One thing Six could do was paperwork. This crew would have presented every necessary piece of paper, with every i dotted and every t crossed. In and out, no one any the wiser until the real prisoner transport team arrived, hence the thirty minutes of driving rather than taking him straight to Frankfurt Main or the military airport at Wiesbaden. Six didn’t want the Germans knowing it was Her Majesty who’d sprung their suspected papal assassin. It wasn’t exactly good form for a monarch to be getting her royal hands dirty like that, even if she didn’t know what was actually being done in her name.
Konstantin pocketed the passport and the ticket.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Don’t thank me, mate. I’m only doing what I’m told. Thank the old man for calling in every favor he had with every man, woman and child from here to Timbuktu. Without him you’d be rotting away in Berlin for the rest of your natural, pal.”
He broke one of the smaller Euro notes at a kiosk, buying a phone card.
It took him the best part of an hour to find a working pay phone.
He called in to Nonesuch.
Lethe answered on the first ring. It took a moment for the line to connect and then both of them were talking without the other hearing. Then the line opened. Konstantin started again, “I am on the evening flight from Frankfurt Main to Heathrow. When I land I am going to call again. By then I want you to have found Miles Devere for me.”
He hung up before Lethe could get a word in.
It was an uneventful flight, both on the ground and in the air. A lot could happen in nine days it seemed, including people forgetting a face, or half-recognizing it and not being sure where from, even when it was a face they had seen day after day on the news reels and in the press. He wasn’t a film star and he wasn’t a pro ball player. What that meant was when they looked at him a few people did a weird sort of double-take, then shook their heads as though dismissing him. They had recognized him on some subliminal level, just like any other famous person, but they had filed him as just that, a famous person. Logic told them he had to be one, and who was he to argue with logic?
The fact of the matter was that the BKA were hardly about to announce to the world that they’d lost him. Airports, train stations and bus terminals would be swarming with agents on the ground looking for him-but they weren’t looking for John Smith.
As it was, he landed in London refreshed from the flight and disembarked the plane. On the way along the metal passage back toward the gate, he asked one of the ground crew where the nearest pay phone was and made the call to Lethe.
“Welcome home, Koni,” Lethe said, even before the phone had started to ring in his ear. “We were worried about you.”
“Touching, I am sure. You have the address for me?”
“The old man told me to tell you he wants you here for a debriefing first thing.”
“Second thing. First thing I have a promise to keep.”
“Whatever you say, man, I’m just passing on the message. Second thing it is.”
“The address?”
“He’s in England. He entered the country the day after the assassination.”
“England isn’t small. Where in England?”
“I just want you to appreciate my brilliance for a moment, Koni. I found him for you, just like you asked. But think about it, if I say he’s in London, that means he’s one of seven and a half million people spread over thirty-two different boroughs. That’s a lot of people and a hell of a lot of streets. That’s your needle in a haystack right there.”
“Where is he?”
“Well, out of all those millions of buildings, I found the one he’s in. That’s how good I am at what I do, Koni. He has a place in the heart of London, Clippers Quay, off Taeping Street. You can take the DLR to Mudchute and walk from there in a couple of minutes. Most of the houses are built around the old Graving Dock. There are four apartments in the block. The penthouse is his. You can’t miss it.”
“A graving dock? Isn’t that appropriate,” Konstantin said.
“It doesn’t mean they used to bury people there, Koni,” Lethe said in his ear. The phone line started to beep, but he talked over them.
“Well it does now.”
Konstantin hung up and went to keep a promise.
He left the train and walked quickly down the stairs that ran between the up and down escalator. He was the only person left on the train by the time it reached the Isle of Dogs. This part of the city was called Little Manhattan because of the mini-skyscrapers that had been built all along the riverside development of Canary Wharf. The Devere Holdings building was in there amid all of the merchant banks and import/export offices. Mudchute rather matched its name. Despite its nearness to the skyscrapers, it was like something out of the ’50s and owed its curious name to the fact that when it was being built the country was suffering from football factories, and its hooligans were the fear of Europe; otherwise, it would have been called Millwall Park, after the football team.
He followed the road around. Twenty years ago this part of London would have been full of kids kicking tin cans and pretending to be Teddy Sheringham and Tony Cascarino. Tonight it was quiet.
There was more building going on on the other side of the tracks. The metal skeleton of the building was slowly being wrapped in bricks and mortar.
He didn’t have a weapon. No doubt he could have climbed over the wall and dropped down onto the building site and found a decent sized rock. Or maybe a piece of steel pipe or rebar, a chisel, hammer or other tool. He decided against it, not for any ethical reasons-he had no problem with stealing from a construction site. No, he wanted to do this with his bare hands. He didn’t want anything between him and Devere as he beat the life out of him.
Konstantin found the building. Lethe was right, he couldn’t miss it. It was one of those carbuncles on the face of the city Prince Charles had been railing about for years while no one paid the slightest bit of notice to his royal raving.
He had lost his bump key when the BKA took him into custody, so getting past the security was going to be a little more complicated. He stepped back, standing just out of the puddle of light from the streetlight, and looked up at the facade. There was a fairly substantial drainage system on the outside of the house, with pipes running all the way down from the roof. He’d never understood why the British put their water pipes on the outside of their houses, when the cold came they were always going to crack, maybe not for ten years, but eventually they would. Freeze, thaw, and all of that. Pipes on the outside was asking for problems. Good metal pipes properly set into the mortar were asking for an entirely different set of problems.
Konstantin picked a path up to the first balcony. It was a long affair that actually ran around half of the frontage, then turned right to catch some of the lowering evening sun. The second story balcony repeated the pattern. It was the same for each of the four stories. The water pipes threaded through the narrowest of places, where the balconies didn’t over lap. Once he got to the first one it would be relatively easy to climb to the next. Of course there was no guarantee that when he got there the balcony doors would be open-and if they weren’t, hell would freeze over before Devere stopped playing Little Pig and let him in.
He could always try the buzzer trick again, but there were only three buzzers and no lights in any of the lower apartments. He didn’t waste any more time. He shimmied up the drainpipe, scuffing his feet off the wall, and hooked his hand onto the first balcony so that he could pull himself up. Second to third was almost as easy. He stood on the balcony rail and reached up. The next level was six inches out of reach, so leaning out over the drop, he jumped.