He waited a minute after Emma had left the room, then went into the hall and took the elevator downstairs. In the lobby, he immediately saw Dr. Blackburn—the real Dr. Blackburn—and Jamie Meadows and a host of other well-fed, prosperous physicians gathered by a coffee station in a far corner. If his watchers were also present, he saw no sign of them. There was no OBG in a blue tracksuit looking his way. No shady characters keeping a hand to their earpiece, monitoring his progress through dark sunglasses.
Even so, Jonathan skulked around the perimeter of the lobby, head down, keeping to the walls. He was due to give his speech in a little over two hours, and if anyone saw him, they’d be worried. He hadn’t shaved or showered. Dressed in jeans, desert boots, a navy blazer pulled over his old Basque sheepherder’s shirt, he looked like the kind of bad element the doormen were paid to keep out.
He passed through the revolving door and hit the street. He craned his head left and right, hoping for a glimpse of a woman dressed in black with her hair pulled back severely from her forehead and up in a pony-tail. He failed to see her, but he wasn’t disheartened. He didn’t imagine that she had walked through the front door when she had come to visit last night, and he didn’t imagine she’d left that way at the height of the morning rush. He headed to his left, circling the building, and came to the service area. Delivery trucks idled in the garage as workers unloaded crates of beer, boxes of fresh produce, and freshly laundered towels. A set of stairs led down to the employees’ entrance. He glanced over the railing. The door was shut. Wheeling, he studied the backstreets for the likely avenue Emma had taken. One road ran parallel to Park Lane and was flanked by mews houses. Another ran eastward into the heart of Mayfair, but dead-ended after a few blocks. Twenty-five meters to his right, an alley ran down toward Green Park. It was in this direction that he’d been instructed to walk last night. He jogged down the pavement, training his eye for swaths of black.
He stopped at the first corner. As he waited for a car to complete a left-hand turn in front of him, Emma materialized as if out of thin air a hundred meters up the street. On closer examination, he observed that she’d emerged from a boutique. Some instinct or reflex caused him to retreat into a doorway, and at that moment she turned and glanced behind her. He held his position. Waiting, he noticed that he was sweating and that his heart was beating faster than it should.
He counted to five, but before setting out, he shot a look up the street behind him.
One block back, a tan Ford Mondeo idled at the curb. The morning light struck the windshield full on and reflected off the driver’s shiny blue tracksuit. One official bodyguard licensed to carry firearms, according to Emma’s furious description. He caught another figure in the passenger seat and maybe one in the rear. Jonathan’s watchers in the flesh.
They’ll follow you to get to me.
He returned his attention to Emma. She was keeping close to the storefronts, never looking back as she neared the intersection with New Bond Street.
It was then that he made a decision.
Stepping onto the sidewalk, he continued in his wife’s direction. At the next light he waited patiently for the signal to change. It wasn’t necessary to look over his shoulder to check if the Mondeo was there. The sideview mirror of a cab idling next to him did the job astonishingly well. Jonathan was picking up the tools of Emma’s trade.
The signal changed in his favor. He entered the intersection, but halfway across he darted to his right and regained the sidewalk. He looked for a store to duck into, somewhere he might disappear for a minute or two. But the street was lined with private residences. Door after door was locked. He checked behind him. Caught in traffic, the Mondeo hadn’t yet made the turn. Across the street, Jonathan spotted a newsagent’s shop. There might just be time …
He dashed into the oncoming traffic, dodging the fast-moving cars, ignoring the horns and the squeal of brakes. Reaching the far sidewalk, he flung open the door to the newsagent’s, setting a chain of bells tinkling madly. He bent low behind a wall of magazines. A moment later he spied the Mondeo speeding past. Still breathing hard, he watched until it disappeared from sight. Only then did he leave the store.
“Where the hell is he?” shouted Frank Connor from his position in the backseat of the Mondeo.
“I don’t see him,” said the driver. “Do you, Liam?”
The rangy dark-haired man in the passenger seat shook his head.
“Turn around,” said Connor, shifting his considerable bulk so that he could peer out the rear window. “He’s in one of those shops. He couldn’t have gone anywhere else.”
“I can’t just yet,” said the driver, indicating the steady stream of oncoming traffic.
“Screw the traffic,” retorted Connor. “Make a U-turn.”
“It’ll cause an accident.”
“Just do it. Now! There’s a break!”
The driver whipped the car around, keeping one hand firmly pressed down on the horn. The sudden turn tossed Connor against the door. He glanced up in time to see a white van skidding toward them. There was a squeal of brakes, a cacophony of horns, followed by the sickening crunch of metal impacting metal. The collision threw Connor to the other side of the car, and he struck his head violently against the window. The Ford came to a halt and he pulled himself upright.
“I told you,” the driver was shouting. “I knew there was no way we could make the turn. Crap!”
“You were too slow,” said Connor. “You got no reflexes. You had plenty of time.”
“Like hell!”
“Forget about it,” said Connor.
The man named Liam pointed at Connor’s head. “You’re bleeding, Frank.”
Connor drew a hand across his brow and looked down at fingers red with blood. He asked for a handkerchief and held it to his forehead, then climbed out of the car. Already traffic was snarled in both directions. An irate woman was walking up the road, berating him for being “a demon of a driver,” and “some kind of idiot.” Connor pushed her out of his way and stalked to the sidewalk. He looked up the road toward the intersection where he’d last seen Jonathan Ransom, but it was hopeless. Ransom was gone.
Connor told his men to take care of the mess, then started up the road. He should have known better than to rely on his own depleted resources.
It was time to bring in reinforcements.
New Bond Street was a commercial thoroughfare famed for its high-end retail outlets and tony art galleries. At 9:30, pedestrians crowded the sidewalk. Jonathan zigged and zagged through the onslaught of people, searching for his wife’s auburn hair. It’s impossible, he said to himself. There were simply too many people. Oxford Street was two blocks away, and he knew that if he didn’t spot Emma soon, he’d lose her for good.
He started to run, knocking into men and women, slowing only to stand on his tiptoes and gaze ahead. A hundred meters farther on, he pulled up. It was no use. The sidewalks were growing more crowded, not less. He put a foot into the street and stood exposed, canvassing the cascade of bobbing heads and shoulders.
There …
It was Emma. She stood on the far side of the street at the end of the block, one foot in the road like him, a hand raised to hail a taxi.
Jonathan looked to his right. Spotting a cab with its fare light on, he signaled for it to pull over. The cab docked at the curb expertly. Jonathan leaned into the passenger’s side window. “Make a U-turn. I need to follow a cab going in the opposite direction.”
“Can’t turn here, gov. ’Gainst the law, isn’t it?”
Jonathan threw a fifty-pound note onto the seat. “Emergency, isn’t it?”
“Hop in,” said the cabbie. “Which car is it you’d like me to follow?”
“Turn around and I’ll tell you.”
Jonathan hauled himself into the backseat, all the while keeping an eye pinned on Emma. As the cab negotiated a U-turn, he was afforded a perfect view of his wife climbing into a maroon taxi with a T-Mobile placard affixed to it
s doors.
“That’s the one,” said Jonathan. “And keep your distance.”
They followed Emma’s cab without incident to a home in Hampstead, a well-to-do neighborhood in the northern reaches of London. The driver was born to subterfuge. Effortlessly he maintained a safe distance behind Emma, never going closer than four car lengths. In a city where taxis nearly outnumbered private cars, he was invisible. Taking up position at the rear of a line of parked cars at the end of the block, they watched as Emma paid off her cab and walked to the side of a modest mock-Tudor-styled home, where she entered through a side door. Jonathan checked his watch. It was after ten. Emma had officially missed her flight to Dublin.
He had another concern. He was due back at the hotel in little more than an hour to deliver his keynote address. If he left now, he might just make it back in time, but he would have to shower and shave in record time. Blackburn and his associates had spent a lot of money to fly him to London and put him up in the five-star luxury to which they believed he was entitled. Jonathan didn’t want to disappoint them. And yet he could not make himself leave.
Just then the garage door opened, and all thoughts about rushing back to the Dorchester vanished. Jonathan leaned forward, his eyes trained on the gray BMW sedan pulling out of the garage and turning in their direction.
“Get your fare light on,” he commanded as he flung himself flat onto the rear seat.
“Already done.”
“Is it her?” Jonathan asked, still lying low.
“Bingo, gov. It’s her.”
“Then what are you waiting for? Get moving.”
It took Emma exactly thirty minutes to reach her destination. Her route took her south, back through Hampstead to Bayswater Road, where she cut through Hyde Park toward St. James. She drove slowly, more cautiously than was her habit. His Emma—or the real Emma, as he liked to think of her—was an Indy car driver in search of a track. She had only two speeds, fast and faster. This one braked for yellow lights instead of flooring it to make it through, signaled religiously, and rarely changed lanes. The implication was clear. Operational Emma, or Nightingale, could not afford to be stopped by the police.
From St. James it was a maze of narrow residential streets, constantly turning left, then right, but always keeping toward the Thames. Afraid to be seen, Jonathan shouted for the driver to lag behind, and two or three times they lost all sight of her. Luck, however, was with them, and after a tortured span of five or ten seconds, they spotted her again.
She parked in a space on Storey’s Gate Road. It was a narrow two-way street bordered by attached buildings dating from the late nineteenth century. All were five stories high, hewn from an identical batch of gray Portland cement, and constructed as part of a single ambitious project to gentrify the area. Only afterward did Jonathan remark on the perfect timing of the departing motorist, or recall that the car pulling out of the space had been a Vauxhall, the same car mentioned by code in the text message on Emma’s phone. At that moment, he simply attributed it to Emma’s good fortune.
“What now?” asked the cabbie as they stared at the BMW from a distance of a hundred meters. Emma’s silhouette was distinctly visible. She sat behind the wheel, as stationary as a statue.
“We wait,” said Jonathan.
16
It was past seven a.m. when Kate Ford returned home and closed the kitchen door behind her. “Good Lord!” she muttered as the scent of spoiled milk assaulted her senses. She flipped on the light and immediately identified the culprits: a bowl of half-eaten muesli and a quart of milk stood on the table exactly where she’d left them some twenty-six hours earlier. In her rush to get to One Park, she’d forgotten to clean up after herself.
Hurriedly she flung open the windows and waved the foul-smelling air out. Unlike Lord Robert Russell, she did not enjoy the benefits of central air conditioning. East Finchley was much farther from Park Lane than 20 map kilometers. Sighing, she dumped the cereal down the sink and followed it with the clotted milk. It was not how she’d envisioned coming home after her first day back on the job.
Upstairs, she turned on the shower. When it grew hot, she undressed and threw her suit and blouse into a pile on the floor. It was off to the dry cleaner for both. She didn’t like the idea of paying ten quid to have them cleaned and pressed, but she liked the idea of not smelling to high heaven. She took care climbing into the tub. The water was hot and the pressure was strong enough to peel paint, which was how she liked it. She washed her hair, then soaped her body, running a loofah over her arms and legs. She was careful to avoid the scar above her hip. A few weeks earlier, when she’d first come home from hospital, it had bulged like a swollen leech. The bullet had entered from the rear, just above the spleen, leaving barely a clean hole, and then blasted through the other side like a sledgehammer through rotting wood. Hollowpoints did that. The doctors had been unanimous in pointing out that it was a miracle that the splintered round had not nicked an artery or caused greater internal damage.
Kate remained under the showerhead until every last drop of warmth had been bled and the nozzle ran as cold as a Scottish stream. And then she stayed longer. She stood beneath the jets until her skin prickled with goose bumps and her flesh went numb. The numbness helped her deal with the silence. If she was frantic to towel herself dry, she didn’t notice that there was no radio blaring, no clumsy male hands clanking the breakfast plates, no East End baritone ordering her to hightail it to the car so they could drive in to work together.
A mirror hung on the wall, and she caught sight of her body, thinner now than it had ever been. She stared at her biceps, which looked taut and ropey beneath her pale skin, at her pelvis, so sharp and fragile, and at her scar. “The bullet destroyed one of your ovaries,” the surgeon had explained with maddening sympathy. “It also tore the lining of the uterus. To control the bleeding, we had to remove the uterus in toto. I’m so sorry. We did everything we could.”
He’d never mentioned the baby, though surely he’d known. Six weeks along was hardly enough for it to show. Maybe he’d been waiting for her to ask. Or maybe he thought Kate didn’t know herself and hoped to save her further anguish. She never knew if it was a boy or a girl.
She touched the scar and felt a jab inside of her, sharp as a spear. Gasping, she caught her eye and stared at the frightened woman bent double in the mirror. Cry, she told the reflection. No one can see you. You’ve been strong. You don’t have to prove how tough you are. It’s time.
The pain went away. Kate stood up straight. Dry-eyed, she turned away from the mirror and wrapped the towel around her.
Someone was knocking at the back door.
Still in her towel, Kate hurried downstairs and ducked a head into the kitchen. She was surprised to find a tall, fair-skinned man in a dark suit standing there with his hands in his pockets, as if he belonged there. “I think your milk’s gone bad,” he said.
“Who the hell are you?”
“Graves. Five. I apologize for letting myself in. I’d been knocking awhile, and I was afraid that your neighbors were getting curious.”
“Five” for MI5, the country’s national security and counterterrorism apparatus, better known as the Security Service. She should have known it by his posture. He looked as if he had a steel rod in place of a spine.
“What branch?”
“G Branch.” G Branch handled counterterrorism in all countries except Northern Ireland. Kate peered out the front window. The curb in front of her home was empty. “Where’s the blue Rover?” she asked on a hunch, remembering the car that had been parked inside police tape at 1 Park Lane yesterday morning.
“Parked it down the road. Think you might like to get dressed? They’re waiting for us at HQ. Traffic’s a bugger this time of day.”
Kate took a longer look at the man who’d let himself into her home. He was fortyish, tall and spare, with thick blond hair cut more casually than she would have expected. He wore a navy pinstripe, clearly Savile Row, wit
h the requisite inch of cuff showing, and a striped necktie that hinted at service in some elite outfit or another. His black wingtips were of the sleekest order and polished to a paratrooper’s exacting standards. But it was his eyes that captured her attention. They were diamond blue and near holy in their intensity. They were the same eyes she’d seen yesterday evening gazing at her from the offices of Oxford Analytica.
“You have a first name, Mr. Graves?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Colonel.”
MI5 has its headquarters in Thames House, an imposing block-long building situated (as to be expected by the name) on the banks of the River Thames in the Millbank section of London, overlooking Lambeth Bridge. Graves’s office was on the first floor, down the hall from the director. Kate, the born striver, was suitably impressed. It was a corner office, decorated with fashionable modern furniture. Picture windows offered a stunning view over the south side of the river.
“Sit down,” said Colonel Graves. “You know why you’re here. It’s about Robert Russell. Or, to be more accurate, what he was working on.”
“I was made to understand he didn’t work for the Security Service,” said Kate, taking her place on a low-slung fawn-colored sofa. A chrome-and-glass coffee table faced her. There was an ashtray brimming with cigarette butts alongside copies of various law enforcement journals.
“He didn’t,” replied Graves. “Not knowingly, at least. You spoke with Ian Cairncross. He told you about Russell’s interest in TINs—trusted information networks. You know … experts he’d assembled to gather information about this or that subject. Let’s just say that Lord Russell was a member of my TIN.”
“Looks like he was a member of quite a few.”
Graves nodded. “At the time of his death, Russell had pieced together information indicating that some sort of attack or plot was being planned on London soil. We’re viewing his murder as validation that he was correct. Accordingly, we’ve ramped things up a bit.”
Rules of Vengeance Page 11