The John Milton Series: Books 1-3 (11 page)

“It’s all right,” Milton said. “You’re in hospital. You’ve been asleep.”

“What time is it?”

“Six.”

“Jesus,” she said. “I’m so late. My boy—I need to be home.” She looked around, panicked. “Where are we?”

“Hospital.”

“No,” she said, pushing herself onto her feet. “I have to be home. My boy will be there. He won’t know where I am; he won’t have had his tea. No one’s looking after him.”

“The doctor’s been. He wanted to speak to you. He’s coming back when you’re awake.”

“I can’t. And I’m fine, besides. I know it was a stupid thing to do. I’m not about to do it again. I don’t want to die. I can’t. He needs me.” She looked into his face. Her expression was earnest and honest. “They can’t keep me in here, can they?”

“I don’t think so.”

She collected her bag from the chair and started for the door.

“How are you going to get home?” Milton asked her.

“I don’t know. Where is this?”

“The Royal Free.”

“Hampstead? I’ll get the train.”

“Let me drive you.”

“You don’t have to do that. I live in Dalston. That must be miles out of your way.”

“No, that’s fine. I live just round the corner—Islington.” It was a lie. “It’s not a problem.”

The medical staff were uncomfortable about their patient discharging herself, but there was nothing that they could do to stop her. She was not injured, she appeared to be rational, and she was not alone. Milton answered their reflexive concern with a tone of quiet authority that was difficult to oppose. She signed her discharge papers, politely thanked the staff for their care, and followed Milton outside.

Milton had parked in the nearby NCP building. He swept the detritus from the passenger seat, opened the door, waited until she was comfortable, and then set off, cutting onto the Embankment. He glanced at her through the corner of his eye; she was staring fixedly out of the window, watching the river. It didn’t look as if she wanted to talk. Fair enough. He switched on the CD player and skipped through the discs until he found the one he wanted to listen to, a Bob Dylan compilation. Dylan’s reedy voice filled the car as Milton accelerated away from a set of traffic lights.

“Thanks for this,” Sharon said suddenly. “I’m very grateful.”

“It’s not a problem.”

“My boy should be home. He’ll be wanting his tea.”

“What’s his name?”

“Elijah.”

“That’s a nice name.”

“His father liked it. He was into his Bible.”

“How old is he?”

“Fifteen. What about you? Do you have any kids?”

“No,” Milton said. “It’s just me.”

He pulled out and overtook a slow-moving lorry, and she was silent for a moment.

“It’s because of him,” she said suddenly. “This morning—all that. I know it’s stupid, but I didn’t know what else to do. I still don’t, not really. I’m at the end of my tether.”

“What’s happened?”

She didn’t seem to hear that. “I don’t have anyone else. If I lose him, there’s no point in carrying on.”

“Why don’t you tell me about it?”

She looked out of the window, biting her lip.

“How have you lost him?”

She clenched her jaw. Milton shrugged and reached for the radio.

She spoke hurriedly. “There’s a gang on the Estate where we live, these young lads. Local boys. They terrify everyone. They do what they want—cause trouble, steal things, deal their drugs. No one dares do anything against them.”

“The police?”

She laughed bitterly. “No use to no one. They won’t even come into the Estate unless there’s half a dozen of them. It’ll calm down a bit while they’re around, but as soon as they go again, it’s as if they were never even there.”

“What do they have to do with Elijah?”

“He’s got in with them. He’s just a little boy, and I’m supposed to look after him, but there’s nothing I can do. They’ve taken him away from me. He stays out late, he doesn’t listen to me anymore, he won’t do as he’s told. I’ve always tried to give him a little freedom, not be one of those rowdy Jamaican mothers where the kids can’t ever do anything right, but maybe now I think I ought to have been stricter. Last night was as bad as it’s ever been. I know he’s been sneaking out late at night to be with them. Normally he goes out of his bedroom window, so I put a lock on it. He comes into the front room, and I tell him he needs to get back to bed. He just gives me this look, and he says I can’t tell him what to do anymore. I tell him I’m his mother and he has to listen to me for as long as he’s under my roof. That’s reasonable, isn’t it?”

“Very.”

“So he says that maybe he won’t be under my roof for much longer, that he’ll get his own money and find somewhere for himself. Where’s a fifteen-year-old boy going to get the money for rent unless it’s from thieving or selling drugs? He goes for the door, but he’s got to come by me first, so I get up and stop him. He tells me to get out of the way, and when I won’t, he says he hates me, says how it’s my fault his father isn’t around, and when I try to get him to calm down, he just pushes me aside, opens the door and goes. He’s a big boy for his age, taller than I am already, and he’s strong. If he won’t do as he’s told, what can I do to stop him? He didn’t get back in until three in the morning, and when I woke up to go to work, he was still asleep. “

“Have you thought about moving away?”

She laughed humourlessly again. “Do you know how hard that is? We were in a hostel before. I used to live up in Manchester until my husband started knocking me about. There was this place for battered women; we ended up there when we got into London. I’m not knocking it, but it was full up. It was no place to bring up my boy. I was on at the Social for months before they gave us our flat. You have no idea the trouble it’d be to get them to move us somewhere else. No. We’re stuck there.”

She paused, staring out at the cars again.

“Ever since we’ve been in the Estate we’ve had problems. I worry about Elijah every single day. Every single day I worry about him. Every day I worry.”

Milton had started to wonder whether there might be a way that he could help.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Here I am telling you all my troubles and I don’t even know your name.”

Milton almost reflexively retreated to his training and his long list of false identities, but he stopped himself. What was the point? He had no stomach for any of that any longer. A foundation of lies would not be a good place to start if he wanted to help this woman. “I’m John,” he said. “John Milton.”

He approached the junction for Whitechapel Road and turned off.

“I’m sorry for going on. I’m sure you’ve got your own problems. You don’t need to hear mine.”

“I’d like to help.”

“That’s nice of you, but I don’t see how you could.”

“Perhaps I could talk to him?”

“You’re not police, are you?”

“No.”

“Or the Social?”

“No.”

“I don’t want to be rude, Mr. Milton, but you don’t know Elijah. He’s headstrong. Why would he care what you said?”

He slowed down as they approached a queue of slower-moving traffic. “I can be persuasive.”

CONTROL HAD REQUESTED Milton’s file from the archive, and after it had been delivered, he shut himself away in his office with a pot of tea and a cigar and spread the papers around him. It was late when he started, the sun long since set and the lights of the office blocks on the opposite side of the Thames glittering in the dark waters of the river. He lit the cigar and began his search through the documents for a clue that might explain his sudden, and uncharacteristic, decision. Their conversation had unsettled him. Milton had always been his best cleaner. His professionalism had always been complete. He maintained a vigorous regimen that meant that he was as fit as men half his age. His body was not the problem. If it was, he mused ruefully, this would have been easier to fix. The problem was with his mind, and that presented a more particular issue. Control prided himself on knowing the men and women who worked for him, and Milton’s attitude had taken him by surprise. It introduced an element of doubt into his thinking, and doubt, to a man as ordered and logical as Control, was not tolerable.

He held the smoke in his mouth. Milton’s dedication and professionalism had never wavered, not for a moment, and he had completed an exemplary series of assignments that could have formed the basis for an instruction manual for the successful modern operative. He was the Group’s most ruthless and efficient assassin. He had always treated his vocation as something of an art form, drawing satisfaction from the knowledge of a job well done. Control knew from long and vexatious experience that such an attitude was a rarity these days. Real artisans—real
craftsmen
—were difficult to find, and when you had one, you nurtured him. The other men and women at his disposal tended towards the blunt. They were automatons that he pointed at targets, then watched and waited as they did their job. Their methods were effective but crass: a shower of bullets from a slow-moving car, a landmine detonated by mobile phone, random expressions of uncontrolled violence. It was quick and dirty, flippant and trite, a summation of all that Control despised about modern intelligence. There was no artistry left, no pride taken in the job, no assiduity, no careful deliberation. No real nerve. Milton reminded Control of the men and women he had worked with when he was a field agent himself, posted at Station M in the middle of the Cold War. They had been exact and careful, their assignments comprising long periods of planning that ended with sudden, controlled, contained violence.

Control turned through the pages and found nothing. Perhaps the answer was to be found in his history. He took another report from its storage crate and dropped it on his desk. It was as thick as a telephone directory.

In order for a new agent to be admitted to the Group, a raft of assessments were required to be carried out. The slightest impropriety—financial, personal, virtually anything—would lead to a black mark, and that would be that, the proposal would be quietly dropped and the prospective agent would never even know that they had been under consideration. Milton had been no different. MI5 were tasked with the compilation of the reports, and they had done a particularly thorough job with him. They had investigated his childhood, his education, his career in the army and his personal life.

John Milton was born in 1968. He had no brothers or sisters. His father, James Milton, had worked as a petrochemical engineer and led his family on a peripatetic existence, moving every few years as he followed work around the world. Much of Milton’s early childhood was spent in the Gulf, with several years in Saudi Arabia, six months in Iran during the fall of the Shah, then Egypt, Dubai and Oman. There had been a posting to the United States and then, finally, the directorship of a medium-sized gas exploration company in London. The young Milton picked up a smattering of Arabic and an ability to assimilate himself into different cultures; both talents had proven valuable in his later career.

His life had changed irrevocably in 1980. His mother and father were killed in a crash on a German autobahn, and John had been sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Kent. A substantial amount of money was bequeathed to him in trust, and it was put to good use. He was provided with a first-class private education, and after passing the rigorous entrance examination, he was sent up to Eton for the autumn term in 1981. His career there was not successful, and thanks to an incident that MI5 had not been able to confirm (although they suspected it involved gambling), Milton was expelled. There was a period of home tutoring before he was accepted at his father’s old school. He stayed there until he was sixteen and then took a place at Cambridge to read law.

He was involved in the OTC, and it had been no surprise to anyone when he ignored the offer of a pupilage at the Bar to enlist in the Royal Green Jackets. He was posted to the Rifle Depot, in Winchester, and then sent to Gibraltar as part of his first operational posting. He served in South Armagh, where, as a newly promoted lance corporal, he killed for the first time during a firefight with the Provisional Irish Republican Army. After spending eight years with the Green Jackets, he decided to attempt SAS selection. The process was renowned for being brutally difficult, but he passed, easily. While serving with Air Troop, B Squadron, 22 SAS, Milton worked on both covert and overt operations worldwide, including counterterrorism and drug operations in the Middle East and Far East, South and Central America, and Northern Ireland. He trained as a specialist in counterterrorism, prime target elimination, demolitions, weapons, tactics, covert surveillance roles, information gathering in hostile environments and VIP protection. He worked on cooperative operations with police forces, prison services, anti-drug forces and Western-backed guerrilla movements as well as on conventional special operations.

The Distinguished Conduct Medal he received, together with the Military Medal that he won during a patrol in Northern Ireland, made Milton the British Army’s most highly decorated serving soldier when Control decided that he was the perfect replacement for Number Seven, who had been killed while on operations in China. He made the pitch himself. It was a persuasive offer, and Milton had accepted immediately.

Control put the history aside and turned back to contemporary papers. Milton’s recent yearly assessment had seen a significant dip in results, and as he turned back through the years, he noticed a trend that had remained hidden until then. The assessments were intense and combined a rigorous physical examination, marksmanship tests and a psychological evaluation. Milton’s performance in all three elements had been in decline over the last three years. The drop was steepest this year, but it was not isolated. He chided himself for missing it. His continued success in the field had blinded him. He was so good at his job that the suggestion that he might not have been infallible was ridiculous. Now, as he examined his file with the benefit of hindsight, he saw that he had missed a series of indicators.