by Gregg Loomis
The biker realized their purpose only seconds after reaching full throttle. Swerving sharply to avoid the first five of six, handlebars and knees were centimeters from the unforgiving pavement.
This time, Jacob and Lang could only circle to keep the diminishing stack of bricks between them and their attacker, a defense that would work only for so long.
Using a single hand to steer, the driver swept over the curb as he raised the pistol for another fusillade.
The move must have distracted his attention for an instant, a micro-second in which the front wheel hit a brick. The bike shuddered as tire left pavement. The rider dropped his weapon as the hand that had held it joined the fight to regain control.
The potential victims were suddenly the aggressors. Jacob sprinted for the automatic now lying in the street as Lang picked up and threw half and quarter chunks of bricks. The first two went wild. The third smashed into the bike rider’s plastic face shield, sending him into what would have been a perfect backward summersault had the asphalt been a foot further away.
The impact of body hitting pavement could be heard above the screech of metal bike itself slid on its side across the street before being stopped by impact with the curb.
It had barely come to rest before Jacob snatched the pistol from the street, pointing it at the motionless rider.
“He’s not going anywhere,” Lang said, ushering his friend away from the prostrate body.
He could feel his heart beating against his rib cage. He took several deep breaths, waiting for the adrenaline that filled his system to disperse. He had told himself a thousand times he could live without this sort of high. Each time he experienced it, though, he knew he was being delusional when he thought the thrill of extreme danger was something from which he could do without. More than once, Gurt had remarked he was as addicted to the excitement of danger more strongly than Leon had been to meth. Leon had shed his addiction. When he was truthful with himself, Lang doubted he could.
The wavering wail of a siren was growing louder. “And somebody called the cops,” he added. “Toss the gun and let’s disappear. I, for one, had rather not spend the rest of my trip here trying to explain what happened.”
Jacob stooped to slide the gun into a sewer before the two turned, forcing themselves to walk calmly back in the direction from which they had come.
A police panda car, black and white, passed them, then slammed on its brakes hard enough to make rubber scream. It backed up until the driver’s window was next to where Jacob stood.
“You there,” the uniformed officer called.
Jacob leaned over so his face was level with that of the policeman’s. “Constable?”
“We have a report of shooting. Have you seen anyone. . .?”
Jacob’s face wrinkled in puzzlement. “Shooting?”
“Discharging a firearm.”
Jacob shook his head, bewildered. “If someone were shooting around here, I’d think we would have heard.” He turned to Lang. “Did you hear any shooting?”
Lang shook his head. “Not hereabout. Been quiet as a churchyard.”
The window slid closed and the car sped away, siren and lights at full cry. Lang and Jacob watched it disappear around a bend in the road before walking the next few blocks in silence.
“Now,” Lang said, “before we were interrupted, you were going to explain why it was necessary for me to come to England.”
“Because I didn’t want to endanger anyone using a communication media that may well be compromised.”
Lang rubbed the tip of his nose. For some reason it had developed an intolerable itch. “I’m an American, remember? I’m used to my government spying on me.”
Jacob gave him a look as though he might, just might take the remark seriously. “Perhaps so but I saw no need to put others in danger.”
His nose satisfied, Lang stuffed his hands in his pockets. “And just who might those ‘others’ be?”
Jacob told him of his visit to Cavanaugh House, finishing with, “And when Isaacs called me, he said he might have a name for me. I wanted you to hear firsthand what he has to say and answer any questions you might have.”
“If that motorcyclist is any indication, I’d say just meeting with the Marquess is putting him in danger.”
“Not if they don’t know we are meeting with him.”
Lang hated the indefinite antecedent. “ ‘They’?”
“Whoever sent our friend on the motorcycle, whoever had your friend. . .?”
“Lydia?”
“Lydia killed.”
Too many whoevers.
“How do you propose to make sure the meeting is secret? They sure knew I was coming here.”
By this time, they had reached the Hoste.
Jacob held up a finger. “Patience.”
Walking to the slightly mutilated Audi Lang had driven, he produced an object Lang at first mistook for a pocket watch. Jacob walked around the car in much the same manner as the prospective purchaser of a horse might before he knelt beside the passenger door and ran a hand along the frame.
“Aha!” He stood, a small black box the size of a cigarette pack in the hand not holding the other device. “Behold, the Foxtrax Mini MT Portable tracker, available to lorry fleet owners, parents of teen age drivers and suspicious spouses for about twelve quid a month. They knew where you were every minute.”
“But how. . .?”
“You said the man at the car place told you there were no GPS systems on compact cars, right? He simply steered you to the car to which someone had already attached this bugger.”
Lang’s knees felt weak. Basic Agency training mandated sweeping a vehicle whose immediate past was unknown. It had been so long since he had used a detection device like Jacob’s, he had all but forgotten both their necessity and existence. His carelessness could- and almost had- gotten both of them killed.
Lesson learned.
33.
Cavanaugh House
Approximately 90 Minutes Later
The drive had lasted no more than half an hour at most but Lang was thankful to get out of Jacob’s diminutive old Morris and stretch his legs. From the half full car park, a manicured lawn seemed to stretch for miles although Lang knew the feeling was an illusion fostered by the framing of precision cut hedges.
A queue of fifty or so people stood outside the house’s main entrance, a two story, limestone edged arch in the middle of which a pair of massive, brass studded doors stood open.
“Your friend lives well,” Lang commented.
Jacob was in the process of locking the Morris. “Not exactly my friend, but indeed he does. Doesn’t seem the toff, though.” Dropping the keys in his pocket, he led the way. “We’re to have the people at the door call him, the people dealing with the grockles.”
“’Grockles’? Isn’t that some kind of bird?”
“Tourist, you’d call ‘em.”
To many naturalized citizens word wide, the local argot was a means of becoming more native than those born in the country. Idly, Lang wondered if his friend went out of his way to acquire that of Great Britain. He was more likely to use slang than the average person Lang encountered.
A walk of perhaps a hundred yards along gravel paths lined by boxwoods brought them to the main entrance. They drew hostile stares and muttering as they edged their way to the head of the line. Behind a table, a woman of undetermined age exchanged printed tickets peeled from a roll for pound notes. She looked up, a question on her face, when Jacob had no money in his hand.
“That will be will be five pounds twenty,” she said peevishly. “Each.”
“We’re here to see the Marquess,” Jacob announced. “I believe he’s expecting us.”
She made no effort to conceal her doubt as her eyes flicked from Jacob to Lang and back again.
Jacob pointed to a stack of papers on the corner of the table. “I think I see a note announcing us right there on top.”
A pair of glasses appear
ed, seemingly from thin air, as she scrutinized the sheet in question.
Satisfied, she pointed behind her where a single carved oak stair case displaying turned Elizabethan balusters ascended before dividing into two to climb into a darkness three stores above. From the adjacent paneled walls, portraits of people in sixteenth and seventeenth century dress stared down on visitors. They seemed uniformly unhappy at the intrusion, although, arguably, one or two could just as well be suffering from gastro-intestinal problems.
“Take the door at the top of the second landing. End of the hall.”
They were dismissed as she turned to tear off tickets for a family of four.
The instructions were as accurate as they were terse.
Jacob knocked on a door, which, like the staircase, mirrored the Jacobean Age’s marriage of the carpenter’s art with the joiner’s. Two lions rampart appeared to lunge at a single brass ring in the center of age- darkened oak.
When the door opened, Jacob realized they had reached the same spacious study as before, this time by more conventional means.
The Marquess stepped aside. “Come in, come in.”
He was dressed, if not in the same cardigan, one equally tatty. He had exchanged the Wellies for loafers with the low quarters of Italian manufacture. At least one crocodile had died.
Jacob introduced Lang and the three men sat, Lang and Jacob in the wing chairs facing a contemporary desk, an acrylic top across what looked to Lang like very blond wood. Perhaps Scandinavian? Whatever its origin, it screamed contrast to its surroundings.
It took Lang a full minute to absorb his surroundings: the high rococo ceiling, the massive bookcases, the rosette of antique arms.
“So,” Jacob began, “you were going to, I believe, your words, ‘search’ your memory and ask about. I gather either your remembrances or queries came up with something or you wouldn’t have invited us here.”
Isaacs’s forehead wrinkled. “I’m not sure what I found, certainly not of its significance to what you are searching for.” He paused, stood and went to the window, speaking over his shoulder. “If I recall, you were looking for someone or someones in British intelligence with access to unrestrained military resources, someone with ultra- nationalistic-or perhaps royalist- views.”
Jacob nodded. “And. . .?”
“I asked about, even visited Albert Embankment to chat up some chaps. Still have a security clearance, One name kept coming up, the name of an organization that may not even exist, the Saint George Society.”
“Never heard of it,” Jacob said.
“I rather think you weren’t supposed to,” Isaacs replied. “Best as I could ascertain, its members are not the type who would want public recognition, if you get my meaning. Mostly MI6, MI5 types, a few military men, particularly SAS and special ops. My information goes back only to 1982 and the Falklands War. . .”
“When the Argentine military junta seized the Falkland Islands, a few tiny dots in the far South Pacific?” Lang asked.
“More or less,” Isaacs replied. “The hostilities arising from the dispute as to ownership had been building for years but the Argentines needed a causa bella, something to get public opinion behind an invasion. The record is sketchy at best but what is clear is in March of ’82, someone gave an Argentine scrap merchant permission to remove a long abandoned whaling station on South Georgia. The British disputed the legality of his operation and sent twenty Royal Marines. The Argentine junta grabbed the provocation as an excuse to invade the island. The next day, a British flotilla was on the way.”
“I’m not sure I get the significance,” Lang said.
Truthfully, he was certain he did not.
The Marquess returned from the window to his seat behind the desk. “It never was satisfactorily explained who gave the scrap merchant permission to salvage the whaling station, if in fact, anyone did. What is clear is that the appointed royal governor was subsequently quite vocal he had not while the Argentines produced a wire from his office doing just that.”
Lang shook his head. “I still don’t get it. What difference does it make now, nearly thirty-five years later, who, if anyone . . .?”
Isaacs lifted a hand, stop. “What I haven’t mentioned was that the assistant royal governor was a young named Nigel Symthe who subsequently left the diplomatic corps for MI6. He’s still there. His immediate superior is a man named Alred James. An unauthorized peek into the dossiers of both of them indicate they are almost certainly members of the St. George Society.”
Lang shrugged. “I still don’t get it.”
Jacob spoke up. “Say this ultra-patriotic organization, the St George Society, felt it was in England’s best interest to settle the long simmering dispute with Argentina over the ownership of the Falklands. Let’s suppose that the fuse needed a match and getting this scrap dealer to make an unauthorized incursion onto one of the islands seemed a convenient means. . .”
“You’re saying this Smythe person applied the match by sending a seemingly legitimate wire giving the scrap merchant the go-ahead? Seems a bit of a reach to me,” Lang said.
“Perhaps,” Isaacs soothed, “but add to that theory the suspected facts the man was the one who turned Gaddaffi over to the Lybian rebels, strictly on his own. Plus he works for James. Rumor has it if he, James, didn’t actually have Diana killed, he was prepared to.” He nodded to Jacob. “Seems to be a smidgen of truth to what you said when you were here last. Anyway, both of them seem to have the ultra-nationalistic, pro-royalty ideas you described to me and they certainly belong to an organization that shares those ideas.”
Lang said, “Even assuming your information is correct, there’s nothing that ties either to . . .”
The sentence’s completion was interrupted by the door flying open, its ancient hinges screaming in protest. Two men stood in the doorway. Lang recognized them both. Timmy and Broken Nose. He also recognized the silenced Sig Sauer p226 each man held as the preferred side arm of SAS. Sig Sauer Cerakote’s
34.
Park View Condominiums
272 14th Street
Atlanta Georgia
At the Same Time
Celeste Harper had been putting this off as long as she could rationalize doing so: Too busy reviewing a long trial transcript for an article on an ongoing a series of fraud litigation, not emotionally ready, too painful, all of those excuses we employ to avoid tasks unpleasant or stressful.
Today she would sort through Livia’s things, decide which to donate to the Good Will store, which she might keep.
Keep, she thought to herself, holding up a glittering evening gown with a navel level neckline. She couldn’t get her right leg into the thing, let alone her rotund body. She smiled. Livia’s model’s figure, almost anorexic, meant that even at the Good Will, few of her clothes would sell.
She tossed the dress on the bed and glanced around the room, savoring memories as a dog might a scent.
The condo was luxurious by Midtown standards, almost two thousand square feet. Built pre-war as a third floor walk-up apartment, it featured nine foot plus ceilings and wooden floors. Two bedrooms one of which Celeste and Livia had shared as bed room and the other as an office, although the closets were full of Livia’s stuff. A view of Piedmont Park filled the windows on the east side while the southern exposure provided sun light to the potted garden of succulents with which Celeste busied herself.
Livia, of course, could have afforded something more upscale, maybe one of those high rises in Buckhead but Celeste had objected. First, she wasn’t sure how a lesbian couple might be received in Atlanta’s wealthiest neighborhood, although Elton John lived in one of those towering glass and steel holes in the sky. Second, no way she, Celeste, could afford even one half of the condo fees, what with twenty-four hour valet service, a complete gym and an Olympic size swimming pool. And the monthly mortgage payments? LOL!
Oh, Livia had just laughed and said she could take care of it if Celeste really wanted Buckhead. After all,
a generous family trust fund supplemented her professor’s pay check. But Celeste would have none of it: Here, the mortgage and condo fees as well as the utilities and groceries were split fifty-fifty, Celeste’s share well within her means. From experience, she knew what happened when one partner paid most if not all the expenses, particularly if the one paying was as attractive as Livia.
She picked another hanger from the closet. She remembered this dress: A casual, backless sun dress. Livia had purchased it specially for a lecture series at The University of Puerto Rico in Ponce year ago this past week. She had insisted Celeste come along. Holding the hanger at arm’s length, Celeste turned it back and forth and sighed. Livia had worn this the day they visited San Juan’s old fort and had lunch at some little place in the Old City. Cold beer and entrees she couldn’t pronounce.
She sighed again, this time as a film of tears blurred her vision. No good. She’d be at this all day and become an emotional basket case in the process. Good Will could come pick it all up, the sooner the better.
She started to shut the closet door, more to rid herself of the sight of Livia’s possessions than any other reason. Livia also had some really nice jewelry: A spectacular emerald ring and diamond encircled emerald earrings to go with it, several pearl necklaces, both white and black, a diamond bow pin that had been her grandmother’s. Stuff Celeste, or any woman, would love to have. She smiled sadly. The jewelry on her would be like the crown of England on a hippopotamus. Besides, Livia’s little sister should get all that. Even had Celeste and Livia gone and gotten married in one of those same sex marriage states, something they had often discussed but never quite gotten around to, the little sister deserved the jewelry.
Celeste almost finished closing the closet door when something caught her attention. There on stacked shelves were several bright orange bags, the bags Hermes hand bags come in. Prada, Christian Dior, Chanel, Livia loved them all but Hermes was her favorite. Celeste had never considered buying a purse that cost as much as a midsize car but she had to admit they were lovely: Handcrafted soft leather, shiny brass fittings, all kind of compartments.