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The live guy didn’t really answer. He just shook his head and breathed out and held his hands out from his sides, palms upward, like a helpless shrug. The question was repeated. This time the live guy answered, just a mumble, his bloodied mouth barely moving at all, three or four syllables, nothing more. Maybe
he jumped us
, or
they jumped us
, or
they got away
, or
we didn’t get ’em
.

The giant processed the information, his huge head going down a degree, then coming back up, as if swallowing the bad news, physically. He was quiet for a minute. Then he started talking again, his body language exaggeratedly amiable, which meant he had to be taunting the guy, because there was no more pertinent information to be gotten.
There were two of you, right? And two of them? One of which was a girl? Was it her who hit you?
And so on and so forth, sarcastic and humiliating. From my angle I could see the live guy’s face, which was looking more and more miserable. And apprehensive. And terrified. As if he knew what was coming.

And then it came.

The giant moved with astonishing speed for one so big. His right hand bunched into a fist the size of a bowling ball, and his waist and his shoulders twitched, and he smashed a straight drive into the centre of the live guy’s ruined face, and the guy smashed backward against the truck’s left-hand door, and bounced off, and went straight down on the concrete, face first.

‘Charming,’ I said. ‘Not the kind of leadership skills they teach you at West Point.’

The guy on the ground lay still. The kid with the greasy hair stared at him, with his mouth wide open. Casey Nice stared too, with her mouth open. Then her phone dinged again. Another text. She looked away from the window. She said, ‘General O’Day is e-mailing the data from MI5. We should have it in a minute.’ She swiped to another screen and waited.

Below us the giant stood still for a second, and then he jerked his enormous head towards the Bentley, and his chauffeur scurried back and held the door. The big guy strode over and lined himself up and started re-folding himself to fit. The action figure became a dump truck again. He bent his knees, and bent at his waist, and tucked in his elbows, and hunched his shoulders, and ducked his head, and backed butt-first into his seat. The chauffeur closed the door on him, and looped around the hood to his own place. The car backed up and turned around and drove away.

Two guys got back in the Jaguar and followed the Bentley, and the other two rolled the live guy over, and picked him up off the concrete, armpits and knees, and shoved him back in the rear of the van. They closed the doors on him again, and locked the handle, and pulled the key. One of them came out with a decent-sized pink banknote, fifty British pounds, I thought, and gave it to the kid. Then they got in the front of the van together and backed up and turned and followed the Jaguar. The kid was left standing alone in the pool of light, holding the money, looking like he had wanted more, maybe a nod or a clap on the shoulder or a promise of future inclusion. He looked disappointed, as if by an anticlimax, as if he was thinking:
I could have gotten fifty lousy pounds by mugging an old lady
.

Casey Nice’s phone made a different sound, like a tiny muted
clang
. She said, ‘The e-mail from General O’Day.’

Which was blank except for a link to an attachment. She touched it and a dense document slid sideways into view. We sat together on the bed, thigh to thigh, and she held the phone between us, and we read. The header was a dry, academic, multi-line sentence about organized crime activity in and around Romford, Essex, written in a manner I presumed reflected the British clandestine services’ house style. Very University of Cambridge. Like Yale, but different. Nothing like West Point. Nothing like the real world, either.

The opening paragraph was first a disclaimer, and then a reassurance. Nothing had been proved, and there were no criminal convictions, but all information contained therein was believed to be solid. It went on to say there was no proof and there had been no convictions because of presumed witness intimidation, and because of other factors that weren’t exactly specified, which I took to mean bribery of local law enforcement officials.

The second paragraph opened with a bald statement that organized crime activity in Romford, Essex, was entirely dominated by a structured association of local inhabitants who had long been called the Romford Boys. The tone was slightly apologetic, as if University of Cambridge types were embarrassed to repeat a name that belonged so clearly on the street, rather than in the classroom. Then the paragraph continued with an overview of the Boys’ activities, which, as O’Day had already told us, covered the importation and sale of illegal narcotics, and illegal firearms, and the control of prostitution, which involved human trafficking, and the operation of protection rackets, which were believed to extend through the majority of commercial enterprises in the locality, and loan sharking at fantastic rates of interest. The gross value of the activities was put as many tens of millions of British pounds annually.

The biographies started in the third paragraph.

The boss was one Charles Albert White, known as Charlie. He was seventy-seven years old, born on a local street, and educated at public expense until the age of fifteen. He had no third-party employment records, owned a home unencumbered by mortgages or other kinds of loans, and was married with four adult children, all of which lived elsewhere in London and were believed to be uninvolved in their father’s activities.

A clandestine surveillance shot laid into the document showed Charlie White to be a bulky, round-shouldered old man with sparse grey hair and a plain face dominated by a bulbous nose.

Below Charlie in the pecking order was a kind of executive council made up of three men, first Thomas Miller, known as Tommy, sixty-five years of age, and then William Thompson, known as Billy, sixty-four, and finally, a much younger man at just thirty-eight, was Joseph Green, known as Little Joey.

Little Joey was the giant. No question about it. His photo was cropped a whole inch longer than the others. He was listed as six feet eleven, and twenty-two stone, which as far as I understood foreign weights and measures came out to exactly three hundred and eight pounds. He was their enforcer. Again MI5 was scrupulous about mentioning the lack of proof or convictions, but Little Joey’s swift rise to parity with men old enough to be his father could only be explained by extreme efficiency. He was in MI5’s books for eleven certain homicides, and too many beatings to count.
Grievous bodily harm
was the legal phrase used, which seemed appropriate.

Casey Nice said, ‘Why do they call him little?’

‘Because they’re British,’ I said. ‘They’re into irony. If they called him Big Joey, he’d be a dwarf.’

She scrolled onward, but the document ended right there. Little Joey was the last item. I said, ‘We need more than this. We need the spear carriers, and locations, and addresses. You better get back to O’Day.’

‘Now?’

‘Sooner the better. Data is king. And get what he has about the Serbians in the West.’

‘Why?’

‘We need guns. Elephant guns, for preference, having seen Little Joey in action. And I doubt if the Romford Boys will be keen to sell us any. So we need to make contact elsewhere.’

‘We don’t have time for all of that now. This hotel is paying protection money, almost certainly. And we can be sure right about now the Romford Boys are starting to call around for information.’

I nodded. ‘OK, finish your pizza and we’ll move right along.’

‘I lost my appetite. We should get going immediately.’

She closed the document and swiped her phone back to its home screen, as if to underline her point.

I said, ‘Where do you want to go?’

She said, ‘We can’t go back to our own hotel. They were there once already. That’s the first place they’ll look.’

‘Your stuff is there.’

She didn’t reply.

I said, ‘We could risk five minutes. In and out, real quick, to get it.’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Can you live without it?’

‘You don’t have stuff.’

‘I’m used to it.’

‘Maybe I could get used to it too. The Sherlock Homeless method. I mean, how bad can it be? We could stop by somewhere and I could get a toothbrush.’

I said, ‘You never put on clean clothes in the morning. That’s about the worst of it.’

‘Right now that sounds better than the alternative.’

‘And no pyjamas.’

‘I can live with that.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘We’ll head downtown. The centre of London. The Ritz, maybe. Or the Savoy. We’ve got plenty of money, thanks to them. And they won’t have eyes in places like that.’

‘How do we get there? We can’t call a cab.’

‘We’ll take the bus,’ I said. ‘I doubt if the London transportation system is paying protection money.’

So we left the room, with nothing in our hands, and we dumped the key at the desk, and we let ourselves out into the night.

THIRTY

THERE WERE BIG
red buses running both ways on the road outside, and we elected to go south, aiming to change at the next big crossroads and head west for the centre. All our money was in big bills, which we figured wouldn’t be welcome on a bus, so we ducked into a convenience store and bought travel cards named after bivalve molluscs. Then we located the nearest bus stop and hung back in the shadows until we saw what we wanted lumbering through the traffic towards us. It was after seven in the evening, and I was tired, and Nice looked completely done in. She hadn’t slept in about a day and a half.

The outer hinterland of London felt vast, and the bus was slow, so we took a chance and got out again back in Barking, where we knew we could get the subway, which we figured would be faster. We checked the map at the station and used the District Line, which had a stop at a place called St James’s Park, which sounded like it might be near some fancy places. Which it was. We came up into the night air and saw signs to Westminster Abbey in one direction and Buckingham Palace in the other. And there was a big hotel right across the street. Five stars. Not the Ritz, not the Savoy, but a shiny international chain that looked adequate in every respect.

We went in, and the guy at the check-in desk took a little advantage of our fatigue by claiming only top-tier rooms were available that night, at prices that would have rented a house with a pool for a month outside of Pope Field, but the Romford Boys were paying, so we didn’t really care. I counted off the huge sum from one of the greasy rolls, and in return we got key cards and all kinds of information about room service and restaurants and club floors and business centres and wifi passwords. Casey Nice bought a toothbrush in the lobby shop, and we rode up in the elevator. I saw her to her door, and waited until it locked behind her, and then I continued on to my own room, which justified its top-tier status not by being notably large, but by having its bed more or less completely hidden under fat chintzy pillows. I swept them all to the floor, and threw my clothes after them, and climbed under the covers, and went straight to sleep.

I was woken up eleven hours later by Casey Nice on the room phone. She sounded bright and cheerful. Whether that was due to eleven hours of sleep or better living through chemistry, I didn’t know. She said, ‘Do you want to get breakfast?’

The clock in my head was showing just after eight in the morning, and there was bright daylight outside my window. I said, ‘Sure, come knock on my door when you’re ready.’

Which she did, about ten minutes after I was showered and dressed. She was in the same outfit as the day before, obviously, but she didn’t seem unduly perturbed by it. We rode down to the restaurant, and got a table for two in the far corner. The place was full of sleek types discussing agendas and doing deals, some of them face to face, some of them on cell phones. I ordered British food, heavy on fat and sugar, but with coffee, not tea. Casey Nice chose lighter fare, and laid her phone next to her napkin, for easy reference.

She said, ‘According to General O’Day, as of this morning neither MI5 nor the local police department knows anything about a casualty among the Romford Boys. Seems like Charlie White is playing it close to his vest.’

I nodded. Par for the course. Standard procedure. The dead guy would have gone into a car crusher in a back street or a pig trough in a local Essex farm about the same time I was going to sleep.

She said, ‘And General O’Day says so far six out of the eight nations have attempted undercover contact with the outer cordon, and they’ve all failed.’

I nodded again. A no-brainer. The Romford Boys would be erring on the side of caution. They would take the small risk of missing a genuine deal, in order to protect their mission.

She said, ‘We’ll get a full roster of names later today. And locations, but that data is difficult. There are lots of potential locations, including remote rural places. Plus we assume by now they’re already exploiting Karel Libor’s infrastructure. Which would give them more options.’

I nodded for a third time. Kott and Carson were needles in one of about a hundred unknown haystacks, and they would stay that way for the time being.

She said, ‘And the best approach to the Serbians is through a pawn shop in a place called Ealing. Which is an outer suburb, to the west, a little less than halfway back to the airport. I looked it up on the map.’

‘You’ve been busy. I hope you slept.’

‘I did,’ she said. ‘I feel great.’

I didn’t ask about pills.

She said, ‘You knew the minicab company was bent. Didn’t you? Right at the beginning.’

I said, ‘Educated guess.’

‘You used them to attract attention. Like having them pick us up at the hotel and take us to Wallace Court. Which was the plan you made on the plane. You decided to make the cordon come to us.’

Which was giving me more credit than I was due. Largely because of the word
plan
. I said, ‘I wasn’t sure what to expect. No one ever is. It’s all about reacting.’