Personal

‘We’ll show you where Little Joey lives. Nothing happens without him. You can watch the comings and the goings, and you can see if you can figure things out.’

‘Are you saying you can’t?’

‘The movements we have so far observed have so far shown no coherent pattern.’

‘Then maybe Little Joey isn’t the guy.’

‘Charlie White is far too old and far too grand to be running around, and Tommy Miller and Billy Thompson are only ten years younger, and they’re nothing more than bureaucrats now, anyway. Which is what gangs are all about these days. Tax strategies, and legal investments, and things like that. Little Joey Green is the only one who actually does anything. Trust me on that. If they’re rotating the guards in and out, or sending food and women, then it’s all coming through Little Joey’s driveway.’

‘Except you haven’t observed it.’

‘Not as yet.’

‘How long have we got, before the politicians panic?’

‘Not long.’

‘Do they have a Plan B?’

‘It would help me if we didn’t get that far.’

‘So now we’re helping you?’

‘We’re both helping each other. That’s how it’s supposed to work, isn’t it?’

‘Do you listen to the hot line between Downing Street and the Oval Office?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Personal interest.’

‘By tradition we leave that one alone.’

‘Good to know.’

He said, ‘Let’s go and find you a new hotel. You should have some down time. I’ll text you when we’re ready to go out to Little Joey’s place.’

I said, ‘You have our phone numbers?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Silly question,’ I said.

Bennett swapped places with Nice and drove us south, to the Bayswater Road, which was the northern limit of Hyde Park, and then east to Marble Arch, and then south again on Park Lane, into Mayfair, which was rich enough to be neutral territory. No gangs there, at least of any type I would recognize. We drove past the Grosvenor House Hotel, and the Dorchester, and we pulled in at the Hilton. Bennett said, ‘They won’t look for you here. With the money you’ve taken, they’ll figure you went somewhere fancier. Somewhere with a bigger name, like Brown’s or Claridge’s, or the Ritz, or the Savoy.’

I said, ‘How do you know about the money we’ve taken?’

‘It was in Ms Nice’s report to O’Day.’

‘Which you happened to test for intelligibility.’

‘The choice of test sample is a random procedure. Purely a lottery. Driven by engineering. Something to do with the mean time between failures.’

‘We should throw our phones away.’

Casey Nice said, ‘We can’t.’

Bennett said, ‘I agree. You can’t. You need to check in with O’Day on a regular basis. That’s the deal he made with Scarangello. If you go to radio silence now, then the deal is off, and you’re disowned by all concerned, in which case you better be out of the country within an hour, or you’re going to be hunted down like common fugitives.’

‘You know about Scarangello too?’

‘Try to remember, anything that ends up in the state of Maryland goes through the county of Gloucestershire first. And in reverse.’

‘You must be listening to the whole world.’

‘Pretty much.’

‘So who’s bankrolling this thing? Have you figured that out yet?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘And you’re the A team, right? With the big brains? So much better than the rubes at Fort Meade?’

‘Normally we do pretty well.’

‘But not this time, apparently. So now you want to dump it all on us. You want us to keep on communicating with O’Day, so you can listen in while we take all the risks.’

‘We didn’t rule the world by being nice.’

‘The Welsh ruled the world?’

‘The British ruled the world. And the Welsh are British. Just as much as the Scots. Just as much as the English, even.’

I didn’t answer. Nice passed me the ammunition boxes, and I put them in the environmental shopping bag, and we got out of the car, and we walked into the hotel lobby.

THIRTY-SEVEN

THE HILTON WAS more than adequate for our needs. A generic name, but they had maxed out the fanciness in honour of the Park Lane location. And the prices. And the snootiness. They started out a little dubious about our lack of luggage. All we had was the bag of bullets. And they started out equally sniffy about taking cash, but then they saw our many thick rolls of bills, and instantly upgraded us in their minds from budget tourists to eccentric oligarchs. Not Russians, probably, because of our accents, so Texans, maybe, but in either case they became extremely polite. The bell boys were especially disappointed we had no other bags to carry. They were smelling fifty-pound tips.

Our rooms were on different floors, but we headed together to Nice’s first, for a safety check, and because I felt she should have a box of ammunition with her. A lone last stand in a hotel room was highly unlikely, but highly unlikely things can happen, in which case a hundred and sixteen would be a much more interesting number than plain old sixteen straight.