She gestured down to the small, hot-pink travel case she’d been wheeling around with her since she’d got to Charing Cross Road, inviting him to open it.
He studied her, seeming to weigh her up, then bent his immense frame down towards the floor and began to unzip the fabric.
“Not too much,” she warned him. “Trust me, we don’t want everyone seeing what’s in there.”
He unzipped just one more inch and then, pulling apart the teeth of the zipper, peered inside. His eyes widened.
“Silver?” he asked her, voice pitched low.
“Yes. Twenty-eight bars, a thousand ounces - that’s a little over ten thousand dollars’ worth, if you don’t keep track of the market. Not a lot, but as much as I could carry, and hopefully enough to assure you my intentions are sincere, even if they’re not that honourable.”
Altogether, the silver was worth slightly more than the figure she gave him, though she was pretty sure he wouldn’t know that. Karen had been sad to see it go, and initially reluctant to part with it at all - but had eventually conceded, without enthusiasm, that the sacrifice was probably worth it, for the greater good.
Carruthers’ eyes, still wide as saucers, raked over the ingots.
“How’d you get it here?” he asked her, awe overtaking his wariness.
“That’s not for you to worry about, Mr Carruthers. Point is, I have it, and a lot more of it than this. You agree to help me, and you can take a little of it home yourself. How does a hundred thousand sound to you?”
“A hundred grand in silver?”
“It holds value better than cash, I assure you. And attracts a lot less outside interest.”
He zipped the bag closed and straightened himself up in his chair.
“I’ll have to talk to my partner,” he said. “See if we can make it work.”
“Ah.”
She pursed her lips; clicked her tongue thoughtfully against the roof of her mouth.
“I say something wrong, Ms. Chen?”
She grimaced; sighed.
“I wouldn’t say wrong, Mr Carruthers. But I guess I should’ve been clearer upfront: it’s you I want for this job. Only you.”
He hesitated before answering.
“I work with a partner, Ms. Chen. Always have.”
“Yes. And I know all about her. Oh, don’t look so surprised - you think I don’t do background checks, for something like this? Of course I do. I’m not a goddamn idiot.”
“You know about her, but you don’t want to work with her? I find that hard to believe.”
“Don’t be offended, please. She has a good reputation - a great reputation. Comes highly recommended. But she’s not getting any younger. She’s, what - nearly seventy now? That’s a little long in the tooth to be doing the kind of work you do. The kind of work that demands… precision. A steady hand.”
“She’s still great. I don’t know what you heard, but…”
“Let me interrupt you here, Mr Carruthers, before you go on. I love that you’re loyal to her - really, I do. But it isn’t her I want. And that part of the deal really isn’t negotiable.”
He lapsed into silence.
“Do I get to think about it?” he asked.
She pulled her lips into another grimace - this one suggesting that she’d rather he didn’t, but if he absolutely had to…
“I’m in town until tomorrow night,” she told him. “If I don’t hear from you before then, I’ll assume it’s a no and move on to another contractor.”
“Tomorrow night?”
“Yes, Mr Carruthers - tomorrow night. Thirty-six hours, or thereabouts. Should give you the time you need to decide, shouldn’t it? And when you’ve decided… you just let me know.”
Chapter 24
Osterley Park, London, May 1998
“I must say, it’s been a while since I did this,” Sita said, pushing a tree branch away from her face. It swung away from her and then, like an arboreal boomerang, yo-yoed back, its leaves rustling loudly as they hit her for a second time.
“Keep your voice down, would you?” Ruby hissed, parting another set of branches with her own, Kevlar-covered hands. “They’ll hear you all the way out in bleedin’ Ruislip, the way you’re talking.”
“Forgive me for trying to assuage our nerves with a little conversation.”
“Shut it, both of you,” Karen snarled quietly over her shoulder. There was something of the military squadron leader about her, in her dark camouflage gear; in the bulky bulletproof vest protecting her torso from hip to throat.
Do I look like that? El wondered, looking down at her own vest, her own black camo gear and boots.
Neither Sita nor Ruby did, she knew that much. Sita wore her vest like a fashion accessory, casually unzipped at the neck and carried off with so much panache that it might as well have been a gilet thrown on for walk in the countryside, while Ruby - short and round and bearing the weight of a loaded rucksack over her charcoal burglar’s attire - might have been an old crone from a fairy-tale, peddling apples door-to-door to unsuspecting princesses.
Rose, El was unsurprised to see, fit the outfit like a glove, moving as easily in the body armour as she might have in a pair of jeans or a sundress.
It’s because she’s used to it, El reminded herself. She’d have to be, wouldn’t she, with all that breaking and entering and robbing she did as a kid?
Apparently chastised, the two old women pressed on through the wood, El and Rose behind them and Karen leading the way, Hannah at her side.
(“You keep her close,” Ruby had warned Karen, before they set out. “She’s a bloody rattlesnake, that one. Can’t be trusted, not as far as you could throw her. So you don’t take your eyes off her, alright? She’ll have to come with us – we need as many warm bleedin’ bodies as we can get. But she’ll kick us in the teeth soon as look at us, if she thinks there’s something in it for her. You’d do well not to forget it.”
“Trust me,” Karen had told her, “there’s no danger of me forgetting. No danger”).
Kat hadn’t joined them, for this part of the job. El could forgive her for it, even if her absence did nothing to bolster their body-count advantage.
(“It’s not that I don’t want to go,” she’d told El. “I mean, I don’t want to go, because what sort of fucking lunatic would want to go walking straight into the lion’s den like that? But even if I did want to, I couldn’t. I wouldn’t last two minutes traipsing through a forest with my legs the way they are. One of you lot’d end up bloody carrying me to the finish line, the way I’m going”).
Even through the encroaching foliage and with the dark closing in all around them, El could see the cameras, strung about - and in some cases, mounted on - the trunks and upper branches of the trees: sleek grey cylindrical things, as free of wires as Karen had suggested, and entirely unlike any CCTV system she’d seen before. Stuart Ma, she suspected - it seemed ridiculous to keep calling him Pasadena, now they knew his real name - wasn’t just adept at using and manipulating new technology, but at inventing it, too. Coming up with his own solutions, when the affordances of existing hardware fell short.
“Stop worrying,” Rose whispered, following El’s gaze up into the red pinprick iris of the nearest camera. “They’ve been taken care of, remember?”
And they had been; Karen had assured her of it. Disabling them - every one of them, from the woods and fields to the farmhouse itself - was one of several things she and Jeremiah had arranged, on the first visit they’d paid Ma.
But still, their presence made her nervous. Their proximity.
Even Ruby softened her step as they approached the farmhouse; as they trod on tiptoe to the back and turned the handle of the unlocked door that led to the kitchen, as Ma had instructed.
“They won’t hear you, if come in that way,” he’d told Karen and Jeremiah, the night they’d dropped by to see him. “They’re never in the kitchen. They’re always here - in the games room. There’s a drinks cabinet down here,
look - right in the corner. Thea likes to drink, while they talk.”
Karen’s eyes had swept, disinterestedly, to the cabinet, then right back to Ma.
“Doesn’t seem very definite, if you ask me, Stuart,” she’d replied. “So how about this instead: we tell you when we’re coming, and you make very fucking sure they’re down here for it, enjoying a little snifter of something expensive out of one of the bottles you got in that cupboard. That sound good to you?”
Ma had stared at her, utterly terrified; then he’d nodded, taken his head in his hands and wept.
Locating Ma, once they were in the house, had been - as Karen described it - a piece of piss. They’d heard him from outside the kitchen: the rhythmic thud of the game he’d been playing - a beat ‘em up, by the sound of it - reverberating up from the open door of the basement below.
He didn’t notice they were there until long after they’d descended the stairs, so absorbed was he in defeating his pixelated opponent; didn’t falter in his manipulation of his control pad until Karen had perched herself on the edge of the pool table behind him and Jeremiah had spun the swivel-chair he’d been sitting in around to face her.
“Alright?” she’d greeted him - the replica gun in her hand entirely for show, although she’d had a sense that he hadn’t known that.
He’d tried to make a run for it, to spring up out of his chair and race for the door, but Jeremiah, who’d anticipated just this, held him down, the fingers of the boy’s bony but surprisingly strong hands digging into the tender flesh of Ma’s upper back.
Ma hadn’t been able to speak at all at first - just gape and gawp at them in their hellish clown makeup, his mouth opening and closing as wordlessly as a fish’s.
“You say something, there?” Karen had asked him, cupping a hand - the hand not holding the weapon - exaggeratedly to her ear.
“Take the money,” he’d begged. “Please. It’s in the safe in the master bedroom, I can get you the passcode. Whatever’s in there, you can have it, all of it. Just please, please - leave the rest.”
“The rest?” Jeremiah had said, curious.
“The hard drives. The laptops. Please.”
Jeremiah had glanced at Karen for confirmation of what to do next - a look she’d rewarded with a wide, bright smile.
“Sweetheart,” she’d told Ma, looking down at him from her baize-upholstered throne, “we’re not after your gear. Or your money, come to that.”
Ma had shrunk back into his seat and lowered his head, the bleached-blond strands of his boyband hair falling limply into his reddening eyes.
“What is it you want, then?” he’d asked, voice beginning to break.
And Karen’s grin had widened.
Ma met them in the kitchen; ushered them through, closed the door behind them gently, and pressed a finger to his lips for silence.
He was still terrified, El saw: gnawing at his lip and wringing his hands, his pulse leaping out from his neck and his jaw grinding involuntarily back and forth, as if he’d taken more amphetamine than he was used to and washed the lot of it down with a Turkish coffee.
Karen raised an eyebrow at him, expectantly, and a tremor ran through him.
She tilted her head, the gesture somewhere between a question and an instruction.
He lowered his head in return, turned on the spot, and beckoned them to follow him further into the house.
“You don’t know who I am, do you?” Karen had said, leaning in to close the distance between her and Ma. “Funny, I thought you’d be more observant than that, all the time I heard you’ve been spending eyeballing me. But then, I suppose I’m not normally done up like a David Bowie album cover, am I?”
She’d reached the gun-free hand into her pocket, pulling out a tissue-sized packet of wet wipes.
“Easily sorted,” she’d added, and rubbed the wipe across her face - once, twice, half a dozen times, until enough of the makeup had gone for the features underneath it to be clearly discernible.
Recognition had dawned across Ma’s face, then, and he’d let out a gasp before he’d been able to stop himself.
“And now he sees me!” she’d told Jeremiah, who’d twisted his own lips into a wry approximation of a smile.
She’d jumped down from the edge of the pool table and walked towards Ma, until she was standing over him.
“I can’t stop her,” Ma had said hoarsely, raising his chin to look at her. “I can’t call her off.”
“Her?” Jeremiah had asked.
“He means his boss,” Karen had answered, when Ma didn’t. “Madera. Isn’t that right, Pasadena?”
Ma had said nothing, mashing his lips together like two halves of a clamshell.
“He’s scared of her,” she’d told Jeremiah. “More scared of her than of us, I reckon. And why wouldn’t he be? She’s Rosa fucking Klebb, and we’re just some twats who walked in off the street. Except,” she’d tapped the tip of Ma’s nose very lightly with the muzzle of the gun, making him flinch, “he doesn’t know what we know, does he? Or what we’ve got on him.”
Something like panic had seemed to grip Ma, at that final statement.
(“Once he’d twigged who I was,” Karen said afterwards, “it couldn’t’ve taken him long to work out what I might’ve done to him. And how I might’ve done it to him, if you know what I mean”).
“What did you do?” Ma had croaked. “What the fuck did you do?”
She’d pointed down to the floor - to the white holdall she’d carried with her to the farmhouse.
“Grab the laptop out of there, would you, J?”
Jeremiah had blinked, just once, by way of assent, and opened the holdall, from which he’d produced a boxy grey PowerBook.
“Have a look at this,” she’d told Ma, as Jeremiah had flipped up the computer’s screen and placed it, with no small amount of reverence, on the flat denim planes of Ma’s upper thighs.
Ma had peered into the soft blue glow, his eyes darting from left to right as he’d taken in the information displayed on the screen.
“That’s not possible,” he’d said, but with just enough of an edge of panic to indicate that even he wasn’t wholly convinced by the words.
Jeremiah had clapped him, hard, on the shoulder.
“It’s not just possible, mate. It’s done. Karen here… she’s done it.”
“He’s not kidding,” Karen had agreed.
Ma had blinked at the laptop - over and over, an owl in thrall to a blast of strobe lighting.
What he’d been seeing, Karen said, was a distillation of the behind-the-scenes work she and Fergus - especially Fergus - had been doing since Hannah had rocked up at the house in Chelsea. The document was short, just five pages of text interspersed with the occasional passport-photo image, but from Ma’s perspective, the most terrible kind of threat.
It was, in effect, a list: a chronologically ordered inventory of every pseudonym Ma had used since leaving university - and attendant details of the financials, addresses and registered possessions associated with each - alongside brief but incendiary summaries of the multiplicity of local, federal and international crimes he’d committed under cover of each identity. And, more damning still: allusions to a far larger trail of evidence connecting each identity back, irrefutably, to Ma himself.
It would have been enough, had it been passed along to Interpol or the FBI or the California Department of Justice - or indeed any other of the investigation and intelligence services interested in garnering verifiable, legally admissible intel on the person they’d known only as Pasadena - to keep him in a supermaximum-security penitentiary until the day he died.
Karen and Fergus, though, had been formulating a different use altogether for the data they’d gathered.
“And you’re thinking,” she’d told Ma, “that all this is looking pretty fucking bad for you, right? I mean, I would be. Thing is, though, Stuart - can I call you Stuart? I feel like we’re there now, you and me. The thing is,” she’d crouched down n
ext to him, until the pseudo-gun was level with his heart, “it’s actually so much fucking worse than it looks.”
“What did you do?” Ma had repeated, stammering and swallowing, blinking eyes caught between the gun, the screen and Karen’s beaming, makeup-smeared face.
“What did we do? We deleted you, Stuart. All of you, every trace. Every name, every social security number, every fake birth certificate and driving licence you’ve ever used. And I know you like sniffing around other people’s money, so you’ll get a kick out of this one - every bank account, as well. Everyone you’ve ever been, and everything they’ve ever had - gone. All gone. Pasadena - gone. And Stuart Ma - you can probably guess where I’m going with this, but… he’s gone, too.”
Ma had looked, Karen said, as if he was going to pass out. A stress-induced stroke hadn’t seemed, from the abject horror written across every visible inch of him, like a complete impossibility, either.
“Now,” she’d continued, judging that the moment to deliver the killing blow had come, “would you like me to tell you what you can do for us, to get him back?”
Chapter 25
Osterley Park, London, May 1998
They followed Ma through the house, El marvelling at how little sound their feet made on the carpet underfoot.
Had Ma had the place soundproofed? she wondered.
Had Madera asked him to have it soundproofed?
And if she had… what plans did she have for the house, that meant it needed to be soundproofed?
The inevitable conclusion of the thought was both logical and profoundly alarming. El shut it down before it could take root, or tried to - but still, the idea of the house as what she couldn’t help but think of as a killing room persisted, dancing uninvited on the edges of her consciousness, and she shivered.
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