They were water-bombing the hills off the San Diego Freeway, aircraft amphibians droning low and heavy to deluge the smouldering aftermath of a bush fire. Outbreaks could happen anywhere, carry below the soil, set in undetected. A hot summer in LA. The traffic crawled, soot smoke hung patchy and acrid, and a brace of millionaires sifted through the carbonized wreckage of their mansions set high on the reaches of Mulholland Drive. Dwellings were made for burning. Another aerial pass, change in engine pitch. The scene lodged in Kemp’s mind. He understood stacked odds, a city braced for punishment.
Krista had driven him out to the Valley. It was strange to be around her – reassuring yet unsettling, everyday but extraordinary – a chance to reacquaint and move on. Friendship was the only known antidote to mistrust, the sole identifiable remedy to paradox. They had made the decision to try, for themselves, for each other, for Emmy. She would have liked that, had always wanted that. It was why they sat in Jerry’s Diner, Woodland Hills, talking – just talking – two people at ease, passing time, two people representing the security agencies of the United States and United Kingdom. Fears, hopes and race hate: a mixed agenda for a jumbled situation. Things to get sorted over a turkey melt.
She dropped him off at a local park. He planned to idle for twenty minutes, scope the surroundings and walk the distance to the professor’s mock-hacienda house. It was not a bad area, merely dull, poolside, pointless, a quiet enclave detached from the Mexican blue-collar swamp of Reseda and the other dotted suburbs of Tarzana, Westlake, Hidden Hills and Thousand Oaks. Names to conjure with, to cut your throat to; names to traverse on the 101. He already felt homesick for the Maria Johanna. Length of stay depended on the professor, on intelligence take and correlation, on known conditions and unknown factors, on an unfolding panorama. There was a common threat – thread – from an uncommon adversary, a grand plan that had introduced next-stage barbarity to Britain. The source lay beyond his country’s borders, would have to be traced outside. It made no sense to stay in London.
Two children played happily on swings. Their Hispanic minder had either misunderstood the health warnings displayed proud on the gates or wilfully ignored them. A rare event in California – hazards being put in perspective. One scraped knee and there would be litigation. Bet on it. Kemp strolled on, wondering how the state would cope with conflagration. The nanny noticed him go, had seen the handsome broad-shouldered gringo saunter by with a focused look of concern and concentration to his face. Sad eyes there, an unsettled aura. She liked the damaged ones. They were more interesting, more dangerous. He must have troubles – money, women, it was ever thus – would fit well in the pages of her current romance-read and bored imagination. She turned to watch her charges. Kemp wandered from shot.
Deserted houses had a stillness to them, a lifeless quality, a lack of presence. It was an absence he detected at fifty yards, a closed-down resonance from a façade with shuttered blinds, climbing plants and an automated yard sprinkler system. A high-value, low-maintenance property, commanding on its shallow rise, excellent for the no-kids widower and academic with hectic international travel and lecture itineraries. The garage door was closed, the entrance to the pool and cast-iron security gates before the front door locked. It might be a ruse, the professor cultivating an impression of absence, hiding out in reclusive safety behind alarm systems, theatrical feints and transcontinental telephone messages. After all, Pitt often received death threats, was a regular feature on the hit-lists of every left-wing extremist and militant ethnic-political cell. Hate totems tended to be cautious. But the image did not fit with the man Kemp had met in England – the polished performances, the arrogance of intellect, the mastery of subject, the open disdain for critics. Nothing open here.
He rang the brass bell-button, waited, rang again, heard the abrasive reverberation cut loud through the interior. Emptiness sounded back. A couple of directionless gulls shrieked briefly and wheeled off to scavenge, a black-and-white cat slunk in bushes across the street, and Kemp stood and cursed beneath his breath. Date and time had been
set, punctuality promised and insisted upon. It had been a brief conversation. Any changes and Pitt would have telephoned them through. No margin for error or circumstance; no rescheduling. That was the deal, the terms, the basis on which the professor would play informant. He was not playing today. Kemp thumbed the cellphone memory and listened. The messaging service broke in after five seconds. Above him, a larger flock of gulls dived towards the pool.
Something of an oversight. The electric motor hummed smoothly, the garage door lifting at the press of a wall-mounted switch. Kemp’s doubts rose with it. A silver Mercedes rested inside, its boot and a rear passenger door ajar. Spot the anomalies. He might win a bullet from a passing cop, embarrassment for the British government, an end to cosy FBI–MI5 relations, free air travel home. The enemy would enjoy that. It could be what they planned for. They were involved, had visited this house. He sensed them – was conditioned to – the wake they left behind, an electro-magnetic interference counter-espionage officers were tuned to detect. There was no need to dust for prints, to scan with spectral filters. He temperature-tested the bonnet with the back of a hand, edged through to the rear to sniff at the exhaust. Cold. He shivered, the nervous system alerted, acclimatizing, awareness crawling over him in a tightened skin. It had been the same in Germany, the tail following him from the Colonel, the appreciation of a wider plot, of another dimension.
Access came easily, in the push of an unlocked inner door and activation of lights. He stepped in, entered chaos, destruction by numbers, by design. They were efficient, had dissected an entire dwelling and its contents. Shredded books and furnishings, sliced rugs and pictures, all minutely anatomized, the dismembered remains of bedlinen, shelving and food containers lying heaped and scattered across the floor. Roaches were busy in a corner, scurrying fretfully on a slurry of decaying fruit. They vanished centrifugally at his footfall, disappearing through holes punched in the plywood walls. It had been an exercise in dismantling from within, in reconstituting everything but the shell. Across one length of the room, daubed in rust-brown lettering, attended by a band of inquisitive flies, was reversed text reflected from a mirror opposite. A rallying cry for the Union League, political body, extension of will, for Reverend Al Azania.
The smell was of crushed geraniums, ripe and full on the nostrils, making the stomach leap, the throat gag, as he rolled aside the glass. It came from the pool area, one source, only a single possibility. An unmistakable aroma, as strong as solid shot, drawing and repelling, attracting the wildlife. Perfumed bio-decay at its pungent worst. He steadied himself against the metal gate and looked towards the tree. Site of reckoning, lynching, blackening, a gourmet zone for hungry birds. He extracted the cellphone from his canvas jacket, put the call through to Krista. His eyes stayed fixed on the upturned image, on small pupating movements in the open mouth, on a centipede wallowing in stomach leakage, on a crow feeding proprietarily at an exposed source of femur marrow. Something rotten in the state of California. Dead flowers, blooming flesh. He had found the professor.
‘You’re invited over,’ he said. ‘Bring forensics.’
CHAPTER 11
The USA
‘What’s taken you so long, Special Agent?’
Prison grey, prison blue. It was the same picture as before. Things changed slowly in a maximum-security jail like San Quentin. Krista viewed the man, the arrogance of low-life – no life – staring her out, making her out. Making out with her in his mind. He was manacled again, seated, she standing with her back to the mirrored one-way panel and reflecting his gaze. A sterile room for a sterile meeting. Except he would enjoy it, would invest it with the commitment of a hardened woman-hater, the enthusiasm of a sadist with a close-proximity target. Getting off on a visitor was partial substitute for getting off at the parole board. Good behaviour was irrelevant. The only early release would be in his pants.
He tilted his head, eyes jeering, tried once more. ‘You come to see me cry over the niggers that got whacked on the route outside Selma?’
‘A lot of people died. Women, children.’
‘Boo-hoo. My face is wet.’ His expression crumpled, then brightened as quickly. ‘Man, that was some kind of air display. Once in a lifetime.’
‘I was there.’
‘I was here.’
‘Figures. Hope you didn’t waste the hard-on.’
‘Hope you’re not wasting my time.’ He would be difficult to flush out, a survivor confident in his position, secure in his redoubt. The prison authorities had yet to unearth his communications links, the command structures. But he would feature somewhere. It accounted for his longevity, his continued health while other white supremacists expired. Everything pointed to membership of a higher group, a secret cell, the Forresters.
‘Heard the news about Professor Duncan Pitt?’
‘Who?’ Uninterested, disingenuous.
‘Thought he’d be your patron saint.’
‘You just love to come here and tease, don’t you, Miss Althouse? Brought your nigger boyfriend Special Agent Wood to watch?’ He bent round to peer towards the mirror.
‘Heard the news about Professor Pitt?’ she repeated.
‘Nice try. There’s desperation in your eyes. Same look those bitches had when I took ’em and cut ’em.’ He scanned her face, waiting for reaction. ‘Yeah, I heard about Pitt.’
‘Want to comment?’
‘The food in here is shit. That do?’
‘You believe Al Azania’s Union League was responsible? You think the blacks did it?’
The head waggled playfully, cheeks sucked in. ‘Gee, I guess so. Who gives a fuck? He was a soft target, obvious target. Controversial motherfucker.’
‘Certainly was.’
‘Azania’s attacked him in public, the nigger high command’s taken casualties.’ A shrug. ‘Matter of time.’
‘How’s your time? You survived the first round, what about the second? As you say, African-Americans are pissed. You’re an obvious target too.’
‘You ask a fuck-load of questions, FBI woman. Means you’ve got squat, don’t have answers.’
She rested her hands on the back of the empty chair facing him. ‘There’s an answer in every question you evade.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning it’s odd you’re still alive, unless you’re plugged into the magic circle, the chosen few. It’s odd that when Duncan Pitt died, his house was turned over, his computers, disks and files taken. He was interrogated – brutally. Implies he knew things.’
‘More than you, Special Agent.’
