Triple Crown

A mile and a quarter

Churchill Downs, Louisville, Kentucky

First Saturday in May

Run every year since 1875

3

‘America?’

‘Yes.’

I was on the telephone to Faye, my sister. Her with the cancer.

‘How long for?’

‘I don’t really know,’ I said. ‘But not for too long, I hope.’

For as long as it takes, Tony had said.

‘On holiday?’

‘No. I’m going to be on attachment to the American anti-corruption agency. It’s like an exchange. Their Deputy Director has been here with us at the BHA for three weeks and I’ll be doing the same over there.’

‘When do you go?’ she asked.

‘I’m already at Heathrow. My flight leaves in an hour.’

‘That was rather sudden.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I only knew about it myself two days ago. I should have called but, you know how it is, I’ve been busy getting everything done ready to leave.’

‘Is Henrietta with you?’

‘No,’ I said.

There was a silence from the other end of the line as Faye waited for me to expand my answer. I didn’t.

‘It is over then?’ she asked finally.

‘Pretty much,’ I said. ‘We live in different worlds.’

Henrietta had been my girlfriend for the past few months. An initial whirlwind romance that had cooled almost as quickly as it had started. Such was life.

‘Does she know you’re going away?’ Faye asked.

‘I told her last night,’ I said. ‘I think she was relieved.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Yes, so was I. But it was no good trying to go on if it didn’t work.

‘You’ll also miss Quentin’s birthday.’

Quentin was Faye’s husband, my brother-in-law, and missing his birthday was not something I would be losing any sleep over, unlike Henrietta.

‘When is it?’

‘Next weekend,’ Faye said. ‘I was going to ask you over.’

‘I’ll send him a card.’

‘Right.’

She seemed distant, as if thinking of something else.

‘Is everything OK?’ I asked.

‘Absolutely.’

There was something about the way she said it that convinced me that things were absolutely not OK.

‘Are you well?’ I asked.

A simple question with so many unspoken nuances.

There was another silence from her end.

‘Faye, what’s wrong?’ I asked earnestly.

‘I’m told it’s nothing to worry about.’

‘What is nothing to worry about?’ I asked, with dread in my heart.

‘I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather recently.’ She forced a laugh. ‘Not that that’s been unusual these past few years. So I went to see my oncologist and he did some tests and a scan. I received the results yesterday.’

She paused.

‘And?’

‘There’s another spot on my liver.’

Oh dear God, I thought, will this bloody disease never leave her alone?

‘What precisely did the doctor say?’ I asked.

‘He told me it was nothing to worry about but, naturally, I do. I’ve got to have another round of chemo and maybe some radiotherapy. I can’t say I’m particularly looking forward to it.’

‘My dear Faye, I’m so sorry. Perhaps I shouldn’t be going.’

‘Nonsense. Of course you must go. The chemo won’t start for at least another week anyway as I have a touch of flu and they want me to recover from that first. It seems the damn chemo drugs also reduce my white-cell count and I need those to fight the infection. You’ll be back before things get really bad. I’ll be fine. I promise.’

Was she trying to convince me or herself?

‘I can always fly home if you need me. You only have to call.’

‘Thank you, but I’m sure I won’t need you. I’m a big girl and I can look after myself. You go and enjoy yourself.’

I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be a fun trip, but I didn’t say so.

‘I’ll call you as soon as I know where I’m staying. The agency’s head office is in Virginia, near Washington, DC.’

‘Say hi to the President for me.’ Faye laughed again, this time with a little more genuine amusement.

‘Sure will.’

My flight landed at Dulles Airport at a quarter past two, Washington time, on Saturday afternoon.

I had looked up the climate for Virginia on an American weather website. The temperature averaged from sixty-two degrees Fahrenheit at the beginning of the month to seventy-two at the end. But it regularly varied from below fifty to almost ninety.

I’d decided I would have to take everything from shorts and T-shirts to a scarf and gloves, in fact the whole shebang other than my skiwear. I had also packed my collection of disguises. You never knew when they might be useful. Fortunately the luggage allowance in business class was fairly generous.

Tony had worked miracles at the US Embassy in London and had fixed within twenty-four hours both a letter of introduction and the required non-immigrant work visa. Consequently, apart from the usual lengthy queue, I had no difficulty in clearing US Immigration and Customs.

There was even a driver waiting for me in the arrivals hall with HINKLEY written in large letters on an iPad screen.

‘That’s me,’ I said, going up to him.

‘Welcome to America,’ he said, taking my luggage trolley. ‘I’m parked across the road in the lot.’

I followed him out of the terminal into bright sunshine.

Today must be one of the nearly-90-degree days, I thought, as I rapidly started to perspire under the intense rays. It is easy to forget how much further south Washington, DC is compared to London. Apart from Alaska, not a single part of the United States is as far north as any part of the United Kingdom, with Washington at the same latitude as Lisbon in Portugal. Perhaps I wouldn’t need my scarf and gloves after all.

Thankfully, the car was air-conditioned and the driver also knew where we were going, which is more than I did. He took me to a hotel in Arlington where the reception staff were expecting me.

‘Someone called Mr Andretti made the reservation this morning,’ said the young woman behind the desk. ‘He didn’t say when you were leaving.’ She raised her eyebrows in a questioning manner.

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I don’t yet know.’

My accommodation was more of an apartment than a regular hotel room, with a small kitchen plus sitting room as well as bedroom and bathroom. It overlooked the Pentagon, Arlington National Cemetery and the Potomac River, with the Lincoln Memorial and the rest of Washington’s iconic buildings clearly visible in the distance.

As I stood by the picture window taking in the spectacular view, I had mixed emotions. Part of me was excited to be here in a new place, with a new task among people who did not know me, just as I had longed for, but I was suddenly overwhelmed by the undertaking ahead of me.

I had done some research on FACSA and had been amazed to discover that it had over 800 federal agents and nearly 2,000 other employees, most of them at its Virginia headquarters. Even the horseracing team, one of the smallest sections in the agency, was larger than I was used to at the BHA.

How was I going to discover a mole in that lot?

A knock at my door brought me back from my daydreaming. It was Tony.

‘Welcome, Jeff,’ he said, shaking my hand. ‘Everything OK?’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Good flight, and this is very comfortable.’ I waved my hand around.

He smiled. ‘Anything you need?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I need information. In particular I need copies of the personnel files for all your racing team and the results of your communication inquiry.’

He nodded but looked troubled.

‘I’m not sure I can get the personnel files.’

‘You’re Deputy Director,’ I said. ‘Surely the files are not confidential from you.’

‘It is not the confidentiality that’s the problem, although they are, it’s that I don’t want anyone to know why you are here, not even the personnel team.’

‘Tony, I really need that info. Otherwise I’ll be wasting my time. I should really have the opportunity to study it before I arrive at your offices on Monday.’

‘I’ll get on to it. Anything else?’

‘Yes. I also need details of all the operations that you have launched, including those that you feel were compromised. There has to be a common link. And I need direct access to you at any time.’

‘I’ll give you my private cell number,’ Tony said. ‘Never ever contact me at the agency, either in person or by using agency comms.’

‘I thought I was here as your guest, as you were mine at the BHA.’

‘My trip to the BHA was made without the knowledge of anyone at FACSA other than the Director. As far as anyone else at the agency is concerned, I was away on annual leave travelling in Europe with my wife, Harriet. Your cover is that you are here under our international exchange scheme for law-enforcement agencies simply to observe our methods of operation.’

‘But the British Horseracing Authority is not a law-enforcement agency.’

‘I know but it is as good as. The exchange scheme was the best excuse the Director and I could think of. All federal agencies have observers from other national police forces, mostly from those where the US is helping to set up law enforcement such as in Afghanistan and Iraq. So our staff are used to visitors but, as such, you would not have direct access to the Deputy Director. Therefore you must never contact me except through my private cell. And never refer to anyone about my time in London. That’s essential. I do not want to give our mole friend any cause for alarm.’

There was something about the way he said it that made the hairs on my neck stand up.

‘What are you not telling me?’ I looked him directly in the eye.

He turned away.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘It might not be connected.’

‘What might not be connected?’

He looked back at me.

‘You are not the first person we have approached to assist us.’

He paused.

‘Who is the other person?’ I asked.

‘Was,’ Tony said. ‘He’s dead. He was killed last December in an auto wreck on I-95 south of Baltimore.’

‘Accident? Or deliberate?’

‘There was a thorough investigation by the Maryland State Police. Their conclusion was that he went to sleep while driving home late at night. His vehicle left the road, hit a tree and caught fire. Toxicology tests showed he’d been drinking.’

‘Didn’t your agency initiate its own investigation?’ I asked.

‘How could we?’ Tony said. ‘It was outside our jurisdiction.’

‘Who was he exactly?’

‘His name was Jason Connor. He was a journalist who wrote about horseracing for a magazine called Sports Illustrated.’

I nodded. I’d heard of it.

‘How did you come to use him?’

‘Initially, Connor went to NYRA last October because he was concerned about blood doping in racehorses at Belmont during their fall meet. He had seen some transfusion apparatus at a training barn at the track that he felt was suspicious.’

‘NYRA?’ I pronounced it as a word in the same way as Tony had.

‘New York Racing Association. They control horseracing at the three tracks in New York State. It was NYRA who contacted us. We initiated a raid on the barn and we found absolutely nothing. The whole place had obviously been steam-cleaned. I have never seen a barn so spotless and disinfected. You could have eaten your dinner off the stall floors. And the horses had been sent away to Kentucky for what was described as a vacation. I ask you. Some of them had been due to race at the track that week. The whole thing was a farce.’

Tony shook his head.

‘Jason Connor was furious. What he was really after, of course, was an exclusive for his magazine and now he wouldn’t get one. He blamed both the agency and NYRA for leaking the information. At first we dismissed his notions as just the ranting of an angry man, but then I started looking at how often our operations were being compromised. That’s when I went back to him to ask him for help.’

‘And you now think his death was to do with that?’

‘The Chief Medical Examiner for Maryland declared his death was accidental but I’ve never liked coincidences. On the very day Jason Connor died, he’d been to Laurel Park racetrack to question a groom who had previously been working at the barn at Belmont.’

‘What did the groom say?’

‘I don’t know. Connor never got to report back and the groom has since vanished. Not that that’s particularly unusual. It happens all the time. He was probably an illegal alien who was frightened away by the attention.’

‘Didn’t you try to find him?’ I asked.

‘Of course. But trainers’ record-keeping is not always great at the tracks. Turns out the groom had a work permit issued on forged paperwork in the name of a 26-year-old Mexican called Juan Martinez. That may or may not be his real name. Martinez is by far the most common surname in Mexico, much more so than Smith is here. And they didn’t even have a photo.’

‘Who did the looking?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Was it someone from your agency?’

‘I did it myself,’ Tony said. ‘I was once a detective in the Bronx. I reckon I still know the moves but this one was a dead end.’

‘So who at the agency knew about Jason Connor?’

‘Everyone in the racing section knew he’d been to NYRA with the original concerns. That was common knowledge. It was with the help of his information that we set up the operation.’

‘Who knew he’d also been approached to help find your leak?’

‘Supposedly only the Director, the chief of the horseracing team, and me.’

‘Who is the chief of the horseracing team?’

‘Norman Gibson. He’s an ex-cop from Chicago.’

‘Do you trust him?’

‘I would say so, yes.’

‘Does he know about the real reason I’m here?’ I asked.

‘No. He does not.’

‘So you don’t trust him that much,’ I said. ‘How about the Director of FACSA? Do you trust him more?’

‘I’d trust him with my life,’ Tony said.

‘How about with mine?’

It felt like the stakes had suddenly been raised dramatically.

It was clear to me that, whatever the Maryland Medical Examiner might say, Tony believed that the death of Jason Connor and the investigation into the agency leak were connected. And I didn’t like coincidences either.

‘Why didn’t you tell me all this in London?’ I asked.

Tony looked uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I was afraid you wouldn’t come.’

He clearly didn’t know me very well.

‘OK,’ I said, clapping my hands together. ‘In the light of all that, we need to beef up our security. First, you shouldn’t be here now, it is a risk we ought not be taking.’

‘I told no one I was coming here, not even Harriet.’

‘No matter,’ I said. ‘You are Deputy Director of an agency that employs over two thousand people. Your offices are up the road from here. Even on a Saturday, one of those employees might have seen you arrive as they walked their dog. Then they might mention it to a colleague, just in passing, and so on. You never know who is watching or listening.’

Tony nodded.

‘Also,’ I said, ‘it was a mistake to give your name when you made the hotel reservation. The front desk staff told me it was made by a Mr Andretti.’

‘I had to use a credit card to confirm.’

‘Your private card?’

‘The agency’s.’

‘Who has access to the statements?’

‘I have to sign them off for the finance team.’

‘Won’t someone question a charge for a hotel so close to the offices?’

‘I’ll say we were entertaining a guest,’ Tony said.

‘And the next question would be who and why. What are you going to do? Lie? Lies get you into trouble if only because someone in the finance team will think you’re having an affair — getting a little bit more than only a ham sandwich during your lunch break. I will pay for the hotel with my own credit card. You can reimburse me at a later stage.’

Tony nodded. ‘I’ll give you my cell number.’ He reached for the notepad and pen next to the hotel phone.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not secure enough. I will buy two pay-as-you-go phones. One will be delivered by courier to your office marked for your attention only. We will only use those to talk to each other. You must not use that phone for any other reason.’

Tony looked rather sceptical that such a thing was needed.

‘Tony,’ I said firmly, ‘this is important. We must take no unnecessary risks. Get the personnel files and have them delivered to me here, preferably by tomorrow. Pay cash for the delivery and arrange it yourself well away from Arlington. And don’t use the agency address on the paperwork.’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll get on it.’

‘Now, who do I report to and what have they been told?’

‘Norman Gibson is expecting you on Monday morning. He’s been told you are from England and are part of the international observer scheme.’

‘Does he know I work for the British Horseracing Authority?’

‘All he’s been told is that you are from England and you are to be shown the workings of our horseracing section.’

‘I think that I’ll say I am from the BHA. It’s too dangerous otherwise. Am I supposed to be sponsored by the British Government?’

‘Yes,’ Tony said, ‘through the Embassy. That’s how exchanges have been organised in the past.’

‘Let’s hope your mole doesn’t have a friend who works at the British Embassy.’

‘Do you think he will check?’

‘I would if I were him,’ I said. ‘I’d be hugely suspicious of anyone turning up unexpectedly. I expect him to verify my story down to the very last detail. That’s why it is essential he can find me at the BHA.’

I was reminded of the advice I’d been given in the army by an MI6 operative — a spook. ‘Lie only when it is absolutely necessary,’ he had said. ‘Make your cover story as true as it can be. Otherwise it will be the little things that catch you out while you are concentrating only on the big ones.’

‘I’ll get on to Paul Maldini in London to warn him,’ I said.

‘What about the Embassy?’

‘If Norman Gibson has already been told that it has been arranged through the Embassy then we’ll have to take the chance. Changing things now will draw more attention.’

‘Norman may not have told anyone else,’ Tony said.

‘No matter. Leave it.’

I did not want anyone else knowing the truth.

My life might depend upon it.

4

On Sunday morning I walked down the street to the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City, a vast shopping mall over four floors with everything from major international department stores to a shop dedicated only to the finer art of men’s shaving.

I was searching for a mobile-phone store. There were two and, in one of them, I found what I was looking for.

‘This one won’t go on the Internet.’ The young sales assistant was doing his best to direct me towards one of his more expensive models.

‘I know,’ I replied patiently. ‘It’s for my mother and she doesn’t really understand technology.’ In fact, my mother had died when mobile phones were still the size of a brick, but the young man wasn’t to know that. ‘This is the model I have been recommended by her care home. I’ll take two of them.’

‘Two?’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know if we have two. No one ever wants phones like this any more.’

He went off into the back still shaking his head but triumphantly returned holding two boxes from which he blew off the dust.

‘You’re lucky,’ he said. ‘These are the last ones. The company is discontinuing this item when they’ve all gone.’

‘It will still work though, won’t it?’ I asked with mild concern.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It’ll work fine for calls and texts, but it is not 4G. It’s not even 3G and doesn’t have Bluetooth, GPS or even a camera. Are you sure you still want it? The iPhone 6 does far more. That’s like a full-blown computer in your pocket and very good value. We have it on special offer.’

His enthusiasm was almost infectious.

‘These are just perfect,’ I said, touching the two boxes in front of me on the counter. Perfect, I thought, if you wanted phones that weren’t ‘smart’. Smartphones might be great for accessing the Internet and for using the thousands of apps available for download, but they could also be tracked and hacked.

‘Right,’ said the young man, slightly deflated. ‘Do you want them on a contract?’

‘No. Pay-as-you-go.’

‘It is cheaper on a contract,’ he said, ‘in the long run.’

‘But I’m not sure my mother has a long run,’ I said, smiling at him. ‘Pay-as-you-go will be fine.’

‘For both?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘For both. My mother has a habit of mislaying things so I’m buying her two.’

He clearly thought I was mad but he inserted SIM cards into the phones before topping them up with a hundred dollars each of credit. More than enough, I thought, for calls and texts between Tony and myself over the next few weeks.

I paid for it all with cash and gave a made-up name and address to the young man for the guarantee — just to be on the safe side.

Next I went into a computer store and bought a desktop colour printer, spare ink cartridges, a USB connecting lead and some paper.

Finally, I went to the FedEx Office Print-and-Ship store on Crystal Drive, conveniently open on a Sunday, and arranged for one of the phones to be delivered early the following morning to Tony Andretti at FACSA.

‘Any message?’ asked the young woman behind the counter.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Only the box, thank you.’

I again paid in cash and gave a false return address. The transaction might have been anonymous but I had noticed the CCTV camera in the corner of the store, silently recording the faces of everyone who entered. I wondered whether I should have used one of my disguises, but perhaps I was being paranoid about secrecy.

But it was better to be paranoid, I thought, than dead.

I spent some of Sunday afternoon sightseeing.

To be precise, I took a taxi from my hotel across the Potomac to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.

My first disappointment was that the cherry blossom was well past its prime, with much of it now decaying on the ground beneath the trees that surrounded the memorial. But there was enough remaining to give me some idea of how magnificent it must have been only a week or so earlier.

I climbed the circular marble steps and walked between the classical Ionic columns. In the centre, under the shallow marble-clad dome, stood a nineteen-feet-high bronze statue of the third president of the United States. I looked up at the face of the man after whom I had been named.

Jefferson Hinkley.

As a child I had hated my name. I was made fun of at my junior school because of it and I had vowed at the time that, thereafter, I would be known only as Jeff.

Curiously, in the presence of his likeness, I felt a slight affinity towards the man. Not that he was buried here. His final resting place was on his family plantation at Charlottesville, about 100 miles south-west, and this memorial had been built more than a hundred years after his death.

Jefferson was perhaps best known as the principal author of the US Declaration of Independence and part of his preamble was cut into the marble: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…

Strange, therefore, that Jefferson had been such a strong supporter of slavery. Indeed, he’d even had African slaves working in the White House during his presidency and, after his death, 130 slaves from his plantation were sold at auction to help pay his debts.

All affinity gone, I walked away without a backward glance across the bridge into West Potomac Park and on to the memorial of my other presidential namesake.

In full, I was officially Jefferson Roosevelt Hinkley. I was never able to ascertain the reason why my parents had named me after dead American presidents. By the time I realised where my strange forenames came from, my mother had died and my father claimed it had been her idea and he couldn’t remember the reason. In truth, he couldn’t remember much, other than where he had hidden his whisky.

I had always imagined that the Roosevelt after whom I had been named was Franklin Delano, the hero president of the New Deal and the Second World War, rather than his fifth-cousin Theodore — he of teddy-bear fame — who only became president due to the timely assassination of his predecessor.

The memorial to FDR was very different to that of Jefferson, being very much a creation of the mid-1990s. It lacked the grandeur of the earlier structure, consisting of four outdoor ‘rooms’ depicting the four terms of his presidency.

One of the many inscriptions on the memorial caught my eye, an extract from Roosevelt’s inaugural speech on first becoming President in 1933.

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

I hoped he was right.

‘Mr Hinkley,’ called the young woman at Reception as I walked into the hotel, ‘package for you.’

I signed for a small plain-white padded envelope with my name written on the front in pencil. It had to be from Tony, I thought. No one else knew I was at this hotel.

The envelope contained two USB flash drives and a short handwritten note:

Here are the agency personnel files, the communication inquiry and the operation reports. I had them copied from the off-site data backup server so no one at the agency should be aware. I’ve asked my wife to deliver the package.

He’d clearly been busy in the twenty-four hours since we’d met.

The flash drives were each sixty-four gigabytes and they were both crammed with data.

I sat at the desk under the picture window and opened the first drive on my computer. It contained the personnel files of not only the racing section but all 2,631 employees of FACSA, as of the previous Friday. They were listed alphabetically by last name and it took me some time to navigate my way around the index to access them by section. But, before long, I had found the files of the eight agents working specifically on horseracing, together with their section head and six support staff — two intelligence analysts, one IT specialist and three admin assistants.

I connected the new printer to my computer with the USB lead. I had purposely not bought one that worked wirelessly and, furthermore, I ensured that both the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities on my laptop were switched off. Unlikely as it might be, I did not want someone else remotely snooping on my snooping.

I printed out the front page for each of the fifteen files and laid them out on the floor in a large semicircle round my chair. Fifteen faces stared up at me like arrest mugshots. I stared back at them.

Was one of these faces really that of a mole — someone who was prepared to forewarn wrongdoers of an impending raid? And if so, why? For financial gain? Or out of some misplaced sense of mischief?

Six of the fifteen were women — two of the agents along with four of the support staff.

Where the hell did I begin?

I spent the next four hours cross-referencing the names of the fifteen with their phone and email records that Tony had provided.

It was a mammoth job and I had barely scratched the surface by the time the figures began swimming in front of my eyes from tiredness.

By then I had discovered only one thing of interest.

I had no absolute proof, no smoking gun, but I was pretty sure that two of the agents were engaged in a secret relationship. It was something about the tone of their emails, together with the number and timing of the phone calls between them that left little doubt.

I looked more closely at their files.

Robert Wade, known as Bob, was forty-two, a former DC Metro-area traffic cop, married with two teenage daughters. He had been recruited into FACSA at the time of its creation sixteen years previously and was now considered to be one of its senior agents. According to comments in his assessments, he was being tipped as a future head of the horseracing section.

Steffi Dean was a recent recruit, having been a field agent for only a year. A graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, she had spent seven years in the service as a logistics officer, rising to the rank of captain before quitting the military to join the agency. At twenty-nine, she was thirteen years younger than Bob Wade, and single.

I leaned back in the chair and yawned.

I wasn’t here to pass judgement on the morals of the agents, just on their honesty. We all have our little secrets. It was only those that harboured corruption that I was after.

I went on through the lists but my concentration levels were dropping so much that I was wasting my time.

I glanced at the brightly lit red digits of the hotel alarm clock — 10.02 p.m. Hardly time for bed, but it was 3 a.m. back in London and I could hardly keep my eyes open.

I would have to continue in the morning.

As requested, I presented myself at the Federal Anti-Corruption in Sports Agency at nine o’clock on Monday morning dressed in my best Armani suit plus silk tie. First impressions were important and an Englishman abroad would be expected to be smart.

The agency was housed in what appeared to be a normal, modern, glass-and-concrete office block, whose architect had clearly devoted only a minimum of imagination to its design.

But there was nothing normal about the security arrangements.

The building and its associated parking lots were surrounded by an eight-foot-high steel fence topped with razor wire, and the main gate would not have looked out of place at a top-security prison.

When I arrived on foot there was a line of vehicles being checked through, each of them having to first negotiate a tight chicane of large concrete blocks before being searched by the guards, some of whom had machine carbines slung across their chests.

‘Papers?’ demanded one of the guards in a manner that reminded me of a Gestapo officer in a war film.

I handed over the letter of introduction I had been given from the US Embassy in London together with my passport. The guard left me standing outside the pedestrian gate as he went into the guardhouse to check my credentials.

I waited.

There was a large notice on the guardhouse wall that declared that all firearms were prohibited on these premises unless authorised by the Attorney General of the United States. Beside it was another that announced that it was unlawful for more than twenty-eight persons to occupy the guardhouse at any one time, by order of the US Department of Homeland Security.

I was attempting to count the guards, to ensure there were fewer than twenty-eight, when the Gestapo man returned and handed back the letter and my passport together with a FACSA-branded lanyard attached to a rectangular pass with ‘VISITOR’ stamped diagonally across it in large red letters.

‘Use the front door,’ he said, letting me through the gate and pointing across at the building. ‘Report to security inside.’

More security? What are they hiding?

I had to empty my pockets and then pass through a metal detector before I was directed towards the building’s main reception desk where again I had to produce my letter of introduction.

‘Norman Gibson is expecting me,’ I said.

I was asked to wait.

The receptionist made a telephone call and, presently, a man in his late forties appeared from the lifts and strode purposefully towards me.

‘Jeff Hinkley?’ he asked. ‘I’m Norman Gibson.’

We shook hands.

‘Delighted to meet you,’ I said.

‘Let’s go up.’

He used his lanyard pass to activate yet another security barrier and ushered me through.

‘It is like getting into Fort Knox,’ I said.

‘Blame Timothy McVeigh,’ Norman replied.

In April 1995 Timothy James McVeigh had detonated a 5,000lb bomb outside the federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including nineteen young children in a day-care centre. Needless to say, security since then had been greatly beefed-up at all US federal buildings.

‘I’ll fix it so you get your own pass,’ Norman said. ‘Then it’ll be easier for you to get in. Security is a bore but I suppose it’s better than being dead.’

‘Much,’ I agreed. ‘And the threats seem to be ever-increasing.’

‘You’re so right. We have more than our fair share of nutcases who blame the government for everything. Plus we have the anti-abortionists and the animal liberation lot to contend with — both worthy groups, I’m sure, but they seem to attract extremists. And don’t even mention the Islamic militants…’

I thought about the security arrangements at my office in London — or rather the lack of them. There was a reception desk in the lobby by the front door of the building but it was usually unmanned. The main reception for the horseracing authority was on the second floor and that was dead easy to bypass.

We took the lift up and I followed Norman along a corridor and through two more security doors before we reached his office, a glassed-off corner of an otherwise open-plan space.

‘Welcome to the racing section at FACSA,’ he said.

‘Thank you.’

‘Who are you with?’

‘The BHA,’ I said. ‘The British Horseracing Authority.’

‘Is that a government agency?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It was set up by the British Jockey Club and is wholly funded by the racing industry. We’re responsible for the regulation of all horseracing in Great Britain.’

‘We could do with something like that here. American racing is still regulated by the individual states, each of them with different rules. Everyone agrees it would make sense to have a nationwide authority but the states are reluctant to give up their power bases. They all think they know best. That’s why we at FACSA act as the de facto upholder of common standards using federal anti-corruption legislation.’

It sounded like a line he’d used often before.

‘But it is a bureaucratic nightmare.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Everything to do with governments is.’

‘The BHA gets no financial support from the British government, nor do we answer to it.’

‘Lucky you,’ Norman said. ‘Now, how can we help you?’

‘I’ve really come only to watch and listen,’ I said. ‘To study how you do things and compare them to our own methods. To see if there’s something for us to learn.’

He nodded. ‘I hope there is, but you have far more racing over there than we do here. Perhaps we should be the ones taking lessons.’

I smiled at him. ‘Maybe there will be something I can spot that would be beneficial to us both.’

‘Fair enough,’ Norman said, although my smile was not reciprocated and I detected a slight annoyance that an outsider was here at all, let alone a foreigner with more experience of racing.

‘I’ll try not to get in your way,’ I said.

‘Good. We’ve not had a foreign observer in this section before. Most go to the FBI anyway, although I think our baseball team had someone from Japan last year.’

‘How many sections are there in FACSA?’ I asked.

‘Lots,’ he replied somewhat unhelpfully. ‘The major sports each have their own — baseball and basketball are the biggest. Then there’s the Olympic Games section. That’s where it all started. There was such a hoo-ha over allegations of bribery to get the Winter Olympic Games at Salt Lake City back in ’02 that the Department of Justice set up FACSA to ensure it could never happen again.’

I had a vague memory of all the fuss at the time.

‘You should have a FIFA section,’ I said with a laugh. ‘That would keep you busy.’

‘We do,’ he replied seriously. ‘We pass our findings on to the FBI as we have no jurisdiction outside the US. Hence it was FBI agents who made arrests with the Swiss police at FIFA headquarters back in May 2015.’

‘Have you been with the agency long?’ I asked.

‘I joined twelve years ago,’ he said. ‘Moved from Chicago. The winters were too long and cold up there.’ He smiled but it didn’t really reach his eyes.

And I knew the real reason why he’d left Chicago.

I’d been up early and studied his personnel file.

He had been a high-flying detective in the Chicago Police Department, promoted young to be commander of the 26th District on the city’s South Side. However, his glittering police career had stalled somewhat when five of his junior officers had been arrested for planting incriminating evidence to secure a conviction. Even though the investigation by the FBI had concluded that Gibson had not known about or been involved in the conspiracy, he had done the honourable thing and resigned.

That principled action had been rewarded by the call to set up the racing section at FACSA.

There was a knock on the office door. Norman looked over my head and stood up. ‘I’ve arranged for you to spend time with one of our special agents, Frank Bannister.’ He waved the man in. ‘Frank, this is Jeff Hinkley, from England.’

I stood and shook Frank’s hand while we both looked each other up and down. He was taller than me by at least four inches, and broader too. He squeezed my hand hard as if to make sure I knew that he was also stronger. He smiled down at me and I smiled back without a waver. If he wanted to play silly games, so be it, but I wouldn’t rise to his bait.

‘Frank will show you the ropes,’ Norman said. ‘Stick to him like glue.’

Frank didn’t look best pleased at the prospect but he was civil enough — just.

He showed me round the office and I met the other staff.

‘Bob Wade,’ one of them said, smiling warmly and offering his hand. ‘Welcome to the madhouse.’ He laughed with a distinctive rapid-fire guffaw.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

Steffi Dean sat at the desk next to his. Not conducive, I thought, to hard work. I also shook her hand and wondered what she saw in Special Agent Wade, who appeared somewhat older in the flesh than in his personnel-file mugshot.

‘Are you all special agents?’ I asked.

‘Sure are,’ Frank said. ‘All FACSA agents are special.’

I wasn’t sure if he was being facetious.

‘Ignore him,’ Steffi said. ‘But he’s right. Special agent is a rank and all FACSA agents are special agents. We’re all L-E-Os, just like the special agents in the FBI and DEA.’

‘L-E-Os?’

‘Law-enforcement officers.’

‘Does anyone have only regular agents?’ I asked.

‘Not here,’ Frank said loudly. ‘Nothing regular about this lot.’ He laughed expansively at his own joke while Bob and Steffi looked slightly embarrassed.

‘Does everyone carry a gun?’ I asked.

It was difficult not to notice the automatic pistols that each of them had in holsters either on their belts or under their shoulders. The Attorney General had clearly been busy with his authorisations.

‘Only the special agents,’ Steffi said. She patted the gun as if it were a family pet. ‘Never leaves my side. I even sleep with it under my pillow.’

I wondered if there were two guns under her pillow when she slept with Bob Wade.

‘Have you used yours much?’ I asked her.

‘Only on the range. We all have to pass a marksman test every year in order to keep our special-agent status. But I’ve never had to use my weapon in the field. Not yet, anyway.’

‘Is it loaded?’

She smiled at me as if I was an imbecile. ‘Of course it’s loaded. No point in having it otherwise.’ She removed the gun from the holster. ‘Glock twenty-two-C, point-four-zero-calibre automatic.’ She pushed a latch on the pistol grip and slid out the magazine, visibly full of shiny brass bullets. ‘Fifteen rounds per mag. Smith and Wesson hollow-nosed expanding ammunition. And I have a silencer plus two more full mags on my belt.’

‘A silencer?’

‘In case we need to be covert,’ she replied. ‘But we don’t use it as a general rule. It upsets the balance of the weapon in the hand. Tends to make the shots go high and right.’

She snapped the magazine back in and returned the pistol to its holster in a single movement. She clearly was completely at ease with such deadly apparatus.

‘I thought expanding bullets were illegal,’ I said. ‘Aren’t they against the Geneva Convention?’

Expanding bullets would flatten out or fragment on impact with anything hard, like human bone, causing serious trauma over a much wider area than a normal bullet. They had been much feared during the American Civil War due to the horrendous wounds they produced.

‘It was the Hague Convention,’ Bob Wade said. ‘But it only applies to warfare, not to law enforcement. All US police forces use them.’

I must have looked somewhat aghast that ammunition banned in war as being too brutal and cruel was standard issue on the streets of America.

‘Expanding bullets,’ Bob said in explanation, ‘are less likely to pass right through suspects and into innocent bystanders behind them. They also have more stopping power.’

Nevertheless, I was still not convinced that using them was ethical. No wonder more than a thousand members of the American public were shot dead by police each and every year.

Tony Andretti had said in the lay-by near Oxford that he couldn’t get his head round Brits and guns.

Well, I couldn’t get my head round Yanks and guns either. Statistics showed that, in all circumstances, you were seventy times more likely to be shot to death in the United States than in England. And that must have something to do with the number of guns at hand.

And what worried me most was that the section mole was likely to have a Glock 22C holstered on his hip with fifteen.40 expanding bullets in the magazine, plus a silencer and two more loaded mags on his belt.

I really would have to watch my back.

5

By the end of the day I had been round the whole office and met all the section staff except for the most junior admin assistant, who was away on maternity leave.

I had a good memory for faces and facts and I had been easily able to match the individuals to their life stories as outlined in the personnel files. The only difficult thing was not appearing to know something that I hadn’t been told. For example, I nearly asked one of the two intelligence analysts if he liked working for FACSA more than for a bank when he hadn’t actually mentioned his previous employment.

‘Monday is a good day for you to start,’ Frank Bannister said over coffee in the FACSA cafeteria at lunchtime. ‘It’s when all the special agents try to be in the office for meetings and such. Mondays and Tuesdays are usually dark at the major tracks, unless they’re public holidays.’

By ‘dark’, he meant there was no racing.

‘Do you go to the tracks a lot?’ I asked.

‘I usually go somewhere every week,’ he replied. ‘All of us do. It is as important for us to be seen as it is for us to see what’s going on. I tend to concentrate on the northeastern tracks but I love going to the smaller ones too, especially those that race only for a few days each year. Over the years I’ve been to almost all of them.’

‘It must do wonders for your frequent-flier miles.’

‘We don’t get them,’ he said. ‘We often travel on government jets. Even when we are on commercial flights, federal-service rates don’t earn you miles.’

‘Where are you going this week?’ I asked.

‘Highlight of the year,’ he said with a big smile. ‘Louisville for the Derby. You coming?’

‘You bet,’ I said.

For years I had wanted to go to the Kentucky Derby but it was run on the first Saturday in May, usually on the same day as the 2000 Guineas at Newmarket, and my presence had always been expected at one of the biggest days of the English racing season.

Now I was free of that obligation and the prospect of going to Churchill Downs thrilled me.

‘How do I get there?’ I asked.

‘The whole section is going Wednesday. Make sure the boss puts you on the manifest.’

‘I sure will.’

Overall, it was an interesting but somewhat frustrating day.

Whereas I was welcome to wander round and speak to the section staff throughout the morning, I was sidelined for much of the afternoon as all but three of them gathered in a room for a meeting on the second floor. A meeting from which I had been specifically excluded.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked one of the non-participants, one of the two intelligence analysts, who sat resolutely at his computer throughout.

‘Planning and briefing for an operation.’

‘Why aren’t you there?’

‘No point,’ he said. ‘The op is not based on any intel I’ve looked at, and I don’t get involved with planning.’

‘When is the op?’ I asked hopefully.

‘Sorry. I can’t say. It’s a secret.’

I suppose I shouldn’t really have minded. Back in London I’d given Tony rather a hard time for letting too many people know about FACSA operations so I could now hardly expect to be one of them.

Mind you, to my sure knowledge, there were at least eleven at the meeting, which was still far too many for something so secret.

‘Where does most of your intelligence come from?’ I asked the analyst.

‘Information comes from a variety of sources. It is analysis that turns info into intelligence.’ He sounded rather full of his own importance.

‘What sort of sources?’ I asked, ignoring his second comment. ‘In England we have a network of covert informants from within the racing industry.’

He nodded. ‘Us too. But they’re mostly disgruntled grooms who have a score to settle with their employers either for being fired or being overlooked for promotion. Much of the stuff is just malicious lies with no substance. It’s my job to apply contextual knowledge to sort the truth from the trash.’

Perhaps he was important after all.

The operational planning meeting went on and on, and there was a limit to the amount of time I could hang around doing nothing.

The hands on the clock moved slowly round to four-thirty.

‘Tell Frank I’ve gone, will you?’ I said. ‘I’ll see him in the morning.’

The analyst simply waved an acknowledgement and went on studying his computer screen.

After escaping the security cordon, with the photograph on my new shiny identity pass scrutinised at every door and gateway, I walked back to the hotel via a 7-Eleven store, where I picked up a few essential supplies like coffee, milk, cereal and so on, as well as a ready-meal of cheese and pasta for my dinner.

Back in my room, I called Paul Maldini. It was ten in the evening in London but he picked up straight away.

‘You were right,’ he said. ‘There was a call to the office from the US asking about you.’

‘What time?’

‘At five, just as I was leaving.’

Midday in Washington.

‘Man or woman?’

‘Man.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He asked for you by name. I’d had Reception direct any calls for you to my phone.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I told him that Jeff Hinkley was away and was not available and could I help him. Then he asked me where you were so I told him you were in the United States.’

‘Did he say anything else?’

‘He asked what you were doing in the US and how long you’d be away. I told him you were visiting another racing authority and I didn’t know for how long. Just as you told me to. Was that right?’

‘Yes, Paul, it was. Thank you. Did you happen to ask the man for his name?’

‘I did but he said that didn’t matter, then he hung up.’

‘Any clues about his voice?’

‘He had an American accent,’ he said. ‘Other than that I can’t help you. I couldn’t tell you which part. All Yanks sound the same to me.’

Must be his Italian heritage, I thought. Tony Andretti would have been appalled.

I thought back to what I’d been doing at midday.

Even though Norman Gibson had told me to stick to Frank Bannister like glue, I’d been intent on meeting as many of the section staff as I could and, at midday, I had been moving from desk to desk introducing myself as a member of the BHA Integrity Department.

I couldn’t be exactly sure when I’d rejoined Frank to go down to the cafeteria. Probably nearer 12.30. So any of the men in the section could have made the call. And why shouldn’t they? Other than a letter from the US Embassy in London and my passport, I had no documents confirming my bona fides.

Had I called FACSA when Tony had turned up in London to check up on him?

No, I hadn’t. But these guys were attached to the US government and far more security-minded than the BHA.

Maybe the call had been merely an innocent check-up.

But why then had the caller not given his name when asked?

I used my new pay-as-you-go phone to call Tony.

He answered at the second ring.

‘The phone arrived safely then?’ I said.

‘First thing this morning. Where are you now?’

‘Back in my hotel. Where are you? Can you talk?’

‘I’m in my car,’ he said. ‘Still in the parking lot at FACSA. I’m leaving for the day.’

‘Are you alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Stay and listen. I need a couple of things.’

‘Shoot.’

‘First, someone from here made a call today to the BHA offices asking about me. It may have been an innocent check or it might have been our friend being suspicious. The person declined to give his name. Can you access the section phone records? Can you find out if anyone called London at midday today?’

‘I’ll try,’ he said, not sounding particularly hopeful.

‘But don’t tell anyone else. If it was our friend who made the call, I don’t want to spook him.’

‘What’s the other thing?’ Tony asked.

‘I was excluded from an operational planning meeting today. If this is another operation where the details are likely to be leaked, I need to know what’s going on. I can’t do this job if I’m to be kept in the dark.’

There was a pause from the other end.

‘Tony?’ I said.

‘I’m thinking,’ he said. ‘When Jason Connor first came to me with his suspicions, I sent a memo to all staff reminding them of the need for secrecy and not to let any non-agency personnel be aware of our operations. It would be a bit hypocritical for me to now insist you were brought into the loop.’

‘I agree,’ I said. ‘And it would flag up to our friend that I’m more than just an observer. But I still need the information. You’ll have to get it for me. And Tony, could you make a list for me of everyone who knows about the operation?’

‘No problem,’ Tony said. ‘I was at the meeting today so I already have the details. How shall I get them to you?’

‘Could your wife deliver them? After dark.’

‘No problem,’ he said again. ‘I’ll go back in and make copies of the paperwork.’

‘Tony,’ I said. ‘Be careful. If FACSA is anything like the BHA, you can’t make copies without entering your personal code on the copy machine.’

‘OK,’ he said with a resigned sigh. ‘I’ll use the small copier in my PA’s office.’

As far as I was concerned no precaution was too minor to be ignored. In my experience, it was usually the accumulation of small clues that added up to create the big picture rather than any single dramatic revelation. The fewer traces we generated regarding the true purpose of my visit the better.

‘I also need account details for all the racing section staff, preferably recent bank statements. Whoever is leaking information may be being paid for it. If so, we need to find those deposits.’

‘That’ll need court subpoenas,’ Tony said.

‘Then get them. But will the staff then know their statements are being looked at?’

‘They shouldn’t. I’ll deal with it personally and the banks will get the subpoenas, not the staff. The need for discretion will be emphasised.’

‘Good.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I want to go to the Kentucky Derby this Saturday. Frank Bannister told me the whole racing section is going to Louisville on Wednesday. Can you fix it so that I go with them?’

‘Absolutely,’ Tony said. ‘The operation we were discussing today will be executed at Churchill Downs this coming weekend. I’ll ensure you are included on the flight.’

‘Carefully,’ I said. ‘You don’t know me, remember.’

‘I’ll have a quiet word with Norman Gibson.’

‘He’s not in the loop,’ I said. ‘I’d prefer it to remain that way.’

‘Don’t you trust Norman?’

‘I trust nobody to keep a secret that my life might depend on.’ Not even you, I thought, but I decided not to say so.

The package from Tony arrived at nine o’clock as I was again studying the FACSA personnel files.

Out of curiosity, I had looked up Tony Andretti’s own record.

He was 64 years old, having been born on Staten Island, New York, in the 1950s. He was not named Anthony, as I had assumed, but Antonio after his Italian father, and he was married with three grown-up sons. He and his wife Harriet now lived in Fairfax, Virginia, a few miles away from his office.

He had joined FACSA as a special agent direct from the NYPD when the agency had been first established. He had worked his way up through section chief to assistant director in charge of administration, and then finally to Deputy Director three years previously.

He had reached the pinnacle of his career. Simple research on the Internet showed that the Director was a political appointee, determined by the US President and, as with the FBI, the position was invariably awarded to someone outside the organisation.

Tony would not get to be Director.

I opened the package. It contained details of an operation to raid a trainer’s barn at Churchill Downs to check for the improper use of medications in horses.

Unlike in the United Kingdom, where horses were trained ‘at home’ and then only taken to a racecourse by horsebox on the day of their race, racehorses in the US were trained at the track, living in barns on what was known as the backside or backstretch. Each individual trainer had a barn and there were accommodation blocks for the grooms.

The main reason for the difference lay in the way races were scheduled and that, in turn, was largely due to the differing surfaces on which the horses competed.

In the UK, the vast majority of races were run on turf rather than on dirt whereas in the States it was the reverse. Dirt tracks could take far more use than turf as they didn’t cut up and were simply harrowed back into pristine condition after each race.

Consider Santa Anita Park, one of the major tracks in California. During the first six months of each year, there were eight, nine or even ten races a day on four days of every week. That was nearly nine hundred races in only half a year.

Compare that to Newbury racecourse, one of the busiest tracks in the UK, where twenty-nine days’ racing were spread evenly across all twelve months. With seven races each time, at Newbury there were far less than a quarter of the races of Santa Anita over twice the time.

But the real difference was that the Santa Anita backside barns were also home to some two thousand racehorses that were also exercised on the dirt track every day. No turf racecourse could stand up to such punishment.

I read through the paperwork for the proposed raid and the details were surprising to say the least — horrifying might be a better word.

6

I was familiar with the British regulatory structure that had a simple but all-embracing rule in relation to drugs being present in a horse during a race — they aren’t allowed and, if detected, severe penalties would follow.

In addition, certain substances were not permitted to be introduced into a horse’s system at any time. They included all anabolic steroids, hormones, and any metabolic moderators such as insulin.

Reading one of the background briefing papers for the Churchill Downs raid, it became very clear to me that the situation in the United States was very different.

Anyone connected with racing worldwide was well aware of the widespread use in America of the drug furosemide, sold under the trade names Lasix or Salix. It is a potent diuretic and is used in horses to prevent bleeding in the lungs under extreme exertion, a condition known as EIPH, exercise-induced pulmonary haemorrhage. Whether they actually need it or not, almost every horse that races in North America has 500mg of the drug injected intravenously four hours before they race.

The diuretic effect is dramatic, with the horse producing ten to fifteen litres of urine in the first hour after administration of the drug. This in itself has a two-fold effect. First, it makes the horse ten to fifteen kilogrammes lighter, and second, it tends to flush out of the animal’s system any other drugs, which then become impossible to detect in a post-race dope test.

And, boy, according to what I was reading, there were plenty of other drugs.

American racing was seemingly rife with them, and most were allowed by the various state rules, even though there were attempts to reduce the dependence.

In some states, the administration of any legal medication was permitted up to twenty-four hours before a race, while in others the period could vary from a few days to a few weeks before racing.

A particularly worrying aspect of drugs in American racing was the widespread use of anti-inflammatory and painkilling medication such as phenylbutazone, known as ‘Bute’, which was often administered intravenously, allowing a horse to race when otherwise it would be unable to do so.

In the UK, the racing authority warned trainers that such painkillers should be discontinued a minimum of eight days prior to a race. In practice, most trainers stopped any course of treatment at least two weeks beforehand so that no trace remained. Otherwise they would be liable to large fines and lengthy suspensions. However, in the US, use of such drugs right up to race day was common, and a ‘positive’ post-race test for Bute was not against the rules.

According to the briefing paper, the disturbing effect of this was that the drugs allowed horses to compete when really unfit to do so, masking injuries such as sprains and even slight cracks. This could result in catastrophic collapse, an all-too-frequent occurrence on American tracks, where the rate of horses fatally injured in flat races was twice that of the UK.

However, the purpose of the proposed raid at Churchill Downs was not to look for Lasix or Bute. Finding those would be expected. It was to test recent runners for anabolic steroids, in particular stanozolol, a drug that promotes growth of muscle and hence improves performance.

I knew all about that drug.

Back in 2013, the BHA had expelled trainer Mahmood Al Zarooni from all racing for eight years for giving it to horses in his care. And the discovery of stanozolol in his urine had been the reason Ben Johnson was stripped of the hundred-metre Olympic gold medal in Seoul, bringing disgrace on him and his sport.

In UK racing the rule was crystal clear. Anabolic steroids were banned in horses at any time. But in the United States things were not so straightforward. Their use had not been regulated at all until 2010 and, even since then, several anabolic steroids were permitted for therapeutic treatment up to thirty days before racing.

But, it seems, some old trainers found it difficult to learn new tricks.

FACSA had received intelligence that one such trainer, Hayden Ryder, based at Churchill Downs, was still using the methods of the past and injecting his horses much closer to race time than was permitted, relying on a hefty dose of Lasix on race day to wash traces of the illegals out of their system.

And who could really blame him. The potential gains were huge and typical penalties for getting caught very modest — a fifteen-day ban and a maximum fine of one thousand dollars.

The date of the raid was set for very early on the coming Saturday morning, the day of the Kentucky Derby, the aim being not so much to remove a miscreant trainer from the sport as to get maximum media coverage to demonstrate that horseracing will not tolerate cheating.

It was to be a major media moment.

Today was Monday. The raid was due in five days. That would give Ryder plenty of time to get rid of the evidence if he was made aware of what was going to happen. It might even give him the opportunity to arrange transportation of horses elsewhere to prevent them from being tested.

I read through everything in the package twice, including Tony’s handwritten list of those present at the planning meeting.

I recognised most of the names. Section chief Norman Gibson was on the list, as was Frank Bannister, together with the other seven FACSA special agents I had met earlier in the day. In addition there were two others from the section: one of the intelligence analysts plus an admin assistant.

Tony had told me he had been present at the meeting but there had been two other senior agency staff there as well — the head of the resource planning office, and the assistant director in charge of security.

Would one of these fourteen people really pass on information to Hayden Ryder?

And, if so, why? For what gain?

‘Bring the op forward,’ I said. ‘Do it tonight or first thing tomorrow morning.’

It was late, well gone eleven, and I was speaking to Tony using our non-smart phones. I think I had woken him.

‘That’s logistically impossible,’ he said, suppressing a yawn.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Our raid team is still here in Virginia.’

‘Have you no one in Louisville?’

‘The nearest FACSA regional office would be Cincinnati, but that’s concerned only with baseball and football. We also have one in Indianapolis but they deal with the NCAA.’

‘NCAA?’ I asked.

‘College sports — sadly, no horseracing.’

‘You surely don’t get much corruption in college sports?’

‘You must be joking,’ Tony said. ‘It’s huge business. College football has three times as many spectators per annum as the NFL.’

‘There must be someone else in Louisville who could act for you,’ I said. ‘How about the FBI?’

I could almost hear the cogs turning in his brain.

‘Difficult, if not impossible,’ he said. ‘Use of anabolic steroids in horses close to a race may be a corrupt practice, as we see it, but does it actually break any federal law? The FBI would be unable to act unless they also suspected racketeering, such as making or taking illegal bets as a result of the steroid injections. And they would be most unlikely to mount a raid so quickly just on our say-so anyway.’

‘Then get the FACSA team from here to Louisville tonight. Do the raid in the morning. If details of this operation are leaked to Hayden Ryder then you can expect to turn up at his barn on Saturday morning to find the place cleaner than a priest on Sunday. You’ll find nothing. Even the drugged-up horses will have been moved out. Rather than being a media coup for FACSA, it will be a media disaster. You will be a laughing stock.’

There was a lengthy silence as if he had never considered the possibility.

‘Tell me what to do,’ he said finally.

In the end, Tony convinced me that he couldn’t rouse the troops from their beds and arrange for them to be transported more than 450 miles in the dead of night.

‘The raid is simply not important enough,’ Tony said. ‘I’d never get the authority for the cost. It is not as if the President’s life is at stake or anything. It’s only a few drugs.’

Yes, I thought, and drugs that weren’t even illegal. Maybe if it had been a stash of cocaine or heroin, I’d have had more chance, but anabolic steroids occurred naturally in the human body and were regularly prescribed to thousands of citizens for the treatment of cancer and AIDS.

‘I’ll try to bring forward the move to Louisville from Wednesday to tomorrow,’ Tony said. ‘I’ll also arrange to do the raid on Thursday morning.’

‘Do it on Wednesday morning,’ I said. ‘The sooner the better. And don’t tell anyone.’

‘I’ll have to tell them something. Everyone is expecting to be travelling on Wednesday.’

‘Make up a reason,’ I said. ‘Say that flights are full on Wednesday so they have to go earlier.’

‘We’re due to travel on a government-owned aircraft out of Andrews.’

‘Air Force One?’

‘I wish,’ Tony said with a laugh. ‘Just a regular jet. I’ll have to check if it’s available tomorrow.’

‘If not, get them onto commercial flights. Say the government plane has broken or something, but don’t say anything about moving the raid forward. Say you need to gather them together for a rehearsal or something on Wednesday morning then, at the last minute, switch it for the real thing when it’s too late for the information to be leaked.’

‘I ought to discuss this with someone. For a start I would have to inform the US Department of Agriculture.’

‘What on earth for? Don’t you have the authority yourself?’

‘It is not that,’ Tony said. ‘USDA provides the accredited veterinarians we need to take the blood samples. Also I have to liaise with the local Kentucky law enforcement. They’re expecting us to go in on Saturday, not Wednesday. I don’t want to start a shooting match between our agents and the Louisville Police Department.’

‘Then do what you have to do,’ I said wearily, ‘but stress the need for confidentiality. Ask them not to even tell their wives and husbands. Secrecy is essential if we are not to waste our time, and far too many people know about this raid already.’

Add the vets from USDA and the local police force to those from the agency who knew and I was quite surprised it wasn’t already on the Kentucky tourist information website as an upcoming attraction.

‘I’ll also have to talk it through with the Director,’ Tony said. ‘And I ought to consult Norman Gibson. He is the section chief.’

‘But what if he’s also the mole?’

The calm of Monday morning in the FACSA racing section had been replaced by a hive of activity twenty-four hours later.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

‘Ask the damn government,’ Frank said crossly, as he collected papers from his desk and stuffed them angrily into a briefcase. ‘I’ve been informed that our delightful private jet trip to Louisville is off. Some member of Congress has requisitioned the aircraft — probably to take his mistress on a vacation to Hawaii. So we’ve got to go commercial — and we’re flying coach.’ He threw his hands up in disgust. ‘My flight leaves from National in two and a half hours and I’ve got to get home first to pack.’

‘I thought we were going tomorrow.’

‘We were but, apparently, there are no seats left tomorrow due to everyone else going to the Derby.’

‘Is everyone going today?’ I asked, all innocently.

‘As far as I know,’ Frank said. ‘But not on the same flight. We’re on all sorts. Some are having to go through Atlanta or Chicago, for God’s sake. Atlanta is completely the wrong direction.’

‘How about me?’ I asked.

‘Go see the boss,’ Frank said. ‘Maybe he can help you. I can’t.’

With that he rushed off towards the exit.

I walked over and knocked on Norman Gibson’s door.

He looked up and waved me in.

‘Frank tells me he’s off to Louisville,’ I said.

‘So am I. The whole section goes to the Derby.’

‘How about me?’ I asked.

The look on his face told me that he hadn’t thought about me.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Er… I don’t know.’

‘There’s no point in me staying here if you are all in Kentucky.’

‘No, I suppose not. I’d assumed you were coming with us on the jet but that’s all changed.’

‘Is there somewhere for me to stay in Louisville if I make my own way there?’

‘Sure. No problem. We have use of a dorm block and mess hall at the Kentucky Air National Guard. It’s not quite the Brown or the Seelbach but it’s good enough. We always stay there for the Derby.’

‘Where is it?’ I asked.

‘At Louisville Airport. On the eastern edge, away from the civilian side. It’s real close to Churchill Downs.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you there.’

‘If you can get a flight,’ Norman said. He spread his hands wide. ‘I’m sorry there’s nothing I can do.’

‘Don’t worry. I’m sure I’ll get there somehow.’

He seemed relieved.

Not as relieved as me, I thought.

I had been afraid he would say that I couldn’t go at all.

And what Norman didn’t know was that I was already booked on a flight from Washington to Louisville that afternoon. I had made the reservation the previous evening, after I had spoken to Tony and before the FACSA logistics team had filled up all the available seats.

I was due to leave National Airport somewhat later than Frank, at 3 p.m. local time, and I was packed, with my suitcase ready for collection on my way to Check-in.

7

National Airport, or Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport to give it its full title, was only a couple of miles from the FACSA offices and I was there in good time for my flight.

As I waited at the gate for boarding to commence, I discovered that I was not alone among strangers. Three of the FACSA special agents were there too.

‘Hi, Jeff,’ Bob Wade said, walking over to where I was waiting. ‘How did you get on this flight? I thought all seats were taken. Steffi is having to go through Chicago.’

Oops!

I thrust my boarding pass for seat 8C into my trouser pocket.

‘I’m a standby,’ I said. ‘I get on only if there’s a no-show.’

Bob seemed to accept my hastily made-up explanation.

He came and sat down next to me while the other two took the seats opposite.

‘You’ve met Cliff Connell and Larry Spiegal?’

‘Sure,’ I said, leaning forward and shaking their hands. ‘We met yesterday.’

‘What is it yer do?’ Larry asked in a deep Southern drawl.

‘Much the same as you,’ I said, ‘but in England.’

‘I went to England once,’ he said slowly. ‘With a friend when I was in college. Absolutely loved it. The best thing was y’all being able to drink booze at eighteen without a fake ID.’ He laughed. ‘I remember we made the most of that. Sadly, now, I reckon I can’t remember much else.’ He laughed again and Bob joined him, producing his rapid-fire guffaws.

The flight was called and Bob, Cliff and Larry went to board. I remained seated.

‘Good luck,’ Bob said. ‘See you in Louisville.’

I watched them go through the gate and down the jetway to the plane.

I waited until the very last minute to board and then made my way down to 8C only to find that I was seated right next to Cliff Connell.

‘Made it then?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I replied sitting down. ‘Must be my lucky day. Where are Bob and Larry?’

‘Farther down the back.’

I strapped myself in and we taxied out to the runway for take-off.

The flight was scheduled to take two hours, not enough for a full meal service, but about half an hour in the flight attendant came through the cabin with a trolley offering drinks for purchase.

‘Fancy a beer?’ I said to Cliff.

‘I can’t,’ he said.

‘On duty?’

‘Armed,’ he said quietly in my ear while lightly touching his jacket beneath the left armpit.

‘Really? Don’t you get stopped at security?’

‘I have authorisation to carry a concealed weapon at all times. All federal special agents do.’

‘I thought guns and planes didn’t mix.’

‘I wouldn’t really want to use it while airborne,’ Cliff said with a smile. ‘But I always have it with me, just in case.’

The flight landed at Louisville on time at five o’clock and I was quite surprised to find that, in spite of being so far west, we were still on Eastern Time.

‘The time zone changes west of Louisville,’ Cliff informed me. ‘About half of Kentucky is on Eastern, the rest on Central.’

‘Doesn’t that make things rather complicated for the state government?’

‘Time zones are decisions for individual counties not states, although they have to be approved by the US Congress,’ he said. ‘But there are still a few crazy anomalies in some places — towns on Eastern Time that are farther west than neighbouring towns on Central.’

Tempus fugit, I thought, whatever the time zone.

Cliff and I joined up with Bob and Larry at baggage reclaim. Each of the agents had checked two large bags compared to my one, and theirs appeared to be much heavier than the fifty-pound airline allowance. But I suspected that they hadn’t had to pay any excess charges.

I hitched a lift in their pre-arranged transport from the civilian terminal round to the Kentucky Air National Guard facility.

Getting in was easy for the others but less so for me.

My new security pass, it seemed, was only valid for FACSA headquarters in Arlington. Fortunately I had three special agents with me to vouch for my integrity and soon all four of us were drawing up outside the dorm.

There was a list pinned to a noticeboard near the entrance showing names and the allocation of rooms. At least someone was expecting me, even if my name had been written in by hand on an otherwise typed sheet. I had been assigned Room 304 on the top floor, next door to Steffi Dean who was in 303.

Alongside the rooming list was another sheet of paper with NOTICE TO ALL FACSA SPECIAL AGENTS printed large and boldly across the top. Beneath, it stated that all agents must immediately read the briefing papers placed in their rooms.

I went up the concrete stairs to the third floor. The key was in the door.

I had imagined the dorm would be a large room with iron bedsteads arranged down each side, as in Tom Brown’s School Days, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth.

The dorm was, in fact, a block of twenty-four identical self-contained apartments, eight on each of the three floors. Each apartment consisted of a bedroom, an en-suite bathroom and a kitchen-cum-living room, that came fully equipped with furniture, large refrigerator and a microwave oven. There was even a wide-screen TV bolted to the wall with a bracket.

And these were enlisted men’s barracks, not those for officers.

I thought back to some of the accommodation I had been required to live in during my time in the British Army. I don’t think I’d ever had an en-suite bathroom, let alone a government-issue television.

I went back out into the corridor.

The key was also in the door of Room 303.

Steffi is having to go through Chicago.

That’s what Bob Wade had said to me at Washington National.

Surely she wouldn’t be here yet.

I looked up and down to check there was no one else in the corridor, then I opened the door to 303 and went in, removing the key while I did so.

There was a large white envelope on the bed with ‘Steffi Dean’ written on the front. The envelope was sealed shut.

Damn it.

I picked up the envelope and took it back to my own room. Then I searched the kitchen area and found what I was looking for in a cupboard — an electric kettle.

I hadn’t steamed open an envelope since I was thirteen, when I’d opened my school report before my father could see it. I had been particularly worried about what my history teacher had written concerning my poor behaviour in his class, and with good reason. I had removed the offending piece of paper before resealing the doctored report back into its envelope. My father had never known and I, of course, had never told him.

I did, however, discover one difficulty now that I hadn’t had the last time. Due to the development of more modern technology, this kettle kept switching itself off as soon as it started to boil, cutting off the flow of steam from the spout.

I solved the problem by tying a dishcloth around the kettle that held down the switch in the ‘on’ position and, before long, the white envelope was lying open on the worktop.

I scanned quickly through the briefing papers, ever conscious that Steffi could arrive at any time.

Much of the details I already knew from Tony’s earlier package. However, this time there was a detailed map of the barns at Churchill Downs with Hayden Ryder’s outlined in red, together with the raid timetable and a list of actions specific to Steffi Dean. I noted that she was to secure the northeastern corner of the barn on arrival.

The briefing papers also stated that the track opened for training at dawn, which was at 6.45, so the raid would take place at 6.30 a.m. on Saturday. They also gave details of the raid personnel and their specific roles, as well as the transport arrangements. All eight FACSA special agents would be involved together with Norman Gibson, the section chief, who was to be in overall control.

My name was not included on the raid personnel list.

Local Kentucky law enforcement would be present on-site immediately after the raid was initiated in order to limit disruption for trainers in other barns. In addition, three veterinary surgeons from the US Department of Agriculture would travel on the transport with the agents to secure samples from each of the twenty-four horses known to be stabled in Ryder’s barn.

The papers went on to say that there would be a full-scale rehearsal on Wednesday morning using an unused barn on a local horse farm. Special agents should study and fully assimilate the map of the real Churchill Downs barns prior to the rehearsal. All personnel were to be fully kitted with their firearms readied, as if for the real thing, at 0600 hours on Wednesday. The Deputy Director would be attending the rehearsal and making an assessment of individual performances.

Tony had obviously followed my advice to the letter.

I put the papers back in the envelope and resealed it. Then I slipped it under my arm beneath my coat and went out into the corridor.

I could hear voices in the stairwell at the far end.

I quickly reinserted the key into the handle of Room 303 and went in, placed the envelope back where I’d found it, and made a hasty retreat.

I was only just back in my own room when I heard Bob Wade’s distinctive laugh coming down the corridor.

That was much too close for comfort, I thought, and my thumping heart agreed.

I took a couple of deep breaths and stepped back out into the corridor. Bob and Steffi were kissing and they jumped apart as if they’d had an electric shock. Silly people. Why not wait until they were inside?

‘Hello, Jeff,’ Steffi said with a nervous laugh. ‘I didn’t realise you were coming.’

‘It’d be a waste of my time to remain in Arlington with you all here,’ I said. ‘I’m off to explore.’

I walked past them and on towards the stairwell without looking back. I smiled to myself. Perhaps they would be so engrossed in each other for a while that they wouldn’t notice that the white envelope still had a slight dampness to it due to the steam.

Dinner was at six-thirty, served in what Frank Bannister called the chow hall, a large building close by the accommodation.

I personally thought it was a little early to eat but some of the others bemoaned the fact that it was so late, and they didn’t seem to worry that two of the agents who’d had to fly via Atlanta hadn’t yet arrived.

‘I’m sure they’ll get something on the flight,’ Frank said, helping himself to a second serving. ‘I would if I were them.’

‘It won’t be long ’til breakfast anyway,’ chipped in Trudi Harding, the second female special agent, sitting alongside Steffi Dean. ‘Why do we have to be up so damn early? Why can’t the rehearsal be at a more reasonable hour?’

‘That’s government service for you,’ Frank said, laughing. ‘They never take your comfort into consideration.’

He was so right. In the army, I’d regularly risen at five, ready to be at work by six or six-thirty. And that was in the UK. On operations in Afghanistan it was a matter of catching an hour’s sleep whenever and wherever you could. Only since joining the BHA had I grown fonder of my bed.

After eating, everyone drifted back to their rooms ‘to check kit, clean weapons and to memorise their individual action plan’ according to Frank. ‘It’s not often we get a Deputy Director’s assessment,’ he said. ‘Failing can result in loss of special-agent status.’

‘Does that happen often?’ I asked.

‘I’ve never known it at FACSA,’ he said, ‘but there are stories from other agencies. And no one here wants to be the first.’

He rushed off, no doubt to oil his Glock 22C and polish his expanding bullets. I, meanwhile, wandered over to a quiet open space to make a call to Tony.

‘Where are you?’ Tony asked.

‘In Louisville,’ I said. ‘How about you?’

‘I’ve just landed.’

I instinctively looked over to my left towards the airport runways. Crazy really. There was not a chance in hell I’d be able to see him.

‘Any luck with the staff bank statements?’ I asked.

‘The subpoenas have been issued and served on the various banks. We should have everything by tomorrow.’

I was impressed. The wheels of government agencies could spin fast after all.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now about tomorrow morning. I am not on the list of raid personnel.’

‘Have you seen it?’

‘Yes. I borrowed the briefing papers from one of your agents.’

‘Someone showed them to you?’ He sounded troubled.

‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘I borrowed them without their knowledge.’

‘But those papers are highly confidential.’

‘Then people shouldn’t leave them lying around for others to look at, even if they were in a sealed envelope in a locked room. It was plain careless to leave the key in the lock. I couldn’t help myself.’

Tony laughed. ‘You see, I do have the right man.’

‘But what can you do about it? I need to be there for the raid.’

‘Why don’t you ask me in the morning?’

‘I’m asking you now,’ I said, slightly irritated.

‘No. I mean ask me formally in the morning with the others listening. I’m sure Norman Gibson will introduce you to me if you ask him. I will just say — why not? — and you’ll be in.’

I supposed it was a better plan than him going directly to Norman to request it.

‘OK,’ I said, ‘I will.’

‘See you in the morning, then.’

‘Yes,’ I replied.

I was excited about the raid but also quite apprehensive.

Who wouldn’t be with eight special agents running around in an enclosed space with their firearms readied? A space that was also shared by two dozen highly strung Thoroughbred racehorses.

While not necessarily a recipe for disaster, there was ample scope for things to go wrong.

8

And they did go horribly wrong. At least, I thought so, although the others seemed to be remarkably happy with the outcome.

Everyone was ready well before the 6 a.m. call and it quickly became apparent why the agents’ baggage had been so heavy — body armour.

Each special agent was wearing a dark blue bullet-proof vest with FACSA in large yellow letters on the front and back. In addition they were all in matching uniform of dark blue trousers, a lighter blue shirt and black baseball cap, again with FACSA embroidered in yellow above the peak.

There was no attempt now to hide the weapons, their Glock 22Cs visible in full sight in gunslinger-style holsters attached to the agents’ belts and tied around their legs above the knee with black straps.

They were also wired with personal radios, with earpieces on curly wires, and microphones attached to their non-gun wrists.

The final touch was a shiny gold badge with ‘Department of Justice’ and ‘US Federal Anti-Corruption in Sports Agency’ embossed around the edge and a large ‘Special Agent’ stamped across the middle. Secured to the front of each agent’s bulletproof vest above the heart, they reminded me of the toy sheriff’s star I’d pinned to my cowboy outfit as a child.

The sky was still totally black as Norman ushered the eight special agents into a line on the dot of six o’clock.

‘Does everyone know their roles?’

He received eight thumbs-up.

‘Justin and Mason, are you sure you’re happy?’

Justin Pickering and Mason Rees were the two agents who had arrived late via Atlanta the previous evening.

They both nodded. ‘We’re ready, boss,’ one of them said.

At that point, a black Chevy Suburban pulled up in front of the line and Tony Andretti climbed out from the back seat. He was wearing a dark suit as if for a day at the office, save for the earpiece already in his ear.

Norman Gibson stepped forward to greet him and the two men shook hands.

I, meanwhile, was hovering at the far end of the line, having previously asked Norman to introduce me to the Deputy Director.

Tony walked briefly along, stopping once or twice to talk to the agents. Then he came straight towards where I was standing.

‘Deputy Director,’ Norman said, ‘can I introduce Jeff Hinkley? He’s an international observer from England.’

‘Delighted to meet you,’ I said, shaking Tony’s offered hand.

‘What organisation in England?’ he asked.

‘The British Horseracing Authority.’

‘Then this operation should be up your alley.’

‘So can I come with you?’ I asked.

‘I don’t see why not,’ Tony said. He turned to Norman. ‘What do you think?’

‘Sure. It is only a rehearsal,’ Norman said. ‘No problem.’ He looked down at his watch. ‘OK, everyone, let’s load up.’

Even though there was a fleet of half a dozen black vans available, identical to the one in which Tony had arrived, the transport on this occasion was a military vehicle, identical to the ubiquitous American school bus, but painted dark blue rather than the regular bright yellow.

The three USDA veterinarians were already on board and no one had told them it was a rehearsal — because it wasn’t.

I had recommended to Tony that he should wait as late as possible before informing his special agents about the switch from rehearsal to real thing, so that no one would have the opportunity to make a call or send a warning text. But I hadn’t expected him to leave it as late as he did.

The journey from the Kentucky Air National Guard facility to the backside barns of Churchill Downs was only four miles.

We had turned off I-264, with the iconic twin spires of the grandstand almost visible in the pre-dawn twilight, before Tony stood up at the front of the bus.

‘Listen up, please, ladies and gentlemen.’ He spoke loudly and had the instant attention of all. ‘The operation has been brought forward. This is not a rehearsal. I repeat. This is not a rehearsal. We will arrive at Hayden Ryder’s barn at Churchill Downs in precisely two minutes. I trust you will perform your duties with the usual FACSA expertise and proficiency. Good luck.’

I was trying to watch their faces to see if I could detect any emotion, perhaps a touch of panic that information given to Hayden Ryder in good faith had now been rendered inaccurate.

From the look of his eyes, Norman Gibson was not at all happy. I couldn’t blame him. He was meant to be in charge of this operation but he, too, had been unaware of the switch. There was also some surprise among the others and a couple of murmurs of disapproval, but nothing particularly obvious in the way of panic.

Cliff Connell, sitting right opposite me, simply shrugged his shoulders and removed his Glock 22C from its holster. He checked once again that the magazine was full, and then cocked the weapon by pulling the slide back sharply and releasing it.

He saw me watching him and smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘The safety’s still on.’

But I did worry, and I was beginning to wish I had a bulletproof vest like the rest of them.

To say that the Churchill Downs raid was different from similar operations I had conducted in the UK would be an understatement.

Only the previous September, I had led a team of three BHA integrity officers to a training stables in Newmarket after an anonymous tip-off that certain horses were being given a concoction of bicarbonate of soda by tube into their stomachs before racing. The process, known as ‘milkshaking’, has the effect of making the blood and muscle less acidic, and hence reducing fatigue.

Milkshaking was a serious breach of the Rules of Racing.

The three of us plus a veterinary technician had appeared unannounced at the stables to carry out a search and to take blood samples for analysis. The trainer in question had been understandably concerned by our arrival but he had assisted us in identifying the correct horses and, all in all, he had cooperated in every way without the need for coercion or threats.

There had been no question of us turning up then in the same manner employed here today by the FACSA agents — before dawn like a posse in a Wild West movie with their guns drawn.

The bus swung in silently through the backside gates, helpfully opened by a Kentucky police deputy, and came to a gentle stop at the designated spot at the end of a line of barns. If I remembered correctly from Steffi’s map, Hayden Ryder’s was the third one down.

‘All set?’ Norman said it in a whisper but each of the agents heard it clearly through their earpieces. ‘Final radio check.’

Again there were eight raised thumbs.

‘OK,’ Norman said, checking his watch. ‘The op is on.’ He withdrew his own weapon from its holster and cocked the mechanism. ‘Get into your positions and wait for my call before going in. Good luck, everyone.’

He started to go down the steps but turned to look straight at me. ‘Jeff, you can use this.’ He tossed me a spare radio. ‘But you wait on the bus with the Deputy Director and the veterinarians. You do not come forward until I tell you to do so. Do you understand?’

I nodded.

The raid team followed Norman off the bus with a mixture of enthusiasm and apprehension showing in their faces. Trudi Harding smiled down at me wanly but her eyes betrayed her anxiety. She was the most nervous. Cliff Connell, meanwhile, was clearly excited and raring to go.

The seven men and two women each knew their starting positions and moved silently towards them. Although it was still before sunrise, there was plenty of light both from the brightening sky in the east and from numerous security lights set high on poles, and I watched through the bus window as the team spread out.

Even though the track wouldn’t be open for another fifteen minutes, there was already much activity in the barns with horses being readied for their morning exercise.

‘I’m going closer,’ I said to Tony.

‘But Norman said you were to wait on the bus.’

I looked at him with my head cocked to one side as if to say, ‘So what?’

I went down the steps and moved slowly past the first barn in the line, stopping close to the second one. Hayden Ryder’s barn was the next one down and appeared quite normal, with several internal lights visible through the open sides.

All was still quiet.

‘Listen up,’ Norman’s whispered voice said in my earpiece. ‘Anyone not in position?’

There was no responding call from the agents.

‘Good. Count down — three, two, one — go!’

The stillness of the dawn was suddenly broken by seemingly all nine armed agents shouting at the same time.

‘Armed federal officer! Stand still with your hands up.’

I watched as Steffi Dean made her way towards the northeastern corner of the barn, her two arms stretched firmly out in front of her, her right hand locked around the grip of her Glock 22C, with her left hand holding her right wrist for added stability.

No silencer, I noted. This was not a covert operation.

Back in the offices in Arlington, she had told me that she’d never fired her gun other than on a range, but now she looked more than ready, moving her whole torso from side to side with her head so that the barrel always pointed directly where she was looking.

As I crept closer, there was more shouting from within the barn and then, quite suddenly, a series of shots rang out — at least ten in rapid succession.

‘Man down! Man down!’ was shouted loudly through my earpiece by a high-pitched female voice.

Oh shit!

Even I knew that ‘Man down’ meant that one of the special agents had been injured, or worse.

I inched forward and peered around the side of one of the huge steel skips that were dotted around the site for the collection of manure.

I could see Steffi Dean standing in the exit at the corner of the barn, her gun held out straight in front like a natural extension of her arm.

‘Who’s down?’ Norman asked in my ear.

‘Bob Wade,’ came the reply. It was Trudi Harding who spoke.

I watched as Steffi buckled at the knees and almost went down to the dirt floor.

Her gun dropped to her side and, even from my hiding place some ten yards away, I could clearly hear her gasp with despair.

‘I think Bob’s fine,’ Trudi went on. ‘I shot the assailant. He’s down too.’

From somewhere over my right shoulder I could hear the rhythmic raising and falling siren of an approaching ambulance.

‘Are we secure?’ Norman asked. ‘Anyone else need assistance?’

There was no reply.

‘Suspects?’ Norman said.

‘Only the one down here,’ Trudi replied.

‘All others lying face down in the dirt and cooperating,’ a male voice added. ‘Secure on the south side.’

‘And on the north,’ chipped in another agent.

‘All clear,’ called Norman. ‘But stay vigilant, everybody. Conduct a full search.’

In front of me, Steffi Dean had recovered her composure somewhat and again had her Glock 22C up at the ready. She moved into the wooden building and started to move forward, looking into each horse-stall in turn.

Hayden Ryder’s barn was identical to most of the other barns at Churchill Downs. About seventy yards in length, it contained twenty-four wooden-built horse-stalls, arranged in two rows of twelve, situated back to back, with wide, open walkways running along in front, bounded on the outside by a half-height wall. At either end were more substantial, two-storey, block-built structures containing the trainer’s office, equipment and feed stores, together with the stable dispensary.

The whole thing was covered by a green shingle-covered roof that stretched from the structures at either end over the total length and width of the barn, supported above the half-walls by white-painted vertical wooden beams.

From the direction of the shots, it seemed that all the action had taken place at the far end of the barn.

I walked up alongside and went in.

Three of the special agents, Larry Spiegal, Cliff Connell and Mason Rees, stood looking down at a man who lay in a crumpled heap on the ground.

No one made any attempt to help him, because he was beyond help.

The back of his head appeared to have been entirely blown away.

Norman appeared from the far side of the barn. He took in the scene, together with the fact that I was standing there. He pursed his lips.

‘Anyone know who it is?’ he asked.

None of the agents replied.

‘I think it’s Hayden Ryder,’ I said. ‘The trainer.’ They all looked at me. ‘I did some research on the Internet. I think that’s his face, or what’s left of it.’

We all looked down again at the mangled bloody mess at our feet.

‘Cover him up,’ Norman said to no one in particular.

Larry Spiegal took a horse rug that was hung over the half-wall and draped it over the body.

‘Where’s Bob?’ Norman asked.

‘Down there,’ Mason Rees said, pointing.

I glanced to my left. Bob Wade was sitting on the floor with his back up against one of the stall walls and his legs stretched straight out on the dirt. Trudi Harding was crouching down next to him.

‘What happened?’ Norman asked.

‘This guy came at Bob with that fork,’ Mason said, indicating the long-handled, two-pronged pitchfork lying close to the body. ‘I saw it happen. He came out of that door, ran straight at Bob, and stabbed him in the chest.’ He made a two-handed stabbing motion. ‘Trudi took him down.’

Norman walked over towards Bob.

‘You OK?’ he asked.

Bob Wade looked up at him and nodded. ‘A bit shaken up but I’ll be fine. One of the prongs hit my badge.’ He fingered the groove that the fork had made in the metal.

‘You were lucky,’ Norman said. ‘How come he got close enough to stab you?’

‘He came from behind me. I heard him and turned but he was too close. He was on me before I had a chance to react.’

Norman was far from happy.

It was clear that Trudi was still shocked by what had happened.

‘He would have killed Bob,’ she said, speaking with a nervous timbre in her voice. ‘I’m sure of it. He was lining up for a second attempt with the fork so I shot him.’

‘You did the right thing,’ Norman said.

Two uniformed paramedics ran into the barn weighed down with medical kits. They took a brief look at the body under the rug, and then went over to Bob Wade. They could only help the living.

Norman walked a little bit away and signalled for me to follow.

‘I told you to remain on the bus.’

‘I heard you say “all clear” over the radio so I came forward.’

He didn’t like it but there was little else he could do.

‘Go back to the bus now,’ he said firmly. ‘I will try to sort out this damn mess. It might take some time as I have to call in the Louisville Police to investigate the shooting.’

‘Can I help in any way?’ I asked hopefully.

He shook his head. ‘Get back on the bus and wait for me there, or else I will have you arrested.’

That seemed to be a fairly definite no, then.

I went back to the bus.

9

I sat on the bus for the next two hours, by which time the whole area round Ryder’s barn had been cordoned off with bright yellow ‘POLICE — DO NOT CROSS’ tape by the Louisville Police.

From my vantage point, I watched as a black van with ‘County Coroner’s Office’ painted in white lettering on its side arrived and drove up to the barn.

A little while later, the van departed, carrying, I presumed, the mortal remains of Hayden Ryder.

Soon after that the three veterinary technicians were called forward to collect blood samples from the horses.

That left me alone on the bus. Even the driver had deserted me and I hadn’t seen Tony since before the raid had gone in.

Meanwhile, life on the Churchill Downs backside went on as usual with horses being prepared from the other barns for their daily workout on the track.

True, there were more members of the media on site than might be normally expected three days before a big race, and the crews were from the TV news networks rather than from the sports channels, but the welfare and training of the horses still had to go on. It seemed it would take more than the shooting of a trainer to derail the Kentucky Derby juggernaut.

With over 170,000 spectators expected for the main event, some having paid in excess of $6,000 for a single ticket, it was the big annual occasion for Louisville. Every hotel room was full for a hundred miles around, and you had more chance of walking on water than getting a dinner reservation in a city-centre restaurant.

But only for the first Saturday in May.

For the rest of the year, Louisville returned to its regular, sleepy existence where the tourist highlights included an educational visit to the Louisville Slugger baseball-bat factory, or nostalgic trips to the birthplace and grave of Muhammad Ali.

Eventually Norman returned. He came up the steps into the bus and sat down on the seat opposite me.

‘Who the hell are you?’ he asked.

‘You know who I am,’ I replied. ‘Jeff Hinkley, from the BHA in London.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m on the international exchange scheme.’

‘Don’t give me that bullshit. I reckon you’re here to spy on us. I just don’t know yet who sent you.’

He’d clearly been a pretty good detective.

‘Whatever gave you that idea?’ I said, trying my best to control my voice and be all innocent.

‘You know things you shouldn’t, and you also do things you shouldn’t.’

‘Like what?’ I asked.

‘Like how did you get here from DC?’ he said. ‘Every single seat was taken on the direct flights. I know because I was trying to use my position at FACSA to get more without any success. The airlines told me they were already oversold, yet you made it here easily.’

‘I must have been lucky.’

‘I don’t believe in luck.’ He said it without a trace of humour in his voice. ‘But, most of all, how did you know it was Hayden Ryder who was shot?’

‘I told you,’ I said. ‘I recognised him.’

‘How?’

‘I’d researched him on the Internet.’

‘Why?’ he said slowly. ‘You shouldn’t have known anything about this raid. You certainly shouldn’t have known we were after Hayden Ryder.’

That had been careless of me.

I stared at him.

‘Who told you?’

‘I think you had better speak to the Deputy Director.’

‘I’m speaking to you.’ He said it with some real menace in his voice. ‘Who told you?’ he asked again.

I didn’t answer.

He removed his Glock 22C from its holster, cocked the mechanism, and pointed it right at me, somewhere between my eyes, from a distance of only a few inches.

‘I’ll not ask you again,’ he said calmly.

Was this really happening?

My head told me that he wouldn’t possibly pull the trigger, but my head hadn’t informed my heart, which was pounding away so fast that it felt in danger of bursting out of my chest altogether.

I’d had loaded guns pointed at me before but I’d never seen the business end of one quite so close up. I almost had to cross my eyes to focus on the.40-calibre black hole at the end of the barrel.

My mind started playing silly tricks, like wondering if I would have time to actually see the expanding bullet appearing before it took off the back of my head.

I decided it was time to come clean.

‘I was asked to find a mole in your organisation, someone who has been leaking confidential information to those you were meant to be investigating.’

The Glock 22C didn’t move a fraction of a millimetre.

For a moment I was worried that it was Norman who was the mole, and I had just signed my own death warrant.

‘So who told you about the raid?’

‘Tony Andretti,’ I said. ‘He gave me the details after your meeting in the offices on Monday.’

He dropped the gun down onto his lap and I breathed a quiet sigh of relief.

‘I wondered why he let you come on the bus when he knew it wasn’t a rehearsal.’

‘It was my idea to bring the operation forward to this morning. To reduce the chance that the information would leak or, at least, to reduce the time any leak could be acted upon.’

‘Why wasn’t I told?’ Norman said, but he was smart enough to work out the answer. I just looked at him.

After a few seconds, he nodded. It didn’t seem to make him any happier.

‘So who is the mole?’

‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’

‘Will you go on looking?’

‘Yes, I suppose so. If I’m asked to.’

But I was now a little worried. It had been my carelessness that had allowed Norman to work out that I’d been highly economical with the truth.

I wondered who else might have come to the same conclusion.

By the time Norman finally allowed me off the bus, Tony had been summoned to Louisville City Hall to explain to the mayor why one of FACSA’s special agents had shot dead a prominent Kentucky racehorse trainer on his patch. And in the week of the Derby, too, when the entire world’s horseracing media was focused on Churchill Downs. It was the wrong kind of publicity, and most unwelcome.

My release from the bus, however, did not provide me with access to the barn at the centre of the action. That was still cordoned off by the yellow tape and the local police were proving far too vigilant at keeping me out.

Hence I was still standing close to the bus when a huge eighteen-wheel truck and trailer pulled up alongside.

‘Which one is Hayden Ryder’s barn?’ the driver called, leaning out of the window towards me.

‘The one behind the police tape,’ I said. ‘You can’t get there at the moment.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Someone got shot,’ I said.

The driver didn’t seem unduly surprised or worried. Shootings were commonplace.

‘I’ve come to pick up Ryder’s horses.’

That was quick, I thought. Hayden Ryder hadn’t yet been dead for four hours and someone was already here to take away his horses.

‘Where are you taking them?’ I asked.

‘Chattanooga.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Tennessee,’ said the driver. ‘Three hundred miles south.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Is this going to last long? I’ll have to get going by midday at the latest, or I’m stuck here overnight. I’d be out of hours.’

I looked at the side of his truck. ‘CHATTANOOGA HORSE TRANSPORT’ was painted in large black letters on the white side of the trailer.

‘Have you come from Chattanooga this morning?’ I asked him.

‘Sure have,’ he said. ‘I’ve been on the road since five.’

‘Five this morning?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘Made really good time up I-65 from Nashville.’

‘How many horses are you collecting?’

‘A full load,’ he said. ‘Fifteen for me. There’s another truck behind me for another nine.’

All twenty-four horses.

Hayden Ryder’s whole barn of Thoroughbreds would have been shipped out of Churchill Downs 300 miles south to Chattanooga only three days before the planned FACSA raid.

Could that be a coincidence?

I didn’t like coincidences.

‘When were you booked for this trip?’ I asked the driver.

‘Yesterday,’ he said. ‘Rush job. I’ve had to postpone a trip down to Tampa to fit it in.’

‘Which racetrack are you taking the horses to?’

‘It’s not a racetrack — there’s no horseracing at all in Tennessee. They’re going to Jasper, west of Chattanooga. To a horse farm.’

No horseracing in Tennessee.

How convenient, I thought.

There would be no state racing commission to authorise any testing. And Jasper might be far enough away not to bother to send someone from Louisville.

‘Do you have a name?’ I asked the driver.

‘Elvis,’ he said.

I laughed.

‘It’s true. Elvis O’Mally. My dad came over to Tennessee from Ireland as a boy. He was a huge fan of the King.’

‘Well, Elvis,’ I said, ‘you wait here. I’ll try and find out when you can get the horses.’

I wandered a little away from his listening ears and called Tony on the non-smart phone.

‘I can’t talk,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m in a meeting with the mayor.’

‘Don’t hang up,’ I replied quickly. ‘Listen. Two horse trailers have arrived here to collect all Hayden Ryder’s horses and take them to Tennessee. The trailers left Chattanooga at five o’clock this morning. They were booked yesterday.’

I allowed time for the significance of the information to sink in.

‘And another thing,’ I said. ‘Norman knows.’

‘Knows what?’ Tony said.

‘He knows the real reason why I’m here. I had to tell him or I’d have been arrested.’

Or shot.

‘I’ll get back there as soon as I can,’ Tony said.

He hung up.

I walked back to Elvis the driver, who had climbed down from his cab.

‘You’ll have to wait,’ I said.

‘For how long?’

Good question.

Tony returned shortly after midday, by which time Elvis and his fellow Chattanooga Horse Transport driver had given up waiting.

‘It’s a damn shame,’ Elvis had said. ‘I should have been sunning myself on the beach in Tampa, not hanging around up here.’ He climbed up into his cab. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow morning for this lot.’

I doubted it.

I wasn’t certain what would happen now to the twenty-four horses still standing in the barn, but I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be going to Jasper, Tennessee.

It would be up to their owners to find them new trainers, either here at Churchill Downs or at another track.

Elvis was backing up his truck. I went over and banged on the driver’s door. He lowered the window.

‘What time yesterday did your trip to Tampa get postponed?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, uninterested. ‘Must have been in the morning. My boss told me when I got back to the depot around one.’

He turned his eighteen-wheeler around in a space I’d have had trouble turning a dinghy trailer. Then he drove off, followed by his mate.

I was still standing by the blue bus when Tony came over to me, with Norman Gibson in tow.

‘On the bus,’ Tony ordered.

The three of us climbed aboard.

Norman started to complain to Tony that he hadn’t been told the true purpose of my visit but Tony cut him off.

‘Tell Norman what you told me.’

‘Hayden Ryder’s horses were due to be removed from here today and taken to Tennessee.’

‘How do you know?’ Norman said.

I told him about Elvis and his Chattanooga Horse Transport van.

‘Is he still here?’ Norman looked out of the bus windows.

‘No. He’s gone. He’d run out of time to drive all the way home today. He told me he’d be back in the morning.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me this while he was here?’ Norman was not best pleased.

‘I couldn’t get through the police line to find you,’ I replied in my defence. ‘But I do have the company’s phone number.’

I handed over a piece of paper. I’d copied it off the side of the truck.

Tony was more interested in the significance of Elvis being there in the first place.

‘It means that Hayden Ryder must have been aware of the raid by one o’clock yesterday at the latest.’

Norman nodded. ‘The stable dispensary has also been packed up in boxes ready to be shipped out.’

‘So who told Ryder?’ Tony said.

It was the all-important question.

Sadly, we could no longer ask the man himself for the answer.

10

There was a debriefing for the FACSA raid team at four o’clock that afternoon, back at the mess hall of the National Guard facility.

Most of them had spent some of the preceding eight hours being individually interviewed by detectives from the Louisville Police Department’s fatal-shooting investigation team.

‘It is perfectly routine,’ Tony told me on the phone when I called him well away from the others. ‘There’s a standard procedure for all officer-involved shootings. Such events bring intense media scrutiny and we have to guard against any damage to the agency’s reputation. Hence the local police conduct a detailed enquiry and interview everyone involved.’

‘I wasn’t interviewed,’ I said.

‘The fatal-shooting investigation team is only concerned with events up to the moment the shots were fired. You were not a witness to the actual shooting so I didn’t give them your name. I thought it was best to keep you out of it.’

‘I agree,’ I said. ‘Thanks. So what happens next?’

‘The evidence may have to be presented to a grand jury to confirm the killing was justified, although that’s most unlikely in this case.’

‘So you think the killing was justified?’ I asked.

‘Without a doubt,’ Tony said. ‘Ryder attacked a law-enforcement officer with a deadly weapon. That in itself is enough reason for him to be shot.’

‘But surely not ten times.’

‘It can often take more than one shot to bring down a suspect. Our agents are trained to fire multiple rounds in case some of them miss.’

‘I was told your agents are all hotshots,’ I said. ‘Surely they don’t miss.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ Tony said. ‘They may be OK on the range but operational situations are very different. A Miami police survey showed that of thirteen hundred bullets fired at suspects, more than eleven hundred missed. And NYPD found barely a quarter fired from under six feet hit their target, with less than a fifth at ten feet.’

‘How many hit Hayden Ryder?’

‘I don’t know yet. The autopsy will tell us. The important thing is that at least one did, and that one was enough to disable him.’

It had done more than that, I thought.

I had spent the day trying to erase from my mind the grisly image of Ryder’s head completely torn apart by an expanding bullet.

I’d seen more than my fair share of killings during my time with the army in Afghanistan but nothing really prepares you for the sudden finality of violent death, the instant wiping out of an active, vivid and cognisant existence, to be replaced by… nothing. Nothing more than a useless rotting corpse.

‘What will you do now?’ Tony asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay on here for the Derby. I wouldn’t want to miss that, but I feel I’m approaching the problem from the wrong end.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘These guys are smart — they don’t get to be federal special agents if they’re not. I can’t hang around forever on the off-chance that our friend will make a mistake. He won’t. And I’ll have wasted my time, and yours. I feel we have to tackle things from the opposite direction.’

‘Explain.’

‘I work best undercover but I’m not using those skills here. Everyone at the agency knows who I am and that severely limits my scope.’

I took a deep breath. In for a penny…

‘I need to get a job on a track backside, maybe as a groom or something, with one of the trainers. FACSA then has to plan a raid on that trainer for some reason and hope our friend somehow tips him off.’

‘Would the trainer be made aware of your existence?’ Tony asked.

‘Best not, at least to start with. I know from experience that being undercover is fraught with danger. It is ten times worse when somebody is aware of the truth. Body language can be a real giveaway.’

‘But how would you know if the trainer had been forewarned about a raid?’ Tony asked.

‘Hayden Ryder couldn’t have packed up the whole of his stable dispensary and arranged to ship out his horses without the help of his staff. Racehorses have to have grooms accompanying them — they would hardly walk onto a truck on their own. Ryder’s whole team had to be involved in the preparations even if they didn’t know the reasons why.’

‘But how will you get a job? Do you have any experience working with horses?’

‘Loads,’ I said. In truth, I’d only had a little. But I was confident around racehorses and that was half the battle.

‘And you’re hardly the right size,’ Tony said.

I was five feet ten inches in my socks, but I was lean and fit. Maybe I was a bit tall and perhaps a tad too heavy to ride young Thoroughbreds, but not to work as a groom.

One thing I had discovered while I’d been waiting at Churchill Downs all day was that, unlike in the UK, the grooms did not ride the horses. That was the preserve of the exercise riders, up-and-coming riders or retired jockeys who would often move from barn to barn, exploiting their skills for more than one trainer.

The grooms were simply there to, well, groom the horses, to muck out their stalls, and to fetch and carry their feed and water. On race days they might get to lead one of their charges over to the saddling boxes and the mounting yard but, in truth, the life of a backside groom was far from glamorous.

Tony wasn’t finished. ‘Most grooms are Latino or African-Americans. An Englishman would surely stick out like a sore thumb.’

He was right.

‘How about an Irishman?’ I said.

I had always been good at speaking with an Irish accent. While at school, I had entertained my classmates by mimicking our headmaster, who had come from County Cork.

‘I can easily pass as an Irishmen,’ I said. ‘I’ve done it before, and I know you have Irish grooms over here. I’ve heard their banter.’

‘Will you try to work at Churchill Downs?’ Tony asked.

‘That might be a bit of a risk. Almost all of the Churchill Downs backside staff came over to Ryder’s barn to have a look at the action at one time or another today and many of them asked me what was going on.’

‘Where then?’

‘How about at Pimlico?’ I said. ‘Isn’t the Preakness run there in two weeks?’

‘It sure is,’ said Tony. ‘But Pimlico isn’t used any more as a regular training centre. Their barns are only open for seven weeks during their spring meet. Better to try Belmont in New York. That’s where the third leg of the Crown is run. There are plenty of full-time trainers at Belmont.’

‘Isn’t Belmont where the Sports Illustrated journalist thought someone was blood doping?’

‘Yes,’ Tony said. ‘Jason Connor.’

‘Right, then I’ll try there. Can you get me a list of Belmont-based trainers, especially those you may have doubts about?’

‘Sure,’ Tony said. ‘No problem. Anything else?’

‘Yes. You told me in London about a raid on a trainer who employed suspected illegal immigrants as grooms. Where was that?’

‘Aqueduct Racetrack. Also in New York, near JFK. Back in February.’

‘Is the use of illegal-immigrant grooms widespread at all tracks?’

‘Cash gambling tends to make racing a cash-rich business. Wherever cash is used to pay staff there will always be illegals working.’

‘Could you therefore send an official letter to all the trainers at Belmont advising them of the severe consequences of employing illegal immigrants?’

‘What for?’

‘If you can fix me a legal work visa, it might help provide a vacancy for me to fill.’

Tony laughed. ‘The letter would be better coming from ICE — Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It’s part of the Department of Homeland Security. They’re responsible for tracking down illegal immigrants. I know the Deputy Director, we’ve been to conferences together. I’ll get him to write the letter.’

‘Best not to tell him why.’

‘I’ll say it’s a follow-up from FACSA’s raid earlier in the year. I’ll recommend he sends the letter to all registered racehorse trainers across the country threatening them with jail for employing illegals.’

‘Is that true?’

‘Unlikely,’ he said. ‘But it could happen in extreme cases.’

‘Would your man be prepared to cover the cost of sending a letter to all trainers?’

‘Sure he will,’ Tony said. ‘It’s peanuts compared to what else they spend. Their budget is over five billion a year. I’ll get it sorted straight away — have it done this week.’

‘How about the work visa?’ I said. ‘Preferably in a false name.’

‘What name?’

Think of a common Irish name. ‘How about Patrick Sean Murphy?’

‘Shouldn’t be too much of a problem,’ Tony said. ‘I’ll have a quiet word with someone I know in the State Department.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘And how are the bank statements coming along?’

‘They should be with me this evening. How shall I get them to you?’

‘Can we trust Norman?’ I asked. But it was a rhetorical question. He already knew the true purpose of me being there. If we couldn’t trust him my cover was totally blown anyway, and my future prospects were likely to be severely limited.

‘We have to,’ Tony said.

‘Then give the statements to him to pass on to me.’

‘He’ll want to know what they are.’

‘Then tell him. But best not to say that his bank statements are there too. He might not like that. In fact, you’d better remove his in case he checks, but scan them yourself first for any suspicious deposits.’

‘You don’t really trust him, do you? Not even now.’

‘I trust no one,’ I said.

‘Not even me?’ Tony asked. ‘Not even my mother,’ I said.

And she’d been dead for twenty-five years.

Back in the National Guard mess hall, Trudi Harding was being hailed as a hero.

She was applauded and cheered by the other agents when she finally arrived back after a lengthy interview with the Louisville police.

Bob Wade embraced her warmly, which didn’t particularly endear him to Steffi Dean, who looked on stony-faced.

Everyone was in good spirits, as if the whole raid hadn’t been blighted by the shooting dead of Hayden Ryder.

Some of them even thought it was a bonus.

‘Saves all the expense of a trial,’ Cliff Connell said openly with a huge grin.

The debriefing turned rapidly into a self-congratulatory celebration.

There was even a short emotional address by Norman Gibson, who thanked his staff for ‘a job well done’.

None of them seemed to entertain the notion that death had been rather an extreme penalty for Ryder’s alleged wrongdoing, even if he had been shot for attacking Bob Wade rather than giving his horses prohibited drugs.

I personally found all the backslapping and high fives a bit tasteless, what with Hayden Ryder’s body still cooling in the county coroner’s morgue.

Hence I left them to it.

Instead I went up to my room and watched as a local Louisville TV newsreader echoed the same sentiments, blatantly accusing the dead trainer of serial drug abuse and the wilful maltreatment of his horses.

I knew that freedom of speech and honest opinion were enshrined in the First Amendment of the US Constitution but, even so, the claims seemed somewhat outrageous.

I had a political journalist acquaintance who once told me that there was nothing better than finding out that some detested fat cat had died. ‘You can’t libel the dead,’ he would say, while gleefully filling his column with some lurid tales of wrongdoing that may have been mildly suspected of the deceased, but were far beyond any actual proof.

‘Do you have no compassion?’ I’d said. ‘Surely it’s disrespectful to speak ill of the recent dead?’

‘Maybe,’ he’d replied with a smile, ‘but it sells papers.’

No wonder some people tell you never to believe what you read in the newspapers.

I used the remote control to flick through the other TV news channels and found much the same fare on all of them. In the end, I lay on my bed watching a quiz show where, bizarrely, the contestants had to give the question, having been shown the answer.

It wasn’t long before it caused me to drift off to sleep.

I was woken almost immediately by someone hammering on the door.

I opened it to find Norman Gibson standing there with a large brown envelope in his hand, but he didn’t hand it over. Instead, he pushed past me and marched through into the apartment living room, where he stood in the middle of the space with his feet firmly set about eighteen inches apart as if ready for action.

He was far from a happy man. Steam was almost emanating from his ears and he had obviously been working himself up into quite a fury.

‘Now, fella,’ he said loudly, jabbing at my chest with his right index finger, ‘you had better explain to me what the fuck’s going on here.’ He emphasised the expletive with raw anger in his voice. ‘What makes you so important that you can get to see all our bank statements, while I get to look like a fool?’ He waved the brown envelope right into my face.

He was so furious that I seriously thought he might hit me, and I was considerably relieved to see that he didn’t still have his Glock 22C holstered on his hip. But, no doubt, it would be hiding somewhere beneath his jacket.

I’d had to deal with this sort of confrontation before, in Afghanistan, when boiling-over tempers of local village elders could easily end up messily with bullets flying around. I had been trained to keep control of my emotions and to maintain my composure, but I knew from experience that nothing provoked an angry response more than belittling or ignoring someone’s grievance.

I had found that an apology usually helped to defuse difficult situations, even if there was nothing for me to actually be sorry for. Consequently, I was a serial apologiser and had, over time, expressed my personal remorse and sorrow for everything from Adam’s consumption of the forbidden fruit to the Nazi Holocaust.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said to Norman, doing my best to sound sincere. ‘You should have been made aware of the true purpose of my visit.’

I didn’t mention that it had been my idea not to tell him.

‘Won’t you sit down?’ I said, indicating towards one of the armchairs.

Norman hesitated. Sitting down clearly had not been on his agenda, but he slowly lowered himself into the seat. I relaxed a little. It was far more difficult, if not impossible, to hit someone from a seated position in a deep armchair.

I then sat down opposite him, making sure I was well out of reach.

How much did I really trust him?

Enough, perhaps, to talk about being invited by Tony Andretti to try to find the section mole — he already knew that by now — but maybe not enough to apprise him of my future plans.

‘Tony Andretti approached my boss in London and requested some help in finding a mole in your organisation. It clearly was a mistake not to involve you and, for that, I am very sorry.’

My apology tactic seemed to be working. Norman’s ire was placated and the high-pressure steam in his head slowly abated.

‘So what have you discovered?’ he asked, his voice full of sarcasm.

‘Precisely nothing,’ I said.

I wasn’t able to read in his face whether he was pleased or disappointed. Either way would not have been incriminating. In his place, I wouldn’t have been particularly happy if the new kid on the block had found out something in just three days when he’d been trying without success for months.

He simply nodded knowingly. He hadn’t expected anything else and I wondered if Norman actually believed there was a mole in the first place.

‘Mr Andretti asked me to give you these.’ He tossed the envelope he had been carrying into my lap. ‘What do you want them for anyway?’

‘To see if anyone in FACSA’s racing section is receiving money from someone they shouldn’t. Payment in exchange for a tip-off.’

‘Do you really think one of us is selling confidential information?’

‘Why else would someone be forewarning your targets?’

He shrugged. ‘Maybe out of cussedness.’

I thought that most unlikely. Especially if Tony was correct and Jason Connor had been killed because of it. It was my belief that sane people didn’t kill just out of cussedness; they did it for one of four other reasons — money, revenge, jealousy, or a political cause.

Which one was it here? Surely it had to be for money.

‘So what are you going to do now?’ Norman asked.

‘Keep my eyes and ears open, and enjoy the Derby.’

I’d also be watching my back.

11

The rest of my time in Louisville was considerably less stressful, although equally exciting, but for different reasons.

The Kentucky Derby was the most hyped sporting event I think I had ever attended and easily outshone the Epsom version for glamour and glitz.

While the Derby at Churchill Downs could not match the pomp and circumstance and the genuine royalty of the original, it attracted the Hollywood ‘royalty’ in abundance, complete with red-carpet entrance where the public was encouraged to stand and idolise the screen superstars as they made their way to Millionaires Row, as the upper level of the grandstand is officially known.

I reflected on the differing attitudes to money that existed on either side of the Atlantic. In the UK, serious wealth is mostly played down by those who have it. To do otherwise is considered rather vulgar. In the United States huge riches are to be applauded, and flaunted at every opportunity.

And Kentucky Derby Week was certainly one of those.

Accompanying the two minutes of the race itself were several days of celebrations with a succession of parties and dinners to satisfy every taste and wallet. Those in the inner circle, and those with the greatest wealth, could secure an invitation to the exclusive black-tie eve-of-Derby gala, an event that regularly creates a lengthy traffic jam of stretch limousines throughout downtown Louisville.

For my part, I spent most of my time shadowing Frank Bannister and, fortunately for me, he enjoyed the good things in life and was not averse to using his federal-special-agent status to gain entry to occasions and activities where his presence was hardly warranted.

Early on Friday morning, Frank drove the two of us in one of the Chevy Suburbans from the National Guard facility to the backside of Churchill Downs, to see the Derby hopefuls in their morning exercise.

Hayden Ryder’s barn was still cordoned off with yellow tape but the local police no longer guarded the perimeter. The horses had gone too, quickly snaffled by other trainers eager to fill their own barns. The police did, however, guard the Derby runners, with a sheriff’s deputy standing watch outside each stall.

‘To stop them getting nobbled,’ Frank said.

I considered it was more of a token presence than true security. Any determined nobbler would have found it dead easy to get past the deputy’s laissez-faire attitude, chatting and joking with the stable staff with only half an eye at best on the actual horse. But it was good for the cameras, as TV crews from all the local stations were invited from barn to barn to observe the stars ‘at home’.

Frank and I joined the racing press on a small bleacher-seat viewing stand as the twenty Derby contenders made their way out onto the track. By this stage, with less than thirty-six hours to the race, the hard training work was done and now it was only a matter of maintaining peak condition and not overtiring the young equine athletes.

‘Come on,’ said Frank after fifteen less-than-exciting minutes of watching the horses gallop. ‘I’ve seen enough. Let’s go to Wagner’s before the rush starts.’

‘Wagner’s?’

‘Wagner’s Pharmacy.’

‘What do we need a pharmacy for?’ I asked.

‘You’ll see,’ he said with a laugh, leading me back to the Suburban.

Wagner’s Pharmacy was on South 4th Street, across from the entrance to the Churchill Downs infield. And it was not a pharmacy as I knew it.

True, it sold its own proprietary racehorse liniment in gallon containers for the treatment of bumps, bruises and strains, but it was most famously known as the place to have breakfast during Derby week.

Frank and I sat down on the only two free stools at the long counter.

‘Two orders of bacon, eggs over easy, toast and grits,’ Frank said to the waitress behind the counter. ‘Plus coffee and orange juice.’

‘Grits?’ I asked.

‘Boiled ground corn,’ Frank said. ‘I was raised on the stuff in Alabama.’

The waitress poured our juice and coffee and, shortly after, delivered two enormous plates of food — two fried eggs each, four or five rashers of crisp bacon, two rounds of toast, a mini-mountain of fried potatoes, plus a side bowl of grits — a white sloppy concoction akin to lumpy wallpaper paste, complete with a dollop of melting butter on the top.

I sampled a small amount and pulled a face.

Frank guffawed loudly. ‘I reckon it’s an acquired taste.’

I concentrated on the eggs and bacon.

‘Eat up yer grits, man. They’re good for you,’ he said, shovelling another great spoonful of the white stuff into his mouth. ‘Full of iron.’

I’d have rather chewed on a rusty nail for my iron than eat grits, but the rest of the meal was excellent and I was soon fit to burst.

‘It’s a tradition,’ Frank said, forcing in yet another mouthful. ‘It wouldn’t be the Derby without a breakfast at Wagner’s.’

Clearly everyone agreed with him and soon a line had formed out on the sidewalk as people waited their turn to get in. As it was, not a spare inch of floor space was wasted with horsemen, media and a few brave tourists crammed together at tables so close together that no one had enough elbow room to cut their bacon.

And it was noisy too, with most of the banter being about the chances of the various horses in the following day’s big race.

‘Fire Point, that big chestnut colt of George Raworth’s, will surely canter up,’ said one man on my left. ‘Destroyed the field in the Gotham Stakes at Aqueduct in March.’

‘He’s no chance,’ called the waitress as she delivered more breakfasts. ‘He’s drawn in Gate One and everyone knows that being on the rail is not good. He’ll be swamped in the early running.’

Racing really was the religion in these parts come early May.

‘Did you hear that Ryder was shot seven times,’ said someone behind me. ‘Twice in the head, poor man. Killed him instantly, apparently.’

‘He shouldn’t have tried to stick one of them Feds with a pitchfork,’ said someone else. ‘He had it coming, if you ask me.’

Nobody did, and most of the sympathy was clearly with the dead trainer. Overall, however, I was amazed that Ryder’s death hadn’t caused greater disquiet among the racing fraternity. They seemed to take it in their stride, almost as if sudden violent death was an expected part of the business. Of course, it was, but not often for the human participants.

‘I fancy Liberty Song for the Derby.’ The man on the other side of us said it to no one in particular. ‘He was truly brilliant in the Blue Grass Stakes at Keeneland last month. Won by five lengths easing up.’

‘But he had no competition,’ claimed a man sitting further beyond him. ‘I reckon it will be one of those two West Coast horses that’ll clean up this year.’

Racing chat was the same the world over as punters tried to pick a winner.

The truth was that the starters in the Kentucky Derby were all potential champions. They were the best three-year-old horses in North America, each of them having had to qualify through outstanding performances in some of thirty-five other major stakes races held at tracks all over the country. Points were awarded for the first four home in each race and the top twenty points holders were entitled to a place in the Derby starting gate.

This year there were four horses with far more points than any of the others but that was no guarantee of success. In 2009, the $1.4million prize was carried off by a gelding called Mine That Bird, which had been bought as a yearling for only $9,500. His career before the Derby had not been spectacular, finishing last in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile, but he scraped into the Derby field with a win in the Grey Stakes at Woodbine and a fourth-place finish in the Sunland Derby in New Mexico.

No one gave the horse a chance, the press being far more interested in the trainer, Chip Woolley Jr, who had driven the horse himself the 21-hour, 1,700-mile trip from his home to Louisville in a horse trailer attached to a pickup truck, and with his broken foot in a cast to boot.

Yet, Mine That Bird, stone last and so far out of the running for the first half of the race that he didn’t even appear in the TV coverage, slipped through an opening on the rail at the top of the final stretch and romped home to win by six and three-quarter lengths, the longest margin of victory in over sixty years, and at a price of fifty-to-one. It was a lesson in not writing off any of the starters.

Frank and I finished our breakfast and gave up our seats to the next two in the ever-growing queue. He had been absolutely right about beating the rush.

‘Where to now?’ asked Frank as we climbed back into the Suburban.

‘You’re the expert,’ I said. ‘I’ve never been here before.’

He drove us round to the front entrance of Churchill Downs.

‘You’ll never find anywhere to park,’ I said. ‘It’s the Oaks today.’

The Oaks was sometimes called the Fillies’ Derby. It was raced over the exact same course and distance some twenty-four hours earlier, but was reserved for three-year-old female horses.

Frank just smiled at me. Oaks Day was second only to Derby Day itself as a crowd-puller, not least because if you wanted to buy a Derby ticket, you had to buy one for the Oaks as well. Most racegoers, therefore, made a two-day trip of it.

But that didn’t seem to worry Frank.

A quick flash of his ‘FACSA Special Agent’ metal badge and we were welcomed into the restricted parking lot with open arms.

The same tactic allowed us not only to gain entry to the public enclosures but also to jump the sizable line, and to get in for free. It seemed that the simple words ‘security check’, together with the badge, was an automatic ‘Open Sesame’ to every cave of treasures.

‘He’s with me,’ Frank said, when one of the staff asked for my non-existent ticket. I could get used to this, I thought but, to be fair, I too had an ‘access all areas’ pass for every racecourse in Britain.

Even though it was still well before nine o’clock, Churchill Downs was beginning to fill up. The entrance gates had opened at eight and many had been queuing for several hours before that for general admission tickets. Indeed, even twenty-four hours ahead, there was already a line for Derby Day with some hardy folk staking their place early so they could be first through the gates the following morning.

General admission ticket holders did not get a seat and were not able to get much of a view of the track itself, but that didn’t seem to dampen their spirits. They were there to see, and to be seen with, the rich and famous.

‘General admission tickets also give access to the infield through the tunnel,’ Frank said. ‘About seventy thousand will cram into there tomorrow and hardly any of them will even get to see a horse, let alone the race. Most come only to drink and get laid. It’s like a big frat party. The bars open at eight in the morning and everyone’s drunk by lunchtime.’

‘It must be hell if it rains,’ I said.

‘It is hell anyway,’ Frank said, laughing. ‘When it rains the women wrestle in the mud. When it’s dry, they just wrestle. It’s a complete nightmare.’

It was far removed from my mental image of Kentucky Derby Day, with gentlemen in seersucker suits and ladies in haute couture and fine hats, all of them sipping traditional Derby mint juleps.

‘Come on,’ said Frank. ‘Let’s go check out the upper echelons.’

The metal special agent badge again worked wonders as we rose in a special VIP elevator directly to the top floor of the clubhouse, to Millionaires Row and the even-more-exclusive ‘The Mansion at Churchill Downs’, where the admission charge was so high that, if you queried the $700 tab for a single bottle of bubbly, you plainly couldn’t afford it.

We wandered round on the deep-pile carpet between the lush leather seating of the dining area, and then out onto the spectacular terrace doing our ‘security check’. The view was indeed as stunning as the price.

Frank and I completed a full sweep of the clubhouse and the grandstand without finding anything out of place.

‘Do you and the others have a specific job to do here?’ I asked as we went through the private suites on the fifth level.

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘They like us to provide a presence and react if necessary. But we won’t get into these sections tomorrow. The Vice President is coming and his security is the job of the Secret Service. They’ll have the place sealed up as tight as a tick.’

‘It must be confusing having so many law-enforcement agencies all working at the same place. Is there an accepted hierarchy?’

‘Not officially, but the Secret Service act like they’re the top dogs.’

‘And are they?’

‘I suppose so. They’re here to protect the Vice President, and what they say goes. They won’t be interested in the racing, only in the people.’

‘While you’ll be busy watching the horses?’

‘I keep an eye out for everything. But the racing integrity work is the responsibility of the state racing commission. They’ll contact us only if they think anything suspicious is going on.’

‘Have they done that before?’

‘A few times. Betting matters, mostly. Especially when someone is trying to avoid paying the tax on their winnings.’

‘Are racetrack winnings taxed?’ I asked with surprise.

‘Sure are,’ Frank said. ‘All gambling winnings are considered to be taxable earnings. Even if you win a car or a trip on Wheel of Fortune, you have to pay income tax on its market value.’

‘So how do people try to avoid it?’

‘Multiple identical bets,’ he said. ‘Any payout over five thousand bucks is subject to hefty withholding tax by the track. So big bets are rare. Much more sensible to have several smaller identical bets on separate tickets. Then, if they win, you collect from lots of different windows, keeping each one below five grand, and don’t tell the IRS anything.’

‘Clever,’ I agreed.

‘Yeah, maybe it is, but it’s also dishonest. And we’re getting wise to that tactic. The IRS is busy installing cameras at the track payouts windows to record faces.’

‘Spoilsports.’

He laughed. ‘Whose side are you on?’

‘Not the taxman’s,’ I said, ‘that’s for sure.’

‘It’s my job,’ he said. ‘Anyway, some big gamblers now get their friends and family to collect for them so that no one individual collects more than five grand. But then those people are required to declare it on their own 1040s, or Uncle Sam might come knocking. There’s nothing as certain as death and taxes.’

‘It still seems unfair to tax a slice of good luck.’

‘Lotto and casino winnings are taxed too. You know those people who put a dollar in the big slot machines in Vegas, pull the handle, spin the reels and win a million? You see it sometimes on the TV.’

I nodded.

‘The IRS takes a quarter straight off the top, there and then. And there’s more to pay the following April fifteenth.’

I shook my head in disbelief.

‘What happens in England?’

‘There is no tax on racetrack winnings. Whatever it says on the ticket, that’s what you get. It’s the same for all gambling. All payouts are free of any form of tax.’

‘Even the lottery?’

‘Absolutely. Every sort of winnings.’

‘Wow,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll move to England.’

On Friday evening, with Frank Bannister still acting as my chaperone and mentor, I went to the Fillies and Lilies party at the Kentucky Derby Museum before moving on to one of the other Derby-eve events in downtown Louisville.

The only problem was that we couldn’t have anything to drink.

‘Not while on duty,’ Frank explained. ‘Not with this baby on my belt.’ He tapped the Glock 22C under his jacket. Although unarmed myself, I felt obliged also to be teetotal for the evening.

There were several other FACSA special agents at both events.

‘Are y’all havin’ a good time?’ Larry Spiegal asked in his deep Southern drawl at the Fillies and Lilies event.

‘Sure are,’ Frank said. ‘But there are more menfolk here in hats than I’ve seen outside a rodeo.’

I looked around and it was true. Most of the men were sitting at tables either in small narrow-brimmed straw trilbies or large ten-gallon cowboy hats. I thought it bizarre to wear hats indoors but my new colleagues thought nothing of it.

‘A true cowboy always wears his hat,’ Frank said, ‘except when greeting a lady.’

Clearly, they didn’t consider that the scantily dressed young fillies at this party were ladies.

‘But we’re inside,’ I said.

‘Inside and out,’ Frank said, ‘makes no difference.’

‘He’ll wear it even when taking a shit,’ Larry added unnecessarily.

‘Especially then,’ Frank confirmed. ‘Keeps it off the floor.’

Yet another reason why I concluded that Americans were a rum lot.

12

I finally turned out my bedside light at almost two in the morning. Not that I’d been partying the whole time.

Frank and I had returned to our quarters about eleven but I had spent the next three hours continuing my examination of the bank statements of FACSA’s racing section.

In the first pass, I had discovered not a single suspicious deposit into any of the accounts. But I hadn’t really expected to. Someone who had been clever enough so far to avoid detection would not have been so stupid as to make large payments into their own personal bank account.

They might, of course, have a second bank account, which they hadn’t declared. But that wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Every US bank is required to disclose the names of all account holders to the tax authorities, together with their dates of birth and Social Security numbers.

Maybe the mole was using an offshore account.

However, that option was also fraught with danger. Under the new Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, the US Treasury forced a deal with over a hundred other countries compelling their banks to report the names of all US citizens holding accounts with them directly to the IRS. Even the traditional offshore tax havens such as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands had all signed up.

Basically, hiding illicit money in a bank anywhere is now extremely difficult, and is getting more so every year as governments bring in new anti-money-laundering measures.

So what is the alternative?

Cash.

We all use cash at some time — for burgers at McDonald’s, taxi fares, milk at a convenience store, even a wager on the horses. Sure, these days, we could probably pay with plastic if we had to, but no one blinks an eye at our using cash.

How about if we also paid cash to fill the car with fuel? Or for the weekly groceries? Even buying an expensive Christmas present for the wife or kids?

Still no one would question our cash in hand.

Indeed, under US law, it was not necessary to report any cash transaction under ten thousand dollars.

So I started to search through the bank statements again, looking for an account that had absolutely no cash withdrawals, no ATM records, and where other transaction activity was sparse, perhaps indicating that utility and other bills were also being settled with cash.

The columns of figures finally drove me to sleep.

But it felt like I had been dead to the world for only a short while when I was woken by a furious slamming of doors and the sound of feet running along the corridor.

Bleary-eyed, I stuck my head out.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked Steffi Dean as she appeared from her room fully dressed in her FACSA uniform, including bulletproof vest and holstered Glock 22C.

‘We’ve been scrambled,’ she said. ‘There’s trouble at the track.’

I dressed in record time and made it onto the last of the black Suburbans to leave, one driven by Cliff Connell and also containing Special Agents Trudi Harding and Justin Pickering.

‘What’s the trouble?’ I asked.

‘We’re not sure,’ said Cliff over his shoulder. ‘Norman got an urgent call from the State Racing Commission saying they needed our help.’

We raced past a large lit-up sign on a pole that showed it was 6.15 a.m. and 52 degrees. I must have slept longer than I realised. The sky was even becoming light in the east.

The backside was a hive of activity when we arrived, with sheriff’s deputies, Louisville Police and the FACSA agents all pacing around the barns not really knowing what they were looking for.

I came upon Norman standing next to one of the Suburbans.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked.

‘Three Derby horses are sick,’ he said.

‘Is that all?’ I said. ‘With all this fuss, I thought someone else must have died.’

‘They’re three of the most favoured runners. The trainers are claiming they’ve been got at.’

‘Is that what you think?’ I asked.

‘I’ll wait for the test results,’ Norman said. ‘The veterinarians are taking samples. There’s a rumour it might be EI.’

EI, or equine influenza, was a much-feared disease in the racing world, and for good reason. Highly infectious through the air, and with an incubation period of only a day or two, it could spread through a horse population like a bushfire in a drought. Its appearance at a major centre like Churchill Downs, where the training barns were packed so tightly together, could easily shut down racing here for weeks.

In August 2007, four stallions arrived in Australia from Japan, where there had recently been an outbreak of EI. As was normal practice, the stallions were transferred to a quarantine centre near Sydney Airport.

On the twenty-fourth of August, tests confirmed that several horses at the quarantine centre were infected with the H3N8 subtype of the equine influenza virus.

Even though the affected animals were supposed to be isolated from the general horse population, new cases of the same subtype were simultaneously reported at a nearby equestrian centre. Although never proven, the official report assumed that the virus had been transferred accidentally on the tools of a farrier who had attended to horses at both sites.

The following day some eighty horses were found to be sick and, by the end of August, just one week after the first instances, 2,000 horses were unwell with the disease. Movement of horses throughout Australia was banned without a permit and many equestrian events were cancelled, including the Sydney spring racing festival. At the peak of the outbreak, more than 47,000 horses across New South Wales and Queensland were infected and horse-industry operations did not return to normal for almost a year.

To lessen the likelihood of such epidemics, all racehorses in the United States and Europe have to be vaccinated and then given regular six-monthly boosters but, as in humans, the influenza virus can mutate, rendering the vaccine useless.

The outbreak of a new variant, even this close to the race, would put the Derby itself in jeopardy. No wonder the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission was running round in panic mode.

All morning exercise on the track was cancelled and the media circus, which had arrived to cover it, instead spent their time speculating as to what might happen next. Multiple TV crews busily set up at various locations between the barns, much to the alarm and dismay of everyone else, who worried that they might help spread the plague yet further.

An impromptu press conference was called for eight o’clock and everyone crammed into the tented press centre situated next to the track to listen.

The nervous-looking racing commissioner sat alone at a table with a microphone set up in front of him. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began, ‘let me start by assuring you that the Kentucky Derby will go ahead later this afternoon as planned.’

There was a collective sigh of relief from the assembled media, and a round of applause from the many owners, trainers and jockeys who were squeezed in at the back.

The commissioner waited for silence before continuing. ‘Early this morning, at around five a.m., three horses that had been due to run in today’s Derby didn’t eat up their food and were found to be showing signs of sickness. The horses in question were immediately placed in isolation and, as of just now, no further cases have been reported. However, on veterinary advice, those three have been scratched from the Derby. As it is now past the deadline for replacements, only seventeen runners will go to post.’

‘Is it equine influenza?’ shouted one reporter from the front row.

‘As yet, we have no indication of the disease,’ said the commissioner, ‘but we wish to remind you that all US racehorses are routinely immunised against equine influenza.’

‘So are you saying it is not influenza?’ asked the reporter.

‘Er… no, I’m not. It may be a new strain. We will all have to wait for the results of blood tests.’

He didn’t exactly exude confidence, but he changed direction by then naming the scratched horses and, as Norman had indicated, they were three of the four most favoured for the win.

Was it just the way my mind worked, or was that rather convenient for the fourth?

Life in the backside returned to normality, if that was the right term for the excitement generated by Derby Day morning at Churchill Downs.

The remaining seventeen Derby hopefuls were trotted up in turn in front of the state senior veterinary officer for him to decide whether each animal was sound and also, in the light of what had occurred earlier, for them to have their temperatures checked. Fortunately, after a thorough inspection, all were declared well and fit to race.

After the medical examination each was then presented to the press in what can only be described as a beauty pageant for horse and owner.

Occasionally, in England, especially at the Cheltenham Festival, connections of a particular horse might wear a necktie in similar shades as their racing silks, or perhaps a knitted scarf in comparable tones — nothing too ostentatious, you understand.

There was clearly no such restraint in Kentucky.

One of the Derby owners was decked out in a three-piece suit cut from cloth boldly printed with his green-and-yellow racing colours, complete with matching tie, baseball cap and even coordinating green-and-yellow-striped shoes. The poor horse looked positively embarrassed to be standing next to him for the photographs. But there was more. The owner’s wife and family were similarly attired in green and yellow and, in case you couldn’t work it out, each of them wore a huge button badge with the name of their horse printed large across it.

And the man was as brash as his outfit, telling all the assembled press that his baby was a certainty to trot up and collect the trophy. None of them really believed him as the horse in question was one of the rank outsiders, but that didn’t seem to dampen the owner’s enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, away from the limelight of the press parade, I watched behind the media tent as another owner, inconsolable in his grief, was trying to come to terms with the fact that his prized Thoroughbred star, strongly tipped to be a Triple Crown winner, would now not even get to the starting gate of the first leg.

It is not generally polite to stand and watch a grown man cry, but I felt sorry for him. Only a handful of racehorse owners ever have the privilege of owning a potential champion and this man’s dream of glory had been snatched away by a virus so small he would need an electron microscope to see it.

And there would be no coming back next year to have another go. The Kentucky Derby, like all the ‘classic’ races, was for three-year-old horses only. This might have been the unfortunate man’s only chance in life of owning a Derby runner, let alone the favourite — no wonder he was in tears.

Horseracing history is full of heartbreaking ‘if only’ stories and this one, like all the others, would quickly be forgotten by everyone except those whose lives it touched most closely. The victor that afternoon would be hailed as the conqueror of all and, in future years, no one would ever mention the three who failed to line up at the start.

Such was life.

But for this moment, it was almost too much for the desolate owner to bear and he sobbed openly. Fortunately for him, all the TV crews and photographers were busy snapping the fancy suit and striped shoes around the other side of the tent.

At ten o’clock the focus of attention for some switched from the backside barns to the racetrack proper.

The Derby was far from being the only race of the day. In fact, there were twelve additional contests scheduled, ten before and two after, and, for the owners, trainers and jockeys, the support races were clearly worth winning too. In addition to the Grade 1 Derby itself, there were three Grade 2 stakes, plus two other Grade 1s, each with purses in excess of half a million dollars.

But for the enormous crowd already teeming into the public enclosures there was only one race that mattered, the one due off at precisely twenty-six minutes to seven in the evening. Everything about the day was building up to the moment when the starting gates would swing open and the ‘most exciting two minutes in sport’ would begin.

Fortunately, there was still plenty of time for eating and drinking before then, especially drinking, with the sickly sweet mint juleps on sale in special commemorative glasses from the moment the entrances opened at eight am.

Frank and I tried to get another breakfast at Wagner’s but decided the line was too long, stretching out the front and right round the corner of the street, so we found a drive-thru burger outlet and sat in the Suburban munching our way through English muffins filled with bacon and eggs.

‘No grits today, then?’ I said with my mouth full.

‘We’re not far enough south. They have it at home in Alabama.’

‘McGrits?’ I said, laughing at my own joke.

Frank didn’t think it funny in the slightest.

13

As Frank had suspected, our movement throughout the grandstands was much restricted compared to the previous day. Indeed, I was lucky to be able to get in at all as I didn’t have a magic badge and a simple ‘I’m with him’ didn’t seem to work with the gateman today.

‘No ticket, no entry,’ he kept repeating.

Fortunately, Frank was able to rustle up Norman Gibson on his mobile phone, and he soon arrived, together with the racetrack head of security. Eventually the gateman relented and allowed me through, but he clearly didn’t like it. Perhaps he thought I looked a bit shady, and he was probably right. I hadn’t had a shave for four days, not since I’d decided to go undercover as a groom, and I was already sporting some substantial stubble.

If I thought that the Gold Cup at Cheltenham or the Grand National at Aintree were jam-packed, it was nothing in comparison to Churchill Downs on Kentucky Derby Day.

At least at Cheltenham and Aintree it was just about possible to move from the grandstands to see the horses in the paddock and then get back to the stands to watch the race. Here, it was virtually impossible.

Several hundred of those with general admission tickets had no intention of ever seeing the race itself. They had arrived early to bag a preferred spot on the paddock rail from where they would not budge, couples taking turns to elbow their way to the restrooms and the beverage outlets, so as not to lose their place. In the grandstand boxes, suites and glass-fronted restaurants, meanwhile, the patrons wore their tamper-proof, colour-coded wristbands with pride and tended to stay where they were between races, venturing only as far as the nearest bar or betting window.

As the afternoon progressed, the excitement built, with rock bands playing in the infield and a string of A-list celebrities swaggering along the red carpet. At two o’clock, the Vice President arrived in a bulletproof limousine with much fanfare and the playing of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’.

There was some general dismay among the crowd that three of the best horses had been scratched from the race but it didn’t seem to diminish people’s enjoyment unduly.

Frank and the other FACSA special agents were assigned to assist with enhanced security measures for the Derby horses, so I made my way through the grandstands to find somewhere to watch the racing. That sounds easier than it actually was because, unlike on British racecourses, there was no standing concourse at the front. Rather, the ticketed seating went right down to the running rail.

I managed to talk myself past another gateman and into a spot in front of a temporary grandstand on the clubhouse turn, but it lacked any shade and, boy, it was getting hot, with the sun baking down from a cloudless sky. I began to wish I had one of the straw hats that were clearly popular all around me.

But I couldn’t leave my position to buy one or to find some other shade. With only a few hours to go to Derby post time, every vantage point had been seized by the tens of thousands without a reserved seat. If I left my spot now, I’d never get back, even if I could again talk myself past the gateman.

I started seriously to envy those upstairs in the air-conditioned luxury of The Mansion at Churchill Downs, enjoying a five-course Derby lunch while imbibing their seven-hundred-buck vintage champagne.

As in the UK, the first few races of the day were scheduled at half-hourly intervals, but here, as the afternoon progressed, the periods between races became longer. There was more than an hour between the ninth and tenth races and then almost a two-hour break before the Kentucky Derby itself.

I thought the crowd might have gone off the boil a bit during this extended period but the excitement was cranked up by the ‘Derby walkover’, when the seventeen equine participants were led from the barns on the backside round the track to the paddock to be saddled.

Each horse was accompanied by its owner and trainer, along with their various family members, friends and, of course, a sheriff’s deputy, all of them cheered to the rafters by the expectant spectators.

The full green-and-yellow brigade was there in force, the striped shoes getting covered with dirt from the track. The brash owner looked far more circumspect now as the nervousness had set in with fifty minutes to post time.

Fire Point, the big chestnut colt trained by George Raworth, was now the only one of the top-four points scorers still in the field and he was the overwhelming favourite.

I watched as he was walked past me led by a groom wearing a huge white bib with the number ‘1’ emblazoned large on both back and front.

I remembered back to what the waitress had said at Wagner’s.

He’s drawn in Gate One and everyone knows that being on the rail is not good. He’ll be swamped in the early running.

According to the race-day programme, which contained every Kentucky Derby statistic known to man, the race had been won eight times by a horse drawn in Gate 1, although the last of those had been over thirty years ago.

Would Fire Point break the mould?

We would soon find out.

At six-fifteen precisely, a rotund huntsman, clad in a bright scarlet jacket and black riding hat, stood in front of the grandstands and played ‘The Call to Post’ on a long silver trumpet to announce the arrival back onto the track of the seventeen hopefuls, now saddled and mounted by their brightly silked jockeys.

One could almost cut the mounting tension as the 170,000 crowd joined together to sing ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ before the horses made their way down to the starting gate at the far end of the finish straight.

I had attended all the big races in England and some others around the world but there was something unique about the atmosphere here today at Churchill Downs. Hysteria would hardly be too strong a word to describe the excitement that had gripped those around me. Two people on my left were openly praying and a man to my right almost collapsed from hyperventilation.

There was a lull in proceedings as the horses went behind the starting gate to be loaded. It was as if everyone was taking a deep breath, but then the bell rang and the gates swung open. The race was on.

I am sure there was a track commentator somewhere calling the race but I had no chance of hearing him over the shouting and cheering from the crowd as the seventeen runners broke in an even line.

My vantage point, low down on the clubhouse turn, was not ideal but there was a huge-screen TV across the track giving me a perfect view.

As predicted, Fire Point was indeed swamped by the others in the early running as they all moved left towards the rail to take the shortest route, but he wasn’t impeded, passing the finish line for the first time in sixth place, well tucked up behind the leading group.

They came into view around the turn, sweeping past right in front of me at a terrific speed. Then they were off down the back straight where the field began to spread out as the breakneck pace caused some of the lesser animals to tire.

Fire Point was not among them.

The chestnut colt hit the front coming off the final turn and was never again headed, striding away from the chasing pack down the stretch, in the shadow of Churchill’s famed twin spires, to win by three lengths.

As the horse passed under the wire, his jockey, Jerry Fernando, stood tall in the stirrups, saluting the crowd with his whip hand held high, while those in the enclosures roared back their approval.

I noticed that the green and yellow silks finished fourth, collecting a hundred grand for the man in the striped shoes. Perhaps he’d be happy but, in this race, as in every other, winning was everything. Unlike in Formula One, there are no trophies in horseracing for coming second.

The jockeys pulled up their exhausted mounts right in front of me, each of them bar one with a hard-luck story of how they maybe didn’t get a clean run down the stretch, or were hampered on the rail in the turn, or the track was too dry, or a hundred other reasons why they didn’t win.

But for the connections of Fire Point, all their Christmases had come at once, as their champion racehorse was led to the Kentucky Derby winner’s circle to be draped across the withers with the traditional three-metre-long garland of red roses.

The race wasn’t called the ‘Run for the Roses’ for nothing.