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

  “Build It Up? I know about that. Read an article about them on the plane.”

  “Yeah,” Peacock said. “Them. Milton is working with them.”

  “And you want to get rid of someone building houses for a charity?”

  “That’s right. He got involved in business that he has nothing to do with.”

  “You’ve spoken to him?”

  “No.”

  “Mr. Dubois?”

  “No.”

  “So a little background, please.”

  Dubois spread his hands over the table. “We’ve been trying to buy the houses they’ve been building. They won’t sell. We sent two men to frighten them. Milton was there. Put his nose where it doesn’t belong.”

  “These two men? Who were they? Guys you found on the street?”

  Dubois shrugged.

  Boon chuckled. “Let me guess. Milton ate them for breakfast? Broke a few bones, sent them away with a message for you?”

  Dubois shifted in his chair, flickering with irritation. “You’d do better, would you?”

  Boon just smiled. “Where can I find him?”

  “Lower Nine,” Peacock said. “Salvation Row.”

  “Salvation Row? Who comes up with that shit?”

  Peacock shrugged and tapped the bulge beneath his armpit, where his pistol was holstered. “You said you wanted to get a piece here. You haven’t got anything yet?”

  “Not yet. Get me a 9mm. Not from evidence, something off the street. Roll a dealer, something like that. I don’t care how you do it.”

  “Easy,” Peacock said.

  “That’d normally be enough. But Milton is Milton. I might need something heavier.” He paused, thinking about it. “I’ll let you know about that.”

  “Fine.”

  “And a car.”

  “Sure.”

  “And that’s all I need.”

  “When can you do it?”

  He got up. “You make the down payment, I’ll start today.”

  Dubois got up, too. He removed a thick envelope from his pocket and placed it on the table. “Twenty. I’ll get you the other thirty this afternoon. The other fifty when it’s done.”

  Boon took the envelope and pocketed it. “That works.”

  “You talk a good game, Mr. Boon. But you still haven’t said why I should believe that you can do this.”

  Boon paused. These guys were ridiculous. Part of him felt like drilling Dubois in the nose, walking out of the bar and going back to the airport. He didn’t need shit in his life, and he was starting to find this guy a little stuck-up, too smarmy for his own good. But, the money was good and, since he had promised Lila they would use it for a month in Turtle Bay, he took a moment and composed himself and gave him a nice friendly, little smile.

  “I’m expensive. You want to know why that is? It’s because I’m the best there is at what I do. I can charge whatever I like, someone’ll pay it. I’m not like the guys you used, the ones who fucked up. I’m not like them at all. I don’t get drunk. I don’t do drugs. When I go after someone, I don’t go after them in a half-assed sort of way. I go after them in a serious, no mistakes, no fucking up kind of way.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that I’m a professional. I’ve been doing this for years, Mr. Dubois. I messed up some things in my life, but never that. When I do it, it stays done. Milton’s a dangerous man, but he doesn’t know that I’m coming. That means he doesn’t have a chance. And that you don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

  #

  LILA WAS asleep when he got back to the room.

  Boon looked at her and felt the familiar surge of intense, all-consuming love. They had been together for three years, and the feelings that they shared had not dulled at all. That, he knew, was remarkable. His married friends in the Kidon, and the older men he had known in the army before that, all of them had grumbled about their domestic arrangements. That was just how it was. That was life. Boon, himself, had come to feel the same way about his first wife. There had been the usual intense first few months before the bloom came off the rose. Familiarity, contempt, all that. That it had not been that way with him and Lila was the source of all the joy in his life. He knew how lucky he was.

  Lila had been born and raised in the West Bank town of Hebron. She was twenty-four, a full twenty years Boon’s junior. Her father had two careers, one public and the other private. The first was as a senior Hamas official, just a few steps removed from the leadership. His second was as an Israeli collaborator. It was his information that had led to the successful assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, the co-founder of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. Boon had benefitted from Lila’s father’s perfidy. He was one of the twenty-six Kidon agents who were responsible for his elimination in his Dubai hotel room. A colleague had administered the muscle relaxant, and Boon had smothered the man beneath a pillow.

  Lila’s father’s treachery had been uncovered soon after the operation, and he was promptly executed. Lila, her mother and her sister were extracted and resettled in Jerusalem. When she and Boon met, she had been waiting tables. He had immediately fallen for her. Bright blue eyes that sparkled with life and an insouciant attitude that didn’t waver, even when—weeks later—Boon told her about the particular kind of work that he did for his country. He knew enough about her by then to know that honesty was a calculated gamble, but he couldn’t lie. She hated Hamas. She knew the men who had killed her father. Boon killed both of them, then the man who had sent them, and then the man who had sent him. As a demonstration of love, it was particularly effective.

  Boon had not been Boon then. His birth name was Avi Bachman. He was still married to his first wife, a wholly unsatisfactory relationship that he maintained for the sake of appearances. The time he spent with Lila was like a long glass of cold water in the desert. She was playful. She made him feel younger. She loved him.

  He would have divorced his wife and taken up with her, but that wouldn’t be possible. The Mossad’s culture was brutally nationalistic. Lila’s father might have been of value to Israel, but she was still a Palestinian. They would never have been able to trust her, and, had they known of their dalliance, it wouldn’t have been a question of his continued employment. It would have been a pistol pressed into his ear and a bullet put into his brain. Hers, too.

  And so, when he could pretend no more, he engineered a way out. He had deliberately botched the assassination of a bomb maker in a Cairo slum, allowing the director to think that he had been killed when the plastique that he had been fitting to the underside of the man’s car had detonated prematurely. He had been close enough to the seat of the blast that witnesses had attested to the impossibility that he could have escaped. But he had escaped. First deeper into Egypt and then to France, where he spent fifty thousand euros on a premium false identity from a genius hacker to whom he had been referred by an old acquaintance. The acquaintance and the hacker had both been murdered to remove the threads that might lead back to him. He had boarded an Air France plane to Chicago as Claude Boon, a forty-three-year-old man with dual French and American nationality. Lila was in the first-class seat next to him. The irony was not lost on him that, for the first time in his adult life, he did not have to lie about her. He just had to lie about everything else instead.

  After living as Boon for long enough, he came to refer to himself as Boon. He had been trained that way. A cover was most effective when the subject subsumed himself totally in the fictional creation within which he was hiding. It was automatic and, after a month, he no longer considered himself as Bachman. After two months, when Lila had habitually called him Avi, he hadn’t answered. His old self was dead. So she called him Claude now, too.

  He traced his fingers across her face and watched her wake.

  “Hey,” she said, blinking the sleep away.

  “Hey.”

  “How’d it go, baby?”

  “Not what I was expecting.”


  “Yeah?”

  “The guy we’re here for, turns out I know him. From before.”

  “What? The Mossad?”

  “No. British.”

  “Any good?”

  “He was. Very good. Very good, indeed.”

  “So?”

  “So it’s one hundred, not fifty.”

  “That’s good. Can we have an extra week?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s this guy’s name?”

  “John Milton.”

  “And Milton’s dangerous?”

  “He is.”

  “So you’ll be careful, baby, right?”

  “I’m always careful.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  ZIGGY PENN parked the UPS truck that Milton had stolen on the opposite side of the street to the big house at 5201 St. Charles Avenue. It was a grand place: big, lots of windows, good-sized grounds. Milton had explained that the property was connected to a man that he wanted to know more about. He said that this man, name of Jackson Dubois, had met with two hoods after they had tried to put the heat on Isadora Bartholomew. Milton had prevented them from doing that, followed them to the rendezvous, and then had found Dubois’s details when he had broken into his car.

  There were some things that Ziggy had been able to do from the comfort of his hotel room. He had discovered that the owner of the house was a company registered in the Cayman Islands. Details on the ownership of that company were obscured by a series of blind trusts, all wrapped up in the Caymans’ obsession with anonymity. It might be Dubois, but it was impossible to say. The place had been purchased, in cash, two years previously from a local cable television executive. Ziggy had called the woman on a pretext, but he had struck out. The transaction was carried out at arm’s length, through agents, and there was nothing she could offer that would shed any light on the corporation or any of the people behind it.

  Those were the only details that he had been able to discern.

  He needed to get creative.

  He picked up his phone and called Milton.

  “It’s me. I’m here. Where is he?”

  “Still in the office.”

  “Got any idea what he’s doing?”

  “He’s with lawyers. That’s all I know.”

  “Note down who they are. Maybe I can find out when I get back.”

  “I already did. Are you ready?”

  “I’m just going in now. If you think he’s coming back, give me plenty of notice. I haven’t done this for a while. I won’t be as quick as I used to be.”

  “Got it.”

  “Wish me luck.”

  But Milton had already ended the call.

  Ziggy got out of the truck. He was wearing a UPS delivery man’s uniform. He had hacked into their operations department’s servers yesterday—the work of a moment—and fast-tracked the delivery of a brand-new uniform. It had arrived, still in its protective polythene wrappers, before he had set out this morning. Milton had found the truck the previous night, climbing the fence of the depot, hot-wiring it and driving it to a secluded spot where they could change the plates without fear of discovery.

  The street was residential and too exclusive to be particularly busy. Ziggy went around to the side of the truck and collected his case. He had assembled the contents yesterday and was as confident as he could be that he had everything that he needed. He checked both ways, waited for a Lincoln town car to trundle by, limped across the street and walked to the wrought-iron gates that blocked the driveway that led to the house.

  He pretended to use the intercom, leaning in so that his mouth was close to the microphone, the angle of his body enough to obscure the scanner that he had in his hand. The gates were remote and would open whenever the remote sent a signal to the sensor. Ziggy activated the scanner and waited as it cycled through the available frequencies, sending out a million potential handshakes until it had the right one.

  There was a metallic clunk as the lock opened, and then a scrape as the gates rolled back.

  Ziggy hobbled up the driveway to the house.

  #

  ZIGGY WORKED QUICKLY. His case contained all the things that he needed: a cordless drill, with a succession of ever smaller bits; a screwdriver set; a selection of tiny bugging devices and Wi-Fi cameras. His first job had been to scout the house. It was unusually empty. There were no papers or documents that he could have copied, no computers, no electronic devices that he might have been able to compromise and mine. Three of the four bedrooms were empty, and the fourth had a futon on the floor. There were four identical suits hanging in the closet, seven identical white shirts, and a series of sober ties. The spartan appearance of the place continued downstairs, with empty cupboards and a handful of empty fast food containers in the garbage. Whoever Dubois was, he wasn’t the sort that would make a place look homely or settled. The overwhelming impression was one of impermanence. It was as if he used the house, as extensive and expensive as it was, for sleep and not much else.

  Two of the empty bedrooms were above the large lounge area on the ground floor. Ziggy pulled back the carpet and the underlay and removed a foot-long section of the floorboard. There was a cavity between the joists and the drywall that formed the ceiling, more than enough space for him to rest the power supply for the miniature camera. He took his drill, selected the smallest bit, and carefully pierced through the drywall, just enough so that a tiny pinprick of light could be seen from below. Ziggy arranged the camera so that its cone lens was flush with the hole, and then secured it in place with tape. He switched the camera on, replaced the floorboard, and covered it up with the carpet.

  He went through into the second bedroom. This one was not carpeted, but there was a rug that he could use to hide the surgery that he performed on the floorboards. He worked quickly and neatly, drilling a second tiny hole and lining up the camera. He flicked the power to live and obscured his handiwork.

  He returned downstairs. There were two small piles of chewed-up drywall on the floor. He found a hand-held dust buster and cleaned them away. He looked up to the ceiling. The two holes were visible, but discreet enough to remain unobserved unless the target knew to look for them.

  He took his case and left the house, locking the door behind him.

  He made his way back to his truck and drove two blocks away. He parked and took out his phone. Footage from the cameras was broadcasting to the application that he had installed earlier. It was in colour and good quality, the fish-eye lenses distorting it a little, a price worth paying for the extended coverage that they offered. It was good work. Not perfect, because he had hoped that he might be able to get his hands on a laptop or a tablet, but it would do for now. He had a very useful piece of kit being couriered overnight, but this would serve until it arrived.

  He closed the application and called Milton.

  “Well?”

  “Done.”

  “Good. He left two minutes ago. Heading back your way.”

  “You might have told me.”

  “Didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “If he had seen me—”

  “He didn’t. Stop moaning, Ziggy. Is it working?”

  “What do you think?” he said indignantly. “It’s perfect. We’ll be able to see and hear everything he does.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  DETECTIVE PEACOCK left a second-hand Ford on the street outside the Hilton, the keys under the mat. Boon took the key and opened the trunk. There was a 9mm Beretta with plenty of ammunition under a blanket. He took the gun, shoved it into the waistband of his jeans, and got into the back. Lila slid behind the wheel.

  “Where to, baby?”

  “Head down to the place.”

  She put the car into drive and pulled away into the traffic.

  Boon took out the gun and stripped it.

  “Is it okay?”

  “It’s in decent shape. It’ll do.”

  They crossed the Industrial Canal at the North Claiborne Bridge
.

  “This guy,” Lila said. “Who is he?”

  Boon had been thinking about Milton ever since he had seen the picture. The details came back easily. “He worked for the British. He was very good, too.”

  “As good as you, baby?”

  He grinned. “Didn’t say that.”

  “So you ever work with him?”

  “Once. The job in Iran.”

  “He was on that?”

  “Him, the Americans, one other Brit.”

  “And?”

  “Apart from him being very good? He’s quiet. Thoughtful. A lot of the guys I worked with—CIA, especially—they’re loud and brash, kind of boring. Wouldn’t last five minutes in the Mossad with a personality like that. They would’ve been dragged out into the desert, shot in the head and buried. Milton was more like us than them. He would’ve fit in well.”

  “And now?”

  “No idea, baby. I haven’t seen him for years.”

  “And you have no problem with him being the target?”

  Boon snapped the magazine back into the well and put the gun away. “No, I don’t. Business is business. If the shoe was on the other foot, he’d have no trouble, either. He’s just unlucky that he’s ended up with us.”

  They turned off North Claiborne and into the grid of devastated streets to the south. Lila followed the satnav to Salvation Row.

  “Look at this place,” she said.

  They saw the row of colourful houses, bright and new, standing out as a stark rejoinder to the crash of jungle and dereliction all around them.

  “Over there,” Boon said, pointing to a lot that was being cleared.

  “That him?”

  “Don’t slow down. Just drive by.”

  He slid down a little, but not enough so that he couldn’t look out of the window as Lila drove by the lot. There was a crew there, seven men hacking at the overgrown plants that had sprouted around the wreck of a house. A pickup was parked at the curb and a small riding lawnmower was being refuelled from a gas can. He focussed on one of the crew in particular. A man of average height and build, black hair, the wings of a tattoo visible on the skin revealed by a dirty muscle top. The man drove a shovel into freshly tilled earth and reached down for a bottle of water. The car went by and the man looked up. Boon remembered, years back, to Cairo and Tehran. It was Milton. He hadn’t changed.