Call Me Joe (15 page)

"Clear, sir," the five said in chorus.

"Communicate that to the people out on search, please. Atkins, if you would be so kind as to organize a canvas?"

"Straight-away, sir," Atkins replied. "My condolences, Mr. Calvert."

Calvert nodded and caught Atkins' eye.

"He was a good egg, this one," Calvert murmured. "Let's find whoever did this, shall we?"

"Absolutely, sir," Atkins nodded. "Absolutely."

Seventeen

Katja's tiny flat in Soho had been sitting empty for almost eleven months, so Joe opened all the windows and turned on the two large ceiling fans.

He had asked the cabbie to stop at a fast-food fish and chips shop on the way. He sat in the bedroom windowsill, with its lovely view of a blank airshaft, and devoured the breaded cod and fried potato wedges like a starved wolf. He was always ravenous after a job and the double portions did little to fill his tank.

He popped his suitcase and dug out the two long, silver tubes of hair dye and his straight razor. He ran the shower as hot as he could stand and climbed in with his razor and clarifying shampoo.

Torgesen's color swirled down the drain, flecked with the nubs of scruffy beard. The moustache stayed, along with longish sideburns carved out of the wreckage of the facial hair.

He worked in the red color paste and sat on the ledge at the back of the stall. He ran the water completely cold to conserve the hot and leaned back, eyes closed, feeling the fatigue drain out his pores like poison.

In about 40 minutes, it was done. He slid the gum inserts in along his molars and above his incisors and carefully shaped them with the tips of his pinkies.

His contact in L.A. had made him a full set of British I.D. complete with a valid Harrod's credit card. Joe smiled as he remembered it. No way, of course, his guy could have known but the only way the Nigel Tufnall pictured on the I.D. would ever get a Harrod's card would be to mug somebody.

Joe had always had a quick facility with dialects and he'd first done cockney when he was 13 and saw a B.B.C. comedy show. He was convincing enough, he knew, to fool natives and he now looked the part, too.

He flipped open the new phone and dialed Katja's cell from memory.

"I'm here," he replied to her greeting. "You should see me, now.

"No, I shouldn't," she chuckled dryly. "My face is, sadly, no longer comfortably anonymous in the British Isles."

"I know," Joe sighed. "I'm taking the new I.D. out for a spin."

"Be careful," she warned. "Don't mistake the locals for credulous yahoos. Most of them could steal your underwear while pinching your cheek."

"Semper paratis," Joe smiled. "Just a pint or two w'me mates, then."

"Ciao," she replied."

"Ciao."

Eighteen

"Anthony Pembroke, please," Jack said into his cell. "Jack Bartinelli."

Jack deftly cut a wedge out of the stack of pancakes Dale's wife had sent up, bright and early at 7 a.m.

He had been awake for an hour, getting caught up on the daily scoop at Synsys and talking to his stockbroker. I was still pulling cobwebs out of my mouth and eyes and grappling with a cup of really gorgeous coffee that I was about to ruin with too much creamer.

"Stop shouting," I grunted.

"Whassa matter? Screaming Eagle doesn't agree with ya?" he grinned.

"Well, it gives me a headache just like my own house red," I sighed. "Just a far more upscale headache."

"Yes," Jack said into the phone. "Omigod. When did…"

He listened for about 30 seconds, an intent scowl settled on his brow.

"I see," he replied. "Well, if you would, please, convey my sincerest sympathy to Mr. Kensington's family and tell Mr. Pembroke I can be reached at the same cell number he called last night. Yes. Thank you. Good day."

He closed the phone and settled back in the chair.

We were sitting in a small breakfast nook tucked into a large bay window that faced west toward lightening skies over the Kettle River mountain range. A fine mist shimmered over the valleys among the round, rolling peaks, painted a soft orange in the swelling light. Old-growth pines framed the endless hills. A family of deer was clearly visible, cautiously grazing the shrubs on a low rise just behind the motel. The morning air through the open window was cool and moist and almost shockingly clean.

It was the dictionary definition of pastoral, spoiled only by the expression on Jack's face.

I arched a brow and nipped at the coffee.

"Somebody shot Percy Kensington this morning," Jack murmured. "8 a.m., broad daylight, right outside his back door. I met the guy not even three weeks ago; just a good-natured old geezer who liked his beer, rugby, low-stakes poker, and working on the Pembroke & Hawkes Board, which he'd done since God was in diapers. Also, just about the only guy on the Pembroke & Hawkes Board who thought P.P.V. was a good idea."

"What are you thinking?" I asked.

"Well, I was talking to Anthony 3's assistant, so he didn't know a lot. But apparently there was some sort of e-mail that came in about the time of the shooting. I'll want to find out what that was. And, guess I can't really lean on P.P.V., right at the moment. No point in shaking the tree if nobody notices."

He was quiet for a moment. I knew what he was thinking and decided not to wait him out.

"No," I said quietly.

"No…what?" Jack frowned.

"No to what you're thinking right now. You're wondering if Kensington's murder is tied into this. No. How? Why? He was, you said, a 'good-natured old geezer', who didn't even work for P.P.V. With absolutely no information, I think it smells like one of those bizarre, obscure, European eco-terrorist loons, pissed off at Pembroke & Hawkes for clear-cutting the Balkans or contaminating the water table or just for providing the paper those filthy old Euros are printed on. Some such arcane shit that Europeans argue about in cafes. If somebody wants to derail this, you shoot Anthony 3…or you."

"Now there's a happy thought," Jack chuckled. "Of course, even that wouldn't really stop the project. My company is run by my brother. If I get killed, he'd probably just…make more money. Point is, Anthony or I suddenly get gone, the company's structure just coughs up a successor."

"Like I said, no," I smiled.

"You'd have to shoot a whole bunch of folks to upend some operation like Pembroke & Hawkes, or even P.P.V., since they're a wholly-owned subsidiary," Jack mused. "You're right. Still…"

"Scotland Yard is on it, I'm sure," I replied, "and they're pretty damned good at what they do. If Kensington does have something to do with this business, you'll know before long."

"Yeah," Jack nodded. "Right. Eyes on the ball. What's next?"

"Today we do my best thing," I grinned.

"Which is?"

"We bother people."

Nineteen

For the millionth time, give or take a hundred, Rod Hooks looked around himself and wondered how the hell he ever wound up there.

"There" was a shamelessly opulent office overlooking Kensington Gardens in the heart of London. His office, replete with brocade drapes, antique sideboard of solid mahogany, a 19
th
century handmade cherry desk you could play tennis on, Persian rugs, flat screen TV, mini-bar, private toilet ("loo," his colleagues called it), and a Dell workstation with DSL, CD burner, and a 3600 D.P.I. laser printer.

All this, however, was not what had Rod Hooks pondering his situation. Now, he considered all this as what he stood to lose if the guy sitting across the desk didn't get the right answers.

Anthony Pembroke—"Tony 3," to his staff, to distinguish him from the Anthony Pembroke one flight up—always seemed to be less than half engaged in any conversation he conducted. He carried the perpetually bemused air of a man on his way to meet someone far more interesting and fun than you. He was unfailingly polite, profane in that clumsy way English preppies affect when they're trying to be one of the boys, and nearly devoid of any clearly-defined personality.

His management style was one Hooks had seen before:  search exhaustively, interview endlessly, hire with ceremony and loud proclamations about "hiring the best and letting them work," and then land on them like a genteel ton of hammers when something goes wrong.

Having one's only real ally on the board of the parent company gunned down in his own driveway, Hooks thought glumly, was the very definition of "something gone wrong."

"I'm rather puzzled," Pembroke continued, "as to how absolutely no one, Roderick, had any inkling of opposition to the Colville site. The permit process went smoothy, locals were positively cordial, the state has been helpful to a fault, and yet…"

"I don't know that we can place a lot of stock in the content of that e-mail, Tony," Hooks replied. "As irrationally quiet as we've kept the site, and as little buzz as there's been, I can't see how someone could know enough to become so incensed to do something this drastic. I mean…the project is far more visible and public here than it is in Washington or Idaho."

"Well, obviously it played some role in Percy's death," Tony snapped, "and that is intolerable to me. Apart from the fact that I've known him my entire life and consider him a member of my own family, he was our—your—only ally on the board. Oh, I know the whole thing is a bit ass-backwards but we had to publicize it here and hope that public opinion would galvanize the old pack of shits."

"It's worked—barely—but the brutal truth is that the board was being held back by their regard for Percy. I can milk that for a while by saying it's what Percy would have wanted but, let's face it, the lot of them are older than dirt and death is much of a spectator sport with them. In two-three weeks, Percy's blood will draw every shark in the water."

"What I don't understand is the motivation," Hooks sighed. "It can't be the European enviro-Nazis. Why would they care about Washington? And in Washington…lord knows there's no shortage of conservation freaks. But they take their shots with video cameras, not rifles."

"I need to remind you that this is why I hired you—to know things like this. You're from Washington. You've worked in Oregon and Idaho. You told me, in our first conversation, that you had your ear to the rail in that part of the world. Now, something unimaginably drastic has evolved and you had no clue."

Pembroke ran his fingers through his hair and rose from the chair.

"My contacts in the Northwest don't include people who monitor the paranoid delusions of solitary gun freaks," Hooks replied. "I'm a paper salesman, not a fuckin' detective."

"So hire one," Pembroke shrugged.

"What?" Hooks blurted, startled.

"Hire a detective," Pembroke said, warming to the idea. "D'Onofrio uses that Seattle chap…can't think of his name but Arthur could, I'm certain. I'll authorize the money. It makes practical sense because we need to know if there'll be more ghastly business like this, but…I owe it to Percy, as well."

"If we go that route, the lid will come off the project," Hooks warned.

"Which would be a relief, frankly," Pembroke sighed. "I can't understand the thinking on that. Our one chance to make P.P.V. a viable entity is this project. We should have been selling for a month, now."

"So do it, Tony!" Hooks sputtered. "For god's sake, you're the president of the company. If we fail, you're in the soup."

"I may be the president," Pembroke mumbled, "but we all have our marching orders, don't we?"