Lee Child - Personal

Then they left.

We took the tablet to Nice’s room. It was like half of a laptop computer. No keyboard. Just a screen. A blank screen. Nice said, ‘You remember his name, right?’

‘I remember both their names,’ I said.

‘But I assume the password is the first one. The main man.’

‘The target.’

‘Yes, him. Or was the other one attempting to escape also?’

‘Actually he was the only one attempting to escape. The target was already down. He didn’t see me coming.’

‘Which one were you investigated for?’

‘The second one, technically.’

‘Did people talk about the case?’

‘Not if they wanted to live. It was about the assassination of an American citizen on American soil.’

‘But if they had talked about it, what would they have called it? The case as a whole, I mean, like the John Doe thing, or whatever.’

‘Definitely the first guy.’

‘Who was the target. And Mr Bennett is British, and therefore ironic. Which means we can assume his mention of the escape was tongue-in-cheek. Which all focuses back to the target. Which was the first guy. Which is the name we should use.’

‘First or last?’

‘Has to be last. This was the U.S. Army, correct?’

‘Or code name?’

‘He had a code name?’

‘He had two. One from us, and one from the Iraqis.’

She said, ‘Do you wake up in a sweat about it?’

‘About what?’

‘That operation.’

‘Not really,’ I said.

‘But if you did, what name would you call him? Like, I shouldn’t have done that bad thing to whoever.’

‘You think it was a bad thing?’

‘It wasn’t helping old ladies across the street to the library in Africa.’

‘You’re as bad as Scarangello. We need to get you out of there and into the army before it’s too late.’

‘What was his name?’

I said, ‘Tell me about your mother.’

‘What about her?’

‘You know her Social Security number?’

‘I help her with her paperwork. She’s sick at the moment.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘She has a brain tumour. It won’t go away. She can’t think straight. I deal with insurance and disability and things like that. I know her details better than mine, probably.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘She must be young.’

‘Too young for this.’

‘Do you have brothers or sisters?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s just me.’

I said, ‘Would the average person know her mother’s Social Security number?’

‘I don’t know. Did you know yours?’

‘I don’t think so. Do you visit your mother?’

‘As often as I can.’

‘In downstate Illinois? That’s a lot of flying.’

‘It keeps me busy.’

‘Plus you worry when you can’t get there, I guess. Like now.’

‘Nothing I can do.’

‘When did she get the diagnosis?’

‘Two years ago.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, for the third time.

She said, ‘It is what it is.’

‘When did Tony Moon start going to the doctor?’

‘It’s not connected.’

‘You absolutely sure about that?’

‘My mother isn’t here now.’

‘But you’re thinking about her.’

‘A little.’

‘And therefore feeling a little anxious.’

‘Not about her. It’s not connected.’

I said nothing.

She said, ‘I have one pill left.’

‘You took one?’

‘Last night. I had to sleep.’

I said, ‘Do your bosses know about your mother?’

She nodded. ‘It’s a requirement. Family situations must be reported. They’ve been very supportive about it. They keep me free on weekends whenever they can.’

‘So there’s a human resources file somewhere at Langley, recording the fact that your mother is sick and you’re taking care of business for her. Which has to be confidential. Because everything at the CIA is confidential. And there’s another file somewhere in the Pentagon, recording the name of a guy I shot in the head twenty years ago. Which I know for damn sure is confidential. But somehow MI5 in London got access to both files, to come up with unbreakable passwords for us. They’re like DNA, or fingerprints.’

She nodded again. ‘Mr Bennett’s hacking theories might be true. In which case he’s showing off.’

‘Unless O’Day showed him the files.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘That’s a question we’ll ask Bennett.’

‘What was your guy’s name?’

‘Archibald,’ I said.

‘That’s the kind of name you don’t hear often.’

‘Lowland Scottish,’ I said. ‘Via Old French and Old High German. The third Earl of Douglas was called Archibald the Grim. No such romance in my case. My guy was called Archibald the worthless piece of shit.’

She held down a button and the screen lit up with a dialog box. She dabbed it with a fingertip and a cursor started blinking on the line, and a picture of a keyboard came up below it. She typed Archibald , nine letters, with a capital A and the rest in lower case. She checked it for spelling, A-r-c-h-i-b-a-l-d , and then she looked at me with eyebrows raised, and I nodded a confirmation, and she touched Submit , and there was a pause, and then a green check mark appeared at the end of the typed name, and the dialog box rolled away, and was replaced by a second box that looked just the same. She dabbed a button that changed the keyboard letters to numbers, and she typed three digits, and a hyphen, and two more digits, and another hyphen, and then four more digits. She checked it over, and touched Submit , and the green check mark showed again, and the dialog box rolled away, and was replaced by ranks of thumbnail images.

THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT maps would have been great if we wanted to fix a sewer line or lay fibre optic cable. They showed plenty of subterranean detail, under the sidewalks, and under the road itself. In the movies we would have found a storm drain, about as wide as my shoulders, that ran under Joey’s kitchen floor, and I would have climbed down into it two streets away, and inched along, until a sudden thunderstorm threatened to drown me before I got where I was going. It would have been a tense sequence, but in reality there was no storm drain. There was nothing wider than my wrist. Gas line, phone line, electricity supply, water main, and sewer pipe. The house itself was shown as nothing more than the grateful recipient of those public utilities. It was drawn as a large blank rectangle, with no interior detail at all.

The leftover architect’s blueprint from the zoning office was better. It was printed small, but Nice stroked her fingertips over the computer screen and made it bigger, and then moved it around, so we could examine each separate area in detail. Or we could pretend it was us moving, not the plan, and take miniature walks through the house, from room to room, and up and down the stairs. The plan was covered in the architect’s handwriting. Which looked like every other architect’s handwriting. Maybe handwriting was a required credit in architect school. But the words the guy had written were plain and simple. He was giving us the structural details. Wood, metal, brick, plaster, and glass. Which was good to know. Almost every component listed was custom made. Which made sense. If you need a three-foot door, you go to the store. Four feet six, you call whatever old guys are still in their workshops. The 50 per cent hike in dimensions must have put 10,000 per cent on the tab.

The house had two levels only. No habitable attic, and no basement. There were bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs, plus a separate self-contained guest suite, which had bedrooms and bathrooms all its own, plus a living room attached. Downstairs had a kitchen, and a breakfast room, and a dining room, and many other rooms, variously labelled as living rooms, or nooks, or parlours, or libraries, or studies, or offices. At first sight the floor plan looked intimate, even cosy, until you remembered how big it all was. The nooks were as big as anyone else’s living rooms. And half as tall again, presumably. Like museum halls, at night. Not vast, but not human scaled, either, and badly lit, and echoing.