by Gregg Loomis
Unless he had managed to steal a car, or have one waiting at the curb, Jenson’s killer was going to be easy to identify if Lang could catch up to him before he could change clothes.
Of course, he could have still been in Jenson’s shop, too. The possibility slowed Lang as he edged towards the showroom, his back to the wall in case the bell had meant an entry rather than the killer’s departure.
As he reached the curtains separating the show area, Lang saw something on the floor. For an instant, the dim light gave the illusion of another body. He felt himself tense until he realized he was looking at nothing more than a bundle of clothes, coveralls stained red with blood.
Lang was certain he would have seen them had they been there when he came in. He picked them up, quickly searching. He would have been surprised to find anything useful, but he had to look. The idea the murderer had been there when he arrived, watched him go into the office, was enough to make the fish and chips lurch in his stomach.
Why not try to finish what They had failed to do in Atlanta?
Lang’s question was answered soon enough. A police constable in the traditional four-button jacket and high, rounded hat was looking around the showroom. He held an automatic pistol pointed in Lang’s direction.
Lang’s first thought on seeing the weapon was that the killer had remained, disguised as a police officer. Then he remembered that the London police had abandoned tradition and begun to carry arms a few years ago.
“Someone called, said there’d been . . .” The cop’s eyes widened and Lang realized he was still holding the bloody clothes.
“Look, I didn’t . . .” Lang began, all too aware of how lame he sounded.
Judging by the tremor in his voice as he spoke into the radio transmitter fixed to the lapel of his jacket, the constable was more frightened than Lang was.
“Backup, more chaps ’ere in a ’urry,” he shouted in an East End accent that would have done Eliza Doolittle credit. “ ’Urry th’ bleedin’ backup! I got the bugger whot done it right ’ere. Number Twelve Auld Bond Street.”
Lang dropped the incriminating coveralls and backed through the curtains into the storage area, his hands extended so the policeman could see he was no threat. “I just walked in here, found him.”
The officer was young and clearly nervous. The muzzle of his weapon—a Glock nine-millimeter, Lang guessed—wavered. “An’ I’m th’ bleedin’ Queen’s Consort. Right where you are, Yank, ‘old it right where you are.”
Lang took another step backwards and came up against a large piece of furniture. The cop followed slowly. Maybe he was afraid if he let Lang get too many steps away he would miss if he had to shoot. Lang put a hand behind his back to feel his way around the obstacle. His fingers touched one of the picture frames he had seen earlier.
“ ’Ands up where I can see ’em,” the constable demanded.
Lang was betting the cop wouldn’t pull the trigger unless forced to, a risk Lang wouldn’t have taken in Atlanta. Lang wasn’t going to submit to arrest if he could avoid it without doing the young policeman any great harm. When and if Lang could be proved innocent, the tracks he was following would be cold. Besides, he had had more than enough experience with the criminal justice system to know it for the crapshoot it was. Lang’s fingers ran along the ornately carved frame as the officer came closer. The hand that wasn’t holding the gun was fumbling behind him—for handcuffs, Lang guessed.
“Both ’ands, I said. . . .”
Lang took a deep breath and shifted his weight to his front foot. He gave a high kick that the Rockettes would have envied and the Glock spun from the officer’s hand and clattered to the floor. As the officer spun to retrieve it, Lang swung the picture frame over his own head and the policeman’s. It could not have fit better. The officer’s arms were pinned to his sides by the gilded wood. The constable could do little more than glare.
“Trust me,” Lang said, headed for the door, “I had nothing to do with this and I’d like nothing better than being able to stick around and prove it.”
The constable didn’t look much like he believed him.
Lang could already hear the pulsing sirens used by police all over Europe, the ones that reminded him of the movie The Diary of Anne Frank. It might as well have been the Gestapo coming for him: if he was caught, he wouldn’t be sent to Auschwitz but he sure as hell would be going somewhere behind barbed wire where They could reach him at their leisure.
Lang stepped outside and walked away, resisting the impulse to run like hell. He was two blocks down the street before he realized he had left his umbrella.
6
London, St. James
Ten minutes later
There was a note waiting at the Stafford:
Gone shopping. Dinner at Pointe de Tour. Tea here at
1600 hrs.
Gurt
Attached was part of an article clipped from a magazine, informing Lang that the Pointe de Tour was one of the new London restaurants, located on the south side of Tower Bridge. French cuisine, multiple stars. Expensive.
Waiting around for Gurt didn’t seem wise. He went to the room and packed his bag. He felt guilty as hell but she had no place in his plans. They had set him up, killing Jenson and calling the police to nab him virtually in flagrante delicto, as lawyers say.
Well, as some lawyers say, those who remember the phrase from law school.
Every law enforcement agency in Europe as well as the United States would have a reason to be looking for Lang once the fingerprints were lifted from the umbrella and it was traced back to Fortnum and Mason. Being part of a couple wasn’t going to be sufficient cover, anyway, once the constable got to a police artist who could draw Heinrich Schneller’s face.
Once run through Interpol, the fingerprints would put the Herr Schneller persona to rest for good.
Lang pocketed the cash Gurt had left in the room’s safe, wrote her a note he knew was inadequate, and left.
Crossing the Mall to St. James’s Park, he spent a few minutes pretending to watch the birds on Duck Island. No one else showed an interest in him or the waterfowl. He walked along Whitehall and the edge of the brown pea gravel of the Horse Guards’ parade ground and the Paladin facade of Banqueting House, the site of royal revels. That princely party boy, that swinging sovereign, Charles I, had been beheaded there. Today, Lang wasn’t nearly as interested in history as he was in anyone who might be following.
Of course, the fact he couldn’t see Them didn’t mean They weren’t there. Lang appreciated Their cleverness. Jenson’s killer could have killed Lang in the shadows of the shop. In a country with fewer annual homicides than, say, Montgomery, Alabama, such a murder would have raised more questions than merely the death of the antique dealer would have. They had arranged to have Lang sought as the culprit.
Once Lang was in custody, he suspected They would know where to find him. A criminal organization with members in America and Europe would have access to police records and, quite likely, any jail in which he might be incarcerated. And what could he do? Who was going to believe a suspect in two murders who raved about international conspiracies and secrets hidden in pictures?
Clever.
Lang used a doorstep to pretend to tie his shoe, taking the opportunity to look behind without being obvious about it. A group of Japanese, cameras clicking amid bird-chirp voices, stopped to photograph everything in sight. Lang left them behind as he turned right, hoping to disappear among the traffic, pigeons and milling crowd that was Trafalgar Square.
Lang had at least one advantage, small though it might have been. They didn’t know about the bloody paper with the company name on it, presumably the source of the painting. They had killed Jenson to stifle the vary information They had overlooked.
At Charing Cross, a huge shopping plaza and office building rose over the Underground station. Lang stopped at a public phone, an uninteresting steel box similar to the ones in the States. Most of the old red phone boxes had long s
ince become decorations in bars in the U.S., he supposed. At least that was the only place he still saw them. Unlike American phones, the directory was still attached. Lang found the number and dialed, keeping an eye on the small bag of possessions he had brought from the hotel.
By the time the brief conversation was complete, an anemic sun had broken through the clouds, its appearance more aesthetic than warming.
Once he hung up, he continued down The Strand until he reached the Temple Bar Memorial, an iron griffin that marked the place the actual City of London met Westminster, two of the municipalities generally lumped together as “London.” Here The Strand became Fleet Street, the former center of London’s newspaper publishers.
Lang wasn’t here for newspapers. For that matter, the press had long since departed for the suburbs: shorter commutes, lower rents and more modest salary demands from unions.
One last check behind him and he turned into a narrow street, more of an alley, Middle Temple Lane. From here an even more confined byway led to a small park surrounded by the buildings of the Temple Bar, the site of the offices of almost every barrister in London.
Lang let his memory lead him up a marble staircase worn uneven by centuries of clients seeking potential rectification of injustice and certain diminution of their money. At the top, a half-glass door bore flaking gilt letters, “Jacob Annulewicz, Barrister.”
Barrister Annulewicz’s business spilled into the shabby waiting area. Two chairs covered in a chintz popular in the 1940s, worn almost beyond recognition, overflowed with stacks of paper. Files were piled on a much-abused table. The secretary’s desk was surprisingly neat, its peeling veneer visible under an over-sized computer monitor, the only indication Lang was still in the twenty-first century.
If there was one, the secretary was gone, dismissed for the duration of Lang’s visit.
“Reilly!”
An older man stood in the doorway to the inner office, dressed in a black gown, a starched white split dickey at his throat and a short white periwig perched on an otherwise bald scalp like a bird’s nest on a rock.
“Jacob!” Lang set his bag down to return a bear hug. “When did you join a Gilbert and Sullivan revival?”
Jacob stepped back, releasing enough pressure to allow at least shallow breathing. “Still the smartass, I see.”
“And you’re still defending the indefensible,” Lang said, indicating the robe. “What’s with the costume? I thought you only wore it to court or with a mask on Guy Fawkes’s Day.”
“And where do you think I was just before you called, the Mayfair Club?”
“Not unless they’ve substantially relaxed their membership requirements.”
Jacob beckoned Lang into his office, a small room that reeked from the briar pipes dead in an ashtray. “Not likely,” he said without rancor. “Still no women, Jews or Labour MPs. And you have to have a letter from at least five members, two of whom must be deceased.”
Jacob’s office was as cluttered as the outer room. He moved a stack of files to look under it, set it down and lifted another. This time he uncovered a small wooden box into which he put the wig.
“Clubs. It is still difficult, being one of Jehovah’s chosen among the Gentiles.”
Lang moved papers from a chair and sat on genuine Naugahyde. “From the looks of your waistline, you haven’t encountered any good pogroms lately. I take it you’re still away from the Promised Land by choice.”
The son of Polish Holocaust survivors, Jacob had been taken to Israel as a child. He subsequently immigrated to England, becoming a British citizen, an act that did not deprive him of his Israeli citizenship but made him a prime candidate to become one of the Mossad’s undercover agents stationed in friendly and unfriendly countries alike. If history had taught the Jews anything, it was the uncertainty of alliances with goyim. Consequently, they spied on friend and foe alike with admirable evenhandedness.
Jacob’s brief had been to keep an eye on Arab diplomats in London, to pass along to his handlers the snippets of information from which the tapestries of international affairs are woven. The information might or might not be passed along to the intelligence community of the United States, which hosted no Iraqi, Iranian or Liberian embassy of its own upon which to spy.
Somewhat less well known was Jacob’s ability with explosives, learned during his time in the Israeli Army before his migration to England. Unconfirmed rumor had it that he was the one who had gotten into the hiding place of one of Hamas’s more notorious terrorists and wired T4 to the telephone’s dial. The next call blew the man’s head off without so much as cracking the mirror on the wall. True or not, Jacob had the reputation of being the duke of detonation, a prestidigitator of plastique.
The Americans as well as the British had suspected his duties included spying on them as well. All potentially aggrieved parties—CIA, FBI, MI5, MI6—agreed he was now retired, no matter how odd his choice to spend his final years in the practice of law that had been his first love, or, odder still, his preference for London drizzle over Mediterranean sun.
Jacob opened doors behind his desk, revealing a small cupboard, counter and gas ring upon which sat a teapot. “Still lemon, no sugar?”
Lang had to smile. “Age hasn’t taken your memory.”
Jacob poured into porcelain mugs. “Not entirely a blessing. I can still remember whom I dislike but my eyesight’s gotten so bloody bad, I can’t see the blokes coming.” He opened a tin and shook his head sorrowfully. “Out of biscuits, I’m afraid.” He extended a steaming mug and lit one of the malodorous pipes. “So brief me on the last ten years, Langford. You might include the reasons for that ridiculous moustache, what I hope are false jowls and that dreadful German-made suit.”
Lang glanced around the room and touched his ear.
Jacob nodded. “Ah, yes, ’tis a lovely spring day outside. Why don’t we take our tea out to the courtyard. Who knows, we might even hear a lark sing, although the last of the poor creatures I saw in London was years ago, dying of the smog, he was.”
The sun had grown no warmer and Lang shivered as they entered the courtyard. “If you think your office is bugged . . . ?”
Jacob’s head bobbed solemnly. “Was it not your poet Robert Frost who observed some people believe good fences make good neighbors? In our business . . . our former business, good listening devices make good neighbors. Your Agency, MI5, the others, do not fear what they think they know. So I let them listen in to what happens in my office. It must put them to sleep. I have nothing to hide anymore. Besides, had it not been for your countrymen . . .”
“You’d be dead,” Lang finished.
Years ago, Lang’s employers had known from bugging Jacob’s phone that he was going to be nearby at the same time a Hamas group planned to explode a car bomb at the Israeli Embassy. Unknown to the would-be terrorists, the building had long previously been rendered impervious to anything smaller than a nuclear blast and the most serious damage would be to the surrounding neighborhood. Arresting those planning to join Allah in paradise would have tipped the fact the Arab group was seriously infiltrated. Lang had insisted no point was to be served by letting Jacob be reduced to his composite atoms and had warned him clear.
“I would indeed be dead,” Jacob agreed, “a fate only marginally worse than old age. Now, the last ten years, what have you been doing that you worry about being overheard?”
Lang told him.
Jacob shook his head. “My sorrow for the loss of your family. Your sister, nephew, I didn’t know. But Dawn . . . A name from the poetry books. You will remember I had the wisdom to ask her what she saw in you when you two visited London some years ago. Lovely person.
“Now you are a lawyer in America, wanted for murders you did not commit both here and there. How may I be of help?”
They had walked the short distance between the law offices and an old round structure, the Temple. Lang pulled open the heavy door and motioned Jacob inside.
“I’m col
d,” Lang said. “There’s no one here and I doubt anyone has bugged this place.”
The Temple was just that. Built in the twelfth century by the Order of Knights Templar, it was round with an inner circle supported by columns. In the middle of the circle, several stone effigies reposed on the worn limestone floor, swords clasped to their armored chests. No inscription gave a clue as to their identity. Lang had always assumed they were Templars.
Jacob and Lang circled the room as Lang finished his story.
“Pegasus, Limited,” Lang finally said. “The only clue I have, or at least the only one I understand. If it does business in Europe, Echelon would know.”
Jacob stopped. “Echelon? Your National Security Agency doesn’t share that information with any agency where I might find out.”
The National Security Agency was the most secretive of the secretive. Its operatives were computer jocks, its weapons high technology. It participated in no active espionage in the conventional sense but maintained a heavily guarded satellite monitoring station just outside London which had the capability to intercept every fax, e-mail and phone call made in Europe. The information was shared only among England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Lang smiled. “Of course, your retirement. Plus Mossad naturally has no means of intercepting Echelon and would be reluctant to do so if it could. I wouldn’t want to impose on our friendship by asking . . .”
“You cannot get this information from your former employers or their friends at MI6?”
Lang shook his head. “My former employers don’t owe me a favor, particularly not the London Station. It’s the plumb of the service, draws all the Harvard-Yale types, guys that wouldn’t dream of being seen with someone who graduated from a state college.” He wrinkled his nose, giving his very best imitation of an upper-class British accent. “As for MI6, old thing, why they’re just too, too. Hardly can understand the blighters, talking through their Cambridge-Oxford noses, y’know. Just too tiresome, dealing with a bloody Yank. No sense of . . . Well, old stick, you know what I mean.”
