Lee Child: Personal

Then right on cue the gates rolled back and the giant door opened and four guys spilled out, like parachutes streaming from a plane. The mood looked confused. The guys looked uncertain. They were stumbling, looking left, looking right, one guy hitching his coat on, another combing his hair with his fingers. They got in the Jaguar and drove through the out gate, to the street, and then they took off, fast, into the far distance, until they were lost to sight.

They left the gates open.

John Kott didn’t come out.

Not in the first minute, or the fifth, or the tenth.

He was staying inside, to fight it out.

I looked at Bennett and said, ‘You got my information about the glass?’

‘It’s in French,’ he said.

He set it up for me on his phone. It was a scan of a Xerox or a fax of a classified document. It was very long. I had to swipe the screen to scroll. It was marked top secret in several different places. I said, ‘Does it set on fire in five minutes?’

Bennett said, ‘No, but I might.’

I said, ‘Thank you for getting it.’

He said, ‘Think nothing of it. But I hope it turns out useful.’

It was in French because glass was a big deal in France. A manufacturing success story, all over the world. All kinds of stemware, and hotel ware, with an emphasis on industrial efficiency, and strength. You could throw a French restaurant tumbler like a baseball, and it would probably survive. Who better to move onward and upward into modern bulletproof technology? A research and development laboratory in Paris had taken up the challenge. As always, the mission was to combine optimum clarity with optimum strength. No point in putting a president behind something safe but murky. Visuals were important. Security agencies in all the major NATO countries had contributed funding. The guys in Paris had taken the money and gotten to work.

First surprise was, it wasn’t called bulletproof glass. It was called transparent armour. Second surprise was, it wasn’t glass. Not even a trace. Previous bulletproof panels had been layered, with glass panes separated by and skinned by soft polycarbonate or thermoplastic materials. Some of the glass sheets were hard, and some were less so, to allow flexing. Results were usually good, but there were two problems. Edge on, the finished assembly could look like plywood. And the index of refraction was different for every layer, which at certain angles made it like looking into about six different swimming pools at once. Imperfect visuals. Bad for television.

So the scientists turned their backs on glass, and went for aluminium instead. Which sounded weird to me but, as always with chemistry, things were not exactly what they seemed. The substance in question was aluminium oxynitride, which they claimed was a transparent polycrystalline ceramic with a cubic spinel crystal structure composed of aluminium, oxygen, and nitrogen. A chemical formula was quoted, full of large letters and small numbers and graceful parentheses. The molecule was sketched, which looked like the chandelier in my greataunt’s dining room in New Hampshire.

The aluminium oxynitride started out as a powder, which was carefully mixed, like flour for a cake, and then it was compacted in something called a dry isostatic press, and then it was baked at an extremely high temperature, and then it was ground and polished, until it looked more like glass than glass itself. It was optically perfect. It was heavy, but not crippling.

And it was strong. The design brief was to survive a .50-calibre armour-piercing round, and the test procedure was meticulous and detailed. I read it very carefully. I could understand most of the language used, although some of it was highly technical and therefore unfamiliar. But numbers were the same the world over, and I could recognize 100 when I saw it. The test panels had scored 100 per cent against nine-millimetre handguns, and against .357 Magnums, and .44 Magnums, at ranges from fifty feet all the way down to contact shots, like Joey.

So then they flew the panels down to a place called Draguignan, in the south of France, near where my grandfather had stabbed the snake, where there was a huge military facility, with rifle ranges galore. They set up at three hundred feet, and the panels scored 100 per cent against .223 Remingtons and 7.62-millimetre NATO rounds. At which point the scientists doubled down. They must have been feeling good. They shortened the range to two hundred feet, which was unrealistically short for the larger calibres, and then they skipped right over worthy contenders like the .308 Winchester and the British .303, and went straight to the .44 Remington Magnum. From two hundred feet. Which was less than seventy yards. Like a battleship firing at the harbour wall.

The panels scored 100 per cent.

Then came the moment of truth. They loaded up the .50-cal and laid it on the bench. Armour-piercing ammunition. For which seventy yards was more than unrealistically short. But I understood the point they were hoping to make.

The panels scored 100 per cent.

And at a hundred feet, and at fifty, and even at twenty-five. Although the scientists were open enough to point out that the visible pitting at the shorter ranges would require replacement of the panels after every such incident. Even the scientists were political enough to understand a candidate couldn’t show up behind gear already riddled with bullet holes from previous failed attempts. Like he had gotten out of Dodge just in time. Not good for the image. People might get a clue.

There was a lot of foreign money in the project, and a lot of valuable foreign lives depending on the outcome, so the test procedure was supervised every step of the way by representatives from all the interested parties. They checked the numbers, they asked the questions, they looked behind the curtain. They were all intelligence specialists, but scientifically literate. The old guard, with nothing better to do, all extremely experienced. The guys from Paris didn’t mind. It was like any other peer review. Just compressed in time. I swiped the screen and scrolled down, through the list of participants, just a little ways, to E, for Etats-Unis d’Amérique.

The United States of America.

The Pentagon had sent Tom O’Day.

I LOOKED OVER the low wall at Joey’s house. The gates were still open and lights were still burning. But nothing else was happening. I gave the phone back to Bennett, and I said, ‘Why don’t you go take a short stroll?’

He said, ‘Why would I want to?’

‘I need to talk to Ms Nice alone.’

‘What are you going to say to her?’

‘Something inaudible, from where you’re going to be.’

He paused a beat, and then he got up and disappeared in the dark, there one minute, gone the next, like on the apartment balcony in Paris. Nice and I squatted side by side, with our backs against the wall.

I said, ‘This is the scene where I try to get rid of you.’

She didn’t answer.

I said, ‘Not for the reasons you think. I could use your help a dozen different ways, and you’d be good at all of them. But this is between Kott and me. He wants me gone, therefore I want him gone. Not fair to involve other people, in a private quarrel. I’m going to tell Bennett the same thing.’

‘Bennett will stay away anyway. He has to. There are rules. But I’m free to do what I want.’

‘This is me and Kott. Which has rules too. It’s one on one.’

‘You’re just saying that.’

‘Because I mean it.’

‘I think you’re being kind.’

‘That’s an accusation I don’t hear often.’

She said, ‘Why did he take my pill?’

‘Take as in deprive, or take as in swallow?’

‘Swallow.’