Lee Child - Personal

‘He knows we’re not. He’ll have checked Google Maps, surely. Street View, probably. He knows where we are.’

‘Then why ask?’

‘He wants to know why we’re not mobile.’

‘Tell him to relax. Micromanaging from three thousand miles away is pointless.’

‘I can’t. He’s updating us, and I’m supposed to update him. That’s the only way this thing is going to work.’

I looked down at the scene below. No change. The van, inert. The kid, waiting. I said, ‘OK, tell him we’re acting on Shoemaker’s suggestion. Tell him we’re attempting contact with the outer cordon.’

‘I’ll have to tell him how, I’m afraid. As in, not with a phoney business proposal.’

‘Go ahead. He won’t mind.’

‘He might. They were worried about you.’

‘Scarangello was. Shoemaker might have been. But O’Day won’t get all bent out of shape.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Try it,’ I said. ‘Tell him exactly what happened.’

So she swiped and dabbed at her screen with dancing thumbs and I glanced back at what was happening out the window. Which wasn’t much. The light, the mist, the van, the kid. I looked away again and saw her finish up and put her phone on the bed and take a second slice of pizza. I chewed cheese and sipped Coke and waited. Below us the young guy was watching the road, and ducking back to the van every few minutes, laying his hand on it and calling through the door seal, with reassurances, probably. Yes, I called, they said they were coming, they’ll be here in a minute .

Nice’s phone dinged again. O’Day’s reply. She checked it twice and told me, ‘He sends his sincere congratulations and says keep it up.’

I nodded. ‘Human life means nothing to him. All he cares about is the result.’

Nice didn’t reply.

I said, ‘Ask him for the intel he got from MI5, about these Romford people. Pictures, histories, rap sheets, everything he’s got. We should know exactly who we’re dealing with here.’

She started texting again. Below us the young guy was talking through the door seal again. His body language was placatory. He was squirming and patting the air and glancing hopefully towards the road. They’re coming, I promise .

And then they came.

Two cars drove into the lot, both of them black, both with dark windows, the first a four-door Jaguar sedan, the second a big two-door coupé, long and low and imposing. A Bentley, I thought. They came in fast and slammed to a stop, right in the middle of the space. All four of the Jaguar’s doors opened wide and four men climbed out, all of them white, all of them in dark suits. They formed up like a perimeter, facing outward, heads up, hands loose by their sides. The kid with the greasy hair hung back. The Bentley’s driver got out. He was another guy in a suit, just like the first four. He checked all around, left, right, front, rear, and then he walked a wide circle to the passenger door and opened it, like a chauffeur should.

And a giant climbed out.

He led with a bent head and a bent back, folded at the waist, folded at the knees, and then he straightened up in stages, like a complex mechanism, like a child’s toy that starts out as a squat dump truck and then clicks open, one component after another, to reveal an action figure. He was huge. His arms were longer than most people’s legs, and his hands were bigger than shovels, and his torso was the size of an oil drum, tightly encased in a tubular three-button suit coat that would have been ankle-length on an average human. His feet were the size of river barges, and his neck was a foot wide, and his shoulders were a yard wide, and his head was bigger than a basketball. He had big ears sticking straight out, and an overhanging brow, and pronounced cheekbones, and tiny eyes buried deep, and a receding simian chin. He looked like a Neanderthal waxwork in a natural history museum, except that he was pale and sandy, not dark, and he was at least twice the size of any ancient hominid. He could have been seven feet tall, and three hundred pounds. Maybe more. He moved with a kind of loose-limbed rawboned ranginess, four or five feet with a single enormous stride, his huge shoulders rolling, his immense hands swinging free.

Casey Nice said, ‘Jesus Christ.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘No beard. No sandals.’

The guy stepped up close to the back of the van, two paces, where a normal guy might have needed four, and he flapped his hand towards it, a gesture like a big white swan taking off, and his chauffeur dug in a pocket and came out with a key. The big guy stood back a pace, four feet right there, and the chauffeur jammed the key in the lock and turned it and pulled the doors, first the right, and then the left. The four guys from the Jaguar shifted position, moving the perimeter tighter, turning to face inward, making a half-circle, enclosing the space like bystanders watching a street fight.

They all waited.

The live guy scrambled out, sliding on his front, feet first, slow and stiff and hurting. He steadied himself against the lip of the load floor, and straightened up, and turned around to face the music. The gush of blood down his front looked black in the vapour light. His skin looked yellow. The giant stepped forward again and stared past him into the dark interior. At that point I couldn’t see his face, but he seemed to ask a short question. Probably: What the hell happened?

The live guy didn’t really answer. He just shook his head and breathed out and held his hands out from his sides, palms upward, like a helpless shrug. The question was repeated. This time the live guy answered, just a mumble, his bloodied mouth barely moving at all, three or four syllables, nothing more. Maybe he jumped us , or they jumped us , or they got away , or we didn’t get ’em .

The giant processed the information, his huge head going down a degree, then coming back up, as if swallowing the bad news, physically. He was quiet for a minute. Then he started talking again, his body language exaggeratedly amiable, which meant he had to be taunting the guy, because there was no more pertinent information to be gotten. There were two of you, right? And two of them? One of which was a girl? Was it her who hit you? And so on and so forth, sarcastic and humiliating. From my angle I could see the live guy’s face, which was looking more and more miserable. And apprehensive. And terrified. As if he knew what was coming.

And then it came.

The giant moved with astonishing speed for one so big. His right hand bunched into a fist the size of a bowling ball, and his waist and his shoulders twitched, and he smashed a straight drive into the centre of the live guy’s ruined face, and the guy smashed backward against the truck’s left-hand door, and bounced off, and went straight down on the concrete, face first.

‘Charming,’ I said. ‘Not the kind of leadership skills they teach you at West Point.’

The guy on the ground lay still. The kid with the greasy hair stared at him, with his mouth wide open. Casey Nice stared too, with her mouth open. Then her phone dinged again. Another text. She looked away from the window. She said, ‘General O’Day is e-mailing the data from MI5. We should have it in a minute.’ She swiped to another screen and waited.

Below us the giant stood still for a second, and then he jerked his enormous head towards the Bentley, and his chauffeur scurried back and held the door. The big guy strode over and lined himself up and started re-folding himself to fit. The action figure became a dump truck again. He bent his knees, and bent at his waist, and tucked in his elbows, and hunched his shoulders, and ducked his head, and backed butt-first into his seat. The chauffeur closed the door on him, and looped around the hood to his own place. The car backed up and turned around and drove away.