FORTY
WHEN WE GOT close I started to recognize some of what we had seen from the minicab, the second one, the one properly pre-booked on the telephone. I had seen some of the streets before, suburban but compressed, a little busier and narrower and faster than they really wanted to be. I remembered some of the stores, even. Carpets, cell phones, chickens, cheeseburgers, kebabs. And then the sudden green space, and the fine old house, and the crazy wall, still shouldering London aside after all these years.
The same squat tough guy was on duty at the gate, with his Kevlar vest and his sub-machine gun. Bennett nodded to him, and the guy took a step towards the gate, but his gaze fell on me, and he came back and said, ‘You’re the gentleman with the guidebook. Sixpence to see the grounds. Welcome back, sir.’ Then he set off again and opened up. No radio check, no paperwork. No badge. Just a nod and a wink. The guy was in combat gear, basically, but it was blue, and it had Metropolitan Police on it here and there, embroidered on tapes and silk-screened on Kevlar, subdued order, with black thread and black ink, plus monochrome versions of their helmet shields, like corporate branding, so I had no doubt the guy was a cop, but equally I had no doubt Bennett wasn’t, yet Bennett was nodding and winking and the guy was hopping right to it.
It’s all pretty fluid at the moment.
We drove the length of the driveway, and parked on the gravel near the door, where there was another armed policeman on duty. The house jutted in and out in places, where afterthought additions and extensions had been tacked on, but it was basically rectangular, much wider than it was deep. Not that it would be cramped from front to back. Far from it. I was sure it would be plenty spacious. But the proportions were dominated by the long, scattershot facade. No question about that. The place looked like four shoeboxes laid end to end. Maybe oak trunks long enough for front-to-back rafters were hard to find in Queen Elizabeth’s time. Her dad had just built the Royal Navy. Lots of oak ships. Whole forests had been cut down.
We got out of the car, and Bennett nodded to the second cop, who nodded back, and then Bennett hustled us inside, impatiently, like he was embarrassed to be seen with us in public. Or maybe he was worried about rifle sights. Maybe he didn’t want to stand next to me in the open. He had survived Paris, and he didn’t want to get nailed in London.
The door was most of a tree, nearly five hundred years old, banded with iron and studded with nail heads as big as golf balls. Inside I saw dark panelling, almost black with age, waxed and gleaming, a worn flagstone floor, and a huge limestone fireplace. There were oak settles and tapestry chairs, and electric bulbs in iron candelabra. There were oil portraits of solemn-faced men in Tudor costumes. Bennett took a right-hand corridor, and we followed him, ultimately into a room that had been modernized with white paint and an acoustic ceiling. Beyond it was another room, similar, but smaller, with a large door in its end wall.
Bennett said, ‘That’s the side entrance. That’s where your president’s tent will be. We imagine they’ll all use it. From there they can come through here, with secure onward access to anywhere they need to be. Every room has natural light, but they’re all big, and all seating is in the centre, so in no case does anyone need to get close enough to the windows to be visible from outside. The impromptu walks on the lawn and the photograph are the only points of weakness.’
We walked back the way we had come, but we took a right-hand turn well before we got to the hallway, into another corridor, this one with a creaky wide-plank floor, which led to a narrow room laid out left to right in front of us, which had nothing in its far wall except French doors, not at all correct for the period, all glass from top to bottom, with the patio beyond.
Bennett said, ‘They use this like an anteroom. They come in, they line up, they count heads, they make sure they’re not leaving someone locked in the bathroom. Then they step out.’
I stood there for a second, where they would, as if I was one of them, and I looked ahead through the glass. We were right of centre, in terms of the building’s symmetry, and the patio was built in a gentle curve, which meant we would be stepping out somewhat to the side of the deepest part. Which was OK. It would make the collegial cluster look geometrically authentic, rather than politically desperate. And it meant the shallow steps to the lawn were slightly closer, which would give the short guys less distance to hustle the tall guys. Presumably the photographers would be penned to the right, which meant the house would be at an angle in the background, which was better than a head-on brick wall, like a mug shot.
I put my hand on the handle, and I wondered if I had sold them short, by imagining their forced guffaws and their fake bewilderment, at having to change gears so quickly. Maybe it wasn’t fake. In the tent, in the side door, through the secure access, not close to a window, these guys lived with close-order security every minute of their lives, maybe to the point where stepping out to an open-air patio was indeed a bewildering thing to do. Stepping out, shuffling slowly, head high, eyes nowhere except on some other guy equally scared, then standing still, facing front, chest out, smiling, not moving, a high sky above, and who knows what in the distance.
It’s not the same with a sniper out there.
I opened the door, and I stepped out, and I stood still.
The early morning air was cold and a little damp. Underfoot the patio was made of mid-grey stone, which was worn with age and smoothed by rain. I walked to the exact centre of the paved area, and I stood straight and faced front, and then I turned half left and stared in that direction, and then back to the right, and then I walked slowly forward to the lip of the steps to the lawn, like a diver at the edge of the board, and I stood with my hands behind me, chest out, head high, like I was in a photograph, or in front of a firing squad.
Ahead of me was a broad sweep of lawn, and then the back wall, and then a scrubby piece of common land, and then a safety fence, and then the M25 motorway, which could have been eight lanes at that point, rushing right and left in the far distance. And right there and then I abandoned Bennett’s motorway idea. No just-in-time delivery. Not a viable location. Traffic was fast and heavy. Heavy in the sense of flow and per-minute density, and heavy literally. Some of the trucks were huge, and the biggest were in the inside lane, and they were all going fast, immense rushing bludgeons through the air. Trees far beyond the shoulder were thrashing about. A parked truck would be battered by slipstream. A platform built high inside would feel it badly. It would rock and judder, more or less continuously, with peaks and troughs at unpredictable intervals. Range would be about three-quarters of a mile, which meant a rock or a judder worth the thickness of a dime would see them miss the house altogether. Not a smart spot. Dismissed.
But could a parked truck let two guys out, to make their own way forward?
No point. There were no viable firing positions anywhere between the house and the motorway. None at all, short of propping a ladder against the back wall, and aiming over it. Which would be discouraged, no doubt, probably by squat tough guys in Kevlar vests.
All safe dead ahead.
In which respect the pizza-slice shape of the site was a bonus. It meant the safe zone was not just dead ahead. It curved around sideways, and generously, both directions, to my left and my right, in a big, empty sweep, from maybe ten on a clock face all the way around to two.
The pizza-slice shape also meant the streets flanking us were not parallel. They ran away from us, one to the left and one to the right, like the spines in a fan. Which was good, at first glance. It meant the more distant the house, the more extremely oblique its line of sight would get, to the point where maybe we could eliminate some buildings altogether. A sniper could hardly hang out a window and aim more or less parallel to the glass, like riding sidesaddle.
But at second glance it was too good, because the angle exposed us to just as many side windows as front windows. You win some, and you lose some. I checked everything I could see, on the north side first, then the south, from about eight hundred yards out to sixteen hundred, which was thousands and thousands of windows, most of them winking the dawn sun back at me, in a ragged linear sequence, with moving spots of pink, first one street, and then a jump to the next, as if the neighbourhood had been built by ancient astronomers for solar celebrations.
In the end I figured the south side was worse than the north. It was denser, and on balance it had taller buildings. I picked one out at random, about fifteen hundred yards away, most of a mile, a tiny thumbnail, a tall, narrow house, red brick and handsome, with a steeply pitched roof. It looked like it had all kinds of attic rooms. And maybe actual attics. A dislodged roof tile would work as well as an open window. I pictured John Kott, prone on a flattened bedroll, on a board laid across rafters above a top-floor plaster ceiling, with a chink of light ahead of him, where a tile had been slipped sideways, unnoticeable from the outside, too high, and just one of many. We had gales last winter, Bennett had said, in his sing-song voice.
I pictured Kott’s eye, patient and unblinking behind the scope, the inch-wide crack in the roof giving him twenty yards side to side, at the far end of the deal. I pictured his finger on the trigger, relaxed but ready to squeeze, through the slack, pausing, then moving again, like clicking a tiny mechanical switch, the quiet tick of a precision component, causing an immense chemical explosion, the recoil bucking, the bullet launching on its long, long journey. More than three whole seconds in the air, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, half an inch wide, like a human thumb, flying like a missile, straight and true, subject only to the immutable effects of gravity and elevation and temperature and humidity and wind and the curvature of the earth. I stared at the distant house and counted three long seconds in my head and tried to picture the bullet’s flight. It seemed as if I should be able to see it coming. Straight at me. Like a tiny dot, getting bigger.
Flash one thousand two thousand three thousand game over.
Which is when I knew.
More than three whole seconds in the air.
FORTY-ONE
I WAS A lot faster getting back into the anteroom than I had been getting out of it. Bennett was watching me, and I asked him, ‘The bulletproof glass in Paris was new, right?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Improved, anyway.’
‘Do you know anything about it?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Other than it’s glass, and, well, bulletproof.’
‘I need to know everything about it. Who designed it, who researched it, who funded it, who manufactured it, who tested it, and who signed off on it.’
‘We already thought of that.’
‘Thought of what?’
‘Borrowing the shields and flying them in from Paris. Putting one either side. They’re not very wide, but given the way the streets run, they would reduce the field of fire by about ten per cent each. But we decided against it. Politicians are civilians. They’d cower behind the shields. Subconsciously, maybe, but it wouldn’t look good. And they couldn’t stay there for ever. Which would give the bad guys the other eighty per cent to aim at anyway. So all in all we thought it would be a net loss.’
‘That wasn’t what I was thinking of. All I need is the information. On the quiet, if you can. No need to make a whole big thing out of it. Pretend it was just you and me. Like a private venture, outside of the mainstream. Like a hobby. But fast.’
‘How fast?’
‘Fast as you can.’
‘What does the bulletproof glass have to do with anything? We’re not going to use it. I told you that.’
‘Maybe I want to use it myself. Maybe I want to ask if they sell direct to the public.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘It’s a side venture, Mr Bennett. Just a small inquiry. Nothing to do with anything. But fast, OK? And face to face only. Nothing on paper. Nothing up the chain. Understood? Like a hobby.’
He nodded, and glanced back at the corridor, which presumably led to other corridors, and staircases, and rooms, and he said, ‘Do you need to see anything else?’
‘No, we’re done here,’ I said. ‘We’re leaving, never to return. Like the Darby family, after all those years, when the motorway was built. No more Wallace Court for us.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s never going to get this far.’
‘You sure?’
‘Hundred per cent.’
He didn’t answer.
‘You said that would be a favourable outcome. You said we were supposed to help each other. You said that’s how it’s supposed to work.’
He said, ‘It is.’
‘Then relax. Trust me. Crack a smile. It’s never going to get this far.’
He didn’t crack a smile.
We drove back to the hotel, snarled all the way in traffic, maybe the peak of the morning rush, an hour or so after sunrise, or maybe just after the peak, but bad enough anyway. The immense sprawling city was still packing them in, but only just, and very slowly. We got back to Park Lane two hours after we left it, three-quarters of which had been spent in the car. Worse than LA.
Bennett gave his keys to the valet, just like a regular person, and we all three rode up to the top-floor restaurant, where we figured the breakfast service would still be running. We got a booth behind a structural pillar. Worse view, but better privacy. Bennett spent a lot of time tapping on his phone. He said he was ordering stuff up for us, including large-scale government maps, and an architect’s blueprint still held by the zoning authority, and three sets of aerial images, one taken from a space satellite, and another from an accidentally-on-purpose-off-course sightseeing helicopter, and a third from an unknown source, which he said had to mean an American drone, except officially there were no American drones in Britain, which was why it was labelled an unknown source. He said his people would load what we needed on a secure tablet computer, and bring it to the hotel.
Then he said, ‘We can’t afford collateral damage. Not there. Some people on that street are innocent members of the public. Not many, but a few. Which is a shame. We could have taken care of this long ago. We could have planted a bomb and called it a gas leak.’
Then he left, but Nice and I lingered a little, over coffee in my case, and small bites of toast in hers, and she asked, ‘Why are you all of a sudden so interested in the bulletproof glass?’
‘Just a theory,’ I said.
‘Something I should know about?’
‘Not yet. It doesn’t change what we have to do next.’
‘Will Bennett get that information for you?’
‘I think so.’
‘Why? Does he owe you a favour now? Did I miss something?’
‘It’s a brother soldier thing. You should try it. You’d be happier.’
‘Is he British Army?’
‘Think about that fluid thing he keeps on talking about. It can only mean they’ve put special units together. The best of the best. All the different agencies, like an All-Star team. Who would lead such a thing?’
‘They would all want to.’
‘Exactly. So much so their heads would explode if they didn’t. But whose head would explode the worst? Who’s bringing the gun to the knife fight, in terms of exploding heads?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘The SAS. They don’t like their own officers. They certainly aren’t going to work for someone else’s. Easiest just to put them in charge. Which is obviously what they did. Which was a good move. Because they know best anyway. Plus they think they have a dog in the fight. The renegade, Carson. Bennett wants him just as much as I want Kott.’
‘Bennett is SAS?’
‘No question.’
‘What do we have to do next?’
‘Get into Joey’s house.’
‘Into it?’
‘I’d prefer to make them come out. But that’s hard to do. In fact it’s a tactical question that has never really been answered. We studied it in the classroom. Easy enough to make sure they never come out, but that’s not the issue. How do you make them come out of there voluntarily? No one knows. No one ever has. I remember my dad studying it, when we were kids. With stuff like that, he used to involve us. With questions afterwards. My brother Joe came up with a huge machine like a gigantic subwoofer, blasting infrasonic waves at them, real low frequencies at a real high volume, because he said it was believed by some scientists that modern humans had a low tolerance for such a thing.’
‘What was your answer?’
‘Bear in mind I was younger than him.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said set the house on fire. Because I was damn sure modern humans had a low tolerance for that. I figured they’d come on out, sooner or later.’
‘Are we going to set Joey’s house on fire?’
‘It’s an option, obviously.’
‘What are our other options?’
‘They all involve taking Joey out of there and dealing with him separately. Ahead of time. Before we do anything else. Because in that case, back at the ranch, we would see a leadership vacuum. Which we could exploit.’
‘As in, we would be fighting a less effective enemy.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But we would be fighting somebody.’
‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’
‘You said they wouldn’t fight on for free. Because they’re unemployed now. You said they would disappear.’
‘Hope for the best, plan for the worst.’
‘Which is it going to be?’
‘It’s going to be the same thing it always is.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Somewhere in between.’
The tablet computer showed up an hour later. Bennett’s people brought it. The computer looked very modern, and the people looked the way such people have always looked, which was surprisingly normal, but not completely. One was a man and one was a woman, both of them a long way past their rookie years, both of them quiet and contained and competent, and neither one visibly unhappy with their short-straw courier assignment. Good team players, obviously. Only the best for the best. They said normally they would ask us to sign for the delivery, given the sensitivity of the contents, but on this occasion Mr Bennett had waived the requirement. They said the computer required two passwords. They said the passwords were Ms Nice’s mother’s Social Security number, and the name of the prisoner Mr Reacher shot while attempting to escape. The passwords were case-sensitive, and could be entered one time only. No three-strikes-and-you’re-out with British software.
Then they left.
We took the tablet to Nice’s room. It was like half of a laptop computer. No keyboard. Just a screen. A blank screen. Nice said, ‘You remember his name, right?’
‘I remember both their names,’ I said.
‘But I assume the password is the first one. The main man.’
‘The target.’
‘Yes, him. Or was the other one attempting to escape also?’
‘Actually he was the only one attempting to escape. The target was already down. He didn’t see me coming.’
‘Which one were you investigated for?’
‘The second one, technically.’
‘Did people talk about the case?’
‘Not if they wanted to live. It was about the assassination of an American citizen on American soil.’
‘But if they had talked about it, what would they have called it? The case as a whole, I mean, like the John Doe thing, or whatever.’
‘Definitely the first guy.’
‘Who was the target. And Mr Bennett is British, and therefore ironic. Which means we can assume his mention of the escape was tongue-in-cheek. Which all focuses back to the target. Which was the first guy. Which is the name we should use.’
‘First or last?’
‘Has to be last. This was the U.S. Army, correct?’
‘Or code name?’
‘He had a code name?’
‘He had two. One from us, and one from the Iraqis.’
She said, ‘Do you wake up in a sweat about it?’
‘About what?’
‘That operation.’
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘But if you did, what name would you call him? Like, I shouldn’t have done that bad thing to whoever.’
‘You think it was a bad thing?’
‘It wasn’t helping old ladies across the street to the library in Africa.’
‘You’re as bad as Scarangello. We need to get you out of there and into the army before it’s too late.’
‘What was his name?’
I said, ‘Tell me about your mother.’
‘What about her?’
‘You know her Social Security number?’
‘I help her with her paperwork. She’s sick at the moment.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘She has a brain tumour. It won’t go away. She can’t think straight. I deal with insurance and disability and things like that. I know her details better than mine, probably.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘She must be young.’
‘Too young for this.’
‘Do you have brothers or sisters?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s just me.’
I said, ‘Would the average person know her mother’s Social Security number?’
‘I don’t know. Did you know yours?’
‘I don’t think so. Do you visit your mother?’
‘As often as I can.’
‘In downstate Illinois? That’s a lot of flying.’
‘It keeps me busy.’
‘Plus you worry when you can’t get there, I guess. Like now.’
‘Nothing I can do.’
‘When did she get the diagnosis?’
‘Two years ago.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, for the third time.
She said, ‘It is what it is.’
‘When did Tony Moon start going to the doctor?’
‘It’s not connected.’
‘You absolutely sure about that?’
‘My mother isn’t here now.’
‘But you’re thinking about her.’
‘A little.’
‘And therefore feeling a little anxious.’
‘Not about her. It’s not connected.’
I said nothing.
She said, ‘I have one pill left.’
‘You took one?’
‘Last night. I had to sleep.’
I said, ‘Do your bosses know about your mother?’
She nodded. ‘It’s a requirement. Family situations must be reported. They’ve been very supportive about it. They keep me free on weekends whenever they can.’
‘So there’s a human resources file somewhere at Langley, recording the fact that your mother is sick and you’re taking care of business for her. Which has to be confidential. Because everything at the CIA is confidential. And there’s another file somewhere in the Pentagon, recording the name of a guy I shot in the head twenty years ago. Which I know for damn sure is confidential. But somehow MI5 in London got access to both files, to come up with unbreakable passwords for us. They’re like DNA, or fingerprints.’
She nodded again. ‘Mr Bennett’s hacking theories might be true. In which case he’s showing off.’
‘Unless O’Day showed him the files.’
‘Why would he do that?’
‘That’s a question we’ll ask Bennett.’
‘What was your guy’s name?’
‘Archibald,’ I said.
‘That’s the kind of name you don’t hear often.’
‘Lowland Scottish,’ I said. ‘Via Old French and Old High German. The third Earl of Douglas was called Archibald the Grim. No such romance in my case. My guy was called Archibald the worthless piece of shit.’
She held down a button and the screen lit up with a dialog box. She dabbed it with a fingertip and a cursor started blinking on the line, and a picture of a keyboard came up below it. She typed Archibald, nine letters, with a capital A and the rest in lower case. She checked it for spelling, A-r-c-h-i-b-a-l-d, and then she looked at me with eyebrows raised, and I nodded a confirmation, and she touched Submit, and there was a pause, and then a green check mark appeared at the end of the typed name, and the dialog box rolled away, and was replaced by a second box that looked just the same. She dabbed a button that changed the keyboard letters to numbers, and she typed three digits, and a hyphen, and two more digits, and another hyphen, and then four more digits. She checked it over, and touched Submit, and the green check mark showed again, and the dialog box rolled away, and was replaced by ranks of thumbnail images.