Authors: Mark Dawson
“You didn’t find me, Milton, I found you. And that threat doesn’t work if you’ve got nothing left to lose.”
He pressed ahead. “What about Control?”
“What about him?”
“If he finds out where you are, you know what will happen. He’s still there. He hasn’t stopped.”
“Look at me, Milton. You’re not listening. Do you think any of that frightens me? Shcherbatov. Control.” She shaped her fingers into the shape of a gun and pressed the tips against her temple. “You think the gun’s for defence? You know how many times I’ve wanted to put a bullet in my head and lost my nerve? Every day.” He felt his stomach turn and he reached across and took her wrist; there was no resistance in her arm as he gently lowered it and held it against the table. “I can’t even do that. I’m fucked up. They come over here and do it for me, I’m telling you, they’d be doing me a fucking favour.” She sucked down on the smoke and gazed out into the street. “My life is over. My husband is dead. I lost my daughter. I’ve got no money. I’m a drug addict. I’m done, Milton. Finished. How do you think this is going to end?”
“There must be something you can do.”
“You got any ideas? I’m all ears.”
“Something, anything. It would have been better than coming here to all … this.”
“This?”
“The opium, for a start.”
“I don’t need your morality,” she said, glaring at him. She took another cigarette from the packet and lit it.
“Why?”
“Why do you think?” she snapped. “It helps me forget how I’ve fucked up my life.”
“It doesn’t work, though, does it?”
“No? I don’t think about very much when I’m high. You should try it.”
“I have tried it,” he said. “That’s the reason I don’t drink any more. It works for a while until it doesn’t. And then it’s much worse.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re in a program?”
“A.A.” Milton said. He smiled wryly.
“What’s so funny?”
“That’s the first time I’ve admitted it to anyone who wasn’t already in the Rooms.”
“Yeah? Well, good for you, but I still think it’s bullshit. There’s no point trying to persuade me to do something stupid like that. The first thing you need is to want to stop, right?”
Yes…”
“I don’t want to stop.”
“You’re not…”
“There’s something else, Milton. The other reason I do it.” She took a deep breath and laid her hands out on the table, palms down, fingers splayed. “It’s a palliative.”
“For what?”
“I have cancer.”
“Oh, shit. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I told you. I don’t need your sympathy.”
He shifted uncomfortably; the conversation had veered hopelessly away from where he thought it might go. “How bad is it?”
“Bad. Breast cancer, stage four. It’s in my liver and my lungs. I found out three months ago.”
“Have you had treatment?”
She shrugged. “What’s the point?”
“So you haven’t?”
She waved a hand disdainfully. “There’s a doctor I know, discreet if you pay him enough. He’s given me two rounds of chemotherapy. I might’ve had a third but I’ve run out of money. Don’t do anything stupid like offer to pay for it. I’m alright with it. We’re all going to die, Milton, especially people like us. I just know I’ll be sooner than most.”
“How long do you have left?”
“He can’t say for sure. All they can do is manage it now. No more than twelve months.” She smiled bitterly. “So I eat like shit and I smoke and I drink and when the pain gets too much I smoke heroin so I can’t feel it any more. And one day, when I can’t take it any more, I’ll shoot up enough to bring an end to it. You think about it from my point of view, it’s not a bad way to go.”
Milton laid his hands flat on the table. “What about your daughter?”
Her eyes flashed. “Don’t.”
“You don’t want to see her again? Before…”
“Before I die? Yes, Milton, of course I do. I want that more than anything. But if Control gets even the slightest hint that I’m in the country again he is going to think I’m coming after him; and if he thinks that, she isn’t safe. I can’t take the risk. I can’t go back. You see, Milton? This can’t be fixed.”
He stared right into her face. “No. You’re wrong. Everything can be fixed.”
“Not this.”
“What about if I said I could get her back?”
THEY TALKED FOR another two hours. Milton didn’t have a plan and so they worked it out on the fly.
“Where are the flash drives?” he asked her.
She paused.
“You have to trust me. I’ve got almost as much of a reason to bring down Control as you do. And this won’t work if you don’t.”
“I know. But… I don’t really know you, Milton, and that’s my only leverage. If I let you have it and it goes wrong…”
“Come on,
think
. What’s that leverage really worth? How much good has it done you?”
“And how would giving it to the Russians help me?”
“Who said that I was going to give it to them?”
“Then what?”
He rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand. “There are other ways to make this work.”
“It’s in England.”
“Okay.”
“And so is my daughter. How are you going to get her? It’s
England
. You can’t go back just like I can’t go back. Control will kill you.”
“Someone has to go back. It might as well be me. I can’t keep running forever.”
ANNA INSISTED that she meet Beatrix. It was, she said tersely, a prerequisite for the continuation of the operation. Milton called Beatrix and they arranged a sit-down at the coffee shop. They took a table. Beatrix kept them waiting for thirty minutes and, when she finally arrived, she was wearing dark sunglasses and an impassive expression.
“Thank you for coming,” Anna said, trying to sound authoritative but the effort was undermined by the tremors in her hand. The indignation with the way that Milton had manoeuvred her quickly disappeared as she sat between the two veteran assassins. Her confidence wilted and she fell back upon bravado. Milton was surprised to find himself sympathetic towards her. Seeing her flounder reminded him how young and inexperienced she was. He also felt regret at what he knew he was going to have to do once they were in England. He was sure now that this was her first solo operation and it was obvious that she was determined to do well. She was young and vigorous and desperate to impress Shcherbatov.
It wasn’t going to end up the way she wanted.
“Let’s be quick,” Beatrix said. “There are things we need to be doing.”
“I need to know what you have planned,” she said. “If I’m not satisfied, we don’t go any further.”
“I could just leave,” Beatrix said. “I can go wherever I want.”
“But he can’t,” she said, gesturing towards Milton.
“What are you talking about? He can go wherever he wants.”
“Let me put it another way,” she said, managing to put a little irritation in her voice. “You can both go wherever you want, whenever you want, but if Mr. Milton cares about Mr. Pope, you’ll do this on my terms.”
“
I
don’t care about him,” Beatrix said. “I hardly know him, and it was a long time ago. You need me, and you’ll need to do better than that.”
Anna’s mouth opened and closed as she tried to find the proper retort and failed. She looked from Beatrix, still wearing her glasses, and turned to Milton, looking at her with amused forbearance. “Mr. Milton,” she said, floundering a little, “I thought you said she was reliable?”
“She is,” he said, and, turning to Beatrix, he added, “Go easy on her. She’s got her orders.”
Beatrix sat back and raised her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Fine. She’s your problem, not mine.”
Milton leant forwards and looked into Anna’s face. “The plan is this,” Milton said. “Beatrix says that she can get you the evidence that the colonel needs for whatever it is he has planned for Control. She’s going to tell me where to find it and I’m going to go and get it.”
“Why can’t she go?”
“England isn’t safe for her.”
“It’s not safe for you.”
“It’s a risk I’m prepared to take. The items are hidden. It doesn’t have to be Beatrix who collects them. She just needs to tell me where they are.”
“And what about her? What does she do?”
“She’s going to stay here.”
“And she’ll give up her secrets just like that?” She looked at Beatrix again and said, accusatorially, “What’s in it for you?”
Beatrix sighed. Milton looked at her, and could see Anna’s face reflected in the lenses of her glasses. “We all have skin in the game here, don’t we?” she said. “Control needs to be out of the picture. The reason I can’t go back is because of him. Same goes for Milton. And he’s told me that your colonel has a hard-on for him. He’ll be able to take him down with my evidence. We all win: your boss gets Control, Milton gets to go home, I get to go home.”
Anna didn’t give up. “Why can’t you go back?”
“That’s none of your business,” Beatrix said.
“I think it is.”
“He has my daughter. If I go back, and he knows sbout it, she isn’t safe. Alright? Is that a good enough reason for you?”
“Your daughter…”
“Anna,” Milton said, interrupting her. “You don’t need to trust her. You only need to trust me. And I’m prepared to go back to England because I believe that she has the evidence that you need and I am going to get it for you. If I’m wrong about her, it’ll probably mean I end up getting shot. But I’m a good judge of character and I think I’m right. That should be good enough for Shcherbatov.” He paused and assessed her; she looked as if she was wrestling with a decision. “Do you need to speak to him?”
She shook her head, frowning angrily. “It’s my operation,” she said. “It’s my decision.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“Fine.” She clenched her jaw. “We go to London.”
LONDON
MILTON STOOD on the edge of the small airfield, looking at the rows of planes lined up at the side of the grass strip. It had been a long day and a half of travel and there was still more to come. Anna had obtained two tickets for them on Emirates from Hong Kong to Paris Charles de Gaulle and, from there, they drove north to Brittany. The atmosphere between the two of them had been tense for the first few hours. She was still angry and embarrassed about the way that Milton had waylaid her and the inflammatory meeting with Beatrix hadn’t helped. It was pride. Milton knew that she needed to reassert her authority again and so he played along; he needed her on his side for at least the next couple of days.
They had discussed the best way to get into the country when they returned to the hotel. Milton had explained that there was no way that he would be able to get in through the airports, the tunnel or the ports. He knew that his likeness would have been circulated and that it would take moments for an alert to be sounded, and moments after that for armed police to have them face down on the ground. Anna wasn’t phased. She had another method prepared. There was a private airfield on the outskirts of Lannion that local enthusiasts used to explore the north coast of France. There was a small café that served croissants and coffee and they had met their pilot there. He was a quiet, taciturn man, and, when he spoke, it was with an English accent. The man explained that he had flown south from Bournemouth on the pretext of a pleasure flight and that he was cleared to return by the end of the day. He was an SVR man, Milton assumed. It was not a surprise. The agency had already demonstrated the breadth of its reach and it clearly was not beyond them to be able to activate a pilot in the south of England to fly them across the channel.
“Where are you planning to land?” Milton asked as they walked across the facility to the Cessna Skyhawk that had been wheeled out of the line and readied for take-off.
“Back to Bournemouth,” the man said.
“We will drive from there to London,” Anna said. “Will that work?”
“If you can get me into the country, I can handle the rest,” he said.
The pilot opened the cabin door and pulled himself inside. Anna followed him. Milton paused for a moment, taking a final look at the airstrip. There had been a number of moments over the last week that could have been described as points of no return. This was another, and the most significant yet. He knew that once he was inside the country it would be difficult for him to get out again. He had been running away from the Group for months and now he would voluntarily be making it much simpler for them to find him. He entertained the thought, briefly, that he should turn away from the plane, make his way back to the autoroute, put out his thumb and hitch to Paris. It wasn’t too late. He dismissed the notion as quickly as it had formed. That would mean Pope’s death and he knew he would not be able to bear that on his conscience. And he had promised Beatrix his help, too. He couldn’t let her down. His options were circumscribed and it was with that knowledge, and misgivings that what he was doing was still a mistake, that he reached up for the sill of the door and hauled himself inside the cabin.
#
THE FLIGHT was easy. The conditions were perfect and, save a little turbulence as they descended over the south coast to the airstrip at Bournemouth airport, it passed off without incident. The pilot was a member of Bournemouth Flying Club. Like many of the other members of the club, he had a history of return trips to France and there was nothing about this trip that excited the interest of Customs and Excise. His flight details had recorded that the Cessna was carrying three passengers on departure from the UK and there were three passengers upon its return. He taxied the plane to its parking spot and all three disembarked. There was no official attention. The pilot went to file his papers with Customs; Milton and Anna took the car that was waiting for them in the car park and set off for London.
“What are you going to do?” she asked him as he drove north.
“I’m going to get your evidence.”
“And then?”
“And then you can get us back into France and we can go and give it to the colonel.”