FORTY-TWO
THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT maps would have been great if we wanted to fix a sewer line or lay fibre optic cable. They showed plenty of subterranean detail, under the sidewalks, and under the road itself. In the movies we would have found a storm drain, about as wide as my shoulders, that ran under Joey’s kitchen floor, and I would have climbed down into it two streets away, and inched along, until a sudden thunderstorm threatened to drown me before I got where I was going. It would have been a tense sequence, but in reality there was no storm drain. There was nothing wider than my wrist. Gas line, phone line, electricity supply, water main, and sewer pipe. The house itself was shown as nothing more than the grateful recipient of those public utilities. It was drawn as a large blank rectangle, with no interior detail at all.
The leftover architect’s blueprint from the zoning office was better. It was printed small, but Nice stroked her fingertips over the computer screen and made it bigger, and then moved it around, so we could examine each separate area in detail. Or we could pretend it was us moving, not the plan, and take miniature walks through the house, from room to room, and up and down the stairs. The plan was covered in the architect’s handwriting. Which looked like every other architect’s handwriting. Maybe handwriting was a required credit in architect school. But the words the guy had written were plain and simple. He was giving us the structural details. Wood, metal, brick, plaster, and glass. Which was good to know. Almost every component listed was custom made. Which made sense. If you need a three-foot door, you go to the store. Four feet six, you call whatever old guys are still in their workshops. The 50 per cent hike in dimensions must have put 10,000 per cent on the tab.
The house had two levels only. No habitable attic, and no basement. There were bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs, plus a separate self-contained guest suite, which had bedrooms and bathrooms all its own, plus a living room attached. Downstairs had a kitchen, and a breakfast room, and a dining room, and many other rooms, variously labelled as living rooms, or nooks, or parlours, or libraries, or studies, or offices. At first sight the floor plan looked intimate, even cosy, until you remembered how big it all was. The nooks were as big as anyone else’s living rooms. And half as tall again, presumably. Like museum halls, at night. Not vast, but not human scaled, either, and badly lit, and echoing.
Casey Nice said, ‘Do you see a way in?’
I said, ‘We don’t have an armoured vehicle. Therefore we’re pretty much limited to the doors and the windows.’
‘Which will be wired for alarms.’
‘Which will be redundant. They won’t need a bell on the roof to tell them we’re there.’
‘Which is where, exactly? In a house with four remaining guards and two world-class killers? Who collectively outnumber us three to one? In a structure much easier to defend than attack?’
‘Assuming those questions were rhetorical, I think that’s a fair summary.’
‘How long would it take to build a giant subwoofer?’
‘I should have bought cigarette lighters, when I bought that shopping bag.’
She said, ‘Seriously. I spent time at Fort Benning. They’d tell us we need to rethink this thing from zero minus about a hundred hours.’
‘Who would?’
‘The instructors.’
‘Who all lived long enough to become instructors by improvising every single step of the way. They know plans are useless.’
‘Reacher, we have to have a plan.’
I said, ‘Let’s take a look at the aerial photographs.’
The aerial photographs were in one sense amazing, in that they were all pin sharp, rock solid, high definition colour images, whether taken from a satellite many miles above the earth, or a silent drone too high to be seen, or a lurching helicopter a thousand feet up. In another sense they were useless, because they showed us no more than we had seen for ourselves through the night-vision binoculars. The same nothing, but from a different angle. There was a note against the helicopter shots saying the house had not been the primary focus of the mission. The focus was supposed to have been a meeting over drinks in the garden. Those pictures were included, for reference, and showed nothing but three men throwing their arms up over their heads. But by accident the coverage of the house was the best of the three. We could see all four walls pretty well. Doors, windows, points of strength and weakness. Of which there was more strength than weakness, overall. It was not an easy target, even before worrying about who or what was inside.
I said, ‘We’ll figure something out. We have plenty of time. We have to deal with Joey first anyway.’
She said, ‘Do you have a plan for that, at least?’
‘What I did last time worked pretty well. Imagine if we had been out there in that parking lot. Behind the little supermarket. In the shadows. We couldn’t have missed.’
‘You want to do that again?’
‘I don’t want to. Feel free to come up with alternative ideas.’
‘Would it even work again?’
‘Good point. Probably not with a guy the same level as before. Joey might smell a rat. We’re going to have to invoke his elaborate courtesies. We need to find someone he can’t stay away from.’
‘Like who?’
‘Old Charlie White would be favourite. But I imagine he’s taking extra precautions. So I guess we should look at either Tommy Miller or Billy Thompson. Which might spark some kind of infighting, possibly. Some kind of internecine conflict, over the spoils. In which case maybe all three of the others would show up at the scene, just to keep an eye on each other. In which case we could give the Romford Boys a real serious leadership vacuum.’
‘Joey has to be the priority.’
‘He will be. But if there are targets of opportunity after he’s down, we should be prepared to react accordingly.’
‘I should clear it with General O’Day.’
‘Go right ahead. But first text Bennett and ask him what kind of security Miller and Thompson use. As in, the same as Joey, or better, or worse? And explain why we’re asking.’
She found her phone, and her thumbs started dancing. I heard the sound of her first text leaving, a comic noise, like a cartoon character slipping on a banana skin, and then she continued typing, on and on. The update for O’Day, I was sure. Full and complete compliance. O’Day had that kind of effect on people. I started thinking about bulletproof glass again, and I asked her, ‘Did you tell O’Day we were headed for Wallace Court this morning?’
She said, ‘It’s in the first paragraph here.’
‘No, I mean, did you tell him ahead of time, that we would be there in the future?’
She slowed her thumbs, and spoke slowly, too, talking and typing all at once. She said, ‘No, not ahead of time. I wasn’t sure we would actually go. Because I wasn’t sure why we would want to. So all in all I figured a retrospective report would work better.’
‘OK,’ I said. She sped up again, and I watched her. Eventually she stopped typing, and read it all through, and sent it, with the same banana-skin noise. I asked her, ‘Do we have addresses for Miller and Thompson?’
‘They weren’t in the bios,’ she said.
‘Then text Bennett again. I’m sure he knows.’
The next hour was mostly texting, back and forth with Bennett and O’Day, asking and answering questions, and stockpiling data. Miller and Thompson lived in Chigwell too, four streets from each other, and four streets from Joey. No operational reason. Simply that Chigwell was where you went when you made money in Romford. Their security arrangements were the same as Joey’s too, at least on paper. They each had a driver and four bodyguards. Three rotations a day. Miller had a new-model Range Rover, black, and Thompson had a new-model Range Rover Sport, also black. As good as Bentleys, according to many. Three lieutenants, all treated the same. At least on paper. But Bennett said in fact the people assigned to Miller and Thompson were second-rate. Little Joey got the pick of the litter. Partly because he was Little Joey, and partly because Miller and Thompson were bureaucrats. Vital, but not at the heart of the action. Hence a whole different dynamic. Between the two of them, there was nothing to choose. Either one would be a target of equal softness.
‘Comparatively, I suppose,’ Casey Nice said.
I said, ‘We need a vehicle.’
‘General Shoemaker gave us credit cards. We could rent one.’
‘Not a good idea. Too much paperwork.’
‘Maybe Mr Bennett would lend us one.’
‘I’m sure his are all fitted with satellite trackers, in which case he’d be worried about subpoenas.’
‘So how?’
‘Second choice would be steal one. But ideally we should find another pair of foot soldiers and take their panel van. That would buy us a couple of seconds, with Miller or Thompson. They wouldn’t see the threat right away. We’d look like their own people. At least at first.’
‘So that’s two attacks we’re making, not one.’
‘With two more still to go,’ I said. ‘The foot soldiers, then Miller or Thompson, then Little Joey Green, then whoever is still holed up in his house.’
‘So we have to survive four separate times. How likely is that?’
‘Like the World Series. A big ask, but someone does it every year.’
‘It’s a total of eighteen people.’
‘Twenty. You’re forgetting the drivers. Miller and Thompson have one, and Joey has one. But it’s not twenty all at once. That’s the good news here. Maximum of six at a time, when we get to the big names, with the driver each and the four bodyguards.’
‘Some of which are the pick of the litter, standing in front of a guy nearly seven feet tall.’
‘We can aim over their heads.’
‘This seems crazy to me.’
‘Because you aren’t quite sure what to expect. To which I say what?’
She thought back, and repeated it straight up. She had a good memory for words. She said, ‘You say no one ever is sure what to expect. On either side. Which is a good thing. It means the game goes to the fastest thinker. That’s all I need to be.’
‘Correct,’ I said. ‘Weird things are going to happen, and things are going to change, and the ground is going to move under our feet, but if we keep on thinking fast, we’ll be OK.’
‘You sure?’
‘Like you said before, it’s all comparative. Bottom line, it’s about thinking faster than Joey Green. And the data was in on that a long time ago. Modern humans outlasted Neanderthal Man.’
‘What did you mean when you said weird things are going to happen?’
‘Just that nothing turns out like you think it will.’
‘It sounded like you meant something more specific. Do you know things you’re not telling me?’
I didn’t answer.
Then Bennett showed up again in person, and raised the stakes. We got a call in Nice’s room that he was downstairs. He asked us to meet him in the restaurant. He said he would buy us lunch. Nice shut down the tablet computer, which locked his semi-useful pictures behind our twin passwords, and then we rode up in the elevator, and we found him at a table by the window, with our drinks already ordered, bottled water for Nice and black coffee for me, at which point I knew he was about to ask for some real big favour.
Which he did.
He said the behavioural psychology subcommittee had met again, to review the report he had submitted that morning. And apparently the subcommittee had exceeded its brief, by thinking for itself. It had started from the same feeling I had gotten about internecine strife. If Miller or Thompson went down, then depending on the exact distribution between Charlie White and his lieutenants, which was an unknown at that point, then somewhere between perhaps 15 and 20 per cent of the Romford Boys’ net profit was up for grabs. Which would be interesting.
But not as interesting as it might perhaps become, if the stakes were somewhat higher still, and certainly more Oedipal. Suppose our initial attack was on Charlie White himself? That would cut the head off the octopus, not just an arm. And it would certainly bring all three lieutenants to the scene, and even if I didn’t get them all there, then they might well take care of each other later, because there would be an immediate war of succession. The two old heads against the young usurper, for the whole enchilada. The old heads knew all the business details, and the young usurper was nearly seven feet tall, which would make their opening skirmishes lively, which might make them all forget for a minute that old Charlie paid his cops and his councillors weekly, which might lead to a brief bribe-free window, during which time arrests could be made and prosecutions sought.
So, what did we think?
I said, ‘How are you doing with my information about the bulletproof glass?’
Bennett said, ‘It’s coming.’
‘When?’
‘How urgent can it be?’
‘I want it one minute after you get it. And I want you to get it soon.’
He nodded. ‘So what are we going to do about Charlie White?’
‘We?’
‘OK, you.’
I said, ‘Where does he live?’
‘He’s still in Romford. Born and bred. He fancies himself an authentic man of the people.’
‘Single-family house?’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Detached,’ Nice said, like a translator.
‘Of course,’ Bennett said. ‘Normal size, but it has a wall just like Joey’s. Or a fence, or whatever you want to call it. Brick and wrought iron. To keep the grateful proletariat out.’
‘Security?’
‘Six guards and a driver.’
‘Pick of the litter?’
‘Competitive.’
‘Does he go out much?’
Bennett said, ‘He’s going out tonight, as a matter of fact.’
‘Where?’
‘To meet with the Serbians. To express his condolences.’
‘Is that one of the elaborate courtesies?’
‘One of the most fundamental. They’re in business together, and the Serbians suffered a casualty. The same thing happened last night, but in reverse, because of the guy you hit in the throat.’
‘An hour from now, is the behavioural psychology subcommittee going to come back to us and say we have to take out the Serbians too?’
‘We would like nothing better, but realistically you shouldn’t take them on all at once.’
I said, ‘We haven’t agreed to take them on at all.’
‘The committee asked me to point out that we might have understated the quality of the security details protecting Miller and Thompson. They’re better than we said. The point being, it’s not much of a step to go for White instead.’
‘Is any of that true?’
‘No. It’s a very big step.’
‘But they have to be psychological.’
‘Whatever works.’
‘Works better with prior insight. Have you seen our files?’
Bennett smiled and said, ‘You got my heavy hint? With the passwords? O’Day supplied your files.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we asked.’
‘Back in the day he would have told you to get lost.’
‘He’s not what he was. He’s feeling his way back. His star was fading, for a couple of years.’
‘Khenkin said the same thing in Paris.’
‘We could help you, if you need it. Four of Charlie’s guards will be in a separate car, obviously. We could pick it off. A traffic stop, or something. Then you’d only have two to deal with, plus the driver, plus Charlie himself.’
‘One guard in the front with the driver, and the other in the back next to Charlie?’
‘That’s how they do it.’
‘What kind of car?’
‘A Rolls-Royce.’
‘Black?’
‘Of course.’
‘Armoured, like Karel Libor’s Range Rover?’
‘Only the back doors and the back glass. And only against handguns. I guess they call it the anti-opportunistic assassination option. For the kind of customer who has enemies walking by.’
‘And the chase car is a Jaguar?’
‘They have dozens of them.’
I said nothing.
Bennett said, ‘Traffic stops are expensive. Not just in money. There’s exposure, and risk, and liability. Suppose a pregnant lady couldn’t get through to the hospital? Suppose an old man had a heart attack because of all the excitement? Questions would be asked. It’s a tactic we couldn’t justify unless there was a significant potential reward.’
My turn to smile. I said, ‘You didn’t rule the world by being nice, right? You’re saying if we go after Charlie White, you’ll handle the chase car for us. But not if we settle for Tommy Miller or Billy Thompson. So our choice is fight two of Charlie’s guards, or four of theirs. Charlie’s will be better, but probably not twice as good. Therefore, what we have here is an incentive. Proposed and recommended by the behavioural psychology subcommittee. Am I right?’
‘We’re here to help each other. That’s how it’s supposed to work.’
‘When am I going to get my information about the bulletproof glass?’
‘One minute after I get it.’
‘Which will be when?’
‘Very soon.’
‘What time will old Charlie start out for his condolence visit?’
‘Late. The sun has to be down. It’s some ethnic thing. They have their rituals too. We have some details, including a likely route. And we think we’ve found a spot for the thing with the chase car. I’ll send over what we’ve got, on another computer.’
Then he left.
Casey Nice asked, ‘Is this one of the weird things that were going to happen?’
I said, ‘No, this part was predictable.’