Personal (Jack Reacher, #19)(67)

I said, ‘You have our phone numbers?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Silly question,’ I said.

Bennett swapped places with Nice and drove us south, to the Bayswater Road, which was the northern limit of Hyde Park, and then east to Marble Arch, and then south again on Park Lane, into Mayfair, which was rich enough to be neutral territory. No gangs there, at least of any type I would recognize. We drove past the Grosvenor House Hotel, and the Dorchester, and we pulled in at the Hilton. Bennett said, ‘They won’t look for you here. With the money you’ve taken, they’ll figure you went somewhere fancier. Somewhere with a bigger name, like Brown’s or Claridge’s, or the Ritz, or the Savoy.’

I said, ‘How do you know about the money we’ve taken?’

‘It was in Ms Nice’s report to O’Day.’

‘Which you happened to test for intelligibility.’

‘The choice of test sample is a random procedure. Purely a lottery. Driven by engineering. Something to do with the mean time between failures.’

‘We should throw our phones away.’

Casey Nice said, ‘We can’t.’

Bennett said, ‘I agree. You can’t. You need to check in with O’Day on a regular basis. That’s the deal he made with Scarangello. If you go to radio silence now, then the deal is off, and you’re disowned by all concerned, in which case you better be out of the country within an hour, or you’re going to be hunted down like common fugitives.’

‘You know about Scarangello too?’

‘Try to remember, anything that ends up in the state of Maryland goes through the county of Gloucestershire first. And in reverse.’

‘You must be listening to the whole world.’

‘Pretty much.’

‘So who’s bankrolling this thing? Have you figured that out yet?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘And you’re the A team, right? With the big brains? So much better than the rubes at Fort Meade?’

‘Normally we do pretty well.’

‘But not this time, apparently. So now you want to dump it all on us. You want us to keep on communicating with O’Day, so you can listen in while we take all the risks.’

‘We didn’t rule the world by being nice.’

‘The Welsh ruled the world?’

‘The British ruled the world. And the Welsh are British. Just as much as the Scots. Just as much as the English, even.’

I didn’t answer. Nice passed me the ammunition boxes, and I put them in the environmental shopping bag, and we got out of the car, and we walked into the hotel lobby.





THIRTY-SEVEN


THE HILTON WAS more than adequate for our needs. A generic name, but they had maxed out the fanciness in honour of the Park Lane location. And the prices. And the snootiness. They started out a little dubious about our lack of luggage. All we had was the bag of bullets. And they started out equally sniffy about taking cash, but then they saw our many thick rolls of bills, and instantly upgraded us in their minds from budget tourists to eccentric oligarchs. Not Russians, probably, because of our accents, so Texans, maybe, but in either case they became extremely polite. The bell boys were especially disappointed we had no other bags to carry. They were smelling fifty-pound tips.

Our rooms were on different floors, but we headed together to Nice’s first, for a safety check, and because I felt she should have a box of ammunition with her. A lone last stand in a hotel room was highly unlikely, but highly unlikely things can happen, in which case a hundred and sixteen would be a much more interesting number than plain old sixteen straight.

Her room was empty and unthreatening. It had the same basic architecture as a thousand motel rooms I had seen, but it was prettied up to a far higher standard, including literally, in that it was twenty floors from the ground with a view of the park. I put her box of a hundred Parabellums on her nightstand, and glanced around one more time, and headed back towards the door.

She said, ‘I’ve still got two left. I feel good now.’

I said, ‘Tell me about when Bennett got in the car.’

‘That’s what he did. He just got in the car. I saw him on the opposite sidewalk, dialling his phone, and then listening, like people do, and at that point he was just some guy, but then my phone started ringing, so I answered, and it was him. He crossed the street and got in right behind me. He told me General O’Day had given him my number, and that General Shoemaker had confirmed it, and that we should move off the kerb and drive around the block because we were in a no-parking zone and there was a traffic cop behind us.’

‘So you moved off?’

‘He was clearly legitimate. I thought to know the names of both generals showed he was on our side.’

‘What do you think now?’

‘Not entirely legitimate, but still on our side.’

I nodded. ‘That’s what I thought, too. Did you believe the things he said?’

‘I think there were some exaggerations. Unless he was being suicidally candid about a programme that must still be deeply classified. On the British side, certainly. Who would react, surely, if their biggest secrets were being talked about in the open.’

‘Some guys can be suicidally candid. They grow to hate the bullshit. There’s no reaction because it doesn’t really matter anyway. People like that are not security risks. Having everything out there is the exact same thing as having nothing out there. The Brits are hacking our signals. The Brits are not hacking our signals. Both things are up there under the spotlight. Which doesn’t help us know which one is true.’