The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 (53 page)

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

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

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

“She knows who they are.”

“Who?”

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

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

“They used to write for her blog.”

“Shit.”

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

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

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

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

“I’m working on that.”

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

“Work faster.”

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

“Wait here,” he said to his son.

“
Padre
?”

“Stay here.”

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

“Pablo.”

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

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

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

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

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

“You are Isaac?”

“I sure am.”

“And your friends?”

“Kevin and Alejandro.”

“Your business partners?”

“That’s right.”

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

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

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

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

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

“How is this relevant?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No emails.

No social media.

No banking activity.

No credit cards.

No immigration data.

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

“What are you missing?” she said aloud.

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

“Excuse me?”

“Talking to yourself again.”

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

“Going to tell me what about?”

“Not really, it’s—”

“—classified,” he finished for her.

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

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

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

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

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

He looked almost comically crestfallen. “A boyfriend?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Have you done this before?”

“No. You are my first.”

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

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

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

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

“Okay. What do you want to know?”

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

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

“Too good for you?”

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

“Have you seen Control again?”

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

“Do you know why they’re looking for him?”

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

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

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

“What about him?”

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

“But they value him?”

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

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