Personal (Jack Reacher, #19)(85)

I said, ‘How are you coming along with my information about the glass?’

He said, ‘You’ll get it as soon as I do.’

‘I know that. But when will you get it?’

‘Tonight, at the latest. Hopefully before the nine o’clock start time. If not, then I’ll have it immediately afterwards.’

‘Where is it coming from?’

‘You know I’m not going to tell you that.’

‘Who else did you talk to, and what kind of notes did you write?’

‘Nobody, and none at all. It’s as low profile as you can get. Which is probably why it’s taking so long.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Relax. Take a break. We’re going to. We’ll see you later tonight. You might not see us, but don’t forget, we’re out there somewhere, and we’re depending on you.’

Bennett looked at me, but said nothing.

Then he left.

We ate at five thirty, because we wanted to be full of energy and good nutrition three and more hours later, and human digestion gets slower with stress, not faster. Then we put our phones side by side on her window ledge, twenty floors above Hyde Park, and she said, ‘I’m going to tell General O’Day we suspected penetration by British intelligence. It’s the only possible defence. I’m breaking strict orders here.’

I said, ‘Understood.’

‘And it will only work once. They’ll make some new trade where the penetration becomes legitimate, in exchange for something else. So then we couldn’t come up with some entirely random new excuse a second time around without looking obvious. So this is the only time we can do it. Is it worth it, for the Brits?’

‘We only need to do it once. There wouldn’t be a second time.’

‘But why now?’

‘It’s as good a time as any.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘We leave here at seven thirty,’ I said.

At seven thirty we were standing next to the silver Vauxhall, in the Hilton’s carriage circle, pooling and piecing together our impressions of the local geography, and coming to an unfortunate conclusion. Which was, to get where we were going, we had to either try a tricky slalom through the back streets, or drive around Hyde Park Corner in the direction of Buckingham Palace. Casey Nice felt the back streets raised the odds too high, of getting lost and thereby missing our deadline for the most mundane of reasons. I agreed. Then she said on the other hand Hyde Park Corner was a racetrack, and fender benders or traffic tickets were equally mundane. I agreed with that, too. But then she said she supposed back streets could be just as bad for fender benders and traffic tickets. Narrow spaces, parked vehicles, no-left-turn, no-right-turn, no rolling stops, or whatever the rules were. Probably the risk was far greater. So Hyde Park Corner it was. I volunteered to drive, but she insisted. Which was good. She was better at it.

It was like jumping into a rushing river, and going with the flow, and then jumping out again at exactly the right spot, which was basically two bold manoeuvres separated by a lot of held breath. But Nice got it right both times, and we made it out to Grosvenor Place, safe and sound, tight against Buckingham Palace’s side wall, which looked a lot like Wallace Court’s side wall. Maybe the same contractor had built them both. Maybe at the time he had a long list of prospective customers, all of them worried about the same kind of thing.

We dumped the car in a no-parking zone a hundred yards from the St James’s Park subway station. We felt a hundred yards was enough to keep our destination ambiguous. We could have been headed elsewhere. There was plenty of other stuff in the area. And the station itself served two separate lines, including the Circle Line, which like its name suggested ran in a subterranean circle, not as wide as the aboveground orbitals, more like the downtown Loop in Chicago. The other line was the District Line, our old friend, the one we wanted, which ran all the way across London from the east to the west.

We stopped in at a bright white branch of Boots the Chemist and bought two burner cell phones, with cash. Then we walked onward to the subway, and we used our cash-bought travel cards, and we went down to the platforms, where we waited for a train running east, away from Ealing, away from the giant four-way, and away from Bennett.





FORTY-FIVE


WE GOT OUT of the Tube at Barking, and we walked up to the Barking Minicabs office, where Nice fired up her new cell and called for a car from the sidewalk outside. There was the usual ragtag selection of sedans on the kerb, old Fords and Volkswagens and Seats and Skodas, unfamiliar models to us, but clearly ideal for their line of work, like Crown Victorias in America or Mercedes Benzes in Germany. Within a minute a guy came out of the office. He was digging in his pocket for a key. He was middle-aged, and he looked local, and a little sleepy. He saw us and didn’t react in any way. Maybe he was part-time only, and unaware of late-breaking gangland APBs. He said, ‘Where to, folks?’

I said, ‘Purfleet,’ because I liked the sound of the name. I had seen it on a road sign. I figured it was east and a little south of Barking. The guy indicated a scraped-up Ford Mondeo the colour of sewage, and he said, ‘Climb aboard.’

Which we did, side by side on the rear seat. The guy slid in behind the wheel and took off, smooth and competent, left and right through the back streets, working the gearshift, keeping the diesel purr going. I figured he was aiming to join the main Purfleet road as late as possible, to beat the traffic, which worked for me. I waited until I saw a bleak stretch up ahead, with weedy sidewalks, and boarded windows, and a forlorn line of shuttered small-business workshops, and I pulled out my gun and waved it in the mirror, long enough for the guy to see it for what it was, and then I touched it to the back of his neck, and I said, ‘Pull over, right here.’