‘About my work?’ She nodded. ‘I doubt it. I’m sort of between jobs at the moment.’
She grinned. ‘Me too.’
‘Hold it,’ he said. ‘I notice all we’ve done is talk about me. Your turn.’
‘OK, but I’m hungry; how about lunch?’
‘I’m sorry, I was certain he was dead.’
Charles Lee tossed the remains of his cigarette from the car window and studied the couple talking together on the bench. He should have done the job himself. His partner had been too impatient – a young man’s flaw; one learned patience as one grew older. He would have shadowed Saintclair and bided his time until he was certain of the outcome. True, the attempt should have succeeded, but that wouldn’t be in his report to the agent from Beijing. Better that the younger man was at fault. There would be a little residual fall-out, but he would survive, and that was what mattered.
‘It couldn’t be helped,’ he lied. ‘We know where he lives. We’ll go back tonight and do the job properly.’
‘Ninety per cent of accidents happen at home. Perhaps he’ll drown in the bath?’
Charles Lee didn’t smile. ‘As long as we take care of it this time, no one needs to know.’
The younger man nodded, visibly relieved.
‘What about the girl? Who is she?’
‘She wasn’t with him when he went into the station. Maybe someone he knows who witnessed the . . . accident?’
Lee reached behind him and picked up a black SLR camera from the back seat. The lens appeared normal, the kind any tourist would use for photographing London’s sights, but it had been specifically designed to provide the same results as a much larger telephoto. He homed in on the couple and took a series of shots.
‘Well, we’ll know by tomorrow morning.’ If the girl had a passport or any form of picture identification anywhere in the world, the Bureau’s sophisticated photo identification software would find her.
‘What if she’s there tonight?’
Lee put the car into gear and moved carefully out into the traffic.
‘That would be too bad.’
Ten minutes later the Ford pulled up at a set of lights by a row of derelict shops. Beyond the shops stretched a broad empty space where a factory had stood, but which now contained a few burned-out wrecks that had once been automobiles. They had made the journey in silence, Lee allowing his colleague to contemplate his failure and formulating in his mind how to ensure the man from Beijing saw his own part in the best possible light.
‘I thank you for your forbearance and support, comrade,’ his partner said.
‘I’ve told you before, don’t call me comrade. You are in London now.’
The younger man nodded. He looked up as a motorcycle and pillion passenger drew up beside them, noting faded jeans and a fringed leather jacket. ‘If the commander heard how we’d failed . . .’
The helmeted rider turned his head towards the car and an alarm rang in the younger man’s head. He reached for the pistol below his seat. ‘Drive!’ he screamed.
Lee reacted as quickly as any driver could have done. Even the man from Beijing would have been impressed. He was still too slow. His hand had barely touched the gearstick when the pillion passenger calmly raised a silenced Mach 10 machine pistol and kept his finger on the trigger until the bolt clicked on empty. The Mach 10 is an old design, developed by Gordon B. Ingram as far back as 1963, but it is remarkably efficient and remarkably quiet. If someone had been close enough to hear, the only sound they would have registered was that of the thirty-two 9mm hollow-point rounds thumping against the interior of the Ford after passing through their victims, and even that was drowned as the motorcyclist revved his engine. For these particular assassins, the hollow point had two advantages over normal jacketed ammunition. When the bullet hit soft tissue it was designed to mushroom, thereby creating extensive damage along a wider path through the body and a significantly larger exit wound. Trapped by their seatbelts the two Chinese agents jerked and shuddered as almost half a pound of metal travelling at a thousand feet per second punched into them and the interior exploded into a charnel house of blood, bone and ragged flesh. The same mushroom phenomenon slowed the velocity of the bullets so that, although they tore up the plastic trim, none pierced the metalwork to leave outward evidence of the hit or inconvenience passers-by. When the bodies stopped twitching the pillion passenger leaned over to place a package inside the Ford. He gave the driver the OK to move off. From the moment they had pulled up beside the car it had taken less than ten seconds.
‘So what’s wrong with being a freelance journalist? Somebody has to do it, right?’ Sarah went quiet for a few seconds as she chewed her burger. Jamie was fairly certain he’d never eaten a Big Mac before, but there was a first time for everything. It was worth enduring the soggy cardboard-textured bun to be in the company of this mercurial girl-woman with a point of view so different from his own. He sat back as she drew breath and continued the broadside that had been provoked by nothing more than a look of mild disquiet. ‘If you’re thinking scavenger, think again. I did a Masters in English Literature at Harvard. I’m a writer, and what I really want to do is write novels. But even writers have to eat, and a hundred thousand words is just so much computer crap until somebody wants to publish it, right, so I do features; homes and gardens, fashion, that kind of stuff.’ She reeled off an impressive list of publications. ‘OK?’ The final word was a challenge and he could almost feel the heat from the fire in her eyes. He wondered what would happen if that level of passion was channelled in a different direction.