He said nothing.
‘A simple chain of logic,’ I said again. ‘Kott and Carson are in London, the Romford Boys are hiding them, but there’s no traffic in and out of Little Joey’s driveway.’
Bennett said, ‘All true.’
‘Therefore Kott and Carson are inside Little Joey’s house.’
Bennett said nothing.
‘Joey doubled his guard for a reason. He was expecting house guests. I mean, where could be safer? The cops can’t get near the place, and no civilian would dare to try. And if Joey wants to keep these guys close, maybe with an eye to the future, then there’s no place like home for a thing like that. He’ll let them hole up there as long as they want. They’ll leave when the time is right. They could walk from here to Wallace Court, if they had to. They arrived inside one of those stray vehicles you saw. Maybe driven around the back. No use following the vehicle afterwards, because it wasn’t going anywhere. It had been hauling stuff in, not hauling it out. But aside from all of that, you’re seeing exactly what you’d expect to see. Two teams of house guards rotating in and out, and lots of food coming in. Enough for three people.’
Bennett didn’t answer.
‘Now you can say wow, you must be right, we had no idea, and we’re so sorry for accidentally bringing you to a spot exactly four hundred yards from where two of the world’s greatest riflemen are watching out the window.’
‘I am sorry,’ he said.
‘But there’s a silver lining, right? There always is. If you see a weapon discharged inside that house, you could order up all kinds of SWAT and armoured vehicles. Job done, right there. If you see a weapon discharged. Which isn’t a given. But which might become more likely if they had something to shoot at.’
‘Not my idea,’ he said.
‘Whose, then?’
‘Like I said before, they didn’t rule the world by being nice.’
‘They?’
‘We. But not me. Not personally.’
‘Don’t apologize,’ I said. ‘This is exactly where I wanted to be.’
THIRTY-NINE
I STAYED WHERE I wanted to be for about thirty more minutes, with Casey Nice alongside me at her own pair of binoculars, both of us watching the static scene and trying to draw what conclusions we could from it. Bennett stood behind us, listing the activity they had already seen, and answering the few questions we had.
I asked him, ‘What kind of probable cause would get you in there?’
He said, ‘Apart from a muzzle flash?’
‘Let’s hope things don’t go that far.’
‘A positive visual ID on either one of them would work.’
‘Which you haven’t gotten yet.’
‘Not yet.’
There were lights in some of the windows, both upstairs and down, behind what looked like semi-transparent roller shades. But there were no shadows cast, no figures, no movement. And no blue glow from a television set. Probably the occupied core of the house was in the back, or on the far side, neither of which we could see. A kitchen and a family room, possibly, with guest bedrooms upstairs. Or a self-contained suite of their own. Like a pied-à-terre apartment, except 50 per cent larger. Designed either for the present purpose, or for giant and incapacitated parents, twenty years in the future.
I asked, ‘You got an opinion on when exactly they’ll move into position down at Wallace Court?’
Bennett said, ‘That’s the big question, isn’t it?’
‘What’s the big answer?’
‘We’ll be closing roads a day or two before it starts. I’m sure they’re aware of that. And I’m sure they know a day or two means three or four, sometimes. So my guess is they’ll move five days ahead.’
‘That gives them a long wait.’
‘Snipers love all that lying-up bullshit. All part of the mystique.’
‘Can you catch them in transit?’
‘We could if we knew what time on which day they’re due to head out. We could engineer a traffic stop. A broken brake light, or something. But we don’t know. So we’d have to stop everything of theirs that moves, for about a week or so, to be on the safe side. After the third or the fourth time, old Charlie White would start calling in favours. He owns some local politicians, and some local police, we think. Might be worth it, just for the entertainment value alone. We’d have half a dozen solid citizens swearing up and down that yeah, OK, old Charlie might be a pimp and a thief and a gun runner, but he’s definitely not a terrorist.’
I asked, ‘Who’s the we? As in, we could, we’d have to, we think, we’d have?’