Then it was about surfing back upright, and turning, and taking a short choppy stride, and snatching the Glock from my back pants pocket, and then leaping, like a kid aiming to go joyously knees-first into a snowdrift, except there was no joy involved, and the snowdrift was Joey’s belly, and I was whipping the Glock around and down, so that all three points would land at the same time, in a perfect triangle, my left knee, my right knee, the muzzle of the Glock, which hit his solar plexus with all my weight behind it, two hundred and fifty moving pounds, punching it way down, and then I pulled the trigger.
I was a rule three guy.
In pathology class they would have called it a starburst entry wound. The muzzle had been hard against him, and naturally the first thing out was the bullet, which punched a neat ninemillimetre hole through his flesh, which didn’t stay neat for long, because the next thing out was a blast of exploding gas, which had nowhere to go but straight down the bullet hole, deep inside Joey’s body itself, which was not as hard as the steel of a gun barrel, so the gas swelled instantly to a hot bubble the size of a basketball, which burst the skin at the entry point, so that when it settled back down after the gas was gone, it looked like a five-pointed star.
The first advantage was it killed him instantly. At that kind of range, more or less dead centre, there was a whole lot of stuff in there. Spine, heart, lungs, all kinds of arteries. The second advantage was the through-and-through, which it must have been, could have killed only earthworms. Maybe the larvae of parasitic grubs. In which case the bowling club should have thanked me.
The third advantage was the inside of Joey’s whole chest cavity acted like a silencer. Like I had mounted a suppressor the size of an oil drum. He worked pretty well. The sound of the gunshot was very muted. But even so Bennett played it safe. He came over and said, ‘I heard that.’
I said, ‘Of course you heard it. You were only fifty feet away.’
‘If I heard it the neighbours heard it.’
He took out his phone and texted a word.
I said, ‘What’s that?’
‘It means it was one of ours. If someone phones it in to the local cop shop they’ll be told it was a car backfiring, and not to worry.’
‘You can do that now?’
‘I just did.’
‘Since when?’
‘Some inconveniences were eliminated very early in the process.’
I said nothing.
Little Joey’s phone rang in his pocket.
And rang.
We let it ring until it stopped.
I said, ‘We need to get going. We need to be sure Kott doesn’t run with his guards. We need to see the front of the house. But much closer than this.’
Casey Nice said, ‘The shortest distance between two points is a straight line,’ and she set off the way the gale had blown, and we followed her, over the fresh-cut stump of some guy’s tree, and through the gap in some other guy’s fence.
FIFTY-THREE
WE TRESPASSED THROUGH
five separate yards, I figured, and we stayed in the last of them, behind a low ornamental wall, directly across the street from Joey’s place. A close-up view. Better than any binoculars. There was a single black Jaguar on the driveway. The gates were closed. The giant door was closed. It had a brass letter slot, and a handle, and in the plate below the handle was a single keyhole. Some kind of a fancy multi-lever mortise lock, no doubt, recommended by insurance companies everywhere, not that Joey Green had needed insurance, other than his name.
Then right on cue the gates rolled back and the giant door opened and four guys spilled out, like parachutes streaming from a plane. The mood looked confused. The guys looked uncertain. They were stumbling, looking left, looking right, one guy hitching his coat on, another combing his hair with his fingers. They got in the Jaguar and drove through the out gate, to the street, and then they took off, fast, into the far distance, until they were lost to sight.
They left the gates open.
John Kott didn’t come out.
Not in the first minute, or the fifth, or the tenth.
He was staying inside, to fight it out.
I looked at Bennett and said, ‘You got my information about the glass?’
‘It’s in French,’ he said.
He set it up for me on his phone. It was a scan of a Xerox or a fax of a classified document. It was very long. I had to swipe the screen to scroll. It was marked top secret in several different places. I said, ‘Does it set on fire in five minutes?’
Bennett said, ‘No, but I might.’
I said, ‘Thank you for getting it.’
He said, ‘Think nothing of it. But I hope it turns out useful.’
It was in French because glass was a big deal in France. A manufacturing success story, all over the world. All kinds of stemware, and hotel ware, with an emphasis on industrial efficiency, and strength. You could throw a French restaurant tumbler like a baseball, and it would probably survive. Who better to move onward and upward into modern bulletproof technology? A research and development laboratory in Paris had taken up the challenge. As always, the mission was to combine optimum clarity with optimum strength. No point in putting a president behind something safe but murky. Visuals were important. Security agencies in all the major NATO countries had contributed funding. The guys in Paris had taken the money and gotten to work.
First surprise was, it wasn’t called bulletproof glass. It was called transparent armour. Second surprise was, it wasn’t glass. Not even a trace. Previous bulletproof panels had been layered, with glass panes separated by and skinned by soft polycarbonate or thermoplastic materials. Some of the glass sheets were hard, and some were less so, to allow flexing. Results were usually good, but there were two problems. Edge on, the finished assembly could look like plywood. And the index of refraction was different for every layer, which at certain angles made it like looking into about six different swimming pools at once. Imperfect visuals. Bad for television.
So the scientists turned their backs on glass, and went for aluminium instead. Which sounded weird to me but, as always with chemistry, things were not exactly what they seemed. The substance in question was aluminium oxynitride, which they claimed was a transparent polycrystalline ceramic with a cubic spinel crystal structure composed of aluminium, oxygen, and nitrogen. A chemical formula was quoted, full of large letters and small numbers and graceful parentheses. The molecule was sketched, which looked like the chandelier in my greataunt’s dining room in New Hampshire.
The aluminium oxynitride started out as a powder, which was carefully mixed, like flour for a cake, and then it was compacted in something called a dry isostatic press, and then it was baked at an extremely high temperature, and then it was ground and polished, until it looked more like glass than glass itself. It was optically perfect. It was heavy, but not crippling.
And it was strong. The design brief was to survive a .50-calibre armour-piercing round, and the test procedure was meticulous and detailed. I read it very carefully. I could understand most of the language used, although some of it was highly technical and therefore unfamiliar. But numbers were the same the world over, and I could recognize 100 when I saw it. The test panels had scored 100 per cent against nine-millimetre handguns, and against .357 Magnums, and .44 Magnums, at ranges from fifty feet all the way down to contact shots, like Joey.
So then they flew the panels down to a place called Draguignan, in the south of France, near where my grandfather had stabbed the snake, where there was a huge military facility, with rifle ranges galore. They set up at three hundred feet, and the panels scored 100 per cent against .223 Remingtons and 7.62-millimetre NATO rounds. At which point the scientists doubled down. They must have been feeling good. They shortened the range to two hundred feet, which was unrealistically short for the larger calibres, and then they skipped right over worthy contenders like the .308 Winchester and the British .303, and went straight to the .44 Remington Magnum. From two hundred feet. Which was less than seventy yards. Like a battleship firing at the harbour wall.
The panels scored 100 per cent.
Then came the moment of truth. They loaded up the .50-cal and laid it on the bench. Armour-piercing ammunition. For which seventy yards was more than unrealistically short. But I understood the point they were hoping to make.
The panels scored 100 per cent.
And at a hundred feet, and at fifty, and even at twenty-five. Although the scientists were open enough to point out that the visible pitting at the shorter ranges would require replacement of the panels after every such incident. Even the scientists were political enough to understand a candidate couldn’t show up behind gear already riddled with bullet holes from previous failed attempts. Like he had gotten out of Dodge just in time. Not good for the image. People might get a clue.
There was a lot of foreign money in the project, and a lot of valuable foreign lives depending on the outcome, so the test procedure was supervised every step of the way by representatives from all the interested parties. They checked the numbers, they asked the questions, they looked behind the curtain. They were all intelligence specialists, but scientifically literate. The old guard, with nothing better to do, all extremely experienced. The guys from Paris didn’t mind. It was like any other peer review. Just compressed in time. I swiped the screen and scrolled down, through the list of participants, just a little ways, to E, for Etats-Unis d’Amérique.
The United States of America.
The Pentagon had sent Tom O’Day.
FIFTY-FOUR
I LOOKED OVER
the low wall at Joey’s house. The gates were still open and lights were still burning. But nothing else was happening. I gave the phone back to Bennett, and I said, ‘Why don’t you go take a short stroll?’
He said, ‘Why would I want to?’
‘I need to talk to Ms Nice alone.’
‘What are you going to say to her?’
‘Something inaudible, from where you’re going to be.’
He paused a beat, and then he got up and disappeared in the dark, there one minute, gone the next, like on the apartment balcony in Paris. Nice and I squatted side by side, with our backs against the wall.
I said, ‘This is the scene where I try to get rid of you.’
She didn’t answer.
I said, ‘Not for the reasons you think. I could use your help a dozen different ways, and you’d be good at all of them. But this is between Kott and me. He wants me gone, therefore I want him gone. Not fair to involve other people, in a private quarrel. I’m going to tell Bennett the same thing.’
‘Bennett will stay away anyway. He has to. There are rules. But I’m free to do what I want.’
‘This is me and Kott. Which has rules too. It’s one on one.’
‘You’re just saying that.’
‘Because I mean it.’
‘I think you’re being kind.’
‘That’s an accusation I don’t hear often.’
She said, ‘Why did he take my pill?’
‘Take as in deprive, or take as in swallow?’
‘Swallow.’
‘I’m guessing he took all kinds of pills. A guy that big gets aches and pains. In his back, and his joints. So he already likes the opiates and the painkillers, and then he starts to dabble in the bad stuff passing through his hands. Pretty soon, he sees a pill, he takes it. Occupational hazard.’
‘I don’t want to take them any more. Did you see his mouth? He was disgusting.’
‘Right now you can’t take them any more. Even if you wanted to.’
‘Is that the reason? You think I’m going to freak out?’
‘Are you?’
‘Not from anxiety, anyway. I can’t even see anxiety in the rear-view mirror.’
‘We’ll be OK.’
‘We?’
‘You out here, me in there.’
‘I should help.’
‘This is me and Kott,’ I said again. ‘I’m not going to gang up on him. Wouldn’t feel right, afterwards.’
The gates were still open, but I didn’t want to go in the front. It was the obvious point of entry. It was the main place Kott would watch. Probably MI5 would come up with a number.
Kott spent 61 per cent of his time watching the front
. In second place would be the back yard. Third and fourth place would be the end walls. But which was third and which was fourth? I guessed third place went to the end facing the bowling club. That was where the action had been thus far. So I headed the other way, to the other end of the house, fourth place, away from the night-vision, creeping through the shadows, then climbing the fence. Which was not easy, but it was feasible, because the ironwork had sculpted features that acted like rungs on a ladder. I stepped down into a flowerbed. The side of the house was right there, across a narrow path. There were eight ground-floor windows. They would all have been drawn small by the kid with the crayon, but I could have gotten through any one of them standing up.
I checked the nearest window. The sill was chest-high to me. A small room. Relatively speaking. A nook or a niche or a parlour. Or a library or an office or a sitting room. I moved on to the next window. Through which was a hallway. Which was much better. There was the foot of a staircase visible, about thirty-five feet away. I guessed the hallway turned ninety degrees to the right at some point, to reach the front door.
I stood still and took a breath. In, and out. Then again. Then I used the butt of the captured Browning, and I broke the window,
smash, smash, smash
, all the glass I could reach, until the hole was big enough to climb through. I figured Kott would instantly see it as a bluff. No more than a diversion. As in, he was supposed to investigate, and meanwhile I would come in the front door, behind him. He would predict that. So he would go guard the front door instead. Except he was professionally paranoid, so just as instantly he would call it a double bluff, and he would head for the window as planned, to meet me head-on. So I triple-bluffed him. I sprinted for the front. I knew the door was open. That kind of a lock, you have to stop and use the key, both ways, out as well as in. And the departing guards hadn’t. They had gotten straight in the Jaguar, and hit the gas, no delay at all, putting on their coats, and slicking down their hair.