Blackout - John Milton #10 (John Milton Thrillers) Read online

  “We were approached a week ago by a woman who said that she knows you. You were in Manila several years ago. Operation Attila. Do you remember? There was a company shipping surface-to-air missiles to the Maoists.”

  “Tactical Aviation,” Milton said.

  “That’s right. British chap at the helm.”

  The details came back. “Yes,” Milton said. “That’s right. Fitzroy de Lacey.”

  “You got him convicted, didn’t you?” Logan said rhetorically.

  Milton didn’t answer.

  “Been in jail ever since. Still there, as far as I know.”

  “What does your coming here have to do with him?”

  “It doesn’t,” Logan said. “Not really. It’s to do with you.”

  Milton sipped the tea. He had started to remember Attila and how much he had been drinking back then. He was nervous about what might come next.

  “There was a local woman involved with Tactical. I suppose, if you were being charitable, you’d say she was employed in a hospitality role. Her name was—”

  “Jessica,” Milton finished for him.

  “Jessica Sanchez.”

  “Yes,” Milton said. “I remember her.”

  “But Miss Sanchez was working for us, too. She was on our books. She helped you get into the company.”

  Milton shrugged. He wasn’t about to share what he could recall with a man whom he had never met before tonight.

  Logan seemed content to continue. “Miss Sanchez came to the embassy two weeks ago. Wanted to see you, in fact. I told her that was impossible—we don’t just arrange appointments between our agents and any Tom, Dick or Harriet who comes in off the street. But she was pushy. I told her no again, and then she said that she’d go to the local rag and spill everything about the operation to put de Lacey away. You probably don’t remember this, Milton, but Tactical had people in London on the payroll. Government people. She gave me some names and they checked out. She knows all of it. And some of these people are still in post. Some of them are senior now. It would be very embarrassing if that ever got out. Very bloody embarrassing indeed.” He sat back and spread his hands. “I tried to get rid of her, but she insisted. She had to speak to you. You and only you. And that, old boy, is why I flew halfway around the world to see you.”

  “How?” he said. “How did you find me?”

  “Wasn’t easy. I understand you had some trouble a few years ago. Went to ground for a bit?”

  Milton shrugged.

  “But things have calmed down since then?”

  Milton thought about that. It would be a stretch to say that things had calmed down, but at least he wasn’t being pursued by Control and the other crooked agents who had gone rogue with him.

  “It’s quieter,” Milton said, “and that’s how I like it. I prefer to keep a low profile.”

  “But you’re hardly off grid. I had to dig around a bit, but I found you eventually. They have files on all of us, especially people like you.”

  “Patently.”

  “Indeed,” Logan said with a smile. “Patently.”

  Milton found that he was gripping his mug tightly. There was no point in putting it off any more. “So,” he said, “you’d better tell me. What does Miss Sanchez want?”

  “That’s the thing,” Logan said. “Bit sensitive.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “She said that the two of you had a thing while you were over there. An affair. Not long. Just a couple of months.”

  Milton felt another twist of anxiety. He shrugged.

  “Well, the thing is—and I don’t suppose there’s any easy way to say this without dropping a great big bloody surprise in your lap—she says that she had a child after you left. She says it’s yours. You’re a daddy, old man.” He raised his mug ironically. “Cheers.”

  3

  LOGAN SAT in the back of the black cab and thought about the meeting.

  Had it gone well? He thought so. There was nothing to suggest that Milton had seen through the pretence that had been arranged for his benefit.

  Logan was not a foreign office functionary. He had never worked at Manila Station. He was not employed by the government, although he had worked for them as a contractor before. He was freelance and preferred it that way.

  He travelled a lot. He would accept the offer of a contract and then he would go and carry it out. He was thorough and diligent, spending as much time as the diktats of the operation allowed to research his victims and the lives that they led. It was his goal that he should know them as if he were a good friend.

  Milton had been much more interesting than anyone else that he had ever been sent to kill.

  He had heard of him before, of course. The existence of Group Fifteen had always been a badly kept secret within the intelligence community. Milton was one of the Group’s better known alumni, mostly because of the acrimonious nature of his departure and the desperate attempts of Milton’s corrupt handler to locate him and bring him to heel. The extent of Control’s perfidy had sounded the death knell for the Group, a fate that was underlined by the disappearance of the most recent head of the unit, Michael Pope. Group Fifteen had been mothballed, the agents dispersed, and steps taken to discreetly airbrush the whole sorry show from the annals of history.

  They had deleted Milton’s records, but his reputation lingered.

  Milton had been Her Majesty’s most dangerous assassin for many years, with more than one hundred and fifty confirmed kills to his name. He had been gone for years now, but Logan had found evidence of his handiwork in places as diverse as Ciudad Juarez, San Francisco, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and, most recently, London and Calais. It was obvious from his rather pitiful existence in London that he was trying to melt into civilian life, but a man like Milton couldn’t easily do that.

  Milton was a killer, and he would always be a killer.

  Death would be his constant companion.

  Their calling was the one thing that they had in common.

  Because Logan was a killer, too.

  * * *

  LOGAN HAD a room at the Dorchester. He didn’t have a permanent address. He worked all around the world, and the itinerant life suited both his profession and his temperament. Nothing about him was permanent. His name wasn’t Logan, for example. It was the name of the man in his passport who bore his likeness. The picture was the same in his passports from Australia, Canada, the USA, Ireland, and Germany. Only the name changed.

  He had been in the Special Boat Service for five years before he had resigned to work on his own account. British intelligence was moving away from a formalised department like Group Fifteen, preferring the greater discretion offered by a series of unconnected agents who had no formal ties to the government nor any knowledge of one another. The men and women who gave Logan government work tended to be drawn from the same small class of senior agency staff, and it was they who stood between him and his ultimate clients: a diplomatic mission with troublesome locals, perhaps a trade envoy who wanted to remove a customs official who was proving to be troublesome for British businesses, or underworld figures who were threatening vested interests. Other jobs—like this one—were passed to him after he had been recommended by previous clients.

  Logan had travelled all over the world, flitting in and out of expensive hotels like this one, carrying out his orders with scrupulous care, leaving barely a ripple in his wake. He caught sight of himself in one of the lobby’s big mirrors. His suit was expensive, but not so expensive as to be noticeable; his leather bag was just the same as the one toted by the man ahead of him, although Logan’s held a pistol and ammunition rather than a laptop; his features were blandly unremarkable, like those of a bored provincial accountant. He worked hard to maintain that air of dour, world-weary boredom. It was a veil behind which he could conceal his true self.

  Logan passed through the promenade. He watched rich Arabs and Russians being tended to by burly minders and eager women. He passed an African family
dressed in garishly expensive clothes. He paused in the elevator lobby to allow an elderly couple to emerge, the cologne and perfume that drifted off them in pungent waves as redolent as the smell of money.

  He put his key in the elevator and rode it to the fourth floor. He went to his room, closed the door, and took out the burner phone that he had purchased at the airport. He opened Gmail and started to type.

  IT’S DONE. I MET HIM.

  He saved the message as a draft and then went to run a bath.

  He refreshed the browser when he returned. His draft message had been replaced by another.

  WHAT DID HE SAY?

  He deleted and then typed.

  HE WAS SURPRISED. HE WASN’T EXPECTING TO HEAR FROM HER AND IS THINKING ABOUT VISITING. I’LL SEE HIM AGAIN TOMORROW.

  He went to turn off the taps and then refreshed the browser again.

  WHAT DO YOU THINK?

  He typed.

  GET THE GIRL READY. I THINK HE’S COMING.

  4

  MILTON SLID out of bed. His bedroom was cold and he had barely slept. He went through into the tiny bathroom, stepped into the bath and ran the shower. The cold had sunk into his bones and he stood under the hot water for fifteen minutes until the warmth had driven it away.

  It wasn’t just the cold that had kept him awake. He had been thinking about what Logan had told him.

  His memories of his second visit to Manila were patchy. He had been drinking heavily then and the alcohol had robbed him of many of his memories. He had been playing the part of an ex-soldier who was involved in close protection. One of Fitzroy de Lacey’s previous men had gone missing, an occurrence engineered by Milton so that he might apply to fill the vacancy. His experience in the Regiment, together with a fabricated history as a mercenary, made him the perfect candidate for the role and he had been accepted into the organisation.

  De Lacey was a suspicious man, and the effort of maintaining the facade was something that Milton had found more than usually difficult. His days had been spent gathering the evidence that would eventually be used to put de Lacey behind bars. It was stressful, a long list of untruths that Milton had to remember, and he had returned exhausted to his hotel room every night, where he would empty the minibar and fall into his bed in a stupor.

  Jessica Sanchez had worked for Tactical Aviation too. Milton had lost many of his memories of his time in the city, but he had not forgotten her. She was beautiful, dark skinned and with hair the colour of midnight. Her brown eyes were large and soulful, and they sparkled with a mischievousness that was at odds with the cool demeanour that was the hallmark of her work for de Lacey. She knew that she was beautiful, and she knew that de Lacey had placed her in a role where her beauty could be deployed to his best advantage, and, despite the unpleasant men that she was paid to entertain, she maintained a professionalism that never wavered.

  Milton had been attracted to her the first time that he had laid eyes on her. He had always been a terrible judge of reciprocated feelings, and he had stayed back even after he was sure that she felt the same way.

  The other men in de Lacey’s security detail spoke about her and the other women who were summoned up for the regular parties on his enormous yacht with no attempt to temper their lascivious thoughts. They also revealed that de Lacey occasionally shared Jessica’s bed, and that, more than anything else, was the motivation that Milton needed to retreat to the hotel and the oblivion he could find at the bar.

  He scrubbed the water into his face, trying to shake away the worst of the dull fugue that had settled over him.

  One night stood out in his mind more than all the others. Even now, years later, even though the years had been soaked in alcohol and most of his memories had been erased by blackouts, it was the scene that had played through his mind and kept him awake. Milton had been trying to sleep, the windows open to allow a little air into the stifling room. There had come a knock at the door. Milton had not expected anyone, so he had opened it a crack with his pistol hidden behind the frame. Jessica was standing there. Her face was bloodied and bruised. He had let her in and poured her a drink from the bottle of vodka that he had very nearly finished.

  She had explained: she had been with de Lacey, and he had beaten her. There had been a contract with a supplier of weapons from Armenia. The man and his entourage had flown to Manila to seal a deal, and Jessica had been in charge of ensuring that they had a trip to remember. Something had gone wrong—Milton couldn’t remember what it was—and the man had left without signing the deal. De Lacey had blamed Jessica for the failure and had exacted his punishment with his fists and his belt. Milton had seen the evidence of his displeasure as the girl stepped out of her dress: there were welts all the way down her back from the top of her spine to her waist.

  Milton had been drunk. The booze, the attraction that he felt for Jessica, and the swirl of anger at what had been done to her, had all mixed into a cocktail of lust that had overwhelmed his professionalism and then his defences. In the back of his mind, despite the alcohol, he had known that it was a stupid idea, but he was unable to resist. She removed the rest of her clothes and joined him in his bed.

  They had fallen asleep eventually, and Milton had stirred first. He remembered: he had been soaked through with sweat, with warm air riffling the blinds and slowly inching up the temperature in his room. His head pounded with an awful reminder of the previous night’s excesses, although that was far from unusual. He had slowly levered himself upright, his hangover had ratcheted up a level, and he had turned to see the girl laid out next to him. He felt sick at the foolishness of what he had done.

  Jessica, disturbed by his movement, had woken with a start, and, as she realised what had happened, she had become frantic with worry. She told Milton that de Lacey was a jealous man and that they would both be in danger if he discovered that they had slept together. They talked. They had been crazy, they agreed. It was a stupid risk. But they could rescue the situation if they kept what had happened between themselves. There was no reason why de Lacey or anyone else ever need know.

  So Milton had gone to work as if nothing had happened. De Lacey was on his yacht and he had asked Milton to take him out in one of the tenders so that he could swim in the deeper water. Milton remembered being swamped with anger. De Lacey was enjoying himself, laughing and joking with him as he undressed and dived into the clear blue water. It was as if what he had done to Jessica was of trivial importance, as if it were just another administrative task that he had attended to for the good of his business. Milton had thought how easy it would be to end him there and then. The two of them were alone, a mile from land. Milton was armed. It would have been simple to shoot him, weigh the body down and let it sink to the bottom.

  But he couldn’t do that. He had very strict instructions. This was not a typical operation, ending with the death of the target and a clean exfil back to London and whatever came next. The aim of the operation was to have de Lacey arrested and, ultimately, incarcerated. It was more subtle than usual, more nuanced, and those strictures constrained his freedom to carry out his orders as he saw fit.

  His pistol had felt red hot in his shoulder holster, but he’d left it there. Instead, he had helped de Lacey out of the water, passed him his towel, and piloted the tender back to the harbour, his multi-million-pound yacht and his breakfast.

  5

  MILTON CALLED Logan on the number that the man had given him and arranged to meet him on the South Bank at two o’clock.

  It was eleven. He had three hours before he needed to be there.

  There was a meeting of the fellowship at the community centre near to Victoria Park.

  He put on his coat, locked his flat, and set off.

  * * *

  IT WAS a thirty-minute walk to the meeting.

  Milton followed Columbia Road up to the bustle of the weekly flower market. The narrow street was thronged with customers, clutches of them gathered around the tables as hoarse traders barked out their deal
s and offers, the street full of the sweet scent of lilies, roses, amaryllis, hippeastrum, shamrock, chrysanthemum, and brassicas. Milton passed by the old primary school and the old boozers that had been prettified by the relentless gentrification that had swallowed up this once rough neighbourhood. He continued to the northwest, going by Hackney City Farm and the empty BMX track at Haggerston Park; he crossed the canal and continued east until he reached the westward tip of the sprawl of Victoria Park. The meeting was in the community centre, an ugly 1960s brick building that had been put up to fill the gap caused by one of the Luftwaffe’s bombs.

  Milton had never been to this meeting before, and, although he recognised a few faces amid the twenty or so who were here, he didn’t acknowledge anyone and took a chair, as was his habit, at the back of the room.

  The secretary brought the meeting to order and opened by reading ‘How It Works’ from the Big Book. Milton closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing. He knew that he would find a small margin of peace at the meeting, and, as the speaker began to tell her story, he let her voice lull him into the meditative place where he was sometimes able to decode the buzz of noise in his head.

  Was he doing the right thing? He didn’t know. Common sense said that he should ignore the news that Logan had delivered, pack up his few possessions, and move away. He had finally begun to feel safe enough to live a semblance of a normal life, but now this unwelcome contact with the establishment had reinvigorated his desire to submerge beneath the surface again. The ease with which Logan had found him was disconcerting to a man whose entire adult life had been spent in the shadows. He had been thinking about returning to South America, and the idea of that—the opportunity to travel, to erase all evidence of himself in shiftless movement—was now much more attractive than it had been. There was nothing for him here. He would miss his job and the men and women who were connected to the shelter, but he didn’t consider any of them to be real friends. None of them would miss him if he was gone.