I called up the cameras around The Butts, and looked for changes before and after the erasure of Anya’s visit. It was like one of those Can you spot 20 differences in these two pictures? puzzles. I had never been good at those, but Argus had software to answer that question for me, and it highlighted a parked white van that had changed positions during Anya’s ten-minute visit.
I fast-forwarded the camera in question, until suddenly that white van disappeared in a blur of motion. I rewinded, slowed it down, pressed PLAY. Then I leaned forward until my face was almost touching the computer screen, and repeated it in slow motion.
Two men had carried a carpet out to that van. A carpet? Or Jesse’s body, wrapped in a carpet? And if so, was he alive or dead? It was suddenly hard to breathe, my lungs felt squeezed shut, incapable of taking in air. It had never occurred to me that they might kill him. Surely he was too valuable to them alive. Surely not even Anya was capable of ordering her lover of three years executed as casually as that.
My hands shook as I instructed Argus to track the vehicle in question. It had left Brentford and headed due north, along country roads, wandering in and out of camera coverage, until it reached the very same airfield on which I had landed less than 24 hours ago.
I sagged with a kind of appalled relief. He was alive, but beyond my help, or probably anyone’s. They had flown him out of the country, probably to Russia -
No, they hadn’t. I stiffened with surprise, prompting a bolt of agony in my lower back, as Argus’s tale of the van’s behaviour continued to unspool before me. It did reach the airfield, but the gate was closed and locked. After a brief discussion between driver and gate-guard, the van had turned away and started back south without ever unloading its cargo.
I skimmed the daily record of the airfield cameras. The ability to look back and forth in time, wherever and at whatever I liked, was already becoming almost second nature; those patches between Brentford and the airstrip where the van had been invisible seemed like undesirable aberrations, jagged tears in the smooth fabric of the panopticon. It seemed that all flights had ceased and the airfield had closed around 3PM this afternoon. I wondered why. G8 security? I hoped so. It was about time the bad guys got hoist on their own petard.
The white van had returned to Brentford; the carpet, and its contents, had been carried back into the stately old house on The Butts; and according to Argus, as of fifteen seconds ago, there had been no visible activity since.
I drew the tentative conclusion that I knew where Jesse was.
Now I just had to figure out what to do about it.
Chapter 64
The black cab to Brentford cost me sixty pounds, but time seemed of the essence, and I could steal more money if necessary. The Butts was a cobblestoned thoroughfare in a quiet residential district, lined by big old houses with an air of genteel decay. At 4AM it was postapocalyptically lifeless, which suited me fine.
I stood beside the white van that had driven to and from the airfield and stared over the rusted wrought-iron fence at the house that I believed was Jesse’s prison. The night air was cold and I shivered in my hoodie. I did not feel like a man capable of a successful home invasion. I felt tired and weak and half-crippled and empty.
Various James Bond scenarios played through my brain. In one I broke in through a basement and rescued Jesse without his guards ever knowing. In another I climbed the walls and entered in through a skylight in the roof. In a third I improvised a club, triggered some sort of distraction out front, and brained them when they came out to investigate.
Daydreams all. I was not James Bond, and there was no way I could outfight former Russian Special Forces soldiers in hand-to-and combat, element of surprise or no. I had to try to outthink them, to treat this not as a battle but an engineering problem.
This quiet residential neighbourhood might not be without its advantages. My resources were slender at best; but maybe I could forage for more.
First I hustled to Brentford’s High Street and its 24-hour convenience store. To my surprise they sold cheap prepaid Virgin Mobile cell phones, so I bought one of those, as well as a cigarette lighter and a newspaper, as well from the sleep-deprived Asian man behind the counter. Then I returned to The Butts, and sidled not onto the target property, but the one right next door.
I made my way down the narrow grassy alley between that house and its back yard, squinting and moving gingerly, my hands held high against the semidarkness that revealed only outlines. I had hoped to find a shed, a garden, some tools. Alas, none were apparent, so I forded the fence to the next neighbour over.
The noiseless traversal of chest-high wrought iron was no easy thing for someone in my lacerated condition. It was easy to imagine an insomniacal little old lady calling the police to report the maniac prowling through her garden. I felt a little like I was a maniac, reduced to foraging through strangers’ backyards by some crazed imperative that I could not resist. The imperative in question was necessity rather than madness, but just then the line between the two seemed fine.
Again nothing. I forced myself over another fence, this time barking my shin hard enough that I very nearly cried out, and limped across a third yard.
Success at last: in their little vegetable garden I found a trowel, a garden hose, and a bucket. I used the trowel to hack out a four-foot length of hose, stole the bucket, and returned to the street. There an old Citroen lay parked in the shadow of an oak tree. I opened its gas cap, inserted the hose, put the other end to my mouth, knelt to the pavement, and sucked as hard as I could. For my efforts I was rewarded with a gagging mouthful of gasoline.
I spat it out, filled the bucket from my improvised siphon, and carefully made my way over fences to the yard behind the house in which Jesse was held. It was mostly stone and brick, but it had some wooden joists and a wooden deck. I soaked them as best I could, and hoped it was enough. The eastern sky was growing worryingly luminescent.
I hustled away a safe distance, pulled out my gleaming new cell phone, and dialled 911. Nothing happened. It wasn’t until my third attempt that I remembered that the UK emergency number was 999.
“Listen,” I said, ignoring the responder’s request for my name, pitching my voice to frantic while keeping it quiet, “I need the police, I’m in Brentford, a street called The Butts, I just saw two men beating the shit out of another one and dragging him into their house, I think they’re holding him against his will, I think he’s in serious danger, they were being really violent, it was a really bad scene. Number 8, The Butts. I’m outside there right now, I think I hear screaming inside, you better send police right away.”
“Yes, sir,” the woman said, coolly, “can you please tell us -“
“Oh shit I think they saw me,” I gasped, and hung up.
Trembling with adrenalin, I rushed back to the neighbours’ lawn, all but vaulted their fence, made my way to the house in which I devoutly hoped Jesse was being held, and waited, hoping, praying.
When I heard the oncoming siren it was like seeing a burning bush.
The cigarette lighter caught first time. I lit my rolled Daily Mail and touched it to the gasoline-soaked wood. Flames rose immediately, unexpectedly translucent, and spread like ripples skittering across a pond. Seconds later I had to back away from the intensity of the heat. Then I fled, across the fence yet again; but this time I went the other way, away from The Butts, through another back yard, past another house, onto another street.