Down Among the Dead Men (47 page)

Noone stands and offers his hand to Frank. 'No hard feelings, sport?'

Frank glances at Noone's hand. There's a small, fresh-looking scratch on the back of his knuckle. Frank turns towards the door. He doesn't have any smart comeback. He just feels ill.

Forty-One

Back at the apartment around nine, Frank feels as tired as he's ever felt. Worse, he feels beaten. He'd rather have had a physical encounter than the comprehensive humiliation he's just been put through.

Koop doesn't feel good either but as the lead investigator it's Frank who's shouldering the greater burden. Koop leaves him watching coverage of the presidential visit, which seems to consist of overexcited reports from outside the agent's home and cutaways to the agenda for the rest of the week.

Koop heads into his room and calls Zoe. She's not exactly turning handsprings to hear him but at least she's talking. It'll do for now.

Afterwards, in front of the TV, Koop's about to suggest a beer somewhere when Frank gets a call.

It's Angie.

Angie's clearly a night owl. It's past ten when she calls, replying to the message left on her phone. Frank lies about being a friend of Ben's from his travelling days in Liverpool and persuades her to meet him at a coffee shop just around the corner from her apartment. Angie won't make the trip into the city from her place in Santa Monica at this time – not simply for safety reasons but because it'll take her too long and she's not
that
interested in catching up with one of Ben's buddies. Frank guesses she has an hour to fill. Or maybe there's some relationship thing with Noone that Angie's not happy about. Frank knows that women will do a lot to get information about someone they care about. If Noone's Santa Monica property is anything to go by, maybe Angie has her sights on becoming more than a girlfriend. Whatever the reason, she says she'll meet.

'What do you reckon?' says Frank. 'Worth a shot?'

'No idea,' says Koop. 'But what else are we going to do? Pack?'

They take a circuitous route, conscious that since the meeting with Sheehan the stakes have been raised considerably. Only when they are sure they have shaken any tail do they drive to Santa Monica; and even then Frank makes them park four blocks away.

Neither of them is anxious to take that day trip to Kandahar.

Now Frank and Koop are sitting at stools in a late-night diner. Koop's got his laptop open and they both have coffee on the go.

Just after eleven Angie walks in and they recognise her from the photo on Noone's wall. He waves and she nods.

'Angie? Frank.'

She sits down. A punked-up waitress arrives at the table and pulls out a pad. Angie orders tea, Frank and Koop get more coffee.

'I like your accent,' Angie says to Frank. 'Cute.'

'What about mine?' says Koop. Angie gives Koop a glance and smiles pityingly.

He's been weighed, measured, and found wanting, all inside the three seconds it's taken to say the sentence. Koop sits back and lets Frank take the lead. It's been a long day.

'I have a confession,' Frank starts. He lowers his voice and beckons Angie closer. He takes out his wallet and shows her his Merseyside police ID. 'I'm not a friend of Ben's, Angie. Far from it.'

Angie inspects Frank's badge and pulls back, wary.

'You're in a great deal of danger, Angie,' says Frank. 'Ben Noone has killed six people in England, and myself and my colleague are here to investigate further. I strongly suspect that he's killed one of my investigators already.'

'No,' says Angie. 'Ben wouldn't do that.'

'Yes. He would.' Frank takes out the case file and lays some images of Nicky Peters' body taken in the metal box inside the Williamson tunnels. 'He and an accomplice imprisoned this boy underground and let him die. After they'd fucked him and filled him full of coke.'

Angie looks like she's going to be sick. Tears are in her eyes. It's an old trick but Frank's got no time to come up with anything clever. His main aim is to shock Angie into giving up what she knows – if she knows anything – and do it as quickly as possible.

'He killed the boy's parents,' says Frank, and shows her a photo from the blood-soaked bedroom in Birkdale. Angie puts her hand to her mouth. Frank pushes on. He places a photo of Dean Quinner on the mud at Garston and another of the charred corpses of Terry and Alicia Peters. He explains in a low, urgent voice what he believes Noone to have done. By the end of it, Angie is silently weeping. The waitress looks over, attitude on her face, but Frank's dark-eyed glare is so intense that she retreats behind the relative safety of the counter.

'Angie,' says Frank. 'I need to know anything that might help me. And I think that if you're being honest with yourself, there's part of you that knows that what I'm saying about Ben could be true. In fact I'm willing to bet that's the case. If you think there's absolutely no chance that Ben Noone could kill anyone then just walk away now. I won't stop you and I won't bother you again. But before you do, ask yourself this: did Ben Noone request anything from you related to the presidential fundraiser?'

Angie's head jerks upright. 'What?'

'The fundraiser. Did he want anything from you? Do you have anything to do with the fundraiser?'

'Yes,' says Angie. 'Well, sorta. I know one of the guys who is organising something.'

A case that Frank and Koop felt had gone forever is suddenly back on track.

'What do you mean?' says Frank.

'Ben was very interested that I knew this lawyer on the organising committee. Said he was going to go to the fundraiser too. Showed me the ticket and everything so I thought it was all right.' She looks at the two men. 'I haven't done anything wrong, have I?'

Frank pats Angie's arm. 'No, Angie. You're doing fine. Tell us what Ben wanted off you.'

'Well that's what's so weird about all this,' says Angie. 'He wanted to see the guest list.'

'And you had that list?' Frank's surprised. A list like that would surely be more closely guarded.

'Well, there was no real secret about it,' says Angie. 'I mean it's supposed to be kept confidential but there's no way you can do that.
Not with an event that big. And it's not like it was the list for the party that the president is going to or anything.'

'What's the list for?' says Koop.

'The fundraiser, of course.' Angie looks at them both as if they're crazy.

'Wait,' says Koop, holding up a hand. 'I'm confused. Ben Noone wanted to see this guest list, right? Ben Noone bought a ticket for the event. The president's going to be there.'

Angie shakes her head. 'Uh, no. He's not. This friend of mine who works for the fundraising committee? He's not doing the presidential event in Hollywood. He's doing the other one.'

'The other one?'

'There're about four fundraising events this week. All sorta linked to the big one but the one that my friend is helping organise is out of town. This one's for the CCC. The Children's Climate Community – they're a charity?' Angie says this as though it's a question. 'It's a picnic. Like, a big one?'

'Where is it, Angie?'

'Mount San Jacinto,' says Angie. Frank and Koop look at her blankly.

'Palm Springs,' says Angie. 'That's the one Ben was asking about.'

Forty-Two

'A dummy,' says Frank. 'The devious fucker.'

'What?'

Frank looks at Koop. 'Noone buying the ticket. He sold us a dummy. Thirty grand gets him a clear run. He never intended that his ticket would be used. Whatever he's got going on is going to happen out at . . .' Frank looks at Angie. 'What's the name of that mountain again?'

'Mount San Jacinto. Nice place. Got a cute cable car running up the side of it.'

'I thought it was desert out there?'

'They have hills too,' says Angie. 'Do you think we should call someone? The cops. I mean, like, our cops?'

'We will,' says Frank. 'We just want to check the details first.' He doesn't tell Angie that Dennis Sheehan has already ensured that all official routes are effectively blocked. The lines are blurred between the public and private here in a way that is not reassuring for an outsider like Frank. Ashland and Baines, for example. Frank wouldn't like to guess where their desks are. And, what's more, he'll probably never know.

The list Angle's got, the one Noone asked for, was in an email, which is why she still has a copy.

'Will I get in trouble?' she says. 'Showing Ben the list, I mean. Part of my friend's job was to forward this on to the media. Ben could've got it somewhere else.'

'That's OK, Angie,' says Frank. 'You're fine.'

Koop thinks of something. 'It's mid-summer. Won't it be too hot for a picnic? Out in the desert?'

Angie frowns. 'No. The picnic's up at the top of the mountain. It's like, cooler up there? I mean, way cooler. They get snow sometimes all year.'

Koop opens the park details up on the laptop. 'It's more than eight thousand feet,' he says. Photos show an almost Alpine wilderness in stark contrast to the desert below. There are streams and pine trees and squirrels. The park is reached by a cable car rising up from just above Palm Springs to the ranger station at the top. From there, hiking trails fan out into the park itself.

'I don't get it,' says Frank. 'Why would Noone be interested in a picnic at the top of a mountain?'

Angie shakes her head in disbelief. 'The First Family, of course,' she says, looking at Frank and Koop as if they are mentally impaired. 'It's being hosted by the president's wife.'

Angie downloads the guest list from her email account using Koop's laptop.

'There,' she says, and rotates it towards Frank. Despite her initial disbelief about Noone, Angie seems to now regard herself as one of the team. Frank wonders if she thinks this is an episode of
CSI
. In LA it can be hard for some people to know the difference between reality and TV.

Frank runs his eye down the long list looking for something to jump out. There are approximately four hundred names on the list. Most of them, judging by the school name following their own, are children from the Palm Springs area. Frank disregards those. On a first pass through the rest there's nothing he can see. Representatives of fundraising committees, local dignitaries, veterans associations. Then a number of addresses strike a memory.

Twentynine Palms.

Warren had lost Noone on the highway before Twentynine Palms. Frank's assumption for the last half-hour since he'd found out about the San Jacinto fundraiser had been that any trip Noone was making out there was to look at the mountain.

'Get Twentynine Palms up there,' he says to Koop.

Koop gets the map onscreen and Frank looks at the distance between San Jacinto and Twentynine Palms. The two places are more than eighty kilometres apart.

Noone must have had a good reason to go there. From what Warren had said it wasn't a tourist spot – other than a jump-off point for Joshua Tree National Park – and Frank has a hard time seeing Noone as a hiker.

There are twelve names on the list of people who live at Twenty-nine Palms. Four are women and six of the others, Frank guesses, might be military veterans. The six names are followed by a rank.

'Let's see what we can get on these guys,' says Frank.

'Can I go?' says Angie. 'You guys look like you're gonna be here all night.'

'Thanks, Angie,' says Frank and watches her leave. So does most of the restaurant.

Forty-Three

'We shouldn't be involved in something like this,' says Frank after Angie's gone. It's past midnight and the diner's almost empty. 'I'm from Bootle, Koop. People from Bootle don't end up doing this sort of stuff.'

'Where do people who do this sort of stuff come from?'

'No idea. But it isn't fucking Bootle.'

'I'm still not sure what it is exactly that we are doing,' says Koop. 'To be honest.'

'Me neither. I just think we're going to.' Frank toys with the ketchup bottle on the counter. 'How about the names from Twenty-nine Palms? Did you get anything there?'

'I don't know,' says Koop. He flicks open some of the information he's got but it's all over the place. Personal blogs, the odd news report, people with the same names, all the internet can spew out. Without access to official databases the six names don't mean much. 'What are we looking for? You think one of those names might be working with Noone?'

Frank shrugs. 'Maybe. Or a target.'

Koop doesn't respond. It doesn't sound convincing. They're fishing without bait. Or hooks.

'We have a day before the picnic,' says Koop. 'I could try Dooley again, see if he can help.'

'If we try Dooley I think Sheehan will find out.'

'We could do nothing. Go home.' Koop doesn't expand on where this would be for him. The Northern Rivers don't feel like home now so much.

'We could do that.' Frank's nodding. He's serious. They could do nothing.

They
should
do nothing.

'In the movies they'd just ride out and fix it. A showdown. High Noon.'

'How?'

'No idea. But that's what happens in the movies. Bruce Willis gets on a spaceship armed with a nuke. They act.'

'I could call MIT,' says Frank. 'See what they say.' He taps a finger on his phone, which is lying on the plastic surface of the table.

'No Bruce Willis ending?'

Frank checks his watch and picks up his phone. Past midnight here, morning in Liverpool.

'Not very Hollywood,' says Frank. 'I'll take this outside.' He leaves and Koop orders a beer.

Pacing in front of the diner Frank gets through to Charlie Searle. He's in a meeting but Frank insists that it's urgent.

'Frank,' says Searle. His voice is brisk but not yet hostile. He's going to give Frank some room to explain why he needed to be dragged out of a meeting but Frank can tell there won't be much leeway. 'News?'

'Something like that, sir.' Frank moves to a quieter area of the street and explains the information from Angie and his feeling that Noone is planning an attack on the fundraiser picnic. '

'That's it?' says Searle when Frank stops talking. 'That's all you have? A list of invites to a picnic? It's not exactly a smoking gun, is it, Frank? Jesus.'