Bad Angels Read online

  Unlike me.

  Aniela knew better than to ask any questions of this man. Some patients were dying to talk, and some wanted extreme discretion: Jon was polite and friendly, but nothing in his manner indicated that she should do anything but examine how his surgery was healing.

  She bent over, so close to him now that her breath was on his skin, and began to peel away the bandages that held the gel dressing over his scar. As soon as the wounds were fully closed, the dressings would come off so that the scar that was forming could dry and heal, exposed to the air; but until then, it needed to be kept moist, and Aniela needed to check that it was all healthy pink tissue with no hint of necrosis.

  Jon didn’t move as she gradually examined his entire scalp. He might have been carved from stone. Nor did he ask any questions: he waited patiently for her to finish and pronounce her verdict.

  ‘Two more days,’ she said finally. ‘Just to be safe. I will replace the dressings today and tomorrow, and after that I think there will be no more.’

  ‘Because there’ll be enough scar tissue,’ he said, a simple statement.

  ‘Exactly. You will be able to wash your hair then,’ she said, trying for a light, easy comment. ‘That will be nice for you.’

  ‘Can’t wait,’ he said dryly. ‘I’ve been doing the best I can with a little soap, but it’s not the same as standing under a shower.’

  Oh, no. I’m imagining him under the shower, water pouring down on his naked body – lifting up his arms, the biceps flexing...

  Christ, Aniela, enough! Get hold of yourself !

  She began to cut strips of the gel dressing and lay them, one after another, along his scalp.

  ‘I don’t need to tell you not to move at all as I do this,’ she observed. ‘I can see you know. You are keeping very still.’

  ‘I’m isolating,’ he said. ‘That’s why I can work out and know I’ll be okay.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ She didn’t understand him.

  ‘Isolating my muscles,’ he said. ‘Look.’

  Without his head shifting a millimetre, he held up his right arm, straight out from his side. As Aniela watched, a ripple of muscle started just below the cap of his shoulder muscle, running down the firm, taut bicep, past the crook of his elbow, along his lean, flexed forearm. It was like a little ball rolling under the skin, a flexing pulse that ran right down to his wrist, completely under his control. Aniela drew in her breath sharply: she had never seen anything like it.

  ‘Are you a magician?’ she blurted out.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Jon sounded genuinely surprised as he lowered his arm.

  ‘Like one who does escapes,’ she said, not knowing the right word. ‘You know, like Houdini? He also trained his muscles to be very controlled.’

  ‘An escapologist?’ There was more than a flicker of amusement in Jon’s voice. ‘That’s pretty astute of you. Yeah. I guess I’m something along those lines.’

  Aniela had all the strips of dressing on his skull now: she reached for the bandages, aware that her hands were trembling. She hoped desperately that he wouldn’t notice.

  Just a few minutes more, she told herself. The view from above was just as distracting as the one from the front or behind: she was looking directly down on his strong, flexed shoulders, could see the even swell of his pectorals, the hairs glinting golden-red on his lightly freckled skin. Tiny beads of sweat that he hadn’t completely dried with the towel were still visible on his trapezius muscles, and, with horror, Aniela realised that she wanted, more than anything, to lean down and lick them off, one by one, to taste each salty bead bursting on her tongue, to move further and further down the curve of his back, to the point where, just visible at the lowslung waist of the grey sweatpants, she could see the twin swell of his buttocks parting, pulling the marled fabric fractionally away from the skin to reveal a tiny V-shaped dark shadow—

  ‘All done!’ she exclaimed with huge relief. Her hands, thank goodness, were so well-trained by now that they had carried out the entire process of fixing the dressings in place without her even realising; neat and tidy, completely regular and efficient, with no sign of the turmoil she had been feeling. She jumped up, stuffing everything into her bag without her usual precision, and took two steps back, slinging the bag over her shoulder, ending up against the wall of built-in Gaggenau ovens that no Canary Clinic patient, in her experience, had ever turned on.

  ‘I will be here at noon tomorrow,’ she said swiftly. ‘And I am at the Clinic the rest of the time, twenty-four seven. You can page me if there is anything you need, to ask a question. Anything at all.’

  Jon nodded, the horribly damaged face on the perfect body the strangest of contrasts; seated, his lean body creased at the waist, his belly was still flat. In the split-second before she turned away, Aniela couldn’t help noticing how there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him.

  She fled from the apartment as if she were being chased by the hounds of hell. The dark décor, the dim lighting of the corridors and lift had never been so welcome. It took the entire ride back down to the atrium for her to regain her composure: she was grateful all over again for the lack of mirrors.

  ‘Everything go all right?’ Andy, the concierge, asked from his desk at the far side of the huge lobby. The desk was custom-made to blend into the walls, which were heavily textured, a rippling effect created by thousands of long strips of highly polished wood set at slight angles to each other, rising a hundred feet to the high glass pyramid at the top of the atrium. Light played entrancingly over the entire expanse; an Italian expert in lighting design had been paid a six-figure sum to conceive and coordinate the way the underwater lights of the huge central fountain and the carp pond echoed perfectly the gently pulsing stream of light that ran around the rim of the glass pyramid. High above, through the big glass panels, the December sky was cold and grey, but here, inside the warmly lit atrium, with the rippling sound of water flowing over the huge polished steel balls of the fountain and feeding invisibly into the koi pond, there was nothing but calm and serenity.

  ‘All good,’ she answered. ‘Patients doing fine.’

  ‘Do they want anything? Anything at all?’ Andy asked with the wistfulness of someone who knew there was no hope of a positive answer. He was, Aniela knew, a highly trained concierge, who had been poached from the W Hotel in Leicester Square specifically to look after the needs of some of the richest, most demanding clients in London. Though it would have been some people’s dream to be paid to do barely anything at all in the most luxurious surroundings imaginable, it was clear to Aniela that Andy was champing at the bit to be given a series of highly complicated and near-impossible tasks to perform.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, shrugging. ‘You know what the Clinic patients are like. They watch TV, they order food, that’s it.’

  ‘All I’ve done this week is organise shopping trips,’ Andy said gloomily. He was a very good-looking young man in his late twenties, with skin the colour of gleaming, red-brown chestnuts and a hundred-watt smile; it wasn’t in evidence now as he slumped back on his ergonomic leather chair, running his hands over his smooth, shaved scalp. ‘And they never want anything but the same old stuff, you know? I could put together a really fun tour – Borough Market, all these trendy little boutiques in Shoreditch, visits to designers’ ateliers... ’ He heaved a sigh. ‘But all they want is sodding Burberry, Aquascutum, and Harrods. And lunch at Harvey Nichols Fifth Floor. Thank God Mr Khalovsky’s due in today. I might actually get something to do.’

  Aniela grimaced at him sympathetically; she could identify with the frustration of someone eager to do a great job and blocked from doing so at every turn. Andy didn’t even get to perform the duties of a doorman, taking in packets, running the day-to-day life of the building; across the atrium was a much larger desk, at which a uniformed doorman was installed, and behind him was the office in which two security guards sat, monitoring the computer screens that showed every public area of Limehouse Reach.

  Nod
ding at the doorman, who was playing a game on his Nintendo below the level of the desk, as happy to be unoccupied as Andy was aggravated by it, Aniela walked over to the discreet, unmarked door on the left of the desk, and held the key card that hung from her neck on a lanyard up to the electronic entry panel. It beeped green and the door unlocked; she passed through, down an anonymous, carpeted corridor, and through a fire door at the far end.

  It led into the reception area of the Canary Clinic, which had been purpose-built to link into Limehouse Reach. Decorated in calming shades of sage green and off-whites, the reception desk a ripple of pale grey mosaic tiles, it spoke perfectly of affluence, discretion and the highest medical standards of hygiene and clinical excellence.

  The main door was locked, the Clinic empty of staff; there were no appointments scheduled now until the New Year. Aniela put her bag down on the reception desk and went through into the office behind it, where all the files were kept in the same pristine order with which the entire Clinic was run. Jon and Melody’s files were laid out on the white Formica table, where Aniela had gone through them that morning before her patient visits. Now she filled the kettle, dropped a bag of mint tea into a mug, added a dollop of honey, and prepared to settle down for an even more thorough reading of Jon’s extensive patient notes.

  There’s some mystery about this man. I’m sure of it. And maybe, if I look carefully enough, the answers will be in here.

  Jon

  What the hell just happened?

  If he hadn’t just had extensive reconstructive plastic surgery, Jon would have shaken his head in absolute disbelief at the encounter that had just taken place between him and the nurse.

  Jesus, did I take a whole bunch of painkillers by accident? Where the hell was my impulse control?

  He’d shown her his ability to isolate and move one particular tiny muscle after the other in series, something that he couldn’t remember having ever let anyone else see. He’d agreed with her when she commented that he must be an escapologist – no, even worse. She didn’t come up with that word. I did.

  I must have gone temporarily insane.

  Other people would have stood up, paced back and forth, their body restless as their mind worked out a complicated problem. But Jon didn’t move, not an inch. He sat there in complete stillness, feet planted on the ground, hands resting on his lap, as his brain raced, playing back the last thirty minutes, trying to figure out what had just gone on.

  There was something about her that made me let down my guard. I better figure out what the hell it was, because it damn well can’t happen again.

  It took a real feat of memory for Jon to think of the last time he’d let down his guard like that. Probably when I was nine or ten, showing Mac the squirrels I’d shot for dinner. Hella proud of myself, cause the deer jerky was all gone, and this meant we wouldn’t go hungry, Ma could do us a nice stew. And then he backhanded me right across the kitchen, because I’d taken the Winchester without telling him first, even though he was too damn drunk to tell him. Passed out on moonshine and Crystal Light.

  He hadn’t remembered that moment in a long time. He’d had a real smile on his face as he strutted into the kitchen, squirrels dangling from his belt, setting the Winchester down carefully in the corner of the kitchen, in the gun rack. Probably the last real smile I ever flashed, he thought grimly. Teeth all gappy and messed up. He’d been teased about his teeth mercilessly by the other recruits at Marine Corps basic training; no kid in the States had teeth that bad unless they’d grown up where Jon had, the backwoods of Appalachia, with no medical insurance, so no access to doctors, let alone dentists. Occasionally a charity would fly volunteer dentists into one of the most deprived areas, set up an emergency clinic, and backwoodsmen would come from all over, queuing for days, pitching tents to camp out in line. Mostly all the dentists could do was pull the diseased teeth with a bit of Novocaine for pain relief, but that was better than getting a relative to do it with pliers and no anaesthetic at all.

  The first thing Jon had done when he got some money was to get his teeth fixed. That was after they’d read his psych report and pulled him out of the Marines for much more specialised training than even they could provide, yanked him away from the San Diego boot camp before he graduated – before his name could be officially recorded as having passed out, he thought. Put me down as one of thousands of dropouts who couldn’t hack training, and flew me up to DC instead. Where they taught me all sorts of real useful and interesting skills. Evading capture, covert action. And how to kill people in about a thousand different ways.

  Evading capture.

  And I just told that nurse I was an escapologist.

  Not a muscle on his swollen, bruised face moved as he thought this over.

  Siobhan, the previous nurse, had been a cheerful, giggly Irish girl, her looks similar to the Appalachian Celts of whom Jon was one; the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia were almost entirely populated by Scots-Irish who had come over after the potato famine in Ireland, and ended up hardscrabble farming or working in the mines, suffering from black lung, poverty causing malnutrition, inbreeding congenital defects and diseases. But Aniela, he could tell by her accent, was Polish. Jon had travelled all over the world in his long career, and he’d turned out to have a good ear, could recognise most accents after hearing a few words. And he’d picked up a fair amount of vocabulary too. Aniela, he knew, meant ‘angel’. Impatiently, he pushed himself to his feet. This is a complete waste of time. Just keep your mouth shut tomorrow. Don’t volunteer any information at all. Let her do her job and get the hell out. And after I don’t need the dressings any more, she won’t need to come in at all. I can just lie low here, waiting for the bruising to go down.

  Jon had no intention of leaving Limehouse Reach until his new face had healed, until he could walk down a street without everyone turning to gawk at his injuries and speculating how he’d received them. His whole intention was to be as anonymous as possible, to fade into the background. That was how he had spent his entire adult life: fading into the background. No, even before that, he thought, walking over to the corner window, staring down at the river below. From when I was real small. Learning to curl into a ball when Mac was on a rampage, to stay out of his way. Slipping out into the woods when his back was turned, setting traps for groundhogs, taking the rifle as soon as I was strong enough to aim and fire, teaching myself to shoot.

  Knowing I’d have to provide for me and Ma, and Davey when he came along, ’cause all Mac’d do with the money he made from brewing moonshine was spend it on meth. The training Jon had given himself in his childhood, the rigorous discipline he had imposed on his young body and brain, holing up for hours on end in improvised shelters he had constructed, squirming through bracken and mud, moving into the perfect position and then waiting, soundlessly, for squirrels or – infinitely more precious prey – deer, had turned him into that most valuable of things to the Army: a born sniper. He had nailed the target shooting at the Recruit Training Depot at San Diego, racking up hundred-per-cent scores, making him of immediate interest to the brass, who had pulled him out of basic and put him through a series of psychological tests. He’d been interviewed by an Army doctor with the rank of major, a staff sergeant and a quiet woman in civilian clothes who didn’t say much, just tossed out the occasional random question that he didn’t see the point of, but answered anyway. He told them the absolute truth about almost everything: his one big secret he held back, as he always would. But whatever he had said had got him on a plane to DC that very evening, and then upstate to a secret CIA facility that specialised in black ops. Jon was on the fast track: he’d been headhunted, and gradually he realised why. The Army wanted to make him into an assassin.

  And he let them. The team surrounding him, his CIA handlers and the ex-Army men and women who trained him and the couple of others who’d come in with him, handpicked from the latest batch of recruits, were the only people ever to take an interest in him, ever to think t
hat he might be talented.

  Interesting. Unique, even. And Jon, deprived of any affection since birth, barely educated, malnourished, responded to that interest like a parched flower finally given water: he drank up eagerly everything they had to teach him. He was the fastest learner the programme had ever had. For ten years, he trusted his handlers implicitly, did whatever they said: went where they sent him, killed whoever they told him to kill, asked no questions.

  Until they pushed me too far. Asked me to take out a whole damn family.

  And when that had happened, he’d used all the skills he’d learned from them to drop permanently off their radar. You didn’t leave the Unit, ever. There was no resignation process; there couldn’t be. Its members simply knew too much to be allowed to quit.

  Jon had faked his own death, and found a plastic surgeon willing to give him a new facial identity. But I didn’t know what to do next, he thought, watching the boats pass on the Thames below, the regular river clipper, whose schedule he knew perfectly by now. It was part of his training to be able to register every little detail of his surroundings, file them away in his subconscious, so that any break in a pattern would make him instantly alert.

  So I just went on using the only skill I had. The one Uncle Sam spent a whole hell of a lot of time and money teaching me. Drew Mackenzie, as he’d been then, had enlisted at seventeen. At twenty-seven, Drew Mackenzie died in a car crash and Gregory Cunningham was born. Gregory Cunningham set himself up as a hired gun, a hitman. And he was a damn sight more careful about choosing his targets than the CIA ever was, Jon thought with a rare flash of a savagery he did his best to suppress. But even with careful selection of targets, even making sure the only people he took out from now on were bad guys – drug dealers, kidnappers, rapists, killers – after seven busy and very lucrative years of hard work, Gregory Cunningham had found himself increasingly reluctant to take a life, even if his own were under threat.