Reconstruction

by Mick Herron

  But Ben didn’t think, at this late stage, they’d go for anything tricky. The hostages were safe; Ben himself didn’t count – he was a spook. He said, ‘Give me the gun a moment.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Give me a break, Jaime. You’re not going to shoot me.’

  ‘Where do we go? When we get in the car?’

  ‘London. They’ll follow us, sure. And the car will be bugged anyway. But once we’re clear, I’ll call my bosses. You’re not going into police custody, Jaime. You’re coming with me, and you’ll get to tell your story again. About Bad Sam and Ashton coming after you. Now give me the gun.’ Jaime opened his mouth. Closed it. He’d run out of options, Ben didn’t need to remind him. He did what Ben said.

  The gun felt heavy in Ben’s hand. He’d done weapons training, but there was something quintessentially different about holding a gun outside a practice ground, where you wouldn’t just get up and walk away afterwards.

  He said, ‘You know, if you hadn’t made that call – if you’d closed Miro’s door and walked away – no one would have been looking.’

  Jaime’s eyes flashed. ‘I know that. Of course I do.’

  ‘I mean it. As far as anyone was concerned, Miro had no close ties. They’d gone through his life with razor blades, slicing everything they found just to see what it hid, but they didn’t come up with you, Jaime.’

  Even as he was speaking, he was having a vision of what Miro’s life must have been like: paranoia raised to an art form. He must have logged every item Jaime ever brought into his flat, and logged each one out again after he’d left. Burned the bedlinen, replaced the crockery; vacuumed the ceilings in Jaime’s wake, so there’d be nothing to remind him he’d ever been there. Which was a kind of self-protection; one that erased happiness as soon as it departed, so its souvenirs didn’t lacerate the present. The one time Ben had seen the flat, he wouldn’t have guessed Miro ever had a boyfriend. Everything he laid eyes on had Miro printed all over it: the boxed sets of operas; the Everyman hardbacks; the Klimt reproduction in the hall. It was true: if Jaime had kept his head down, his existence would have stayed secret.

  ‘I guess you’re just really unlucky,’ Ben said. He removed the clip from the Heckler & Koch; handed the gun back to the boy. ‘Here. You’re going to have to hold this to my head. And I don’t want you accidentally pulling the trigger if you step on a tennis ball.’

  ‘Tennis ball?’

  ‘Or something.’ The nursery rhyme tape was really painful now; sounded like an infantile version of grunge. Jack and Jill with fuzzbox. But there seemed little point in turn-ing it off. It could play itself out while this chapter ended. Whistler? The car’s at the gate.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s see if they mean it.’

  * * *

  There was a rule about these situations: when you emerged, you were given a cup of tea and had a blanket draped around your shoulders – Louise had shaken her head at the tea; shrugged her shoulders so the blanket hit the ground. ‘They want a car,’ she’d said. After a while, they let her say it to someone who mattered.

  Peter Faulks had asked, ‘Which one of them wants it?’

  Did that matter? She supposed, to the cops, it might. ‘And a phone. They want a phone, too.’

  Faulks had muttered off; minutes passed. The blanket reappeared on Louise’s shoulders; a cup of tea in her hand. Somewhere, someone was boiling water: lots of it.

  She’d lost track of time. It was broad daylight, which felt wrong: they should have been standing under stars – there should have been snow on the ground. Eliot and his boys were nowhere in sight; Judy had vanished too. Perhaps they were in the Incident Van; a large rock-band-on-tour vehicle by the junction, one of the elements converting the familiar to the surreal. Louise recognized a few faces in the crowd down the road, but all seemed weirdly out of context, like family members spotted in a dream. Which brought to mind her mother – she should call her mother; let her know she was safe. Should go to her. But she couldn’t move. Whatever happened next, she would be here to see it. The cops were unlikely to use force to shift her. Not with all the cameras about.

  Whistler?

  Faulks was back at his loudhailer.

  The car’s at the gate.

  A bland blue four-door, parked where he said. Ben and Jaime would have to leave the annexe and cross both play-grounds to reach it, under armed scrutiny every step of the way: there were policemen round the side of the nursery, and perched on the adventure playground equipment, and up on the roof too – the one with the rifle trained on the annexe door. All would be watching Ben and Jaime.

  And now the time she’d lost track of speeded up, as if it had forgotten its major function: to prevent everything from happening at once. The immediate area tightened its belt. Sound wavered; when it started again, it was mostly background noise – the crowd by the junction; distant traffic. An electric squawk, which was probably a radio. Then the annexe door opened and Ben and Jaime emerged, as close as newly-weds. It was a moment before Louise could unravel the picture: Jaime’s arm was round Ben’s waist; Jaime’s gun to Ben’s temple – Ben was Jaime’s shield.

  For a moment they remained immobile; every eye trained on them – this image was being beamed into houses across the country. How weird that the world could focus like this, on somewhere only ever meant to be ordinary. And then they were moving. It was a shuffle, no more; four legs trying to move like two. This whole huge stage waiting, and the best they could manage as they edged into its spotlight was a graceless, uncoordinated amble; Ben’s face defensively blank; Jaime’s patently terrified. As if they’d had their roles reversed, and Ben was the nerve-less hostage-taker, Jaime his jelly-limbed victim. His gun was shaking, Louise could see. Which spelled what to the body-language experts? That he was armed and nervous; and might break at any moment. That there was little chance of him missing Ben Whistler’s head if his trembling fingers squeezed that trigger.

  They stepped on to the path leading to the gate in the inner fence.

  It might have been – the thought occurred later, on the bus into London – the same spot on which the fox had sat; the fox she’d chanced upon one morning, which had graced her with a look so superior, it evidently knew everything she didn’t. All the secrets she’d once supposed would reveal themselves with age, but never had. After briefly pitying her ignorance, it trotted off into its own version of her neighbourhood. It didn’t take much to turn everything you thought you knew upside down. It didn’t take much to make you lose your foot, or your head. Ben slipped as they reached the path; ever afterwards, recall-ing the moment, Louise constructed the comical image of the blank expression on his face giving way to absolute puzzlement as he surrendered to gravity’s pull, and dropped free of Jaime’s embrace. Who was left standing for a fraction of a second, probably aware that a fraction of a second was all that it would be. Because something bloomed at last in the barren morning, and Jaime lost his head, its contents spraying across the rainbow-crayoned cardboard sign on the annexe door, splashing it red and grey and red and grey, while pigeons lifted in a spume from the trees lining the railway at the end of the lane, their wings thrashing and clattering as they mowed the air.

  Up on the roof, job done, Bain lowered the rifle and removed the black cap that had held her hair in place these hours past.

  Target acquired.

  She was steady.

  Part Two

  p.m.

  Once upon a time, City banks were large, solid constructions; their entrances supported by unmissable pillars; their plate glass windows reminiscent of churches. The scrollwork over their doors assumed a working knowledge of Latin, their floors were tiled, and their partners’ names were gilt-etched on to large wooden boards in the lobby, possibly facing a Landseer, or something equally permanent. Ceilings were high, voices low. Tickertape chattered behind cashiers’ desks. The necessary vulgarity of the telephone was mitigated by the instrument’s being fashioned of black Bakelite, with
a cup you held to one ear while rattling the handset for the switchboard’s attention. All of which Louise knew to be true, because she had a weakness for old movies. These were the banks where characters from Brief Encounter cashed a cheque when the butcher’s bill arrived. And everything about them was intended to reassure; their very presence a valet’s murmur confirming the rightness of your choices. They were the repository of their clients’ futures, and did not take this trust lightly.

  Which was long before Louise came in, because some-time in the nineties, an architectural shift had matched the social revolution of the eighties, and the dominant style was now the big fuck-off. Huge glass and chrome buildings vied to dominate the skyline, and when they weren’t telling each other to fuck off, they were reminding passers-by that they could fuck off too. Because these banks weren’t safeguarding petty cash, they were bankrolling governments, multinationals, insurance companies, arms firms, big pharma, record companies, fast-food franchises, media conglomerates, supermarket chains, and every other organization whose fundamental if usually secret purpose was to remind the little folk that they were powerless and, if they didn’t like it, could fuck off.

  She stood on the pavement opposite, looking at fourteen storeys from a previous life. The time was 4.34.

  Because the mind records everything – because we all carry a black box in our brains, ceaselessly taping our every move – it probably wasn’t true that she had no idea how she’d ended up here: which route she’d taken, or at what point she’d known what she was doing. But access to the black box wasn’t readily available, so the ninety minutes she’d spent on a bus looking out at the unwinding landscape, the disappearing sliproads, and finally the factory walls and rotating billboards that lined the road into the capital currently existed in a fog. It was earlier events that stained her eyelids every time she blinked, like a snuff movie showing in her head. It happened again now. She blinked, and for a fraction of a second saw it all in lurid slow motion. Ben slipped; gravity pulled. Then something bloomed in the barren morning, and Jaime lost his head, its contents splashing across the rainbow-crayoned sign red and grey, red and grey, while pigeons lifted from the local trees, their wings mowing the air.

  The fox was nowhere to be seen.

  Look both ways before crossing the road. This was a sign of how out of touch with the City she’d become: regulars never looked both ways; they looked the relevant way first, and got as far as they could. Worried about the second half later. Above her head a walkway angled into a maze of concrete and brickwork. Ahead of her, the bank: DFM. DeJohn Franklin Moers. And just to one side – curious how often this happened in the City – hid a quiet little mews; a lane she’d wandered down, sandwich in hand, more lunchtimes than she could put a number to. That had probably happened in dull weather as often as not, but the way she recalled it now, those lunches had always been sunny.

  She hadn’t eaten today. It didn’t matter. She reached the other side, and walked into the lobby of the bank.

  When Jaime’s head exploded, it had done so in slow motion. Maybe Louise’s responses had become cinematized. There’d been, it felt now, a swelling in the atmosphere; a wave sucking back on a pebbly beach. All the sound dragged out of the air, as if she were hearing every-thing through the wrong end of an ear trumpet. And she’d remembered what he’d said earlier: that he’d use the gun. He’d spoken truly. But she’d been looking into his eyes as he’d spoken, and was sure that what he’d meant was, he’d use it on himself.

  As for the aftermath, there’d been that same atmospheric swelling. All the noise rushed back into the air at once: the noise of horror, fear and disgust, with an under-current of satisfied cruelty, that withered to nothing as the coppery smell of blood filtered past the cordon.

  Louise had never watched anybody die before.

  Stepping into DFM was like what? Going back to school? If she’d been asked this morning for her worst moment, Louise would have said: her last day at the bank. Everyone had known the details; no one spoke them aloud. Multimillion harassment suits weren’t uncommon in the square mile, and battle lines were sharply drawn. It wasn’t that her colleagues favoured Crispin over her; it was just that they had mortgages and coke habits to feed. Louise had never had the slightest intention of heading down the litigation corridor – the idea of reprising her love life in open court filled her with disgust – but at the time it hadn’t occurred to her that this was on anyone’s mind. Later it explained the attitudes she met. Women she’d thought friends ducked out of her way or looked right through her; the men displayed open contempt or else hit on her, hoping for a rebound shag. There’d been a short career’s worth of desk junk to stuff in a box; there’d been a security gauntlet to run – the desk junk itemized before she was allowed to remove it from the building. Yes: before this morning, that day would have made her top worst, no problem.

  Not much had changed. Big lobby, full of wasted space, with a water feature in one corner: seventeen shades of grey gravel and a fountain. Four lifts behind the security guard: one for senior execs exclusively; men too important to stop on floors not their own. ‘Men’ used advisedly. Lots of glass, lots of light – where banks of old had relied on Latin and stone to inspire confidence, the new ones flung glass and light about to demonstrate the transparency of their dealings. This, too, was part of the big fuck-off.

  Louise approached Reception, from whose desk a young blonde woman smiled at her: black jacket, white shirt; ever so slightly over-made up. HR, she used to think, didn’t so much hire these people as download them.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I’d like to see Crispin Tate.’

  (Why would she have thought that – that Jaime had been ready to use the gun on himself?

  Because he’d been scared. Two men had tried to kill him: he’d been chased round Marble Arch and wound up in a lay-by with a thug and a gun. Next thing he was the vil-lain of the piece, a hundred armed coppers aching for his scalp. And all because he’d been involved with, been the lover of, the wrong man.

  Why did that sound familiar?)

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’

  ‘No. But he’ll see me.’

  Of course he will, the girl’s smile lied. ‘And you are?’

  Louise told her.

  From over by the lifts, the security guard was watching. But that was what security guards were for.

  The girl hit some keys, then looked up from her mon-itor. ‘I’m sorry, Ms Kennedy. Mr Tate isn’t in the building this afternoon.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I can leave a note on his calendar that you called.’

  She had a sudden vision of how that would work: Louise Kennedy called, and just look at the date. Would he even remember it was their anniversary? If that’s what you still had, after you were over.

  ‘That’s all right. No. Wait.’ This could all just fade away; she could head back home, resolve broken. By tomorrow all her suspect certainties would have dissipated the way dreams do, even the good ones. Jaime would still be dead, though. And there’d be blood etched into the annexe door, no matter how hard it was scrubbed.

  And she did not want Crispin thinking she’d dropped by because of the date.

  ‘Okay. Tell him I was here.’

  Behind the guard, the lift door opened, and a woman stepped out.

  ‘Tell him I wanted to ask about the money. Oh, and to find out what happened to Miro.’

  ‘Miro?’

  ‘M – I – R – O. It’s not complicated.’

  ‘Louise?’

  She knew that voice, but didn’t turn. ‘Did you get all that?’

  ‘I think so.’ The girl’s tone would have cut glass if set sideways.

  ‘I’m so relieved.’ Now she turned. ‘Charlie,’ she said.

  ‘It is you.’

  ‘Yes. But do you mind if we don’t do the air-kiss thing?’ This to forestall Charlie Stubbs, who was leaning in. A hurt, puzzled look swept across an expensively made-u
p if horsey face. ‘It’s just, I remember last time I was here. It’s not so much that you didn’t say goodbye. It’s more that you hid in the toilet till I’d gone.’

  This small triumph carried her out to the street, where whatever she’d thought she might achieve by coming here floated up before her eyes and popped like a bubble. If it was true, what could she have done about it anyway? If Crispin had realized his dream, and created actual money out of nothing – out of a digital stream of stolen pixels – what would have been gained by standing in front of him, and telling him she knew? Nothing, except – well, except the obvious. That it would have been her, standing in front of him, telling him she knew. Telling him she’d won.

  Better that he hadn’t been there. Ben Whistler had the story, anyway. Jaime was dead, but his story wouldn’t die with him.

  And here she was, standing on the pavement, wonder-ing what she did now, when she saw she was being watched – that a man on the pavement opposite had been leaning against the wall, but was upright now. Upright, but not very tall.

  The smaller man –

  That’s Bad Sam.

  Traffic passed, strobing her view. He was short, dark, suited, smoking, though he tossed his cigarette into the gutter as she watched, then looked right, waiting for a gap to cross the road.

  Miro is not a thief.

  Maybe Bad Sam forced him to do it.

  He torture him?

  I wouldn’t put it past him.

  There were God alone knew how many short dark men in the world, and a racing certainty that the City had its share. But she knew this was him, and he was heading towards her. And she knew why, too.

  She was a loose end.

  A few hours earlier, the nursery annexe had been sealed off as if it were the birthplace of a brand new virus. Peter Faulks was in charge; Fredericks was back at the station. The boss wanted Ben Whistler in a locked room, with a tape recorder running.

  ‘You won’t have him long,’ Faulks had said.