by Lee Child
TWENTY-SIX
I ASKED CASEY Nice about the photograph, and she gave me a detailed explanation. She said like everything else to do with politics and diplomacy it was a bigger deal than it appeared to be. It was much more than a ritual formality. It was freighted with subtext. It was about image, and collegiality, and an opportunity for the little guys to stand next to the big guys, on an equal footing, literally. It was about status and worth and the newspapers back home. In other words it was about exposure, both metaphorical and real. An open-air background was considered important. It was about being seen out there in the world with your peers, talking, joking, joshing, rubbing shoulders, doing deals, being just as important as everyone else.
And Nice said they would all be outside for more than just the photograph. They would walk on the lawns from time to time, in twos and threes. If the guy from Italy had a problem about the debt or the euro, he had to be seen strolling with the German, deep in private conversation. Maybe they would only be talking about their kids or soccer, but the image would count in Rome. Likewise our president would be seen with the Russian guy, and the British guy and the French guy would get together, and the Japanese guy would talk to the Canadian. The potential combinations and recombinations were endless. Plus they all got on each other’s nerves on a regular basis, and some were still secret smokers, so breaks were always necessary.
Nice said, ‘Kott and Carson are going to have visible targets, believe me.’
I asked, ‘Is there an option to cancel the meeting?’
She said, ‘No.’
Through the steamy café window I saw a black panel van pull up outside our hotel.
I asked, ‘Can’t the photograph be taken inside?’
She said, ‘Theoretically, but not under these circumstances.’
‘Reasonable prudence is not acceptable?’
‘Not if it looks like cowardice.’
‘That’s crazy.’
‘That’s politics. The world needs to see them taking care of business. And some of them have elections coming up. This kind of coverage is important.’
Across the street the black panel van waited at the kerb. No one got out. No one got in.
I said, ‘What about if it’s raining?’
She said, ‘They’ll wait until it stops.’
‘It might never stop. This is England.’
‘It’s not raining now. Want me to look up the weather report?’
I shook my head. I said, ‘Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Is the outside location for the photograph fixed in advance?’
She said, ‘The back patio. There are shallow steps. The short guys like to use them.’
‘The back of the house faces the highway. Better than facing the city.’
‘Plenty of structures either side.’
‘Are they using bulletproof glass?’
‘No point,’ she said. ‘Those panels work with one guy at a microphone. They don’t work with eight people milling around.’
I nodded. I pictured the eight people in my mind, milling around. Presumably they would come out of some kind of a patio door, all of them faking bewilderment at the way they had so suddenly to pivot between high-minded seriousness and the sordid demands of the press. Gosh, really? We have to do this now? Well, let’s be quick about it and get back to work. So there would be plenty of faux-sheepish grins, and plenty of good-natured jostling for the back of the line. Which would all take place within a very tight little group, I guessed, because of the demands of collegiality and equality and reflected glory. Certainly none of them would want to get separated. A leaked picture with a group of seven on one side of the frame and a lone figure on the other wouldn’t look good. The headlines back home would write themselves. Out of touch, ignored, shunned, aloof, doesn’t play well with others.
So they would stay tight, and then when they figured the news outlets had enough goofy stuff in the can, they would line up on the steps, and they would puff out their chests, and they would stand absolutely still.
With no blindfolds.
Across the street the black panel van was still there.
I said, ‘How are you doing with the pills?’
She said, ‘I still have five.’
‘So you’re feeling OK?’
She nodded. ‘Pretty good.’
‘Because the brief is mastered, and our initial execution has been satisfactory?’
‘Because I can see a way through this now. I feel like the problem is narrowing itself down. Kott and Carson will want to see the back patio, and the back lawn, maybe. Which takes about sixty per cent of the buildings right out of the picture. We know where we’ll find them. Roughly, I mean. Ballpark, at least.’
Across the street the black panel van was still there.
I said, ‘Suppose we hit a roadblock along the way?’
She said, ‘What kind?’
‘Something unexpected. Will you be OK?’
‘I think that would depend.’
‘On what?’
She was quiet for a long moment. She was giving the question her serious attention. She said, ‘I would be OK if it didn’t knock us off our stride.’
‘You mean, if we get a problem, we should deal with it fast and decisively?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘If it’s a roadblock, we have to get through it and keep on going. We can’t afford to get sidetracked. I can see a way through now, and I don’t want it to close up again.’
The black panel van was still there.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back to the hotel.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
THE VAN AT the kerb was facing away from us as we walked towards it. It was about the size of a small SUV, and about the same shape, but it was all sheet metal at the back. A windshield, and a driver’s window, and a passenger’s window, and nothing else. It was painted black, with no writing on it, as far as I could see. And it was very clean. It was waxed and polished, like a mirror. Like the SEAL car in Seattle. Which was a good question, right there. Who uses large black vehicles and keeps them immaculately clean? Only two answers. Limousine companies, and law enforcement. And limousine companies didn’t use panel vans. Small buses, maybe, but passengers like windows.
Except this was London, and what did I know? Maybe a cultural revolution was under way, involving a sudden new enthusiasm for automotive cleanliness. Maybe it would hit America six months later, like Beatlemania. Although every other vehicle I had seen was filthy.
Casey Nice said, ‘Are they cops?’
I said, ‘I’m sure they’ll make it clear, one way or the other.’
We crossed the street and we walked on, towards the van, all the way, and the front doors opened, both together, fast and smooth, unlatched when we were close, and then opened when we were closer still. Two guys climbed out. The one on the sidewalk pivoted slowly, while his partner hustled around the hood. Same sweep, different speeds. Some kind of a synchronized move, no doubt perfected by long practice.
Both guys were in dark suits under black raincoats. Both were white. Or pink, to be accurate. Chapped, like they’d had a long hard winter. Both were shorter than me, but not much lighter. Both had big knuckly hands, and cords of muscle in their necks.
They blocked our way.
‘Help you?’ I said, like the neighbour in Arkansas.
The guy who had taken the shorter pivot said, ‘I’m going to put my hand in my pocket very slowly and show you a government identification document. Do you understand?’
Which was a neat trick, potentially, in that we would be staring at the guy’s moving hand, inching its way into his pocket, pausing there, inching back out, and meanwhile the other guy could have been doing anything at all. He could have been assembling a brand-new Heckler and Koch from a kit of parts.
But then, if they thought they needed weapons, they would have come out the van holding them.
I said, ‘I understand.’
The guy glanced at Casey Nice and said, ‘M
iss?’
She said, ‘Go ahead.’
So he did, slowly, and he came out with a leather ID wallet. It was black, and it looked old and worn. He opened it, finger and thumb. It had two plastic windows, a little yellowed, face to face. Behind one was a version of the Metropolitan Police badge. Sculpted and shiny and very impressive on their pointed helmets, not so much when printed on paper. Behind the other plastic window was an ID card.
The guy held out the wallet.
His thumb was over the picture.
I said, ‘Your thumb is over the picture.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
He moved his thumb off the picture. The picture was him.
Above his face was printed Metropolitan Police.
He said, ‘We need to ask you some questions.’
I said, ‘What questions?’
‘We need you to get in the van.’
‘Where will you sit?’
The guy missed a beat, and said, ‘We need you to get in the back of the van.’
I said, ‘I don’t like the dark.’
‘There’s a wire screen at the front. You’ll get plenty of light.’
‘OK,’ I said.
Which seemed to surprise him a little. He missed another beat. Then he nodded and stepped forward, and his partner came with him, and we stepped backward, and half turned, and stepped off the kerb into the road, and then we hung back and waited politely for one of them to open the doors.
The one who had hustled around the hood did it, first by turning the handle, then by pulling the right-hand panel, and propping it, then by pulling the left-hand panel, and propping it too, both doors standing open more than ninety degrees, so that together they made a chute. The load area inside was completely empty, and completely unmarked, and every bit as clean as the outside. All bare metal, all painted black, all waxed and polished. The interior walls were stamped and pressed for strength. The floor was ribbed. And as promised there was a thick wire grille welded full-width and full-height behind the passenger compartment.
There were no handles on the inside of the doors.
The guy turned back from the left-hand door, coming up a little, because he had stooped to operate the prop, and I launched off my back foot and jerked at the waist and smashed my elbow into the bridge of his nose, a clubbing blow, slightly downward. His knees crumpled and his head snapped back and bounced off the door with a metallic boom, but I didn’t see what happened to him next, because by that point I had already twisted counterclockwise and knocked Casey Nice out the way and launched the same elbow at the first guy, who was a big strong man, but clearly not much of a fighter. Maybe he had gotten too comfortable with getting by on appearance and reputation alone. Maybe it was years since he had been involved in an actual scuffle. The only way to deal with a sudden incoming elbow was to twist and drive forward and take it on the meat of the upper arm, which is always painful and sometimes numbing, but generally you stay on your feet. But the guy went the other way. He chose the wrong option. He reared up and back, chin high, hoping to dodge the blow, which didn’t work at all, and never really could. The elbow caught him full in the throat, perfectly horizontal, like an iron bar moving close to thirty miles an hour. Speed matters, like in baseball and busting down doors. And the human throat is full of all kinds of vulnerable gristle and small bones. I felt my elbow crush a lot of it, and then I whipped back to the other guy, but he didn’t need a follow-up question. He was sitting on his ass, propped against the open door, blood streaming from his nose, out for an eight count. So I turned back again and saw the guy I had hit in the throat flat on his back in the gutter. He was whooping and wheezing and pawing at his windpipe.
I knelt next to him and patted him down. No gun. No knife. I went back to the guy on his ass. No gun. No knife. Not in broad daylight, I guessed. Not in London.
Casey Nice staggered back into view. She looked very pale. She said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’
I said, ‘Talk later. We’re in public here. Get them in the van first.’
The guy in the gutter was barely breathing. I bunched the front of his raincoat in my hands and lifted him up and turned him around and got his head and shoulders into the load space, and then I shovelled the rest of him inside, and then I did the same thing with the other guy, but with his collar from behind, and the back of his belt, because he was bleeding badly all down his front, and I didn’t want to get marked or sticky. I kicked the props and closed the doors on them, and checked the handle.
Secure.
Casey Nice said, ‘Why did you do that?’
I said, ‘You didn’t want to be sidetracked.’
‘They’re cops, for God’s sake.’
‘Get in the front. We need to dump this thing somewhere.’
‘You’re crazy.’
I looked all around, and saw some cars and people, but they all seemed to be going about their normal business. No big crowd was gathering. No one was standing with a flat hand over an open mouth, or fumbling for a cell phone. We were being ignored. Almost consciously. The same the world over. People look away.
I said, ‘You told me if we get a problem, we should deal with it fast and decisively.’
I stepped back up on the sidewalk and tracked around to the driver’s door. I got in and pushed the seat back as far as it would go, which wasn’t very far, because of the wire screen. I was going to be driving with my knees up around my ears, on the left side of the road, with a stick shift and a diesel engine, none of which I was used to.
Casey Nice got in next to me. She was still pale. The key was still in the ignition. I started the motor and pressed the clutch and waggled the stick. There seemed to be a whole lot of gears in there. At least seven of them, including reverse. I took an educated guess and shoved the stick left, and up, and looked for the stalk that would work the turn signals.
Casey Nice said, ‘I meant different problems than cops.’
I said, ‘Cops are the same problem as anything else. Worse, in fact. They can take us back to the airport in handcuffs. No one else can do that.’
‘Which they will now. For sure. They’ll hunt us down with a vengeance. You just assaulted two police officers. We’re on the run, as of this minute. You just made things a thousand times harder. A million times harder. You just made things impossible.’
I clicked the turn signal and checked the door mirror. I moved off, with a lurch, because of a clumsy left foot.
I said, ‘Except they weren’t police officers.’
I changed gear, once, twice, three times, a little smoother as I went along, and I got straight and centred in the left-hand lane.
She said, ‘We saw his badge.’
‘I bet it was done on a home computer.’
‘You bet? What does that even mean? You’re going to assault a hundred cops just in case one of them isn’t?’
I changed gear again and sped up a little, to blend in.
I said, ‘No cop on earth would call his badge a government identification document. Cops don’t work for the government. Not in their minds. They work for their department. For each other. For the whole worldwide brotherhood. For the city, just maybe, at the very best. But not the government. They hate the government. The government is their worst enemy, at every level. National, county, local, no one understands cops and everyone makes their lives more and more miserable with an endless stream of bullshit. A cop wouldn’t use the word.’
‘This is a different country.’
‘Cops are the same the world over. I know, because I was one, and I met plenty of others. Including here. This is not a different country when it comes to cops.’
‘Maybe that’s what they call their ID here.’
‘I think they call it a warrant card.’
‘Which he knew we wouldn’t understand. So he used different words.’
‘He would have said, I’m a police officer, and I’m going to put my hand in my pocket very slowly and show you ID. Or my ID. Or
identification. Or credentials. Or something. But the word police would have been in there somewhere, for damn sure, and the word government would not have been, equally for damn sure.’
She said nothing for a minute, and then she bagged out her seat belt and squirmed around and knelt up for a look through the grille.
She said, ‘Reacher, one of them isn’t breathing.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
I GLANCED BACK, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off the road long enough to be sure. Maybe he was just breathing very slowly. Casey Nice said, ‘Reacher, you have to do something.’