From the high ground at the edge of the field, Kat and Luxton watch Sayer’s convoy leave. She waves to her father. He waves weakly back. He’s too far away for her to see his face.
“Well done,” says Luxton. He leads. They cross the field to a footpath that takes them through woodlands.
“Is there somewhere we can go, rest up, work things out?” says Kat.
“You’re looking at it.” Luxton’s setting the pace, knocking branches and high plants out of his way. “If we go to a hotel, we’re marked, even if we pay cash. The computer will alert the authorities if our ID puts us as living closer than a thirty-mile radius, if our credit card doesn’t match the car number, if our biometrics don’t match.”
“Why are we walking so fast then?”
“If Tappler was bent, it means Cranley might be bent, which means Liz—wherever she is—she’s in trouble.”
He doesn’t say if she’s still alive, but it hangs with them. He stops at the edge of the woods. Twenty yards ahead is a main road, hood to trunk with cars backed up against a rotary. On the other side is a gas station; beyond that a shopping mall with the parking lot packed. It’s Friday evening. The place is jumping.
“Wait here,” says Luxton.
“Wait! I need to know what you’re thinking.”
“To get a vehicle and go to London.”
“And when you get there, what are you going to do?” Her hands are on his shoulders, shaking him. His face is cut. The bandage on his hand is dirty with dried blood. His eyes look as red as hers feel. “How does that help you find Liz?”
His hand goes onto hers. There’s anger in his touch, affection, too.
“You’re chasing your sister’s killer,” he says. “I want to get to Liz before I have a killer to chase.”
Kat puts her knuckle to her mouth. “Yeah,” she says softly.
Luxton points across the road to the mall. “I need a car. I need a phone. I need money. I need weapons.”
“This is England,” says Kat. “Guns are illegal.”
“There’s a place. It should be empty, no one expecting us.”
SIXTY-EIGHT
Friday, 8:40 p.m., BST
Luxton and Kat are five miles from Cherry Tree Farm in Bradfield St. Mark in a Land Rover SUV that Luxton stole from the mall parking lot. Luxton’s driving. They have cash taken out of ATMs from three different cards and four cell phones. One is neutralizing the Land Rover’s tracking system. Another’s been used three times: a call to Liz, then one to Cranley. Both calls were put through to voice mail. Then, Kat switched the SIM card and made a fast call to Mercedes Vendetta. He picked up. She told him what she needed. They buried the phone, with its SIM card, three feet down in soft earth to weaken the tracking signal.
They drove through a small town where the TV screens showed President Jim Abbott with Prime Minister Michael Rand, a shot of them at the door of an English country house, with the caption underneath ABBOTT AT CHEQUERS ON EVE OF SUMMIT. The Russian, Chinese, and other leaders are due to be at Chequers for dinner, too. The signing is to take place at the historic palace of Hampton Court, just outside of London on the Thames River.
The sports screen showed fans draped in the red-on-white cross of the English flag, outside the stadium, laying out sleeping bags for the night. The England–Brazil final was to kick off at 1:00. The CPS signing was scheduled for 12:45.
A rolling caption beneath the news screen said a cargo plane had crashed into the North Sea, with no casualties.
Luxton slows, but drives straight past Cherry Tree Farm. Lights are on in the kitchen and the living room where Kat, Tappler, and Cranley watched Suzy’s History Book. The curtains are half drawn. A light’s on in the bathroom upstairs. The Toyota Highlander is gone. The Mini Cooper and the blue Jaguar are still there.
Tappler’s house is exposed across a freshly harvested field in the front, but protected by a wooded garden and high trees in the back. It’s set back from the road in the village. It’s partly isolated, but not enough to make it a perfect retreat. Their advantage is that Kat has approached it before. The problem is that Cranley and Tappler saw her.
Luxton’s also been there. He went in through the front door, and Tappler showed him how his security system worked. Luxton knows the field of view of the cameras, the pressure pads under the lawn and the driveway, the infrared cordon across the garden and the front approach. He knows the code on the wall pads, one inside the front hallway, one by the back door. He knows he will have 20 seconds to punch in the six-digit code. That’s if Tappler hasn’t changed it or if it doesn’t rotate automatically.
He knows that inside the main house, where Kat went, visitors see a rambling farmhouse, welcoming, shabby, outdated. But in the garden sheds outside, he knows that Tappler keeps an arsenal.
If it weren’t for that, they wouldn’t be here. They have everything they need except guns.
Luxton parks on a farm track half a mile up the road. They leave the cell phone connected in the hope the vehicle stays invisible. They walk back toward the house. It’s dark, and there’s no moon.
They enter the village along a narrow road, with cottages on one side and open land on the other. Kat can make out a building and soccer field goalposts. At an intersection, there’s a school on the right, two thatched houses on the left, and straight ahead, slightly to the left, is Cherry Tree Farm.
About 200 yards to the right is a bigger road with steady traffic. To the left, the road runs down a hill and curves away. The hedge that separates Tappler’s house from the road has a gap for the path leading to the front door.
The storehouse, where the weapons are, lies 50 yards up the driveway, beyond the vehicles. Luxton doesn’t know if the buildings are individually alarmed or linked to the central system inside the house. He does know that Tappler separated the weapons into two caches.
His automatic rifles and sidearms are in a locked metal cabinet in the room at the back of the building. When Tappler showed them to him, Luxton saw 5.26mm light machine guns, AK-47s, M16s with M20 grenade launchers, Heckler & Koch 7.62 automatics, and others.
The ammunition was kept in an air-conditioned cellar accessed through a trapdoor hidden by a rubber mat on the floor, together with two M72 LAW rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
Tappler revealed the weapons to gain trust—proof that he would oppose the CPS, with violence, if necessary.
Kat moves ahead of Luxton, skirts around the edge of the property toward the back of the house, the same way she did before. Luxton stays across the road.
She watches the garden. She watches for a shadow cast by movement across a lightbulb. The garden is hued with light from the house. She can see an outline of the long brick storehouse with its skewed, mossy, tiled roof where, if Luxton is right, they can arm themselves.
Her cell vibrates. It’s a message from Vendetta, who confirms that he has the SIM card Kat gave him on Dix Street and he’s in the place where Kat told him to go, a café on P Street, with soft chairs and Wi-Fi, where people hang out for hours at a time.
Kat sends a text message to Luxton. He responds immediately.
Luxton’s good. He’s quiet. She doesn’t see him until he’s lit up for a beat by a flash of the orange sidelights of the Mini Cooper as he unlocks the vehicle with a message programmed by Kat and sent from his cell phone.
All those years back, she used the same system to get into Nate Sayer’s safe. If you get the frequency right, there’s no difference between a cell phone and a car key.
The Mini’s interior light comes on. Luxton opens the glove compartment, gets what he needs, and closes the car door. Tappler’s wife, away in France with the children, had left the remote to turn off the house alarm in the car. Even if there were an automatic code rotation, the remote would have kept up.
For a second, spotlights flare on in the garden, then die. An alarm inside the house beeps. Then there is quiet. Luxton walks up the driveway to the storehouse. There’s been no beep, no flare f
rom the storehouse. The alarms aren’t linked, and Luxton hasn’t seen it. They don’t know where the cordon is.
There’s no time to text. Any moment she could stand on a pressure pad under the grass, but Kat runs across the lawn, and when she’s close enough, she shouts to Luxton.
He stops. She reaches him and explains. They go to the house.
The back door has two locks; one computerized, which has been opened by the remote, and one Yale cylinder deadbolt, which Kat opens in less than ten seconds.
They step inside. Both of them are familiar with the house. There’s no sound. No one there. The lights are on, but the windows are closed.
It’s been just over 24 hours since Simon Tappler drove Kat through country lanes until she found a motorcycle to steal. She spent almost three hours watching the RingSet base at Byford before killing Lancaric and boarding the plane.
Luxton closes the door quietly behind them. They are in the kitchen. No alarm goes off. There’s a stuffiness in the air, thicker than for a house that’s only been left empty for a day, something that catches in the back of Kat’s throat.
Luxton pushes open the door to the living room. The smell becomes more pungent. “A lot of questions answered,” he says flatly.
Cranley’s body lies behind the sofa with a sheet draped over it. He’s been shot in the back of the head.
SIXTY-NINE
Friday, 10:16 p.m., BST
The back lawn, which slopes uphill from the house, ends in an apple orchard, and this is where Kat and Luxton bury Stephen Cranley’s body. They don’t speak. There is no ceremony. The grave is shallow.
Afterward, Luxton finds the keys for the storehouse and heads out. Kat closes the kitchen door and opens the window to clear the mustiness. She sees a light flashing on the landline phone—the voice mail.
“Stephen, Simon, are you there? It’s Liz. Phone me as soon as you c-can.”
The message is time stamped 5:23—seventeen hours ago. Liz left a number, but Kat doesn’t use it. Instead, she calls Bill Cage.
“Cranley’s dead,” she says.
“How?”
“Tappler shot him.”
“Where are you?”
Kat doesn’t say. “What’s happening with the CPS?” she asks.
“Abbott’s in England. If he signs, we lose. If he doesn’t, we survive.”
“In Washington?”
“Nobody’s moving. The cops, the military, Congress, business. Everyone’s waiting, like an African town riding out a coup.”
“Two things.” She recites the number Liz left. “First, trace it. I need to know exactly where she is. Or was. Then, set up a secure route for me to call it.”
“Okay.”
“And there’s a guy you need to see. Large, black, slightly crazy eyes.” Kat gives Cage the address of the café on P Street.
For the next hour, Kat strips and reformats Tappler’s laptop. She practically builds a new computer that cannot be tracked. She’s so immersed that the opening of the kitchen door makes her jerk around.
“Take your pick,” says Luxton. He lays a Colt 45, a Glock 18 automatic, and a Heckler & Koch 9mm MP5 submachine gun on the table. “The rest are in the car. I’ll bring in some other stuff in case we need it overnight. Then I’ll reset the alarms.”
Kat slips a power cable into the laptop and boots it up. Luxton washes his hands. Cage calls back.
“It’s a cell phone,” says Cage. “Right now, it’s on the third floor of the central Media Axis building in London. Give it sixty seconds from when I hang up. I’ve rerouted your line. You will be secure for at least three minutes.”
“Thanks,” says Kat, ending the call. She looks up at Luxton. “Liz left a message on Tappler’s voice mail. Cage tracked her.”
Luxton pulls out a chair, leans on it. “Where is she?”
“Media Axis. Or at least the phone is.”
“Jesus,” he says. “How?”
“I’ve fixed it so we can make a secure call to that number.” She holds out the landline’s handset to him. He takes it.
“Untraceable?”
“For three minutes. But I need two minutes with her.”
Luxton dials. Kat saw some feeling in Luxton when he made her a daisy chain, although it was tempered by mistrust. But now, as he talks to his sister, he is awash with humanity. Kat leaves the room to let them talk, but a minute later steps back in again, and Luxton is wiping a tear from his cheek.
“Speak soon,” he says.
As he hands the phone to Kat, she asks, “Is she—?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Liz?” says Kat, taking the phone.
“What c-can I do?”
“How safe are you?”
“Everyone’s waiting until tomorrow. Stephen Cranley got me out of jail. I’m at work.”
“Can you get into the edit suite where I left Suzy’s file?”
“Yes.”
“You got a pen?” Very slowly and precisely, Kat dictates to Liz the code to get through the digital walls she put around Suzy’s file. Liz repeats it back. Kat tells Liz what she wants. “Once you’ve done that, separate it off, copy it, and send it to this e-mail address.”
With the call ended, Kat leans back in the chair, puts her feet up on the table, and covers her face with her hands.
“Will it work?” says Luxton.
“Your sister will create a masterpiece they will never forget.”
“Thank you,” he says.
“For what?”
“Getting me out of that Voz Island hellhole.”
“Thank you for getting us here.”
He laughs briefly, perches on the windowsill, lights a cigarette, and looks out over the garden. There’s a moon of sorts draping it in a hazy glow. “This must be the safest house in England tonight,” he says, exhaling so the smell of tobacco smoke drifts across to Kat.
Kat thinks of her call to Cage, the vehicle, and a million other ways they could track her here. But they’re armed. She has a plan. As Luxton says, this is the last house they might think of coming to, and she’s decided, once they find Liz, what she is going to do.
She picks up the Colt, waits for him to finish his cigarette, then takes Luxton by the hand, leads him up the stairs, to the bedroom where she’d bathed and changed the day before. She closes the door and puts the Colt on the bedside table.
“Lie down,” she says softly. “Don’t speak. Just do as I ask.”
She lays him on the bed and takes off his clothes. She doesn’t speak, nor does she take her eyes off his. His body is firm, and she can see the strength in his shoulders. He lets her take control. She takes off her shirt, sits on top of him, leans down, and kisses him on the mouth, enjoying the lingering smell of nicotine and the taste of male sweat. He cups her breasts with his hands. Then she stands up, slips off her pants, and leans over him, letting her nipples brush across his mouth. She sees teardrops trapped inside his eyes.
She puts him inside her, puts her mouth on his, takes each hand and entwines his fingers in hers. She clutches him to her, as close as two people can get, and when she feels him quiver and she begins to come herself, she lets out a little cry, closes her eyes to blackness, knowing that whatever happens tomorrow, nothing will destroy the common ground they’ve just created.
She rolls off him and lies next to him, letting him cradle her, thinking she needs to rebuild herself into a woman again before she goes out to fight Yulya Gracheva.
SEVENTY
Saturday, 6:23 a.m., BST
World leaders will begin arriving at Hampton Court Palace shortly after 1:30 to attend a reception in the Great Hall among 16th-century Flemish tapestries that illustrate the biblical story of Abraham.
An orchestra will play a mix of multicultural music from the Minstrels Gallery that overlooks the hall. After the signing, delegates will move out to the gardens, where they can talk privately among orange trees planted by King William III, Prince of Orange, and lime trees planted by King
Charles II in honor of his Portuguese wife, Catherine of Braganza.
Alone in the kitchen, with Luxton asleep upstairs, the Colt 45 within arm’s reach, Kat reads through the itinerary for the CPS signing. Cage is due to call at any time. He should be ready to send her data from the SIM card kept by Vendetta, the raw material from Suzy’s History Book. Kat will load it into the laptop. Then, Cage will secure the line for her to call Liz, who will send across the parts she has edited.
In all, Kat reads, 187 world leaders or their representatives will attend. Many are flying there by helicopter from Heathrow airport. Others are driving in from London. Rogue nations have not been invited. A few states have boycotted.
For the signing itself, the leaders of the three primary powers, the United States, China, and Russia, will sit in the center of a long wooden table. Other leaders will be on their flanks, ranked not alphabetically but by the size of their economies.
In the center of the room will gather leaders of the world’s most powerful nations. On the fringes will be the weakest. Behind political leaders will sit business leaders. Tiina Gracheva from RingSet is listed as a representative for Russia.
The signing is due to take fifteen minutes, with Abbott, as leader of the world’s biggest economy, making the last speech. When he ends, the signing begins, then over on the other side of London, the England–Brazil match will kick off.
At this stage, CPS delegates will be joined by community representatives from their countries, chosen by lottery. In the United States, one lottery winner has been the Strongcross Sports and Community Center from Iowa.
While delegates mingle, images of the game will be superimposed around the tapestries, on dark wood walls, and across the lawns, onto enormous screens erected in the gardens.
In the evening, the British prime minister will host a reception at Downing Street for the Brazil and England teams—whatever the result.
Kat checks several sites and keeps her eye on the television. There’s nothing public about Abbott’s precise itinerary, except that he’s at the prime minister’s country house near a village called Princess Risborough in Buckinghamshire—about a hundred miles southwest of where she is now.
The History Book Page 29
