Vicky walked down the pathway from the child-protection centre entrance, out of the gate and along the empty street towards her car around the corner. As she approached it, reaching for the lock with the key, she stopped and looked up. Standing across the road watching her was Stratton.

Vicky was a little shocked. She’d expected never to see him again and did not know what to say or how to react. Then she looked down, ignoring him, and opened her car door.

‘Vicky – I need to talk to you,’ Stratton said as he crossed the road.

She stopped and watched him walk around the back of her car and step onto the sidewalk to face her. ‘I spent two hours with the FBI today. You’re wanted for two murders,’ she said.

‘Those were the men who killed Sally.’

‘My God,’ Vicky said, putting a hand to her brow. ‘Despite all that has happened I somehow hoped they were wrong. How stupid does that make me? Three men died in that car you blew up. Did you know that?’

‘They came to kill me.’

‘You’ve got it all figured out, haven’t you? You’re crazy, John. You’re certifiable. We have a process of law in this country.’

‘Not for everyone. If you knew the whole story you’d understand.’

‘I don’t think so, John. There is no way I am ever going to condone murder, even for revenge. Josh’s kidnapping is your fault, John.’

‘I know.’

Vicky could see Stratton’s pain and was unable to stop a sudden feeling of sympathy for him.

‘Now I have to put it right,’ he said.

‘How are you going to do that?’

‘Give them what they want.’

‘You?’

‘Yes.’

‘Go to the FBI, John. There has to be a way to work this out.’

‘You don’t know these people. They want their revenge and they’ll have it one way or another. If I go to the Feds I’m out of it. I’ll get locked up. They’ll never let Josh go, anyway. They’ll kill him even if they have me. It’s a mess, Vicky. I came here to tell you I’m sorry for everything – for you, for Josh, maybe for us too.’

Vicky thought she had dealt with this after their last meeting. But her emotions welled up and she was unable to beat them back.

‘We won’t see each other again,’ Stratton said. ‘It hurts me to say that.’

She blinked hard to stop the tears.

‘Bye,’ Stratton said before turning away and walking up the street.

‘John!’ she called out, a part of her wanting him to come back and talk to her. But deep down she knew that it was futile. He needed help, which was what she was supposed to be good at, but this was beyond anything she had ever experienced before. She had been ready to give herself to him, something that was so very difficult for her to do. Stratton had released something in her. A desire she had not felt for anyone in a long time. She had even daydreamed of going back to England with him, fantasised about waking up with him in his home. It seemed obvious that Stratton would adopt Josh and she would play the role of the boy’s mother. It was an idyllic prospect: an instant family, a man, a son, a purpose – and then suddenly it was all shattered.

Vicky watched Stratton walk away until he disappeared around a corner. Then she climbed into her car and, unable to drive for the moment, sat there feeling a terrible sorrow for Stratton, for Josh and for herself.

26

Stratton heard Vicky call his name but chose not to respond. Any further conversation with her would have been pointless and, frankly, painful. He liked her, more than he’d imagined he could have when they’d first met, but if their worlds had been far apart that day they were out of sight of each other now.

He walked around the corner and crossed the road to an old workhorse of a GM pick-up truck parked in the quiet residential street. The grey paintwork was chipped in places, revealing patches of rust and its original fire- engine red. Storage cabinets ran along both sides with rails on top connected by crossbars for ladders. Stratton had seen it advertised in a local newspaper. Its previous owner was an old independent roofing contractor in Mar Vista who’d been happy to announce that he had finally given up hauling all the crap around himself after getting wise to subcontracting and buying himself a used but newer and smaller Toyota pick-up. From now on the only thing that he was going to haul up ladders and onto roofs was his own ass to inspect the work of others.

Stratton climbed in, put the key in the ignition and turned it. The heavy old petrol engine cranked over a couple of times before gunning noisily to life. The old man had said that she might sometimes sound as if she’d died in the night but apart from the occasional hangover she was a reliable old gal.

Stratton pulled the heavy door shut and wiggled the loose column gear change until the needle lined up with the ‘D’ and the vehicle shunted into drive. He released the brake, pressed the accelerator pedal slowly down and the truck jerked forward with surprising power. The wheel turned easily, aided by the power steering and he steered the pick-up out of the parking space, straightened it up in the centre of the narrow road and accelerated noisily between the cars parked on either side.

He turned onto Fourteenth Street heading south and five minutes later was driving east on Highway 10 that joined the 405 North within a couple of miles. On the springy bench seat beside him were the rolls of construction blueprints for Skender’s building, a couple of yellow-page directories and a sheet of notes: names and addresses of shops and warehouses and a long shopping list. Next stop was Bakersfield, 150 miles north of LA. From there, after acquiring the items on his list, Stratton was going to head for a small town called Twin Oaks just beyond Caliente where Vicky had been born and an operations base that he had found on the Internet thanks to something she had told him over dinner.

He had a plan, or at least a broad outline of one, that was going to need a lot of work to turn into reality. It was risky and it was big – and it was the only way he was going to get Skender’s attention. There was one aspect of it that Stratton chose not to think about in too great detail and that was the high risk to him personally. It was a two-part plan, each with several phases, the final one of which he would only implement if it looked as if he had failed to save Josh. He’d examined thoroughly the two choices he had – to go for it or to run – and had chosen the first simply because he knew that he could not spend the rest of his life with the guilt of having failed Jack and his family.

The freeways had not been very congested although the pick-up had struggled to climb the steep and winding southern slope of the Grape Vine, a hilly region of the San Andreas Fault that ran north of LA. Three hours later Stratton was pulling into a massive industrial and commercial complex on the east side of Bakersfield that was filled with manufactured-goods and materials outlets of almost every kind.

First stop was a hardware superstore where he bought a tengallon drum of quarter-inch ball-bearings, a tarpaulin big enough to cover the inside of the pick-up, four ten-gallon industrial cooking pots, the largest glass bowl he could find, a gas burner and gas bottle, several wooden serving spoons, a large sieve, a thousand-foot reel of thin cord, a packet of heavy-duty freezer bags, several rolls of masking tape, a couple of hundred feet of fine wire and thirty-two plastic sandwich boxes the size of house bricks.

Stratton’s next visit was to an outdoor-adventure store where he bought every camping-fuel stick or hexamine tablet they had in stock, which amounted to around seventy pounds in weight. It was short of the amount he needed but after locating every similar store in the city and clearing them of their stock he had about enough. The next place was hard to find and Stratton drove around the complex for almost ten minutes before he saw a sign advertising Alan’s Chemicals.

He pulled into the building’s forecourt, shut down the engine, stepped out of the truck’s cab and climbed onto the back to make sure that the tarp was neatly covering everything that he had bought so far. Then he jumped down and headed for the reception building, a small prefabricated add-on to the front of an old hangar-like warehouse.

A customer at the counter was being served and Stratton walked over to a small messy table covered in powdered milk and sugar where a coffee pot was brewing beside a sign inviting customers to help themselves.

Вы читаете The Operative
Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату