Lee Child - Personal

Which wasn’t quite enough, unfortunately. The biggest guy naturally felt threatened, and naturally saw an opportunity for further consolidation, and he had friends in high places, all bought and paid for. So law enforcement made an uncharacteristic attempt to enforce the law. Which was helped by the weather. Spring in the far east of Russia was not the same thing as spring in North Carolina or Paris or London. There were freezing temperatures and late snow. The newly-second-biggest guy’s plane had been grounded. His entourage had all been found holed up in a local hotel. Datsev was with them. A spell of old-wine-in-new-bottles KGB-style interrogation had gotten to the heart of the matter fairly quickly, and Datsev was in custody. O’Day figured he would be given a choice: go back to work for the SVR, no bitching and moaning, or go to jail. Which was really no choice at all, he said, for anyone with a working knowledge of the Russian prison system. He had already moved Datsev’s file out of the freelance column and into the employed. What the future would bring, he didn’t know, but he was clear about the past: Datsev hadn’t been in Paris on either occasion, and wasn’t in London now.

We clicked off the call. We were still in our hotel lobby. Casey Nice said, ‘It just got harder. Because Carson is local, and Kott speaks English too.’

‘Want coffee?’ I said.

‘No,’ she said.

‘Hot tea?’

‘Decaf, maybe.’

So we left the hotel again in favour of a bare-bones café on the other side of the street, and a little ways down the block. Not an international chain. Nothing like the coffee shop in Seattle. Just a traditional London place, with chilly fluorescent light and damp laminate tables. I got coffee, and she got decaf, and I said, ‘Close your eyes.’

She smiled and said, ‘Shoes on or off?’

‘Think about what we saw, walking away from Wallace Court. Picture it. Tell me the first thing that pops into your head.’

She closed her eyes and said, ‘Sky.’

I said, ‘Me too. It was a low-built environment. Some threestorey row houses, some four- and five-storey apartment houses, but mostly regular two-storey two-family houses, some of them with attic bump-outs.’

‘Which adds up to about ten thousand upper-storey windows within a three-quarter-mile radius.’

‘Not ten thousand. It ain’t Manhattan or Hong Kong. It’s Romford. But a few thousand, sure. Of which a few hundred might be really good choices. What would you do, if you were in charge of security?’

She said, ‘I’d have to defer to the Secret Service.’

‘Suppose you were in charge of the Secret Service?’

‘I wouldn’t change anything. I’d tell them to keep on doing what they’re doing.’

‘Which is what? Have you seen the president arrive somewhere?’

‘Of course I have. An armoured limousine drives into a closed street, and then into a large white tent attached to the destination building. The flap of the tent is closed behind it. The president is never exposed. He’s safe in the armoured car, and he’s safe in the tent. From a sniper, at least. The sniper doesn’t know exactly where or exactly when the president is getting out of the car. He can’t see, because of the tent. He could fire randomly, I suppose, but what are the odds? Best guess in the world would miss by twenty feet and two seconds.’

I said, ‘And the Secret Service will bring that system, right? They always do. Their own armoured limousine and their own tent, in an air force cargo plane. Doesn’t matter what the Brits say about running their own show. If you want the President of the United States at your party, the Secret Service tells you how things are going to be. You’re going to have a tent on the side of your house, whether you like it or not. And the president is not going to say the others can’t use it. He’s not going to say, sorry guys, but you have to go to the tradesmen’s entrance.’

‘They don’t all have their own armoured limousines.’

‘Doesn’t really matter. A couple of Mercedes sedans would work. With dark windows. Which one is the prime minister in? Which one has the aides and the staffers? It’s the same principle as the tent.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘If I’m John Kott, I’m not liking it. Or William Carson. Against me I’ve got obvious and infallible security precautions that will inevitably be used, and a low-built environment, and a very flat trajectory, and prime firing positions numbered only in the low hundreds. I mean, if the Brits broke open the overtime budget they could put a cop in every single bedroom.’

‘You think an attack is not possible?’

‘Where could it be? The limousine drives into the tent.’

She said, ‘You’re forgetting the photograph.’

I ASKED CASEY Nice about the photograph, and she gave me a detailed explanation. She said like everything else to do with politics and diplomacy it was a bigger deal than it appeared to be. It was much more than a ritual formality. It was freighted with subtext. It was about image, and collegiality, and an opportunity for the little guys to stand next to the big guys, on an equal footing, literally. It was about status and worth and the newspapers back home. In other words it was about exposure, both metaphorical and real. An open-air background was considered important. It was about being seen out there in the world with your peers, talking, joking, joshing, rubbing shoulders, doing deals, being just as important as everyone else.

And Nice said they would all be outside for more than just the photograph. They would walk on the lawns from time to time, in twos and threes. If the guy from Italy had a problem about the debt or the euro, he had to be seen strolling with the German, deep in private conversation. Maybe they would only be talking about their kids or soccer, but the image would count in Rome. Likewise our president would be seen with the Russian guy, and the British guy and the French guy would get together, and the Japanese guy would talk to the Canadian. The potential combinations and recombinations were endless. Plus they all got on each other’s nerves on a regular basis, and some were still secret smokers, so breaks were always necessary.

Nice said, ‘Kott and Carson are going to have visible targets, believe me.’

I asked, ‘Is there an option to cancel the meeting?’

She said, ‘No.’

Through the steamy café window I saw a black panel van pull up outside our hotel.

I asked, ‘Can’t the photograph be taken inside?’

She said, ‘Theoretically, but not under these circumstances.’

‘Reasonable prudence is not acceptable?’

‘Not if it looks like cowardice.’

‘That’s crazy.’

‘That’s politics. The world needs to see them taking care of business. And some of them have elections coming up. This kind of coverage is important.’

Across the street the black panel van waited at the kerb. No one got out. No one got in.

I said, ‘What about if it’s raining?’

She said, ‘They’ll wait until it stops.’

‘It might never stop. This is England.’

‘It’s not raining now. Want me to look up the weather report?’

I shook my head. I said, ‘Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Is the outside location for the photograph fixed in advance?’

She said, ‘The back patio. There are shallow steps. The short guys like to use them.’

‘The back of the house faces the highway. Better than facing the city.’

‘Plenty of structures either side.’

‘Are they using bulletproof glass?’

‘No point,’ she said. ‘Those panels work with one guy at a microphone. They don’t work with eight people milling around.’