Final Target

CHAPTER 29

H ixon One, parked down the block from Matson’s flat, gave himself a discreet scratch, then settled in for the evening. Alla emerged a half hour later dressed in a blue Marks amp; Spencer running suit. She stretched for a few minutes against the black wrought-iron fence surrounding the property, then ran off, her long legs beating a practiced rhythm.

Gage had just disconnected from Hixon One’s update when Mickey and Hixon Two arrived at his room. He directed them to the couch and again sat in the wing chair.

“Is Two what people really call you?” Gage asked.

“Family and friends,” she said. “My mother died when I was four. Since then it’s been Pop and me, One and Two.”

She looked even younger up close, but her eyes had a mature depth of experience.

“How long have you been in the service?”

“Almost five years. Three in regular army and two in Reconnaissance and Surveillance. I joined after college. It was Uncle Mickey’s idea.”

“Where’d they send you?”

Hixon Two grinned. “Around.”

“Good answer.” Gage leaned forward. “So, tell me what happened inside the Ax Man.”

She straightened up, as if preparing to report to a superior.

“Matson met Russians. Or at least Central Europeans who spoke Russian to each other. Mostly friendly. At one point it got tense, then it lightened up. But I’m not sure the meeting ended well.”

“That was our impression, too.” Gage reached over and opened his laptop to display the digital photos he snapped outside the Ax Man after Matson stormed out. He’d numbered them one through thirty-seven. He turned the computer toward her.

Hixon Two studied the first fifteen spread across the screen. “Number three, six, and eleven were the ones who met with Matson.”

She pressed the page-down button, then worked her finger across along the images.

“Sixteen is the bodyguard. A giant. He came in just for a minute, otherwise he was in a Mercedes outside. Number three did almost all the talking.” She looked up at Gage. “I don’t recognize anyone else.”

“Could you hear what they were saying?”

“I played girly-girl at the bar in order not to be too obvious, so I didn’t catch much of the conversation. I went to the WC twice so I could walk by the table. All I caught was ‘leave him out of it’ and ‘when the time comes.’ At one point Matson raised his voice a little and said ‘arranger’ or ‘ranger’ or some word like that a couple of times.”

“Could it be Granger?”

“Yes, I think that could be it. At one point number three took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. I saw a tattoo on his arm.” She reached into her pants pocket and pulled out a bar napkin that bore a detailed drawing. “It was like this.” She handed it to Gage. “But I don’t know what it means. It’s not the kind Russian soldiers get.”

“It means number three is a thief-in-the-law,” Gage said, “a vory-v-zakone. Each point represents a year in prison. There are only a few hundred vorys in the world. If they were Italian mafia, we’d call them made men. But these are Russians and Ukrainians and it’s a lot tougher to get made. Even a guy like John Gotti wouldn’t have made it past gofer.”

“Shouldn’t they be called thieves outside the law?” Hixon Two asked.

“It’s law in the sense of a thief’s code.”

“Like a no snitching rule?”

“Exactly.” Gage closed his laptop. The click echoed in the now silent room. He looked back and forth between her and Mickey. “How about I take you two out for dinner and we can make plans for tomorrow?”

Heads nodded.

“How about Indian?” Mickey said, smiling. “A little chicken tikka, a little tandoori, a few chapattis. Food in London is wonderful. It’s the only surviving benefit of imperialism. Anytime we want, we get to eat food from all the colonies we’ve been thrown out of.”

Gage sent them home after dinner, then returned to his hotel room to check his e-mails. One from Faith was waiting. She’d sent it just after meeting Courtney at the hospital: Burch’s doctors had reported that his condition remained unchanged.

After logging off, Gage rose and looked out of his seventeenth floor window at the city lights, the traffic sounds muffled by glass and elevation. He imagined Burch lying in his bed, insulated from life by his coma. For a moment, he wished that Burch could remain there, suspended in time and space, at least long enough for Gage to construct a seawall around him; for if Burch regained consciousness now, it would be only to see a wave cresting above him.

A whelping ambulance siren passing on the street below shook Gage’s mind free of the fantasy. Whatever the doctors’ intent may have been in saying it, the notion that Burch’s condition could be unchanged was at best an evasion to comfort Courtney, and at worst a delusion. The truth was that each day he would get weaker and his body would become less able to fight toward daylight.