Personal(121)

She said, ‘I’m not going to join the army. I’m going to stay where I am.’

‘You should. It’s different now. You know what really happened. You just moved up a step. You’re harder to betray.’

We flew on, chasing the clock, but losing, and we landed at Pope Field at two in the morning. We turned and taxied, all the way to the small administrative building with 47th Logistics, Tactical Support Command on it. The engines shut down and the guy in the uniform opened the door and lowered the stairs.

He said, ‘Sir, madam, you need the red door, I believe.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. I pulled out the fat rolls of British money, from Romford and Ealing, and I gave them to the guy. I said, ‘Have a party in the mess. Invite the duchess.’

Then I followed Nice down the steps, and through the dark, to the red door.

The red door opened when we were still six feet from it, and Joan Scarangello stepped out. She had a briefcase in her hand. She had waited up for us, but she wasn’t about to admit it. She was trying to look like she was just heading home after a long day at the office.

She stopped and looked at me and said, ‘I take it back.’

I said, ‘Take what back?’

‘You did very well. The British government is officially grateful.’

‘For what?’

‘Your input helped their operative achieve a very satisfactory conclusion.’

‘Bennett?’

‘He states in his report he couldn’t have done it without you.’

‘How long were we in the air?’

‘Six hours and fifty minutes.’

‘And he’s already written a report?’

‘He’s British.’

‘What couldn’t he have done without me?’

‘He took Kott off the board inside a local gangster’s house. Where he went solely at your suggestion. Hence the gratitude. Along the way he was forced to neutralize a number of gang members, including two really big names, and so Scotland Yard is grateful, too, and because of what he wrote some of that will rub off on us, so all in all I would say we’re heading for a period of glorious cooperation. Our London operations will be better than ever.’

I said, ‘He claims they’re reading your signals.’

She said, ‘We know.’

‘Are they?’

‘They think so.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘We built a new system, in secret. It’s hidden in routine data from weather satellites. That’s where we talk. But we kept the old system going. That’s what they’re reading. We fill it with all kinds of junk.’

I said nothing.

She said, ‘We don’t rule the world by being dumb.’

And she walked away, in her good shoes and her dark nylons, and her black skirt suit, with her briefcase swinging, and I watched her for thirty yards, which was no kind of a hardship, because it all worked well together, especially the nylons and the skirt, and then she stepped out of the last pool of light and the darkness swallowed her up. I heard her heels a minute more, and then Casey Nice pushed the red door open and stepped inside.

The buffet room was empty. No pastries, no coffee. All cleared away, at the end of the day, pending new deliveries in the morning. We walked upstairs, fast and easy on the standard dimensions. Shoemaker’s office was empty. The conference room was empty. But O’Day had his light on.

He was at his desk, in his blazer, with the sweater under it. He was leaning forward, on his elbows, reading. His head was down, and he looked up at us without moving it.

He said, ‘We’ll do the debrief in the morning.’

We waited.

He said, ‘I have one preliminary question, however. Why did you fly back with the RAF? Our own plane was standing by.’

I sat down, on the navy-issue chair. Casey Nice sat down next to me. I said, ‘Do we get to ask a preliminary question?’

‘I suppose a fair exchange is no robbery.’

‘We flew back with the RAF just for the fun of it. We wanted to see how the other half lives.’

‘Is that all?’

‘We wanted to make Bennett work for what he was getting.’

I saw him relax.

I said, ‘Our question is, why can’t either the NSA or GCHQ see the money?’

I saw him unrelax.

He didn’t answer.

I said, ‘It was a year of Kott’s rent, and his living expenses, and his fee, and the rifle itself, and all that practice ammunition, and the neighbour, and the private jet to Paris, and whatever the Vietnamese cost, and the two gangs in London, and presumably some kind of homeward transportation. That’s not tens of millions of dollars, but it’s more than nine-eleven cost. Therefore I’m sure their computers wouldn’t ignore it. And they’re smart people. And motivated, because whatever happens, they’ll get blamed too. Because everything starts with money. So why can’t they see it?’