Reconstruction (18 page)

‘We didn’t have the chance,’ Faulks told him.

‘She was there, in plain sight –’ ‘She was there on sufferance, sir. If I don’t go back, he’ll use the gun. That’s what she said.’

‘And if he uses it now, he’s got one more body to use it on.’

‘She went back inside. She didn’t have to. Before we got here, I mean. She brought a little girl out, raised the alarm, then went back inside. Because there are other children there.’

‘I don’t trust heroes,’ Fredericks said.

‘Me neither, sir,’ said Faulks. ‘But they’re more use in there than out here. You know what we really need?’

‘I’m sure you’re about to tell me.’

‘Thermal imaging. Show us exactly where everyone is, what they’re doing. With the right equipment, we could take this guy out with no risk to the hostages. We have trained men, he’s just a kid with a stolen gun. We don’t even know he can use it.’

‘So killing him might be an overreaction.’

‘And might be saving five innocent lives. We don’t have to do the maths ourselves. The press will do that afterwards.’

‘Is that what recent history’s taught us, Peter?’

‘De Menezes wasn’t who they thought he was. This guy’s got a gun.’

‘But we don’t have the equipment, that’s what you’re saying.’

‘We could have it within the hour. One call to the Met –’

‘That’s not going to happen.’

Faulks said, ‘Between the Chief Constable and the security services, we’re going to be lucky if today turns out right, Malc.’

Fredericks didn’t respond. Instead, he turned and surveyed the house next to the nursery grounds, twenty yards or so behind them: a large detached building which had gone up at the same time as the nursery. Nice-looking piece of property, with two substantial chimney stacks, one either end of the roof. A figure nestled against the nearest; strapped to it, Fredericks assumed. The rifle it held was trained on the annexe door.

On which Whistler knocked twice before pushing it open, and walking in.

Knocking – the wood harsh against his knuckles – returned Ben to reality. As he’d walked through the deserted nursery grounds, this quality had been suspended: he’d entered instead some post-apocalyptic environment, though the nature of the apocalypse remained obscure. But it was clear that there had been people here, who had left in a hurry: there was even a doll face down on the grass, a movie-version staple of catastrophe. Other clues abounded: footprints in the flowerbeds; an abandoned sweater. Mostly, though, there was an indefinable sense of recent evacuation. Ben could almost see the shapes hanging in the air: cut-outs of children who’d been playing here, until fear dispersed them. The same fear was infecting Ben. Here in the quiet zone, the only living human was himself, though countless watchers studied his every footfall, their unrelenting gazes scoring hot marks on his back. Strange that he felt like a target to those behind him, when it was the man up ahead he really had to worry about.

That’s his boyfriend in the nursery, Whistler. Miro Weiss’s
boyfriend. His name’s Jaime Segura. You heard that name
before?

No, Ben hadn’t.

But Segura had heard of him.

There was a voice. ‘That is Whistler?’

‘This is Whistler, yes. Should I come in?’

His voice scraped, as if he’d not used it in a while. He swallowed.

There fell a pause. All this way: what were the odds Segura had sent for Ben just to put a bullet in him as he walked through the door? Numbers rattled through his mind, but none were any help. That was the thing about probabilities: they became irrelevant in the face of event. In the face of a gun.

‘. . . Yes.’

Ben pushed open the door and walked in.

There were six people in the room, but he only saw one to start with. Jaime Segura was a lot younger than Miro Weiss – and Miro, troubling forty, had given the impression of being older. One of those people who’d been middle-aged the day he first picked up a razor. But Segura had olive skin, dark hair, brown eyes, and though he evidently hadn’t used a razor himself recently, this mostly showed on his chin and upper lip, the way it does in adolescence. His hair was a tangled mass of feathery curls. And his clothes were a generation removed from anything Miro might yet be found dead in: jeans and a brown fake-leather jacket over a zip-up top.

He wore boots that looked like they’d seen a mile or two.

He carried the gun Neil Ashton had dropped when the car uncluttered his brain.

Closing the door behind him, Ben said, ‘So,’ which even to his own ears sounded like make weight conversation.

‘You will stand against the wall?’

‘If that would make you comfortable.’

Jaime didn’t answer.

Ben crossed to the wall, keeping a careful distance between himself and the gun as he did so.

Though it wasn’t like there was enough space in this room to confuse a bullet.

There were other eyes on him, of course, and now Ben counted them down: they belonged to two women, two boys, and a man about his own age. The eyes of the twins gazed out from a pair of heads half-buried in their father’s thighs, and even Ben – unused to children – could tell they didn’t know if he represented threat or promise. Fair enough. He wasn’t sure himself. Their father’s look was less complicated, as if Ben’s arrival bore the stamp of authority. And with that look, something other than fear settled on Ben’s shoulders – for the first time, it weighed on him that it wasn’t only his own life he had to worry about here. Strange that it was the man’s look rather than the children’s that brought this home to him.

Strange, too, that it had taken this long for the message to get through.

As for the women, the older – she’d be the cleaner; the one he’d had no information on – looked down almost before she’d looked up. But hatched-faced; that was the expression that fit – though almost before it occurred, another replaced it: anvil-faced. Anvil-faced. Her round, bitter mask bore the marks of the blows life delivered. Or maybe he was reading too much into an extreme situation. The younger woman didn’t look away. She’d be the teacher, the one who’d come back inside when she’d had the chance to flee. Which spoke of bravery, obviously, but again it might be foolish to jump to conclusions . . . And she was pretty; dark-haired, light-skinned, with eyes full of feeling – anxiety, but defiance too, and maybe hope. And here was another strange element in a moment full of them: that even with a stranger’s gun pointing at him, and a wall to stand against, he could notice a woman’s looks, and appreciate that he was the focus of her attention.

‘My name’s Ben Whistler,’ he said to the room at large.

‘Thank you,’ Louise Kennedy whispered.

He wondered whether she always sounded like that, or whether her voice, like his, was coming out twisted and unnatural. He was not trained for situations like this. He was – as Bad Sam Chapman had mentioned – a back room boy. An accountant.
I’ve had the training, I’ve done the Leipzig
course. I scored in the top five per cent.
Which was true, except for the bit about the top five per cent. Like any good figures man, Ben knew when to fiddle the numbers.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’m here. Now what?’

The boy pointed the gun at the space precisely between Ben’s eyes.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Nott was south of the river.

South of the river was Vauxhall Cross, where Nott had once spent a working life crammed full of meetings like this, though on the other side of the desk. His role had been to smile politely at out-of-house visitors while feed-ing them through a mincer. The day he’d been told he was being relocated was black-ribboned in his memory.

‘Operations Director, Jonty. It’s not a demotion.’

It’s not a demotion
carried a subtly different meaning to
It’s a promotion
.

‘Directing the operations of a bunch of money shufflers.’

‘Which is important. Keeping track of the pennies, that’s what it’s about these days, yes?’

‘I thought it was about defending the Commonwealth. Foiling terrorists.’

‘Well, that’s important too. And it’s felt that such an, ah,
delicate
task is best left to those who show aptitude for it.’

In the aftermath of 7/7, a lot of careers received unwanted attention. Jonathan Nott’s desk was packed and boxed before that chat was over.

And now he was back on-site for the weekly debriefing, an increasingly uncomfortable session. These past weeks he’d eschewed the official car; had taken to walking along the river. A small enough economy – he’d have to maintain it for a couple of millennia to cover his section’s short-fall – but the river was more conducive to thought than the stream of honking traffic. Not that the relative calm had produced any brainwaves.

Other side of the desk was Roger Barrowby: aka the Barrow boy. The grammar school/redbrick background helped. Roger had thinning sandy hair, a prominent chin, and a habit of pressing the tip of a finger to its central dimple, as if trying to encourage it back into his jaw. His jacket was flaked with dandruff. Perhaps he worried too stringent a shampoo would lay waste to his suffering hair.

‘Terribly pleasant morning, don’t you think?’

‘I hadn’t noticed.’

‘South Bank’s lovely, weather like this. Sun glinting off the river sort of thing.’

Nott hadn’t imagined his travel arrangements had passed without notice, and wasn’t about to rise to the bait. ‘If you say so.’

Small talk over. ‘Anything to tell us, Jonty?’

‘Apart from the fact that I’m only Jonty to friends and equals?’

Roger smiled, as if Nott had made an amusing observa-tion. ‘I’m assuming there’s no news of Mr Weiss.’

‘No.’

‘Because if there had been, you’d have let us know soonest.’

‘Soonest. Of course.’

‘You’re not being blamed for this, you know.’

‘No? I rather had the impression I was.’

‘Nobody expects anyone of your, ah,
seniority
to be up to speed with the digital world.’

‘We wouldn’t be bordering on age discrimination, would we, Roger?’

‘Heaven forfend. I have trouble setting the video myself. No, I simply meant that with these keyboard whizzkids, anything can happen. Turn your back for a moment, they’ve diverted the Service’s PAYE funds into their Halifax supersavers.’

‘I’m not sure “whizzkid” applies to Weiss. The man’s thirty-nine.’

A flash of annoyance crossed the Barrowboy’s face. ‘Not really the thrust of my point, Jonty. All I mean is, you’re still one of Us. Exile doesn’t change that.’

‘Exile? I was under the impression I’d been
not demoted
.’

‘Of course.’

‘Though I seem to remember you used to call me sir.’

‘It’s the new informality, Jonty. Makes the wheels turn faster.’

‘This is before they run you down, yes?’

‘Speaking of which, what happened this morning? Some, what would you call it,
incident
out Oxford way? Bit off your patch, isn’t it?’

‘I haven’t been to Oxford since my last gaudy. Which, by the way, does make it my patch, rather.’

‘Ah, the old college ties. One of your boys run over, am I right?’ Fake concentration briefly furrowed his brow. ‘Ashton?’

‘Neil Ashton.’ As you know.

‘Bit of a turnaround, eh? When the dogs get involved in hit and run, they’re normally doing the driving.’

‘The driver was an estate agent, for God’s sake. He had two children in the car. Getting a jump on the school run.’ ‘Interesting wrinkle.’

‘It was an accident,’ Nott said.

‘Good to know. So what was Ashton up to? With Sam Chapman riding shotgun?’

‘Routine business.’

‘Sure about that, are we? Nothing to do with Weiss?’

‘Not as far as I’m aware,’ Nott said.

Barrowby leaned back. His index finger strayed to his chin before he jerked it away – habits were something you broke in this business, whatever they happened to be. ‘And now there’s a hostage situation in a nursery school.’ ‘An unfortunate chain of events. Or possibly coincidence.’ Nott allowed his gaze to drift to the window, and a skyline that seemed to change by the week. Sometimes he wondered whether Six’s remit went far enough. Terrorists were one thing; were architects another? Hauling himself back, he went on: ‘Ashton’s gun was lost in the accident. It may –
may
– have ended up in the wrong hands. But nothing’s certain. The hostage taker might be a wild card. Nothing to do with us at all.’

‘Making it, as you say, a coincidence. That would be a first. Why the helicopter?’

‘Chapman’s offering aid and assistance. He was
in situ
, after all. I sent back-up. End of story.’

‘Rather stretching the definition of your function, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I’ve been running operations since you were failing your eleven-plus, Roger. Sam Chapman’s an experienced field man. If there’s anything for us in this nursery inci-dent, he’ll be the first to know.’

‘Experienced, I’ll give you. But experience doesn’t always equate with reliability, does it?’

‘You’ll have to run that by me again.’

‘It’s been three weeks since Miro Weiss disappeared with enough money to start his own country, and Bad Sam’s no nearer finding him. How hard is he looking?’

Nott said, ‘Like you say, it’s a digital world. And Weiss covered his tracks well.’

‘I don’t care if he’s the last of the fucking Mohicans, if Chapman was trying, he’d have him by now.’ Roger Barrowby paused – he didn’t swear often, and knew Nott knew this. ‘There have been rumblings,’ he went on. ‘You police your own, we know that. In principle, we stand by that.’

‘You sound like New bloody Labour all over again,’ Nott said. ‘Identify the principle, then shoot it down in flames.’

‘It’s been three weeks. A quarter of a billion pounds. And you’re getting nowhere. We need a fresh approach.’

‘You want to call my dogs off,’ Nott said calmly. Frankly, he was surprised they’d held off this long. ‘You’re sending your own in.’

‘Yes.’

‘But it’s my section. I have jurisdiction.’

‘As I said, we stand by that principle.’

‘When I hear you people say
principle
, I reach for my sickbag.’