Killing Ground Read online

  He asked, sour, 'What sort of place is this going to be?'

  The man driving looked ahead. 'How the hell should I know?'

  'I was just asking.'

  'Listen, man, because I work out of London doesn't mean that I know every corner of the country - and the heater stays on.'

  There was no rain, and the narrow tarmacadam surface of the lane was dry, but there was wind. The wind that made white caps on the grey-blue sea ahead, tossed at the few trees that had survived the winter gales that came hard at the Devon coastline and blustered the flight of the gulls above. If they hadn't had the heater on, if they'd had the window of the Cherokee Jeep down, then he didn't reckon he'd have been cold. His way of sulking, making his protest, was to wipe with his shirt sleeve the condensation on the inside of the door window beside him and on the inside of the windscreen in front of him. He wiped hard, a small release for his stress, but as a way of clearing the condensation it was lousy work and the window beside him and the windscreen ahead of him were left smeared. He heard the guy who was driving hiss annoyance beside him. He bent his head and studied the map and won no help from it. His finger followed the thin red line of the lane across empty space towards the blue-printed mass of the sea and on the map there were names over the sea like Stoke Point and Bigbury Bay and Bolt Tail. He looked down at his watch. Shit. He looked back at the map, and the page spread across his knee was harder to see because the evening was closing down, and the width of the Cherokee Jeep filled the lane and the cut dark hedges were high above the windows. Shit. Goddam it . . .

  The brakes went on hard. He was jolted in his belt. It was his way, whenever he was riding as passenger in a vehicle that went to emergency stop, to drop his right hand to his belt, it was the instinct from long ago, but riding as passenger in a lane in the south of Devon in the west of England meant that his belt was empty, carried no holster. And his way also, and his instinct, at the moment of an emergency stop to swivel his head fast, the pony-tail of his hair flying, to check the scope behind for fast reverse and the J-procedure turn. He grinned, the first time anything of a smile had creased his mouth since they had left London, a rueful twitch of his lips, because he reckoned the guy driving would have seen his right hand drop to his belt and seen the swift glance of his eyes behind. They had come over the summit of a hill, then there had been a hard right turn, then there had been the cattle herd in the lane. The big lights of the Cherokee Jeep speared into the eyes of the lumbering and advancing cows. A small dog, seeming to run on its lstomach, came out from under the cattle's hooves and it was leaping, barking, growling at the radiator grille of the Cherokee Jeep. Behind the dog, behind the cattle, down below them, were the lights of the community that was their destination and beyond the lights and stretching away, limitless, was the sea. The breath hissed in his throat. He wondered what time the letter post came round to a place like this, reached the community down at the end at the lane beside the sea - some time that day, but not early, was the best answer he'd been able to get before they'd left London. And he wondered what time a young woman finished teaching the second year - some time in the middle of the afternoon, but she might stay on to check that day's work and to prepare for the next day's classes, and he had to add on to 'sometime in the middle of the afternoon' how long it would take a young woman to ride a low-power scooter back home along the lanes from the town behind them. It was important, when the letter was delivered, when the young woman came home. He wanted to hit her, meet her, after the letter had been delivered, after she had reached home and read it, but not more than a few minutes after she had read it. It was Important, the timing, and it was down to him, the plan . . . He was stressed. He reckoned he could have killed for a cigarette, and in front of him on the glove box was the 'No Smoking' sticker which was standard these goddam days in any Drug Enforcement

  Administration vehicle, back in the States or overseas. The time to hit her was critically important.

  The cattle split in front of the Cherokee Jeep. Either side of the radiator and bonnet, and then the side windows, the cattle, a mixed Friesian and Holstein herd, scrambled on the bank below the scalped hedges, slipped, blundered against the vehicle. The driver's-side wing mirror was pressured back. A wet and slobbering tongue squelched against the glass of the window. The Cherokee Jeep shook from the weight of an animal against the body of the vehicle behind him. The lights shone on the face of the man who drove the cattle, unshaven, pinched in the wind, weathered. He could see the agitation of the man as his mouth with the gaps in his teeth flapped in silence, silence because of the noise of the goddam heater. Beside him, the hand was reaching for the gear stick.

  'Where the hell are you going?'

  'I'm going to back up.'

  'How many miles are you going to back up? Stay put.'

  'He's telling me to back up.'

  'Then tell him to go eat his own shit.'

  'You're kind of edgy, aren't you?'

  The face of the man driving the cattle was close to the windscreen. The mouth still flapped. There were three teeth missing, he reckoned, and he reckoned that there was a denture set back home at the farm for inserting when the day was done and the evening meal was on the kitchen table. He spited himself, turned the Cherokee Jeep's heater higher so that the blast of dry warm air and the roar of the motor drowned the man's protest. The perspiration ran on his forehead and in his groin and down the small of his back but he could not hear the protest of the man driving the cattle. The man was peering at them through the windscreen, squinting through narrow eyes at them.

  'Like we're out of the zoo,' Axel said.

  And he should not have said that, no. Should not have said that because Dwight, the driver, was Afro-American. At Quantico, in an Ethics class, they would have gone ape.

  A remark such as his last might just have been enough to get a guy busted out of the Training Academy. Axel did not apologize, he seldom made apologies.

  The man driving the cattle stared hard at them, at two guys in an American Cherokee Jeep, wrong-side drive, peculiar number- plate, one white with a goddam pony-tail of hair, one black as a dark night.

  'I get the feeling we're noticed/ Axel said in bitterness.

  Daniel Bent, farmer, sixty-nine years of age, working the land of his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather, who had maintained the development of the twin Friesian and Holstein herds

  10 to championship status, cursed Axel Moen and Dwight Smythe. He cursed them richly, obscenities and blasphemies, because he saw the risk of one of his cows falling from the bank between the road and the hedge, plunging under the body of the four-wheel-drive and breaking a leg. He noticed, too fucking right, the bastards and recognised them for Americans, and wondered what was their business late in the day on the lane to the coast.

  When the big vehicle, too big for these roads for sure, going at speed and ignoring the 30 mph limit, came past her, Fanny Carthew saw them.. Mrs Carthew, artist of sea views in oils, eighty-one years old, muttered the protest that in the moment afterwards gave her a tremor of shame and would have shocked her fellow worshippers 11 at the Baptist Hall in Kingsbridge if they had heard her utter such words. The cause of her protest - she had to heave at the leash on which she walked her venerable Pekinese dog right off the lane and into the nettles of the verge. She knew them to be Americans, the scowling white one with his hair ridiculously pulled back

  .... and the coloured one who drove. She noticed them and wondered

  ...... I the business that brought them down the lane that led no wh e r e .

  Because the Jeep was slowing, moving as if with hesitation past the houses, Zachary Jones saw them. Zachary Jones, disabled building worker, fifty-three years old, short of a leg, amputated below the knee from a construction-site fall, sat at the window of his cottage. He saw everything that moved in the collection of homes at the end of the lane that was too small to be called a village. With his binoculars he noted every coming and going, every visitor, .e
very stranger. The binoculars' magnification flitted from the face of the white one to the face of the black one, and he thought they were arguing and thought they disputed their directions, and then down to the tail-end registration plate.

  Zachary Jones had worked the building game in London, knew diplomatic plates, before coming home as an amputee to live with his spinster sister. He wondered what brought Americans from their embassy down to this God-forgotten corner of nowhere.

  Mrs Daphne Farson saw them from behind her lace curtains, then lost them when her view was obscured by the sign in her front garden that advertised bed-and-breakfast accommodation. She knew Americans.

  The retired clergyman, the occasional gardener, the crab fisherman, the retired librarian, the District Nurse, everyone who lived in that community at the end of the lane beside the sea shore saw the big Cherokee Jeep edge down over the last of the tarmacadam, pause in the car park for summer visitors, reverse, turn, come back up the lane and stop just short of David and Flora Parsons' bungalow. All of them heard the engine stilled, saw the lights doused.

  All eyes on the Cherokee Jeep and all eyes on the front door of David and Flora Parsons' bungalow. The waiting time ... A small collective shiver of excitement held the community.

  'You sure it's right?'

  'It's what I was told, a white singled storey in a crap place,' Axel said.

  'We got here, so when you going to shift yourself?'

  'She's not here.'

  'You know that? How do you know that?'

  'Because her scooter's not parked in the driveway.'

  'Maybe she put it in the garage.'

  'Her father's car is in the garage, she leaves the scooter in the driveway, if it matters to you . . .'

  'You haven't been within a thousand miles of here before, you've never met this woman before . . . How come you know that sort of detail, or am I getting bullshit?'

  'I had it checked.'

  'You had it checked, down to whether she put a scooter into the garage or left it out in the driveway?'

  'Checked.' Axel said it sharply, dismissive, like it was obvious that such a detail would be checked. The headquarters in Exeter of the Devon and Cornwall police, through their liaison officer, had provided information on the progress of an airmail letter through the city's sorting service, information on the hours worked by a young woman teacher, information on the nighttime parking of a scooter. He believed in detail. He thought that with detail people more easily stayed alive.

  It had been the idea of Axel Moen. It was the operational plan of Axel Moen. What he wanted most, right now, was to smoke a cigarette. He opened the door beside him, felt the cool of the air, the grip of the sharp wind coming up off the pebble beach, heard the rustle of waves on stones. He reached back and grabbed for a windcheater. He stepped down onto the grass beside the road. Ahead of him, behind a low fence and a trimmed hedge, was the bungalow and the light was on over the door. He lit the cigarette,

  I L

  ucky Strike, dragged on it, coughed and spat. He saw the shadowed bungalows and cottages, with their lights in the windows, stretching as a haphazard ribbon away up the lane to the bend round which the young woman would come on her scooter.

  II It was the sort of place he knew. He wondered where the letter would be-in her room and on her bed or on her dressing table, on a stand in the hall, in the kitchen. He wondered whether she would tear the envelope open before she discarded her coat or her anorak, whether she would let it lie while she took herself to the bathroom for a wash or a pee. He heard Dwight Smythe open his door behind him, then slam it shut.

  This young woman, does she know you're coming?'

  Axel shook his head.

  'You just walking in there, no invite?'

  Axel nodded his head, did not turn.

  'You feel OK about that?'

  Axel shrugged.

  He watched the top of the lane, where it emerged from the bend. The woman with the dog stared down the lane at him, and he could

  make out the man in the window with the small binoculars aimed at him, and he saw the flicker of movement behind the curtains of the house that advertised bed-and-breakfast. It was as it would have been for a stranger driving on a lane on the Door Peninsula, the scrutiny and suspicion. Where the finger of the Door Peninsula cut out into Michigan Bay. And, going north from Egg Harbour and Fish Creek, from Jacksonport and Ephraim, they would have stared at a stranger coming in the dusk and followed him with binoculars and peered from behind curtains. Far in the distance, back beyond the bend in the lane, he heard the engine. It sounded to Axel Moen like the two-stroke power of a brush cutter or a small chainsaw. He dragged a last time on the cigarette and dropped what was left of it down onto the tarmacadam and tramped it with his boot and then kicked the mess of it towards the weeds. He saw the narrow wash of light from up the lane, back beyond the bend.

  'You're a mafia man, right? Have to be a specialist in mafia if you're based down in Rome. What's—?

  'Mafia's generic. Don't you work "organized crime"?'

  'You going to play smart-ass? Actually, if you want to know, I am personnel, I am accounts, I am administration. Because of people like me, arrogant shits get to run around and play their games. What's this young woman—?'

  'Lima Charlie November, that's LCN, that's La Cosa Nostra. I work La Cosa Nostra, we don't call it "mafia".'

  'Forgive me for breathing - I apologize. Best of my knowledge, La Cosa Nostra, mafia, is Sicily, is Italy, is not quite adjacent to here.'

  'Why don't you just go wrap yourself round the heater?'

  The scooter's light was a small beam, dully illuminating the bank and hedge at the top of the lane, then sweeping lower and catching the woman with the dog, then swerving and reflecting in the lenses of the binoculars in the window, then finding the moving curtain at the bungalow that advertised bed-and-breakfast. He saw the arm of the rider wave twice. The scooter came down the hill and was slowing. The brakes had a squeal to them, like a cat's howl when its tail is trapped. The scooter came to a stop in front of the bungalow where the light shone 'welcome' above the porch. The engine was killed, the light was doused. He had not seen a photograph of her. He knew only the barest of her personal details from the file. No way that he could have had a decent picture of her in his mind, but when she was off the scooter and tugging the shape of the helmet from her head, when she shook her hair free, when she started to push the weight of the scooter into the driveway in front of the garage, when she walked under the light above the porch, she seemed to be smaller, slighter, than he had imagined.

  He turned a key in the latch, pushed the door open. The hall light Hooded over an ordinary young woman, and he heard her call that she was back, an ordinary young woman's voice. The door closed behind her.

  Dwight Smythe, above the sound of the heater, called from behind him, 'So, when are you going to bust in, no invite?' Axel walked back towards the Cherokee Jeep. So, when are you going to start to shake the ground under her feet?'

  Axel swung himself into the passenger seat. 'So, do I go short of answers?'

  Axel said quietly, 'About a quarter of an hour for her to read a letter. Don't ask me.'

  Dwight Smythe arched his eyebrows, spread the palms of his hands wide over the wheel. 'Would I dream of asking, would I, what a young woman from down here has to do with DEA business, with organized crime, with La Cosa Nostra in Sicily . . . ?'

  The professor had said, 'If you take the hip and pelvis of Italy and think about it, and look at the map up there, well, that's the piece that's joined to Europe, and that's the bit that's high-class tourism and finance . . .'

  When the rookies were not on Crime Simulation or Firearms Procedures or Physical Education or Legal classes or Defensive tactics, when they were not crowded into the Casino School or the Engineering Research Facility or the Forensic Laboratory, then they sat in on Public Affairs. It was nine years since Dwight Smythe had listened to the professor at the Public Affairs lectur
e.

  'Come on down and you've the thigh of Italy, which is agriculture 'and industry. Move on lower, and you have the knee joint, Rome administration, bureaucracy, high life, the corruption of govern- ment You following me? We go south, we have the shin -

  Naples,

  ........ and it's going sour. There is a heel - Lecce. There is a foot - Cosenza. There is a toe - Reggio Calabria. The way I like to think of it, maybe that toe is bare inside sandals, or at most the protection is the canvas of a pair of sneakers. Sandals or sneakers, whichever, they're not the best gear for kicking a rock . .

  .'

  At Quantico, out in the Virginia forest off Interstate Route 95, FBI and Marine Corps territory, where the Drug Enforcement Administration recruit programme is tolerated, as are relations from the wrong side of the tracks, the professor was a legend. Any heat, any cold, the professor lectured Public Affairs in a three-piece suit of Scottish tweed.

  The material of his suit had the same roughness as the wild beard splaying from his chin and cheeks. In the lecture room, with his maps and his pointer, he taught the recruits the rudimentaries of the countries that would fill their files, the societies they would interact with, the criminal conspiracies they would confront. And he did it well, which was why he was remembered.

  'The Government of Italy, for a hundred years, has been stupid enough to kick with an unprotected toe against the rock that is Sicily. My advice, if you've set your mind on kicking rocks with a bare toe, is go and find one that's not granite or flint. Sicily is hard mineral, and the toe gets to be bloodied, bruised. That rock is a meeting point, where Africa comes to Europe, different cultures, different values. The rock, granite or flint, has been shaped by history. Sicily is where the conquerors liked to come. You name him, he's been there - Moors and Normans and Bourbons, and before them the Greeks and the Romans and the Carthaginians and the Vandals. Government in Rome is just seen as another freebooter, the latest, come to cream off more than his share.'