Reconstruction

by Mick Herron

  . . . Later, she would be asked what she felt on her ordeal ending, and so attuned was she to this from Big Brother evictions that part of her mind was recording her thoughts and feelings as they happened, but they arrived so swiftly, so wrapped around each other, that an honest articulation was a jumbly list: the gun the man the noise the songs the shot the screams who screamed?

  None of it my fault he let me go he kept the children he had the gun

  And underneath, beating like an unacknowledged drum, an image that refused to go away: of a one-inch plastic bear in leather jacket and sunglasses; that a child had given her; that she kept on a shelf in her room.

  Back in his office, the first thing he did was open a window, or pretend to open a window: an old-fashioned sash arrangement lifted if you tugged hard enough, but fitted into the external brickwork was a sheet of reinforced glass strong enough to stop a bullet, apparently. This didn’t open. But you could stand by it anyway, and gaze at the rooftops and their electronic furniture – aerial masts and miniature pylons – and what looked like privies or garden sheds, but were presumably access wells. The hooded carapaces of CCTV cameras hung at innumerable junctions; some static; others twisting on pivots to a preordained pattern, or at the whim of a distant watcher. Perhaps one was pointed his way now. But the glass was treated. No one could see in. That was the theory, and, like the glass’s protective qualities, Jonathan Nott presumed its effectiveness in this area was tested regularly.

  Must make a note of that.

  He turned to his desk, pressed Tina’s number on a key-pad: ‘Anything from Chapman?’

  ‘He’s not answering his mobile, sir.’

  ‘Do we have a fix?’

  ‘It was in Oxford an hour ago.’

  Tina was Queen of the Database. She knew Bad Sam’s phone wasn’t Bad Sam.

  ‘What about Ashton?’

  ‘He’s off the table.’

  For a moment, he wondered if this was euphemism, then it clicked: operating table. ‘Anyone with him?’

  ‘I sent a car for his wife. She’ll be by his bed.’

  Not what Nott had meant.

  ‘Duffy’s there too.’

  One of the Dogs.

  ‘But he’s not expected to gain consciousness any time soon.’

  ‘Right. What’s happening at the nursery?’

  ‘Live on News 24, sir.’

  ‘If I want to know what the media choose to reveal, I’ll pay my TV licence. Has Whistler checked in?’

  ‘He’s been asking for background.’

  ‘On?’

  ‘Hostage contacts. The teacher, Kennedy, used to be in banking. A City job with an international outfit. Whistler wanted to know more.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Second.’ It wasn’t much more than. ‘11.15.’

  ‘While he was inside.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And he didn’t give a sit rep? What are we teaching these kids?’

  ‘He presumably had a gun on him.’

  ‘Which is why we have code words. You spoke to him?’

  ‘An e-mail. He has a Black—’

  ‘I don’t care what they’re called, we’re sure it was him asking?’

  ‘The locator’s not that accurate. It was his device, in or near the nursery.’

  ‘So for all we know it was the gunman.’

  Her pause answered that.

  ‘What are the rest of Chapman’s team doing?’

  Chapman headed a team of six.

  ‘Moody’s in the building, sir. The others are off-shift.’

  ‘Well get them on-shift and get them to Oxford. Tell them I want their boss back here, sooner than now. And if Barrowby calls from over the water, tell him Chapman’s on his way.’

  He killed the call.

  Mobiles, as long as they’re on, send out a regular pulse to the nearest transmitter: if you have one in your pocket, we can find out where you are. Chapman would have switched his off as soon as it started saying things he didn’t like, such as Return to base. If it ever switched on again, they’d have the double fun of trying to second-guess Bad Sam: was the phone still on him, or on a jolly of its own? Nott had a vision of Bad Sam on a railway bridge, dropping his mobile on to a north-bound container.

  It’s been three weeks since Miro Weiss disappeared with enough money to start his own country, and Bad Sam’s no nearer finding him. How hard is he looking?

  Maybe the Barrowboy was right, and Chapman was up to his neck in missing money.

  Nott returned to the window to glare down at the pavement opposite: the ‘private bookshop’; the tourists idling past; the girls like a mobile stripshow. Two men stood smoking by a drainpipe, evidently sharing an hilarious conversation, not one speck of which reached Nott’s ears. It was important to remember that such people were the public – his sole professional purpose being to keep them intact and unslaughtered – but face it: they were small souls mired in banality, and would literally shit if they had his problems. Literally.

  His department had a number of functions, one of which, until recently, had been the funnelling of various astronomical sums of money – astronomical being a precise term: the figures resembling lunar distances – through different channels, each of which put a baffle between the money’s origin and its current whereabouts. These sums spent so much time offshore, they probably developed fins. Which was fine: disguise was good. Though in retrospect, not all that good, given how impeccably invisible a recent sum of money had become; an amount so huge, there was no way of making it real. An amount that weighed more than the average house.

  The first thing you did when you lost this much money was shut all the doors and hope no one had noticed. The second thing, you did a headcount, and found Miro Weiss missing too.

  Once the doors were all shut, the headcount done, Sam Chapman was the obvious one to loose: former field agent and current Top Dog, with years of experience at keeping the kennels in order. Put his track record against that of Miro Weiss – seven years a desk man – and the story wrote itself: twenty-four hours tops, and Sam would have Weiss’s head on a stick. But it hadn’t worked out like that. Weiss had disappeared so comprehensively, he might not have known where he was himself, and Bad Sam’s investigation had generated more heat than light.

  I don’t care if Weiss is the last of the fucking Mohicans, if Chapman was trying, he’d have him by now.

  But that was another desk man talking, wasn’t it?

  Nott sat down.

  Bad Sam wasn’t following orders: anyone else, you might take that as an admission of guilt. But guilt didn’t figure on Bad Sam’s list of attributes, and he’d never been a dog you called to heel. Loose ends were his specialty – he chased them down and annihilated them. Maybe the Barrowboy was right and Sam hadn’t found his man because he hadn’t been looking, but that meant one of two things: he and Weiss had been in it together, or he had some other associate, and Weiss had been his fall guy. Either way Miro Weiss wouldn’t be turning up any time soon, and Bad Sam would either never be seen again or appear with tracks swept so clean there’d be no chance of working out what he’d been up to.

  A desk man himself, Jonathan Nott swept his hand across its clean surface almost fondly. The money had been first to go – the desk would be next, along with the visions Nott had nursed of graceful retirement: a K and the occasional discreet consultation. Best he’d get would be a warm glass of white and a few lacklustre speeches; con-sider himself lucky, too. Back when the Crane brothers were Service hellhounds, a particularly uncompromising attitude towards failure had been the norm. Retirement notices had been known to arrive marked Send No Flowers.

  Hard to tell how long he sat there, making no visible progress in his life or career. When the phone rang, the noise scraped against his consciousness like fingers on a blackboard.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Maybe you should turn the TV on after all.’

  ‘You s
hould have let my boys go,’ Eliot said.

  ‘I do not like her. She is gone now.’

  This with blank finality, as if to leave the annexe was to step out of any known realm.

  Truth to tell, Eliot was starting to feel the same way. They’d been here so long, it was hard to believe the world outside remained familiar. And the Grand Old Duke of York, he remembered, had ten thousand men. He was so adrift, it was a moment before he understood that the thought was triggered by another damn nursery rhyme.

  and when they were up they were up

  and when they were down they were down

  Though they were moving slowly, sluggishly; as if the hill was too steep for their battle-weary limbs; or the batteries powering their pointless manoeuvres dwindling out of life.

  Louise said, ‘Tell us about the money.’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly real money.’

  You can make money, Crispin had said. Out of nothing. All you’d need is the right circumstances.

  ‘I’m familiar with the notion. I told you, I’ve worked in banking. And you work in accounting for the secret services, and so did this Miro guy. What got stolen, some kind of slush fund?’

  Eliot said, ‘It was a war dividend, wasn’t it?’

  He had a twin wrapped round each leg, and both looked up; Gordy murmuring along to the tortured nursery rhyme. He said, ‘We heard a lot about the peace dividend back when the Cold War ended, but cutbacks in military spending didn’t make the taxpayer better off, and if it did the NHS or schools any good, it was well hidden. It was ploughed back into government, wasn’t it? It’s what they’ve been fighting the war on terror with.’

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d strung so many words together. It felt like a speech.

  Louise said, ‘He’s right, isn’t he?’

  ‘The money came from untraceable sources,’ Ben said.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘He means it was stolen in the first place,’ Eliot said. ‘That’s the easiest kind to steal. The kind you can’t report missing.’

  The children gripped him tighter. Though terrified, they’d grown used to what was happening; had accustomed themselves to a reality in which each clutched a leg and muttered rhymes while their father held them tight. And now he was talking to the other grown-ups as if this had become normal to him, too. And both had the same thought at the same moment: both wished their mother were here instead of their father. Their mother would never break her focus on their well-being.

  Eliot went on: ‘You said this Miro was out in Iraq look-ing at all the ways money was going missing. But that wasn’t so you could stop it happening, was it? It was so you could join in the looting.’

  Louise looked at him. For a moment, something passed between them, or Eliot thought it did. He hugged his boys tighter, having registered a shift in their postures, then looked to Ben Whistler for an answer.

  Who was shaking his head. ‘This isn’t wise. You’re going to be asked what we talked about in here. Chapman – this guy, Bad Sam, he’s going to want to know what was said.’

  ‘It’s not like he can interrogate us.’

  ‘Don’t be too sure about that.’

  ‘You didn’t put that tape on to protect us,’ Louise said. ‘You didn’t ditch the phone for us. You did it so he wouldn’t hear what you say to Jaime and what Jaime says to you.’

  Jaime said, ‘I ask for you because Miro trust you. This Bad Sam try to kill me.’

  Jaime?

  They all paused.

  Thank you, Jaime. That was the right thing to do.

  For a moment, it was as if the annexe had reverted to its stated purpose, and Jaime was an infant, praised for a sensible act.

  Are you going to send the others out now, Jaime? How about the children?

  Ben said, ‘Exactly what I was about to say.’

  ‘And I do this, I release them, what happens then? What happens to me?’

  ‘I can get you out of here. But not while you’re keeping hostages. Those guys out there –’

  Jaime? Can you hear me? Maybe you should think about turning the music down.

  ‘– they’re not about to let you go anywhere.’

  Jaime stared at them, one by one. The gun hung by his side as if its weight had grown too much: he looked tireder by the minute, Eliot thought. It was wearying being a hostage – despite the noise and constant fear, the worry of the children, the never knowing what would happen next, more than once Eliot had caught himself wandering on to the edge of sleep; that barely rational state where the real takes a sharp left turn. If he hadn’t been holding the children, he might have followed its lead. But it hadn’t occurred to him how exhausting it must be, holding the gun instead – no spare moment to close an eye. No lapse in concentration allowed. Being the focal point of so much hatred, it could probably power a car. And all this without a grip on the language, after a night on the run. It made Eliot want to say something, but Ben Whistler spoke first.

  ‘Besides, you only need me, Jaime. Because I came in of my own accord.’

  Are you sending the children out now?

  The cop had found extra volume on his gizmo, so he could be heard over the nursery rhyme racket.

  Jaime?

  ‘Let’s let them go, Jaime.’

  Putting himself on Jaime’s side, as if they were in this together. Probably something he’d been taught at spy school, though Whistler still didn’t look like Eliot’s idea of a spy: resembled, rather, the boys who’d been the bane of his life at school – the ones who were good at sports, and wore their ties and blazers as if uniform were their own idea.

  ‘Let’s let them go,’ Ben repeated.

  For hours, this was what Eliot had been focused on; the only outcome he’d allowed himself to visualize. So why did he feel a sense of exclusion, as if he were being denied the chance to know how things turned out?

  ‘Wait,’ he said.

  Ben said, ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘There’s something I need to hear.’

  ‘Are you –’

  ‘Shut up.’ Eliot felt good saying that; felt he had a grip on the situation, instead of the other way around. ‘What happened this morning, Jaime?’ he asked. ‘Tell me that. What happened this morning? They caught you, yes? But how did you get the gun?’

  Jaime looked at Ben.

  ‘Jesus, don’t ask his permission, you’re the one with –’

  ‘Eliot.’ Louise spoke as softly as she could, and still be heard above the tape recorder. ‘Don’t lose it. Not now.’

  He said. ‘I just want to know, that’s all.’

  Ben Whistler was shaking his head, but said, ‘Why don’t you tell us, Jaime?’

  ‘Tell you what happen this morning?’

  ‘Yes. After you walked away from the road.’

  Eliot said, ‘You found somewhere to lie down, but you didn’t sleep.’

  ‘You were cold,’ Louise said.

  Jaime looked from one to the other, baffled by their recitation. ‘It gets light,’ he said after a while. ‘Perhaps I do sleep. Because it gets light very quickly.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Not far from road. There are cars, many cars, but all heading the other way. Away from Oxford.’

  The early draft of rush hour, with traffic anxious to reach the outskirts of London before the system’s arteries hardened.

  ‘I see a building not far away, behind trees. By side of road.’

  ‘In a lay-by?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Lay-by?’

  ‘A place to stop your car.’

  ‘By the side of the road, yes. A brick building, I think it is a toilet. I need to go to toilet,’ Jaime said.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I not want to go in bushes. I have no paper.’

  They all knew they’d never forget that detail.

  ‘So I go towards it. There are lorries parked in this lay-by, and maybe people, but nobody is watching. Perhaps they are sleeping.’

/>   There was an electric squawk from outside; the mega-phone calling Jaime’s name again. But no one was listening.

  ‘I stay in toilet a long time. I feel safer there. I do not have money to buy bus ticket back to London. All I know in Oxford is what Miro say about the lady in the nursery. But I have nowhere else to go. I think perhaps I come here, borrow money for ticket. So that is what I decide to do. But when I leave the toilet, they are waiting for me. They are waiting in a car.’

  He shook his head, as if he still couldn’t believe this had happened.

  Ben said, ‘They must have overtaken you at some point, without realizing it. If there was more than one Oxford bus on the road, it might have confused them. Anyway, I guess they ended up here in the city.’

  ‘Gloucester Green,’ Eliot said. ‘The bus station.’

  ‘They’d have questioned the drivers, found out who picked you up at Marble Arch, and asked them where you got off.’

  ‘They were probably driving up and down that stretch of road looking for you,’ Louise said.

  ‘If you’d hitched a lift back to London, you’d have been home free by now,’ said Eliot.

  All of them filling in gaps for Jaime; pointing out where he’d gone wrong.

  He said, ‘To hitch lift, you stand by road in plain sight.’

  ‘Good point,’ Ben said. ‘For all Jaime knew, they were right behind him. He’d have been making it easy.’

  ‘So they kept looking all night?’ Eliot asked. ‘For four, five hours, whatever it was?’

  ‘They’re professionals,’ said Ben. ‘Miro’s been missing for weeks, and they’ve found no trace of him. Suddenly a young man calls, saying he’s Miro’s . . . friend. They’re not about to lose him twice in one night.’

  ‘They got lucky.’

  ‘After a while, you just play the odds,’ Ben said. ‘If he was on the road back to London, they’d not find him. So they weren’t looking there. They were looking in places he might conceivably be.’