by Gregg Loomis
IRA terrorism of the seventies and eighties had spawned the know-how of storing facial features in data banks. With cameras all over Great Britain, the average Englishman had his picture taken almost daily, a Londoner three times a day. The Irish killers had long since swapped bombs and guns for pin-striped suits and negotiating sessions, but the cameras remained. Like any other government intrusion, once begun, the program was unlikely to end nor the technology to be scrapped.
Mr. Reilly had appeared on one of the cameras at Gatwick a week or so ago, and again the same day on another that scanned London's streets. Although Fitzwilliam had been alerted, there was nothing to be done. In spite of the suspected murder in the West End, the shooting of two unknown thugs on the streets of South Dock, and the surprising discovery in Portugal a few years ago, the American had been cleared of any wrongdoing. There had been no reason to detain him.
Innocence, of course, had no place in data banks.
That had been before the Yard had received notice from Interpol that Reilly was wanted for questioning in connection with a murder in Vienna.
Fitzwilliam exhaled wearily as he turned to the computer terminal on his desk. Some people simply could not shake off the violence that followed them any more than Patel, the inspector's immediate subordinate, could rid himself of the smell of curry.
A few taps on the keyboard and a list of names appeared. The inspector squinted over half-moon glasses at the screen. It seemed each year the font became harder to read, no doubt some space-saving economy by the Yard's accounting boffins. He refused to accept that age had anything to do with the matter.
There it was: Annueliwitz, Jacob, wife Rachel. A flat on Lambeth Road on South Dock. A barrister, unsurprisingly with offices at the Middle Temple Inn.
He printed out the addresses before summoning Patel.
The man appeared silently with the smile that perpetually lit his dark face. Even dressed in a suit and without a canteen, Patel reminded Fitzwilliam of a modern-day Gunga Din. The inspector mentally chastised himself. Let a word of that slip and it would be sensitivity training instead of police work for a fortnight at least.
The policeman handed both addresses and the picture across the desk. "Send a couple of lads to watch both these places. If this Reilly chap shows up, I want him brought in. There's an international warrant on him."
Patel, grin still intact, reached for the papers.
"No, on second thought, send four men to each." He caught himself in another politically incorrect gaffe.
"Officers. Men or women. And make sure they're armed. The bloke has been implicated in some pretty rough activity."
Patel nodded his understanding. "Like the killings a few years back? Should I have vests and rifles issued?"
Fitzwilliam regarded his subaltern for a moment before deciding the man was serious. "Hardly a way to avoid attracting attention, wouldn't you say?"
Grin undiminished and gentle reprimand ignored, Patel turned and left the inspector staring at his office's walls. Sodding rotten luck, having Reilly show up, unbidden as Banquo's ghost, on the night Shandon, his wife, had booked theater tickets.
FORTY-FIVE
Middle Temple Inn
Fleet Street
London
Minutes Later
Jacob listened patiently as Lang brought him up-to-date.
Removing the dead pipe from his mouth, he stared into the bowl as he reached for the nail-like tool. "So, your guess is that those sods in Cairo weren't Mukhabarat at all?"
Lang nodded. "Otherwise they would've called in backup."
Jacob was busily excavating the pipe's bowl. "So, who were they?"
"I think they were Jews. In fact, I think there's some Jewish organization behind this whole thing."
Jacob stopped, his hands for once still as his glasses slid down the bridge of his nose. "You're cocking me a snook."
Despite what Churchill described as the barrier of a common language, Lang guessed at the meaning. "No. I'm serious."
"But why…?"
"Okay, let's look at the facts." Lang held up an index finger. "One, the only way those people could have known I'd contacted Shaffer, the Austrian, was by intercepting a call from my BlackBerry."
"They could have tapped his phone," Jacob argued.
"How would they know to do that? Other than the one call, I'd never spoken to the man before he felt he was being followed, as he clearly was."
Lang flinched at the memory of the corpses in the crypt.
Jacob used the stem of the briar to push the spectacles back into place. "Cell phones are subject to interception."
"Odds of any specific phone are, what, less than hitting the sweepstakes?"
"But the only other way your call could have been intercepted-"
"Would be Echelon," Lang finished the sentence.
Jacob shook his head. "But that's strictly Anglo- American. No one who isn't American, British, Canadian, Australian, or Kiwi has access."
Lang stared at his friend for a few moments.
Jacob finally looked down, running a hand along the edge of the desk as though looking for flaws in the wood. "Dash it all, okay. So, an occasional scrap gets shared with Mossad." He looked up. "But you don't think…?"
"That Mossad's involved? No, I don't. I do think someone in Mossad may be, though. In fact, has to be. The Israelis are the only people outside the club who ever have access to Echelon. Plus the weapons…"
Jacob snorted. "The Israeli army discarded those Desert Eagles years ago. Too heavy."
"I'd be interested in knowing how they disposed of them."
"You can bloody well bet they didn't hand them out as sodding gifts at bar mitzvahs. The army usually destroys obsolete weapons."
"Humor me; call up old pals and see what you can learn about who was supposed to melt down the guns and who has access to Echelon. I'd bet it turns out to be the same person or persons."
It was clear Jacob wasn't happy but that he'd do it. "Anything else on your great bleeding laundry list?"
"Yeah, what I think is the clincher-"
There was a knock on the door, the one between the outer office and the common hallway. "Police! Open up!"
Jacob looked ruefully over his glasses. "This, as you Yanks say, is where I came in, what with the coppers about to beat the door down just like at my flat the last time you got involved with the wrong people."
Lang stood, but not before more blows fell on the outer door. For once he was thankful for his friend's paranoia that had resulted in the locking mechanism.
"Open up before we knock the door in!"
Lang desperately glanced around the office; the only exit was into the outer office. "I haven't done anything."
Jacob nodded calmly. "Same thing you said last time before you wound up hanging off the bleedin' balcony sixteen floors up. Maybe this time you'd like to explain your innocence?"
There was the sound of something hard smashing into wood.
For whatever reason the police wanted him, Lang wasn't about to surrender, to render himself incapable of movement. It was all too easy to arrange an "accident" once someone was incarcerated.
"Where?"
Another smash.
"Where indeed?" Jacob replied.
FORTY-SIX
At the Same Time
It was like pushing to the top from the bottom of a very dark pond: Light was visible but far away. No, not a pool-the ocean, because consciousness kept coming and going like the tide, leaving a bitter, salty taste in her mouth.
It had been like this for…?
Perhaps hours or years; there was no way to be sure. Too many tides had risen and fallen.
Alicia had only hazy memories, fragments from some nearly forgotten dreams that came as regularly as the waves. At first she thought she could hear them murmuring against a distant shore, but she decided it was only the sound of her own pulse pumping in her temples.
But she knew she had not been in the sea forever,
because there was one thing she knew was true, a single bit of memory unclouded, clear, and focused: She had come out of her bathroom in her house, the same way she had every day since moving to Atlanta, and…
What?
There had been strange men in her bedroom?
The idea seemed absurd, but no more so than the sounds and smells of an airport she thought she remembered. Yet maybe she had been in the hospital. She knew she was in a bed with side rails while a tube of some sort was in her arm. And she couldn't move. There were straps around her arms and legs. But at the same time she was certain-as certain as she could be about anything right now-that she had been in an airplane.
Was that possible?
She supposed it was, that she could have been medevaced somewhere.
But why?
Had she been in some sort of accident on the way to work?
No, she thought it all had more to do with those men in her bedroom.
And Lang. Had he been there?
She sorted through the misty images, tried to put the pieces together to make a single picture, like a child's jigsaw puzzle. No use. There were too many parts missing. Some things, like starting out at home, she was sure of. Others, like the nurse or person whose dark silhouette showed up to replace the tube in her arm, she was not sure were real. One thing she was sure of: The pitch of the engine sounds had changed slightly, and the pressure on her ears told her the plane was descending.
And she seemed closer to reaching the surface of the ocean than before.
The familiar shape was beside her bed. It extended an arm, and lights went on. She tried to shield her eyes before she remembered she could not move her arms or legs.
Even through eyes held almost closed, she could now see a face on the figure. She had seen him somewhere before.
In one hand he had what she recognized as a small recorder. The other held a single sheet of paper.
"Ms. Warner," he said in a voice she also recognized, "I want you to read these lines into the recording device."
The first words she had heard since… since she had found herself at the bottom of the ocean.
FORTY-SEVEN
Middle Temple Inn
London
The only other exit from Jacob's office was two windows behind his desk, the old-fashioned kind that actually opened. In a step Lang slid one pane up and looked out. Two floors down to a concrete walkway that would surely shatter a bone or two on impact. At each end stood a man in a suit with the unmistakable look of a cop. A tree's branches beckoned, but Lang discarded the idea. The sound of him grabbing a leafy bough would alert the pair below.
Another blow and the groan of hinges unable to hold much longer sent Lang through the window to a tenuous perch on the keystone of the arch framing the window below. Face pressed against the building, he extended the fingers of his right hand to claw for purchase in the cracks and crevices of the ancient stone, while his left maintained a death grip on the sill of the window he had just exited.
Another window was to his right, across a tantalizingly short chasm three or four feet away.
Lang forced himself not to look down as his left shoe crept along the extrados of the arch below until it found a narrow hold where centuries of weather had eroded one stone slightly more than the other.
Once, twice, he pawed the air with his right foot.
Inches short.
Lang took one, two deep breaths.
Just as he heard Jacob's voice followed by harsh commands, he lunged. His right foot teetered on the adjacent arch as both hands scraped the sill of the window above. His fingers met impassive stone and began to slip as he pushed with his feet.
At what he would later regard as the last possible second, his fingers grasped a niche running along the sill, a crack perhaps left when the medieval opaque glass shutter-type panes were replaced with ones that opened from the top and bottom.
Mentally offering thanks to a deity of whose existence he was less than certain, Lang worked his fingers underneath the bottom pane and pushed upward. Next door he could hear a voice asking questions in a raised voice. He could not make out Jacob's answers.
He wriggled over and across the sill, falling to the floor inside. Hei was in an office similar to Jacob's, though far more orderly. He paused, hardly daring to breathe, as he waited for the occupants to raise an outcry. As he glanced around the small room, he realized he was alone. The computer terminal on the desk was turned off, as was the gooseneck lamp beside the keyboard. An old-fashioned brass hatrack stood sentinel by the door to what Lang supposed was the outer office. From it hung a barrister's black robe.
Lang stood up and glanced around the space from where he stood, desperate for anything that might be of help when the police began their inevitable search of the building. A small leather box sat on a battered tea table between two club chairs across from the desk. In a step he had the box in hand. He had seen one like that before, seen it…
Opening the hinged top he was rewarded with what he expected: a periwig, the white wig of short hair on top and curls down the sides worn before English juries, just like the one he had seen in Jacob's office a few years before.
Feeling more than slightly silly, he perched it on his head and slipped on the robe. A bit short, but it would have to do.
He grabbed a briefcase before fumbling with a cranky dead bolt on the front door and letting himself out into the hall.
A group of what he gathered were the building's tenants was gathered around the open door of Jacob's office, curious as to what had caused the police to interrupt the centuries of scholarly discourse and professional courtesy at the Middle Temple Inn. No one was interested in a lone barrister, briefcase in hand, scurrying for the staircase and the Old Bailey across the street. The two men guarding the entrance were too busy speculating what was going on inside to notice a barrister late for court, head down, searching the depths of his attache for some critical paper as he hurried along.
Once across Fleet Street, Lang submitted to the metal detectors of London's oldest criminal court and entered the rabbit warren that had been in use for four hundred years, although most criminal cases were now heard in newer quarters. He paused at a door marked with a primitive figure of a man above the letters WC and went inside. Making sure he was alone, he deposited wig, gown, and briefcase inside one of the toilet stalls and left the building by a side door.
Lang ducked into the first London Underground entrance he came to. He wished it were later in the day, making it easier to hide among the commuters who would flood the system in an hour or so. As it was, he felt conspicuous sharing a nearly empty car. His only companions were a pair of nannies conversing in some African dialect over the howls coming from matching prams, and asingle man, intent on a racing form advertising the services of Murphy and Quint, Turf Accountants.
As he changed to the Picadilly line, one of the infants was still managing to voice its outrage around the bottle with which his nanny had unsuccessfully tried to quiet him.
Had the British had to deal with their own squalling offspring, they would never have had time to raise the Union Jack over half the world.
Mary Poppins: the cornerstone of empire.
In a car filled largely with American tourists headed for London's largest shopping and entertainment district, Lang felt oddly alien. He envied them their laughter, the fact that they were here purely for the pleasure of travel.
How had the cops known where he would be? Most likely because of the incidents a few years ago, when Jacob had been identified as a contact in the city. Okay, he told himself, but how had they even known he was in the country? His passport had drawn no more than a perfunctory electronic scan upon arrival.
He had only to glance up at a camera attached to the car's ceiling. Surveillance equipment. As common in London as fish and chips. He had been made before he even left the airport.
But why?
As far as he knew, a passport violation would have been handled by
Her Majesty's immigration service, not police. So there must be another reason, one he was fairly certain was not going to make him a happier man.
He got off at Picadilly and walked over to Regent Street and paused to inspect the equestrian stature of William of Orange dressed as Caesar. Or in drag. The thing always made him smile when he envisioned some American politician similarly represented. They tended to straddle issues, not horses.
As he surveyed the sculpture, he looked for the surveillance camera, finally spotting it almost hidden by the pediment of what he guessed was a Victorian's idea of a Greek Revival facade. He picked up a newspaper from a nearby kiosk and pretended to read so that the paper was between his face and the cameras as he circled the block.
Although he was fairly certain he was alone, he stopped long enough to use a shop window as a mirror to make sure.
Then he crossed over to 47 Jermyn Street and stood before an unmarked door beside which were a column of names, each above a bell button. Below was a speaker.
The odds were that, sooner or later, at least one thing would go his way today, and it did. Nellie was still in business.
During his years with the Agency, Lang had an all-too-brief assignment to the London Station. Nellie had been carried on the payroll as a psychological therapist.
Her actual job was slightly less academic if greatly more successful in aligning psyches along the right track. She ran a stable of call girls.
When a defector from one of the Eastern European workers' paradises made it safely from behind the Iron Curtain, he usually wanted three things immediately: a woman, decent whiskey, and American cigarettes.
Nellie could provide all three.
On more than one occasion it had been Lang's job to. go to Nellie's place, select a woman, and bring her back to whatever safe house was serving as a debriefing center at the time. Nellie had often chided him for not wanting to sample the merchandise, even tempting him with an occasional freebie.
