Personal(120)

Another step.

She was seven feet away.

I said, ‘Don’t worry about me, Charlie. I do OK.’

He said, ‘Maybe you did OK in the past. But you ain’t doing so great now.’

She straightened her arm. Her gun was four feet from his back. At which point I started to worry. About a whole bunch of different things. He would smell her. He would smell the gun. He would sense some kind of a disturbance in the air around him. Some primitive instinct. Seven hundred years of ancient evolution for every year of modernity. And if she fired from four feet the through-and-through would nail me, dead on, just the same as if he had fired.

I looked him right in the eye and I said, ‘One second from now I’m going to fall down on the floor.’

He said, ‘What?’

And I did. I let go and fell like a coat coming off a hook and she fired into his back from four feet, and I saw a spit of flesh and blood splash out from the front of his chest, and the feature window behind me shattered, and I landed next to the woman in the towel, who stirred in her sleep and hooked a loose arm around my neck and kissed my ear and said, ‘Oh, baby.’





FIFTY-EIGHT


LESS THAN TWO minutes later we were in the back of a mint-green Vauxhall. Up front was the couple who had delivered the computers. The man and the woman, both still quiet and contained, both still happy with their short-straw assignments. Good team players. We had left Bennett at Joey’s house, and I didn’t expect to see him again.

We had gotten on the East Anglia highway right out of Chigwell. The M11 motorway, as it was called on the local signs. We were heading for a Royal Air Force station in a place called Honington. Which was near a place called Thetford. Ninety minutes, Bennett had promised, but I figured it would be less. The woman was driving extremely fast. The land all around us was flat. Strategically Britain was an aircraft carrier permanently moored off the coast of Europe, and there was plenty of space for flight decks.

RAF Honington turned out to be a big place, mostly shrouded in darkness. The woman drove through gates and straight out to the tarmac. Just like the SEAL at McChord, which all seemed a long time ago. She drove the same kind of well-judged part-circle and came to a stop at the airplane stairs. We got out, and closed our doors, and the mint-green Vauxhall drove away.

The airplane was the same kind of thing as O’Day’s Gulf-stream, short and pointed and urgent, but it was painted dark blue, very shiny, with a pale blue belly under a gold coach line, and the words Royal Air Force above the windows. A man appeared above us, in the oval mouth of the cabin. He was wearing an RAF uniform. He said, ‘Sir, madam, please come up.’

Inside there was no butterscotch leather or walnut veneer. Instead the leather was black, and the veneer looked like carbon fibre. It was severe but sporty. A whole different flavour. Like a modern Bentley, maybe. Like Joey’s. The man in the uniform told us his last passenger had been royal. The duchess of somewhere. Cambridge, maybe. Which started me thinking about MI6 again, and MI5, and everything in between. Nice and I sat across the aisle from each other, but facing, head to toe. The man in the uniform disappeared, and a minute later we were in the air, climbing hard, heading west to America.

We were given a meal, and then the guy in uniform retired to some discreet compartment, and left us alone. I looked at Nice, across the aisle, close enough to touch, and I said, ‘Thank you.’

She said, ‘You’re very welcome.’

‘You OK?’

‘About Charlie White? Yes and no.’

I said, ‘Concentrate on the yes part.’

‘I am,’ she said. ‘Believe me. The way he talked about that girl. I heard him, from downstairs. They took pleasure in tormenting her.’

‘Plus the firearms and the narcotics and the payday loans.’

‘But we shouldn’t be judge and jury and executioner all in one.’

‘Why not?’

‘We’re supposed to be civilized people.’

‘We are,’ I said. ‘We’re very civilized. We’re riding in a duchess’s airplane. They didn’t rule the world by being nice. And neither did we, when our turn came.’

She didn’t answer.

I said, ‘You proved one thing, at least. You can operate in the field.’

‘Without pills, you mean? Are you going to tell me to quit again?’

‘I’m not going to tell you anything, except thank you. You saved my life. Take all the pills you want. But be clear about why, at least. It’s a simple chain of logic. You’re anxious, about your professional performance and your mother, but only one of those is a legitimate worry, therefore you’re taking the pills because your mother is sick. Which is OK. Take them as long as you need. But don’t doubt your skills. They’re separate. You’re good at your job. National security is safe. It’s your mom who isn’t.’