But this was police too: the tickle in her memory, looking at “Adam Lockhead.”
It was rush hour’s last grumble, and as Devon pulled away into the slow-moving traffic up Pentonville Road, Lockhead looked round. “This isn’t the way to the Park.”
This was true. They were heading for another safe house—if the Service ever diversified into private rentals, they wouldn’t have to worry about the cuts. On the other hand, they’d have nowhere to stow problems like Adam Lockhead while they worked out what to do with him.
“Keep him isolated. Don’t interrogate him. Restrain him if necessary.” Diana Taverner’s instructions: Emma was starting to feel like Lady Di’s personal gopher rather than head of internal security.
“Who is he?” she’d asked; a not unreasonable question, she felt. But Taverner’s response had nearly melted her mobile: a twenty-second blast of controlled fury, following which she’d repeated her instructions. Keep him isolated. Don’t interrogate him. Restrain him if necessary.
If not for that, Emma certainly wouldn’t have said what she said to Lockhead now, which was: “Have we met?”
He stared, his expression utterly serious. “I think I’d remember.”
It was the mole on his upper lip. Not that she recognised it, precisely, but it nudged something, a tantalising knowledge on the edge of recollection. She opened his passport again, glanced at the photograph. Not the same man. Similar, but there was no mole, and the words You’re gunna need a pair of tweezers and a sieve made their way to the surface. She’d almost landed the memory—was about to reel it in, drop it to the deck of her conscious mind—when something punched the car’s sidepanels, and her teeth crunched together as Lockhead slammed into her and the whole world blinked.
He hadn’t been able to achieve the speed he’d have liked—it was central London: walking pace the usual ceiling—but he hit the target hard in the circumstances: swerving out into the opposite lane when the oncoming traffic hit a lull, then a violent full-on smash to the driver’s side. He was out of his own recently-stolen vehicle inside seconds, limping slightly from the morning’s events, but otherwise unscathed. The target car’s driver was a hefty-looking black man whose reactions had been distinctly below par, and had mostly consisted of being swallowed by his airbag.
All around them, cars were screeching to a halt, and pedestrians pointing. It was still raining, of course; the ideal setting for an accident.
His second of the day.
After being sideswiped by the taxi in the garage forecourt, an impact he’d barely had time to brace for—instinct had taken over; his body ignoring his mind, leaping for the roof, pulling himself over the cab even before it had screamed to a standstill—Patrice had lost himself in the same sidestreets Sam Chapman had tried to vanish into, with more success, because nobody came looking. They were all too busy picking themselves up off the ground. The rain had continued to hammer down, and the skies growled occasionally, as if hating to give the impression they were already doing their worst. By the time he’d re-emerged onto a main road the pavements were largely empty, and the gutters were swirling with oil-flecked water, puddles swamping the intersections.
Nothing like the rain for clearing the streets.
He’d rung home, the part of him that hated to do this standing no chance against the part that insisted he follow protocol.
“Package still undelivered.”
This was greeted with a silence that whistled down the line all the way from Europe, he wasn’t sure exactly where. That, too, was protocol.
Eventually, Frank had spoken. “Are you compromised?”
Meaning injured or taken.
Patrice said, “I’m gold,” because any other metal would have meant the opposite. The injuries he’d collected rolling over the taxi weren’t worth enumerating. Injuries only mattered if they slowed you down: if they didn’t, you were gold. “I’m gold.”
“Bertrand lit up.”
So did Patrice, hearing that. It was unprofessional, but it couldn’t be helped; if Bertrand was alive, things might yet be all right. Yves was gone, of course, blasted to pieces in lunatic martyrdom, but that didn’t mean everything was over. They simply had to clean up the mess he’d left, by laying a thick cold blanket over anyone who knew who they were. That had been Yves’s real legacy. He had wanted to fulfill what he’d come to believe his destiny, but all he’d achieved had been to make it necessary to destroy all traces of his past.
Which existed only in fragments. Like Patrice, like Bertrand, like all of them, Yves had had his childhood removed even while it was happening, and replaced by qualities Frank favoured: obedience to him, and reliance on no other. Attachments were encouraged only because without them, there was nothing to purge. Patrice remembered how, for Yves’s seventh birthday, Frank had given the boy a photograph of his mother, the first Yves had ever seen. Frank allowed him to look at it for five full minutes before handing him a box of matches. Yves had not hesitated for a second. There had been glee in his eyes as he had trampled the resulting oily mess beneath his feet.
Always, he had gone further than any of them. Patrice had been frightened of Yves, a little. He sometimes wondered if Frank had been too.
Bertrand, though, had been the attachment Patrice had never purged himself of. If Bertrand was alive they could complete this mission together and get the fuck off this godforsaken island.
But “Where?” was all he said.
“St. Pancras. The Lockhead passport.”
You never asked where Frank got his information. You simply knew he had a network, the ghostly remnant of his CIA connections. Someone, somewhere, had picked up a phone when Bertrand’s passport was flagged at border control. But this in turn meant the Lockhead identity was blown . . .
These thoughts winking into place in the time it took him to say, “I’m there.”
He ended the call. No point waiting for instructions. Life at Les Arbres had taught him to grasp what needed doing, which here meant reaching St. Pancras before the action moved on. If Bertrand’s passport was flagged, there’d be security waiting. And of all the things that couldn’t be allowed to happen, Bertrand falling into the hands of MI5 ranked way up high.
What he’d been doing on the Eurostar—where he’d been and why—could stay on the burner for now. What Patrice needed was a car.
Luckily, there were a number of these in the immediate area.
River banged his head on the roof when the car struck, then again on the blonde’s head when she crashed into him. Their own car—not his, but he was identifying with it in the circumstances—had been shunted sideways into a set of railings, and the attacking vehicle had bounced back some yards and was stationary in the middle of the road, blocking traffic. He couldn’t smell smoke, but the air had turned thick with damaged-car smells: petrol and scraped metal.
The view in front of him was bendy and improbable. It took a moment to understand that the airbag had deployed.
He raised a hand in front of his eyes, and the gesture took forever. Not concussed, but inside a bubble of time that wouldn’t allow free movement. His hand looked like nothing he recognised. For a moment he was remembering a rabbit dead on a counter, but there was no clear reason for recalling this, and the next instant he wasn’t. His hand was just his hand. His head hurt, but he wasn’t concussed.
The driver gave a groan, muffled by the airbag. The woman, meanwhile, pulled herself upright and shook her head. Her perfect face was going to have one hell of a bruise, supposing they lived through the next few minutes.
Someone was getting out of the enemy car.