Authors: Ian Rankin
The reason for all the security at Allerdyce’s home was not fear of assassination or kidnap, or simple paranoia, but that he kept his secrets there—his files on the great and good, infor-mation he might one day use. There were favors there that he could call in; there were videotapes and photographs which could destroy politicians and judges and the writers of Op-Ed pages. There were audio recordings, transcripts, scribbled notes, sheafs of clippings, and even more private information: copies of bank statements and bounced checks, credit card bills, motel registration books, logs of telephone calls, police reports, medical examination results, blood tests, judicial reviews… Then there were the rumors, filed away with everything else: rumors of affairs, homosexual love-ins, cocaine habits, stabbings, falsified court evidence, misappropriated court evidence, misappropriated funds, numbered accounts in the Caribbean islands, Mafia connections, Cuban connections, Colombian connections, wrong connections…
Allerdyce had contacts at the highest levels. He knew officials in the FBI and CIA and NSA, he knew secret servicemen, he knew a couple of good people at the Pentagon. One person gained him access to another person, and the network grew. They knew they could come to him for a favor, and if the favor was something like covering up an affair or some sticky, sordid jam they’d gotten into—well, that gave Allerdyce just the hold he wanted. That went down in his book of favors. And all the time the information grew and grew. Already he had more information than he knew what to do with, more than he might use in his lifetime. He didn’t know what he’d do with his vast (and still increasing) store of information when he died. Burn it? That seemed a waste. Pass it on? Yes—but to whom? The likeliest candidate seemed his successor at Alliance. After all, the organization would be sure to prosper with all that information in the bank. But Allerdyce had no successor in mind. His underlings were just that; the senior partners aging and comfortable. There were a couple of junior partners who were hungry, but neither seemed right. Maybe he should have fathered some children…
He sat in the smaller of the two dining rooms and considered this, staring at a portrait of his grandfather, whom he remembered as a vicious old bastard and tightfisted with it. Genes: some you got, some you didn’t. The cook, a homely woman, brought in his appetizer, which looked like half a burger bun topped with salmon and prawns and a dollop of mayonnaise. Allerdyce had just picked up his fork when the telephone rang. Maybe two dozen people knew his home telephone number. More knew his apartment number, and he kept in touch by monitoring the answering machine there morning and evening. He placed his napkin on the brightly polished walnut table and walked over to the small antique bureau—French, seventeenth century, he’d been told—that supported the telephone.
“Yes?” he said.
There was a moment’s pause. He could hear static and echoes on the line, like ghostly distant voices, and then a much clearer one.
“Sir, it’s Dulwater.”
“Mm-hm.”
“I thought I’d let you know the situation here.”
“Yes?”
“Well, I kept watch on the house, but nobody’s been near. So I decided to take a look around.”
Allerdyce smiled. Dulwater was an effective burglar; he’d used the skill several times in the past. Allerdyce wondered what he’d found in Gordon Reeve’s home. “Yes?” he repeated.
“Looks like they’ve moved out for a while. There’s a litter tray and a bunch of cat food, but no cat. Must’ve taken it with them. The cat’s name’s on the food bowl. Bakunin. I checked the name, thought it was a bit strange; turns out the historical Bakunin was an anarchist. There are books on anarchism and philosophy in the bedroom. I think maybe they left in a hurry; the computer was still on in the kid’s bedroom. The telephones were bugged, sure enough—hard to tell who did it; the mikes are standard enough but they are U.S.-sourced.”
Dulwater paused, awaiting praise.
“Anything else?” Allerdyce snapped. He sensed Dulwater was saving something.
“Yes, sir. I found a box of magazines, old copies of something called Mars and Minerva.” Another pause. “It’s the official magazine of the SAS.”
“SAS? That’s a British army unit, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir, mostly counter-revolutionary warfare: hostage rescue, deep infiltration behind enemy lines in time of war… I’ve got some stuff from the libraries here.”
Allerdyce studied his fingernails. “No wonder Reeve dealt so diligently with the two personnel. Have you spoken to them?”
“I made sure their boss got the picture. They’ve been kicked out.”
“Good. Is that everything?”
“Not quite. There was some action in France—a journalist was killed. Her name was Marie Villambard. I recognized the name because it was thrown up during our background search on James Reeve. He’d had some contacts with her.”
“What happened?”
“I’m not absolutely certain. Looks like a firefight. A couple of burned-out cars, one of them British. The Villambard woman was shot execution-style, another guy had his face ripped off by a guard dog. Last victim had his throat cut. They found other bloodstains, but no more bodies.”
Allerdyce was quite for a minute. Dulwater knew better than to interrupt the silence. Finally, the old man took a deep breath. “It seems Kosigin has chosen a bad opponent—or a very good one, depending on your point of view.”
“Yes, sir.”
Allerdyce could tell Dulwater didn’t understand. “It seems unlikely Reeve will give up, especially if police trace the car back to him.”
“Always supposing it’s his car,” Dulwater said.
“Yes. I’m trying to think if we have contacts in Paris… I believe we do.”
“I could go down there…”
“No, I don’t think so. What is there to find? We’ll have Paris take care of that side of things for us. So Reeve is ex-army, eh? Some special unit. What some would call a tough nut to crack.”
“There’s just one more thing, sir.”
Allerdyce raised an eyebrow. “More? You’ve been busy, Dulwater.”
“This is conjecture.”
“Go on.”
“Well, the muscle Kosigin’s using, the one from L.A. He’s supposed to be English.”
“So?”
“So, he’s also supposed to have been in the SAS.”
Allerdyce smiled. “That could be interesting. Dulwater, you’ve done remarkably well. I want you back here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Dulwater?”
“Sir?”
“Upgrade your flight to First; the company will pay.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Allerdyce terminated the call and returned to the dining table, but he was too excited to eat right away. He didn’t know where this story was headed, but he knew the outcome would be anything but mundane. Allerdyce could foresee trouble for Kosigin and CWC. They might have need of Alliance’s services again; there might be a favor Kosigin would need. There might well be a favor.
Maybe he’d underestimated Dulwater. He pictured him in his mind—a large man, quiet, not exactly handsome, always well dressed, a discreet individual, reliable—and wondered if there was room for a promotion. More than that, he wondered if there was a necessity. He finished his water and attacked the food. His cook was already appearing, wheeling a trolley on which were three covered silver salvers.
“Is it chicken today?” Allerdyce asked.
“You had chicken yesterday,” she said in her lilting Irish brogue. “It’s fish today.”
“Excellent,” said Jeffrey Allerdyce.
PART SIX
CLOSED DOORS
SIXTEEN
REEVE HAD FLOWN into New York’s JFK. It had been just about the only route open to him at such short notice. The good news was he’d been offered a cheap seat that had been canceled at the last minute. The woman behind the desk had seemed to take pity on him. He put the flight on his credit card. He couldn’t know if Jay and his men—or whoever they worked for—had access to his credit card transactions, or to flight information and passenger lists; if they did, it would take a day or two for his name to filter down to them. And by then he wouldn’t be in New York anymore.
The passport control at JFK had taken a while, lots of questions to be answered. He’d filled in his card on the plane. The officer at passport control stapled half of it back into his passport and stamped it. They’d done that last time too, but no one had checked his passport going home. The officer had asked him the purpose of his visit.
“Business and pleasure,” Reeve said.
The official marked that he could stay three weeks. “Have a nice trip, sir.”
“Thank you.”
And Reeve was back in the United States.
He didn’t know New York, but there was an information booth in the terminal, and they told him how to get into town and that there was another booth offering tourist accommodation along the other end of the concourse.
Reeve changed some money before heading for the bus into Manhattan. The information booth had provided him with a little pocket map, and his hotel was now circled on it in red. So he’d asked for another map, clean this time, and had torn the other one up and thrown it away. He didn’t want anyone knowing which hotel he’d be staying at—if someone so much as looked over his shoulder, it would have been easy with the marked map. He was gearing himself up, ready for whatever they threw at him. And hoping maybe he could throw something at them first.
He was wearing a roomy pair of sneakers he’d bought duty- free at Heathrow. He’d divvied the birdy up into halves, folded each into a torn section of paper towel, and secreted one in either trainer, tucked into the cushioned instep. He’d also bought a clean polo shirt and sports jacket—again on the credit card. He wanted to look like a tourist for the authorities at JFK, but since he didn’t want to look like a tourist on the streets of New York, he’d kept his old clothes so he could change back into them.
His hotel was on East 34th, between Macy’s and the Empire State Building, as the man in the booth had informed him. He tried not to think about how much it was costing. It was only for one night after all, two at most, and he reckoned he deserved some comfort after what he’d been through. Christ alone knew what lay ahead. The bus dropped him off outside Penn Station, and he walked from there.
It was morning, though his body clock told him it was mid-afternoon. The receptionist said he shouldn’t really check in until noon, but saw how red his eyes were and checked her com- puter, then phoned maid service. It turned out she could give him a room after all, freshly cleaned—she’d just have to tweak a reservation. He thanked her and headed upstairs. He lay down on his bed and closed his eyes. The room spun around him in his darkness. It was like the bed was on a turntable set to 17 rpm. Jim’s first record player had been a Dansette with a setting for 17 rpm. They’d played Pinky & Perky records on it. The pigs had sounded like ordinary people. It was just a matter of slowing them down.
Reeve got up and ran a bath. The water pressure was low. He imagined a dozen maids all rinsing baths at the same time, preparing rooms for new guests, guests who came and went and left nothing behind.
He remembered a quote he’d read in one of his books: something about life being a river, the water never the same for any two people who walked through it. He’d remembered it, so it must have meant something to him at the time. Now he wasn’t so sure. He studied his face in the bathroom mirror. It was getting ugly, all tensed and scowling. It had looked that way in Special Forces: a face you prepared for when you met the enemy, a permanently pissed-off look. He’d lost it over time as he’d let his muscles relax, but he was getting it again now. He noticed that he was tensing his stomach muscles, too, as though readying to repel a punch in the guts. And his whole body tingled—not just from jet lag; senses were kicking in. You might call them a sixth sense, except that there was more than one of them. One told you if someone was watching you, one told you someone you couldn’t see was near. There was one that told you whether to run left or right to dodge gunfire.
Some of his colleagues in Special Forces hadn’t believed in the senses. They’d put it down to sheer luck if you beat the clock. For Reeve it was instinct, it was about picking open part of your brain normally kept locked. He thought maybe Nietzsche had meant something similar with his “Superman.” You had to unlock yourself, find the hidden potential. Above all, you had to live dangerously.
“How am I doing, old man?” Reeve said out loud, slipping into the bath.
In Queens, the fashion accessory of choice was the stare.
Reeve, though dressed in his needing-a-wash nontourist clothes, still got plenty of stares. His map of downtown Manhattan wouldn’t help him here. This was a place they told strangers to avoid. His cab driver had taken some persuading; the yellow cab had been idling outside the hotel, looking for a fare up to Central Park or over to JFK if he was on a roll, but when Reeve had asked for Queens, the man had turned to examine him like he’d just asked to be taken to Detroit.
“Queens?” the man had said. He looked Puerto Rican, a ribbon of black curly hair falling from his oily baseball cap. “Queens?”
“Queens.”
The driver had shaken his head slowly. “Can’t do it.”
“Sure you can, we just need to discuss the fare.”
So they’d discussed the fare.
Reeve had spent a lot of time with the Yellow Pages, and when he couldn’t find what he wanted in Manhattan, he’d switched to the outer limits: the Bronx and Queens. The third store he tried had sounded about right, so he’d asked for directions and written them down on a sheet of hotel notepaper.
So he sat with them in the back of the cab, listening to the wild, angry dialogue of the two-way radio. Whoever was manning the mike back at HQ was exploding. He was still exploding as the cab crossed the Queensboro Bridge.
The cab driver turned around again. “Last chance, man.” His accent, whatever it was, was so thick Reeve could hardly make out the words.
“No,” he said, “keep going.” He repeated the words in Spanish, which didn’t impress the driver. He was calling in, the mike close to his mouth.