the travel or I’ll risk using one of my forged passports and getting picked up at the airport or the ferry. Howell will be looking for me. Get me into England, if you’re so clever.”
“You won’t give up, will you?”
“I have a child to find. I cannot give up, Mila. My kid is to me what those women were to you. Innocents who cannot be abandoned. I can’t stop.”
She got up and closed the door. I sat in bed and I swallowed one of the pills the doctor had left, and then I fell into dreamless sleep.
78
MONDAY IN LONDON. Gray, bleak, the sky smeared with rain. My body hurt but not as bad as yesterday. I’d slept the rest of the day until early the next morning, gotten dressed in new clothes Mila brought me, and we’d taken a private jet to London. Very posh. Mila’s deep-pocketed employers must have given us the okay to chase down Bahjat Zaid. She used one of the new passports for me and there were no problems with immigration. Mila had a Jaguar waiting for us.
It was strange to be on British soil; where I’d been happiest, where I’d faced the worst day of my life.
Zaid’s office was near the Bank of England Museum, in a modern tower. Mila and I were dressed casually: slacks, shirts, jackets. I wore a dark cap to mask the bandage on my head. Zaid’s secretary at Militronics gave us a chilly smile.
“Mr. Zaid is not available,” the secretary said. “He was called away on a matter of urgent import.”
I glanced at Mila.
“Urgent import?” she said. “Do you really talk like that?”
The secretary frowned. “Perhaps if you’d care to leave a message?”
“You tell him that Sam and Mila came by to talk to him about his daughter. We know where she’s been.”
The secretary’s frown deepened. “He left to go see his daughter, sir,” she said. “But I will relay the message.”
“When did he leave?”
“About ten minutes ago.”
We left. We stood on the busy street corner. “Yasmin’s contacted him,” I said.
“Or they’ve finally worked out an exchange,” Mila said.
“We need to find where he’s at. Because if they’re delivering Yasmin to him, then Lucy and Edward are there.”
We walked back to the Jaguar. “You drive,” she said. I got behind the wheel and she opened the glove compartment. A modified netbook, wired into the car’s satellite system, lay inside. She slid it out, opened it, and began to type furiously on the small keyboard.
“There are cameras all over London,” she said. “For traffic and security. We have limited access to the grid. Let’s find out if we can see when Bahjat left.”
She found a video feed that displayed the front of Zaid’s building, rolled it back to the time Zaid stepped out of the building. A Mercedes was brought to the curb, the driver got out, Zaid got inside. He headed up Princes Street.
Mila opened another window on the netbook. Found him turning onto Gresham Street. Followed him making a turn onto St. Martin’s Le Grand, past the Museum of London. Then it looked like she lost him. She rechecked the video. He was heading north on Aldersgate Street. She tapped keys and a map of London appeared in the corner, turning the camera stations she’d tapped red so we could see his route through the city.
It was time-consuming, trying to spot his car in the press of autos, backtracking when she missed it, hoping he hadn’t made a turn when the video feed wasn’t snapping images.
A few more dots and she said, “He’s gone to St. Pancras. I’m a fool. Drive fast, now, come on!”
“What’s at St. Pancras?”
“The Eurostar arrives there. The train. From Holland and Belgium. Edward may have decided now to give Yasmin back.”
Driving in London is often an exercise in madness and patience. I drove like a man possessed.
“This doesn’t make sense. Say Edward has decided to give Yasmin back,” I said. “They could easily have asked for Zaid to come to Holland. But they take the risk of moving her, a kidnapping victim? So they want something from Zaid, goods he couldn’t bring to them.”
“Sam,” she said. “If Lucy is here with them, and we catch them, would you like me to kill her for you? I know it may be hard for you to do so.”
It was the single strangest offer I had received in a life full of bizarre opportunities. “Thank you, no. I don’t want you to harm her. I will deal