Tracers

THIRTY-FOUR

‘They’ve split up.’ Dog reported succinctly. He was carefully picking broken window fragments out of his hair and trying to ignore a painful ringing in his right ear. Luckily, he could hear well enough with his left to make the call. While he waited for a response, he clambered into the front seat and started the engine. It caught with a cough and settled into a smooth hum.

Further along the street somebody was shouting. He ignored them. He felt humiliated but relieved to be alive. Christ, nearly being bested by a woman! He pounded the steering wheel. She was good, though, and should have been; she’d been trained by the best. It was the shout from Tate that had unnerved him. Then that move she’d pulled before opening fire was a beauty. The only thing he couldn’t figure out was why she’d aimed to miss. At that distance, she should have splattered his brains all over the interior of the car. Given the same circumstances, he’d have aimed to kill.

‘All three?’ The drawl on the end of the line was heavy with criticism because Dog had managed to lose both Tate and Ferris. And now Archer. After the screw-up at South Acres, he could have done without it.

‘I could hardly follow them all,’ he replied tersely. ‘I decided to stick with Tate and the girl.’ He hesitated then added, ‘She blew my window out in the middle of the street with a semi-automatic. You never said she was a fucking lunatic.’ It was rare for Dog to swear, especially in the presence of an employer, but he felt it more than suited the occasion.

‘I didn’t think I had to. You know her background. Where are they now?’

‘Gone. Do you want me to come in?’

‘No. Stay in the open. The office is closed until further notice.’

‘Closed?’ Dog didn’t like the sound of that. So far this assignment had not been going spectacularly well, and he had a bad feeling about this latest development. In his experience, poor planning was as much to blame as bad execution. Perhaps Jennings had overreached himself. Maybe it was time he considered getting out while he still could. Except that it went against the grain to have a failure on his record. He couldn’t have that, not after all this time. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Don’t worry about it. A minor operational glitch, that’s all. I’ll call you with a new location when I’m sure it’s safe. In the meantime, I suggest you keep looking. This matter has now gone critical.’

The phone clicked and Dog threw his mobile down on the passenger seat. Critical. So critical he was out in the open and would have to stay on the move to avoid being compromised. Still, it wouldn’t be the first time; some things you just got used to in this business.

As he turned a corner into a quiet square, thinking about where he could find a safe base, he smelled burning plastic. It grew steadily stronger until, seconds later, the engine coughed and juddered, then died.

It was only then that he noticed the two bullet holes in the dashboard.

THIRTY-FIVE

Joanne turned and watched the road behind them, but there was no sign of the other car. ‘That should slow him down a bit.’ She ejected the magazine from the semi-automatic and checked the action, then reloaded and slipped it back in her jacket. ‘By the way, I remember the name of the village where Humphries lived. It’s Green’s Morton.’

Harry hardly dared look at her, too busy wrestling with the wheel and trying to negotiate a series of narrow back streets to shake off any chance of pursuit. It was as if nothing had happened; as if she hadn’t just fired two shots into a man in a north London street, blowing out a car window in the process and probably scaring half the residents into calling the anti-terrorist squad.

‘Are you nuts?’ he shouted. ‘You might have murdered an undercover cop!’

But her response surprised him. ‘Do me a favour. If I’d wanted him dead, he’d be dead. I didn’t even aim at him. The worst I did was probably make him piss himself.’ She grinned like a happy kid on a Sunday outing. ‘Serves him right — he shouldn’t be following us.’

It stopped Harry’s protests in their tracks. He realized she must have been aiming forward of the rear seats. She’d gone for shock tactics rather than something more fatal to put the man off watching them. ‘You could have told me,’ he said after they covered a mile or so. ‘When I first came back out I thought you’d. .’

Joanne laughed. ‘What — legged it? Jesus, why would I? You guys are the only protection I’ve got.’ She looked at him seriously. ‘I trained hard for my job, but it doesn’t make me a psychopath. I know when to draw the line.’ She paused and looked out of the window. ‘If you hadn’t warned me and I’d stepped up to the other window. .’ She shrugged fatalistically. ‘Thanks.’

‘You did well to spot him.’ Harry felt guilty for assuming the worst and jumping on her with both boots. She had exercised enormous restraint in a dangerous situation, which was more than most people would have done.

‘I was lucky. One of his rear side windows got slightly fogged up. It was the kind of thing they taught us on the course.’ Another mile went by before she said, ‘He was no cop, though. A cop wouldn’t have seen me coming.’

Harry agreed. He wondered if the man was connected with Jennings. He jerked his head to the back of the car. ‘There’s a map behind the seat. You find the village and I’ll get us there.’

Joanne dug out the map and located the village, but still seemed doubtful. ‘How do we locate a woman whose surname we don’t know? She might have been married and divorced.’

‘She’s a teacher named Sheila,’ he reminded her. ‘How many primary schools can a village have? As to the rest, finding people is what I do best. Care for a bet on it?’

She curled her lip and turned back to studying the map. Her expression seemed lighter than he’d seen it so far, and he wondered if it was the result of an adrenaline rush. Danger and excitement did that to some people. ‘Head east,’ she added. ‘I’ll let you know when to turn off.’

A little while later, she said quietly, ‘I’m very grateful, you know. You really didn’t have to do this.’

‘Actually, I think we did,’ he replied easily, then concentrated on getting round a gaggle of slow cars hogging the centre of the road.

She said nothing for a few minutes, but threw him a glance now and then. ‘Are you married?’

‘No. Was once.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. We ended up going different ways. You?’

The question seemed to catch her off guard. She hesitated before replying. ‘No. A near miss, once. He was an officer. It got smothered at birth.’

‘Tough.’ Harry sympathized, aware of how the intermingling of ranks was still frowned upon in the armed forces.

‘Well, at least you didn’t look surprised.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Some men think any girl who joins up is a budding dyke.’

‘Is that what your colleagues on the course thought?’

‘No. Well, maybe a couple — the ones who couldn’t believe a woman had any place doing that kind of work. But they never said so.’ She went quiet for a while, then said, ‘You two are a good team. Rik thinks a lot of you.’

Harry gave a non-committal grunt. ‘He should. I taught him all he knows.’

They laughed together, and Joanne instinctively reached out to touch his arm, before drawing her hand back and studying the map.