Die Twice (6 page)

“Are you fit?” he said, glaring at me from behind his desk. “Can you at least continue?”

“Of course,” I said, dragging one of the visitors’ chairs across the room and sitting down.

“What did the paramedics say?”

“Not much.”

“They seemed to be worried.”

“They’re paid to be worried. It’s nothing.”

“Your head’s OK? They spent a long time looking at it.”

“I took a knock in New York, last time out. They saw where I’d been sewn up.”

“That’s all?”

All? Twelve stitches. Neatly done. Barely a scar left, now. Small beer, in the scheme of things. But it had caused way more than its share of trouble. Nothing good had happened since that incident. Looking back, it seemed more like a curse than a wound. I wondered if it would ever stop haunting me.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s all.”

“Well, that’s something, I suppose,” he said. “Saves having to
call for a replacement. The last thing I need to be doing right now is talking to London. Not till I’ve figured a way to explain this latest fiasco. How the hell did it happen?”

“Looks like McIntyre had a couple of friends in town we didn’t know about.”

“You’re sure they were friends?”

“They blew his door off its hinges and tried to haul him out of there. Who else could they be?”

“If they were friends, why break down the door? Why not just knock and wait to be let in?”

“ ’Cause of Rollins. He’d already knocked. I told him to do that and then run away. They must have bumped into him on the stairs.”

“You think he’d have alerted them?”

“In a heartbeat. He was a flake. He’d have spilled everything, immediately.”

“I guess. Fat lot of good it did him, though.”

“Shame he couldn’t have kept it buttoned a little longer.”

“Shame you got him involved at all.”

“I didn’t. He got himself involved.”

“You could have let him go. He may not have asked for any of it. He may have been coerced.”

“How? Was someone threatening to bludgeon him with a sack of cash?”

Fothergill stood up slowly and moved over to the central window, keeping his back to me for a few moments.

“You should see the paperwork I’ll have to do on him,” he said. “Mountains of it. It’ll take weeks. And if we can avoid making his widow a millionaire, it’ll be a miracle.”

“She’s probably already a millionaire,” I said. “Forget about her. McIntyre’s the problem. I can’t deal with him if we don’t know where he is. So what are you doing about finding him?”

“Not much, right now. And certainly a lot less than if we could
talk to either of those guys who raided the apartment. If you’d just shown a little restraint . . .”

“Interesting idea. I suppose I could have. I knew someone who showed some restraint, once. A policeman, in Holland. He was up against guys with MP5s, too. And do you know what he got for his trouble?”

“No. What?”

“A bronze star. Set into the wall in the foyer of their HQ.”

“Really?”

“Really. They put one there for every officer who buys the farm.”

Fothergill was silent for a moment, and then came back to the desk.

“OK,” he said. “We can’t talk to them. So let’s draw a line under that. But what else can we figure out about them? Every contact yields some kind of intelligence. And what we really need to know is, where did McIntyre go when he got out of the building?”

“No idea.”

“Was he hurt?”

“Not by me. And I’d say he wasn’t in too bad shape generally, by the way he dived through the gap between his mates. And he was on his feet again pretty quickly, too. He was out of the door before the others hit the ground.”

“Did anyone help him? Someone waiting outside?”

“I didn’t see anyone. But I can’t rule it out.”

“So he could be on his own again. Or being sheltered by others?”

“Right.”

“We don’t know which?”

“No.”

“Then we need to find out. That has to be our first priority.”

“Agreed.”

“What about the two you took care off Did you hear them say anything?”

“No.”

“What accents did they have?”

“Neither of them spoke at all.”

“We don’t even know what language?”

“No.”

“So we don’t know where they’re from? What country, even?”

“No.”

“Could you tell anything from their clothes?”

“Not without some work. Everything looked new. Jeans, trainers, hoodies. Innocuous stuff. Standard chain-store issue, probably bought specially. What you’d expect from people who know how to look anonymous.”

“That kind of thing is safe to ask the police to follow up. But it does make sense. Shows a level of professionalism. And it ties in with the arms-dealing angle. Just like the weapons. MP5s are expensive pieces of kit.”

“They are. But you can never be sure. I saw one on a council estate in Leeds, once.”

“You’re not being a lot of help here, David.”

“Then maybe the autopsies will reveal something.”

“How? You shot both guys. Multiple times. Pretty straightforward, no?”

“Forget cause of death. Think stomach contents. That might tell us where they’re from, if they followed McIntyre to the States in the last couple of days.”

“Oh. Good thinking. I’ll talk to the PD about that, too. Try to get the medical examiner to put a rush on it.”

“And what about their identities? If they entered the country legally, there should be a record somewhere.”

A muffled soprano started singing an aria from
The Magic Flute
somewhere inside Fothergill’s jacket. It was his phone. He pulled it out and placed it on the desk between us. Then he must have caught the look on my face.

“I love Mozart,” he said. “Don’t you?”

“Are you going to answer that?” I said.

“No. Whoever it is, they can wait. We need to get some kind of plan worked out, first. We should draw up a list of actions. Then we can decide what’s reasonable to pass on to the police, in terms of security and logistics. And whatever’s left, we’ll deal with ourselves.”

I heard a sharp knock behind me, the door swung open, and Fothergill’s assistant appeared. Sadly he wasn’t bringing refreshments.

“Did your mobile not ring?” he said, glancing down at the cell phone on the desk.

“It did, actually,” Fothergill said. “Didn’t quite manage to answer it in time, though. Anything important?”

“It was London,” he said. “Word has spread. They gave me two minutes to find you. Sounds like it’s time to break out the asbestos underwear.”

“Damn,” Fothergill said. “One minute they refuse the resources I need. The next, they’re moaning when the job goes pear-shaped. I can’t win.”

I began to think there was a little more field agent left in him than I’d given credit for. His assistant just shrugged.

“David, I’m sorry,” Fothergill said. “I’m going to have to make this call. How about you head back to your hotel? Catch your breath a little? And as soon as I can get anything concrete pulled together I’ll have it biked straight over to you. Then you can review it in peace.”

I figured that between fending off his bosses in London and calling in favors in the States, Fothergill was going to have his hands full
for quite a while. My hotel was only twenty minutes from the consulate. There was no chance he’d have anything for me to see in that length of time. Which meant I could turn my attention to more important matters. Such as food. I hadn’t eaten a thing since breakfast. That was the best part of nine hours ago, and I was starving.

On the plane yesterday I heard a couple arguing about which was their favorite restaurant in Chicago. The debate was intense. It lasted nearly an hour. At first I thought a Spanish place was certain to come out on top. Then a Mexican, with a choice of bars. But ultimately, the winner was French. I remembered the name. And the location. It was convenient—on Hubbard, not much farther away than the clinic. The menu sounded good. The prices, reasonable. The service, not too intrusive. The decor, not too fussy. Which left me with only one problem. The restaurant where I was supposed to meet Tanya for our final, ill-fated dinner had been French. Part of me never wanted to go into one again. I was on the verge of heading for the Mexican instead, but I realized that was ridiculous. I couldn’t let my life be ruled by ghosts. So I decided to give it a try. The only thing I hadn’t considered was their hours of business. I arrived at the door on the stroke of four thirty. But they didn’t open till five. And that left me with a dilemma.

I decided to wait. Not on the doorstep, obviously. But in the general vicinity. In the nearby maze of backstreets and alleyways. Where you can get right under the skin of the city. Or lose yourself in the genuine, unadorned areas that the guidebooks don’t tell you about. Away from the shop windows and neon signs and office facades, and into the parts where real people get their hands dirty making deliveries and emptying Dumpsters and busying themselves with their ordinary, everyday lives.

Places that people like Fothergill might have gone to, once. But I couldn’t picture him there now.

Most of the buildings on that street seemed to be offices, but the place on the left of the restaurant looked like some sort of shop. I couldn’t tell what kind. It was closed. There were no signs, and the door and windows were obscured by heavy, gray blinds. A passageway led down the side, separating the two businesses. It was paved with cracked, square slabs. They were shiny and well worn. Obviously in frequent use. Almost calling for me to follow them. It seemed like an interesting enough place to start.

The passage led straight to the back of the buildings. There were no lights. No doors or windows opened onto it, and it was too narrow for anything to be stored there. I made my way to the far end, then paused to check the lie of the land. I could see I’d reached a kind of grubby, cobbled courtyard. It was about twenty feet square. To my left was the back of the shop. It had a single window—lined with cardboard and heavily barred—and one exit. The outside of a fire door. Neither showed any name or number. The buildings on the far side were much deeper, reaching almost to the ones from the next street, leaving just enough room for another narrow passageway. That was handy. It would be a second way out of the place, if needed. And a third possible route stretched away to my right, beyond the back of the restaurant, where the space remained wide enough for a medium-sized vehicle to pass through.

It was the restaurant side of the courtyard that caught my attention. Orange plastic packing crates had been arranged in a horseshoe shape outside the double kitchen door, like seats. There were six. Cigarette butts lay scattered all around them. Maybe two hundred altogether. Around a quarter had lipstick marks on them, and I could see at least four different brands. The doors themselves were standing open a couple of inches, and I could hear the murmur of voices and the clash of metallic items banging together from inside. But it wasn’t the sights or the sounds that grabbed me.
It was the smell. Frying meat. Onions. Garlic. Carried straight at me by the clouds of steam that were pouring relentlessly from four stainless-steel vents, lined up in the back wall at head height. It made me think that the couple on the plane had been right. Which again reminded me of Tanya. And made me fear that the next few minutes were going to pass very slowly.

There was nothing else of interest in the courtyard so I crossed behind the restaurant and started down the broader alley on the far side. I was planning to outwalk my memories and kill the rest of my waiting time by making a broad loop back around to the main entrance on the street. But I’d only gone about nine feet when I heard a noise behind me. A loud crash. Something heavy had connected with the brickwork. I stopped in the shadows and turned to look. It was the fire door at the back of the shop. Someone had thrown it open, all the way, so that it banged into the wall. A woman staggered through the opening. Her arms were flailing and she was teetering wildly on transparent plastic stilettos. They were at least four inches high. She finally caught her balance after another half-dozen steps, ending up with her knees pointing inward as the heels slid awkwardly into the cracks between the cobbles. She wobbled again, then quickly ran her hands over her lace-up leather bodice, around her tiny velvet miniskirt, and even down the seams at the back of her sheer black stockings.

A man followed her out. I’d put him in his midforties. His clothes—gray stonewashed jeans and a plain white sleeveless T-shirt—were an extremely tight fit. I guessed he wore them that way to emphasize his pumped-up thighs, torso, and arms. He was only about six feet tall, but that still gave him a good eight inches over the woman, even allowing for her ridiculous shoes. He stepped toward her. She held her ground, glaring up into his face. Then three more guys emerged from the store, moving forward and half surrounding her. The
original one gestured for her to go back inside. She shook her head. He raised his hand, palm open. She flinched, as if anticipating the blow. But she didn’t back down.

The left-hand restaurant kitchen door swung open and a man stepped halfway out, then froze. He was dressed in chef’s whites, maybe in his late teens, scruffy and unshaven. The guys from the store turned as one and stared at him. He held their gaze, hypnotized, for twenty seconds. Then he hunched over, reversed his direction, and withdrew from sight. I was relieved. It seemed like the ideal solution. I’d seen a pair of chefs going after each other in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant in London, once. One had a cleaver. The other, a carving knife. The fight didn’t last long. But it did have a decisive ending. Something like that would be welcome right now. I didn’t know what the woman had done, but I couldn’t help feeling like the four men could use a more challenging opponent. I figured the young guy would be fetching some of his colleagues. That they’d come charging out, any second, brandishing all kinds of cooking implements. Sharp ones. Hopefully, lethal ones.

Nothing happened. Thirty seconds crawled past. Then a minute. The store guys relaxed. They returned their attention to the woman. She took a step back. All four followed, pressing in close. The first man raised his arm again. He leveled it with her face and pulled it back farther, twitching, like a snake all set to strike.