Road (A Joe Tiplady Thriller Book 2) Read online

  ALSO BY JOHN SWEENEY

  The Joe Tiplady Thrillers

  Cold

  Other Fiction

  Elephant Moon

  Non-Fiction

  The Life and Evil Times of Nicolae Ceausescu

  Trading with the Enemy: Britain’s Arming of Iraq

  Purple Homicide, Fear and Loathing on Knutsford Heath

  Rooney’s Gold

  Big Daddy: Lukashenka, Tyrant of Belarus

  The Church of Fear: Inside the Weird World of Scientology

  North Korea Undercover: Inside the World’s Most Secret State

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2017 John Sweeney

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503940932

  ISBN-10: 1503940934

  Cover design by Mark Swan

  For Agim Neza, RIP, Marie Colvin, RIP, and the doctors of what was, once, Free Aleppo

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  MOSCOW

  TROPOJË, NORTHERN ALBANIA

  THE CALIFORNIAN DESERT

  TIRANA, ALBANIA

  WEST HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA

  TIRANA, ALBANIA

  BEIRUT, LEBANON

  RAQQA, EASTERN SYRIA

  TIRANA, ALBANIA

  THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

  NORTHERN ALBANIA

  DAMASCUS, SYRIA

  RAQQA, EASTERN SYRIA

  DAMASCUS, SYRIA

  TROPOJË, NORTHERN ALBANIA

  RAQQA, EASTERN SYRIA

  DAMASCUS, SYRIA

  PALMYRA, SYRIA

  NORTHERN ALBANIA

  PALMYRA, SYRIA

  THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA

  TROPOJË, NORTHERN ALBANIA

  PALMYRA, SYRIA

  DAMASCUS, SYRIA

  THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA

  DAMASCUS, SYRIA

  THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA

  DAMASCUS, SYRIA

  PIRAEUS, GREECE

  DAMASCUS, SYRIA

  THE LONG ROAD

  WESTERN SYRIA

  SERBIA–HUNGARY BORDER

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  SOUTHERN HUNGARY

  CARACAS, VENEZUELA

  CARACAS, VENEZUELA

  NORTHERN HUNGARY

  LOS ANGELES DISTRICT COURT HOUSE, CALIFORNIA

  SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA

  BEAR LAKE, UTAH

  MONTERIPIDO MONASTERY, PERUGIA

  ALEPPO, SYRIA

  LOS ANGELES SUPERIOR COURT, CALIFORNIA

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  [Thunder. Enter the three Witches.]

  First Witch: Where hast thou been, sister?

  Second Witch: Killing swine.

  Third Witch: Sister, where thou?

  First Witch: A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap,

  And munch’d, and munch’d, and munch’d:—

  ‘Give me,’ quoth I:

  ‘Aroint thee, witch!’ the rump-fed ronyon cries.

  Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ the Tiger:

  But in a sieve I’ll thither sail,

  And, like a rat without a tail,

  I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.

  —Macbeth

  The most abominable savagery should continue until the anticipated chaos breaks out.

  —Abu Bakr Naji, The Management of Savagery (2004)

  . . . all around us, though

  We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear.

  —Seamus Heaney, ‘Singing School’

  MOSCOW

  Grozhov’s electric wheelchair whined as it conveyed its master to his desk in the large office in the Lubyanka, the headquarters of Russia’s secret armed fist since 1917. He took out the memory stick, inserted it into his computer and pressed play. A grainy image, black-and-white, not colour. Three separate pinhole cameras captured the scene.

  The black prostitute, the most expensive to be found in South Africa – flown in, business class, from Joburg – was wearing a simple white dress, and a black choker around her neck attached to a chain. She was led in by two blonde goddesses, one from Russian Karelia, one from Siberia. They ripped off her clothes, spanked her – not too heavily – and chained her ankles and wrists to the bedposts so she was quite helpless.

  Then the show proper began. At the end of the performance, the humiliation of the black woman was complete. The customer, hair of spun-sugar and skin of marmalade, was clapping and laughing heartily. Grozhov pressed stop, extracted the USB stick, picked up his phone and gave orders for the black woman to meet with a fatal road accident on her return to South Africa. Nothing in this operation should be left to chance. That done, he called a number in the Kremlin. The other party answered on the second ring. Grozhov explained the content of the secret film in some detail and concluded his report. Silence from the man in the Kremlin. Then four words: ‘So Washington is ours?’

  Grozhov sighed. ‘Not yet.’

  TROPOJË, NORTHERN ALBANIA

  A storm to remember the night before: the small town that nestled in the mountain range dividing the Serbian plain from the Albanian hinterland had been enveloped in its own bespoke thundercloud, sheets of lightning warping darkness into electric-blue day, trees cleaved asunder, roofs ripped up, torrents of water cutting the hideously expensive road the construction mafia had built, cheating the European Union rotten. A lightning bolt had taken out one of two electrical substations feeding High Albania; the other one was out of commission, awaiting repairs. The moment all the lights died, Tropojë warped back to the Middle Ages. Tourist-friendly alleyways became places for thieves to lurk; local vendettas were settled for good and shops looted; lovers took their chances, leading to enraged husbands and suicidal wives. And so it took the best part of a day before Police Lieutenant Agim Neza could follow up on the farmer’s report of a shepherd discovering a body after the storm.

  Agim was in his thirties, a thin, diffident man, dark-haired, clean-shaven, not unhandsome, in stature short for Europe, tall for malnourished Tropojë, a slight cast in one eye. He had a civility and a love of irony that was, well, quietly impressive for someone from the poorest part of the poorest country in Europe.

  The farmer had said the body was high up in the mountains. ‘High up’ wasn’t the half of it: the storm rain had washed away the dirt road in several places and it was only Agim’s ingenuity and deep knowledge of the lie of the land that enabled him to weave a path in his four-wheel drive up to the farm where he’d arranged to meet the shepherd. Twice, Agim had had to edge the jeep along the knife-slash of a precipice, looking down on the eagles coiling in the thermals below, the wheels sending clods of earth and pebbles whistling down to the bottom – a thousand feet, more. It was towards the end of the afternoon when he got to the farmer’s shack.

  The storm had cleared the air and the breeze carried with it the scent of pine. The view was extraordinarily beautiful: even though it was high summer, mountains capped with snow charged towards the eye – black patched with white, like a herd of piebald ponies – above them fantastic whirls of cumulonimbus clouds soaring into an intensely blue sky. In the foreground was a dirty grey concre
te bunker from Enver Hoxha’s time, when the paranoid Communist ruler who fell out with everyone – the West, Stalin’s heirs, eventually even Chairman Mao’s successors – built three-quarters of a million pillboxes, the better to defend a country no one in their right mind would ever want to invade. (Mussolini, who did so, was not in his right mind.) Inside the bunker and outside it, in a pen built of stones, thirty thin sheep or fat goats bleated their devotion to ‘Enver, our Enver’ – or, at least, they bleated. The farmer, a white-haired peasant – tough, lean and so old, people said, that he could remember the time before Enver – made it clear that he was just the messenger. He hadn’t seen a damn thing, on account of the discovery of the body taking place somewhere a bit higher than the farm. He warned Agim that the shepherd – well, he spent time, too much time, on his own and may have seen things that weren’t there. But he added that he had never seen the poor fellow so agitated.

  The farmer invited Agim inside his shack. After the brilliant light of the mountains, it took a while before Agim’s pupils refocused to read the gloom: two chairs, a table hewn out of rough wood, a cot for sleeping in, a fire for cooking; a poor, mean, nine-inch square of window looking out on a view to die for. The farmer offered Agim a cup of coffee, served black and gritty, washed down with a glass of his homemade raki. They drank the coffee and brandy in companionable silence, only the sound of the wind in the pines disturbing the stillness. After a time, the door flung open and in walked the shepherd.

  By the look of him, his father had been a wolf. Leastways, the whole of his face – forehead, too – and the back of his hands were covered in fine black hair, poor man. Agim had read somewhere that there was a disease that caused too-white skin and hair all over the body: a malfunction of the blood, not enough red blood cells, so the body compensated by growing too much hair and compelling the wretched victim to hide from daylight. The disease meant they couldn’t see well, their gums receded and they were ostracised by their fellows and, so fearful of the sun burning their bloodless, thin skin, they only came out at night. The best nights were when they could see by the light of the moon. Driven half-mad by the disease, outside the world of language, they’d only be seen howling at the moon. One more thing, it had said in this article: if a carrier of the disease bit another person carrying a silent copy of the disease and drew blood, it could trigger the disease in the bite victim. So that’s how the legends of werewolf and vampire were born: a disease of the blood parlayed into myth and nonsense.

  Agim smiled at himself: for all his fancy university education in Tirana – never mind his trip to London, to Scotland Yard – he was a local, too. Tropojë was in his blood.

  He said to the shepherd, ‘May I ask, sir, what is your name?’

  Conditioned to people ogling his body hair, this simplest of courtesies pleased the shepherd a great deal, and he smiled at Agim and said, shyly, ‘Sotir.’

  ‘May I ask, Sotir, how far away is the body? How much walking time? An hour? Two hours?’ He really didn’t like the idea of making the trip back to the capital in the dark. The jeep could easily tip over in the darkness and then Tirana would be looking for a new police officer to cover the country’s least popular beat.

  Sotir the half-wolf grunted something in the mountain dialect. Agim was mystified. ‘Not far,’ translated the old farmer, adding, ‘He’ll show you the way.’

  Joined by an old sheepdog with rheumy eyes who seemed more human – or, at least, less of a wolf – than the shepherd, they set off at a punishingly fast pace: Sotir lolloping along, Agim hurrying to catch up with him, the dog trotting on behind.

  Higher and higher they climbed, far up past the tree-line, into a land of lichen and dwarf shrubs, where slivers and fingers of snow and ice still lingered in sunless clefts of rock. In the end, it took them two whole hours before they found the body where the shepherd had left it. Agim shivered, cursing his luck. The sun was sinking low in the west and he would have to pass the night in the farmer’s shack. They would be lucky if they got back even to that before nightfall.

  Was it worth all this walking? Death was everyday up here. Not his job to record every death of every villager. But the farmer had explained that Sotir was insistent that the police officer should attend, and Agim was, if nothing else, a dutiful police officer.

  He made a casual inspection of the corpse and ran off to a rock and leant forwards, hands on knees, vomiting three times.

  After a time, Agim wiped his mouth with a paper handkerchief, took a series of pictures with his phone of the mutilated thing in front of him, steeling himself to do so. The corpse was Mediterranean in appearance, thought Agim – not Albanian, not local. Someone had removed the man’s fingernails, he noted, but that hadn’t been the reason he’d vomited. Looking at the man’s hands, Agim realised that some of the nails had started to grow back, so if he’d been tortured, it had been some time – months – ago. Something else, too: a fine tracery of red on his right arm, like a tattoo, but not like any tattoo he’d ever seen before.

  When Agim had finished taking the photographs, Sotir barked something in the dialect Agim didn’t get, then pointed his finger uphill, to the west. Agim squinted into the dying sun in vain. Sotir pointed at the corpse and held out three fingers.

  Mystified, Agim nodded vaguely, to fob Sotir off, and made to go back down the mountain. The shepherd barked a negative and, tugging at Agim’s leather jacket, set off uphill. Reluctantly, Agim followed him. This time it wasn’t that far at all: nothing more than a sheet of thin rock, some kind of slate, over a cleft in the mountainside. Sotir shifted the slate, and Agim took out his phone and switched on the torch. As he did so, the stink of the dead assaulted him. Three more corpses; these had all been burnt – no, fried, somehow electrocuted. But up here? How was that possible? These bodies, too, had the strange red tracery of the first corpse.

  The half-wolf studied Agim, saw his befuddlement and handed him a lump of rock; it was not heavy, around two inches long, gnarled and knotted, the like of which Agim had never seen before. The policeman put the rock in his leather jacket but still didn’t understand what the gift signified. Sotir’s eyes shifted, coyly, to an old Enverist lookout post, standing on top of a jutting rock, thirty feet away: a metal ladder, a metal frame, an open-sided metal box. Climb that thing in a thunderstorm and you would fry, no question. But lightning doesn’t mutilate.

  None of it made any sense.

  THE CALIFORNIAN DESERT

  Grass burnt the colour of bad gold, leaves crinkling in the wind, the land beyond Pyramid Lake ached for rain. Joe turned his Beetle off the interstate onto a grade running up through a valley with neither life nor end. The blades of a windpump bit against a cobalt sky, but the homestead the pump watered was nothing but a tin roof lying topsy-turvy on a hillock of rubble. A Ford tractor had been dumped in a bone-dry ditch, its skinny front wheels and toothsome radiator grille dating its manufacture to the fifties. Folks had moved out of the valley back in ’73 when they built the dam, so that made a kind of sense.

  The news was on the radio: a report of a rally in the election, a man’s voice, soft, wheedling, then a crowd roaring, ‘JayDee! JayDee! JayDee!’ Joe grimaced and switched it off. Ninety minutes’ driving north of LA and this valley was remote as the sunny side of Mercury and twice as hot.

  The Beetle’s soft top had jammed open and the heat smacked Joe in the head like a bully. He pulled up, switched the engine off and listened to the silence from the dead valley, a stillness broken only by the click-clicking of metal cooling beneath the hood.

  In the slew of stuff on the back seat he found a crushed pork-pie hat with a daffodil-coloured band, and punched it back into shape and plonked it on his head. Just above the escarpment of the valley, a hawk picked his way through the heat, thinking about lunch. Joe checked the signal bars on his cell phone: zero. A man could die out here and no one might know for half a century, more.

  Lost to civilisation, whatever that might be, Joe’s thoughts turned to
the men he’d been driven to kill, and the two women he had loved most truly: the woman who had died for him in Utah and the woman he’d killed for in the prison state. Katya was gone forever; Roxy was locked away, alive for all he knew, but dead to him, dead to the world, dead to the twenty-first century. That was also true of her two golden-haired boys.

  What was Roxy doing right now, as he sat in his Beetle staring out at this barren land? Dusting the photographs of the two gods they’d had to worship – the one who was always smiling and the other one, who looked like a bad Elvis impersonator? Standing in a long line, waiting for her papers to be stamped, for permission to travel to the golden city? Or, most likely, staring into space, thinking about Romania, about Italy, about the life she could have led that was taken from her? He’d killed two men back there: one to save her and her boys; one to save himself. He could never go back, so what was the point of torturing himself by thinking about her?

  Then his thoughts turned to Katya, and the melancholy that haunted him, that filled his soul, grew yet more intense. It always did when he had time on his hands, when he had little to do. That was why he worked so relentlessly. Not for money, but to not think about what he had lost. Katya had been dead for a year and a half, and he hated quiet, inactivity. He was still grieving, still hadn’t come to terms with what had happened.

  Heat baked the air, fuzzying substance. A lone cactus on a ridge wobbled so that it looked like a green man turning and turning again. Best get on with this job, thought Joe, whatever it was, wherever it would take him. The Beetle gurgled into life, and by and by Joe came across a closed gate, part of a metal fence that followed the contours of the land, two men high, on top of it three thin wires running through ceramic Os, murmuring a voltaic hum. Whoever needed an electric fence in this nowhere-land had secrets to keep and then some.

  He got out of the Beetle and walked up to an intercom set on top of a short post. Joe leant on the talk button, lifted his hat out of respect and waited. In a stand of pine was a metal pole, camouflaged mottled green and brown, and on top of that a 360-degree CCTV camera looking him up and down. He had been living in Hollywood for nearly a year, and only now had he made it into the movies.