Predator

On that basis he continued, ‘So, Polunsky’s about a mile east of Lake Livingston, and there’s nothing around it but grass and a few trees. Anyone gets out of that place, which is an impossible dream, there’s nowhere for them to hide. Now, the Walls Unit is different. It’s pretty much right in the middle of Huntsville.’

‘What happens in between?’ D’Shonn asked.

‘Well, it’s about forty miles, I guess, as the crow flies between the two units. And the lake is right between ’em, so you got three basic routes you can take: go around the south of the lake, or around the north, or ride right across the middle on the Trinity Bridge. Now the Offender Transportation Office has a standard protocol for the operation. The prisoner always travels in the middle vehicle of a three-vehicle convoy, with state trooper patrol cars back and front. The only people who know the precise time of the departure from Polunsky are the prison warders, police and Offender Transportation staff involved in the transfer, and the route to be taken is not made public.’

‘But it’s one of three, right? North, south or middle?’ Rashad Trevain chipped in.

‘Yessir, those are the basic routes. But, see, they got ways to vary them all. I mean you got two roads out of the Polunsky Unit, just to start with. Then there’s a road along the west shore of the lake, from Cold Spring up to Point Blank, and that kind of links up the south route and the middle route, so you can move from one to the other.’

‘Multiple variables,’ said D’Shonn.

‘Right, which is the whole idea, makes it impossible for anyone to try and guess the route in advance. Plus, when you’ve got three vehicles, all carrying armed officers, that’s a lot of firepower. Listen, Mr Brown, I don’t know if this is good news for you or not, but your buddy Johnny Congo is going to make it safe and sound to his appointment.’

‘Certainly sounds like it,’ said D’Shonn. There was a roar from the stadium and a shout of ‘Turnover!’ from J. J. Harding. ‘Time we got back to the game,’ D’Shonn added, but as they were heading back to their seats, he tapped Rashad on the shoulder and said, ‘You and me need to talk.’

Modern technology abounds with unintended consequences. The pin-sharp satellite imagery of Google Earth gives anyone with a Wi-Fi connection a capacity for intelligence-gathering once reserved for global superpowers. Likewise, anyone who opens a Snapchat message immediately starts a ten-second clock ticking down to its destruction. And the moment it’s gone, it’s totally untraceable. That works perfectly for teens who want to swap selfies and sex-talk without their parents having a clue, and equally well for someone planning a criminal operation who doesn’t want to leave a trail of his communications.

D’Shonn Brown had connections. One of them was to a specialist arms dealer, who liked to boast of his ability to source anything from a regular handgun to military-grade ordnance. He and D’Shonn exchanged Snapchat messages. A problem was defined. A series of possible solutions was proposed. In the end, the whole thing came down to three words: Krakatoa, Atchissons, FIM-92.

While that debate was proceeding, a handful of high-end SUVs were stolen from shopping mall parking lots, city streets and upscale suburban neighbourhoods. They were all luxury imported models, and all were built for speed: a couple of Range Rover Sports with five-litre supercharged engines, a Porsche Cayenne, an Audi Q7 and a tuned-up Mercedes ML63 AMG that could do nought to sixty in a shade over four seconds. Within hours of being taken, the cars had all had any tracking devices removed, before being driven to different workshops to be resprayed and given new licence plates. Meanwhile, police officers were telling the cars’ owners that they’d do their best to find their precious vehicles, but the chances weren’t good.

‘I hate to say it, but models like that get stolen to order,’ one very upset oil executive’s wife was told. ‘Chances are, that Porsche of yours is already over the border, making someone in Reynosa or Monterrey feel real good about life.’

Rashad Trevain, meanwhile, had one of his people spend a few hours online, scouring every truck dealership from the Louisiana state line clear across to Montgomery, Alabama, looking for four-axle dumper trucks, built after 2005, with less than 300,000 miles on the clock, available for under $80,000. By the end of the morning they’d located a couple of Kenworth T800s and a 2008 Peterbilt 357, with an extra-long trailer that fitted those specifications. The trucks were bought for their full asking price from an underworld dealer who sold only for cash, didn’t bother with paperwork and suffered instant amnesia about his customers’ names and faces, then driven west to a repair yard in Port Arthur, Texas. There they were given the best service they’d ever had. Every single component was checked, cleaned, replaced, or whatever it took to make these well-used machines move like spring chickens on speed. The day before Johnny Congo was due to go to the Death House, the trucks headed over to Galveston and picked up forty tons apiece of hardcore rubble – smashed up concrete, bricks, paving and large stones – in each of the Kenworths and fifty tons in the Peterbilt. Now they were loaded, locked and ready to go. One final touch: a plastic five-gallon jerrycan was tucked behind the driver’s seat in every cab, with a timer fuse attached.

Cross was half an hour into his final afternoon’s fishing when the iPhone in the top pocket of his Rivermaster vest started ringing, ruining the peace of a world in which the loudest sounds had been the burbling of the waters of the Tay and the rustle of the wind in the trees.

‘Dammit!’ he muttered. The ringtone was one he reserved for calls from Bannock Oil head office in Houston. Since his marriage to Hazel Bannock, Hector Cross had been a director of the company that bore her first husband’s name. He was thus powerful enough to have left instructions that he was not to be disturbed unless it was absolutely essential, but with that power came the responsibility to be on call at any time, anywhere, if need arose. Cross took out the phone, looked at the screen and saw the word ‘Bigelow’.

‘Hi, John,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’

John Bigelow was a former US Senator who had taken over the role of President and CEO of Bannock Oil after Hazel’s death. ‘Hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time, Heck,’ he said with all the affability of a born politician.

‘You caught me in the middle of a river in Scotland, where I was trying to catch salmon.’

‘Well, I sure hate to disturb a man when he’s fishing, so I’ll keep it brief. I just had a call from a State Department official I regard very highly …’ There was a burst of static on the line, Cross missed the next few words and then Bigelow’s voice could be heard saying, ‘… called Bobby Franklin. Evidently Washington’s getting a lot of intel about possible terrorist activity aimed at oil installations in West Africa and off the African coast.’

‘I’m familiar with the problems they’ve had in Nigeria,’ Cross replied, forgetting all thought of Atlantic salmon as his mind snapped back to business. ‘There have been lots of threats against onshore installations and a couple of years ago pirates stormed a supply vessel called C-Retriever that was servicing some offshore rigs – took a couple of hostages as I recall. But no one’s ever gone after anything as far out to sea as we’re going to be at Magna Grande. Was your State Department friend saying that’s about to change?’

‘Not exactly. It was more a case of giving us a heads-up and making sure we were well prepared for any eventuality. Look, Heck, we all know you’ve had to go through a helluva lot in the past few months, but if you could talk to Franklin and then figure out how we should respond, security-wise, I’d be very grateful.’

‘Do I have time to finish my fishing?’

Bigelow laughed. ‘Yeah, I can just about let you have that! Some time in the next few days would be fine. And one more thing … We all heard how you handed that bastard Congo over to the US Marshals and, speaking as a former legislator, I just want you to know how much I respect you for that. No one would’ve blamed you for taking the law into your hands, knowing that he was responsible for your tragic loss, and our tragic loss, too. You know how much all of us here loved and respected Hazel. But you did the right thing and now, I promise you, we in Texas are going to do the right thing. You can count on that.’

‘Thanks, John, I appreciate it,’ Cross said. ‘Have your secretary send me the contact details and I’ll set up a Skype call as soon as I’m back in London. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve just spotted what looks like twenty pounds of prime salmon and I want to put a fly in its mouth before it disappears.’

Cross dropped his fly on to the water downstream of where he was standing; then he lifted his rod up and back and into a perfect single Spey cast that sent his line and lure out to a point on the water where it was perfectly positioned to tempt and tantalize his prey. But though his concentration on the fish was absolute, still there was a part of his subconscious that was already looking forward to the task that Bigelow had set him.

It seemed to Cross like the perfect assignment to get him back into the swing of working life. His military expertise, and his ability to plan, supply, train for and execute an interesting, important task would all be utilized to the full. But the work, though challenging, would essentially be precautionary. Just like all the soldiers, sailors and airmen who had spent the Cold War decades training for a Third World War that had thankfully never come, so he would be preparing for a terrorist threat that might be very real in theory but was surely unlikely in practice. If he was really going to lead a less blood-soaked life, but didn’t want to die of boredom, this seemed a pretty good way to start.

It was half past eight in the morning of 15 November and all the morning news shows in Houston were leading with stories about the upcoming execution of the notorious killer and prison-breaker Johnny Congo. But if that was the greatest drama of the day, other tragedies, no less powerful to those caught up in them, were still playing themselves out. And one of them was unfolding in a doctor’s consulting room in River Oaks, one of the richest residential communities in the entire United States, where Dr Frank Wilkinson was casting a shrewd but kindly eye over the three people lined up in chairs opposite his desk.

To Wilkinson’s right was his long-time patient and friend Ronald Bunter, senior partner of the law firm of Bunter and Theobald. He was a small, neat, silver-haired man, whose normally impeccable, even fussy appearance was marred by the deep shadows under his eyes, the grey tinge to his skin and – something Wilkinson had never seen on him before – the heavy creases in his dark grey suit. When Bunter said ‘Good morning’ there was a quaver in his thin, precise voice. He was obviously exhausted and under enormous strain. But he was not the patient Wilkinson was due to be seeing today.

On the left of the line sat a tall, strongly built, altogether more forceful-looking man in his early forties: Ronald Bunter’s son Bradley. He had thick black hair, swept back from his temples and gelled into a layered, picture-ready perfection that made him look like someone running for office. His eyes were a clear blue and they looked at Dr Wilkinson with a challenging directness, as if Brad Bunter were forever spoiling for a fight. Even so, the doctor could see that he, too, was suffering considerable fatigue, even if he was more able to hide it than his father. There was, however, nothing wrong with Brad Bunter that a good night’s sleep wouldn’t cure.

The patient whose condition was the reason for the Bunters’ visit to Frank Wilkinson’s office sat between the two men: Ronald’s wife and Bradley’s mother Elizabeth, who was known to everyone as Betty. As a young woman Betty had been an exceptionally beautiful, Grace Kelly blonde, with brains to match. She’d met Ronnie when they were both freshmen at the University of Texas; they had married in their junior year and they’d been together ever since.

‘I don’t know what I did to deserve her,’ Ronnie used to say. ‘Not only is she far too pretty for a guy like me, but she’s far too smart as well. Her grades were way better than mine all the way through U. T. Law. If she hadn’t given it up to marry me, she’d have been the one running the firm.’

Now, though, she was a shrunken, hunched-up figure. Her hair was dishevelled and her immaculate everyday uniform of slim-cut, ankle-length chinos, white blouse, pearls and pastel cashmere cardigans had been replaced by an old purple polo shirt, tucked into baggy grey elasticated slacks over a pair of cheap sneakers. She was holding her purse on her lap and she kept opening it, taking out a tightly folded piece of paper, unfolding it, staring blankly at the handwritten words scrawled across it, folding it up again and putting it back in the bag.

Dr Wilkinson watched her go through one complete cycle of the ritual before very gently enquiring, ‘Do you know why you’re here, Betty?’

She looked up at him suspiciously. ‘No, no I don’t,’ she said. ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’

‘No, you haven’t done anything wrong, Betty.’

She looked at him with a desperate expression of anguish and bafflement in her eyes. ‘I just … I … I … I can’t sort it all out … all these things. I don’t know …’ Her voice tailed away as she opened her purse and pulled out the paper again.

‘You are merely suffering from a period of confusion.’ Dr Wilkinson said kindly, trying to cloak the awful truth with the gentlest possible tone of voice. ‘Do you remember we talked about your diagnosis?’

‘We did no such thing! I don’t remember that at all. And I’m a grown woman in her fifties.’ Betty was in fact three weeks shy of her seventy-third birthday. She continued forcefully, ‘I know what’s what and I remember all the things I need to know, I can assure you of that!’

‘And I believe you,’ Dr Wilkinson said, knowing that it was pointless arguing with an Alzheimer’s patient, or attempting to drag them from their personal reality back into the real world. He looked at her husband: ‘Now, perhaps you can tell me what happened, Ronnie.’

‘Yes, well, Betty’s been having a lot of trouble sleeping,’ Bunter started. He looked at his wife, whose full attention had now reverted to the piece of paper, and went on, his voice tentative and his words very obviously skirting around the full truth: ‘She became a little confused last night, you know, and she was … overwrought, I guess you might say.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Dad!’ Brad Bunter exclaimed with an anger born of frustration. ‘Why don’t you tell Dr Wilkinson what really happened?’

His father said nothing.

‘So what do you think happened, Brad?’ Dr Wilkinson asked.

‘OK.’ Brad gave a heavy sigh, collected his thoughts and then began, ‘Seven o’clock yesterday evening, I’m still at the office and I get a call from Dad. He’s at home – these days he likes to be home by five, to look after Mom – and he needs help because Mom’s packed a case and she’s trying to get out of the house. See, she doesn’t believe it actually is her house any more. And Dad’s on the ragged edge because she’s been shouting at him, and kicking and punching him …’

Ronald Bunter winced as if the words had hurt him more than his wife’s fists or feet ever could. Betty still seemed oblivious to what was being said.

Brad kept going. ‘And she’s having crying jags. I mean, I can hear her sobbing in the background as I’m talking to him. So I go over and I try to get her calm enough to at least eat something, right? Because she doesn’t eat any more, doctor, not unless you make her. Then I get home about quarter of nine, to see my own wife and kids, except Brianne’s already put the kids to bed, so we watch some TV, go to bed.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Wilkinson murmured. He wrote a couple of words on his notes. ‘Was that the final disturbance last night?’

‘Hell no. Two o’clock in the morning the phone goes again. It’s Dad. Same thing. Can I come over? Mom’s out of control. I’ll be honest, I felt like saying, you want help in the middle of the night, call an ambulance. But, you know, she is my mom, so I go over again, same story, except this time – and I’m sorry, Dad, but Dr Wilkinson needs to know this, she’s walking around stark naked, babbling God knows what nonsense … and she’s got no modesty or embarrassment at all about it.’

‘There’s nothing embarrassing about the human body, Brad,’ Wilkinson said.

‘Well, just you remember that the next time one of your parents turns your home into a nudist colony.’