Night Moves Read online

Bellworth looked up from his dead cigar. “What? Eh?”

  “You recall that business you had with that . . . Armenian fellow a few months ago?”

  Bellworth snorted. “I could hardly forget that! Blasted damned rogue, the man was, mucking about in my business!”

  “I heard he met with an . . . unfortunate accident, the Armenian.”

  “I should say he did. Fell off of a platform in the tube station and was squashed by a train. Served him right, and no loss to the world at all, damned foreigner!”

  Goswell waited as Paddington returned. Paddington struck a match against the box, let it flare, then bent and held it so Bellworth could rekindle his Cuban torpedo. A cloud of fragrant smoke billowed as the old boy puffed the cigar back to life.

  “Decent of you, Paddington,” Bellworth said.

  Paddington moved the ash tray a hair closer—Bellworth was notorious for flicking the cigar residue onto the rug. “Not at all, sir. Will there be anything else?”

  “No, no, this will do it.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Paddington ghosted away.

  Bellworth looked back to Goswell. “Why on earth are you bringing up such a distasteful subject, Gossie?”

  “Well, I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I have a somewhat similar problem myself. I do believe I need someone . . . discreet to handle it for me.”

  Bellworth took another puff, held the cigar away, peered at the lit end, and nodded through the gray cloud. “You have your own people to attend to such things, surely?”

  “I’m afraid one of my own people is the problem. Having one of his underlings take care of him wouldn’t do at all, would it?”

  “Heavens, no, bad for morale and all that, I understand completely. Well, then, shall I put in a call to my fellow, have him ring you up?”

  “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, Harry.”

  “Not at all, not at all, consider it done. Now, what do you make of Lord Cleese’s proposal about bringing back the poorhouses? I thought it was rather a clever idea myself.”

  Goswell smiled. Here was a subject on which they could certainly agree. Putting the poor to work instead of carrying them on the dole. Bloody Socialists would be the death of the country, if somebody didn’t stop them, and such suggestions were, for Goswell’s money, right on the mark. It would never happen, of course. The bloody Socialists would have bloody conniptions if anybody tried, but still and all, it would shake people if Parliament actually considered such a thing. Indeed it would.

  It would seem he was going to have to take direct control of his own personal war on the world’s foolishness, given as how his primary tools had somehow gotten bent. He sighed. One should expect such things in this day and age, but they still came as rather a surprise. You simply could not get dependable help these days, not of the caliber that once was. Such a pity.

  Tuesday, April 12th

  London, England

  Toni didn’t expect to see Alex waiting for her when she got through the throng at the Chunnel train station, but there he was. She was tired after the ride from Paris, and the air in the tiny tunnel under the English Channel had seemed particularly stuffy, though that was probably just psychological. All that unseen water weighed heavily upon you. Good thing she wasn’t claustrophobic. She was beat, but her spirits lifted immediately when she saw him.

  “Alex! What are you doing here?”

  They hugged, he took her bag, and said, “I missed you. Welcome back, sweetie. How’d it go?”

  “Okay. They really are well-mannered, most of the French. It’s only the few who give them such a bad reputation. Well, okay, more than a few, but it wasn’t so bad. As long as you don’t pretend to understand the language and try to speak it, even the waiters aren’t too nasty.”

  “You always liked anybody who liked Jerry Lewis,” he said.

  “He was a comic genius. Good slapstick isn’t easy, you know.”

  He laughed. It was an old joke between them. But Jerry Lewis was funny; he had created that monkey character, built from it, and some of his later dramatic roles were as good as any actor working. He was underrated.

  “Anything happening here?”

  “No . . . not really. Well, except that I got a call from John Howard. He’s landed at an Air Force base north of here.”

  “The colonel? Why?”

  “Plekhanov’s hired gun, Ruzhyó. They traced him to England.”

  “Great. One more brick on the load.”

  He didn’t say anything to that.

  “You look tired,” she said.

  “I didn’t sleep well.”

  “I bet I can help you fall asleep tonight.”

  “I bet so.”

  She squeezed his arm. He smiled at her. They’d been passing each other in the dark lately. It was time to get back on the same track. She said, “You talked to Jay? He called me. He’s doing better.”

  “Yeah. I’m glad to hear that.”

  “And he says he is making progress toward finding our hacker.”

  “About time we had some good news on that front.”

  He seemed a little bit stiff, but just look at him, he was obviously tired. A nice hot shower and crawling under the covers together would do wonders for both of them. She had missed lovemaking with him. And, truth be known, she was getting horny from all the working out with Carl. Best drain that tension and be done with it.

  Tuesday, April 12th

  Cambridge, England

  Howard sat in the backseat of the Ford behind Julio and the driver loaned to them by the RAF. They were on the M11, heading south, toward London. He passed signs for Bishop’s Stortford and Sawbridgeworth, and except for the colors and shapes of the signs, it could have been an American freeway in the countryside of New York or Northern California. The greenery was similar, the look of civilization not all that different.

  Well, except for being on the wrong side of the road.

  Julio sat where an American would be at the steering wheel back home, and he seemed a bit more relaxed on the motorway than he had been on the surface streets. Leaving the base, every time they’d rounded a corner and seen cars coming from the opposite direction, Howard had seen Julio tense, his foot going for an imaginary brake. He understood the feeling, since he had put his own braking foot against the back of the seat a few times.

  Why on earth had the British chosen to drive on the wrong side of the road?

  It was maybe a little easier because the driver’s controls were on the right, but it would take some getting used to before Howard wanted to do his own driving here.

  They were still thirty miles from downtown London, the driver told them, but they were also zipping along at about seventy-five, and Howard knew that was miles per hour and not kilometers. They were going to MI-6 to meet Commander Michaels and fill him in on the hunt for the Rifle—which was what Ruzhyó meant in Russian. The guy had a warped sense of humor to go along with everything else.

  “You doing okay up there, Sergeant?”

  “Just fine, sir. Enjoying the lovely countryside.”

  The driver, a British airman, grinned. “I went to visit my uncle in New York City once,” he said. “I thought I’d go mad first time I got out on the road in his car. Why’d you Yanks decide to drive on the wrong side of the road that way?”

  “You are in error, Limey,” Fernandez said. “What’s the brand name on this beast? F-O-R-D, isn’t it? We invented cars, so we got to pick which side of the road first.”

  “Begging your pardon, Sergeant, but where did you get that notion? Henry Ford was a Johnny-come-lately, now wasn’t he? Making a lot of them is not the same as making them first, is it?”

  “You’re not gonna sit there and try to tell me with a straight face that the English invented the automobile, are you?”

  “It’s the king’s truth, Sergeant.”

  “Bullshit it is.”

  The driver grinned wider. “Well, everybody knows it was the Frogs what made the first s
team carts, Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, with his tricycle steamer in 1769. By the 1830s everybody and the king’s nephew had steamers up and running, in England as well as half of Europe. Even had those in the States by the end of your Civil War. But we’re not talking about scaled-down steam trains that ran on dirt roads now, are we? We’re talking about automobiles.

  “The first real car with an internal combustion engine? Well, that was built and driven up Shooter’s Hill in London by Sam Brown round 1823 or 1826, if you believe old Sam himself, who was admittedly a bit hazy on dates. Ran on carbureted hydrogen, it did. I make that a bit sooner than John Lambert, who put the first one together in the U.S. in 1891. He beat the Duryea brothers by almost two years, though they usually get credit for the first ’un, but that’s only a drop in the bucket compared to sixty years, innit?”

  “Great,” Fernandez said. “Just my luck to sit next to the fucking Royal Historian slumming as an airman driver.”

  The driver laughed. “Man ought to know his tools, right? I drive ‘em, I might as well learn a little something about ’em, eh?”

  Fernandez laughed. “Score one for the home team. Which side of the road do they drive on in France?”

  “Who cares?” the airman said. “They’re the bloody French, aren’t they?”

  Even Howard laughed at that one.

  Tuesday, April 12th

  London, England

  Ruzhyó met Peel at a corner in front of a giant Coke sign that flashed thousands of lights overhead. They were to discuss his assignment, but when he asked about it, Peel shook his head. “Let’s leave off on that for a moment,” he said. “I’ve got something else I need you to do.”

  Ruzhyó raised one eyebrow. “Yes?”

  Tourists bustled along the sidewalks. A group of schoolchildren in uniforms, holding hands in pairs, snaked past like a blue and white caterpillar.

  Peel looked nervous. He checked his surroundings constantly, if unobtrusively, as if he was being watched. “I need somebody to cover my back,” Peel said. “I think maybe I stepped on somebody’s toes.”

  Ruzhyo nodded. “All right. Do we know whose?” “Not for certain. I have an idea, but I’ll have to check further.”

  “Why me?”

  What he was really asking was more involved than that: Why trust me? We don’t know each other that well. Surely you have your own men?

  Peel answered the unasked part of the question: “Because you don’t have any reason to want me dead.”

  Ruzhyó kept his face deadpan. “Not that you know of.”

  Peel smiled, short and tight. “Have you gotten a gun?”

  “Not yet,” he lied. He kept his voice bland.

  Peel produced a small, zippered, dark blue nylon pouch from his inside jacket pocket and handed it over. “Beretta, model 21A, .22 caliber, Italian, but this model was American-made. Six in the magazine, one in the chamber, double-action first round if you wish, tip-up barrel.”

  “I am familiar with the weapon.”

  Peel nodded. “There are two extra magazines, already loaded as well. CCI Minimags, solids. I could have gotten you a bigger gun, but I understand that Spetsnaz ops have a fondness for the smaller calibers.”

  “It will do. And it shoots how?”

  Peel nodded, as if he expected the question, but nonetheless pleased to hear it. “I didn’t have time to have the armorer smooth it out, so the double-action pull is a bit stiff, probably twelve or fourteen pounds. Single-action is fairly tight, five pounds or so, but with a little creep. Shoots dead on at seven yards, two inches high and slightly right at twenty-five yards.”

  “I understand.”

  “I would appreciate it if you would keep it handy, then. And if you should happen to see somebody sneak up behind me with a gun or a knife, shoot them for me, would you?”

  Ruzhyó gave him a choppy, military nod, slipped the pouch into his pocket, and unzipped it. He removed the pistol, and thumbed the safety off. Given the stubby barrel, the Beretta would not be as accurate as the umbrella gun, but it was added firepower. And the little weapon would also be the devil that Peel knew about.

  The Russian faded into the background, just another foreign tourist with an umbrella, to keep potential trouble off of Peel’s arse. Peel felt a little better, a little safer. Maybe it was all in his mind, a figment of his imagination, being stalked, but he hadn’t kept his body and soul together by ignoring his inner alarms. Now and again he was wrong, and nothing amiss ever turned up, but why take the chance?

  Once, he had been on a bivouac with a drop squad doing training in the middle of some woods in NSW, Australia. They had backpacked in more than fifteen miles off the beaten track, into the foothills. They were only a couple thousand feet up, in a dry area where the dust was red and thick on everything, raising in clouds every time they took a step outside the tents. They were camped in a small clearing amid trees and scrub so thick it was like there were solid walls all around them.

  Just before dark, as the men were settling down to cook the evening meal, Peel got spooked. A sudden, overwhelming fear rose in him, so fast and so powerful that he wanted to run, to get away from the area as fast as he could move.

  It was totally irrational. There was nothing threatening around, no other people for miles, as far as they knew. He tried to reason with himself. God, he was a trained officer, a battle-tested lieutenant, young, brave, armed to the teeth, with six veteran men who could chew nails and pee needles, likewise armed, and there wasn’t anything in the bloody woods that could seriously bother them. But that didn’t matter. His sense of imminent doom was undeniable. Without explaining, and making it seem as if it was some part of their training, he ordered his men to pack up and be ready to move out in five minutes. It took them almost seven, but as soon as they were ready, they force-marched six miles before Peel’s sense of danger faded. They reestablished camp, posted a guard, and turned in.

  Early in the morning hours before dawn, the sentry woke Peel and pointed out the orange glow in the sky. A forest fire.

  Later, when he checked, Peel found that the fire had begun just below their original campsite. It had swept up the hills so fast that fleeing deer had been caught in the deadly flames, and had he and his men stayed above, where the fire raged, none of them would have survived.

  His men had been impressed.

  How had he known? Some faint hint of smoke in the air nobody had caught? Some frightened animals in the woods whose fear had been powerful enough so that he could somehow sense it? He had pondered it but never came up with an answer that satisfied him. More important than how was that he had done it. Some intuition had told him Death was near, and he had had enough sense to go with it.

  Similar things had happened in various firefights and patrols since, though nothing quite as dramatic as the Australian event, and when he had felt the cold touch of it on his shoulder, he had harkened to it. More times than not, such actions had saved his life.

  There was no enemy in sight here, but he felt the fear. The only cause he could figure was the scientist. Nobody else knew what he was doing, and the man certainly had something to hide. It didn’t make sense, not with Bascomb-Coombs giving him a bloody million and making him a kind of partner in the scheme, but who else could it be? And in truth, he hadn’t seen the money stacked up neatly on a table somewhere, had he? It was all electronically vouched for by the Indonesian bank, and normally that would have been enough, but Bascomb-Coombs was owner and operator of the world’s nastiest computer, wasn’t he? Surely he could fool somebody not computer-savvy enough to know the difference, if that was his wish.

  Why would he wish to do that?

  Peel did not have a clue, but something was lurking out there, and he did not wish to become its victim. Best he take steps to find out, and best to be quick about it, too. And if it was Bascomb-Coombs, well, all his genius wouldn’t stand up to a knife between the ribs or a bullet to the back of the skull. When push came to shove, the sword was a much better weapo
n than the pen, no question.

  Peel walked toward the train station, feeling a bit better now that he was taking action.

  29

  Tuesday, April 12th

  Washington, D.C.

  Sojan Rinpoche was coming to see Jay. He was coming here, to his apartment, in the flesh, and Jay was more than a little nervous.

  The advantage of VR was that you could craft your image into anything you wanted. True, Jay tended to look like himself in a lot of scenarios because it was more trouble than it was worth to create a persona to impress somebody. Well, okay, so he touched himself up at the edges, maybe, he looked a little taller, more muscular, had lines that were a teeny bit sharper, but not so much you couldn’t recognize him in RW if you met him. After you had been a player for years, you more or less disregarded what you saw when it came to other players in VR, anyhow. You’d meet them off-line in some RW conference or whatever, and you couldn’t quite reconcile the real person with the net persona. A lot of times, they would build an image that looked totally different but not bother to change their voice, and hearing them speak from a completely unrecognizable body was weird. Or they’d change the voice but not the face, and that was strange, too.

  Truth was a very subjective thing in virtual reality. The term itself was almost an oxymoron.

  Saji had told Jay on the net that he was going to be in D.C. for a couple of weeks and asked Jay if he wanted to meet in real time. Jay had agreed, though he had a few reservations. Saji had saved his butt, no doubt about that, and he owed him BTDS—big-time-damn-sure—but there was that little gnawing worry that the real Saji might not jibe with the virtual version. Buddhists had dealt with illusion a long time before computers had been invented, and maybe he’d look like Saji and maybe he wouldn’t. Sometimes, you hated to meet somebody for whom you had great respect, for fear the reality wouldn’t live up to your imagination. Once, when he’d been a kid, Jay had happened across the host of a television show he’d loved. On the air, the guy had been smiling, avuncular, the kind of man kids wanted for a father. He’d been Jay’s hero. The show host had spotted Jay, and the first words from his sweet lips had been, “Jesus, who let that little dickhead in here?”