Blood Hunt (8 page)

“He wasn’t a very good liar.”

“No, he surely wasn’t. Hey, where did you learn to speak Spanish?”

Reeve opened the car door. “There was a time I needed to know it,” he said, sliding into the passenger seat.

Daniel Trasker ran what looked like four parts wrecking operation to one part repair. When Reeve explained who he was, Trasker went wide-eyed with shock.

“Hell, son, you don’t want to see that car! There’s stains on the—”

“It’s okay, Mr. Trasker, I don’t want to see the car.”

Trasker calmed a little at that. They’d been standing outside the wood-and-tin shack that served as Trasker’s premises. Most of the work was done in the yard outside. Trasker himself was in his well-preserved early sixties, clumps of curling silver hair showing from beneath an oily baseball cap. His walnut face showed deep laugh lines around the eyes, with oil and dirt in-grained. He wiped his hands on a large blue rag throughout their conversation.

“You better come in.”

In the midst of the shack’s extraordinary clutter, it took Reeve a while to work out that there was a desk and chair, and even a PC. Paperwork covered the desk like so much camouflage, and there were bits of engines everywhere.

“I’d ask you to sit,” said Trasker, “but there’s nowhere to sit. If someone’s writing me a check, I sometimes clear some space for them, but otherwise you stand.”

“Standing’s fine.”

“So what is it you want, Mr. Reeve?”

“You know my brother was found in a locked car, Mr. Trasker?”

Trasker nodded. “We got the car right here.”

“Police smashed the window to get in.”

“That they did. We got the replacement part on order.”

Reeve stood close beside the older man. “Is there any way someone could have locked the car afterwards? I mean, after my brother died?”

Trasker stared at him. “What’s your point, son?”

“I’m just wondering if that’s possible.”

Trasker thought about it. “Hell, of course it’s possible. All you’d need’s a spare set of keys. Come to think of it…” Trasker’s voice trailed off.

“What?”

“Let me go check something.” He turned and left the shack. Reeve and Cantona followed him outside, but he turned back to them, holding up his hands. “Now, let me do this by myself. That car’s not something you should be seeing.”

Reeve nodded, and watched Trasker go. Then he told Cantona to stay where he was, and began to follow the old man.

Around the back of the shack, and past heaps of wrecked cars, Reeve saw that there was another low-slung building, double-garage size. Half a dozen tall gas cylinders stood like metal sentries outside a wide door, which stood open. There was a car jacked up inside, but Trasker squeezed past it. Reeve looked around him. He was five or six miles outside San Diego, inland towards the hills. The air was stiller here, not quite so fresh. He had to decide now, right now. He took a deep breath and made for the garage.

“What is it?” he asked Trasker.

The old man shot up from his crouching position and swiveled on his heels. “Nearly gave me a damned heart attack,” he complained.

“Sorry.” Reeve came forward. Trasker had opened the door of the car and was studying it. The car James Reeve had died in. It was smarter than Reeve had expected, a good deal newer, as good certainly as anything in the Mexican’s lot. He approached it slowly. The seats were leather or Leatherette, and had been wiped clean. But as he bent down to peer inside, he could see stains against the roof. A rust-colored trajectory, fanning out towards the back of the car. He thought of touching the blood, maybe it was still damp. But he tore his gaze away from it. Trasker was looking at him.

“I told you to stay put,” the old man said quietly.

“I had to see.”

Trasker nodded, understanding. “You want a moment to yourself?”

Reeve shook his head. “I want to know what you were looking at.”

Trasker pointed to the interior door-lock on the driver’s side. “See there?” he said, touching it. “Can you see a little notch, low down on the lock?”

Reeve looked more closely. “Yes,” he said.

“There’s one on the passenger door-lock too.”

“Yes?”

“They’re sensors, son. They sense a beam from a remote-control key ring.”

“You mean you can lock and unlock the doors from a distance?”

“That’s right.”

“So what?”

“So,” said Trasker, digging into his overall pockets and pulling out a key on a chain, “here’s what came with the car. This is the key that was in the ignition when the police found the car. Now, this is obviously the spare key.”

Reeve looked at it. “Because there’s no button to activate the locks?”

“Exactly.” Trasker took the key back. “You only usually get the one remote-control key ring with a car like this. The spare key they give you is plain, like the one I’m holding.”

Reeve thought about it. Then, without saying anything, he walked back to Cantona’s car. Cantona was standing in the shade provided by the shack.

“Eddie,” Reeve said, “I want you to do something for me.”

By the time Daniel Trasker caught up with Reeve, Cantona’s car was already reversing out of the yard.

“I want to wait here a few minutes,” Reeve said.

Trasker shrugged. “Then what?”

“Then, if I may, I’d like to use your phone.”

Carlos Perez was sucking on a fresh cigar when his telephone rang. It was the brother Gordon Reeve again.

“Yes, Gordon, my friend,” Perez said pleasantly. “Did you forget something?”

“I just wondered about the car key,” Reeve said.

“The car key?” This Reeve was incredible, the way his mind worked. “What about the key?”

“Do you give your customers a spare set, or just the one?”

“That depends on the model of vehicle, Gordon, and other considerations, too.” Perez put his cigar down. It tipped from the edge of the ashtray and rolled off the desk to the floor. He walked around the side of his desk and crouched down, the telephone gripped to his ear.

“Did my brother’s car have remote locking?”

Perez made a noise like he was thinking. The cigar was be-neath his desk. He felt for it, and received a burn on the side of his hand. Swearing silently, he finally drew the cigar out and re-turned to his chair, examining the damage to his left hand.

“Ah,” he said into the telephone, a man who has just remembered. “Yes, that vehicle did have remote locking.”

“And it had the key ring, the push-button?”

“Yes, yes.” Perez couldn’t see where this was leading. He felt sweat glisten on his forehead, tingling his scalp.

“Then where is it now?” Reeve said coldly.

“What?”

“I’m at the garage. There’s no such key here.”

Key, key, key. “I see what you mean,” Perez improvised. “But that key was lost by a previous client. I did not understand you at first. No, there was no remote by the time your brother…” But Perez was speaking into a dead telephone. Reeve had cut the connection. Perez put the receiver back in its cradle and chewed on his cigar so hard he snapped the end off.

He got his jacket from the back of his chair, locked the office and set the alarm, and got into his car. Out on the road, he stopped long enough to chain the gates shut, double-checking the padlock.

If he’d checked everything with the same care, he’d have seen the large green car that followed him as he left.

SIX

KOSIGIN WALKED DOWN TO North Harbor Drive. A huge cruise ship had just docked at the terminal. He stood leaning against the rail, looking down at the water. Sailboats scudded along in the distance, angled so that they appeared to have no mass at all. When they turned they became invisible for a moment; it was not an optical illusion, it was a shortcoming of the eye itself. You just had to stare at nothing, trusting that the boat would reappear. Trust standing in for vision. Kosigin would have preferred better eyesight. He didn’t know why it had been deemed preferable that some birds should be able to pick out the movements of a mouse while hovering high over a field, and mankind should not. The consolation, of course, was that man was an inventor, a maker of tools. Man could examine atoms and electrons. He might not be able to see them, but he could examine them.

Kosigin liked to leave as little as possible to chance. Even if he couldn’t see something with his naked eye, he had ways of finding out about it. He had his own set of tools. He was due to meet the most ruthless and complex of them here.

Kosigin did not regard himself as a particularly complex individual. If you’d asked him what made him tick, and he’d been willing to answer, then he could have given a very full answer indeed. He did not often think of himself as an individual at all. He was part of something larger, a compound of intelligences and tools. He was part of Co-World Chemicals, a corporation man down to the hand-stitched soles of his Savile Row shoes. It wasn’t just that what was good for the company was good for him—he’d heard that pitch before and didn’t wholly believe it—Kosigin’s thinking went further: what is good for CWC is good for the whole of the Western world. Chemicals are an absolute necessity. If you grow food, you need chemicals; if you process food, you need chemicals; if you work at saving lives in a hospital or out in the African bush, you need chemicals. Our bodies are full of them, and keep on producing them. Chemicals and water, that’s what a body is. He reckoned the problems of famine in Africa and Asia could be ended if you tore down the barriers and let agrichemical businesses loose. Locusts? Gas them. Crop yields? Spray them. There was little you couldn’t cure with chemicals.

Of course, he knew of side effects. He kept up with the latest scientific papers and media scare stories. He knew there were kids out there who weren’t being vaccinated against measles because the original vaccine was produced after research on tissue from unborn fetuses. Stories like that made him sad. Not angry, just sad. Humanity had a lot still to learn.

Some tourists wandered past, a young couple with two children. They looked like they’d been out for a boat ride; rosy-cheeked, windblown, grinning. They ate fresh food and breathed clean air. The kids would grow up straight and strong, which might not have been the case a hundred and fifty years before.

Good chemicals, that was the secret.

“Mr. Kosigin?”

Kosigin turned, almost smiling. He didn’t know how the Englishman could sneak up like that every time. No matter how open the terrain, he was always nearly on Kosigin before Kosigin saw him. He wasn’t built to hide or be furtive: he stood six feet four inches, with a broad chest and thick upper arms, so that his lower arms didn’t quite touch his sides when he let them hang. His legs looked powerful, too, wrapped in tight faded denim, with Nike running shoes on the feet. His stomach was flat, ripples of muscle showing through the stretched black cotton T-shirt. He wore foldaway sunglasses, with a little pouch for them hooked on to his brown leather belt, the buckle of which was the ubiquitous Harley-Davidson badge. The man had wavy blond hair, cropped high on the forehead but falling at the back past the neck of the T-shirt. The tan on his face was pink rather than brown, and his eyebrows and eyelashes were as blond as the hair on his head. He seemed proud of the large indented scar which ran down his right cheek, as though a single blemish were needed to prove how perfect the rest of the package was.

To Kosigin, admittedly no authority, he looked like one of those TV wrestlers.

“Hello, Jay, let’s walk.”

That’s all the man had ever been to Kosigin: Jay. He didn’t even know if it was a first or second name, or maybe even an initial letter. They walked south towards the piers, past the wares of the T-shirt and souvenir sellers. Jay didn’t so much walk as bound, hands bunched in his denim pockets. He looked like he needed to be on a leash.

“Anything to report?”

Jay shrugged. “Things are taken care of, Mr. Kosigin.”

“Really?”

“Nothing for you to worry about.”

“McCluskey doesn’t share your confidence. Neither does Perez.”

“Well, they don’t know me. I’m never confident without good reason.”

“So Cantona isn’t a problem anymore?”

Jay shook his head. “And the brother’s flight is out of here tomorrow.”

“There’s been an alteration,” Kosigin said. “He’s not taking the body back with him. There’s to be a cremation tomorrow morning.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I’m sorry, I should have told you.”

“You should always tell me everything, Mr. Kosigin. How can I work best if I’m not told everything? Still, the flight out is tomorrow afternoon. He hasn’t changed that, has he?”

“No, but all the same… he’s been asking awkward questions. I’m sure he doesn’t believe the story Perez threw him.”

“It wasn’t my idea to involve Perez.”

“I know,” Kosigin said quietly. Jay always seemed able to make him feel bad; and at the same time he always wanted to impress the bigger man. He didn’t know why. It was crazy: he was richer than Jay would ever be, more successful in just about every department, and yet there was some kind of inferiority thing at play and he couldn’t shake it.

“This brother, he doesn’t exactly sound your typical grieving relative.”

“I don’t know too much about him, just the initial search Alliance did. Ex-army, now runs an adventure-vacation thing in Scotland.”

Jay stopped and took off his sunglasses. He looked like he was staring at the million-dollar view, only his eyes were unfocused and he had the hint of a smile on his lips. “Couldn’t be,” he said.

“Couldn’t be what?”

But Jay stayed silent a few moments longer, and Kosigin wasn’t about to interrupt again.

“The deceased’s name was Reeve,” Jay said at last. “I should have thought of it sooner.” He threw his head back and burst out laughing. His hands, however, were gripping the guardrail like they could twist the metal back and forth on itself. Finally, he stared at Kosigin with wide greeny-blue eyes, the pupils large and black. “I think I know the brother,” he said. “I think I knew him years ago.” He laughed again, and bent low over the rail, looking for an instant as though he might throw himself into the bay. His feet actually left the ground, but then came down again. Passersby were staring.