Salvation Row - John Milton #6 (John Milton Thrillers) Read online

  “Be patient. I was here first. Wait your turn.”

  Ziggy thought about John Milton. It had been a shock to be contacted by him. He had only been seconded to Group Fifteen for a short while, but it had been obvious even then that Number Six was becoming something of a legend. The Group was organised so that personal connections were kept to an absolute minimum, and it wasn’t a place where institutional gossip was possible. But even with that in mind, Milton’s reputation was something that everyone was aware of. Ziggy had been excited to have been paired with him on the Irish assignment, and it had been that excitement and his stupid desire to impress him that had led him to set off in pursuit of Maguire.

  A second attendant slid into the chair at the desk next to the occupied one, and she beckoned Ziggy over to her. She looked pristine in her British Airways uniform, trim and petite and pretty, and Ziggy gave her his best smile. The one she returned was perfunctory. “Do you have a reservation, sir?”

  “I do.”

  He read out the booking reference and waited as she typed it into her computer. If she was surprised at the booking that was displayed, she mastered it quickly.

  “Mr. Shakespeare,” she said, reading off the screen. “Good morning, sir. One first-class ticket to New Orleans.”

  The woman at the desk alongside must have overheard the attendant. When she turned to look at him, her expression of opprobrium had changed to one of incredulity.

  The check-in attendant printed off his flight voucher and gave him directions to the first-class lounge.

  The woman was still gawping at him as he picked up the carry-on bag with his laptop and other kit inside and left the desk.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  THE ORIGINAL Café du Monde had been a New Orleans landmark for one hundred and fifty years. It was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, only closing on Christmas Day and whenever the occasional hurricane drifted too close to the city. It was a coffee shop that specialised in dark roasted coffee and chicory, beignets, and fresh-squeezed OJ.

  Milton walked up and down the street, surveilling the area, until he was satisfied that there was nothing amiss. There was no reason to think that he was observed, but certainty—or as near to it as he could manage—had always been well worth the effort in his business.

  Ziggy Penn looked different from the last time that Milton had seen him. He was skinnier, his skin was even more pallid, and there were dark circles around his eyes that suggested a lack of sleep. He was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt that revealed sleeves of tattoos that Milton did not remember. There were patchy ginger whiskers on his cheeks, chin and throat, and his little nose and asymmetrical eyes gave his face a striking, misshapen quality.

  Milton sat down opposite him.

  “Hello, Ziggy.”

  He was trying hard to look cool, but he couldn’t hide the same approbation that Milton remembered from before. Ziggy was going to try to impress him again. Milton had thought it stupid then, and he thought it doubly stupid now. Ziggy was not the first analyst Milton had worked with who had considered his grubby profession something to aspire to, as if the glamorous books of Fleming were a reality rather than naïve and childish make-believe.

  Milton knew the truth. He was a killer. He didn’t deserve acclaim. He deserved disgust.

  “Number Six.”

  “Not any more. Just Milton now.”

  “Never thought I’d see you again.”

  “Well, there you go. You never know what’s around the corner, do you?”

  “You were careful? Not followed?”

  “Please, Ziggy. What do you think?”

  “I have to be careful. There are people who would love to know where I am.”

  “Why? What have you done?”

  “You first, Milton. What have you done? I heard you got out.”

  Milton had no idea what Ziggy did or did not know about what had happened to him, but he had little wish to rehash it beyond what was necessary. In order to ensure that the subject was adequately dealt with so that there was no need to revisit it later, he provided a brief account. He told him about his flight from the UK after his attempt to leave Group Fifteen and described his journey through South America and the southwest of the United States. He skipped over his sojourns in Ciudad Juárez and San Francisco and then, since it would be of more relevance to Ziggy, he went into a little more depth about what had happened during his mission to Russia to rescue Pope and what had subsequently happened with Beatrix Rose and Control. Ziggy listened, agog, and by the time that Milton had finished, they had both finished their coffees and ordered refills.

  “I heard you tried to leave,” Ziggy said. “That couldn’t have gone well.”

  “Not particularly,” Milton said with dour understatement. “Control tried to have me killed.”

  “And?”

  “He’s dead now. I don’t have to be quite so careful.”

  The waiter came to their table. The coffee was served black or au lait, mixed half and half with hot milk. Milton ordered his black, Ziggy went for milk, and they ordered beignets, the square French-style doughnuts that were lavishly covered with powdered sugar.

  “So that’s me,” Milton said. “What about you?”

  “How much do you know?”

  Milton didn’t know much. He hadn’t seen Ziggy since the Jayhawk had winched him off the roof of the Bartholomews’ flooded house. He knew that Ziggy had been airlifted straight to the airport, his condition stabilised, and then transferred on board a private jet back to London. But that was it. None of that was unusual. Operatives and analysts had nothing to do with one another outside the parameters of a mission. Milton had not even thought to ask about Ziggy, especially once Control had confirmed that he had survived his injuries. Milton remembered that debrief better than many of the others: the tense atmosphere in his office, the barely suppressed anger, the irritation after Milton had enquired about Ziggy, as if the fact of his survival was an annoyance, as if it would have been better if he had died, punishment for making an already aborted mission even worse than it already was.

  “I know Control was unhappy with you,” he said.

  Ziggy snorted. “You could say that. I guess it’s easier to leave the Group when they don’t want you anymore. He sent me back to GCHQ, and they demoted me. Cryptography. I was there for six months. I still managed to get into a spot of bother, though.” He smiled.

  “Bother?”

  “It’s big news now, the stuff Snowden’s putting out, but I was ahead of him. Years ahead. He hadn’t even joined Booz Allen when I found out what the NSA and GCHQ were doing with surveillance. But I like my life too much to do something as masochistic as blowing the whistle on people like that—not stupid enough, not brave enough, whatever—but they noticed I was snooping around in areas I wasn’t supposed to be. Jesus, Milton, the things I saw…”

  Ziggy let the sentence dangle, inviting Milton to ask for more, but he nodded and waved it off. He remembered Ziggy better now, remembered that he was bumptious and liked to show off with the things that he said that he knew. Always trying to impress. Insecure. Milton’s complete lack of interest inured him to the barrage of teased hints and allusions, and he recalled how that had always baffled and frustrated Ziggy.

  “Anyway,” he said, pretending to ignore Milton’s brush-off, “they sort of suggested that it would be better for me to leave, so I did. Two years ago.”

  “And since then?”

  “A bit of this, a bit of that.”

  “Legal?”

  “Not entirely.”

  Milton cocked an eyebrow. He made no attempt to mask his disdain, hoping that Ziggy might register it and temper his bluster. But self-awareness was not one of Ziggy’s strengths—just working with him for the short time they had been together was enough for Milton to suspect that he had all the basic elements of an autistic personality—and he went on for another minute, crowing about his brilliance, until Milton raised his hand and cut him shor
t. “Ziggy, enough.”

  Ziggy grinned at him and put a hand to the thinning ginger thatch on his scalp, scrubbing at it. “All right, dude. You’re not interested, fine, I get it. Here I am. At your service. You’re lucky I still check that board, by the way. They’ve moved on since then.”

  “What do they do now?”

  “It’s Lana Del Rey, Calvin Harris, Miley Cyrus now. The Smiths are so 1980s.” He took a half-empty pack of duty-free cigarettes from his pocket, slid one out and offered the rest to Milton. He took one and lit it with Ziggy’s lighter. “So, Milton, you want to tell me why you wanted to see me so bad?”

  “It’ll be easier if I show you.”

  #

  MILTON DROVE the Corolla back to the Lower Ninth.

  Ziggy looked out, agog. “Jesus,” he said. “Look at this place. I saw it on the TV, but I had no idea it was like this. It’s like a fucking jungle on the surface of the moon.”

  “Not all of it,” Milton said. He navigated the car through the grid of streets he was starting to know very well. Salvation Row came into view behind the stands of saplings, shrubs and undergrowth.

  “Whoah,” Ziggy said. “Look at that.”

  Milton turned the wheel and cruised slowly down the road. He looked left and right, aware that the place could very easily be under surveillance, but everything was in order. The lights were off in the Bartholomews’ bright-sided house, and he thought of them in the Comfort Inn, forced out by the threat that he still hadn’t really got to grips with.

  “That junction back there, that’s where the Irish took you out. The house we sheltered in is gone. The whole street is gone. It was condemned, so they tore it down. These houses have been built to bring the displaced families back. There’s a foundation behind it—Build It Up. There’s no reason why you would’ve heard about it—”

  “No,” he interrupted. “I have. I read a report on it, must’ve been last year. I just didn’t recognise the street.”

  “This is all they’ve done so far, but they’ve got big plans. You remember the family who took us in?”

  “No.”

  “No,” Milton said, correcting himself. “Of course not. There was a girl. Her name is Isadora. She set the foundation up. She runs it.”

  “That’s impressive.”

  Milton nodded. “It was going well for them until a development was approved here. A mall. Big. The city is trying to take the land. Compulsory purchase. All of this could get bulldozed. Izzy’s fighting it and doing a good job. Too good, probably. Someone has been threatening her and then, yesterday, they tried to take her and me out.”

  “Take you out?”

  “Drove a car into us and then took a couple of shots.” He waved it off. “I can handle them, but I’m just reacting at the moment. I need to go on the attack. I need you to help me find out who’s behind it, and anything else you can get on them.”

  “What do you have?”

  “There’s plenty you can start with. The police are involved now, so I need you to look into them. If they are involved, it’s possible that it goes deeper. Politicians, maybe. Probably.”

  “Anything more tangible?”

  “I’ve got the name and address of someone who I think is involved.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “You had me fly here for that? I could’ve done all that from my apartment.”

  “I prefer to be hands on,” Milton said. “And I think there might be more for you to do once we start to make progress.”

  Ziggy leaned back. There was a tracing of sugar on his top lip. He wiped it off. “Twenty grand?”

  “Yes,” Milton said. “But I’d like to think that you’ll do it because it’s the right thing to do.”

  He grinned. “Sure. But a little money doesn’t hurt, either.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  JACKSON DUBOIS met Peacock in the same place, under the bridge. A ship slid ponderously down the canal, lit up like a Christmas tree, its horn sounding two booming ululations as it approached its berth. The traffic swooshed overhead. The only people down here were junkies, pimps, hookers, and johns. The tires of his car scrunched through the loose aggregate. Peacock appeared out of the shadows, jogging over to him. Dubois let his hand drift down to the space at the side of the car where he had his shotgun. Peacock went around, opened the passenger door and slid inside.

  “Well?”

  “Our friend. The English guy. You know, before, there was only so much I could get? Well, I’ve got more on him now. You really need to hear it. He’s trouble.”

  “Go on.”

  “You know that problem they had up in Michigan, couple months ago? The militia?”

  Dubois said that he did. It had been a big story: an eighteen-wheeler filled with enough fertiliser to make Oklahoma City look like a sneeze. “He was involved with that?”

  “Yeah, he was. The FBI said they got to the bottom of it, right, they said they used CIs? Turns out that he was one of the CIs. I don’t know exactly how he was involved, but he was. The rumours I’m hearing, it wasn’t in no small capacity, either. I’ll never get it confirmed. But I’m hearing he didn’t just snitch on them, he brought them down himself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Peacock shrugged. “Just that.”

  Dubois remembered. There had been killings in the woods, multiple members of a fundamentalist Christian militia found dead. One guy did that? He started to feel uncomfortable.

  “What else?”

  “His name is John Milton, not John Smith. Used to be British Special Forces. SAS. I know that because the Brits got involved after the militia went down and Milton was brought in by the feds. My guess, they got onto them and told them to seal up what happened, keep their boy out of it in exchange for his confidential testimony.”

  “So what’s he doing here?”

  “That much I can’t say.”

  “Keep looking.”

  “I am.” He shuffled a little. “What about those two goons you had working for you?”

  “Not a problem.”

  “One thing I know for sure, if this dude was Special Forces, two crackheads are not gonna cut the mustard. He’ll wrap ’em up and send ’em back with a ribbon on ’em.”

  “I told you,” Dubois snapped. “Not a problem.” Peacock was right, but he was irritated. It felt like the detective was blaming him for setting Melvin and Chad on the job. And two fricasséed junkies were beyond causing him headaches now.

  Peacock shrugged his shoulders. “You want, I can make a suggestion?”

  “About?”

  “Someone you could put on this job. Someone who I can pretty much guarantee will get it done.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I bet you are. First things first. Us taking this guy out wasn’t what the mayor agreed with your boss. He wanted the Bartholomew girl arrested, no more and no less. And we did that.”

  “And then you let her out!” Dubois exploded.

  “Did he really want a writ of habeas corpus going all the way to a judge? She starts blabbing, making wild claims, what if they get traction? Nah. We had to let her out. If you’d stopped them from getting to court, instead of fucking that up…”

  Dubois entertained the notion of reaching down, pulling the shotgun and shooting this loud-mouthed, vulgar braggart. He fought it back and said, coldly and calmly, “What do you want, Detective?”

  “My woman has a kitchen business in Elmwood. I know your boss has those granite quarries up there in Gallatin. I’m thinking, rather than give me cash, maybe he can send a truck of milled granite work surfaces to my woman’s shop. He does that in the next couple of days, I’ll take you and make the introduction to the man who will make all your problems go away.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Name’s Claude Boon.”

  “And where do we have to go to find Mr. Boon?”

  “We don’t go to him. Someone like Boon, we ask nicely, maybe
he comes to us.”

  “Asking nicely,” Dubois said. “How much does that cost?”

  “No two ways about it, he’s expensive.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifty.”

  Dubois was unperturbed. Fifty thousand was nothing. “That might be interesting.”

  “Yeah, right. Like I said, he ain’t cheap, but he’s worth every last cent. Your man Milton, he won’t be a problem for long.”

  Part Four

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  CLAUDE BOON pushed through the raucous crowd into the space where the fight would take place. He was in an underground car park in Jersey, vacant because of the construction work taking place on the office block above. The ring, such as it was, was hemmed in by parked cars, their lights blazing, and arrayed before them was the audience. The night’s activities were not advertised. The fights were illegal and, as such, notice was last minute. The promotion amounted to a series of texts that directed people to a voicemail message that, in turn, directed them to the venue. It was a hot ticket. There were two hundred people here, mostly men, and ten fighters who would each compete twice.

  The atmosphere was clamorous, sharp-edged, feverish with the prospect of bloodshed. Gritty, nasty, electric. Rap music from the ’90s—Biggie, Tupac and Jay-Z—played loud from the open windows of a souped-up muscle car. The fighters waiting their turn stood at the fringes, bare chested. Those who had already fought had ice packs on the contusions on their faces, cuts stitched up or slathered with Vaseline. The last fight had been between a pudgy kid in a T-shirt and mesh shorts and a fifty-year-old former Army Ranger from Jersey City. The kid’s arm had been broken. A hammerlock. The promoter had given the kid ten bucks to take a cab to the hospital. The Ranger had barely broken a sweat.

  Boon looked across the parking lot to the man he had drawn to fight. He was called Cooke. He was bigger than Boon, muscle packed on top of muscle, a mean streak a mile wide, and had a reputation as fearsome as his appearance. Boon guessed that he must have been six six and a good two hundred and fifty pounds. He had six inches and fifty pounds on him. They called him the Vanilla Gorilla and he was undefeated. His first fight, an hour ago, had seen his opponent dragged unconscious from the lot with a mouthful of teeth scattered on the ground.