Personal (Jack Reacher, #19)(84)

I said, ‘What day is it today?’

Nice said, ‘Friday.’

Bennett had hedged his bets by planning for both routes, calling option two the straight shot through the centre, and option one the arc to the north on the North Circular. Not that it really mattered. Because obviously the arc would meet the straight shot somewhere, in this case way in the west, about nine o’clock on a dial. Which was the obvious place to put the pick-off point for the chase car. Two birds with one stone. Which is what Bennett had done. There was an aerial photograph of the place where the two roads met, which had a surreal acreage of blacktop, like a regular four-way stop suddenly swollen up to immense size, but uniformly, like Joey’s house.

Charlie White’s home address was shown as a pushpin graphic on a map, and his destination was shown as another, stuck into an address in Ealing, which was his opposite number’s house. A summit meeting. There was a photograph of the place, which was a big, handsome, not-quite-suburban red-brick pile. Not a million miles from Chigwell, except it was. The street was about thirty years older than Joey’s, maybe, but it was there for the same kind of reason. Successful people had to live somewhere.

Charlie’s latest Rolls-Royce had a file all its own. With photographs. It was big and ugly, with weird suicide doors on the back, but it was very imposing. No doubt about that. Ninety-three point two per cent of the time Charlie sat behind his driver, with a guard next to him on the back seat, and another next to the driver up front. The other 6.8 per cent of the time this linear deployment was changed to a diagonal deployment, with the back seat guard placed behind the driver. No pattern had been discerned. Which I guessed was likely, with computers. No common sense. Obviously Charlie’s regular driver was short. The steering wheel was on the right side of the car, and the car was on the left side of the road, and maybe Charlie didn’t feel comfortable next to the sidewalk, stopped at lights or slow in traffic, so he rode next to the crown of the road instead, behind his driver, which was OK because the guy was short, except the guy needed time off now and then, so on occasion Charlie was forced out from behind a taller replacement, maybe twenty-five days in a twelve-month period, which might have been a legal minimum, and which was 6.8 per cent of a year.

I said, ‘I need to go buy a very sharp knife.’

Nice said, ‘OK.’

We walked eleven blocks on Piccadilly, and the whole length of Bond Street, and we saw plenty of knives, but some of them were solid silver, for eating fish, and others were neat pearl-handled pocket knives, for rooting around in briar pipes, and none of them was any good to me. Until we happened upon a very upscale hardware store. It was full of rugged tools, most of them with dark-stained wooden handles, including a linoleum knife with a wicked hooked blade. I bought two, plus a roll of silver duct tape, and the counterman put all three items in a brown paper bag that he gave me for free.

Then Nice wanted clothes, so we made Oxford Street the third side of our square, and she picked out a store, where she picked out a new outfit. At the dressing-room door she gave me her jacket to hold, and she said, ‘You don’t need to check. I’ve still got one pill left.’

Five minutes later she came out in her new stuff, and she put her jacket back on, and we headed for the street, but first we passed the escalator to the menswear department, so I followed her hint and headed upstairs. I got all new, except for pants, because none would fit. But the coat was better than the Arkansas golf jacket. Bigger pockets, and less of a Glockshaped silhouette. An upgrade, but I felt bad about ditching the old one. Like burying a friend. Khenkin’s brains had been on it, and Nice’s tears.

Then we headed down through Grosvenor Square, past our embassy, towards the back of the hotel, and I said, ‘My guess is Bennett will offer us a government car tonight. In which case we’re going to take it, but we’re going to ditch it as soon as we can.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t want to be tracked.’

‘Would they?’

‘Of course they would. They need to cover their ass. And they need to file a report tomorrow. Twenty point two per cent of the time I was scratching my head.’

‘Why do you need two linoleum knives?’

‘I don’t. I need one, and you need one.’

‘For what?’

‘Like I said before, we need to think for ourselves now, and there may be orders we need to ignore.’

She said nothing.

I said, ‘Best of both worlds. We’re doing our jobs, but we’re doing them our way.’

She said, ‘OK.’

‘Which also means, tonight we leave our phones at home.’





FORTY-FOUR


BENNETT CAME BACK again just after four in the afternoon. He gave us the keys to his silver Vauxhall and told us he had programmed the chosen crossroads into the navigation system. He suggested we stand by a little ways west of the spot, to be ready to pick up the Rolls-Royce immediately after the chase car had been cut loose. He felt Charlie White would neither wait for it nor intervene nor try to help it in any way. Etiquette was too important. He couldn’t be late in Ealing. That would be discourteous, and even disrespectful. Such things were important to London gangsters.

Charlie was expected at the Serbian leader’s house at ten o’clock in the evening, which apparently meant there was an 84 per cent chance he would leave home exactly one hour before, which would give him a twenty-minute margin in case of traffic or other delays. If necessary he would park around the block and wait. Such was his usual habit for sensitive destinations. Etiquette meant everything. Ten o’clock meant ten o’clock. But probably his east–west loop around the North Circular would be uneventful, and therefore he would likely arrive at the pick-off point before nine thirty. Bennett said his crew would be on the scene on full alert from the top of the hour onward, and he advised us to do the same.