him through the streets of D.C., and fresh panic welled inside him.
The door opened and the big blond-haired man in aviators who’d sat across from him at Whole Foods climbed out, stood there, and crossed his arms as he looked on. Marty Wheeler sucked in a terrified gasp. “That’s great, Mr. Black, because the same goon who tailed me the day before is standing next to his truck watching me from about fifty yards away. I don’t know if I will even make it to England.”
Mars’s aristocratic British voice always remained cool. “You’ll make it, lad. Means nothing. Renfro’s been dead less than eight hours. It takes time to stand down a counterintelligence operation. You’ll be on your jet over here soon, right? You won’t see the watchers on you for much longer.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“You have a plane to catch, mate. We’ll see you once you get to London. I’ll have a taxi pick you up, one of ours, with a driver who knows what he’s doing. He’ll take you to the Peruvian embassy; I have an arrangement with them that they’ll shelter people before I get them out of the country.”
“You do this sort of thing a lot, do you?”
“Only when required. Just relax, do what you do, the same way you always do it, and everything will be fine. In forty-eight hours you’ll be at that dacha we bought for you in Ekaterinburg, and living an easy life.”
“Don’t try to sell me bullshit, Black. It won’t be an easy life.”
“It definitely won’t be if you don’t find a way to modulate your tone before the two of us finally meet face-to-face tomorrow.”
Wheeler closed his eyes. He needed Black now. Everything that had led up to today had resulted in this mysterious Englishman being his only lifeline. “I’m sorry, sir.”
“Don’t trouble yourself. You’ll be fine when you get here.”
Wheeler hung up, eyed the big man in the aviators again, then stood to head back to his car. It was farther up the lot from the man surveilling him, so he didn’t have to walk by him, but still he gave the man an extra-wide berth.
Soon he was in his Nissan and heading towards Ronald Reagan to board a commercial flight to London.
* * *
• • •
Court Gentry and Donald Fitzroy sat patiently in the Mercedes, eyeing the Red Lion Club across the street. They were giving Cassidy enough time to scan the room for bugs and to settle in before flipping on the transmitters.
Soon the Englishman broke the silence. “Let’s say Cassidy says something that implicates him in whatever’s going on. What are you going to do?”
“Whether or not he says anything, when he leaves here I’m going to grab him by his collar, put a gun in his ribs, take him to a basement somewhere. Then I will start cutting pieces off him till he tells me what I need to know.” He turned back to Fitzroy. “I’ll wait for him to leave your club. I won’t burn the place to the ground.”
“I do greatly appreciate your discretion.”
Court nodded to his friend and former employer. “Thanks for all this.”
“For nothing, lad. Anytime. But allow an old man to offer some advice.”
“What’s that?”
“You know . . . you know you can’t do this sort of thing forever, don’t you?”
Court touched his still-painful jaw with his fingertips, then looked down to the laptop with the listening software on it. “Depends on your definition of forever. I wake up every morning wondering if today is the day that forever runs out for me. But this is all I know, and I’m pretty good at it, so—”
Fitzroy leaned forward, between the seats. “Let some other poor sod get good at it! You need to get out of it! You’ll die on this bloody job, and you are smart enough to realize that.”
It occurred to Court that Sir Donald had never talked like this back when he was making a commission on Court’s operations. But he still felt the old man had genuine affection for him, so he didn’t judge. “Yeah, no question I’ll die on this job. But there’s always some new asshole that needs dealing with, and I have a hard time turning away from that.”
Fitzroy nodded. “Well . . . if I can’t convince you to stop, perhaps I can remind you to keep your head down.”
Court said, “That I can do.” He put his fingers on the buttons of the micro notebook. “Okay, let’s listen in on this