Rules of Vengeance

15

For eight years Jonathan had lived in the dark. For eight years he’d been married to a woman he’d loved and trusted but in fact didn’t know the first thing about. All too frequently he had watched as Emma left on last-minute trips with vague destinations. If Emma said she was taking a night train to Mombasa to pick up a load of quinine, that was what she was doing. If she needed two days in Venice for some R &R with a friend, she had his blessing. He never questioned her. His faith was absolute.

And then, five months ago, he had discovered that it was all a lie. Not only the trips to Mombasa and Venice, but all of it-her name, her past, her devotion to bringing medical care to those who needed it most. Since the day he met her, Emma had been working as an agent of the United States government, and Jonathan had been her unwitting, unsuspecting cover. Time did not heal this wound, even by degrees. If anything, time worsened it. Jonathan was not suspicious, but he was prideful. Standing with his back to the door, he decided that eight years was enough.

He waited a minute after Emma had left the room, then went into the hall and took the elevator downstairs. In the lobby, he immediately saw Dr. Blackburn-the real Dr. Blackburn-and Jamie Meadows and a host of other well-fed, prosperous physicians gathered by a coffee station in a far corner. If his watchers were also present, he saw no sign of them. There was no OBG in a blue tracksuit looking his way. No shady characters keeping a hand to their earpiece, monitoring his progress through dark sunglasses.

Even so, Jonathan skulked around the perimeter of the lobby, head down, keeping to the walls. He was due to give his speech in a little over two hours, and if anyone saw him, they’d be worried. He hadn’t shaved or showered. Dressed in jeans, desert boots, a navy blazer pulled over his old Basque sheepherder’s shirt, he looked like the kind of bad element the doormen were paid to keep out.

He passed through the revolving door and hit the street. He craned his head left and right, hoping for a glimpse of a woman dressed in black with her hair pulled back severely from her forehead and up in a pony-tail. He failed to see her, but he wasn’t disheartened. He didn’t imagine that she had walked through the front door when she had come to visit last night, and he didn’t imagine she’d left that way at the height of the morning rush. He headed to his left, circling the building, and came to the service area. Delivery trucks idled in the garage as workers unloaded crates of beer, boxes of fresh produce, and freshly laundered towels. A set of stairs led down to the employees’ entrance. He glanced over the railing. The door was shut. Wheeling, he studied the backstreets for the likely avenue Emma had taken. One road ran parallel to Park Lane and was flanked by mews houses. Another ran eastward into the heart of Mayfair, but dead-ended after a few blocks. Twenty-five meters to his right, an alley ran down toward Green Park. It was in this direction that he’d been instructed to walk last night. He jogged down the pavement, training his eye for swaths of black.

He stopped at the first corner. As he waited for a car to complete a left-hand turn in front of him, Emma materialized as if out of thin air a hundred meters up the street. On closer examination, he observed that she’d emerged from a boutique. Some instinct or reflex caused him to retreat into a doorway, and at that moment she turned and glanced behind her. He held his position. Waiting, he noticed that he was sweating and that his heart was beating faster than it should.

He counted to five, but before setting out, he shot a look up the street behind him.

One block back, a tan Ford Mondeo idled at the curb. The morning light struck the windshield full on and reflected off the driver’s shiny blue tracksuit. One official bodyguard licensed to carry firearms, according to Emma’s furious description. He caught another figure in the passenger seat and maybe one in the rear. Jonathan’s watchers in the flesh.

They’ll follow you to get to me.

He returned his attention to Emma. She was keeping close to the storefronts, never looking back as she neared the intersection with New Bond Street.

It was then that he made a decision.

Stepping onto the sidewalk, he continued in his wife’s direction. At the next light he waited patiently for the signal to change. It wasn’t necessary to look over his shoulder to check if the Mondeo was there. The sideview mirror of a cab idling next to him did the job astonishingly well. Jonathan was picking up the tools of Emma’s trade.

The signal changed in his favor. He entered the intersection, but halfway across he darted to his right and regained the sidewalk. He looked for a store to duck into, somewhere he might disappear for a minute or two. But the street was lined with private residences. Door after door was locked. He checked behind him. Caught in traffic, the Mondeo hadn’t yet made the turn. Across the street, Jonathan spotted a newsagent’s shop. There might just be time…

He dashed into the oncoming traffic, dodging the fast-moving cars, ignoring the horns and the squeal of brakes. Reaching the far sidewalk, he flung open the door to the newsagent’s, setting a chain of bells tinkling madly. He bent low behind a wall of magazines. A moment later he spied the Mondeo speeding past. Still breathing hard, he watched until it disappeared from sight. Only then did he leave the store.

“Where the hell is he?” shouted Frank Connor from his position in the backseat of the Mondeo.

“I don’t see him,” said the driver. “Do you, Liam?”

The rangy dark-haired man in the passenger seat shook his head.

“Turn around,” said Connor, shifting his considerable bulk so that he could peer out the rear window. “He’s in one of those shops. He couldn’t have gone anywhere else.”

“I can’t just yet,” said the driver, indicating the steady stream of oncoming traffic.

“Screw the traffic,” retorted Connor. “Make a U-turn.”

“It’ll cause an accident.”

“Just do it. Now! There’s a break!”

The driver whipped the car around, keeping one hand firmly pressed down on the horn. The sudden turn tossed Connor against the door. He glanced up in time to see a white van skidding toward them. There was a squeal of brakes, a cacophony of horns, followed by the sickening crunch of metal impacting metal. The collision threw Connor to the other side of the car, and he struck his head violently against the window. The Ford came to a halt and he pulled himself upright.

“I told you,” the driver was shouting. “I knew there was no way we could make the turn. Crap!”

“You were too slow,” said Connor. “You got no reflexes. You had plenty of time.”

“Like hell!”

“Forget about it,” said Connor.

The man named Liam pointed at Connor’s head. “You’re bleeding, Frank.”

Connor drew a hand across his brow and looked down at fingers red with blood. He asked for a handkerchief and held it to his forehead, then climbed out of the car. Already traffic was snarled in both directions. An irate woman was walking up the road, berating him for being “a demon of a driver,” and “some kind of idiot.” Connor pushed her out of his way and stalked to the sidewalk. He looked up the road toward the intersection where he’d last seen Jonathan Ransom, but it was hopeless. Ransom was gone.

Connor told his men to take care of the mess, then started up the road. He should have known better than to rely on his own depleted resources.

It was time to bring in reinforcements.

New Bond Street was a commercial thoroughfare famed for its high-end retail outlets and tony art galleries. At 9:30, pedestrians crowded the sidewalk. Jonathan zigged and zagged through the onslaught of people, searching for his wife’s auburn hair. It’s impossible, he said to himself. There were simply too many people. Oxford Street was two blocks away, and he knew that if he didn’t spot Emma soon, he’d lose her for good.

He started to run, knocking into men and women, slowing only to stand on his tiptoes and gaze ahead. A hundred meters farther on, he pulled up. It was no use. The sidewalks were growing more crowded, not less. He put a foot into the street and stood exposed, canvassing the cascade of bobbing heads and shoulders.

There…

It was Emma. She stood on the far side of the street at the end of the block, one foot in the road like him, a hand raised to hail a taxi.

Jonathan looked to his right. Spotting a cab with its fare light on, he signaled for it to pull over. The cab docked at the curb expertly. Jonathan leaned into the passenger’s side window. “Make a U-turn. I need to follow a cab going in the opposite direction.”

“Can’t turn here, gov. ’Gainst the law, isn’t it?”

Jonathan threw a fifty-pound note onto the seat. “Emergency, isn’t it?”

“Hop in,” said the cabbie. “Which car is it you’d like me to follow?”

“Turn around and I’ll tell you.”

Jonathan hauled himself into the backseat, all the while keeping an eye pinned on Emma. As the cab negotiated a U-turn, he was afforded a perfect view of his wife climbing into a maroon taxi with a T-Mobile placard affixed to its doors.

“That’s the one,” said Jonathan. “And keep your distance.”

They followed Emma’s cab without incident to a home in Hampstead, a well-to-do neighborhood in the northern reaches of London. The driver was born to subterfuge. Effortlessly he maintained a safe distance behind Emma, never going closer than four car lengths. In a city where taxis nearly outnumbered private cars, he was invisible. Taking up position at the rear of a line of parked cars at the end of the block, they watched as Emma paid off her cab and walked to the side of a modest mock-Tudor-styled home, where she entered through a side door. Jonathan checked his watch. It was after ten. Emma had officially missed her flight to Dublin.

He had another concern. He was due back at the hotel in little more than an hour to deliver his keynote address. If he left now, he might just make it back in time, but he would have to shower and shave in record time. Blackburn and his associates had spent a lot of money to fly him to London and put him up in the five-star luxury to which they believed he was entitled. Jonathan didn’t want to disappoint them. And yet he could not make himself leave.

Just then the garage door opened, and all thoughts about rushing back to the Dorchester vanished. Jonathan leaned forward, his eyes trained on the gray BMW sedan pulling out of the garage and turning in their direction.

“Get your fare light on,” he commanded as he flung himself flat onto the rear seat.

“Already done.”

“Is it her?” Jonathan asked, still lying low.

“Bingo, gov. It’s her.”

“Then what are you waiting for? Get moving.”

It took Emma exactly thirty minutes to reach her destination. Her route took her south, back through Hampstead to Bayswater Road, where she cut through Hyde Park toward St. James. She drove slowly, more cautiously than was her habit. His Emma-or the real Emma, as he liked to think of her-was an Indy car driver in search of a track. She had only two speeds, fast and faster. This one braked for yellow lights instead of flooring it to make it through, signaled religiously, and rarely changed lanes. The implication was clear. Operational Emma, or Nightingale, could not afford to be stopped by the police.

From St. James it was a maze of narrow residential streets, constantly turning left, then right, but always keeping toward the Thames. Afraid to be seen, Jonathan shouted for the driver to lag behind, and two or three times they lost all sight of her. Luck, however, was with them, and after a tortured span of five or ten seconds, they spotted her again.

She parked in a space on Storey’s Gate Road. It was a narrow two-way street bordered by attached buildings dating from the late nineteenth century. All were five stories high, hewn from an identical batch of gray Portland cement, and constructed as part of a single ambitious project to gentrify the area. Only afterward did Jonathan remark on the perfect timing of the departing motorist, or recall that the car pulling out of the space had been a Vauxhall, the same car mentioned by code in the text message on Emma’s phone. At that moment, he simply attributed it to Emma’s good fortune.

“What now?” asked the cabbie as they stared at the BMW from a distance of a hundred meters. Emma’s silhouette was distinctly visible. She sat behind the wheel, as stationary as a statue.

“We wait,” said Jonathan.