Personal (19 page)

We waited, like I had many times before. Waiting was a big part of law enforcement, and a big part of army life generally.
Long slow periods of nothing much, with occasional bursts of something
. I was good at it, and Casey Nice turned out to be good at it too. She stayed awake, which was the main thing. She rested easy, not staring intently, but keeping her gaze where she would notice movement. At one point she used the bathroom, and I wondered about pills, but I didn’t say anything.

Then she asked the inevitable question. She said, ‘Do you feel bad about the guy?’

I said, ‘What guy?’

‘The guy who died.’

‘You mean the guy I killed in cold blood?’

‘I suppose.’

‘Some tough guy he was.’

‘Do you feel bad?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Really?’

‘Do you?’

‘A little.’

‘You didn’t do anything to him.’

‘Even so.’

‘He had a choice,’ I said. ‘He could have spent his days helping old ladies across the street. He could have volunteered in the library. I expect they have a library here. He could have raised funds for Africa, or wherever they need funds these days. He could have done a whole lot of good things. But he didn’t. He chose not to. He chose to spend his days extorting money and hurting people. Then finally he opened the wrong door, and what came out at him was his problem, not mine. Plus he was useless. A waste of good food. Too stupid to live.’

‘Stupidity isn’t a capital crime. And there’s no death penalty here, anyway.’

‘There is now.’

She didn’t reply to that, and we lapsed back into silence. The afternoon light faded, and a yellow vapour lamp came on in the parking lot below us. It was up on a tall pole, and it caught most of the black panel van. Other cars came and parked and went away again. Every one of their drivers glanced at the van, and then looked away. At first I thought it was because they must know whose van it was, and were therefore unsettled. Then I realized there must be another reason.

I said, ‘The other guy must be banging and hollering.’

Which was a mistake on my part. I should have told him not to. Or made sure he couldn’t. It was going to screw up my time line. I wasn’t going to drop a day of worry on them. Couple hours, at most. Although initially there seemed to be a marked lack of enthusiasm among the population of Romford for playing the Good Samaritan. No one did a damn thing for the guy. They all just glanced away and got out the lot as fast as they could. Proof once again, I supposed, that tyrants inspire no love or loyalty.

Casey Nice said, ‘I’m hungry.’

I said, ‘I’m sure there’s food on the block. Kebabs, fried chicken, pizza, hamburgers, whatever you want. This place seems to be the fast-food capital of the world.’

‘Should we get something?’

‘Eat when you can. That’s the golden rule.’

‘Are you hungry?’

‘A little.’

‘What would you prefer?’

‘Pizza,’ I said. ‘Plain cheese. Smaller chance of rats and pigeons among the ingredients. Or cats and dogs.’

‘Something to drink?’

‘Whatever was made in a factory and comes in a sealed container.’

‘Will I be safe?’

‘Depends what you order.’

‘I mean, walking around here.’

‘You worried about getting mugged?’

‘I’m worried about getting spotted by a Romford Boy.’

‘They aren’t looking for us. They think they’ve got us.’

‘There’s a difference between actively looking for us and accidentally spotting us.’

‘If you had seven words to describe yourself, what would you say?’

‘You mean physically or psychologically?’

‘I mean, suppose you were the minicab driver, diming us out.’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Female, average height, ponytail, brown leather jacket. That’s what he said. Nothing you can do about your height or your gender, but you can take out your ponytail and lose your jacket. Then you’re just a twenty-something woman in jeans and a T-shirt. Of which there are a hundred thousand around here. Safe as houses.’

So she reached up behind her and pulled out whatever elastic band she had in there, and she shook her head, and her hair fell loose. She slipped the jacket off one shoulder, and then the other, and she pulled it down over her arms, and she laid it on the bed, and she turned back to face me.

Did she look like Dominique Kohl? Yes and no. Not really, in that she shaded towards the Scandinavian end of the gene pool, and Kohl was closer to the Mediterranean. Kohl had darker skin, and darker hair, and darker eyes. The weeks I had known her had been exceptionally hot, even for D.C. in the summer, and she had gotten browner and dustier as the days went by. She had worn shorts most of the time, and a T-shirt. And it was the T-shirt that connected her to Nice. Kohl’s had been olive green, and Nice’s was white, but under those flimsy garments were young, fit women in the peak of condition, lean, smooth, somehow flexible and fluent and elastic, somehow identical. Outwardly, at least. Inwardly was different. Where Nice was diffident, Kohl had been bolder, completely sure of her capabilities, notably self-confident, absolutely ready to beat the world.

It hadn’t saved her.

I said, ‘Take care.’

Nice said, ‘I’ll be back in ten.’

She left, and I heard her footsteps fade in the hallway. I ducked away from the window for a second and put my hand in her jacket pocket. I pulled out the orange plastic bottle.

She had three pills left.

TWENTY-NINE

I SAT ALONE
and watched the little supermarket’s parking lot, and I saw the same things repeated over and over again. Drivers would park their cars, and get out, and glance at the black van, suddenly startled and unsure, and then they would avert their eyes and hustle inside the store. They would come out again minutes later and drive away as fast as they could.

Ten minutes passed, and Casey Nice didn’t come back.

The sky behind the light on the pole went full dark, and a little night mist came down, and a scrim of dew formed on the black van, which rocked and bounced from time to time. The live guy inside must have been getting desperate. Maybe he needed the bathroom.

Fifteen minutes gone, and Casey Nice didn’t come back.

Then finally a driver parked his car, and got out, and glanced at the black van, and didn’t walk away. He was a young guy, maybe twenty, with a pudding-bowl haircut all slicked down with grease. He took a cautious step towards the van and cocked his head and listened. He took another step and peered in through the driver’s window, from the side, and then he craned his neck and peered in through the windshield, from the front.

He took his cell phone out of his pocket. Contract labour, maybe, anxious to prove his worth. He listened again, presumably to the live guy inside, dictating a number, and he dialled.

Behind me a key turned in the lock and Casey Nice walked in the room. She had two stacked pizza boxes balanced on spread fingers, and a thin plastic bag in her other hand, with wet soda cans in it.

‘OK?’ I said.

She said, ‘So far so good.’

I nodded towards the window. ‘Some kid just made a call.’

She put our dinner on the dressing table and took a look. The young guy was talking on his phone. He bent down and read out the van’s licence plate. Then he held the phone away from his mouth, and shouted a question through the seal between the driver’s door and the pillar, and then he put his ear close to the same crack and listened to the answer. The live guy’s name, presumably, which the young guy repeated into his phone.

Casey Nice asked, ‘Why doesn’t he break the window or force the door?’

I said, ‘You think he knows how?’

‘I’m sure he does. Looking at him, I mean. Not that I should rely on stereotypes.’

‘I’m guessing the guy on the phone is telling him not to. This is a hard world. These are not conquering heroes. They screwed up. They’re not worth damaging a vehicle for. Someone will bring a spare key.’

‘How soon?’

‘Five minutes,’ I said. ‘Maybe ten. Quick enough, anyway. They don’t care about their guys, but they’ll want to hear the story.’

I got up off my chair and opened a pizza box. Plain cheese, white dough, a little bubbled and blackened here and there by the oven, and smaller than the giant hubcaps sold in America. I said, ‘Thank you for my dinner,’ like my mother had taught me to.

She said, ‘You’re very welcome,’ and she took hers, and we both ate a slice. The soda was Coke, and it was ice cold. In the lot below us the young guy was off the phone, stumping around, waiting. For congratulations, without a doubt. Definitely contract labour, racking up the bonus points.

Casey Nice’s phone dinged, like a tiny bell.

‘Incoming text,’ she said. She checked. ‘From General O’Day. He wants to know why we’re static.’

I said, ‘Tell him we’re resting.’

‘He knows we’re not at our hotel. Because of the GPS.’

‘Tell him we’re at the movies. Or the theatre. Or in a museum. Tell him we’re furthering our cultural education. Or getting our nails done. Tell him we’re at the spa.’

‘He knows we’re not. He’ll have checked Google Maps, surely. Street View, probably. He knows where we are.’

‘Then why ask?’

‘He wants to know why we’re not mobile.’

‘Tell him to relax. Micromanaging from three thousand miles away is pointless.’

‘I can’t. He’s updating us, and I’m supposed to update him. That’s the only way this thing is going to work.’

I looked down at the scene below. No change. The van, inert. The kid, waiting. I said, ‘OK, tell him we’re acting on Shoemaker’s suggestion. Tell him we’re attempting contact with the outer cordon.’

‘I’ll have to tell him how, I’m afraid. As in, not with a phoney business proposal.’

‘Go ahead. He won’t mind.’

‘He might. They were worried about you.’

‘Scarangello was. Shoemaker might have been. But O’Day won’t get all bent out of shape.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Try it,’ I said. ‘Tell him exactly what happened.’

So she swiped and dabbed at her screen with dancing thumbs and I glanced back at what was happening out the window. Which wasn’t much. The light, the mist, the van, the kid. I looked away again and saw her finish up and put her phone on the bed and take a second slice of pizza. I chewed cheese and sipped Coke and waited. Below us the young guy was watching the road, and ducking back to the van every few minutes, laying his hand on it and calling through the door seal, with reassurances, probably.
Yes, I called, they said they were coming, they’ll be here in a minute
.

Nice’s phone dinged again. O’Day’s reply. She checked it twice and told me, ‘He sends his sincere congratulations and says keep it up.’

I nodded. ‘Human life means nothing to him. All he cares about is the result.’

Nice didn’t reply.

I said, ‘Ask him for the intel he got from MI5, about these Romford people. Pictures, histories, rap sheets, everything he’s got. We should know exactly who we’re dealing with here.’

She started texting again. Below us the young guy was talking through the door seal again. His body language was placatory. He was squirming and patting the air and glancing hopefully towards the road.
They’re coming, I promise
.

And then they came.

Two cars drove into the lot, both of them black, both with dark windows, the first a four-door Jaguar sedan, the second a big two-door coupé, long and low and imposing. A Bentley, I thought. They came in fast and slammed to a stop, right in the middle of the space. All four of the Jaguar’s doors opened wide and four men climbed out, all of them white, all of them in dark suits. They formed up like a perimeter, facing outward, heads up, hands loose by their sides. The kid with the greasy hair hung back. The Bentley’s driver got out. He was another guy in a suit, just like the first four. He checked all around, left, right, front, rear, and then he walked a wide circle to the passenger door and opened it, like a chauffeur should.

And a giant climbed out.

He led with a bent head and a bent back, folded at the waist, folded at the knees, and then he straightened up in stages, like a complex mechanism, like a child’s toy that starts out as a squat dump truck and then clicks open, one component after another, to reveal an action figure. He was huge. His arms were longer than most people’s legs, and his hands were bigger than shovels, and his torso was the size of an oil drum, tightly encased in a tubular three-button suit coat that would have been ankle-length on an average human. His feet were the size of river barges, and his neck was a foot wide, and his shoulders were a yard wide, and his head was bigger than a basketball. He had big ears sticking straight out, and an overhanging brow, and pronounced cheekbones, and tiny eyes buried deep, and a receding simian chin. He looked like a Neanderthal waxwork in a natural history museum, except that he was pale and sandy, not dark, and he was at least twice the size of any ancient hominid. He could have been seven feet tall, and three hundred pounds. Maybe more. He moved with a kind of loose-limbed rawboned ranginess, four or five feet with a single enormous stride, his huge shoulders rolling, his immense hands swinging free.

Casey Nice said, ‘Jesus Christ.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘No beard. No sandals.’

The guy stepped up close to the back of the van, two paces, where a normal guy might have needed four, and he flapped his hand towards it, a gesture like a big white swan taking off, and his chauffeur dug in a pocket and came out with a key. The big guy stood back a pace, four feet right there, and the chauffeur jammed the key in the lock and turned it and pulled the doors, first the right, and then the left. The four guys from the Jaguar shifted position, moving the perimeter tighter, turning to face inward, making a half-circle, enclosing the space like bystanders watching a street fight.

They all waited.

The live guy scrambled out, sliding on his front, feet first, slow and stiff and hurting. He steadied himself against the lip of the load floor, and straightened up, and turned around to face the music. The gush of blood down his front looked black in the vapour light. His skin looked yellow. The giant stepped forward again and stared past him into the dark interior. At that point I couldn’t see his face, but he seemed to ask a short question. Probably:
What the hell happened?