Personal(101)

No punctuation, no nothing.





FORTY-EIGHT


WE HAD TAKEN careful steps to avoid electronic surveillance, and now we were being asked to come right out and tell the British where we were. Casey Nice said, ‘I think we have to.’

I said nothing.

She said, ‘You’ve been bugging him for data. About the glass. And now he has it. You have to hear what he has to say. It could be important. In fact it must be important. Look at his language.’

‘Unless he’s faking. Maybe he’s pissed we fell off the map. He’s in charge. He’s supposed to know where we are. Maybe he’s taking it like a challenge.’

‘He’s a brother soldier. Look at what he wrote. Would he lie to you that bad?’

‘They didn’t rule the world by being nice.’

‘Your call,’ she said.

I put my finger on my phone’s off button, and I held it there, touching but not pressing, and then I changed my mind and handed the phone to Nice. Her thumbs were quicker. And smaller. I said, ‘Tell him to come alone.’

I wasn’t sure how long Bennett would have stuck around the giant four-way in the west of London, but probably he had twigged pretty early that things were not going to plan, so he might have already folded his tent and started for home. In which case he could be in Chigwell as fast as twenty minutes. Or as slow as forty, if in fact he had hung around until the bitter end. There was no way of knowing.

There was only one practical way to the bowling club, for a pedestrian, which was the yard-wide footpath. No doubt there were ancient easements and rights of way across neighbouring lots, for lawnmowers and heavy rollers and whatever else it took to keep grass that smooth, and if SWAT teams came they would use helicopters and land on the green itself, but if Bennett came alone he would walk.

Charlie White was still watching us. Still unsure. I spent most of the time looking out the windows, but without the night vision and the magnification there wasn’t much to see. Just dark space, vague trees, and the distant glow of Little Joey’s street, a quarter of a mile away. No detail. I could barely make out his house, big as it was. Nice sat on a lumpy canvas bag, with both hands in her jacket pockets, one of them no doubt curled around the butt of her Glock, and the other maybe curled around her pill bottle. I wanted to say I guess this ain’t the night to quit Zoloft, but I didn’t, because I figured she would prefer me to take it seriously. And maybe she wasn’t thinking about pills at all. In which case I certainly didn’t want to remind her. Maybe she was just keeping her hands warm. The air had gone cold. It had been a pleasant day, but the temperature had dropped after sunset.

After fifteen minutes I went out, and closed the smashed door behind me, and hiked across the grit to the clearing’s furthest corner, which gave me a sideways view of the line between the mouth of the alley and the bowling club HQ. Which was the best I could do. I didn’t want to be in the alley itself. I didn’t want to be on the street. I wanted an escape route, if necessary, and our best bet was through the gardens and over the lawns that surrounded us, not along the public highways and byways, which were full of dangers and perils.

And I wanted to be at least a little proactive, too. If Nice had to start shooting, she’d be firing out the front of the hut, so it made sense for me to be firing at ninety degrees. Basic triangulation. Lots of good reasons. Not that I could see very well. Clearly the bowling club had voted down any kind of exterior illumination. Some of the houses backing on to the space had lit-up rooms, and there was the usual kind of urban glow in the sky, the city itself reflected back off low night-time clouds, all averaged out to smoky yellow, but apart from those two faint sources I was looking at nothing but pitch dark. The back part of my brain told me Bennett was a man of average size, and his centre mass would be thirty-seven inches behind his muzzle flash.

I waited.

I was out in the cold seven more minutes, which when added to the original fifteen made twenty-two, which told me Bennett had indeed quit early and holed up somewhere central to wait on events. I heard his footsteps all the way at the far end of the path, a soft, whispering sound, amplified but also modified by the parallel board fences. Then as he got closer I heard the muted crunch of his soles on the thin scattering of grit, and at one point I heard a brief rat-a-tat scuffle, as if he had swayed on the uneven ground and something in his hand had brushed against the boards. Something leather, I thought, given the sound.

He stepped into the clearing, and stopped. I could see his face, just vaguely, a pale gleam, but I couldn’t see anything else. I couldn’t see his hands.