Judgement Read online

  'This … isn't … fair,' he wailed.

  Dimly, through his terror and dread he saw the soldiers behind Zurabov part and a lieutenant in the Turkmenistan army stride up and whisper in Zubarov’s ear.

  Zubarov froze. His jaw dropped open in leaden surprise. He spun to face the man, whispering urgently. The lieutenant nodded repeatedly. He looked scared.

  Zurabov put a hand to his brow, pushing his cap up, looking suddenly sick and hunted. He stood immobile for a few seconds then turned on his heel and marched back towards the Control Building.

  Goremykin looked about in puzzlement. Then he too turned and shouted in his rustic tones after Zurabov's retreating back: 'Comrade Zubarov. What shall we do with these people?'

  Zubarov waved a hand dismissively over his shoulder but did not stop or look back.

  'Lock them up. We may still need to talk to them.'

  The gun's muzzle was withdrawn from Stolykin's neck and he was pushed towards the garage. Legs paralysed, he fell forward onto the apron. The soldiers dragged him the rest of the way.

  He was still weeping one hour later when the soldiers brought them the first food and drink since the nightmare began.

  CHAPTER 3

  Langley, Virginia

  It took Leith a bleary four hours to cross Virginia in Morgan's borrowed Japanese jeep. The early start and Lola's ardour had left him little time for sleep. Navigating the track back to the road had focused his attention, but once the going got easier he found it difficult to stay awake. It had helped when the sun came up in a clear sky, shining painfully in his eyes.

  It was 8:30 when he arrived at Langley. Pulling up at the main gate for about the thousandth time in his career he stifled a yawn, then he flashed his pass at the guard before flipping it closed and sliding it into his inside pocket in one smooth automatic motion.

  The guard smiled.

  Automatically returning the smile he took his foot off the brake pedal and moved it to the accelerator.

  He froze.

  Reapplying pressure on the brake he slowly brought his hands up so they were in full view of the guard.

  'I am unarmed,' he said as clearly as he could. 'Please do not shoot.'

  The guard raised his hand by a few inches, revealing the squat, black barrel of the Mach 10 machine pistol that he had been holding just below the level of the guard post's window.

  'My name is Dr. Robert Leith and I am an Information Technologist with the Records Integration Division working in the section headed by Dr. Stanley Nevis. This vehicle I am driving belongs to Dr. Edward Morgan, also of the RID. It is his face that has appeared on your terminal screen. He has let me borrow his jeep because my vehicle needs repairs.'

  'My name is Mr. George Carlyle of Gate Security and I will blow your fucking head off if you so much as move a muscle,' replied the guard in equally measured tones. 'Sir.'

  It took a half hour to sort it all out. Security had had to contact Nevis. They said he had not been pleased to be woken so early on a Sunday morning.

  Leith spent the time cursing his own stupidity and the mindset born of years of the same routine.

  It being Sunday he was escorted into the building and told he would be locked in until he called Security to be let out.

  He was surprised. The only time he came in on Sundays was if there was a crisis, in which case everyone else came in as well.

  'Suppose there's a fire?' he asked.

  'Then you burn,'replied the escort, his lined face crinkling in laughter. 'Naah, I'm kidding. This lock can be opened by our computer. Mind you...' he stopped as he was about to close the door and stroked the thick white hair of his beard, 'It'd only do that if the fire got really bad. You'd have to run pretty fast.' The closing door cut off his snickering laugh.

  The silence descended like a smothering blanket and for a second he relished the strangeness.

  Langley never slept, but the acute stuff, things that needed unremitting attention like the monitoring of the eighteen current wars, was confined to the main building: a seven storey affair of mundane appearance which dominated the site.

  Here in the North Annex things were less exciting, but there was usually the steady comforting background hum of people and machines talking to each other. But now, like some great beast, the building slept.

  He checked his personal memo dump for Nevis' message.

  ‘Bob: re our discussion of the 25th,' it read, 'one of the internals you tagged has shown up dead in Woodhaven, Long Island. Name Paul Middleton, tagged as a possible contact of Dr. Tariq Cole. I think this one sounds promising. I'll clear your expenses to New York and back and perhaps any other trips from there, but check with me first. Full data follows in sub-file. I look forward to your report,

  Good luck,

  Stan '

  Leith called up the file on Cole. It had only been a few months but already he'd forgotten the details.

  Despite the European surname the man was a Lebanese national, born and bred in the cauldron of Beirut. Weaned to the thunder of Israeli shelling, he had become one of the thousands of urchin snipers blasting away from the ruins at anything that moved.

  Or so he said.

  Cole and his like had been the target of numerous charities that well realised the violent legacy these brutalised children would carry with them into the future, and the warped values they would instil into future generations. A Swiss foundation sponsored his education in Europe in the Nineties, culminating in Cole being awarded a medical degree from the University of Berne.

  Cole had travelled a great deal and had been to the States twice before, once on a two-month trip whilst still a student, and then on a two-week vacation in Florida after graduating. Someone with Cole's history would certainly have turned up in a series of CIA files but at a relatively low level of perceived threat. However, Cole's slight association with the nephew of a Libyan counter-revolutionary leader whilst in Berne had raised his profile. Further digging by the External Threats boys had revealed Cole's name on numerous flights crisscrossing the Middle East.

  Leith sighed with disappointment. It was hardly strong stuff. He'd run his search on Cole during the man's third visit to the States for a skiing holiday in Vale. Cole wasn't even on Immigration's blacklist so he had been let into the country without trouble. The request for a surveillance scan had been routine.

  Leith walked over to get a coffee at the library desk and cursed when he found the pot empty. Of course, Nancy didn't come in on Sundays.

  He yawned and gently stretched his back. It had started to become sore on the drive to Langley and he wondered if he had damaged something during Lola's acrobatics. He gingerly sat back down on his seat and pulled the file on Middleton.

  The connection between Cole and Middleton had been tenuous. Both had stayed at the YMCA in Denver on June 15. Cole had stayed overnight before catching his connecting flight to Aspen and Middleton had been en route to his home in Columbus, Ohio from a tour of California. Leith had hacked the registration computer in Denver and had run standard searches on all the fifty guests at that time. Several had something slightly unusual about them, which was to be expected in any group that size, but Leith tagged them anyway.

  Middleton's unusual feature had been his religion. All Muslims regularly attending Mosques in the US now had their own company files, and one had been opened for Middleton. Leith remembered pulling Middleton's photograph from a passport application made five years before when the man had been in his late twenties: light-haired, with freckles and blue eyes, he had hardly been the picture of a stereotypical Muslim. Leith had considered it sufficiently weird to warrant a tag, but he had taken the matter no further than to make a token effort to find how Middleton had got to Denver. That had turned out to be easy when he cross-checked Middleton's name with the reservations lists on the Y's central computer: the man never seemed to have stayed anywhere else when he was travelling.

  So big deal. Two Muslims stay at the Young Men's Christian Association in
Denver.

  'Feeble, feeble,' said Leith to himself. He dumped Nevis' data files onto the laser printer, tore off the hardcopy and rang Security to be let out.

  Five minutes later Leith heard the lock turn and the grizzled face of the escort poked round the door.

  'Do you smell smoke?' it asked.

  Leith licked his forefinger and reached round to touch his backside. He made a hissing sound and nodded. 'Yeah, too much deskwork. Get me out of here fast.'

  Leith stopped off at his house in Prester to collect some clothes for the trip. Prester was a small country town west of Washington, out past Fairfax and a fifty-minute drive from Langley. Friends said he was crazy living in 'Hicksville', but somehow they didn't mind dropping round for lazy evenings on the porch of the large clapboard house to smoke dope and listen to the crickets. Washington was becoming too crazy, and Prester made a comforting change.

  The house was set back a little from the country road and was surrounded by oaks and sycamores. The nearest houses were a couple of hundred yards away in Prester proper. The town boasted two bars, three churches, a supermarket, and about a dozen businesses selling or repairing farm equipment. Washington was only thirty miles away, but it existed in a different universe.

  The house itself was much too big for him and had got pretty filthy before he found someone with a sufficiently strong stomach to give it its first major clean. Since then Margaret had come in once a week to swill out. She was continually trying to marry him off to spinsters in the county.

  He had gained a certain raffish reputation when his description of his job at the Dept. of Ag. Failed to hold up to close questioning by some of the local farmers. He had tried to further this reputation by suddenly leaving his local bar when a short item on the FBI's Witness Protection Program appeared on a news program playing on the TV. He thought he was being clever at the time, but soon realised what an asshole he'd been.

  Leith stared at his image in the full-length mirrored door of the ancient wardrobe. 'Would Robert Leith, Field Agent, wear a corduroy jacket and jeans?' he asked himself before reluctantly changing into his plain grey suit and black shoes. He packed a couple of shirts and some toiletries in a green tartan holdall, grabbed a strong cup of instant coffee, and hit the road.

  The MGB was too messed up for a long journey so he left it behind, hoping it would spontaneously combust. He had intended to hire a car in Irvine, which he had to pass through on his way to Interstate 66, but the whole country town looked closed. He decided to take the Mitsubishi all the way. Morgan would not be happy, but Eve could drop him off in Langley on her way to the Smithsonian tomorrow. Leith was sure he would be back before Morgan finished work.

  Settling down to the 250-mile drive to New York, he tuned in to one of the local music stations. After twenty minutes of a surprising range of musical styles, from C&W to heavy metal, an announcer came on to give two minutes of highlights from syndicated news sources.

  'WTZB coming to you on a delightful October morning here in Irvine County. And the main news today is from Nevada where a major gangland massacre has taken place in the recently built Crusader Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. Las Vegas Sheriff Thomas Arpeto was questioned at the scene.' There was a slight deterioration in sound quality as the recording came on.

  'What's it like in there, Sheriff?' From the background sound, Leith could imagine the flustered lawman surrounded by the pack of savage newsmen.

  'Its like a goddamn slaughterhouse,' Arpeto sounded genuinely shocked, 'I have never, in my twenty years of policing this town, seen anything even close to this. There's bodies everywhere, all shot to hell. No survivors.'

  'Can you give us the names of the victims?'

  'No, but I can say that some major underworld figures are losing temperature fast right now.'

  The newsmen started firing questions all at once, but one piercing female voice won through.

  'Can you tell us how many bodies there are, exactly?'

  'No, we're still searching the hotel wings, but we've found nearly eighty so far.' Pandemonium. Twenty reporters had their birthdays come simultaneously.

  Leith whistled in surprise as the announcer started on some local news. He lived only fifty miles away, but it would be farming stuff mostly, meaning nothing to him. He laughed as he thought of the thousand or so company people who worked on Mob intelligence; their lazy Sunday had just finished prematurely. He was just about to hit the auto-tune to get more news about the incident when the announcer said:

  'One item of World News now: reports are coming in of an Indian uprising in the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil. Scores of ranchers and hundreds of agricultural workers have been murdered and their bodies savagely mutilated. President of Brazil, Rupert Amero, has declared a state of national emergency and troops are being rushed to the regions involved. Now back to Craig Halliday here on WTZB.'

  Serves the bastards right, he thought. The decimation of the rain forests in Brazil and in other places like Madagascar was a savage global joke. Twenty-thousand square miles of carbon dioxide absorbing rainforest had been lost every year for the past twenty years in Brazil alone: increasing international pressure on the culprit countries had not been matched by the money needed to offset the loss of income from the ending of the deforestation programs. It was like cutting out your lungs to pay the rent.

  The Beltway was almost empty as he made his clockwise circuit of Washington, heading towards 66. He station-hopped for the rest of the morning, each newscast getting longer as the enormity of the horror in Las Vegas became more clear. By the time the death toll topped a hundred, a note of hysteria had begun to creep in.

  Despite being morbidly interested in the demise of a substantial proportion of gangland leaders, his thoughts kept returning to Lola: even though their night together had shown just how human she was, he still felt in awe of her and her hard, demanding little body. She had given him an open invitation to her apartment in the suburbs of Washington. He felt an appealing mixture of anticipation and trepidation, and decided to call in on his way back from New York.

  Traffic was light as he got to the New Jersey Turnpike and started driving through mile upon mile of industrial wasteland. He had always hated this road; it felt like a nightmare version of Lang's Metropolis. His spirits lifted when he finally got onto the Staten Island Expressway that took him across to the greener charms of Long Island. Travelling north on the Cross Bay Boulevard, he watched the big jets from Kennedy gaining height and circling to the north-west.

  He pulled off the expressway after crossing the Woodhaven boundary post and drove into the first gas station he could find. He filled the tank and bought a street map.

  'Looking for a church?' the bespectacled young attendant asked as Leith paid. This puzzled him for a second until he remembered he had put on the jacket of his suit when he got out the car. He shook his head.

  'You ought to, man. We all need Salvation.' The boy looked at Leith intently and seemed to be waiting for a response.

  Leith got into the car and drove away.

  The apartment building where Middleton's body had been found turned out to be only a couple of blocks away. It lay southwest of the town's centre and abutted on to a busy shopping mall. Leith figured he might as well take a quick look, before making for the local police department.

  He parked the jeep in the mall's lot and walked across the grass in front of the apartment block. It looked only about twenty years old, but was tattered and downmarket compared to the rest of Woodhaven, with its well-heeled aura of quiet contentment. He counted ten storeys and estimated each floor was wide enough to hold five apartments front and back. Thirty feet to the right of the graffiti-covered blue entry doors, four bright red cones squatted on the concrete. Streamers of yellow tape with 'Police: Do Not Enter' printed on them hung suspended between the cones.

  He walked up to the demarcated area and looked in. The concrete paving slabs were cracked and moss-stained, except in the centre of the marked-out square whe
re they looked like they had been attacked with a sledgehammer. The smashed area formed two depressions, each about six inches deep and about six feet long. The other ends of the smashed paving slabs were tilted into the air to form a jagged stone thicket. The stones had been recently hosed down, but looking closely he could still see traces of dark red in the cracks between the up-tilted slabs.

  'Thrilling, ain't it?' said a deep voice very close to his ear. He jerked round and found himself eye to eye with a black cop.

  'Let me show you my ID.' Leith fumbled his wallet out of his jacket pocket and flipped it open.

  The cop's eyes opened wider for an instant then he stepped back a little and cast an appraising eye over Leith. The cop was a big man with coarse, heavy features and a hard, dead look in his eye. He flicked a hand at the ID.

  'Is that for real?'

  Leith took Nevis' hardcopy out of his jacket pocket and unfolded it.

  'Is Lieutenant Lundt here? I'm supposed to liaise with him.'

  The cop looked at him steadily, as though trying to work out whether he was being given a hard time. Then he unclipped the radio from his belt.

  'Hey Connor, it's Davis!'

  'Yeah,' the radio crackled back.

  'Got a sp—' the cop glanced at Leith. 'Got a guy here called Leith. Wants to see the Lieutenant.'

  There was silence for a few seconds, then: 'Yeah, send him up.'

  Davis looked at Leith. 'Top floor. Apartment 1008.'

  Leith walked away as coolly as he could. When he got to the entrance he looked back and saw the cop still watching him.

  The elevator and the corridors of the building were dirty and smelled of exotic cooking spices, but at least the graffiti in the hallway did not extend to the tenth floor. The place was seedy, and no doubt set many tongues in Woodhaven wagging, but on the global scale it hardly qualified as a slum.