alexander took the bottle and poured himself a third glass. Milton hoped that he or Izzy might take the bottle back to the kitchen, where he couldn’t see it, but he left it on the table.

Alexander looked at Milton. “What did you say you were doing in town?”

“I didn’t. Business.”

“What business is that?”

He fell back on the cover story that had been created for him. “I’m in IT. We’re over for a conference.”

“From England, right?”

“I am.”

He pointed at Ziggy. “Is he the same?”

“Yes. We work together.”

“So what were you doing down here?”

Milton had anticipated that question. It wasn’t an easy one to answer, and certainly not truthfully.

“Give it a break, Alex,” Izzy said. “What is this, 60 Minutes?”

“Just curious. Why would you want to come down here anyway? And in the middle of a hurricane?”

“It’s Ziggy,” Milton said. “He has a problem.”

“What kind?”

“Drugs.”

Alexander cocked an eyebrow.

“We were in a bar tonight. He got a call, the next thing I know, he’s off. Bang. Couldn’t get a taxi, so he breaks into a car and heads down here. I followed him. My guess, he was coming down to get whatever he needed. Coke. That’s his thing. I think he was coming to buy some. He has that crash and then, you know, here we are.”

“Seriously?”

“What can I say?”

“Shit,” Izzy exhaled.

“Yeah,” Alexander added with a curl of his lip. “Shit.”

“What’s the matter with you?” Izzy asked.

Alexander put the glass to his lips, left it there for a minute to savour it, and then knocked it back. “Nothing,” he said. “Bad mood, I guess.”

He got up and poured another drink, then looked morosely down at the golden liquid. He was about to say something, changed his mind, knocked back the whiskey in one hit and thumped the glass down on the table next to the bottle.

“I’m done,” he said. “I was up early. Need to sleep.”

“Have my bed if you want.”

“No,” he said. “Don’t be crazy. John and me can sleep down here. If he wakes up”—he indicated Ziggy—“maybe he’ll need me. We’ll see you in the morning.”

She nodded, pressed herself up to her feet and smiled sweetly. “In the morning.”

“Thanks,” Milton said. “You’ve been very good to us.”

“It’s nothing,” she said. “I guess, things were the other way around, you’d do the same for us, right?”

Milton was aware that Alexander was watching him.

“Of course,” he said.

Alexander’s lip curled up again, as if ready to deliver a sarcastic retort, but he kept his tongue.

“Night,” Izzy said.

“Goodnight.”

It took Milton an hour to get to sleep and, even when he managed it, it was fitful and unfulfilling. He found it difficult to relax in an unfamiliar place, and the hurricane howling around the house was a reminder of how vulnerable he was there. There were frequent bangs and crashes as debris was tossed around and car alarms sounded without surcease, the owners of the vehicles showing no interest in going outside to switch them off. Alexander, too, was agitated. They didn’t speak, but Milton could sense that he was awake.

He got up at six. The dawn was overcast with the remnants of the storm, and rain was still lashing down. At least the storm had blown itself out. He opened the door and stepped outside. The houses on the street had been badly damaged. Most of them had lost shingles, some of them naked beneath rafters that had been denuded of their covering. Yards were strewn with rubbish, windows shattered. Cars were nudged off kilter, some of them pushed across the street. As Milton stared out at the devastation, he counted another dozen locals who were doing exactly the same thing. They assessed the damage and, no doubt, wondered where they were going to find the money to replace the things that had been lost.

“Ain’t right, is it?”

It was Alexander.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, how is it fair that the poorest get hit the worst? Tell me how that’s fair.”

“It’s not,” Milton said.

He went back inside.

Elsie Bartholomew made herself busy in the kitchen. Alexander had suggested that he would drive home, but she had stopped him with the offer of breakfast. “Like you like it,” she said, and Milton had watched the first honestly spontaneous smile break over his face. He went over to his mother, stroked her arm and said that she’d persuaded him. She puffed herself up, pretended to be indignant when she said that there wasn’t any way a son of hers was going to go outside in that without a full belly, but Milton could see that she was happy to be teased by him.

Alexander had said that he would take a look at Ziggy when they all heard a deep, resounding boom. It could have been an electrical transformer, popping in the distance.

“What was that?” Isadora said.

There came another boom, and now Milton thought it sounded more like an explosion.

The old man looked concerned.

“What was it, Pappy?”

“I been in New Orleans all my life,” he said. “I was in the city in ’65 for Betsy. I’ll never forget it. They blew the levees back then. Bombed them, flooded the Lower Nine to save some of those rich white folks’ houses in Lakefront. I reckon it sounded just like that.”

“You sure?”

“Can’t be sure, but it sounded awful similar.”

Milton looked to Alexander. “We need to get him upstairs.”

The two of them carefully lifted Ziggy from the sofa and took him up the stairs. There were two bedrooms on the first floor. Elsie bustled ahead of them, opening the door to the room that she evidently shared with her husband, and insisted that they lay Ziggy on the bed.

Isadora shrieked, “There’s water in the street!”

Milton went over to the window and pulled the drapes aside.

She was right.

A torrent of water was pouring down the street, already a foot deep and lapping around the foundations of the houses. Milton knew that there were a series of canals close at hand in this part of the city and that the waters of Lake Pontchartrain were held back by a grid of levees. If the levees were broached or overtopped, this whole area stood to be flooded. As they watched, the torrent appeared to gather strength as more and more water gushed between the houses and down the road. It was already up to the porches on the neighbouring properties, and the level continued to climb. The water was chocolate brown, the surface refracting the light with a blue-green sheen of oil and industrial pollutants.

No one spoke.

No words would have done justice to what they were watching.

There was a shocking power to the water, matched by their complete inability to do anything to stop it.

“Shit!” Alexander said. “My car!”

Milton looked down to where the Acura had been parked. The water washed up over the hood, lapping up against the windshield. The front started to twitch and then the chassis lifted as the water picked it up from below. The car lifted all the way up and glided serenely away down the street.

“Shit,” Alexander said again, the anger crushed out of him.

Milton felt it, too: the dawning realisation that the hurricane was nothing compared to what was happening now, and what was about to happen.

“We need to get higher,” he said.

Alexander’s hostility had disappeared. “There’s the attic? Pappy?”

“Lot of stuff up there,” the old man said. “But, yeah, sure.”

Milton left Ziggy with Alexander and followed Solomon out into the hall. There was a wooden hatch in the ceiling and, climbing onto a chair, he reached up and pushed the wooden panel up and then away from the opening. He reached up for the lips of the opening and pulled himself inside. Solomon had found a flashlight and passed it up to him. Milton switched it on and shone its beam around. The attic was small, formed beneath the angle of the pitched roof. It was used as a storage area for bits and pieces of furniture, luggage, and black garbage can liners full of old clothes. Milton swung the torch up to the roof to look for another hatch that would allow access outside. There was nothing.

“Any way to get out onto the roof?”

“No, sir,” Solomon called back up to him. “Not that I can recall.”

“Do you have a hammer?”

“Downstairs. I’ll go get it.”

“Water’s coming in,” Alexander said. “You stay upstairs. I’ll get it.”

Milton walked to the sloping roof and aimed the torch along it, looking for an area that might be weaker than the rest. He tore off a sheet of insulating foam to expose the sheet rock beneath. It had been constructed well and repaired regularly over the years.

“Here,” Alexander said, boosting himself into the attic and handing Milton a claw hammer. His trousers were soaking wet.

He inserted the hammer into a space between the sheets and yanked hard. The boards splintered, nails popping out. Milton drove the hammer into the widened gap and levered it hard for a second time. One of the boards was pulled right back and he was able to use his hands to tear it away, discarding it behind him. He used the hammer to smash through the shingles, admitting shafts of light into the dusty attic. Alexander came alongside and helped, both of them tearing the shingles away and tossing them out through the ever-widening hole.

“How deep is it down there?” Milton asked him.

“Up to my thighs and still coming.”

“We need to get them all up in here.”

Alexander looked around. “There’s no space.”

“All this stuff, we’re going to need to throw it out.”

“Ah, man.” Alexander looked at it. Milton could see that he knew there were plenty of childhood memories in those bags and, after a moment of hesitation, he nodded resolutely. “Ain’t nothing else we can do. Come on, then. Let’s do it before Mom and Pop know what’s going on.”

They heaved the furniture out first of all, listening as the chairs and then a bureau thumped and rumbled down the shingles, hitting the water with a splash. When they were done, Milton thought that there would probably be enough space. They took the rest of the bric-a-brac and pushed it up into the shallow corners, out of the way of the exit that they had torn in the ceiling.

Milton lowered himself through the hatch and dropped down into the hallway. He went to the stairs and looked down. The water was already four or five feet deep in the front room. The furniture was floating on the tide, the chairs and the table bumping against each other and the walls. There was a series of louder and louder cracks, and then the weight of the water shattered the glass and flowed out through the windows.

Milton went to the bedroom. Isadora was sitting next to Ziggy, mopping his brow with a wet sponge that she had taken from the bathroom. Solomon was looking out of the window, a disconsolate expression on his face. Elsie was at the dresser, hurriedly putting items of clothing into a bag.

“We all need to get into the attic,” Milton said. “We’ll move Ziggy first, then Elsie, then Solomon, then you, Isadora. All right?”

“Yes,” Elsie said.

“You need anything?”

“Solomon’s pills? He has medicine for his heart. Can’t leave that.”

“Get anything like that as quickly as you can. The water is still rising. We can’t stay here.”

Milton went to Ziggy and slid his arms beneath his recumbent body. He cradled him easily enough and carried him to the hatch. Alexander was waiting at the top. Milton wrapped his arms around Ziggy’s waist and climbed onto the chair, then boosted his body up until Alexander could grab his wrists and pull him into the attic. If he did have broken ribs…Milton shook his head, no point thinking about that now. Elsie hurried out of the bathroom with her bag. Milton helped her onto the chair, put his hands around her waist and boosted her up to her son. Alexander heaved, Milton pushed, and the woman clambered through the hatch. Solomon was next, insisting that he could manage but baulking when he got up onto the chair. Milton boosted him, too.

Isadora was last. The water was lapping against the top tread of the stair now and, as they waited for her father to be pulled clear of the hatch, it pooled over and started to creep down the wooden floor to them.

“I don’t believe this,” she said quietly. “Their house. How are they going to manage?”

“That’s for worrying about later,” Milton said firmly. He nodded to the water. “There’s nothing we can do about that now. We just have to stay above it.”

She looked at him with wet eyes.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll make sure they’re all right. But we need to get up there with them, okay?”

She nodded.

Milton helped her onto the chair, climbed on after her, and then put his hands around her narrow waist. She was not heavy, and he had no difficulty lifting her so that her brother could snag her hands and haul her the rest of the way.

The boards on the landing window had been peeled off. Milton went back to the window, sloshing through ankle-deep water, and looked out. The water was halfway up the sides of the houses now, and still it was coming. Waves were rolling down the street, debris carried on the tide. Milton saw pieces of furniture and sheets of paper in the water. And then he saw a car, its windshield wipers incongruously flicking back and forth. The Chevy that Ziggy had been driving last night was long gone, as was the car that Milton had boosted to come after him. As he watched, the house opposite the Bartholomews’—which had been barely more than a shack — was crumpled as the weight of the water proved too much for the thin walls. First one side collapsed, then another, and then the roof came splashing down. The current devoured it greedily, snapping the sides into smaller pieces and then swallowing them away. Milton saw furniture snatched out of the opened structure and then, as he watched impotently, he saw the elderly man who must have owned the property as he grabbed onto a plank from one of the two surviving walls. He managed to hold on for ten seconds, but then his grip failed him and he, too, was swept away.

Milton went back to the hall and pulled himself up into the attic.

The waters had swelled and deepened all the way through the morning. The level in the house continued to climb and, when it was just a few inches away from the opening to the attic, Milton suggested that now was the time to get out onto the roof.

The roof had a steep pitch, but there was a dormer that protruded up, away from the house, offering an easier spot for them to wait. Ziggy rested against the dormer, his legs dangling over the edge of the roof. Solomon and Elsie clung onto one another, and their children stared out into the grey murk with expressions that flickered between anger, shock and fear. They sat there in silence for the most part, just looking out at the awesome devastation that had been wrought around them.

The electric grid had been one of the flood’s first victims. They watched the transformers blow, one by one. Without power, the pumps that should have sucked water out of the storm sewers had failed, and then they had become flooded themselves. Gas mains had been wrecked, some of them ignited, staining the dark waters with a greenish glow that burned from beneath.

Milton sat on the pitched roof of the house, straddling it, and looked out onto the grim vista. He could see the humped shapes of the houses that had not been washed away and the figures of people sheltering atop them. One family had taken a bed sheet and painted HELP on it in wide stripes of red paint. Men and women called out for help that wouldn’t come for hours. He heard the sound of a baby’s cries, close at hand, and then the desperate sobbing of its mother. There was nothing that he could do. Nothing that anyone could do.

“Man,” Solomon said, speaking into the stunned silence. “Being born black in New Orleans is like being black twice.”

The hurricane had moved away, leaving behind a margin of comparative calm that was more like an autumnal storm. The palm trees that had not been torn out of the ground or submerged had stopped their frantic jerking, their fronds swaying limply in the lessening wind, bedraggled from their soaking. Most of the neighbourhood was now hidden beneath ten feet of water, deeper in places. The alignment of the street was only discernible from the rooftops and the tops of yard trees that broke the waterline like an apology.

Isadora shuffled next to him.

“I was supposed to have an exam today,” she said.

“For what?”

“My studies.”

“You didn’t say you were studying. What is it?”

“Law. These folk, they get a rough deal a lot of the time and there aren’t too many places they can go for help. When I pass the bar, I want to set up a practice to help people from around here.”

“She’s always been like that,” Alexander interposed.

“Like what?” his sister said.

“A bleeding heart,” he said. “Liberal.”

“My brother thinks that people around here should be able to help themselves. He thinks it should have nothing to do with the government.”

“That’s what we did,” he said. “We didn’t get help.”

“You think they’ll be able to help themselves now?” she asked him.

He turned away and looked out over the flooded vista, the awful devastation of what had happened in just a few short hours and, swallowing hard, he chose not to answer.

Milton looked down and saw the body of a fat black woman in the water. Her colourful dress had inflated with air, spread out on the water around her like the petals of a flower. She bumped against the side of the house, spun off and continued down the street. Isadora was looking up into the sky, her face streaked with drying tears, and Milton said nothing. The body of the woman, rotating with perverse grace, continued on its way until it had passed from view.

Solomon was mumbling about how this was it, the fulfillment of the prophecy about how nature was going to swamp the bowl that New Orleans was built in. No one disagreed.

“How long are we going to be stuck up here?” Alexander muttered.

“Long as it takes,” his father said. “They ain’t gonna be hurrying down here. Make sure the French Quarter is good first. Ain’t gonna want anything to happen up there.”

Milton watched as an upside-down houseboat floated right down the street by the house, turning in the confluence of competing currents at the intersection, jerking, and then finally wedging against the lattice of two bent street lamps.

The clouds parted just after midday and a hot sun shone down. The heat was powerful, and there was nowhere for them to shelter. It baked the roof and soon it wasn’t possible to touch the shingles without burning your hands. The humidity made the air thick and soupy, and Milton was soon covered with sweat. The heat had other, even less pleasant consequences. There were plenty of things in the water that were liable to decompose, and the stench of it was quickly all that he could smell. Dead animals that had been swept inland from the wetlands to the northeast, rotting food, and, over all of it, the dead bodies of people still trapped in their houses. Corpses, too, floating free. Milton saw evidence of several: the top of a shoulder, a hand, a leg, the rest of the body dragged down beneath the surface. The others saw them, he knew, but no one passed comment.

The first boat arrived just after two in the afternoon. They heard the motor first, a steady chug as it glided around the corner where a strip mall had once stood. It sent out a gentle bow wave, the water freighted now with raw feces and toilet paper from shattered sewer mains. The boat was packed to the gunwales with first aid kits, food and bottled water. The cargo was lashed down to the bottom of the boat, a tarp spread over it.

The people on the roofs of the houses started to yell and holler for help.

There was a blare of electrical distortion, and then the voice of the second man in the boat was amplified through a bullhorn. “Stay where you are. Help is on the way.”

“Help is on the way now? What about three hours ago when my daddy died?”

“Stay in place,” the man repeated.

“You gotta get us down from here!”

“We don’t have room in the boat right now, but, when we’ve unloaded, we’ll come back and take as many as we can.”

The atmosphere became more hostile as it was obvious that the boat was not going to stop.

It chugged alongside the Bartholomew house.

“We got a badly injured man up here!” Alexander called down.

“‘Fraid that don’t make him special,” the pilot called back up. “Look around. We got a whole parish like that.”

“No, this is different. He was in a car crash last night. He’ll die if he doesn’t get proper care and shelter. He can’t stay here.”

There was a pause as the man conferred with his colleague. “All right,” he called back. “We can’t get him in here, but I’ll put a call in to the Coast Guard. They’ll send a chopper. Hold tight.”

The helicopter was a big Sikorsky MH-60 Jayhawk. It was another two hours later before it clattered low over the rooftops, the downdraft sending frothing waves to roll against the sides of the houses. The pilot nudged up the nose and bled away the speed, hovering carefully and then sliding across so that it was just above and to the right of the house. Milton looked up and saw that the side door was slid all the way open and a hoist was in place, with a man strapped into a harness.

Milton was on one side of Ziggy and Isadora was on the other.

It might have been the noise of the chopper or the force of the downdraft, or it might just have been a coincidence, but Milton felt Ziggy’s fingers drift across the back of his hand. They slipped around his wrist and squeezed, very gently. Milton looked down at him. His eyes were open.

“Where…?”

The helicopter was much too loud for Milton to make out what he had said. He had to lean down so that his ear was next to his mouth, and then he made him repeat it.

“Where… am… I?”

Milton put his mouth next to Ziggy’s ear. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

“I feel like a horse just kicked me in the chest.”

“You need to take it easy.”

“What happened?”

“You were in a car crash.”

“Shit,” he said, sudden recognition blooming across his face. “Shit, Six.”

“Quiet,” he hissed.

Ziggy tried to sit, gasping from the sudden pain.

“Relax,” Milton urged, his hands on Ziggy’s shoulders.

He spoke with sudden vehemence. “Did you get them? Maguire? Did you get him?”

It was loud, too. Isadora looked across at him, her forehead crinkling with confusion.

Milton very carefully put his spare hand around Ziggy’s and squeezed. “Don’t talk,” he said. “We’re getting you out of here.”

Milton looked up at the underside of the helicopter. The crew member had activated the winch and had started to descend, his legs dangling thirty feet above them. Milton looked down at Ziggy, worried that he wouldn’t know what he was saying. What would happen then? The Group didn’t announce itself to the local authorities when it went about its business. It was not in the business of cooperation or prior approval. What if they asked him questions and he wasn’t switched on enough to deflect them? What if they shot him up with morphine. What would happen then?

Ziggy had closed his eyes again.

All Milton could do was hope that he remembered his cover story when he awoke. There would be questions about why he had been in the Lower Ninth, questions that would not fit neatly with the story that had been concocted for them back in London, before they had set off, but there was nothing that Milton could do about that. He had no choice but to hope that the confusion and disruption of what had happened and was happening to the city would be a good enough distraction. An unusual story from one man, soon to be pumped full of sedatives, could be forgotten in that mad, bewildering mêlée.

They were finally taken down from the roof as the night was drawing in. They had been perched there all day. Milton’s skin had been burned, and they were all subdued and woozy from the weight of the broiling heat. Milton and Alexander helped Solomon and Elsie, holding onto their hands and lowering them down to the NOPD officers in the boat below. Isadora went down next and then Alexander. Milton held onto the edge of the roof, taking one last look at the expanse of water that had swamped the neighbourhood, and then clambered down onto the deck of the boat.

“Anyone else up there?” the cop said.

“No,” Milton said. “I’m the last.”

The boat had collected the people who had been sheltering on several nearby houses, and it was cramped. The pilot fired up the outboard and steered the boat out into the middle of the street, away from submerged obstructions that might otherwise snag it. The atmosphere was muted, depressed, as the residents were given a new perspective of a street that was simply unrecognisable from the one that they remembered.

Izzy worked her way around until she was next to him.

“Look at this,” she said. “Look at it all.”

“It’s incredible,” Milton said.

“How are they going to fix it all? These people have no money.”

He shook his head, unsure what to say.

“You know what’s funny? The mayor, the city, they’ve been wanting to clean up the Ninth for years. God just went and did it for them. Wiped the whole slate clean, just like that.”

The boat chugged along quiet streets to the higher ground to the west. The people aboard were silent, gaping at the buildings that had been wrecked and the spaces that had appeared where other buildings had been destroyed and swept away. They came upon the houseboat that Milton had seen earlier. It had been pushed upwards so that it was on its side, propped against the wall of a 7-Eleven. The scale of the cleanup was incomprehensible.

“What are you going to do now, John?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“You’ll go home? Back to London?”

“Yes,” he said. “I don’t know when, though. I doubt the airport is open.”

She smiled, but didn’t say anything. Milton felt a shudder of shame. He was complaining about a little inconvenience. What was that? He might have to wait a little, but he could just leave. He could board a jet, either here or somewhere else, and he could put all of this behind him. Isadora and her family did not have that luxury. They were stranded, their house destroyed, their things ruined. Where would they live? How could they even begin to put things right? Milton felt foolish, but he didn’t know what to say to apologise without making himself feel even worse.

Izzy sensed his discomfort. “We’ll be all right.”

“Where will you go?”

“I’ve got an uncle in Shreveport. There, I guess, until this gets fixed.”

“I feel bad. Just being able to leave.”

“It’s not your fault. What are you going to do? Stay here? I expect you’ve got a family to go to.”

“No,” he said. “No family.”

“But friends. A job, things you have to do?”

Milton was about to say that he didn’t have any friends, either, but he held his tongue. The mention of a job had made him think of Control and the report that he was going to have to file about the events of the last two days. He realised, and not for the first time, that he would have given almost everything to be absolved of his responsibilities, the necessity of going back to London, the debrief, the training, and the wait for another file to be allotted to him. A red-fringed file, stamped SECRET and EYES ONLY, the subject of the file marked for death at his hand. He realised, miserable because it was utterly out of the question, that he would have liked to have been able to stay here. He would have liked to have been able to help in whatever small way that he could.

The boat edged onwards.

“Thank you,” Milton said. “You didn’t have to help us last night.”

“Sure we did.”

“I don’t think everyone would have been so kind. I appreciate it. If I’m ever back in town and I can help you, you’d only have to ask.”

“That’s nice,” she said, resting a hand on his elbow. “I’d like to see you again. But it’s not very likely, is it? I mean, really? You have a life to lead. Why would you come back to this? I’m not sure that I would.”

She left her hand on his arm as the boat slowed, edging along to a spur of land that poked up from the glassy surface of the floodwaters. It had been turned into a makeshift jetty, with boats jostling for position as they sought the spaces to unload the people that they had rescued. Milton reached down for a mooring line and tossed it over so it could be looped around a baulk. The boat was hauled alongside. Milton climbed onto the gunwale, hopped across, and then reached back to help the others off. Izzy and Alexander waited until everyone else had been removed and then clambered across themselves.

The boat was untethered. It reversed away and chugged softly back into the flooded streets again.

“This is it, then,” Izzy said.

Milton extended his hand. Alexander, who had been subdued all afternoon, took it, his grip loose. “Thank you,” he said. “You saved my friend’s life.”

He shrugged. The afternoon seemed to have bled all the attitude out of him.

“And thanks again, Izzy.”

She took his hand and reached up to kiss him on the cheek. “Stay safe, John.”

Milton called for help and a Group Fifteen sleeper agent was activated, arriving in New Orleans past midnight and driving him to the airport at Baton Rouge. As they drove out of the city, Milton looked again at the damage that the hurricane had wrought. The miles of buildings that had been stripped of their shingles, the windows that had all been stove in, the whole stands of trees that had been flattened, the evidence of the storm’s contemptuous power. The smell was everywhere, too, even away from the flood: the smell of raw sewage, industrial chemicals, and the sweet underpinning of decomposition. The driver, a man whom Milton had never seen before, said nothing, but he could see that they were thinking the same thing. How it was that a twenty-first-century American city had been reduced to this, degraded, cast back a thousand years in the span of a few short hours?

The driver told him that Ziggy Penn had been taken to a medical facility and that the initial assessment was that he was out of danger. Alexander Bartholomew’s work had saved his leg and, most probably, his life.

The driver stopped in the drop-off area at the airport and Milton got out. The heat, even at this late hour, felt like stepping into the damp warmth of a commercial laundry. Milton walked through the terminal, passing the thousands of people begging for seats on the next planes out and the thousands who had given up. They were now camping on the floor in the vain hope that they might be able to leave tomorrow. A Group Fifteen contact had arranged a seat for him on a packed flight to Atlanta and, from there, a seat on the Delta transatlantic flight to London. He stopped at a Starbucks for a coffee and made his way to check in.

He felt guilty, again, that he was able to wash his hands of everything he had seen, board a jet and fly away. He thought of the Bartholomews, and all the others who didn’t have that luxury. They were good people, and their lives had been torn up. He was, by any measure, a bad person: a professional murderer, inured to ordeals like this by the power of his employer. Life was unfair. It bothered him more than usual as he shuffled into the queue, waiting for security.