Personal (Jack Reacher, #19)(70)

Nice said, ‘Suppose they come in to play a game of bowls?’

Bennett said, ‘We changed the lock. That one is ours, not theirs. They’ll think there’s something wrong with their keys. They’ll call a meeting. They’ll vote on whether to spend club funds on a locksmith. They’ll make speeches for and against. By which time either it won’t matter any more, or we’ll have changed the lock back again and gone home happy.’

I said, ‘How well can we see from here?’

He said, ‘Take a look.’

So I shuffled in, and sat down on the middle stool, and took a look.





THIRTY-EIGHT


CLEARLY THE BINOCULARS had some kind of fantastic high technology in them, because the image was spectacular. Not all green and grainy like I was used to, but liquid and silvery and endlessly precise. I was looking at a house about four hundred yards away, at an angle of about forty-five degrees. I could see the front, and all of one side, in large segments, through the bays of an iron fence, which was built on a brick knee-wall, and divided into sections by occasional brick pillars. The effect was reasonably grand, and I was sure the expenditure had been saner than the lunatic scheme at Wallace Court.

The house itself was a large, solid thing, made of brick, made to look Georgian or Palladian or whatever other kind of a symmetrical style was currently in vogue. It was completely conventional. It had a roof, and windows, and doors, in the right numbers, in all the right places. It was like a kid had been given paper and crayons and told to draw a house. Good, now add more rooms. It had an in-and-out driveway, in through one electric gate and out the other. The driveway was made of blocks that looked silvery but might have been brick-coloured. There was a small black sports car crouched near the door, parked at an angle, as if it had arrived in a hurry.

I sat back.

I said, ‘That’s Little Joey’s house?’

Bennett said, ‘Yes, it is.’

‘Great line of sight.’

‘We got lucky.’

‘He designed it himself?’

‘One of his many talents.’

‘It looks like every other house.’

Bennett said, ‘Guess again.’

I sat forward. I took a second look. Roof tiles, bricks, windows, doors, rainwater gutters, all arranged in a boxy rectangular structure filling most of its lot. I said, ‘What am I looking for?’

Bennett said, ‘Start with the Bentley.’

‘I don’t see it.’

‘It’s right there by the door.’

‘No, that’s something else. It’s much smaller than the Bentley.’

‘No, the house is much bigger.’

‘Than a car?’

‘Than a normal house. Little Joey is six feet eleven inches tall. Eight-foot ceilings don’t appeal to him. Regular doorways make him stoop. That house is a normal house, except every dimension on every blueprint was increased by fifty per cent. All in perfect proportion. Like it had swollen up, uniformly. The opposite of a doll’s house. An exact replica, but bigger, not smaller. The doors are more than nine feet high. The ceilings are way up there.’

I looked again, and focused on the car, and forced myself to see it for the size it really was, whereupon the house did exactly what Bennett had said. It swelled up, in perfect proportion. An exact replica, but bigger.

Not a doll’s house. A giant’s house.

I sat back.

I said, ‘What do regular people look like, when they go in and out?’

Bennett said, ‘Like dolls.’

Casey Nice squeezed behind me, and sat on a stool, and took a look for herself.

I said, ‘Tell me what you’ve seen so far.’

Bennett said, ‘First of all remember where we are. We’re right next to the motorway up to East Anglia, and right next to the M25, where we can go either east or west, or we could go the other way, and be lost in the East End ten minutes from now. It’s a plausible centre for operations. That’s why they all check in here. Not just because Joey is a control freak. He came to them. That’s why he built his house here, I’m sure of it. He thinks a good boss is always on top of every detail.’

‘Who have you seen checking in here?’

‘Lots of people. But we can explain them all.’

‘Talk me through it.’

‘We knew something was about to happen, because Joey suddenly doubled his personal guard. At the time we didn’t know why, but now we guess that was when Kott and Carson made their initial contact, before the job in Paris. And now they’re here, as promised, and they need guards of their own, and food, and entertainment, all of which would come through here.’

‘Even if they’re hiding far away?’

‘Far away for Joey Green means the other side of the M25. We’re not talking about the Highlands of Scotland. Thirty minutes from here is the remotest place Joey ever heard of.’

‘But you’re not seeing it?’

Bennett shook his head, no. He said, ‘We would expect a consistent pattern, something extra, laid on top of their normal activity, but we’re not getting it. There are occasional stray vehicles, and we track them as far as we can. We’ve even done computer simulations, based on which way they’re heading. They never go anywhere useful.’