Part 4 (1/2)
A woman's or teenage boy's, to judge from the stature. There wasn't much else to go on, since, clearly, death had occurred months ago. He bent down and probed with his long fingernails.
This enjoyable examination confirmed the corpse was a woman's.
Staring at the loosening skin, the protruding bones, the insect and animal work on what was left of the flesh, Hydt felt his heart quicken. He said to the two workers, 'You'll keep this to yourselves.'
They'll keep quiet.
'Yes, sir.'
'Of course, sir.'
'Wait over there.'
They trotted away. Hydt glanced at Dennison, who nodded that they'd behave themselves. Hydt didn't doubt it. He ran Green Way more like a military base than a rubbish tip and recycling yard. Security was tight mobile phones were banned, all outgoing communications monitored and discipline harsh. But, in compensation, Severan Hydt paid his people very, very well. A lesson of history was that professional soldiers stuck around far longer than amateurs, provided you had the money. And that particular commodity was never in short supply at Green Way. Disposing of what people no longer wanted had always been, and would forever be, a profitable endeavour.
Alone now, Hydt crouched beside the body.
The discovery of human remains here happened with some frequency. Sometimes workers in the construction debris and reclamation division of Green Way would find Victorian bones or desiccated skeletons in building foundations. Or a corpse was that of a homeless person, dead from exposure to the elements, drink or drugs, hurled unceremoniously upon the bin liners. Sometimes it was a murder victim in which case the killers were usually polite enough to bring the body here directly.
Hydt never reported the deaths. The presence of the police was the last thing he wanted.
Besides, why should he give up such a treasure?
He eased closer to the body, knees pressing against what was left of the woman's jeans. The smell of decay like bitter, wet cardboard would be unpleasant to most people but discard had been Hydt's lifelong profession and he was no more repulsed by it than a garage mechanic is troubled by the scent of grease or an abattoir worker the odour of blood and viscera.
Dennison, the foreman, however, stood back some distance from the perfume.
With one of his jaundiced fingernails, Hydt reached forward and stroked the top of the skull, from which most of the hair was missing, then the jaw, the finger bones, the first to be exposed. Her nails too were long, though not because they had grown after her death, which was a myth; they simply appeared longer because the flesh beneath them had shrunk.
He studied his new friend for a long moment, then reluctantly eased back. He looked at his watch. He pulled his iPhone from his pocket and took a dozen pictures of the corpse.
Then he glanced around him. He pointed to a deserted spot between two large mounds over landfills, like barrows holding phalanxes of fallen soldiers. 'Tell the men to bury it there.'
'Yes, sir,' Dennison replied.
As he walked back to the people-carrier, he said, 'Not too deep. And leave a marker. So I'll be able to find it again.'
Half an hour later Hydt was in his office, scrolling through the pictures he'd taken of the corpse, lost in the images, sitting at the three-hundred-year-old gaol door mounted on legs that was his desk. Finally he slipped the phone away and turned his dark eyes to other matters. And there were many. Green Way was one of the world leaders in the disposal, reclamation and recycling of discard.
The office was s.p.a.cious and dimly lit, located on the top storey of Green Way's headquarters, an old meat-processing factory, dating to 1896, renovated and turned into what interior design magazines might call shabby chic.
On the walls were architectural relics from buildings his company had demolished: scabby painted frames around cracked stained gla.s.s, concrete gargoyles, wildlife, effigies, mosaics. St George and the dragon were represented several times. St Joan, too. On one large bas-relief Zeus, operating undercover as a swan, had his way with beautiful Leda.
Hydt's secretary came and went with letters for his signature, reports for him to read, memos to approve, financial statements to consider. Green Way was doing extremely well. At a recycling-industry conference Hydt had once joked that the adage about certainty in life should not be limited to the well-known two. People had to pay taxes, they had to die . . . and they had to have their discard collected and disposed of.
His computer chimed and he called up an encrypted email from a colleague out of the country. It was about an important meeting tomorrow, Tuesday, confirming times and locations. The last line stirred him: The number of dead tomorrow will be significant - close to 100. Hope that suits.
It did indeed. And the desire that had arisen within him when he'd first gazed at the body in the skip churned all the hotter.
He glanced up as a slim woman in her mid-sixties entered, wearing a dark trouser suit and black s.h.i.+rt. Her hair was white, cut in a businesswoman's bob. A large, unadorned diamond hung from a platinum chain around her narrow neck, and similar stones, though in more complex arrangements, graced her wrists and several fingers.
'I've approved the proofs.' Jessica Barnes was an American. She'd come from a small town outside Boston; the regional lilt continued, charmingly, to tint her voice. A beauty queen years ago, she'd met Hydt when she was a hostess at a smart New York restaurant. They'd lived together for several years and to keep her close he'd hired her to review Green Way's advertis.e.m.e.nts, another endeavour Hydt had little respect for or interest in. He'd been told, however, that she'd made some good decisions from time to time with regard to the company's marketing efforts.
But as Hydt gazed at her, he saw that something about her was different today.
He found himself studying her face. That was it. His preference, insistence, was that she wore only black and white and kept her face free of make-up; today she had on some very faint blush and perhaps he couldn't quite be certain some lipstick. He didn't frown but she saw the direction of his eyes and s.h.i.+fted a bit, breathing a little differently. Her fingers started towards a cheek. She stopped her hand.
But the point had been made. She proffered the ads. 'Do you want to look at them?'
'I'm sure they're fine,' he said.
'I'll send them off.' She left his office, her destination not the marketing department, Hydt knew, but the cloakroom where she would wash her face.
Jessica was not a foolish woman; she'd learned her lesson.
Then she was gone from his thoughts. He stared out of the window at his new destructor. He was very aware of the event coming up on Friday, but at the moment he couldn't get tomorrow out of his head.
The number of dead . . . close to 100.
His gut twisted pleasantly.
It was then that his secretary announced on the intercom, 'Mr Dunne's here, sir.'
'Ah, good.'
A moment later, Niall Dunne entered and swung the door shut so that the two were alone. The c.u.mbersome man's trapezoid face had rarely flickered with emotion in the nine months they'd known each other. Severan Hydt had little use for most people and no interest in social niceties. But Dunne chilled even him.
'Now, what happened over there?' Hydt asked. After the incident in Serbia, Dunne had said they should keep their phone conversations to a minimum.
The man turned his pale blue eyes to Hydt and explained in his Belfast accent that he and Karic, the Serbian contact, had been surprised by several men at least two BIA Serbian intelligence officers masquerading as police and a Westerner, who'd told the Serbian agent he was with the European Peacekeeping and Monitoring Group.
Hydt frowned. 'It's-'
'There is no such group,' Dunne said calmly. 'It had to be a private operation. There was no back-up, no central communications, no medics. The Westerner probably bribed the intelligence officers to help him. It is the Balkans, after all. May have been a compet.i.tor.' He added, 'Maybe one of your partners or a worker here let slip something about the plan.'
He was referring to Gehenna, of course. They did everything they could to keep the project secret but a number of people around the world were involved; it wasn't impossible that there'd been a leak and some crime syndicate was interested in learning more about it.
Dunne continued, 'I don't want to minimise the risk they were pretty clever. But it wasn't a major co-ordinated effort. I'm confident we can go forward.'
Dunne handed Hydt a mobile phone. 'Use this one for our conversations. Better encryption.'
Hydt examined it. 'Did you get a look at the Westerner?'
'No. There was a lot of smoke.'
'And Karic?'