John Milton: The Jungle Part 33

"See if anyone has been inside."

Florin took Pasko's pistol from the table and hurried out of the room. Pasko heard him clatter down the stairs.

"Still there, Pasko?"

"You're bluffing."

"Am I? I suppose we'll find out in a minute."

"What do you want?"

"You've caused a lot of misery and unhappiness. I want you to pay for what you've done."

Florin lumbered up the stairs again. Pasko covered the phone. "Well?"

Florin's face was white. "The door's locked and the key is gone. And I can smell gas."

"Pasko," Milton said. "Have you checked?"

"What do you want?" Pasko said. "You want me to apologise?"

"No. It's too late for that. Let me explain something for you. I look at life like I'm running a ledger. You've got the things you're proud of on one side, things you're ashamed of on the other. For a long time, all I did was bad. Everything on the one side of the ledger. Like you, really. I'm trying to find some balance now."

Pasko looked out of the window again. Milton was nowhere to be seen.

"Where are you?" he said.

There was no answer.

"I'm not scared of you, Milton!"

Milton spoke again. "Goodbye, Pasko."

The line went dead.

Chapter Sixty-Three.

MILTON CHECKED HIS WATCH.

Two minutes to five.

He walked away and headed south along Kilburn High Road.

The explosion was powerful. Milton turned. The pressure wave rushed out, picking up the large bin and tossing it into the street, shoving the parked cars across the road and blowing in the windows of the office block. A large cloud of grey smoke and debris billowed out of the freshly opened s.p.a.ce, fragments of brick and debris from inside clattering down onto the street. The dust cloud rose up and wreathed the building, so thick that it was impossible to see inside.

Milton got into his car as alarms started to blare, a frantic cacophony as a dozen different sounds clamoured in a discordant harmony. The dust and smoke started to clear and, as he glanced back in his mirrors, Milton was able to see the extent of the damage. The naked filament would have combusted without the inert gas to protect it, and that, in turn, would have caused the gas in the air to ignite. The building had been torn in two. Half of it was still standing, albeit with severe damage, but the other half was simply not there anymore. There were small stretches of the walls on the ground floor that remained, but everything else had been reduced to a smoking pile of debris. Timbers had collapsed on top of one another, and piles of bricks were strewn all the way across the road. The seat of the explosion had been the kitchen. It was gone. The rooms above it-the rooms where Milton knew Pasko and Florin had been waiting-were gone, too.

Milton started the engine and, carefully and deliberately, pulled out into the empty road and drove away to the south. He was three minutes away when he heard the sirens of the first emergency vehicles.

He drove on.

Chapter Sixty-Four.

THE WAITING ROOM was as quiet as it had been the last time Milton had visited the holding facility. He waited patiently, the sharp edges of the plastic chair digging into his ribs and aggravating the bruises that had developed following the fight with the Albanians two days earlier. He had gingerly examined his body in the mirror after he had showered this morning. The cuts from Florin's knife were superficial and had not required st.i.tches, but they had left lurid purple scores across his skin. His knuckles were bruised, and he had a prominent black eye from where he had been b.u.t.ted in the face. His brow had been cut, too, and a raised sickle, with crusted blood scabbed across the wound, reached down to just above his eyelid. The receptionist had looked at him with a wariness that she wasn't able to suppress, and, for a moment, Milton thought that she was going to ask him to leave. Cynthia Whitchurch had stepped forward, telling the woman-who evidently recognised her-that Milton was her guest and that she would vouch for him. That had done the trick, and the woman had invited them-a little reluctantly, perhaps-to take their seats and wait for the doors to open.

Milton glanced over to his right. Whitchurch was sitting next to Nadia. She was taking down the details that she would need in order to represent her as a client in the application for asylum that they were going to make this afternoon. Nadia had already explained what had happened to her; she had started the story with the commencement of their journey in Eritrea, followed with the crossing to Lampedusa, described her abduction, and then what the Albanians had made her do.

Milton had counselled her not to mention any of the events that had led to her freedom; instead, they had settled on a version of events that had seen her simply walk away from the brothel in which she had been held, with Samir sending Milton to collect her after the siblings had made contact once again. If Cynthia harboured any suspicion that she was being fed an abbreviated version of the truth, it wasn't obvious. Milton doubted that she would dig too deep. Her motivation, written plainly on her face, was to secure the safety of her clients. Samir and Nadia were fortunate to have her.

The doors opened. "You can go through now," the guard called out.

"Ready, Nadia?" Cynthia said.

"Just a moment, please."

"Of course. I'll see you inside when you're ready." Cynthia got to her feet and made her way over to the entrance.

Nadia paused, seemingly reluctant to follow.

Milton went to her. "It's all right," he said. "Your brother will be there in a minute. He'll be glad to see you."

She held his gaze for a moment, and Milton thought that he could see the pain and fear of the last few months in her deep brown eyes. She blinked and found a shy smile, and the moment pa.s.sed.

"Thank you," she said, placing her hands on his shoulders and laying a cool kiss on his cheek.

Milton found himself smiling.

She turned away from him and joined the lawyer at the door. Milton stayed a few steps away, reluctant to share in a moment that he thought best to be private. He could see through the door, though, and he noticed Samir as he came in through the doors at the other side of the visiting room. The young man stood in the doorway for a moment, the other inmates pa.s.sing on either side of him, and then he saw his sister. He grinned, beaming out his happiness, and hurried ahead. Nadia went inside, too, and the siblings met in the middle of the room, embracing fiercely, their sobs loud enough for Milton to hear.

He watched them for a moment. They were so swept up in themselves that they did not notice him, and, as Samir showed his sister to the table that he and Milton had sat at just over a fortnight ago, Milton turned and made his way quietly towards the exit.

"MR. SMITH!"

Milton stopped at the exit. He turned. Cynthia Whitchurch was hurrying toward him.

"Are you going?"

"Yes," he said. "They haven't seen one another for months. They don't need me around to get in the way."

"But you've done so much for them. For both of them."

"There'll be another time for that," Milton said. "I'll wait until you get them asylum."

"That might be a few months."

"But you think you can?"

She paused. "It's possible. I mean, on a compa.s.sionate level, there's no question that they should get it. What's happened to them-everyone can see they deserve it. But what's right and what's legally possible are not the same thing."

"But?"

"I'm quite confident."

Milton put out his hand. "I have to go," he said.

"You have my number," she said. "Give me a call in a couple of weeks. I think this will all be sorted out by then." The lawyer shook his hand. "What are you doing now?" she asked him. "I was going to buy you a coffee."

"It's kind of you, but I can't-I've got a plane to catch."

"Somewhere nice?"

"Not that kind of trip, I'm afraid."

"Business?"

"That's right," Milton said. "Business."

He shook her hand again, told her to call him if there was anything that he could do to help, and pushed the exit door open. He pa.s.sed through security, nodded to the guard standing by the X-ray machine, and went outside into the cold, bright morning.

EPILOGUE: Libya.

Chapter Sixty-Five.

ALI TESSEMA OPENED HIS EYES. His bedroom was dark. The window was open, and he could hear the soft susurration of the sea as it rolled against the beach below.

He thought that he had heard something.

He lay still, damp sheets clinging to his sweaty body, and listened. There was nothing. No sound. He must have been dreaming. He had been drinking all night, expensive Russian vodka that he had smuggled into the country to beat the ban on alcohol. There had been rather a lot of it, and he had been drunk when he had finally stumbled into bed. He still felt a little drunk, and now he was hearing things.

He exhaled, allowing his shoulders to sink back against the mattress, and closed his eyes again.

"Wake up, Ali."

He stopped breathing; his heart felt as if it had stopped beating in his chest. He put down his right arm and levered himself to a half-sitting position. The gentle wind parted the curtains, with just enough moonlight admitted for him to see the man sitting in the armchair on the other side of the room. He was dressed all in black: black combat trousers, a black tactical jacket and black boots. He was wearing a black balaclava that obscured everything save for his eyes and mouth. His left leg was crossed over his right knee and his hands were in his lap. Ali glanced down and saw a pistol in his right hand, the metal sparkling in the dim light.

"Wake up."

Ali had a pistol of his own in the drawer next to the bed. "Who are you?"

The man turned his head so that a little more light fell down onto him. His lips were pressed together in a tight line.

Ali's left hand was still beneath the covers. He carefully, slowly, started to slide it toward the drawer. "What is your name?"

"Milton."

"My guards?"

"Dead, Ali." The man stood and indicated the room with a flick of the pistol. "This is a very nice place. It must have been very expensive."

Ali's throat was suddenly very dry. He swallowed.

"How much did it cost?"

He found that he couldn't answer.

"You can't remember?"

His hand was at the edge of the mattress. "Yes. It was expensive."

The man gestured down at him. "Don't bother," he said. "Your gun's over there."

Ali looked. His pistol and the box of ammunition that he kept with it were on the table next to the armchair.

The breeze died down and the curtains closed. The light disappeared. The man was a shadow now, a darker shape amid the gloom. Ali could feel his presence, close, but he dared not move.

"How many people had to die so you could have a house like this?"

He tried to swallow. "I run a business. I help people. I give them a chance to find a better life."

"No, you don't. You profit from the pain and misery of desperate men and women. Men and women and children. I've seen how you do business. I've been on one of your boats. I've seen the others that didn't make it to port because they were unfit for the voyage. You are a parasite. You're worse than a parasite. Did you really think that there would never be a reckoning for what you've done?"

The shadow was at the foot of the bed. The curtains parted again and the light glinted off the barrel of a pistol that had been raised and aimed at him.

"Please. What do you want? Money? Please. I give you more money than you have ever seen before."

"Your money can't help you now."

The bullet hit him in the forehead. He was dead before he could hear the sound of the gun.