‘Who are you working for? The Forresters?’
Elevation complete. ‘It’s not advice, it’s a demand. Come forward.’
The chosen. Reluctantly, gradually, she shuffled across, stretching time, searching for delay, salvation. Her brain worked faster. Multiple pathways, wasted energy. It still ended in custody, her hands cuffed behind her back. The balaclava head turned in her direction, then back, the pistol staying static and thrust towards Fletcher Wood and Mary. An air of frozen neutrality.
‘Your turn, Wood. Give up your metal, throw it away from you.’ Compliance; the pistol and sub-machine gun were collected. ‘So you want to know our orders?’ the mouth said, eyes shifting. Krista gave a slight nod, her throat dry, mind seizing. ‘Dead or alive is what we’re working to.’ She had thought as much. Sing-song, catch-a-nigger-by-his-toe delivery. ‘Guess we’ll have to split the difference.’
Quick fire – three single shots – fleeting frames. Wood spun and dropped, Mary held her face with clenched hands. Too much to process. Krista found herself in another vehicle, beneath another blanket. Disembodied. She had just remembered a further rule of combat. If your advance is going well – you’re pushing into a killing zone.
* * *
‘I saw that, I saw that.’
The youth had dropped the television set, gaped in belligerent disgust at the receding vehicles. They were gone, and Mary crouched beside Fletcher Wood, holding his head, wrapped in her hopelessness. So much blood, dark to bright, welling, spreading on his chest, spume-coughed from his mouth. Things were going so well, things were going to plan. God could be a bastard. She placed a palm on his forehead, her tears running free, her body rocking. This was what it meant to waste someone, to flush a good, decent man down the gutter. He was draining away around her, his eyes in shock, lips paling blue, limbs vibrating. Miss Althouse would know what to do, but Miss Althouse had her own problems.
‘Okay, I got him.’ The boy was kneeling across from her, inserting a finger into Wood’s mouth, checking the airways. ‘I want him on his side. Gentle.’ They rolled him. Recovery position achieved, recovery itself unlikely. ‘Right, what d’we have? Punctured lung. Chest cavity’s filling with air. It’ll lead to tension pneumothorax, displacement of vital organs, real trouble. That there’s a bullet in the stomach. Unhygienic, bowel area, shit everywhere. Major risk of peritonitis and sub-diaphragmatic abscess. Third bullet’s in the arm, fractured the lower humerus. Possibly damaged the radial nerve. Then there’s the bleeding. Not clever, not pretty.’
‘Do somethin’, anythin’.’ Call an air ambulance.’
‘After that last bird went down? You’re shittin’ me, lady. Won’t come anywhere near. Road ambulances can’t get through, LAPD’s busy.’
‘Please …’
‘Notice there’s a war on? Cops shoot people like me. National Guard wanna use us for tank drill.’
‘He’s dyin’.’ She reached and shook his arm, face beseeching.
‘I need you to press firm here, and here. Use your fist.’ He demonstrated; she copied, balling her knuckles. ‘That’s right, sister. Pressure. He got a name?’
‘Mister Wood … Fletcher.’
He leant over to whisper in the Special Agent’s ear. ‘Listen, Fletcher. Fight, man, you’ve gotta fight. C’mon, brother, stay with us. Everything you’ve got. We’ll get you to hospital. Hang in.’
Her hands were awash. A mop and pail job. The gold chains were in there somewhere ‘It’s not holdin’, not stoppin’.’ Despair in a higher key.
‘Keep going. I’m fetchin’ transport.’
‘You a doctor?’ she asked, concentration, directed grief, wrinkling her features.
‘Doctor?’ A brief laugh, flash of black market, black power, dentistry. Inhabiting the food chain emphasized display above decay. ‘My business, my hood, you gotta be ER-qualified. My bro’ was killed in a drive-by. Chicken shack on Crenshaw.’ He squeezed Wood’s shoulder. ‘Big guy, you’re strong. You won’t let no FBI fuckas take you like that.’
It was too hard to explain, too damn dangerous. They had not been FBI; they were Forresters, murderous white supremacists, following a creed older than the Delta blues, a code earlier than the law. And she was once more in the cross-fire, hiding out in no man’s land, belonging to neither side. So many posses, so many causes in which she did not believe. The small people always got cluster-bombed. She had palmed Fletch’s ID, its sodden warmth a reminder of her drive from normality, her distance from last week. His chances were slim; with incriminating documentation, none. He was struggling, fading, his head drenched in the silver shiver-sweat of an organism shutting down, of just another nameless coloured lying spread on the street. Losing colour. And Mary hoped her baby was safe, wished by mirage or magic that Josh Kemp could appear with a full-strength troop of cavalry. You’re shittin’ me, lady.
* * *
Confidence had its limits, self-belief its breaking point. The Beverly Hills police were unused to serious challenge. They were well equipped, trained, could enforce and reinforce the law, dictate with birdshot, do anything. Profound disappointment had marked their reaction to the ’92 riots. The insurrection had lacked impetus, backed away, failed to reach their territory. A pity. Direct assault was something to look forward to, hand-to-hand an opportunity to shine. It was what they were paid for, what they could drink to in the canteen post-mortem. The scum would have broken against the Kevlar ranks, run bleeding from the battle. Anticipation unfulfilled, denied. Until today. And few were inclined to heroism.
Before the enemy formations came the refugees, a displaced population tumbling westwards along Wilshire. They brought eyewitness accounts, viral apprehension, the overspill funnelled hurriedly through barricades and fanning into the leafy Westwood reaches and campus expanse of UCLA beyond. Resolve waned. This was a military campaign, not a police issue. There was little point in dying for the sake of paper-pulp real estate, an undefended metropolis, for a mayor and chief in captivity, for a governor gone to ground and a president who gave squat for a city he despised. Summer vacationing was preferable, absenteeism pandemic. Everyone was passing the buck, withdrawing – it had to burn itself out, the experts said; Azania was merely making a point, would overreach, the experts said – and everyone was an expert.
11000 Wilshire. Kemp massaged his temples, shuffled the photographs and Photostats and stared once again at the whiteboard diagram. Black – South African – White. The triumvirate, the pyramid. His own had been obliterated: Fletcher Wood dealt with, Krista kidnapped. They were pulling together the strands of investigation. It was why they were lured in, cornered, neutralized. And he was left, protected, unprotected, by a shifting frontline, with clues, without a clue, attempting to square a triangle. The opposition felt threatened, the opposition were well informed. Professor Pitt’s remains, death-redolent, adhered to his thoughts, rotted fresh in his memory. Pomander putrefaction. Kemp tasted bile, his mood sour. A complex aftertaste of worry and loss, of depletion and bitterness. He should have done more, could have done something. There were scenes, implications, he was unable to block, pictures of Krista superimposed on his mind. Extremists had a habit of aggression, of plugging leaks, punishing defection. The prisoner in San Quentin had been finished off with a razor; Krista’s neck was equally exposed. It depended on why they wanted her, relied upon her shelf-life.
Emptiness. He eased himself from the chair. The planning room was full of flowcharts, files, short on ideas. Without Fletch or Krista, he was a liaison officer stripped of contacts, a solitary MI5 appointee, an outsider, devoid of support. Might as well go home. But that was what the opponents wanted, expected, acting through the conviction that this small US–UK cell possessed the scent, an answer, and was on their trail. Jesus, if they only knew. Perhaps they did. He stepped towards a low trestle-table, started to work through a bundle of unprocessed documents seized in the raid on Azania’s mansion. No harm in shifting paper. It was the sole alternative to packing his bags. A full FBI investigative team were on the same floor, analysing much of the data, scanning the Reverend’s computer disks, interpreting swathes of data; tactical teams were raiding Azania’s Union League offices on East and West Coasts. They were unlikely to gain access to the branch established in Downtown LA.
He leafed through a second stack, methodical without being purposeful, his concentration elsewhere. What mattered was off the page, went unrecorded. The beginnings of a cyclone, its opposing weather fronts –Tigers and Forresters, black and white – would not have been forged in writing, could never be pinned to a board. Somewhere in its eye was Krista. Her tracking beacon was off, discovered and destroyed by her captors at the site of abduction. Forewarned, forearmed, they were specialists in the game, well ahead of the one played by the authorities. Nothing was infallible. They had made a mistake in swallowing Special Agent Althouse into the whirlwind. She was resilient, resourceful, she had people on the outside who cared. An ex-husband. Find her, and you found the core. Kemp slammed his fist hard on the pages.
‘Desperation or inspiration?’ The languid English tones of Aubyn St Clair intruded into the room.
‘Guilt.’
Damp forehead, damper chins. The Security Service fixer was not born to a Californian summer. It showed in his perspiration, his shape, in the white linen suit, the broad-brimmed Panama he clamped to the top of a computer monitor before squeezing heavily into a chair. Overload. The suspension coil shrank.
‘Guilt,’ he echoed, the word ‘jawbreaker’ rolled around his mouth. ‘Guilt doesn’t come into it. Militants respond rudely to scrutiny. It’s a fact of life.’
‘Or death.’
‘I note the Forresters had two flies sitting outside Krista’s house ready to jump in your personal ointment. Swatted, luckily. Congratulations.’
‘One improvises.’
‘I should say. A black maid in the response team for the rescue attempt Downtown. Novel.’ He meant bungled. At least they tried, at least they damn well tried.
Kemp’s eyes narrowed, scanning the non-visible spectrum, filtering for nuance. His fellow Briton had made a career from obliquity, the indirect approach. There was method in his conversational meandering. ‘Why are you here? You’re too ugly to play fairy godmother.’
‘But never too old.’ A fleshy pantomime smile communicating all-in-good-time. To Kemp it registered as watch-your-back. St Clair was appreciating the air-conditioning, cooling down to comfort level. Climate-control was an area he had yet to master. ‘I’m over to learn, liaise, and for what are loosely described as high-level discussions. A euphemism for group panic.’
‘How’s London?’
‘Pudding Lane and 1666 come to mind. How’s LA?’
