Road (A Joe Tiplady Thriller Book 2) Read online

  A woman’s voice, tinny and robotic through the intercom, broke the silence: ‘Hello?’

  ‘My name is Mr Tiplady.’ His voice was soft, and Irish as a sudden rain shower. ‘I have an appointment.’

  After a long moment, something whirred and the gate swung open – sorcery in the twenty-first century. The valley beyond narrowed into a gully, its cliffs crowding out the sky, the grade rising more steeply. After a couple more miles, the grade turned a sharp corner and everything was wet and lush and green, as if a giant had drained his fish tank.

  Set against the western rock wall of the gully stood a faux-antebellum mansion with fake Doric columns. To the side was a small lake, or a big pond, fringed with weeping willows, and beyond that a meadow. From somewhere, a burst of electricity crackled, as if a bug had been fried, then the sound fell away. Joe had stumbled into a fake heaven.

  Steps of white marble led to the front door, black but so glossy it served as a mirror. The figure in the looking glass was wearing a pork-pie hat, an expensive suit, pale cream and soft as silk, a dark-blue shirt decorated with little dolphins at play, no tie, no socks, and brown brogues that had never been polished. Joe had shaved his beard off the night Katya was shot dead in Utah. Around his neck, on a thin strip of leather, was the crescent moon she’d given him as a good luck charm. She was dead, he was alive, so it was working but not in a way he would ever have wanted. He hated wearing it, but not doing so felt somehow worse.

  He knocked on the door and stuck a grin on his face to mask what was going on within.

  The door opened magically before he got the chance to knock a second time. The contrast between the harsh white light outside and the cool gloom inside was so stark his eyes couldn’t register detail. As his sight adjusted, he took in a hall, roughly square; at the back, two slender staircases arched up to a mezzanine floor; the walls were opaque, frosted glass, the effect like being inside a house full of bottled fog.

  No one was about.

  In the centre of the hall was an old mahogany table, exquisitely polished, and on it a lamp with a green shade; the light was focused on a document, a fountain pen with the top unscrewed next to it, the nib ready.

  Joe stepped towards the table when a voice, feminine and elegant as invisible robots go, broke the silence: ‘A non-disclosure agreement, Mr Tiplady. I’m sure you’ve signed many of these before.’

  He leafed through some of the NDA in a bored, what-the-hell kind of way, then leafed through a lot more and flicked to the end.

  ‘Forty-seven pages?’ he asked the robot voice.

  ‘Forty-seven pages,’ it intoned.

  ‘What’s the job?’

  ‘Sign the NDA and then we talk.’

  Joe raised his head and stared around the room, void of humanity, knowing that he was being watched, spied on, taped, but he was not able to make out a single camera.

  ‘I got a letter in the mail . . .’ Joe started. No one answered back. ‘It was out of the blue – not an email, not a phone call – inviting me to come to these map coordinates here, to the middle of nowhere on this day, at this time, for an appointment on a sensitive issue. The letter had no address and the signature was illegible. Now I’m being asked to sign the longest NDA I’ve ever seen and still have no indication what this is about.’

  The robot repeated what it had just said.

  Joe sighed, and signed.

  One minute later, the sound of a woman’s high heels click-clacked towards him.

  ‘Mr Tiplady, I assume?’ There was a twinkle in her voice but it had been pre-packed.

  ‘No point in denying it,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, we do love a sense of humour.’ Her voice was as smooth as honey and so, as his eyes adjusted, was the rest of her. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, darkish red hair or reddish dark hair tied up in a severe bun, wearing a starched white shirt buttoned high, the collar tapering into a slender neck, a black, ankle-length skirt and black flat shoes. What little of her skin he could see was the colour of bone china, so exquisitely pale he wanted to reach out and touch it, there and then, to see if she wasn’t fashioned out of porcelain. Her eyes, liquid dark almonds, narrowed at the close attention Joe was paying her – not much, but enough.

  ‘Nice hat,’ she said conversationally.

  ‘No, you’re just being polite.’ Joe took his pork-pie hat off and held it to his chest, as deferentially as he could. ‘I didn’t catch your name?’

  ‘That’s because I didn’t tell you. Suffice to say I’m Dr Franklyn’s attorney.’

  ‘Dr Franklyn?’

  ‘He’s the Director.’

  ‘You’re an attorney and you work the tannoy? Ship ahoy, sign the NDA and all that?’

  ‘Out here, multitasking comes as standard.’

  Her accent was East Coast, old money.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ His accent was East Cork, no money.

  ‘You really are Irish, aren’t you?’

  ‘Like a shamrock.’ He paused, then said, ‘So?’

  ‘I’ll take you to see him now.’

  She led him upstairs towards a metal detector and, beyond that, a double airlock; beyond that was a large room, with a view through floor-to-ceiling windows of the big pond and the dead valley beyond. Someone had moved the Beetle. It must have lowered the tone.

  The room could have been a library, only there were no books. To the far left was a long dining room table built of mahogany or another dark, hard wood, polished to a smooth gloss, around it a dozen upright chairs. To the far right, a sofa in the shape of a U. On the walls were fuzzy etchings of reptiles and amphibians, with and without tails. In the corner was a hatstand; on it hung a white US Navy cap boasting a fair amount of gold braid, and by the side of it a Victorian print of horses dancing around and lots of snaky things in the water. Dr Franklyn clearly had a thing about things that slither.

  One of the opaque glass walls slid aside and a man walked towards Joe, the hand of executive friendship outstretched in pre-welcome mode. He was in his late fifties or early sixties, in superb shape, black hair thick and shiny, teeth white and gleaming, muscles lithe and pulsing. He was wearing a white smock and three-quarter sleeves, white trousers with a white corduroy belt, white socks and white sneakers: medical chic. He would have been quite the gallant doctor were it not for the fact that he was markedly short. Five foot two, if that. If he wanted to inspect Joe’s mouth, he would have to stand on a chair.

  ‘Mr Tiplady, I’m so glad that you could come.’ It sounded as though he meant it – meant it very much. ‘I’m Dr Franklyn, Dominic Franklyn. You’ve met Veronica?’

  ‘I hadn’t caught your attorney’s name, Doctor.’

  ‘Lawyers? Don’t you hate ’em?’

  Everyone laughed.

  ‘Mr Tiplady has signed the NDA,’ said Veronica smoothly.

  ‘Oh no, did you make him do that? I’m so sorry, Mr Tiplady.’

  ‘Call me Joe.’

  ‘And call me Dominic. I’m so sorry, Joe. This country’s getting so legalled up these days, you can’t breathe.’ Franklyn gestured for them all to sit down.

  ‘So,’ Joe said pleasantly, ‘what’s this about?’

  Franklyn’s face shifted from intense smiling to deep sorrow.

  ‘My son . . .’ His eyes fell to the floor while he paused for a beat. ‘My beautiful seven-year-old boy, Ham, has been kidnapped. He has vanished off the face of the earth. Ham has been taken by his mother . . . She has, she has . . . mental health issues. I want you to find him and bring him back. This, I warn you, will not be easy. But money is not an issue. Joe, will you do this for me?’

  Franklyn’s eyes were light grey, flecked with obsidian.

  ‘I’ll need to know a little more,’ Joe said.

  Veronica reached into one of the manila folders she had with her and pulled out a colour photograph showing a boy, dark-haired with a light-brown complexion, wearing a kid’s version of a business suit, starched white shirt and dark tie, standing on pr
icey teak or mahogany decking, the ocean lapping in the background, blue and mighty. He was laughing at someone else’s joke. To Joe, he looked a sunny kind of kid.

  ‘Ham?’ Joe asked.

  Franklyn nodded.

  Veronica passed Joe another manila folder. ‘Your copy, to be returned to us on completion.’

  Joe opened it and saw a photograph that captured perhaps the most beautiful woman he had ever cast eyes on. Huge brown eyes lit up a laughing face of perfect symmetry, freckled lightly, framed by bubbling waves of long black curly hair. Clearly, Ham got his sense of humour from his mother, not his father.

  The photo had been taken at night, the backdrop a bead of lights twinkling in the far distance. Maybe the shot had been taken from one of the Californian Channel Islands, at Avalon on Santa Catalina perhaps, looking back on LA. She was wearing a long black sleeveless dress with a black choker around her neck. Shining from her eyes was a vitality that leapt out of the photograph and kick-stepped around the bookless library, as gloriously out-of-place as a troop of cancan dancers in an old people’s home.

  ‘Jameela,’ said Franklyn flatly. Veronica’s eyes were locked on to nothing, far out in the parched wilderness. Joe got the impression that Veronica and Jameela were not bosom pals.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ Joe said.

  ‘Jameela means exactly that in Arabic: beautiful,’ said Franklyn. ‘But she’s also quite mad. Not only has she stolen my son, not only has she kidnapped him, but she has taken him to a place of great danger.’

  ‘Why me?’ asked Joe. ‘I haven’t had a private eye’s licence for a full year. You don’t know me from Adam.’

  ‘But you have a track record in finding people who have gone off radar.’

  ‘I’ve found a few people who had their own reasons not to be found, yes.’

  ‘And you have glowing references from a former deputy director of the CIA?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And an Irish passport?’

  ‘My passport’s green.’ It was a line from a Seamus Heaney poem.

  ‘Then you’re perfect. Veronica has done her due diligence.’

  She beamed at Joe. So did Franklyn.

  ‘Why haven’t you gone to the FBI?’ asked Joe, on the edge of petulance.

  ‘The FBI?’ Franklyn was incredulous. ‘What good could they do? I believe this woman has taken my son out of the United States, back to her home country.’

  ‘And that is where?’

  ‘Syria.’

  Far off, not quite smothered by acoustic proofing, the sound of a bark or a man crying out for something, once, twice, penetrated the stillness in the room. The bark or cry turned into a long, piercing scream, an animal howl. Then it stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Neither Franklyn nor Veronica registered it, which left Joe feeling as though he was treading on a step that had never, ever existed. He wrestled his mind back to what he had just been told.

  ‘Syria? Where the war is – the war that’s killed half a million people so far?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Franklyn.

  ‘Ah,’ said Joe. ‘Why did she go back to Syria?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Franklyn. ‘We’re worried that . . .’ His voice tailed off.

  ‘You’re worried that what?’

  ‘That she’s joined ISIS.’

  ‘ISIS? The so-called Islamic State, IS, ISIL, Daesh? The psychos who chop off people’s heads in high-definition, broadcast quality?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I don’t understand it, but she became full of hatred: hatred of me, hatred of the United States, hatred of freedom. She seemed to be on a trajectory of anger. ISIS would have been the next logical step.’

  ‘That’s a fear. Not a fact.’

  Veronica’s eyes bored into Joe. ‘We know this is difficult, but you will be properly paid. Here, two thousand dollars per diem; in Syria, twenty thousand dollars per diem; a success fee of two million dollars. Payment via bank account or in cash, however you please. A mentally ill woman has dragged this man’s son to a war zone. We’re asking you to do this for us, to get this little boy back to the United States. It’s not about Dr Franklyn or our work here. It’s about one little boy. Will you try to find him and bring him back?’

  Then Franklyn spoke: ‘Show him the video.’

  Veronica opened up a tablet computer, flicked through a few folders, found the right file and handed it to Joe. He pressed play.

  A moon rocket fallen to earth, a child’s pink boot lying in the mud, a charred hand reaching upwards through a sea of cement dust, the light fuzzy, shot towards dusk. The camera zoomed in on the moon rocket, which was, at second glance, a felled minaret. Lying at an angle, you could make out the details of the minaret’s top, normally hidden from the ground: three silvery moons, a lightning conductor, two loudspeakers. A starling took advantage of the temporary perch and hopped along from one moon to the next. Then a jump cut to a street, and five-storey blocks that had been knocked around by artillery fire. Suddenly, with a boom that shook the tablet, the images on the screen morphed into a mushroom cloud. Crazy camera angles, screams, yelps, then the mushroom melted away and what you saw was a half-memory of what had been there before. Whole blocks had become puddles of dust. Another jump cut showed a roundabout. On it, a ring of decorative iron spikes. On the spikes were four or five dozen severed heads, faces bluish and grey, eyelids closed. A laughing maniac stood in front of one, Kalashnikov on his shoulder, one finger upraised to a dark kind of paradise. One last jump cut, this time to brilliant daylight, the point of view swivelling around, starting with a child’s bedroom, a Batman poster by the bed, bright-yellow wallpaper with laughing black whales on it, then shifting to where the front of the building should have been and you saw that much of it had gone, blown to smithereens, and the walls of the apartment were pockmarked with holes, concrete become Emmental, in front of it a telephone pole, still upright, just, but at a crazy angle, sprouting a thicket of wires that blocked the road.

  Then the camera jerked once more and there they were, Jameela and Ham, mother and son, Jameela in a headscarf, holding her iPhone with an arm outstretched. Both were in black from head to toe, both standing in front of a large black flag with a white circle at its centre, on it lettering in Arabic, both raising a single index finger heavenwards. Both were smiling; both wearing khaki suicide-bomb vests; behind them seven men, dressed in black, their faces masked by balaclavas, holding AKs to the sky. The selfie video stopped, dead.

  ‘You’re asking me,’ said Joe, ‘to reverse-kidnap a child from a mad woman who’s become a jihadi fanatic, a member of the worst, most dangerous terrorist organisation in the world, from a country fighting the most pitiless war on the whole planet?’

  ‘We’re asking you to find my son,’ said Franklyn. ‘To find out where he is and, if you can, get him back to the United States.’

  Franklyn’s head sunk onto his chest, his fingers gripping his face, masking his features. ‘For a grown woman to do this, to join ISIS – well, you can’t stop someone like her. But for a mother to put a suicide vest on her only child . . .’ He shuddered, and Joe, to his intense embarrassment, realised that the man was sobbing, softly to begin with, then becoming louder and louder. Veronica looked out at the desert, reacting to the Director’s grief by turning to stone.

  Clearly the doctor was a control freak. The games that morning with the map coordinates and the NDA were proof of that. But underneath the veneer was a father who was bereft not just at the thought of losing his son from his life, but of losing the life of his son.

  Something deep inside Joe reawakened, an empathy that he’d thought had gone forever when Katya was murdered, and he reached over and grasped Franklyn’s shoulder. Joe found himself saying over and over again: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get your boy back.’

  After a time, Franklyn recovered his composure, wiped his eyes, lifted his head up and studied Joe closely.

  ‘Joe, that crescent moon you’ve got around your neck? It’s got s
ome Arabic on it. What’s it say?’

  ‘May God protect you.’

  ‘Who gave you that?’

  ‘A friend of mine,’ Joe said stiffly.

  ‘You still together?’

  ‘No,’ Joe said in a tone suggesting the dead end of that particular line of enquiry.

  The meeting resumed, weirdly, as if Franklyn’s breakdown had never taken place.

  Joe gestured to the tablet and asked Veronica: ‘How did you get this?’

  ‘By email,’ she said.

  ‘Any text with it?’

  She retrieved a sheet of paper from a folder. On it, there was only one line printed: Dominic, we’re out of your life now. Forever. Don’t try to find us.

  ‘Is this email account active?’

  ‘No. It’s only been used once, for this one email to Dr Franklyn. As far as we can tell, she sent this message from an Internet café somewhere in Syria, then she vanished off the face of the earth.’

  ‘The Arabic on the flag? It’s definitely ISIS?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Franklyn.

  ‘The Jameela in the photograph in the black dress and the Jameela in the ISIS footage, they’re the same woman?’

  Franklyn told him yes, they were the same woman.

  ‘So what happened? What went wrong?’

  ‘Joe, you’ve probably gathered what we do here.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Dr Franklyn,’ Veronica said, ‘is one of the world’s most eminent practitioners of TMI.’

  Joe put on his puzzled face.

  ‘TMI – transcranial magnetic invasion. It’s the very latest in electrotherapy,’ she explained. ‘Here at our facility we enable the ordinary to become extraordinary, the mentally troubled to attain some level of normality. We help high achievers who fear their full potential has not been attained and we treat those who have been rejected by or who have found no solace in conventional psychiatric centres. The mind-stabilising technologies Dr Franklyn has developed here are revolutionary. Don’t take it from me. Some of our clients – well, they say that once they’ve been here, once they “plug in”, they transform, and when they leave, they’re on a higher plane of being.’