Personal

by Lee Child

  likes it rough. No good if his new stars are marked up for the first few weeks. So mostly he heads for the other end of the pipeline. He finishes off the used-up ones.’

  ‘Any recent increase in frequency?’

  ‘There are always hills and valleys.’

  Beside me Casey Nice said, ‘Why haven’t you arrested him?’

  ‘The last time a witness spoke up against the Romford Boys was before you were born.’

  I kept my eyes on the binoculars. Nothing was happening. The scene was static. I said, ‘So what are your theories?’

  ‘Some of us are thinking this cooperation with the Serbians might go back a month. Maybe that initial approach from Kott and Carson was a joint approach. In which case it would make sense to let the Serbians shelter them. Safer that way. We’re all over east London, for obvious reasons, and meanwhile they’re stashed way out in west London. Classic misdirection.’

  ‘Joey wouldn’t get his debriefs.’

  ‘That’s the main weakness in the theory. We think he could live with not knowing their secrets, because you don’t miss what you never had. But he couldn’t live with the Serbians getting them instead. Which emotion comes out on top? The behavioural psychology subcommittee is debating it now.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The behavioural psychology subcommittee.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘The conventional in-house wisdom says we know there’s a safe house somewhere, and the problem is solved the minute we find it. London is full of cameras and recognition software, and we have a mass of real-time traffic data, and we’ve got the programmers working hard, and the analysts harder still.’

  ‘Who are all smart people, right?’

  ‘Very smart.’

  ‘Which is why you’re better than the NSA, right?’

  ‘And cheaper.’

  I sat back.

  I said, ‘I’m wondering why you brought us here. You could have just told us. You could have said, Joey has a house and nothing happens there.’

  ‘We’re sharing the data.’

  ‘You’re overcomplicating the data. Or blowing smoke.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘To tell you that I would have to believe what you say.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you?’

  ‘It’s a simple chain of logic, but I have to trust each component.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you?’ he said again.

  ‘Those things you told us earlier. You have a no-humansinvolved protocol, with different procedures. You’re hacking our phones right now, as individuals. You’re hacking CIA communications generally. You could listen to the hot line into the Oval Office, if you wanted to, but you don’t, simply because of good manners. If all of that is true, then all of it has to be classified. You talk about it, you get sent to the Tower of London. You get your head cut off. Or whatever the modern equivalent is. A life sentence for treason.’

  ‘I’m not going to jail.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘I wasn’t telling you anything I got from inside the building.’

  ‘What building?’

  ‘Any building.’

  ‘So what are you telling us?’

  ‘You know how it is. There are a million stories and a million rumours. Most of them are bullshit. But there are always three or four that could be true. But they’re all contradictory. So you use your hard-won skill and insider judgement and you decide which one to believe in.’

  ‘Why should you believe in any of them?’

  ‘Because one of them is bound to be true.’

  ‘Hacking our phones is neither a story nor a rumour. It’s a fact.’

  ‘It’s a small fact. And the small facts we know can be indicative of the bigger facts we don’t know. All part of the reasoning process. If we attack low-level American assets, why wouldn’t we attack high-level American assets? It’s all the same electricity in the same wires. And if we attack high-level assets, why wouldn’t we listen to the Oval Office?’

  ‘Therefore the things you told us were merely theories you believe in.’

  ‘I can’t prove them.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘I know they’re true.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Human nature,’ he said. ‘You know how it is. Whatever your intentions, if you have the ability to do something, then you will do it, sooner or later. The temptation is always there, and it can’t be resisted for ever. Don’t tell me you think any different.’

  ‘What about the other things you told us?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘You think Kott and Carson are definitely in London.’

  ‘Hundred per cent certain.’

  ‘Based on your skill and insider judgement?’

  ‘Everything I know says they’re here.’

  ‘And they’re being guarded, and fed, and entertained by the Romford Boys.’

  ‘It’s how things are done. The courtesies are very elaborate.’

  ‘Hundred per cent certain?’

  He said, ‘More than.’

  ‘And the guards and the food and the entertainment would be quarterbacked by Joey himself.’

  ‘No question about that. Hundred per cent.’

  ‘But no one is dashing back and forth between Joey’s house and wherever.’

  ‘And that’s not just my belief. That’s a fact.’

  I said, ‘Ms Nice and I had a conversation. The whole British government is getting nowhere. So how likely is it a rookie analyst and a retired military cop are going to provide the vital breakthrough?’

  Bennett said nothing.

  ‘But I guess you want it to look that way. You want it to be one of us who comes out and says it. So you can act all surprised. To ease your conscience a little.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘A simple chain of logic,’ I said again. ‘Kott and Carson are in London, the Romford Boys are hiding them, but there’s no traffic in and out of Little Joey’s driveway.’

  Bennett said, ‘All true.’

  ‘Therefore Kott and Carson are inside Little Joey’s house.’

  Bennett said nothing.

  ‘Joey doubled his guard for a reason. He was expecting house guests. I mean, where could be safer? The cops can’t get near the place, and no civilian would dare to try. And if Joey wants to keep these guys close, maybe with an eye to the future, then there’s no place like home for a thing like that. He’ll let them hole up there as long as they want. They’ll leave when the time is right. They could walk from here to Wallace Court, if they had to. They arrived inside one of those stray vehicles you saw. Maybe driven around the back. No use following the vehicle afterwards, because it wasn’t going anywhere. It had been hauling stuff in, not hauling it out. But aside from all of that, you’re seeing exactly what you’d expect to see. Two teams of house guards rotating in and out, and lots of food coming in. Enough for three people.’

  Bennett didn’t answer.

  ‘Now you can say wow, you must be right, we had no idea, and we’re so sorry for accidentally bringing you to a spot exactly four hundred yards from where two of the world’s greatest riflemen are watching out the window.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said.

  ‘But there’s a silver lining, right? There always is. If you see a weapon discharged inside that house, you could order up all kinds of SWAT and armoured vehicles. Job done, right there. If you see a weapon discharged. Which isn’t a given. But which might become more likely if they had something to shoot at.’

  ‘Not my idea,’ he said.

  ‘Whose, then?’

  ‘Like I said before, they didn’t rule the world by being nice.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘We. But not me. Not personally.’

  ‘Don’t apologize,’ I said. ‘This is exactly where I wanted to be.’

  THIRTY-NINE

  I STAYED WHERE I wanted to be for about thirty more minutes, with Casey Nice alongside me at her own pair of binoculars
, both of us watching the static scene and trying to draw what conclusions we could from it. Bennett stood behind us, listing the activity they had already seen, and answering the few questions we had.

  I asked him, ‘What kind of probable cause would get you in there?’

  He said, ‘Apart from a muzzle flash?’

  ‘Let’s hope things don’t go that far.’

  ‘A positive visual ID on either one of them would work.’

  ‘Which you haven’t gotten yet.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  There were lights in some of the windows, both upstairs and down, behind what looked like semi-transparent roller shades. But there were no shadows cast, no figures, no movement. And no blue glow from a television set. Probably the occupied core of the house was in the back, or on the far side, neither of which we could see. A kitchen and a family room, possibly, with guest bedrooms upstairs. Or a self-contained suite of their own. Like a pied-à-terre apartment, except 50 per cent larger. Designed either for the present purpose, or for giant and incapacitated parents, twenty years in the future.

  I asked, ‘You got an opinion on when exactly they’ll move into position down at Wallace Court?’

  Bennett said, ‘That’s the big question, isn’t it?’

  ‘What’s the big answer?’

  ‘We’ll be closing roads a day or two before it starts. I’m sure they’re aware of that. And I’m sure they know a day or two means three or four, sometimes. So my guess is they’ll move five days ahead.’

  ‘That gives them a long wait.’

  ‘Snipers love all that lying-up bullshit. All part of the mystique.’

  ‘Can you catch them in transit?’

  ‘We could if we knew what time on which day they’re due to head out. We could engineer a traffic stop. A broken brake light, or something. But we don’t know. So we’d have to stop everything of theirs that moves, for about a week or so, to be on the safe side. After the third or the fourth time, old Charlie White would start calling in favours. He owns some local politicians, and some local police, we think. Might be worth it, just for the entertainment value alone. We’d have half a dozen solid citizens swearing up and down that yeah, OK, old Charlie might be a pimp and a thief and a gun runner, but he’s definitely not a terrorist.’

  I asked, ‘Who’s the we? As in, we could, we’d have to, we think, we’d have?’

  Bennett said, ‘It’s all pretty fluid at the moment.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We aim to wrap this up quickly.’

  ‘Says the politician.’

  ‘Who gives, as well as gets. He removes certain barriers, at the stroke of a pen. He relaxes certain regulations. In fact he begs to. He’s ready to repeal anything and everything, all the way back to the Magna Carta. An attack of this nature on British soil would be worse than catastrophic. It would be embarrassing.’

  ‘Why don’t they cancel it?’

  ‘That would be even more embarrassing.’

  I said, ‘How many viable locations did you count near Wallace Court?’

  ‘Your thing in Paris changed our thinking a little bit. That was sixteen hundred yards, and dead-on, apart from the gust of wind. So if we look at the back patio and the back lawn and a radius of sixteen hundred yards, then we figure about six hundred places.’

  Nice said, ‘Which means you’d have to search a hundred and twenty a day to be sure of finding them there. Can you do that?’

  Bennett said, ‘Not a hope in hell. Plus we’re worried about the M25. That would be the ultimate just-in-time delivery, wouldn’t it? Imagine a high-sided commercial vehicle pulling over on the shoulder, with some kind of elevated shooting platform constructed in the interior, and an unobtrusive hole in the siding. And big scopes on the rifles. They could cover the whole of the patio and the whole of the lawn.’

  I said, ‘Can’t you close the motorway?’

  ‘The M25? Unacceptable. The whole southeast of England would be jammed solid. We’re talking about closing the shoulder and the inside lane, for phoney road repairs, but even that’s a big ask. Traffic dynamics are very weird on that road. Like chaos theory. A butterfly flaps its wings in Dartford, two hundred people miss their flights at Heathrow, forty miles away.’

  I sat back from the binoculars. ‘So all in all you’re saying we should nail them before they leave Joey’s house.’

  ‘I think that would be a very favourable outcome.’

  ‘And according to your various closely held beliefs, they’re going to be in there at least the next several days.’

  ‘That’s only a best guess. Always better to strike while the iron is hot.’

  Beside me I heard Casey Nice breathe in.

  ‘Not tonight,’ I said.

  Bennett said, ‘Too soon?’

  ‘Do it once, and do it right.’

  ‘When, then?’

  ‘We’ll text you. We’ve got your number.’

  Bennett locked up the bowling club’s door, and put the key back under the stone, and we walked back the way we had come, out of the small grit clearing into the narrow straight path, and then onward through the silent streets, and back to the pub, and around behind it, where the Vauxhall was waiting patiently, exactly where we had left it, untouched, and not even boxed in.

  ‘Where to?’ Bennett asked.

  I said, ‘An all-night pharmacy.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We want to buy toothbrushes.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘The hotel.’

  ‘I thought Americans had a work ethic.’

  ‘First light,’ I said. ‘Be ready and waiting. You’re going to drive us.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Wallace Court.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to stand on the back patio.’

  Bennett said, ‘Wallace Court doesn’t matter. Not if we nail them before they leave the house.’

  ‘Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Could be the endgame is all in the last five minutes, just before they pull the triggers. We need to know the lie of the land. We need to triage those six hundred places. I’d like a top ten. At least a top fifty.’

  ‘Those streets are full of Romford Boys.’

  ‘I certainly hope so. I want to be seen, still here, still poking around. I want that message to get back to John Kott, double quick.’

  ‘Wouldn’t the opposite be better? You could take them by surprise.’

  I nodded. ‘Surprise is good. But sometimes it’s better to unsettle them.’

  ‘They’re not the kind of people who get unsettled.’

  ‘Doesn’t take much to miss at sixteen hundred yards. A couple of beats per minute, maybe. He hates me because I sent him away. He hates himself because he let me break him down. There’s a couple of beats per minute in either one of those. Both of them together, then two and two make five. I want him to know I’m coming, because that’s the only way I’ll survive long enough to get there.’