Personal

by Lee Child

  She said, ‘General O’Day.’

  Shoemaker gave us the practical stuff. Chargers for our cell phones, credit cards, a wad of English cash money, hotel reservations, and airplane tickets from Atlanta to London Heathrow, on Delta. The company Gulfstream would fly us down to Georgia, but after that we were strictly commercial, just like regular citizens.

  Then we all met in the conference room, because O’Day had two items of late information for us. First up was a photograph. It was a still taken from the security video system at the Gare du Nord railroad station in Paris. It was time-stamped fifty minutes after the shot that killed Khenkin. The focus was off and there was a little blur, but it was clear enough. It showed a guy, average height, wiry, all muscle and sinew. He was turned half away from the camera, lost in a crowd, but his cheekbones gave him away. It was John Kott. His eyes were cast down and his mouth was a tight line. Hard to say from a literal snapshot, but his body language and his facial expression made me feel he was uneasy in the hustle and bustle. Which would be understandable. Fifteen years in Leavenworth, then another in the Arkansas backwoods. The Gare du Nord was one of the busiest railroad terminals in the world. A big change of pace.

  O’Day said, ‘That’s the concourse just ahead of the Euro-star tracks. The London train pulled out ten minutes later. We should assume he was on it.’

  Casey Nice said, ‘Why isn’t Carson with him?’

  O’Day said, ‘We should assume they travelled separately. Much safer that way. They wouldn’t risk both getting nailed, by the same piece of bad luck.’

  Then he opened a file and pulled out a bunch of paper. The gang analysis from MI5 in London. He said, ‘They’re sure it’s the local English guys. They own the streets around the target, and they moved in on Karel Libor’s operations very fast. Too fast for the news of Mr Libor’s demise to have reached them through conventional channels. They knew it was going to happen beforehand. Because they set it up.’

  He read out a list of four names, a top boy and three trusted lieutenants, White, Miller, Thompson, and Green, like a law firm, and then he described an inner circle of thirty more, supplemented when and where necessary by contract labour anxious to prove its worth. He said collectively they were known as the Romford Boys, and always had been, because they were based in a place called Romford, which was on the eastern edge of the city, north of the river, just inside the orbital highway. He said they were largely white and largely native born. He described their business activities, which were drugs, girls, and guns, the same as Libor’s activities, with protection rackets and loan sharking as the icing on the cake. He had no lurid tales to tell us, of gruesome murders and horrific punishments and sadistic tortures. He said over the years their many and various victims had simply disappeared into thin air, and were never seen again.

  Casey Nice went to pack, and I showered again and dressed again and put my toothbrush in my pocket. We met in the Gulfstream’s cabin. She was wearing her Arkansas outfit. She said, ‘General O’Day told me you’re dubious about all of this.’

  I said nothing.

  She said, ‘Working with me, I mean.’

  I said nothing.

  She said, ‘What happened to Dominique Kohl was not your fault.’

  ‘O’Day showed you the file?’

  ‘I had already read it, on Kott’s bedroom wall. It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known.’

  I said nothing.

  She said, ‘I’m not going to arrest anyone. I’m going to hang way back. It’s not going to happen again.’

  ‘I agree,’ I said. ‘These things are generally the exception, not the rule.’

  ‘It could be over before we get there. The Brits must be busting a gut.’

  ‘I’m sure they are.’

  ‘We’ll have all their data a minute after O’Day gets it. We’ll be OK.’

  ‘Now you sound dubious.’

  ‘I’m not quite sure what to expect.’

  I said, ‘Neither am I. No one ever is. On either side. Which is a good thing. It means the game goes to the fastest thinker. That’s all you need to be.’

  ‘We can’t both be the fastest.’

  ‘I agree,’ I said again. ‘I might slip into second place. In which case someone is going to start shooting at me with a rifle. So you better stay seven feet away.’

  ‘Suppose I’m in second place and they start shooting at me?’

  ‘Same thing. Seven feet away. At least I’ll get a sporting chance.’

  The Atlanta airport was so big we had to catch a cab from the General Aviation offices to the passenger terminals. Casey Nice checked in at a thing that looked like an ATM, but I went to the desk instead, where a glance at my new passport got me a boarding pass made of old-fashioned pasteboard. We were in premium coach, which struck me as an oxymoron. Nice said it meant extra leg room. She explained a long and complicated algorithm by which the government saved taxpayer money. Everyone started out in regular coach, unless and until there were compelling reasons why not. The only box we checked was that we were expected to start work immediately after disembarkation. Which got us the leg room.

  Which turned out to be not very much. We went through security, shoeless and coatless and with empty pockets, and then we wandered through what looked like a shopping mall to the gate area, via a coffee cart for me and a juice bar for her. She had a small suitcase with wheels, and a thing about halfway between a handbag and a shopping bag. She fit in better than I did, as a regular citizen. We sat on thinly padded chairs and waited, and then eventually we got on the plane, after the rows with the regular leg room had all filled up first. Our seats were the usual kind of thing, and the extra space in front of them was clearly going to work for her, but not for me. If I jammed the bony structure in the small of my back hard against the seat, then I could bend my knees a little more than ninety degrees, but that was about as good as it got.

  The pilot said the flight time was going to be six hours and forty minutes.

  Two hours later we had eaten and drunk, and the cabin staff turned up the heat so we would all fall asleep and leave them alone. Coshing, I had heard them call it, in conversations among themselves. But it was fine with me. I had slept in worse positions. My headrest had little wings that moved, so I clamped my head like I was wearing a medical device, and I closed my eyes.

  Casey Nice said, ‘I take the pills because I get anxious.’

  I opened my eyes.

  I said, ‘Do they work?’

  ‘Yes, they do.’

  ‘How many do you have left?’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘You had seven last night, at dinner.’

  ‘You counted?’

  ‘Not really. I noticed, is all. It’s a description. They were yellow, they were small, they were in your pocket, there were seven of them.’

  ‘I took one last night and one this morning.’

  ‘Because you were anxious?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What were you anxious about?’

  ‘Mastering the brief, and executing the mission.’

  ‘Are you anxious now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because of this morning’s pill?’

  ‘It already wore off. But I feel OK.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘Because this is the easy part.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Doesn’t Tony Moon’s doctor worry about him never getting better?’

  ‘People take these things for years. All their lives, some of them.’

  ‘Is that what you’re going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What else makes you anxious?’

  She didn’t answer at first. Then she said, ‘The stakes, I guess. Just the stakes. They’re so high. We can’t let it happen again.’

  ‘Can’t let what happen again?’

  ‘September eleventh.’

  ‘How old were you, anyway?’

  ‘Formative years.’

  �
�Is that when you decided to join the CIA?’

  ‘I knew I wanted to do something. The decision was made for me, in the end. I was recruited out of college.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Yale.’

  I nodded inside my medical brace. Yale was pretty much a CIA kindergarten. Like Cambridge University in England, for MI6. All a terrorist needed to do was work his way through the alumni rolls. Or bomb a reunion dinner. I said, ‘You must be smart, to have gotten into Yale.’

  She didn’t answer.

  I said, ‘Do you work hard?’

  She said, ‘I try my best.’

  ‘Do you pay attention?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘And you paid twenty-two bucks for vehicular transportation.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘It means you’re just a little bit unconventional. Which is the fourth of the four things you need to be. All of which you are. Which is all we’ll ever need. Smart people, working hard, paying attention, thinking laterally.’

  ‘We had those on September tenth.’

  ‘No, we didn’t,’ I said. ‘We really didn’t. Like we didn’t have much of an army in 1941. It had been a long time since we had needed one. We had out-of-date people doing out-of-date things. But we got better real quick. Just like you did. It’s not going to happen again.’

  ‘You can’t say that.’

  ‘I just did.’

  ‘You can’t know it.’

  ‘It’s not worth taking a pill for. Just work hard, pay attention, and keep on thinking. That’s all you can do. And it’s not just you, anyway. There are thousands of you, just as good, working just as hard, paying just as much attention.’

  ‘We could still fail.’

  ‘Relax,’ I said. ‘At least for a couple of weeks. This thing isn’t September eleventh. I know Scarangello is full of doom and gloom, but suppose she’s wrong? Some politician gets whacked, exactly half his country will be throwing a street party. They’ll be buying beer and flags. Could spark an economic miracle.’

  ‘I’m sure that possibility was investigated. But I think Deputy Deputy Scarangello’s position represents the majority view.’

  ‘Is that what you call her?’

  ‘That’s what she is.’

  I asked, ‘Is your gun waiting at the hotel?’

  She said, ‘What hotel?’

  ‘Where we’re staying. Or do you pick it up someplace else?’

  ‘There is no gun. I’m unacknowledged. The government can’t arm me. You either.’

  ‘So what are we supposed to do?’

  She said, ‘Standard procedure would be to supply ourselves locally, by foraging.’

  I forced my head left and right, to push back the wings on my headrest. I said, ‘Which might be easy enough to do, because presumably the Romford Boys are being vigilant, on behalf of Kott and Carson, and sooner or later we’re going to touch their outer cordon, like tweaking the edge of a spider’s web, and presumably the outer cordon is armed, which means we’re about to be, because we’re going to take the guy’s weapon away.’

  ‘I think that’s one possibility they would want us to consider. Plus General Shoemaker thinks contact with Romford’s outer cordon is a good tactic in its own right. In the form of an invented approach on a business matter, he suggested. If we get past one layer, we can triangulate against the second layer and get a sense of where the centre is. Where Kott and Carson are, in other words.’

  ‘If I ask you a question, will I get an honest answer?’

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘How many other unacknowledged assets is the United States sending?’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘How many undercover Brits?’

  ‘Last I heard, thirteen.’

  ‘And what about the other six countries?’

  ‘They’ll send two each, except for Russia, who will match us with seven.’

  ‘When will they all arrive?’

  ‘Ahead of us, probably. We might be late to the party.’

  ‘And how busy are these boys in Romford?’

  ‘Busy doing what?’

  ‘Doing deals. With suppliers and wholesalers and retailers and stuff like that.’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘At least moderately busy, right? Drugs and girls and guns is all about buying and selling. And there’s always some new face on the scene with a better price, at one end of the deal or the other. So from time to time they talk to unknown people. They’re somewhat accustomed to it. So if some stranger shows up dressed like a tough guy with a bullshit deal, they won’t think too much about it. Maybe not with the second guy, even. But you just counted thirty-seven people who are all going to have the same idea as Rick Shoemaker did. After the third or the fourth the cordon is going to start shooting on sight. So we’re not going to do the spider-web thing. We’re going to do something else.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘I’ll explain it later,’ I said, because at that point I was drawing a blank, and she had only five pills left.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I SLEPT FOR maybe three hours, bolt upright, head clamped, and then about ninety minutes before arrival the lights came on and a whole lot of crashing and banging started up in the galleys. Casey Nice had the look of a person who hadn’t slept at all. She was a little pale and shiny and feverish. The joys of all-night travel. She said, ‘Have you been to London before?’

  ‘A few times,’ I said.

  ‘What do I need to know?’

  ‘You haven’t been before?’

  ‘Not for work.’

  ‘This isn’t work. We’re unacknowledged, remember?’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘I’m about to walk into a foreign country and break about a hundred laws and treaties. They take a dim view of that.’

  ‘Scarangello told me.’

  ‘She was right.’

  ‘In which case the airport will be your biggest problem. We should assume they’re on heightened alert. And they’re paranoid anyway. They have cameras and one-way glass everywhere. They’ll be watching us from the minute we step out the plane. From the jet bridge onward, literally. Us and everyone else. They’re looking for nervous or furtive behaviour. Because this is their first and best chance to catch people. And it doesn’t help us if we’re turned away at the border or locked up for questioning. So don’t look nervous or furtive. Don’t think about the hundred laws or treaties. Think about something else entirely.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘What would you most like to do in London? Like a secret desire. As stupid as you want.’

  ‘You really want to know?’

  ‘I want you to imagine you’re doing it. Or heading straight for it. That’s why you’re here. You’re going to catch a cab and go right there.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And then after the airport it gets much easier. Except that every square inch of every public space has a camera on it. Plus most private spaces, too. London has a quarter of the whole world’s supply of closed circuit cameras, all in one city. It’s not possible to avoid them. We have to accept it and move on. We’re making a movie, whether we want to or not, and the only thing we can do about it is get out real fast afterwards, before they start to look at the tapes.’

  ‘If we find Kott and Carson, we won’t need to get out fast. We’ll be invited to Buckingham Palace to get a medal.’