So, what did we think?
I said, ‘How are you doing with my information about the bulletproof glass?’
Bennett said, ‘It’s coming.’
‘When?’
‘How urgent can it be?’
‘I want it one minute after you get it. And I want you to get it soon.’
He nodded. ‘So what are we going to do about Charlie White?’
‘We?’
‘OK, you.’
I said, ‘Where does he live?’
‘He’s still in Romford. Born and bred. He fancies himself an authentic man of the people.’
‘Single-family house?’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Detached,’ Nice said, like a translator.
‘Of course,’ Bennett said. ‘Normal size, but it has a wall just like Joey’s. Or a fence, or whatever you want to call it. Brick and wrought iron. To keep the grateful proletariat out.’
‘Security?’
‘Six guards and a driver.’
‘Pick of the litter?’
‘Competitive.’
‘Does he go out much?’
Bennett said, ‘He’s going out tonight, as a matter of fact.’
‘Where?’
‘To meet with the Serbians. To express his condolences.’
‘Is that one of the elaborate courtesies?’
‘One of the most fundamental. They’re in business together, and the Serbians suffered a casualty. The same thing happened last night, but in reverse, because of the guy you hit in the throat.’
‘An hour from now, is the behavioural psychology subcommittee going to come back to us and say we have to take out the Serbians too?’
‘We would like nothing better, but realistically you shouldn’t take them on all at once.’
I said, ‘We haven’t agreed to take them on at all.’
‘The committee asked me to point out that we might have understated the quality of the security details protecting Miller and Thompson. They’re better than we said. The point being, it’s not much of a step to go for White instead.’
‘Is any of that true?’
‘No. It’s a very big step.’
‘But they have to be psychological.’
‘Whatever works.’
‘Works better with prior insight. Have you seen our files?’
Bennett smiled and said, ‘You got my heavy hint? With the passwords? O’Day supplied your files.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we asked.’
‘Back in the day he would have told you to get lost.’
‘He’s not what he was. He’s feeling his way back. His star was fading, for a couple of years.’
‘Khenkin said the same thing in Paris.’
‘We could help you, if you need it. Four of Charlie’s guards will be in a separate car, obviously. We could pick it off. A traffic stop, or something. Then you’d only have two to deal with, plus the driver, plus Charlie himself.’
‘One guard in the front with the driver, and the other in the back next to Charlie?’
‘That’s how they do it.’
‘What kind of car?’
‘A Rolls-Royce.’
‘Black?’
‘Of course.’
‘Armoured, like Karel Libor’s Range Rover?’
‘Only the back doors and the back glass. And only against handguns. I guess they call it the anti-opportunistic assassination option. For the kind of customer who has enemies walking by.’
‘And the chase car is a Jaguar?’
‘They have dozens of them.’
I said nothing.
Bennett said, ‘Traffic stops are expensive. Not just in money. There’s exposure, and risk, and liability. Suppose a pregnant lady couldn’t get through to the hospital? Suppose an old man had a heart attack because of all the excitement? Questions would be asked. It’s a tactic we couldn’t justify unless there was a significant potential reward.’
My turn to smile. I said, ‘You didn’t rule the world by being nice, right? You’re saying if we go after Charlie White, you’ll handle the chase car for us. But not if we settle for Tommy Miller or Billy Thompson. So our choice is fight two of Charlie’s guards, or four of theirs. Charlie’s will be better, but probably not twice as good. Therefore, what we have here is an incentive. Proposed and recommended by the behavioural psychology subcommittee. Am I right?’
‘We’re here to help each other. That’s how it’s supposed to work.’
‘When am I going to get my information about the bulletproof glass?’
‘One minute after I get it.’
‘Which will be when?’
‘Very soon.’
‘What time will old Charlie start out for his condolence visit?’
‘Late. The sun has to be down. It’s some ethnic thing. They have their rituals too. We have some details, including a likely route. And we think we’ve found a spot for the thing with the chase car. I’ll send over what we’ve got, on another computer.’
Then he left.
Casey Nice asked, ‘Is this one of the weird things that were going to happen?’
I said, ‘No, this part was predictable.’
FORTY-THREE
THE NEW COMPUTER arrived, with the same people as before. They said in Nice’s case, her new password was the customer helpline number at her mother’s health insurance company, and in my case, my new password was the name of the other guy Shoemaker had seen me shoot. Then they left, and as before we carried the computer up to Nice’s room, and we entered the private information, and the screen opened up with a long list of files and folders.
Most of the data was deep and random background, painstakingly gathered over many years, and then crunched through computers, this way and that, in the hopes that the past could predict the future. As in, on all the east–west cross-town trips that Charlie White had ever taken, he had never used the M25 motorway, preferring instead the North Circular Road, which, with the South Circular Road, was part of a much earlier attempt at an orbital system, once way out there on the edge of the city, now hopelessly overrun by sprawl. Old Charlie had taken the slow boat 85.7 per cent of the time. The other 14.3 per cent he had been driven straight through the centre. This was believed to show a strong preference. I believed it showed Sunday came but once a week. When the centre was quiet, a straight line was a no-brainer. Weekdays, it was better to keep some distance. There were seven days in a week, and a hundred divided by seven was fourteen point three. Except that in the modern world there wasn’t really much of a difference between Sundays and weekdays. But Charlie was an old man. And old habits die hard. Maybe he remembered London as a ghost town on Sundays, and the M25 as farms.
I said, ‘What day is it today?’
Nice said, ‘Friday.’
Bennett had hedged his bets by planning for both routes, calling option two the straight shot through the centre, and option one the arc to the north on the North Circular. Not that it really mattered. Because obviously the arc would meet the straight shot somewhere, in this case way in the west, about nine o’clock on a dial. Which was the obvious place to put the pick-off point for the chase car. Two birds with one stone. Which is what Bennett had done. There was an aerial photograph of the place where the two roads met, which had a surreal acreage of blacktop, like a regular four-way stop suddenly swollen up to immense size, but uniformly, like Joey’s house.