hate each other.’
Cobb frowned, then read Archer’s face.
‘When was the last time you spoke with him?’ he asked.
‘Not for a long time.’
‘So you didn’t know?’
‘Know what, sir?’
‘He was a Federal agent. A Special Agent-in-Charge. Been with them for the last two years. Your father wasn’t a cop, Archer. He was working for the FBI.’
Archer and Cobb sat in silence for a few more minutes, Archer absorbing everything he’d just been told. Then he scooped up the flight ticket, thanked Cobb and returned to the briefing room, still stunned. The other officers could see immediately something was wrong, and once quiet word spread about what had happened, they all sat there with him in the room, providing company. All ten of them sat there silently. No one left. No one knew what to say. But that didn’t matter. Some of them had been in the younger man’s situation before. They knew that just providing company was enough at that moment. It was all they could do.
Archer had sat in his chair without moving for half an hour, just staring straight ahead. Then his head had started to clear and he’d said his short goodbyes, heading downstairs for his unexpected week off. He made a pit-stop at his apartment in Angel, grabbing his passport, packing a bag and grabbing a black suit and shoes from the closet for the funeral. He locked the door to his apartment, stepped out onto the street, hailed a cab and went straight to the airport.
Cobb had booked him on a British Airways flight, which meant he was leaving from Heathrow Terminal Five. As he paid the taxi fare and walked into the huge glass building, he realised that the last time he’d been here, he’d been face to face with a suicide bomber on New Year’s Eve. She’d been a young girl, no older than twenty, but with bricks of C4 plastic explosive packed into her clothes, concealed as a baby bump. Archer had been the first man at the scene to locate and confront her before she was shot and killed just in time by another officer.
He walked across the Departures Hall and checked in at the British Airways desk. His flight was leaving at 2 pm, around three hours from now, direct from Heathrow to JFK. Cobb had booked him a seat in Club Class, which he hadn’t needed to do, but Archer appreciated the gesture. He had no luggage to check, just a carry-on and his suit, and he moved through the security checkpoints without a problem and headed straight for the Gate as soon as it came up on the screens.
The next three hours felt like the shortest of his life. He’d taken a seat facing the airfield and had been staring out of the window one moment, lost in thought, staring at all the planes on the tarmac. When he finally looked away and checked the time, he realised they had already opened boarding for the plane.
Three hours, gone in what seemed like a second.
London Heathrow to New York JFK was about a seven hour flight, and all seven seemed to pass by almost as fast. This was the first time Archer had ever flown Club Class in his life, and he could instantly see why people paid the extra money.
The seats had been arranged in pairs, one seat facing the rear of the plane, one facing the front, and they were separated by a screen that you could pull up for some privacy. Archer didn’t need to use the screen, seeing as there was no one sitting beside him, but he pulled it up anyway. He had a seat by the window, no one close to him, and the chair was wide and comfortable. It seemed he could press a button to make the seat slide back and turn into a bed if he wanted to. But during those seven hours he didn’t drink a drop of fluid, nor eat a mouthful of food, nor watch a second of any movie. He just sat still, silent, staring at the sky outside the window, watching the wispy white clouds as they drifted past, high above the Atlantic Ocean far below.
This whole thing just felt like some big dream. He’d woken up this morning expecting just another day at the office. Planning what he was going to do over the weekend. Instead, he’d discovered someone had murdered his father and he was now on his way to New York for a week-long